Henry Lee Lucas : " The Hand of Death "

Henry Lee Lucas (August 23, 1936 – March 13, 2001) was an American criminal, convicted of murder and once listed as America's most prolific serial killer. However, he later recanted his confessions. He once flatly stated "I am not a serial killer" in a letter to researcher Brad Shellady.

Lucas confessed to involvement in about 3,000 murders, an average of about one murder per day between his release from prison in mid-1975 to his arrest in mid-1983. A more widely circulated total of about 350 murders committed by Lucas is based on confessions deemed "believable" by a Texas-based "Lucas Task Force," a group which was criticized by Texas Attorney General Jim Mattox for sloppy police work and taking part in an extended "hoax".
Beyond his recantation, some of Lucas' confessions have been challenged as inaccurate by a number of critics, including law enforcement and court officials. Lucas claimed to have been initially subjected to poor treatment and coercive interrogation tactics while in police custody, and that he confessed to murders in an effort to improve his living conditions. This calls into question many of his alleged murders, since his confessions were often the sole evidence cited in favor of his guilt, especially his sole death penalty conviction. Amnesty International reported "the belief of two former state Attorneys General that Lucas was in all likelihood innocent of the crime for which he was sentenced to death."
Lucas' sentence was commuted to life in prison in 1998 by then-Governor George W. Bush. His was the only death penalty case among the 153 that came across Bush's desk in his tenure as Texas Governor in which he intervened and commuted the death sentence. Lucas died in prison of natural causes. Though Lucas' death seemed to have removed the possibility of resolution in many instances, there are still a number of unresolved or open questions. Some authorities — while admitting that Lucas tended to exaggerate his accounts and told some outright lies, and also recognizing that the Lucas Task Force engaged in some very questionable tactics — insist that Lucas was a viable suspect in a number of unsolved murders. Despite these factors, Lucas still maintains a reputation, in the words of author Sarah L. Knox, "as one of the world's worst serial killers — even after the debunking of the majority of his confessions by the Attorney General of Texas."
Lucas allegedly carried out many murders with an accomplice, Ottis Toole, whose reputation as a serial killer is mostly unaltered by Lucas' recantations.

Early life
Lucas was born in Blacksburg, Virginia. He described his mother, Viola Lucas, as a violent prostitute. His father, Anderson Lucas, was an alcoholic and former railroad employee who had lost his legs in a train accident, and who suffered from Viola's wrath as often as his son. Lucas reports that Viola regularly beat him and his half-brother, often for no reason. He once spent three days in a coma after his mother hit his head with a plank of wood, and on many occasions he was forced by his mother to watch her have sex with men. Lucas described an incident when he was given a mule as a gift by his father's friends, only to see his mother shoot and kill it.
When he was a teenager, Lucas claimed to have been introduced to bestiality and zoosadism — the latter a common trait among sociopaths, especially those who become serial killers — as well as receiving convictions for petty theft. Lucas had also damaged an eye during a fight with his half-brother. His mother ignored the injury for three days, and subsequently the eye grew infected and had to be replaced by a glass eye.
Lucas claimed to have first murdered in 1951, when he strangled a girl who refused his sexual advances. Like most of his confessions, he later retracted this claim. In 1954, Lucas was convicted on several counts of burglary in and around Richmond, Virginia, and was sentenced to six years' imprisonment. He escaped, was recaptured, and was released in September 1959.
In late 1959, Lucas moved to Tecumseh, Michigan to live with his half-sister, Opal. Lucas was engaged to marry when his mother visited for Christmas. She disapproved of her son's fiancee and insisted he move back to Virginia. He refused, and they argued repeatedly about his upcoming nuptials.

First murder
On January 12, 1960, Lucas killed his mother during the course of an ongoing argument regarding whether or not he should return home to his mother's house to care for her as she grew older. He claims she struck him over the head with a broom, at which point he struck her on the neck and she fell. Lucas then fled the scene. He subsequently said,

"All I remember was slapping her alongside the neck, but after I did that I saw her fall and decided to grab her. But she fell to the floor and when I went back to pick her up, I realized she was dead. Then I noticed that I had my knife in my hand and she had been cut."

She was not in fact dead, and when Lucas' half-sister Opal (with whom he was staying) returned later, she discovered their mother alive in a pool of blood. She called an ambulance, but it turned out to be too late to save Viola Lucas' life. The official police report stated she died of a heart attack precipitated by the assault.
Lucas returned to Virginia, then says he decided to drive back to Michigan, but was arrested in Ohio on the outstanding Michigan warrant.
Lucas claimed to have attacked his mother only in self-defense, but his claim was rejected, and he was sentenced to between 20 and 40 years' imprisonment in Michigan for second-degree murder. He served ten and a half years and was released in June 1970.

Drifter
Lucas drifted around the American South, working a number of mostly short-term jobs. In Florida, he made the acquaintance of Ottis Toole sometime between 1976 and 1978 (sources disagree) and claims to have had a romantic affair with Toole's pubescent niece, Frieda Powell, who had escaped from a juvenile detention facility. Lucas and Toole both called Powell "Becky" sometimes, partly to disguise her identity and because Powell preferred it over her given name. Lucas and Toole were also reportedly lovers. Lucas would later claim that during this period he had killed hundreds of people, sometimes as Toole's partner. The trio left Florida and eventually settled in Stoneburg, Texas, at a religious commune called "The House of Prayer." Ruben Moore, the commune owner and minister, found Lucas a job as a roofer, and allowed Lucas and Powell to live in a small apartment on the commune.
Powell became homesick, so Lucas agreed to move to Florida with her. Lucas said they argued at a Bowie, Texas truck stop and claimed that Powell left with a trucker. According to Shellady, a waitress at the truck stop supported Lucas's account in court.

1983 arrest and multiple confessions
Lucas was arrested in June 1983 by Texas Ranger Phil Ryan, initially on a firearms violation. He was later charged with killing 82-year-old Kate Rich in Ringgold, Texas, and was also charged with Powell's murder. Lucas claimed that police stripped him naked, denied him cigarettes and bedding, held him in a cold cell, and did not allow him to contact an attorney. After four days of this treatment, Lucas claimed he decided to confess to the crimes in a desperate bid to improve his treatment.
Lucas confessed to the murders but claimed to be unable to take police to the victims' bodies. He closed out his confession with a hand-written addendum that read: "I am not allowed to contact any one I'm in here by myself and still can't talk to a lawyer on this I have no rights so what can I do to convince you about all this" . When he was finally allowed counsel, Lucas's lawyer described his client's treatment as "inhumane" and "calculated solely to require the defendant to confess guilt, whether innocent or guilty."
The forensic evidence in the Powell and Rich cases has been criticized as inconclusive. A single bone fragment recovered from a wood-burning stove was said to be Rich's, and a mostly-complete skeleton roughly matched Powell's age and size, but Shellady reports that the coroner stopped short of positively identifying either remains. As with most of his alleged crimes, Lucas has confessed to these murders only to deny involvement later, but the general consensus seems to be that Lucas did indeed murder Powell and Rich.
Lucas pleaded guilty to the charges, and in open court stated he had "killed about a hundred more women" as well. This was an unexpected confession, and Lucas later claimed to have been despondent over being suspected in Powell's disappearance. Shelladay reports that Lucas said, "If they were going to make me confess to one I didn't do, then I was going to confess to everything." These claims were quickly seized upon by the press, and Lucas, accompanied by Texas Rangers, was soon flown from state to state, to meet with various police agencies in an effort to resolve a number of unsolved murders.
In November 1983, Lucas was transferred to a jail in Williamson County, Texas, where the Lucas Task Force was soon established. Shelladay describes the task force as "a veritable clearinghouse of unsolved murder." Police officially "cleared" 213 previously unsolved murders via Lucas's confessions.
Lucas reported that he confessed to murders only because doing so improved his living conditions, and that he received preferential treatment rarely offered to convicts. Others have offered accounts that seem to support Lucas's claims, for example, that Lucas was rarely handcuffed when in custody or being transported, that he was often allowed to wander police stations and jails at will—including knowing the security codes for computerized doors—and that he was frequently taken to restaurants and cafés. On one occasion, in Huntington, West Virginia, Lucas confessed to killing a man whose death had originally been ruled a suicide. The man's widow received a large life insurance settlement that had been denied after the initial suicide verdict. It has been suggested that such treatment demonstrates that the Lucas Task Force did not consider Lucas a threat.
Texas Ranger Phil Ryan reports that Lucas became so accustomed to such treatment that he began "dictating orders" that were often obeyed by Rangers. Ranger Ryan also reported that he became concerned about the veracity of most of Lucas's confessions, feeling confident in the accuracy of two of Lucas's confessions, and further stated to the Houston Chronicle that "I wouldn't bet a paycheck on any of the others." Shellady reports that in order to expose Lucas' claims, Ryan invented utterly fictional crimes, to which Lucas would generally "confess" involvement, a tactic also employed by Dallas detective Linda Erwin.
Ranger Ryan reports the manner in which Lucas typically confessed to a number of unsolved murders: If a police agency suspected Lucas, and if Lucas admitted involvement—and his total of some 3,000 confessions suggests he rarely denied complicity—they would send the Lucas Task Force a case file with information pertaining to the unsolved crime. Lucas would be questioned at length and sometimes even allowed to read police reports, thus learning any number of details previously known only to police, which he could then use during interviews.
The same Houston Chronicle article reports that Erwin interviewed Lucas after he confessed to 13 murders in Houston. Erwin reports that "when I heard it got to be hundreds and hundreds (of confessions), it was unbelievable to me." Erwin further reports that, like Ranger Ryan, she assembled an utterly fictional crime: She "fabricated a case using random photographs from old murders long since solved and details pulled from her imagination ... He claimed credit for the phony crime, and his confession, containing facts she had dribbled out to him, probably could have convinced a jury to convict him, she said." Erwin admitted she was uncomfortable fabricating a crime, but felt it necessary in order to settle questions of Lucas's reliability. Lucas was not charged with any of the crimes he confessed to committing in Dallas.

"The Lucas Report" and controversy
Lucas's claims gradually became criticized as outlandish and less likely: He claimed to have been part of a cannibalistic, satanic cult called "The Hand of Death", to have taken part in snuff films, to have killed Jimmy Hoffa, and to have delivered poison to cult leader Jim Jones in Jonestown prior to the notorious mass murder/suicide of Jones's group.
In response to these claims, and to reports of the Lucas Task Force's questionable investigative methodology, the Texas Attorney General's office issued a study (sometimes called "The Lucas Report") in 1986.
The bulk of the Lucas Report was devoted to a detailed timeline of Lucas's claimed murders. The report compared Lucas's claims to reliable, verifiable sources for Lucas's whereabouts; the results often contradicted his confessions, and thus cast doubt on most of the crimes in which he was implicated. Attorney General Jim Mattox wrote that "when Lucas was confessing to hundreds of murders, those with custody of Lucas did nothing to bring an end to this hoax," and "We have found information that would lead us to believe that some officials 'cleared cases' just to get them off the books."
Here are a few examples of crimes the Lucas Task Force ruled "closed" based on Lucas's "confessions," when strong evidence has been cited, indicating Lucas was far from the scene of the crime:
Lucas confessed to the August 10, 1977, murder of Curby Reeves in Smith County, Texas, while payroll records indicate that Lucas worked a full shift at the Kaolin Mushroom Farms in Kaolin, Pennsylvania.
Lucas confessed to the March 20, 1979, murder of Elaine Tollett in Tulsa, Oklahoma, while medical records indicate Lucas was in hospital in Bluefield, West Virginia.
Chris Piazza, then a prosecutor in Little Rock, Arkansas, wrote, of a specific 1981 robbery-murder case in which Lucas claimed involvement, that "the testimony of Henry Lee Lucas ... is dubious, to say the least" and that Lucas's testimony was "inaccurate in nearly every detail."

Orange Socks
Ultimately, Lucas was convicted of 11 homicides. He was sentenced to death for the murder of an unidentified woman, dubbed "Orange Socks" after her only clothing, who was discovered in Williamson County, Texas, on Halloween 1979. Lucas's confession was recorded on audio tape and videotape and, when presented at court, had been subject to significant editing, leading critics to speculate that the removed sections showed authorities coaching Lucas on details of the crime.
Dan Morales, Mattox's successor as Texas Attorney General, concluded that it was "highly unlikely" that Lucas was guilty in the "Orange Socks" case. Though initially skeptical of the Lucas Report, he came generally to support its findings.
Williamson County prosecutor Cecil Kuykendall discounted Lucas as a suspect in the "Orange Socks" case and has stated his opinion that Lucas's confession drew attention from a far more viable suspect, further noting evidence that Lucas was in Florida, working as a roofer, during the time that "Orange Socks" was killed. As cited in an Amnesty International report, Mattox stated that during the time "Orange Socks" was killed, "work records, check cashing evidence, all information indicating Lucas was somewhere else. [W]e found nothing tying [Lucas] with the crime he confessed to and was convicted of." Mattox's office decided not to intervene, so certain they were that the state appeals court would overturn Lucas's conviction in the "Orange Socks" case.
Lucas told Shelladay that he confessed to the murder in an effort at "legal suicide," and that he "just wanted to die." Lucas expressed what Shellady describes as "deep regret and sorrow" for offering false confessions, stating that he "was not aware how crooked they [Texas authorities] were until it was too late." The Houston Chronicle article also notes that Lucas offered various motives for his confession spree: Improving his conditions, a desire to embarrass police, and feeling guilt over killing Powell and Rich.
Adding to the confusion, however, was Lucas's habit of making confessions, recanting them, then offering more confessions, and again recanting them. Mattox, wary of Lucas's many false confessions, suggested in 1999 that in the case of Rafael Resendez-Ramirez "I hope they don't start pinning on him every crime that happens near a railroad track."

Clemency and death
Lucas's supposed confederate, Ottis Toole, died in September 1996 from cirrhosis of the liver. He was serving six life sentences in a Florida prison. In 1998, the Texas Board of Pardon and Parole voted to commute Lucas's death sentence to life imprisonment. Then-Governor George W. Bush recommended the commutation. On March 13, 2001, Lucas died in prison from heart failure.

Henry Lee Luca's Artwork :

Ted Bundy : " The Lady Killer "

Ted Bundy (November 24, 1946 – January 24, 1989) was an American serial killer. Bundy murdered scores of young women across the United States between 1974 and 1978. After more than a decade of vigorous denials, Bundy eventually confessed to 30 murders, although the actual total of victims remains unknown. Estimates range from 29 to over 100. Typically, Bundy would bludgeon his victims, then strangle them to death. He also engaged in rape and necrophilia.

Childhood
Bundy was born at the Elizabeth Lund Home For Unwed Mothers in Burlington, Vermont. The identity of his father remains a mystery. Bundy's birth certificate lists a "Lloyd Marshall" (b. 1916), while Bundy's mother, Eleanor Louise Cowell, would later tell of being seduced by a war veteran named "Jack Worthington". Bundy's family did not believe this story, however, and expressed suspicion about Louise's violent, abusive father, Samuel Cowell. To avoid social stigma, Bundy's grandparents Samuel and Eleanor Cowell claimed him as their son; in taking their last name, he became Theodore Robert Cowell. He grew up believing his mother Eleanor Louise Cowell to be his older sister. Bundy biographers Stephen Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth state that he learned Louise was actually his mother while he was in high school. True crime writer Ann Rule states that it was around 1969, shortly following a traumatic breakup with his college girlfriend.
For the first few years of his life, Bundy and his mother lived in Philadelphia with his maternal grandparents. In 1950, Bundy and his "sister" moved to live with relatives in Tacom, Washington where Louise had her son's last name inexplicably changed from Cowell to Nelson. In 1951, one year after their move, Louise met Johnnie Culpepper Bundy at an adult singles night held at Tacoma's First Methodist Church. A Navy veteran and cook at a local Veterans Administration hospital, Bundy was eligible and lonely, much like single mother Louise. In May of that year, Johnny and Louise were married, and soon after Johnny adopted Ted, legally changing his last name to "Bundy".
In time, the Bundy family grew to add four more children, whom the young Bundy spent much of his time babysitting. Johnny Bundy tried to include him in camping trips and other father-son activities, but the boy remained emotionally detached from his stepfather. Bundy was a good student at Tacoma's Woodrow Wilson High School, and was active in a local Methodist church, serving as vice-president of the Methodist Youth Fellowship. He was involved with a local troop of the Boy Scouts of America.
Socially, Bundy remained shy and introverted throughout his high school and early college years. Unknown to others, he was a compulsive thief and shoplifter.

College years
In 1965, Bundy graduated from Tacoma's Woodrow Wilson High School. Awarded a scholarship by the University of Puget Sound, he started there that fall, taking courses in psychology and Asian studies. After just two semesters at UPS, he decided to transfer to Seattle's University of Washington.
While a college student, Bundy worked as a grocery bagger and shelf-stocker at a Seattle Safeway store on Queen Anne Hill, as well as other odd jobs. As part of his course of studies in psychology, he would later work as a night-shift volunteer at Seattle's Suicide Hot Line, a suicide crisis center that served the greater Seattle metropolitan and suburban areas. It was there that he met and worked alongside former Seattle policewoman and fledgling crime writer Ann Rule. Familiar with Bundy and his crimes from a personal standpoint, Rule would later write the most famous biography of Bundy and his crimes, The Stranger Beside Me.
He began a relationship with fellow college student Stephanie Brooks (a pseudonym), whom he met while enrolled at the UW in 1967. Following her 1968 graduation and return to her family home in California, she ended the relationship, fed up with what she described as Bundy's immaturity and lack of ambition. It was at this time that Rule states Bundy decided to pay a visit to Burlington, Vermont, the place of his birth. There, Rule writes, he visited the local records clerk and finally uncovered the truth of his parentage.
After his discovery, Bundy became a more focused and dominant person. In 1968, he managed the Seattle office of Nelson Rockefeller's Presidential campaign and attended the 1968 Republican convention in Miami as a Rockefeller supporter. He re-enrolled at the University of Washington, this time with a major in psychology. Bundy became an honors student and was well liked by his professors. In 1969, he started dating Elizabeth Kloepfer, a divorced secretary with a daughter, who fell deeply in love with him. They would continue dating for over six years, until he went to prison for kidnapping in 1976.
Bundy graduated in 1972 from the University of Washington with a degree in psychology. Soon afterward, he again went to work for the state Republican Party, which included a close relationship with Gov. Daniel J. Evans. During the campaign, Bundy followed Evans' Democratic opponent around the state, tape recording his speeches and reporting back to Evans personally. A minor scandal later followed when the Democrats found out about Bundy, who had been posing as a college student.
While on a business trip to California in the summer of 1973, Bundy came back into Stephanie's life with a new look and attitude; this time as a serious, dedicated professional who had been accepted to law school. Bundy continued to date Elizabeth as well, and neither woman was aware the other existed. Bundy courted Stephanie throughout the rest of the year, and she accepted his proposal of marriage. Two weeks later, however, shortly after New Year's 1974, he unceremoniously dumped her, refusing to return her phone calls. He would later dismiss the proposal and break-up as part of a challenge he undertook, saying, "I just wanted to prove to myself that I could have her." It was a few weeks after this breakup that Bundy began a murderous rampage in Washington state.

Murders

First Wave: Washington State
Many Bundy experts, including Rule and former King County detective Robert D. Keppel, believe Bundy may have started killing as far back as his early teens. Ann Marie Burr, an eight-year-old girl from Tacoma, vanished from her home in 1961, when Bundy was 14 years old. Bundy always denied killing her. The day before his execution, Bundy told his lawyer that he made his first attempt to kidnap a woman in 1969, and implied that he committed his first actual murder sometime during the 1972-73 time frame. His earliest known and confirmed murders were committed in 1974, when he was 27.
Shortly after midnight on January 4, 1974, Bundy entered the basement bedroom of 18-year-old Joni Lenz (pseudonym), a dancer and student at the University of Washington. Bundy bludgeoned her with a metal rod from her bed frame while she slept, and sexually assaulted her with a speculum. Lenz was found the next morning by her roommates in a coma and lying in a pool of her own blood. She survived the attack, but suffered permanent brain damage. Bundy's next victim was Lynda Ann Healy, another University of Washington student. On the night of January 31, 1974, Bundy broke into Healy's room, knocked her unconscious, dressed her in jeans and a shirt, wrapped her in a bed sheet, and carried her away.
Co-eds began disappearing at a rate of roughly one a month. On March 12, 1974 in Olympia, Bundy kidnapped and murdered Donna Gail Manson, a 19-year old student at The Evergreen State College. On April 17, 1974 Susan Rancourt disappeared from the campus of Central Washington State College in Ellensburg. Later, two different CWSC co-eds would recount meeting a man with his arm in a cast — one that night, one three nights earlier — who asked for their help to carry a load of books to his Volkswagen Beetle. Next was Kathy Parks, last seen on the campus of Oregon State University in Corvallis, Oregon on May 6, 1974. Brenda Ball (the only victim who wasn't a student) was never seen again after leaving The Flame Tavern in Burien, Washington on June 1, 1974. Bundy then murdered Georgeann Hawkins, a student at the University of Washington and a member of Kappa Alpha Theta, an on-campus sorority. In the early morning hours of June 11, 1974, she walked through an alley from her boyfriend's dormitory residence to her sorority house. Hawkins was never seen again. Witnesses later reported seeing a man with a leg cast struggling to carry a briefcase in the area that night. One co-ed reported that the man had asked her help in carrying the briefcase to his car, a Volkswagen Beetle.
Bundy's Washington killing spree culminated on July 14, 1974 with the abduction in broad daylight of Janice Ott and Denise Naslund from Lake Sammamish State Park in Issaqua, Washington. Eight different people that day told the police about the handsome young man with his left arm in a sling who called himself "Ted". Five of them were women that "Ted" asked for help unloading a sailboat from his Volkswagen Beetle. One of them went with "Ted" as far as his car, where there was no sailboat, before declining to accompany him further. Three more witnesses testified to seeing him approach Janice Ott with the story about the sailboat, and to seeing Ott walk away from the beach in his company. She was never seen alive again.

Naslund disappeared without a trace four hours later.
King County detectives now had a description both of the suspect and his car. Some witnesses told investigators that the "Ted" they encountered spoke with a clipped, Canadian-like accent. Soon fliers were up all over the Seattle area. After seeing the police sketch and description of the Lake Sammamish suspect in both of the local newspapers and on television news reports, Bundy's girlfriend, one of his psychology professors at UW, and former co-worker Ann Rule all reported him as a possible suspect. The police, receiving up to 200 tips per day, did not pay any special attention to a tip about a clean-cut law student.
The fragmented remains of Ott and Naslund were discovered on September 7, 1974 off Interstate 90 near Issaquah, one mile from the park. Along with the women's remains was found an extra femur bone and vertebrae, which Bundy shortly before his execution would identify as that of Georgeann Hawkins. Between March 1 and March 3, 1975, the skulls and jawbones (and no other skeletal remains) of Healy, Rancourt, Parks and Ball were found on Taylor Mountain just east of Issaquah. Years later Bundy claimed that he had also dumped Donna Manson's body there, but no trace of her has ever been found.

Second wave: Utah and Colorado

That autumn, Bundy began attending the University of Utah law school in Salt Lake City, where he resumed killing in October. Nancy Wilcox disappeared from Holladay, near Salt Lake City, on October 2, 1974. Wilcox was last seen riding in a Volkswagen Beetle. On October 18, 1974, Bundy murdered Melissa Smith, the 17-year-old daughter of Midvale police chief Louis Smith; Bundy raped, sodomized, and strangled her. Her body was found nine days later. Next was Laura Aime, also 17, who disappeared when she left a Halloween party in Lehi, Utah on October 31, 1974; her naked, beaten and strangled corpse was found nearly a month later by hikers on Thanksgiving Day, on the banks of a river in American Fork Canyon.
In Murray, Utah, on November 8, 1974, Carol DaRonch narrowly escaped with her life. Claiming to be Officer Roseland of the Murray Police Department, Bundy approached DaRonch at the Fashion Place Mall, told her someone had tried to break into her car, and asked her to accompany him to the police station. She got into his car but refused his instruction to buckle her seat belt. They drove for a short period before Bundy suddenly pulled to the shoulder and attempted to slap a pair of handcuffs on her. In the struggle, he fastened both loops to the same wrist. Next Bundy whipped out his crowbar, but DaRonch caught it in the air just before it would have cracked her skull. She then got the door open and tumbled out onto the highway, thus escaping from her would-be killer.
About an hour later, a strange man showed up at Viewmont High School in Bountiful, Utah, where the drama club was putting on a play. He approached the drama teacher and then a student, asking both to come out to the parking lot to identify a car. Both declined. The drama teacher saw him again shortly before the end of the play, this time breathing hard, with his hair mussed and his shirt untucked. Another student saw the man lurking in the rear of the auditorium. Debby Kent, a 17-year-old Viewmont High student, left the play at intermission to go and pick up her brother, and was never seen again. Later, investigators found a small key in the parking lot outside Viewmont High. It unlocked the handcuffs taken off of Carol DaRonch.
In 1975, while still attending law school at the University of Utah, Bundy shifted his crimes to Colorado. On January 12, 1975, Caryn Campbell disappeared from the Wildwood Inn at Snowmass, Colorado, where she had been vacationing with her fiancé and his children. She vanished somewhere in a span of fifty feet between the elevator doors and her room. Her body was found on February 17, 1975. Next, Vail ski instructor Julie Cunningham disappeared on March 15, 1975, and Denise Oliverson in Grand Junction on April 6, 1975. While in prison, Bundy confessed to Colorado investigators that he used crutches to approach Cunningham, after asking her to help him carry some ski boots to his car. At the car, Bundy clubbed her with his crowbar and immobilized her with handcuffs, later strangling her in a crime highly similar to the Georgeann Hawkins murder.
Lynette Culver went missing in Pocatello, Idaho on May 6, 1975 from the grounds of her junior high school. While on death row years later, Bundy confessed that he kidnapped Culver and had taken the girl to a room he had rented at a nearby Holiday Inn. After raping her, he stated that he had drowned her in the motel room bathtub and later dumped her body in a river. After his return to Utah, Susan Curtis vanished on June 28, 1975. (Bundy confessed to the Curtis murder minutes before his execution). The bodies of Cunningham, Culver, Curtis, and Oliverson have never been recovered.
Meanwhile, back in Washington, investigators were attempting to prioritize their enormous list of suspects. In an innovative use of technology for 1975, they used computers to cross-check different likely lists of suspects (classmates of Lynda Healy, owners of Volkswagens, etc.) against each other, and then identify suspects who turned up on more than one list. "Theodore Robert Bundy" was one of 25 people who turned up on four separate lists, and his case file was second on the "To Be Investigated" pile when the call came from Utah of an arrest.

Arrest, first trial, and escapes
Bundy was arrested on August 16, 1975, in Salt Lake City, for failure to stop for a police officer. A search of his car revealed a ski mask, a crowbar, handcuffs, trash bags, an icepick, and other items that were thought by the police to be burglary tools. Bundy remained cool during questioning, explaining that he needed the mask for skiing and had found the handcuffs in a dumpster. Utah detective Jerry Thompson connected Bundy and his Volkswagen to the DaRonch kidnapping and the missing girls, and searched his apartment. The search uncovered a brochure of Colorado ski resorts, with a check mark by the Wildwood Inn where Caryn Campbell had disappeared. After searching his apartment, the police brought Bundy in for a lineup before DaRonch and the Bountiful witnesses. They identified him as "Officer Roseland" and as the man lurking about the night Debby Kent disappeared. Following a week-long trial, Bundy was convicted of DaRonch's kidnapping on March 1, 1976 and was sentenced to 15 years in Utah State Prison. Colorado authorities were pursuing murder charges, however, and Bundy was extradited there to stand trial.
On June 7, 1977, in preparation for a hearing in the Caryn Campbell murder trial, Bundy was taken to the Pitkin County courthouse in Aspen. During a court recess, he was allowed to visit the courthouse's law library, where he jumped out of the building from a second-story window and escaped. In the minutes following his escape, Bundy at first ran and then strolled casually through the small town toward Aspen Mountain. He made it all the way to the top of Aspen Mountain without being detected, but then lost his sense of direction and wandered around the mountain, missing two trails that led down off the mountain to his intended destination, the town of Crested Butte. At one point, he came face-to-face with a gun-toting citizen who was one of the searchers scouring Aspen Mountain for Ted Bundy, but talked his way out of danger. On June 13, 1977, Bundy stole a car he found on the mountain. He drove back into Aspen and could have gotten away, but two police deputies noticed the Cadillac with dimmed headlights weaving in and out of its lane and pulled Bundy over. They recognized him and took him back to jail. Bundy had been on the lam for six days.
Upon arrest, Bundy was placed in the smaller Glenwood Springs jail, rather than being taken back to Aspen. Somehow he had acquired a hacksaw blade and $500 in cash; he later claimed the blade came from another prison inmate. He sawed through the welds fixing a small metal plate in the ceiling and, after dieting down still further, was able to fit through the hole and access the crawl space above. An informant in the prison told guards that he had heard Bundy moving around the ceiling, but no one checked it out. When Bundy's Aspen trial judge ruled on December 23, 1977 that the Caryn Campbell murder trial would start on January 9, 1978, and changed the venue to Colorado Springs, Bundy realized that he had to make his escape before he was transferred out of the Glenwood Springs jail. On the night of December 30, 1977, Bundy dressed warmly and packed books and files under his blanket to make it look like he was sleeping. He wriggled through the hole and up into the crawlspace. Bundy crawled over to a spot directly above the jailer's linen closet — the jailer and his wife were out for the evening — dropped down into the jailer's apartment, and walked out the door.
Bundy was free, but he was on foot in the middle of a bitterly cold, snowy Colorado night. He stole a broken-down MG, but it stalled out in the mountains. Bundy was stuck on the side of Interstate 70 in the middle of the night in a blizzard, but another driver gave him a ride into Vail. From there he caught a bus to Denver and boarded the 8:55 a.m. flight to Chicago. The Glenwood Springs jail guards did not notice Bundy was gone until noon on December 31, 1977, 17 hours after his escape, by which time Bundy was already in Chicago.

Bundy's final rampage: Florida

Bundy then caught an Amtrak train to Ann Arbor, Michigan where he got a room at the YMCA. On January 2, 1978, he went to an Ann Arbor bar and watched his former University of Washington Huskies beat Michigan in the Rose Bowl. He later stole a car in Ann Arbor, which he abandoned in Atlanta, Georgia before boarding a bus for Tallahassee, Florida, where he arrived on January 8, 1978. There, he rented a room at a boarding house under the alias of "Chris Hagen" and committed numerous petty crimes including shoplifting, purse snatching, and auto theft. He stole a student ID card that belonged to a Kenneth Misner and sent away for copies of Misner's Social Security card and birth certificate.
Just one week after Bundy's arrival in Tallahassee, in the early hours of Super Bowl Sunday on January 15, 1978, two and a half years of repressed homicidal violence erupted. Bundy entered the Florida State University Chi Omega sorority house at approximately 3 a.m. and killed two sleeping women, Lisa Levy and Margaret Bowman. Levy and Bowman were bludgeoned and strangled, and Levy was also sexually assaulted. Two other Chi Omegas, Karen Chandler and Kathy Kleiner, were bludgeoned in their sleep and severely injured. The entire episode took no more than half an hour. After leaving the Chi Omega house, Bundy broke into another home a few blocks away, clubbing and severely injuring FSU student Cheryl Thomas.

On February 9, 1978, Bundy traveled to Lake City, Florida. While there, he abducted, raped, and murdered 12-year-old Kimberly Leach, throwing her body under a small pig shed. She would be his final victim. On February 12, 1978, Bundy stole yet another Volkswagen Beetle and left Tallahassee for good, heading west across the Florida panhandle. On February 15, 1978, shortly after 1 a.m., Bundy was stopped by Pensacola police officer David Lee. When the officer called in a check of the license plate, the vehicle came up as stolen. Bundy then scuffled with the officer before he was finally subdued. As Lee took the unknown suspect to jail, Bundy said "I wish you had killed me." At his booking Bundy gave the police the name Ken Misner (and presented stolen identification for Misner), but the Florida Department of Law Enforcement made a positive fingerprint identification early the next day. He was immediately transported to Tallahassee and subsequently charged with the Tallahassee and Lake City murders. He was later taken to Miami to stand trial for the Chi Omega murders.

Conviction and execution

Bundy went to trial for the Chi Omega murders in June 1979 with Dade County Circuit Court Judge Edward D. Cowart presiding. Despite having five court-appointed lawyers, he insisted on acting as his own attorney and even cross-examined witnesses, including the police officer who had discovered Margaret Bowman's body. He was prosecuted by Assistant State Attorney Larry Simpson.
Two pieces of evidence proved crucial. First, Chi-Omega member Nita Neary, getting back to the house very late after a date, saw Bundy as he left, and identified him in court.Second, during his homicidal frenzy, Bundy bit Lisa Levy in her left buttock cheek, leaving obvious bite marks. Police took plaster casts of Bundy's teeth and a forensics expert matched them to the photographs of Levy's wound. Bundy was convicted on all counts and sentenced to death. After confirming the sentence, Judge Cowart gave him the verdict:
"It is ordered that you be put to death by a current of electricity, that current be passed through your body until you are dead. Take care of yourself, young man. I say that to you sincerely; take care of yourself, please. It is an utter tragedy for this court to see such a total waste of humanity as I've experienced in this courtroom. You're a bright young man. You'd have made a good lawyer, and I would have loved to have you practice in front of me, but you went another way, partner. Take care of yourself. I don't feel any animosity toward you. I want you to know that. Once again, take care of yourself."
Bundy was tried for the Kimberly Leach murder in 1980. He was again convicted on all counts, principally due to fibers found in his van that matched Leach's clothing and an eyewitness that saw him leading Leach away from the school, and sentenced to death. During the Kimberly Leach trial, Bundy married former coworker Carole Ann Boone in the courtroom while questioning her on the stand. Following numerous conjugal visits between Bundy and his new wife, Boone gave birth to a girl she named "Tina" in October 1982. Eventually, however, Boone moved away, divorced Bundy, and changed her last name and that of her daughter. Their current whereabouts is unknown.
While awaiting execution in Raiford Prison, Bundy was housed in the cell next to serial killer Ottis Toole, the suspected murderer of Adam Walsh. Bundy was often visited by Special Agent William Hagmaier of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Behavioral Sciences Unit. Bundy would come to confide in Hagmaier, going so far as to call him his best friend. Eventually, Bundy confessed to Hagmaier many details of the murders that had until then been unknown or unconfirmed. In October 1984, Bundy contacted former King County homicide detective Bob Keppel and offered to assist in the ongoing search for the Green River Killer by providing his own insights and analysis. Keppel and Green River Task Force detective Dave Reichert traveled to Florida's death row to interview Bundy. Both detectives later stated that these interviews were of little actual help in the investigation; they provided far greater insight into Bundy's own mind, and were primarily pursued in the hope of learning the details of unsolved murders which Bundy was suspected of committing.
Bundy contacted Keppel again in 1988. With his appeals exhausted (Bundy had beaten previous death warrants for March 4, 1986 July 2, 1986, and November 18, 1986), and execution imminent, Bundy confessed to eight official unsolved murders in Washington State for which he was the prime suspect. Bundy told Keppel that there were actually five bodies left on Taylor Mountain, not four as they had originally thought. Bundy confessed in detail to the murder of Georgeann Hawkins, describing how he lured her to his car, clubbed her with a tire iron that he had stashed on the ground under his car, drove away with a semi-conscious Hawkins in the car with him, and later raped and strangled her.
After the interview, Keppel reported that he had been shocked in speaking with Bundy, and that he was the kind of man who was "born to kill." Keppel stated:
"He described the Issaquah crime scene (where Janice Ott, Denise Naslund, and Georgeann Hawkins had been left) and it was almost like he was just there. Like he was seeing everything. He was infatuated with the idea because he spent so much time there. He is just totally consumed with murder all the time."
Bundy had hoped that he could use the revelations and partial confessions to get another stay of execution or possibly commute his sentence to life imprisonment. At one point, a legal advocate working for Bundy asked many of the families of the victims to fax letters to Florida Governor Robert Martinez and ask mercy for Bundy in order to find out where the remains of their loved ones were. To a person, all the families refused. Keppel and others reported that Bundy gave scant detail about his crimes during his confessions, and promised to reveal more and other body dump sites if he were given "more time." The ploy failed and Bundy was executed on schedule.
The night before Bundy was executed, he gave a television interview to James Dobson, head of the evangelical Christian organization Focus on the Family. During the interview, Bundy made repeated claims as to the pornographic "roots" of his crimes. He stated that, while pornography didn't cause him to commit murder, the consumption of violent pornography helped "shape and mold" his violence into "behavior too terrible to describe." He alleged that he felt that violence in the media, "particularly sexualized violence," sent boys "down the road to being Ted Bundys". In the same interview, Bundy stated:
"You are going to kill me, and that will protect society from me. But out there are many, many more people who are addicted to pornography, and you are doing nothing about that."
According to Hagmaier, Bundy contemplated suicide in the days leading up to his execution, but eventually decided against it.
At 7:06 a.m. local time on January 24, 1989, Ted Bundy was executed in the electric chair at Florida State Prison in Starke, Florida. His last words were, "I'd like you to give my love to my family and friends." Then, more than 2,000 volts were applied across his body for less than two minutes. He was pronounced dead at 7:16 a.m. Several hundred people were gathered outside the prison and cheered when they saw the signal that Bundy had been declared dead. When his body was removed from the prison, protesters who were still gathered there surrounded the hearse and struck at it, blocked it and jeered. Bundy's remains were cremated and turned over to his family. The ashes were eventually scattered in the Cascade Mountains. Before the cremation, unauthorized pictures were taken of Bundy's body, showing the electrical burns on his shaved head. Some of these pictures appeared in supermarket tabloids.
Fred Leuchter analyzed the autopsy report on Bundy and told the author of The Missouri Protocol, published in 1990, that at autopsy Bundy's bladder was found to contain "straw-colored urine." Leuchter, a self-taught expert on execution machinery and procedures, believes this indicates that the voltage during Bundy's execution was lower than the correct amount. In the account of the execution found at the end of Ann Rule's The Stranger Beside Me, she says that at least some of the execution witnesses believed that the executioner was female, because they observed long eyelashes underneath the executioner's hood.

Modus operandi and victim profiles
When discussing serial murder with Keppel, Bundy said that serial killers change their habits with time and circumstance. This proved true of Bundy himself. For example, Bundy entered into the homes of his first two known victims, Joni Lenz and Lynda Healy, but would not attack a victim in her home again until the night of the Chi Omega murders, shortly before his final arrest.
Nevertheless, he did have a modus operandi that held true for most of his criminal career. He would approach a potential victim in a public place, even in daylight or in a crowd, as when he abducted Ott and Naslund at Lake Sammamish or when he kidnapped Leach from her school. Bundy had various ways of gaining a victim's trust. Sometimes, he would feign injury, wearing his arm in a sling or wearing a fake cast, as in the murders of Hawkins, Rancourt, Ott, Naslund, and Cunningham. At other times Bundy would impersonate an authority figure; he pretended to be a policeman when approaching Carol DaRonch. The day before he killed Kimberly Leach, Bundy approached another young Florida girl pretending to be "Richard Burton, Fire Department," but left hurriedly after her older brother arrived.
Bundy had a remarkable advantage as his facial features were attractive, yet not especially memorable. In later years, he would often be described as chameleon-like, able to look totally different by making only minor adjustments to his appearance, e.g., growing a beard or changing his hairstyle.
All of Bundy's victims were white females and most were of middle class background. Almost all were between the ages of 15 and 25. Many were college students. In her book, Rule notes that most of Bundy's victims had long straight hair parted in the middle — just like Stephanie Brooks, the woman to whom Bundy was engaged in 1973. Rule speculates that Bundy's resentment towards his first girlfriend was a motivating factor in his string of murders.
After luring a victim to his car, Bundy would hit her in the head with a crowbar he had placed underneath his Volkswagen or hidden inside it. Every recovered skull, except for that of Kimberly Leach, showed signs of blunt force trauma. Every recovered body, again except for that of Leach, showed signs of strangulation. Many of Bundy's victims were transported a considerable distance from where they disappeared, as in the case of Kathy Parks, whom he drove more than 260 miles from Oregon to Washington. Bundy often would drink alcohol prior to finding a victim; Carol DaRonch testified to smelling alcohol on his breath.
Hagmaier stated that Bundy considered himself to be an amateur and impulsive killer in his early years, and then moved into what he considered to be his "prime" or "predator" phase. Bundy stated that this phase began around the time of the Lynda Healy murder, when he began seeking victims he considered to be equal to his skill as a murderer.
On death row, Bundy admitted to decapitating at least a dozen of his victims with a hacksaw. He kept the severed heads later found on Taylor Mountain (Rancourt, Parks, Ball, Healy) in his room or apartment for some time before finally disposing of them. He confessed to cremating Donna Manson's head in his girlfriend's fireplace. Some of the skulls of Bundy's victims were found with the front teeth broken out. Bundy also confessed to visiting his victims' bodies over and over again at the Taylor Mountain body dump site. He stated that he would lie with them for hours, applying makeup to their corpses and having sex with their decomposing bodies until putrefaction forced him to abandon the remains. Not long before his death, Bundy admitted to returning to the corpse of Georgann Hawkins for purposes of necrophilia.
Bundy confessed to keeping other souvenirs of his crimes. The Utah police who searched Bundy's apartment in 1975 missed a collection of photographs that Bundy had hidden in the utility room, photos that Bundy destroyed when he returned home after being released on bail. His girlfriend once found a bag in his room filled with women's clothing.
When Bundy was confronted by law enforcement officers who stated that they believed the number of individuals he had murdered was 36, Bundy told them that they should "add one digit to that, and you'll have it". Rule speculated that this meant Bundy might have killed over 100 women. Speaking to his lawyer Polly Nelson in 1988, however, Bundy dismissed the 100+ victims speculation and said that the more common estimate of approximately 35 victims was accurate.

Pathology
In December 1987, Bundy was examined for seven hours by a professor from New York University Medical Center, Dorothy Otnow Lewis. To Lewis, Bundy described his childhood, especially his relationship with his maternal grandparents, Samuel and Eleanor Cowell. Along with the already established description of his grandfather as a tyrannical bully, Bundy described him as a bigot who hated blacks, Italians, Catholics, and Jews. He further stated that his grandfather tortured animals, beating the family dog and swinging neighborhood cats by their tails. He also told Lewis that his grandfather, who was a deacon in his church, kept a large collection of pornography in his greenhouse where, according to relatives, Bundy and a cousin would sneak to look at for hours. Family members expressed skepticism over Louise's "Jack Worthington" story of Bundy's parentage and noted that Samuel Cowell once flew into a violent rage when the subject of the boy's father came up. Bundy described his grandmother as a timid and obedient wife, who was sporadically taken to hospitals to undergo shock treatment for depression. Towards the end of her life, Bundy said, she became agoraphobic.
Louise Bundy's younger sister Julia recalled a disturbing incident with her young nephew. After lying down in the Cowells' home for a nap, Julia woke to find herself surrounded by knives from the Cowell kitchen. Three-year-old Ted was standing by the bed, smiling at her.
Bundy used stolen credit cards to purchase more than 30 pairs of socks while on the run in Florida. He willingly conceded to being a foot fetishist, believing it to be nothing more than a personal quirk.
When Florida detectives begged Bundy to tell them where he'd dumped Kimberly Leach to give her family some peace, Bundy said "But I'm the most cold-hearted son of a bitch you'll ever meet."

Victims
Below is a chronological list of Ted Bundy's known victims. Bundy never made a comprehensive confession of his crimes and his true total is not known, but before his execution, he confessed to Hagmaier to having committed 30 murders. Ten of his victims remain unidentified. All the women listed were killed, unless otherwise noted.

1974
Jan. 4: Joni Lenz (survived). Bludgeoned in her bed as she slept.
Feb. 1: Lynda Ann Healy (19). Beaten & bludgeoned unconscious while asleep and abducted from the house she shared with other University of Washington co-eds.
Mar. 12: Donna Gail Manson (19). Abducted while walking to a jazz concert on The Evergreen State College campus, Olympia, Washington.
Apr. 17: Susan Rancourt (18). Disappeared as she walked across Ellensburg's Central Washington State College campus at night.
May 6: Roberta Kathleen Parks (22). Vanished from Oregon State University in Corvallis while walking to another dorm hall to have coffee with friends.
May 25: Brenda Ball (22). Disappeared from the Flame Tavern in Burien, Washington.
Jun. 11: Georgeann Hawkins (18). Disappeared from behind her sorority house, Kappa Alpha Theta, at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Jul. 14: Janice Ott (23) and Denise Naslund (19), both from Lake Sammamish State Park in Issaquah, Washington.
Aug. 2: Carol Valenzuela (20). Last seen at a welfare office in Vancouver, Washington.
Oct. 2: Nancy Wilcox (16). Disappeared in Holladay, Utah.
Oct. 18: Melissa Smith (17). Vanished from Midvale, Utah on her way to a friend's house.
Oct. 31: Laura Aime (17). Disappeared from a Halloween party at Lehi, Utah.
Nov. 8: Carol DaRonch (survived). Escaped from Bundy by jumping out from his car in Murray, Utah.
Nov. 8: Debra (Debby) Kent (17). Vanished from the parking lot of a school in Bountiful, Utah, hours after DaRonch escaped from Bundy.

1975
Jan. 12: Caryn Campbell (23). While on a ski trip with her fiancé in Aspen, Colorado, Campbell vanished between the hotel lounge and her room.
Mar. 15: Julie Cunningham (26). Disappeared while on her way to a nearby tavern in Vail, Colorado.
Apr. 6: Denise Oliverson (25). Abducted while visiting her parents in Grand Junction, Colorado.
May 6: Lynette Culver (13). Snatched from a school playground at Alameda Junior High School, Pocatello, Idaho.
June 28: Susan Curtis (15). Disappeared while attending a youth conference at Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah.
July 4: Nancy Baird (23). Disappeared while working at a convenience store. Confessed shortly before his execution. Layton, Utah.

1978
Jan. 15: Lisa Levy (20), Margaret Bowman (21), Karen Chandler (survived), Kathy Kleiner Deshields (survived). The Chi Omega killings, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida.
Jan. 15: Cheryl Thomas (survived). Bludgeoned in her bed, eight blocks away from the Chi Omega Sorority house.
Feb. 9: Kimberly Leach (12), kidnapped from her junior high school in Lake City, Florida. She was raped, murdered and discarded in Suwannee State Park.

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Soviet War Crimes..."Hail Communism!"

Soviet war crimes gives a short overview about serious crimes, which probably offend against international law, committed by the Red Army's (1918-1946, later Soviet Army) leadership and an unknown number of single members of the Soviet armed forces from 1919 to 1990 inclusive including those in Eastern Europe in late 1944 and early 1945, particularly murder and rape. Neither by any international military jurisdiction nor the Red Army’s leadership have any of its members have ever been charged with war crimes by a court of law.

Background
On the part of the Axis powers a racist ideology played a primary role in starting World War II and led to immediate, constant and systematic war crimes against the Soviet civilian population during the German invasion and occupation of Russia (1941-45). An estimated 20 million civilians in the Soviet Union lost their lives during the war as a direct or indirect result of combat operations and a policy of systematic annihilation.
On the Soviet side, the Red Army was ideologically orientated and indoctrinated from its first day. It was created in 1918 by the communist Soviet regime in order to defend the new regime in the bloody Russian Civil War. Leon Trotsky, founding father of the Red Army, used propaganda, indoctrination and ruthless terror to defeat the White Army. As a result of severe famine that started during World War I and disease, the deaths of civilians in the Russian Civil War were several times higher than those of combatants. Some sources state that the number of civilian dead in this conflict were 9 times higher than that of troops in the field. The Soviet Union did not recognize Tsarist Russia's assent to the Hague Conventions (1899 and 1907) as binding on the new regime and refused to sign it until 1955.
Following the repulsion of the German attack on the Soviet Union and Soviet troops entering Germany and Hungary in 1944, the number of war crimes, plunder, murder of civilians, and especially rape, reached a level of previously unknown proportions. For decades, Western scholars have generally explained these atrocities in Germany and Hungary as revenge for German atrocities in the territory of the Soviet Union and for the mass killing of Soviet POWs (3,6 million dead of total a 5,2 million POWs) by the German army. This explanation is now disputed by military historians such as Antony Beevor, at least in regard to the mass rapes. Beevor claims that Red Army soldiers also raped Russian and Polish women liberated from concentration camps, and contends that this undermines the revenge explanation. They are also cases of mass rapes in Polish cities taken by Red Army; for instance, in Kraków Soviet entry brought mass rapes on Polish women and girls, as well as brutal plunder of all private property by Soviet soldiers. This behaviour reached such scale that even communists installed by Soviets were preparing a letter of protest to Joseph Stalin himself, while masses in churches were held in expectation of Soviet withdrawal.
From 1941 on, Stalin was willing to strike back against the invading Axis forces at all costs and led the war with extreme brutality, including against his own soldiers.
The Red Army took much higher casualties than any other military force during World War II, in part because of high manpower attrition and inadequate time for training. Faced with badly equipped infantry units barely capable of standing up against machine guns, tanks and artillery, the tactics of Soviet commanders were often based on mass infantry attacks, inflicting heavy losses on their own troops. This tactic was also used for clearing minefields, which were ‘attacked’ by waves of infantry soldiers in order to clear them. In accordance with the orders of Soviet High Command, retreating soldiers or even soldiers who hesitated to advance faced being shot by rearguard NKVD units: Stalin’s order No 270 of August 16, 1941, states that in case of retreat or surrender, all officers involved were to be shot on the spot and all enlisted men threatened with total annihilation as well as possible reprisals against their families.

However, the Soviet military had always called for a scorched earth policy: a speech delivered by Stalin said that in case of a forced retreat, "the enemy must not be left a single engine, a single railway car, not a single pound of grain or a gallon of fuel".
In Soviet and present Russian history books on the "Great Patriotic War" this order and other Russian atrocities in World War II are hardly mentioned. With rare exceptions (notably Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Lev Kopelev) this evidence was found and published by Western historians after some of the Soviet archives were opened to the public following the Cold War.
Crimes committed by the Red Army in occupied territories (Poland, the Baltic states, Romania, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovenia) between 1939 and 1941 and the follow-up atrocities of 1944–1949 have been present in the historical consciousness of these countries since the crimes were committed. Nevertheless, a systematic, publicly controlled discussion could begin only after the fall of the Soviet Union. This is also true of the territories occupied by Soviet forces in Manchuria and the Kuril Islands after the Soviet Union breached its neutrality pact with Japan in 1945.

Civilian casualties

During the Winter War

The Winter War, also known as the Soviet-Finnish War, broke out when the Soviet Union attacked Finland on November 30, 1939. In November 2006 pictures showing atrocities committed by Soviet soldiers and partisans conducting cross-border raids against Finnish civilians were declassified by Finnish authorities. The pictures include images of slain women and children. They had been kept secret for so long in order not to disturb relations with the powerful neighbor to the east.

1939–1942
The Red Army, in accordance with the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and 16 days after the German attack on Poland, invaded and occupied the eastern part of Poland and later, as negotiated with the Nazi regime, the Baltic States and parts of Ukraine and Bessarabia.
The Soviet policy in all newly controlled areas was ruthless, showing strong elements of ethnic cleansing. NKVD task forces followed the Red Army to clean the conquered territories of "Soviet-hostile elements." The Polish historian Tomasz Strzembosz has noted parallels between the German Einsatzgruppen and these units. Many tried to escape from the Soviet NKVD, and those who failed were mostly taken into custody by the Red Army and afterwards deported to Siberia and/or vanished in the "Gulag".
During 1939-1941, for example, nearly 1.5 million inhabitants of Soviet-controlled areas of former Poland were deported, of whom 63.1% were Poles or other nationalities and 7.4% were Jews. Only a fraction of these deportees survived the war.
According to the American professor Carroll Quigley, at least 100,000 out of 320,000 Polish prisoners of war captured by the Red Army in 1939, was exterminated.
Deportations, executions, torture as well as numerous other crimes against the population (murder, hostage taking, burning down of villages) increased when the Red Army was forced to retreat from the advancing Wehrmacht in 1941. Many political prisoners, arrested by the NKVD, were massacred in order to prevent their falling into German hands. In the Baltic States, Byelorussia, the Ukraine and Bessarabia imprisoned opponents were executed by the NKVD and attached units of the Red Army rather than left behind. These actions by the Soviets increased the hatred of those who had helped the Soviets, or were suspected of being Soviet allies, in particular the Jews. As another result, in these countries the Einsatzgruppen could rely heavily on volunteers, willing to participate in their brutal operations, and tip-offs, especially in the Baltic States.

1943–1945
From the turning point of the war on, the Red Army did not give up territories to the Wehrmacht, but mainly regained lost ground on the Eastern Front. This resulted in revenge actions against all those who were accused of being collaborators during the German occupation, similar to the trials of collaborators in liberated France in France after D-Day. Whilst in France this part of history is documented, debated and subject of many scientific reviews, very little is known today about what happened in the path of the Red Army, re-conquering former Soviet territory of the Baltic States. But some men of these countries voluntarily joined Waffen-SS divisions to defend their homelands against the Soviets, whenever the Red Army was approaching.
In Poland, Nazi atrocities ended in late 1944, but Soviet oppression continued. The role of the Red Army during the Warsaw Uprising remains controversial and is still disputed by some historians. Soldiers of Poland's Home Army (Armia Krajowa) were persecuted, sometimes imprisoned, and often executed following staged trials (as in the case of Witold Pilecki, the organizer of Auschwitz resistance).

Germany 1945
For further information see Flight and expulsion of Germans during and after WWII. German exodus from Eastern Europe. Evacuation of German civilians during the end of World War II.
According to historian Norman Naimark, the propaganda of Soviet troop newspapers and the orders of Soviet high command were jointly responsible for excesses by members of the Red Army. The general tenor in the writings was that the Red Army had come to Germany as an avenger and judge to punish the Germans. The Soviet author Ilya Ehrenburg wrote on January 31, 1945: The Germans have been punished in Oppeln, in Königsberg and in Breslau. They have been punished, but yet not enough. Some have been punished, but yet not all of them ...
Calls of Soviet generals spurred on the soldiers, in addition. On January 12, 1945, army General Cherniakhovsky turned to his troops with the words: There shall be no mercy - for nobody, as there had also been no mercy for us... The land of the fascists must become a desert …
On the German side, any organized evacuation of civilians was forbidden by the Nazi government to boost morale of the troops, now for the first time defending the "Fatherland," even when the Red Army entered German territory in the last months of 1944. German civilians, however, were well aware of the way the Red Army was conducting war against civilians from reports by friends and relatives who had served on the eastern front and feared the Red Army. Also, Nazi propaganda--originally meant to stiffen civil resistance by describing in gruesome and graphic detail Red Army atrocities such as the Nemmersdorf massacre--backfired and created panic among civilians.
As a result and whenever possible, when Nazi officials had already left, civilians began to flee westward at the last moment and on their own initiative.

Fleeing from the advancing Red Army, more than two million people in the eastern German provinces of (East Prussia, Silesia, Pomerania) died, some from cold and starvation, in the post-war ethnic cleansing, or killed when they got caught up in combat operations. The main death toll, however, occurred when the refugee columns were caught up by units of the Red Army. They were overrun by tanks, looted, shot, murdered; women and girls were raped and afterward left to die. In addition, fighter bombers of the Soviet air force penetrated many kilometers behind the front lines and attacked columns of refugees.
Those who did not flee suffered by taking the burden of Red Army's occupying rules: Murder, rape, robbery, and expulsion. For example, in the East Prussian city of Königsberg, in August 1945 there were approximately 100,000 German civilians still living there after the Red Army had conquered the city. When the Germans were finally expelled from Königsberg in 1948, only about 20,000 were still alive.
The rampage which the Red Army in Germany went on during the occupation of the rest of Eastern Germany often led to incidents like Demmin, a small city conquered by Soviet forces in the spring of 1945. Despite the unconditional and complete surrender of Demmin to the Red Army without any prior fighting in or around the city, nearly 900 people committed suicide after Demmin had been declared open for looting and pillaging for three days by Soviet commanders.
Although mass executions of civilians by the Red Army are not reported on a regular basis, there is a known incident in the Treuenbrietzen, where at least 88 male civilians were rounded up and shot on May 1, 1945. This atrocity took place after a victory celebration of Soviet soldiers, at which numerous girls from Treuenbrietzen were raped and a lieutenant-colonel of the Red Army was shot by an unknown person. Some sources claim even up to 1,000 executed in this event.

Poland 1944-1953
Upon seizure of Polish territories occupied by German forces, Soviet soldiers often engaged in plunder, rapes and banditry against Poles, turning the attitude of population to dislike, fear, and even hate the Soviet regime. Red Army troops participated in anti-Polish actions (e.g., in Augustów region, where about 600 perished).

Rapes and pacifications
Germany
A significant minority of Red Army soldiers raped German women and girls. Estimates of the total number of rape victims range from tens of thousands to two million. After the summer of 1945, Soviet soldiers caught raping were usually punished to various degrees, ranging from arrest to execution. The rapes continued however until the winter of 1947-48, when the problem was finally solved by the Soviet occupation authorities by confining the Soviet troops to strictly guarded posts and camps, completely separating them from the residential population of Eastern Germany.
Consequences
Norman Naimark writes--in The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945-1949--that not only had each victim to carry the trauma with her for the rest of her days, [but] it [also] inflicted a massive collective trauma on the East German nation (the German Democratic Republic). Naimark concludes "The social psychology of women and men in the Soviet zone of occupation was marked by the crime of rape from the first days of occupation, through the founding of the GDR in the fall of 1949, until - one could argue - the present."
Hungary
Just during the occupation of Budapest (Hungary) it is estimated that 50,000 women and girls were raped in this city alone.
Hungarian girls in general were taken to the Soviet quarters where they were incarcerated, raped and sometimes also murdered. The nationality of the rape victims meant nothing to the soldiers, who even attacked the Swedish legation.
Yugoslavia
Although the Red Army only crossed a very small part of Yugoslavia in 1944, the northeastern corner, its activities there caused great concern for the communist partisans that feared that the resulting rape and plunder by their communist allies would weaken their standing with the population. At least 121 cases of rape were documented later, 111 of which also involved murder. In addition 1,204 cases of looting with assault were documented. Stalin responded to a Yugoslav partisan leader's complaints at the Red Army's behaviour with "Can't he understand it if a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometers through blood and fire and death has fun with a woman or takes some trifle?".
Slovakia
The Slovak communist leader Vlado Clementis complained to Marshal I. S. Konev about the behaviour of Soviet troops in Slovakia. The response was to blame the activities mainly on Red Army deserters.
Bulgaria
Thanks to the better discipline in Marshal Tolbukhin's army, the relative similarity in cultures, a century of friendly relations, and an open welcome of the Soviet troops, there was a relative absence of rapes in Bulgaria, especially when compared with the situation during the occupation of Romania and Hungary.
Poland
The Red Army cooperated with the NKVD against Polish partizans and civilians. During the Augustów chase 1945 more than 2000 Poles were captured, and about 600 of them perished.
Manchuria (Japan)
A number of rapes committed by the Soviet soldiers were recorded. Where Soviet soldiers advanced, girls and women fled from their villages and small towns, leaving only boys and men to be found by the Soviet soldiers.

Destruction of cities and looting
In general, Red Army officers declared all cities, villages and farms open to pillaging and looting in Romania, Hungary and Germany. A written order, though, does not exist. But there are several documents in which the way the Red Army’s behaviour pattern is described. One of them is a report of the Swiss legation in Budapest, describing the events when the Red Army entered the city in 1945. It states, for example: During the siege of Budapest and also during the following fateful weeks, Russian (Soviet) troops looted the city freely. They entered practically every habitation, the very poorest as well as the richest. They took away everything they wanted, especially food, clothing and valuables. Every apartment, shop, bank, etc. was looted several times. Furniture and larger objects of art, etc. that could not be taken away were frequently simply destroyed. In many cases, after looting, the homes were also put on fire, causing a vast total loss. Bank safes were emptied without exception--even the British and American safes--and whatever was found was taken.
Walter Kilian, the first mayor of the Charlottenburg district in Berlin after the war, who was brought into office by the Soviets, reported extensive looting by Red Army soldiers in the area: Individuals, department stores, shops, apartments ... all were robbed blind.
In the Soviet occupied zone, party members of the SED reported to Stalin that looting and rapes by Soviet soldiers could possibly result in a negative reaction of the German population in the respect of the Soviet Union and for the future socialism in East Germany in general. Stalin reacted to the worries of his German comrades with the words "I shall not tolerate anybody dragging the honour of the Red Army through the mud."
Any evidence, such as reports, pictures and other documents of looting, rapes, burning down of farms and villages etc. by the Red Army was therefore deleted from all archives in the Soviet occupied zone in Germany, which later was to become the GDR. In private memories, diaries and photo albums, however, the events of 1945 had been kept as far as possible or thought to be worth it.
On many occasions Soviet soldiers set fire to buildings, villages and parts of cities, shooting anybody trying to extinguish the flames, such as on May 1, 1945, when Soviet soldiers set fire to the city centre of Demmin and stopped anyone from extinguishing the fire. Of all the buildings around the marketplace only the steeple survived the inferno. Most Red Army atrocities took place only in what was regarded as hostile territory .

Nevertheless, soldiers of the Red Army together with members of the NKVD frequently looted transport trains in 1944 and 1945 in Poland.

Treatment of prisoners of war

The Soviet Union did not recognise the entry of the tsarist Russia to the Hague Conventions (1899 and 1907) as binding for itself and refused to sign it until 1955. This had already led to barbaric treatment of POWs on both the Polish and the Soviet side during the Polish-Soviet War of 1919-21. Moreover, the Soviet Union did not sign the Genevan Prisoners of War convention of 1929 until 1955. Accordingly, the Red Army treated at first Polish and later prisoners of war from Germany, Germany's allies and Japan in a cruel way from the first days of World War II on.
During 1941 emergency landing German flight crews were shot frequently after the capture.Torture, mutilation, murder and other violations of international law were since June 1941 on the agenda. During the winter of 1941/42 the Red Army took approximately 10,000 German soldiers as prisoner each month, but the death rate became so high that the absolute number of the prisoners decreased (or was bureaucratically reduced). The murder of the prisoners was arranged every now and then by instructions, reports and statements of Soviet commanders. Throughout the war, 300,000 German POWs in Soviet captivity died, a loss rate of 14.9%. By contrast, some 3.3 million Soviet POWs died in German captivity, a loss rate of 65%.

Treuenbrietzen massacre
The Treuenbrietzen massacre took place during the last days of April and the first days of May 1945, after a tough battle in which the Red Army took and lost control of the village on more than one occasion; the Red Army rounded up around 1000 (mostly male) civilians and executed them in the nearby forest. According to the German Wikipedia article "Massaker von Treuenbrietzen" the number of victims was between 80 and more than 1000. These executions were allegedly made as retaliation for the death of a high-ranking Soviet officer during the battle for control of the village.

The Hungarian Revolution (1956)
According to the United Nations Report of the Special Committee on the problem of Hungary (1957): Soviet tanks fired indiscriminately at every building from which they believed themselves to be under fire. The UN commission received numerous reports of Soviet mortar and artillery fire into inhabited quarters in the Buda section of the city despite no return fire. The UN commission received reports of "haphazard shooting at defenseless passers-by." According to many witnesses Soviet troops fired upon people queuing outside stores. Most of the victims were said to be women and children. Many cases of Soviet fire upon ambulances and red cross vehicles were reported.

Dennis Lynn Rader : "The BTK Strangler"

Dennis Lynn Rader (born March 9, 1945) is an American serial killer who murdered 10 people in Sedgwick County (in and around Wichita), Kansas, between 1974 and 1991. He was known as the BTK killer (or the BTK strangler), which stands for Bind, Torture and Kill, which describes his modus operandi. Letters were written soon after the killings to police and to local news outlets, boasting of the crimes and knowledge of details. After a long hiatus these letters resumed in 2004, leading to his arrest in 2005 and subsequent conviction.

Early Life

Rader was the eldest of four brothers. He was the son of William Elvin and Dorothea Mae (née Cook) Rader. He grew up in Wichita and graduated from Riverview School and later Wichita Heights High School. According to several reports, including his own confessions, as a child he was cruel to animals, one of the warning signs in the MacDonald triad. Rader attended Kansas Wesleyan University in 1965–1966 and then spent four years from 1966 to 1970 in the U.S. Air Force, including time in Texas, Alabama, Okinawa, South Korea, Greece and Turkey.
When he returned to the United States, he moved to Park City, a suburb located seven miles north of Wichita. He worked for a time in the meat department of Leekers IGA supermarket in Park City where his mother also worked as a bookkeeper.

Personal life
He married Paula Dietz on May 22, 1971, and they have two grown children. He attended Butler County Community College in El Dorado, earning an associate's degree in Electronics in 1973. He enrolled at Wichita State University that same fall. He graduated from there in 1979 with a bachelor's degree in Administration of Justice.
From 1972 to 1973, Rader worked as an assembler for the Coleman Company, a camping gear firm, as had two of BTK's early victims. He then worked for a short time for Cessna, in 1973. From November 1974 until being fired in July 1988, Rader worked at a Wichita-based office of ADT Security Services, a company that sold and installed alarm systems for commercial businesses during Rader's years there. He held several positions, including installation manager. It was believed that he learned how to carefully defeat home security systems while there, enabling him to break into the homes of his victims without being caught.
Rader was a census field operations supervisor for the Wichita area in 1989 for three months, prior to the 1990 federal census.
In 1991 Rader was hired to be supervisor of the Compliance Department at Park City, a two-employee, multi-functional department in charge of "animal control, housing problems, zoning, general permit enforcement and a variety of nuisance cases." In this position, neighbors recalled him as sometimes overzealous and extremely strict; one neighbor complained that he euthanized her dog for no reason. On March 2, 2005, the Park City council terminated Rader's employment for failure to report to work or to call in; he had been arrested for the murders seven days earlier. Rader served on both the Sedgwick County's Board of Zoning Appeals and the Animal Control Advisory Board (appointed in 1996 and resigned in 1998). He was also a member of Christ Lutheran Church, a Lutheran congregation of about 200 people, near his former high school. He had been a member for about 30 years and had been elected president of the Congregation Council. He was also a Cub Scout leader.
On July 27, 2005, after Rader's arrest, Sedgwick County District Judge Eric Yost waived the usual 60-day waiting period and granted an immediate divorce for his wife, agreeing that her mental health was in danger. Rader did not contest the divorce, and the 34-year marriage was ended. Paula Rader said in her divorce petition that her mental and physical condition has been adversely affected by the marriage.

Arrest and conviction
By 2004, the trail of the BTK killer had gone cold. Then, Rader sent a letter to the police, claiming responsibility for a killing that had previously not been attributed to him. DNA collected from under the fingernails of that victim provided police with previously unknown evidence. They then began DNA testing of hundreds of men in an effort to find the serial killer. Altogether, some 1100 DNA samples would be taken.
The police corresponded with Rader in an effort to gain his confidence. Then, in one of his communications with police, Rader asked them if it were possible to trace information from floppy disks. The police department replied that there was no way of knowing what computer such a disk had been used on, when in fact there was. Rader then sent his message and floppy to the police department, which quickly checked the metadata of the document. In the metadata, they found that the document has been made by a man who called himself Dennis. They also found a link to the Lutheran Church. When the police searched on the internet for 'Lutheran Church Wichita Dennis', they found his family name, and were able to identify a suspect: Dennis Rader.
The police knew that BTK owned a black Jeep Cherokee. They drove by Rader's house and saw the black Jeep Cherokee. Unfortunately, this was indirect evidence, so they had to find direct evidence before they could get enough evidence to bring him in. They were able to get his daughter to provide a DNA sample, then compared it with the DNA-samples found at the crimescenes. There was a match.
On February 25, 2005, Rader was detained near his home at 6220 61st and Independence in Park City and accused of the BTK killings. At a press conference the next morning, Wichita Police Chief Norman Williams flatly asserted, "the bottom line... BTK is arrested. " Rader pleaded guilty to the BTK murders on June 27, 2005, giving a graphic account of his crimes in court. On August 18, 2005, he was sentenced to serve 10 consecutive life sentences (one life sentence per victim). This included nine life sentences that each had the possibility of parole in 15 years, and one life sentence with the possibility of parole in 40 years. This means that, in total, Rader would be eligible for parole in 175 years. He was not eligible for the death penalty, as Kansas did not have a death penalty during the period of time during which he committed his crimes. It reinstituted the penalty in 1994.

Victims
Rader's victims include:
1974: Four members of one family (Joseph Otero, his wife Julie Otero, and two of their five children: Joseph Otero II and Josephine Otero)
1974: Kathryn Bright (he also shot Bright's brother twice, but he survived)
1977: Shirley Vian
1977: Nancy Fox
1985: Marine Hedge
1986: Vicki Wegerle
1991: Dolores Davis
He collected items from the scenes of the murders he committed and, reportedly, he had no items that were related to any other killings. He did have other intended victims, notably Anna Williams, 63, who in 1979 escaped death by returning home much later than he expected.

Letters
Rader was particularly known for sending taunting letters to police and newspapers. There were several communications from BTK from 1974 to 1979. The first was a letter that had been stashed in an engineering book in the Wichita Public Library on October 1974 that described in detail the killing of the Otero family in January of that year. In early 1978 he sent another letter to television station KAKE in Wichita claiming responsibility for the murders of the Oteros, Shirley Vian, Nancy Fox and another unidentified victim assumed to be Kathryn Bright (not identified because her brother survived and could have identified him). He suggested a number of possible names for himself, including the one that stuck: BTK. He demanded media attention in this second letter, and it was finally announced that Wichita did indeed have a serial killer at large. A poem was enclosed entitled "Ode to Nancy." In 1979 he sent two identical packages, one to an intended victim who was not at home when he broke into her house and the other to KAKE. These featured another poem, "Oh Anna Why Didn't You Appear", a drawing of what he had intended to do to his victim, as well as some small items he had pilfered from Williams' home. Apparently, Rader had waited for several hours inside the home of Anna Williams, and left when she did not arrive there.
In 1988, after the murders of three members of the Fager family in Wichita, a letter was received from someone claiming to be the BTK killer in which he denied being the perpetrator of this crime. He did credit the killer with having done admirable work. It was not proven until 2005 that this letter was in fact written by the genuine BTK killer, Rader, and he is not considered by police to have committed this crime.
In March 2004, he began the series of 11 communications from BTK that led directly to his arrest in February 2005. The Wichita Eagle received a letter from someone using the return address Bill Thomas Killman. The writer claimed that he murdered Vicki Wegerle on September 16, 1986, and enclosed photographs of the crime scene and a photocopy of her driver's license, which had been stolen at the time of the crime. Prior to this, it had not been definitively established that Wegerle was killed by BTK. In May 2004, a word puzzle was received by KAKE. On June 9, 2004, a package was found taped to a stop sign at the corner of First and Kansas in Wichita, containing graphic descriptions of the Otero murders and a sketch labeled, "The Sexual Thrill is My Bill." Also enclosed was a chapter list for a proposed book entitled "The BTK Story," which mimicked a story written in 1999 by Court TV crime writer David Lohr. Chapter One was entitled, "A Serial Killer is Born." In July a package was dropped into the return slot at the downtown public library containing more bizarre material, including the claim that he, BTK, was responsible for the death of 19-year-old Jake Allen in Argonia, Kansas earlier that same month. This claim was found to be false and the death has been ruled a suicide. In October 2004, a manila envelope was dropped into a UPS box in Wichita containing a series of cards with images of terror and bondage of children pasted on them. Also included was a poem threatening the life of lead investigator Lt. Ken Landwehr and a false autobiography giving many details about his life. These details were later released to the public.
In December 2004, Wichita police received another package from the BTK killer. This time the package was found in Wichita's Murdock Park. It contained the driver's license of Nancy Fox, which was noted as stolen at the scene of crime, as well as a doll that was symbolically bound at the hands and feet with a plastic bag tied over its head. In January 2005, Rader attempted to leave a cereal box in the bed of a pickup truck at a Home Depot in Wichita, but the box was at first discarded by the owner. It was later retrieved from the trash after Rader himself asked what had become of it in a later message. Surveillance tape of the parking lot from that date revealed a distant figure driving a black Jeep Cherokee leaving the box in the pickup. In February there were postcards to KAKE, and another cereal box left at a rural location that contained another bound doll symbolizing the murder of 11-year-old Josephine Otero. Rader asked the police if his writings, if put on a floppy disk, could be traced or not. He received his answer in a newspaper ad posted in the Wichita Eagle saying it would be OK. On February 16, 2005 he sent a floppy disk to Fox TV station KSAS in Wichita. Forensic analysis quickly determined that the disk had been used by the Christ Lutheran Church in Wichita, plus they found the name Dennis. An internet search determined that a "Dennis Rader" was president of the church council. He was arrested on February 25.
After his arrest, Rader stated he chose to resurface in 2004 for various reasons, including David Lohr's feature story on the case and the release of the book Nightmare in Wichita: The Hunt for the BTK Strangler by Robert Beattie.

Example
The following is purportedly the text of a 1978 letter, including grammatical errors:

"I find the newspaper not writing about the poem on Vain unamusing. A little paragraph would have enough. Iknow it not the media fault. The Police Chief he keep things quiet, and doesn't let the public know there a psycho running around lose strangling mostly women, there 7 in the ground; who will be next?
How many do I have to Kill before I get a name in the paper or some national attention. Do the cop think that all those deaths are not related? Golly -gee, yes the M.O. is different in each, but look a pattern is developing. The victims are tie up-most have been women-phone cut- bring some bondage mater sadist tendencies-no struggle, outside the death spot-no wintness except the Vain's Kids. They were very lucky; a phone call save them. I was go-ng to tape the boys and put plastics bag over there head like I did Joseph, and Shirley. And then hang the girl. God-oh God what a beautiful sexual relief that would been. Josephine, when I hung her really turn me on; her pleading for mercy then the rope took whole, she helpless; staring at me with wide terror fill eyes the rope getting tighter-tighter. You don't understand these things because your not underthe influence of factor x). The same thing that made Son of Sam, Jack the Ripper, Havery Glatman, Boston Strangler, Dr. H.H. Holmes Panty Hose Strangler OF Florida, Hillside Strangler, Ted of the West Coast and many more infamous character kill. Which seem s senseless, but we cannot help it. There is no help, no cure, except death or being caught and put away. It a terrible nightmarebut, you see I don't lose any sleep over it. After a thing like Fox I ccome home and go about life like anyone else. And I will be like that until the urge hit me again. It not continuous and I don't have a lot of time. It take time to set a kill, one mistake and it all over. Since I about blew it on the phone-handwriting is out-letter guide is to long and typewriter can be traced too,.My short poem of death and maybe a drawing; later on real picture and maybe a tape of the sound will come your way. How will you know me. Before a murder or murders you will receive a copy of the initials B.T.K., you keep that copy the original will show up some day on guess who?
May you not be the unluck one!
P.S.2
How about some name for me, its time: 7 down and many more to go. I like the following How about you?
'THE B.T.K. STRANGLER', WICHITA STRANGLER', 'POETIC STRANGLER', 'THE BOND AGE STRANGLER' OR PSYCHO' THE WICHITA HANGMAN THE WICHITA EXECUTIONER, 'THE GAROTE PHATHOM', 'THE ASPHIXIATER'.
B.T.K "

Arrest
The BTK killer's last known communication with the media and police was a padded envelope which arrived at FOX affiliate KSAS-TV in Wichita on February 16, 2005. A purple, 1.44-MB Memorex floppy disk was enclosed in the package. Also enclosed were a letter, a photocopy of the cover of a 1989 novel about a serial killer (Rules of Prey ISBN-10 0399134654, ISBN-13 978-0399134654) and a gold-colored necklace with a large medallion. Police found metadata embedded in a Microsoft Word document on the disk that pointed to Christ Lutheran Church, and the document was marked as last modified by "Dennis". A search of the church website turned up Dennis Rader as president of the congregation council. Police began surveillance of Rader.

Sometime during this period, police obtained a warrant for the medical records of Rader's daughter. A tissue sample seized at this time was tested for DNA and provided a familial match with semen at an earlier BTK crime scene. This, along with other evidence gathered prior to and during the surveillance, gave police probable cause for an arrest.
Rader was stopped while driving near his home and taken into custody shortly after noon on February 25, 2005. Immediately after, law enforcement officials — including a Wichita Police bomb unit truck, two SWAT trucks, and FBI and ATF agents — converged on Rader's residence near the intersection of I-135 and 61st Street North. Once in handcuffs, he was asked by an officer "Mr. Rader, do you know why you're going downtown?" to which he replied "Oh, I have my suspicions, why?" Rader's home and vehicle were searched, and evidence (including computer equipment, a pair of black pantyhose retrieved from a shed, and a cylindrical container) was collected. The church he attended, his office at City Hall and the main branch of the Park City library were also searched that day. Officers were seen removing a computer from his City Hall office, but it is unclear if any evidence was found at these locations.
Rader talked to the police for several hours, although he confessed almost immediately.
On February 26, 2005, The Wichita Police Department announced that they were holding Rader as the prime suspect in the BTK killings in a press conference.
Rader was formally charged with the murders on February 28, 2005.

Legal proceedings

Kansas reinstated the death penalty in 1994. The last known BTK killing was in 1991, making all known BTK murders ineligible for the death penalty. Even if later murders are linked to the BTK killer, it was originally unclear whether the death penalty would come into play, as the Kansas Supreme Court declared the state's capital punishment law unconstitutional on December 17, 2004. That ruling from the Kansas Supreme Court, however, was reversed by the United States Supreme Court on June 26, 2006 in the case of Kansas v. Marsh, and Kansas's death penalty statute was upheld. The Sunday after his arrest, Associated Press cited an anonymous source that Rader had confessed to other murders in addition to the ones with which he was already connected. When asked about the reported confessions, Sedgwick County District Attorney Nola Foulston said "Your information is patently false", but she refused to say whether Rader had made any confessions or whether investigators were looking into Rader's possible involvement in more unsolved killings. On March 5, news sources claimed to have verified by multiple sources that Rader had confessed to the ten murders he is charged with, but no additional ones.

On February 28, 2005, Rader was formally charged with 10 counts of first degree murder.

He made his first appearance via videoconference from jail. He was represented by a public defender. Bail was continued at $10 million. On May 3, District Court Judge Gregory Waller entered not guilty pleas to the 10 charges on Rader's behalf, as Rader did not speak at his arraignment.
On June 27, the scheduled trial date, Rader changed his plea to guilty. He unemotionally described, in detail, the killings. He made no apologies. (Rader's pleas online in RealMedia format courtesy KWCH-TV .)
On August 18, Rader faced sentencing. The victims' families made statements, followed by Rader, who apologized for the crimes. He was sentenced to 10 consecutive life terms, which requires a minimum of 175 years without a chance of parole. Because Kansas had no death penalty at the time the murders were committed, this was the maximum sentence allowed.
On August 19, Rader was moved from the Sedgwick County Jail to the El Dorado Correctional Facility, a Kansas state prison, to begin serving his life sentence as inmate #0083707 with an earliest possible release date of February 26, 2180. According to witnesses, while travelling the 40 minute drive from Wichita to El Dorado, Rader talked about innocuous topics such as the weather, but when the victims' families' statements from the court proceedings a day before came on the radio, Rader began to cry. Rader is now being held in the EDCF Special Management unit, also known as solitary confinement, for "the inmate's own protection", a designation he most likely will retain for the remainder of his incarceration. He is confined to the cell 23 hours a day with the exception of voluntary solo one-hour exercise yard time, and access to the shower three times per week.

Beginning April 23, 2006, having reached "Incentive Level Two", Rader has been allowed to purchase and watch television, purchase and listen to the radio, receive and read magazines, and have other privileges for good behavior. The victims' families disagreed with this decision.
According to Rader's record in the Kansas Department of Corrections database, he had a Class Two disciplinary report concerning "mail" on April 10, 2006.

Further Investigation
Police in Wichita, Park City, and several surrounding cities are looking into unsolved cases before, during, and after 1974 and 1991 in cooperation with the state police and the FBI. In particular they are focusing on cases after 1994 when the death penalty was reinstated in Kansas. Moreover police in surrounding states such as Missouri and Oklahoma are also investigating cold cases which fit Rader's pattern.

The FBI, Air Patrol, and local jurisdictions at Rader's former duty stations are checking into unsolved cases during Rader's time in the service. As of September 2007 no other murders have been discovered that can be attributed to Rader.

Evidence pertaining to the murders
Because Rader did not contest his guilt, most evidence was not tested in court. However, physical and circumstantial facts that would have corroborated Rader as the BTK killer include:
DNA analysis of BTK's semen and material taken from underneath the fingernails of victim Vicki Wegerle match the DNA profile of Dennis Rader.
Rader's grammar and writing style matches letters and poems received from BTK, though none of his communications were handwritten, but typed, stenciled, stamped with a stamp set or computer generated.
A pay phone that the killer used to report a murder in 1977 was located a few blocks from ADT Security (Rader's workplace at the time).
Rader had attended Wichita State University in the 1970s. Wichita Police Detective Arlyn G. Smith II and his partner George Scantlin traced BTK's photocopied communications to two photocopy machines, one at Wichita State University and a second copier at the Wichita Public Library. BTK murder victim Kathryn Bright's brother Kevin, who was shot twice by BTK, reported that the killer had asked him if he had seen him at the university. A poem in one of the killer's letters was similar to a folk song taught by a professor on that campus in that time period, though Rader himself dismissed any connection.
Rader lived on the same street as Marine Hedge, just houses away. The BTK killer's other victims were in and around central Wichita, except for his final victim Dolores (Dee) Davis, who lived a half-mile east of Park City.
Two of the victims (Julie Otero and Kathryn Bright) worked at the Coleman Company, though not during the same period that Rader worked there. Rader worked at Coleman only a short time and not at the same location as the victims.
Rader's 30 plus hour confession, given fully and freely after receiving multiple Miranda warnings and recorded on over 20 DVDs, in which he alluded to all 10 known murders in remarkable (and grisly) detail.
Semen found on Josephine Otero or near the bodies of his victims Josephine Otero, Shirley Vian and Nancy Fox was critical evidence linking Rader to the crimes, and DNA obtained from fingernail scrapings of Vicki Wegerle's left hand matched Rader's DNA, eliminating any doubt that he was her murderer. Rader also sent trophies to police in his letters, and others were discovered in his office. Other cold cases in Kansas were reopened to see if Rader's DNA matched crime scenes, but Rader's confession was limited to the 10 known victims and police and prosecutors do not believe there were any more victims because of the extensive records and memorabilia he kept on each of his victims.

BTK's Photos...