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A crossword puzzle created by American serial killer Dennis Rader, known as BTK, could crack the case of a teenage girl who went missing in 1976.
Rader murdered at least 10 people in Kansas between 1974 and 1991. He earned the three-letter nickname that stands for “bind, torture, kill,” which explains how his victims died.
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In the same time frame as the killings, 16-year-old Cynthia Kinney disappeared from a laundromat in Pawhuska, Oklahoma.
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Decades later, Rader was named as a prime suspect in Kinney’s case and other ongoing investigations, according to a news release from the Osage County Sheriff’s Office in August 2023.
Now, a crossword puzzle could be the key to revealing even more details about what happened to Kinney.
Who is Dennis Rader and how did he get caught?
Rader was described as normal, polite and well-mannered by those who knew him, The Crime Wire reported. He enlisted in the U.S. Air Force in 1966, serving for four years. He got married in 1971, moved to Park City, Kansas, and had two children.
However, his seemingly regular life as a church-going family man was filled with fantasies of killing and torture. From 1974, when he committed his first murders, until 1988, he worked at security company ADT, installing security systems in people’s homes.
In most cases, Rader would stalk his intended victims, break into their homes, tie them up and strangle them using rope.
Rader decided to write letters to the media and to police more than a decade after his last confirmed murder.
“His need to gloat over his killings would draw him out of the shadows and into the crosshairs of law enforcement, who had been waiting doggedly for a break in the case,” true crime network Oxygen reported.
In one letter, he asked if a floppy disk could be traced back to him. When police responded incorrectly, on purpose, that it could not, Rader sent a disk to a Wichita news station. Police uncovered clues to Rader’s identity via documents that he believed he had permanently deleted.
Rader was arrested in 2015.
In court, he described in horrific detail the 10 murders — but did not include Kinney as one of his victims.
How could a puzzle crack the cold case?
In April, a woman who wanted to remain anonymous sent a package of items to the Osage County Sheriff’s office, KFOR reported.
One of the items was a puzzle, a mix between a crossword and a word search, created by Rader. He had sent it to a news station in Kansas 20 years prior.
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At the time, certain words — like Wichita, prowl, fantasies, ruse, spot victim, and serviceman — stood out to investigators, KFOR reported.
But upon further investigation last month, more words were discovered that connected Rader to Kinney, including the missing teen’s last name, the name of the street the laundromat was on, and the name of the city where she went missing.
“There’s hints all the way through that can’t be overlooked,” Osage County Sheriff Eddie Virden told KFOR.
“We’re still in the process of trying to evaluate that and sending them out, trying to get some expert opinions on it to see what we can get. But it’s pretty hard to get around the fact that Cindy Kinney’s name is in there.”
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