[malvolio]

Computer Disk Led to Arrest in Killings, Pastor Says

Published: March 2, 2005

WICHITA, Kan., March 1 - In the end, the B.T.K. serial killer's downfall may have been his own love of sending letters, poems and packages out to the world.

Michael G. Clark, the pastor of Dennis L. Rader, the man now charged with 10 counts of murder in the strangulations that terrorized a city, said Tuesday that one item in the killer's most recent mailing to a local television station helped finally crack the case: an ordinary computer disk.

The police here have refused to say what led them to arrest Mr. Rader, a city codes enforcer and a church leader, 31 years after the first killings in Wichita, but they have acknowledged that the B.T.K. serial killer's peculiar and persistent communications with the public, particularly in recent months, worked to their advantage in the investigation.

Mr. Clark said that the police told him they used information on the computer disk in B.T.K.'s final mailing on Feb. 16 to trace it back to a computer at Christ Lutheran Church, where Mr. Clark is the pastor. Mr. Rader, the president of the church council, had used the church's computer a few weeks earlier, Mr. Clark said, to print the agenda for a council meeting he was to preside over.

"I remember showing him how to use the computer, how to use the printer, because his wasn't working at home," said Mr. Clark, whose church office was searched by the police last week, a day before the police announced the arrest. "What the investigators found, from what I understand, running that disk through scanning and processing, was that that disk had to have been in our computer."

So, it seems, the killer who suggested that he be called B.T.K. (for bind, torture, kill) in his rambling, eerie mailings in the 1970's may have been ensnared by technology.

Link to full NY Times article (registration required).

[Ganesha]

At least we now know who watches the meta-data.