Unknown (narrator or host)

This episode contains stories involving violence against children.

Listener discretion is advised.

There are over 100,000 cold cases in America.

Only 1% are ever solved.

This is one of those rare stories.

On February 26, 2005, the Wichita Police Department holds a news conference.

And tells the world they have caught a serial killer.

Lieutenant Ken Landwehr has hunted BTK for most of his career.

Cold Case Files was granted unique access into the investigation that ended in an interrogation of Dennis Rader.

This is Dennis Rader speaking at his plea hearing.

Dennis Rader's arrest and conviction provided the final chapters to a story that began three decades earlier with a little boy and a knock on a door.

In 1977, Steve Relford is six years old when he opens his front door and finds a man on the other side.

The man herds Steve, his brother, and sister into the bathroom.

Then he runs a rope from the doorknob to the sink so the children can't get out.

15 minutes later, the house is quiet and Steve is able to force his way out of the bathroom.

26-year-old Shirley Vian lies face down on her bed.

She has been bound and strangled.

Richard Lemunyan is the former chief of the Wichita Police.

The Otero case refers to a nightmare from which Wichita had never recovered.

In the winter of 1974, police walked into the worst crime scene Wichita had ever seen, its first quadruple homicide.