Dennis Rader, since a few months a suspect as being the serial-killer known as BTK (bind, torture, kill), has now confessed to ten murders he has committed over the past. A well-documented, yet a little muddled, report of his killings plus a quite in-depth look at the case can be found here (mind you, the URL to that case contains the word "unsolved", so don't be surprised if the link doesn't work after I've published this. In that case, go here and find the case!).

There's even film available of Dennis Rader, here. Apparently, Rader has often posed as a "man of order" while acting very emotionally unstable. This story (from Crime Library) gives an example of an incident that happened as he was working as "Compliance Supervisor":

ABC News reported that Donna Barry, a neighbor of Rader's who has known him and his family since she was a child, had seen a darker side of Rader.

"Barry said she and her children were out on their front lawn one day, and a neighbor from across the street was outside with his dog. In his capacity as a dog catcher and ordinance officer, Barry said Rader approached the dog and allegedly tried to mace it.

"But, according to Barry, the 'wind blew the mace back in his face.' She says Rader groped for his tranquilizer gun, but couldn't get to it. That's when he allegedly pulled out a gun and shot the dog."

When I write unstable, I mean he was hated by some, and very much liked by others, who saw his likeable sides: they thought of him as a calm, collected and orderly man. He worked as an installation person, giving him access to customers' homes at all times of the day. He says he committed his murders because of a need to fulfill his sexual fantasies.

Rader's way to capture actually seems very likely to be because of his own doings; among the reasons to why he got captured, I list this puzzle as one and post he sent to a local TV-station to another. The puzzle, which he sent to magazines in 2004, contains his house number and "D Rader". The post included postcards, in which he asked the TV-station to contact a police department, and a padded envelope that contained items that had belonged to one of BTK's victims.

It seems Rader is a quite typical serial killer. He killed because he "had to", to fulfill his sexual fantasies, collected "trophies" from the victims but he managed to keep killing over an unusual long period of time; the police must have had a very hard time tracking him down, as the killings were sparse over the decades he was active. It looks like he turned himself in, and a good thing, too.