The daughter of notorious BTK serial killer Dennis Rader confronted her father in prison after investigators discovered his personal diary that suggested he sexually abused her when she was too young to remember.
In October, Kelly Lawson visited her father, known by his nickname BTK, an acronym for Bind, Torture, Kill, in a Kansas prison. He pleaded guilty to 10 murders in 2005 and is serving nearly 20 years of a life sentence.
It was only the fifth time Lawson had spoken to his father since his conviction. Fox News reported.
“I was sitting right across from you, and while you collapsed and rotted in your wheelchair, I stood tall and brave, confronting you with the harsh truths you’d hidden from me for over 40 years,” she revealed onstage at CrimeCon 2024 in Nashville, Tennessee.
“You denied it, gaslighted me, emotionally and verbally abused me, asked me what PTSD was, and when I explained you said this was all self-inflicted,” she added.
Rader, who is wheelchair bound, was infuriated, she said.
“For a second I thought I was 16 again, running from your angry fists. I even had a brief escape in prison,” she said. “But then I came back, sat down and confronted you harder.”
Lawson had offered to assist the Osage County Sheriff’s Office in investigating the disappearance of Cynthia Dawn Kinney, a high school cheerleader who was 16 years old when she disappeared in 1976.
Investigators believed that Rader’s distorted diary entries might be related to Kinney’s disappearance and asked Lawson to decipher some of the passages.
In one entry, Lawson found his name written in capital letters: “KERRI/BND/GAME 1981.”
“BND” is an abbreviation that Rader says stands for bondage, as her father, a sexual sadist, was known for binding his victims, sexually assaulting them and then killing them.
“My stomach twisted like white-hot lightning,” she said. “Forty years later, there was solid evidence that you, my father, had sexually abused me when I was a toddler.”
Lawson said she found similar entries scattered throughout the diary.
After reviewing her father’s writings, she believes he killed more than the 10 people he admitted to killing. Rader denies killing more than 10 people.
He kept detailed notes about all his victims and others he ominously referred to as “the projects.”
Law enforcement officials believe the project, titled “Bad Laundry Day,” may be a reference to the Kinney case, as Kinney was last seen alive at her aunt and uncle’s laundromat.
Rader, 79, is in very poor health and has been debilitated by a number of ailments in prison.
“Soon you will meet God,” Lawson said of his father. “There will be some things we will discuss. You will soon be gone. If you have any ghosts left, my final request for you is to let them go.”
