Kerri Rawson Bio

Kerri Rawson is famous for being the daughter of Dennis Rader, better known to the world as the serial killer BTK. Since her dad’s arrest, Kerri has been an advocate for victims of abuse, crime, and trauma, by sharing her journey of hope, healing, faith, and forgiveness. 

Kerri Rawson Husband and Children

She now lives with her husband, two children, and two cats in Michigan. She got married in 2003 and her father walked her down the aisle.

How Old Is Kerri Rawson? Kerri Rawson Age

Her age is not publicly known but she is in her thirties as of 2018.

Kerri Rawson Birthday

Details about her birthday will be updated soon.

My Father BTK – 20/20 BTK Killer (20/20 tonight)

A Serial Killer’s Daughter: My Story Of Faith, Love, And Overcoming

What is it like to learn that your ordinary, loving father is a serial killer? In 2005, Kerri Rawson heard a knock on the door of her apartment. When she opened it, an FBI agent informed her that her father had been arrested for murdering ten people, including two children. –googlebooks–

The autobiography book is Expected on 29 January 2019. Kerri Rawson hopes the book will help people come to terms with betrayal, post-traumatic stress, anxiety and depression – afflictions she says she knows well. Kerri has undergone months of therapy off and on since her father was arrested by Wichita police and the FBI in 2005.

Kerri Rawson Brother

She has a brother whose name is still anonymous to the public.

BTK serial killer’s daughter shares letters he wrote her from behind bars: ‘The dark side took me away’

1st Jan. 2019 | abcNews

After “BTK” serial killer Dennis Rader’s shocking confession to murdering 10 people, which brought an end to a decades-long mystery and reign of terror in Wichita, Kansas, his daughter had to find ways to cope with her new, shattered reality. While one nightmare was ending for the town, the personal nightmare for Kerri Rawson was just beginning.

“I had to learn how to grieve a man that was not dead, somebody I loved very much that no one else loved any more,” Rawson told “20/20” in her first television interview.

Rader, now 73, was arrested in February 2005 and pleaded guilty on June 27, 2005, to 10 counts of first-degree murder. He is currently serving 10 consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole.

Rader’s killing spree began in January 1974, when he targeted four members of the Otero family, killing Joseph and Julie Otero and two of their five children. He killed 21-year-old Kathryn Bright later that year and his next two victims, Shirley Vian and Nancy Fox, in 1977.

Rawson was born the following year.

In April 1985, Rader murdered his eighth victim and neighbor, Marine Hedge, who lived just six doors down. Vicki Wegerle became Rader’s ninth victim in September 1986. Five years passed, and then in January 1991, Rader murdered his 10th victim, Dolores Davis.

While Rader was in jail awaiting sentencing, Rawson said a pastor at their church encouraged her to write to her father.

Rawson described some of the letters she exchanged with her father in her new book, “A Serial Killer’s Daughter: My Story of Faith, Love, and Overcoming.”

According to her book, in the months leading up to his plea, Rawson and her father exchanged letters about his court proceedings, reading the Bible and how their family was doing. Rader often wrote matter-of-factly about what his daily life was like behind bars. He also spoke longingly about wanting his family to write him and used the words “forgive me” several times.

“You will always be my baby girl I raised right-proud-independent and now is a grown adult with many years of love to give,” Rader wrote in a letter from July 2005, according to her book. “Life before the arrest was a good time and the dark side took me away.”

In one letter dated April 23, 2005, Rawson asked if something had happened to her father in his childhood, searching for any explanation for his murders. Authorities said Dennis Rader has always maintained that he did not experience physical or sexual abuse as a child, a hallmark characteristic of serial killers. She also told him in that letter to “take care” and “try to stay strong and healthy.”

“I wasn’t corresponding with BTK. I’m never corresponding with BTK,” Rawson told “20/20.” “I’m talking to my father. I’m talking to the man that I lived with and loved for 26 years. … I still love my dad today. I love the man that I knew. I don’t know a psychopath… That’s not the man I knew and loved.”

Rawson couldn’t bring herself to attend her father’s court appearances, and after his plea and his sentencing in August 2005, “I shut down,” she said.

“I was mad. I was done. I wiped my hands of him for two years,” Rawson said.

Even though she didn’t write her father again until 2007, Rader continued to write her after he was sentenced.

According to Rawson’s book, in a letter dated Sept. 22, 2005, Rader again asked Rawson how she, her husband and her brother were doing. He wrote that he wished his wife would write him – Rawson’s mother had been granted an emergency divorce in July 2005 — and he continued to describe his routines in prison.

In that letter, he warned his daughter and her husband to “be extra careful due to all my crimes.”

“I would wish no harm to you but some crazy individual might try something,” Rader wrote.

In another letter Rawson includes in her book, dated Nov. 17, 2005, Rader described watching a Kansas sunset from his cell window.

“Have a west window, looks past home. Can watch bird at times and the seasons change,” Rader wrote. “Kerri, you were always like that, watched and appreciated nature to its fullest. So many people never slow down to enjoy like so simple, beautiful treasures.”

Rawson still didn’t respond.

“My hope is you will write me someday,” the letter continued. “My love as a Dad is still there… if betrayal is what is keeping you from writing, please forgive me.”

According to Rawson’s book, the following month, Rader wrote in a letter to her dated Dec. 17, 2005, how grateful he was for his children and acknowledged that this “cannot be a very ‘Merry Christmas’ or a ‘Happy Holidays’ due to my and family circumstances.”

“Hope things are okay there. Snowing here today! Blessed and better 2006,” Rader wrote.

When she finally wrote back in 2007, it was to let her father know she was pregnant with her first child — a daughter.

“You were a good Dad most of the time and raised us well, and we do not know what to believe – who you were to us, or who you were to others,” Rawson wrote her father in a letter dated Aug. 8, 2007.

But then Rawson said she cut off communication with him again for five years afterward. She now also has a son in addition to her daughter. Rawson said she began writing her father again in 2012, and still does to this day, because she has forgiven him.

“It was a very long journey,” Rawson said. “There was a lot of hard work in me, with faith. I had gone back to church. I was working on my relationship with God, working on my own heart,” Rawson said.

“I realized I was rotting within. I didn’t just forgive my father for him. I had to do it for myself.”

Kerri Rawson News

BTK’s daughter to publish a book about family horror later in 2019

kansas.com | 27-Jan-2019

The daughter of the BTK serial killer plans to publish a book next year about the trauma of discovering that her father had killed and terrorized people for 31 years.

Kerri Rawson grew up with her brother and her parents, Dennis and Paula Rader, in Park City. She hopes the book will help people come to terms with betrayal, post-traumatic stress, anxiety and depression – afflictions she says she knows well. She’s undergone months of therapy off and on since her father was arrested by Wichita police and the FBI in 2005.

The book’s tentative title is “Someday My Heart Will Mend: Holding on to Faith, Surviving the Trauma of My Dad, the BTK Serial Killer.” It will be published by Thomas Nelson publishers, which accepted a book proposal she wrote over the last 18 months, Rawson said.

“Nelson specializes in publishing books for the Christian marketplace,” said Rawson’s agent, Doug Grad. “So there was an immediate connection from Nelson with Kerri’s spirituality and her ability to overcome the tremendous obstacles placed in her path.”

“I’m hoping it’s going to help a lot of people,” Rawson said Saturday, from her home in the Detroit area. “It’s helping me to work on it, to face what my dad did, and to deal with it.”

Dennis Rader, her father, pleaded guilty in 2005 to torturing and killing 10 people, starting with two children and their parents, the Otero family, in Wichita in 1974.

The detectives who captured Rader in 2005 said that Rawson, her brother, Brian, and their mother, Paula, were crime victims as well.

Lt. Ken Landwehr, the commander of the Wichita Police Department’s homicide unit at the time, said he and detectives who spent 11 months investigating the case in 2004 and 2005 were convinced that the family knew nothing of Dennis Rader’s murders or secret life.

Most of her father’s murders took place before Rawson was born; she later learned, to her horror, that her father had strangled victim Nancy Fox while Paula Rader was pregnant with Kerri.

“I was a crime victim before I was born,” Rawson said.

Grad predicts the book will appeal to many, because it’s an unusual story and because many people suffer from emotional traumas. Rawson navigated one of the worst, he said.

“There is really no guidebook for getting through what she endured, because … how many people do we know who have had a serial killer for a father?” Grad said. “But it’s not just a fascinating story; it’s a story where readers can take away something for themselves, and apply it to their own lives.

“She was an innocent victim, just an average person trying to live her life, and suddenly had to deal with this horror,” Grad said. “So she comes here to help people with real-world experience; she’s been through this fire, and is now also well-read in dealing with trauma.” (Editor’s note: Grad previously worked for HarperCollins and was the book editor for The Eagle’s “Bind, Torture, Kill: The Inside Story of BTK, the Serial Killer Next Door,” published in 2007.)

Rawson refused all interviews for nearly 10 years, including with the biggest newspapers, magazines and television news shows in the country. “I was living a quiet life for nine years, trying to recover and heal,” she said Saturday. “I always wanted my life to be quiet.”

But she came forward in late 2014 to talk to The Wichita Eagle because she was irritated by watching author Stephen King on television, talking about “A Good Marriage,” a novella he wrote based on what he thought might have happened in the Rader family as they discovered they had a murderer in their home.