Oklahoma authorities may have linked an unsolved disappearance to the notorious serial killer BTK.
Dennis Rader, 78, is currently serving 10 consecutive life sentences after pleading guilty to 10 counts of murder in 2005. He calls himself the BTK Killer, which stands for “bind, torture, kill.” Now local police have linked Rader to the 1976 disappearance of teenager Cynthia Dawn Kinney, based on a crossword puzzle the convicted killer sent to the media twenty years ago, local station KSN-TV reports.
In 2004, Mr. Rader sent local news outlets a word puzzle containing details about the women he had killed. Now Osage County, Oklahoma, Sheriff Eddie Virden says the puzzle links Rader to Kinney’s disappearance.
“It’s pretty hard to get around the fact that Cindy Kinney’s name is in there, that Osage Laundromat is in there, that Pawhuska is in there,” Sheriff Virden said.
Kinney disappeared from a laundromat in Osange at the age of 16. Rader has been considered the prime suspect in the unsolved 1976 case since August 2023 after police found additional evidence.
Investigators said they had evidence that Rader may have buried Kinney in a barn near the Kansas-Oklahoma border. Her body was never found.
Last year, Sheriff Virden said, officers received an anonymous call after Kinney went missing. A man claimed her body was in an old barn on the Oklahoma-Kansas border. Then in September, law enforcement intercepted messages from Rader in prison that revealed that old barns might have some items hidden in them, the sheriff said.
Her parents, Don and Markie, said shortly afterwards that they were afraid they would never find out what had happened to their “Cindi”.
“We’ve thought for 50 years, every time somebody had something, I hope this sheriff has it,” Don Kinney said last year. “I hope he has good intentions.”
Sheriff Virden says this new evidence reinforces the belief that Rader was involved in Kinney’s disappearance.
“We found carvings and markings in barns, things that we believe 100 percent prove he was active in our area,” he said.
District Attorney Mike Fisher, however, says his office is not so convinced.
“I have not heard Mr. Virden’s latest statement regarding Dennis Rader and the Cynthia Kinney case,” Mr. Fisher told KSN-TV. “However, I can tell you that the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation’s cold case unit has found no connection between Rader and Cynthia’s disappearance.”
“They are still investigating other possibilities, but due to the age of the Kinney case, they have not found anything that points to a specific suspect,” he continued.
Meanwhile, in January 2023, the Osage County Sheriff’s Office launched a new investigation into hundreds of Rader’s drawings and writings that were seized after his arrest in 2005.
“We’re hoping that by posting this, someone will recognize one of these barns or their unique features, or recognize the proximity of the silo to the barn, or maybe even find items they don’t know why they’re there that could be very important in this case,” Sheriff Virden told CNN at the time.
Earlier this year, Rader was also acquitted of another unsolved case that was initially believed to be connected to him.
According to the McDonald County Sheriff’s Office in Missouri, Rader was a potential suspect in the 1990 murder of Shawna Garber. Larry Hall, another serial killer, was also a suspect.
However, neither man is believed to have killed 22-year-old Garber – the sheriff’s office identified Talfey Reeves as a suspect – who died on November 15, 2021.
