💀 “Your Dad Is BTK”: Inside Netflix’s ‘My Father, the BTK Killer’ — and the Daughter Who Learned Her Father Was a Monster

On a cold February morning in 2005, Kerri Rawson opened her front door in Michigan to find two police officers waiting. What they told her would split her life in two.

“Your dad is BTK,” one of them said.

Kerri froze. The words didn’t make sense — not at first. Her father, Dennis Rader, was a church deacon, a Boy Scout leader, and a meticulous rule-follower. But within hours, she would learn that the man who’d raised her with quiet Midwestern discipline was also one of America’s most infamous serial killers.

That moment, and the 20 years of emotional fallout that followed, are at the heart of Netflix’s new true-crime documentary, My Father, the BTK Killer, directed by Skye Borgman — the filmmaker behind Abducted in Plain Sight and Unknown Number: The High School Catfish.

⚡ The Daughter Who Loved a Monster

Borgman says she was drawn to Kerri Rawson’s story not for its horror, but for its humanity.

“It was the way she could love him, or love moments of him, and also not,” Borgman tells TODAY.com. “She can kind of separate the two versions of her father — the dad she knew and the killer she didn’t.”

That contradiction — loving a man capable of monstrous things — forms the emotional backbone of the documentary. Rather than focusing solely on Dennis Rader’s crimes, Borgman’s film explores Kerri’s decades-long struggle to reconcile the father who raised her with the murderer who destroyed so many lives.

🕯️ The Arrest That Changed Everything

At 26 years old, Kerri had built a quiet life far from her Kansas roots when police arrived at her door that February morning.

She recalls the moment vividly in the film: “I remember hearing the words, and then nothing. It was like the world went silent.”

That same day, Dennis Rader — the unassuming compliance officer for the small town of Park City, Kansas — was arrested and charged with 10 murders spanning nearly two decades.

The crimes shocked the world not only for their brutality, but for the sheer ordinariness of the man behind them.

🔪 Who Was Dennis Rader, the BTK Killer?

Dennis Lynn Rader wasn’t a drifter or a recluse. Born in 1945, he was a husband, a father of two, a U.S. Air Force veteran, and a respected member of his community.

But beneath that respectable facade lived the BTK Killer — a name Rader himself invented, standing for Bind, Torture, Kill. It was both a signature and a promise, describing the method he used to murder his victims between 1974 and 1991.

Rader taunted authorities for decades through typewritten letters, detailing his crimes in chilling precision. He mailed some directly to media outlets, while others were left in public spaces — like the Wichita Public Library, where in 1981 police discovered a note describing the murders of Julie and Joseph Otero and two of their children.

“The writer speaks specifically of the murders, their bodies, their locations,” read a 1981 letter from the Wichita Police Department to the FBI. “There is no doubt that this is the same person involved in these killings.”

Rader would go silent for long stretches, living as a devoted father and husband, before resurfacing with new taunts and confessions.

When investigators finally caught him, it wasn’t through DNA or witnesses — it was his ego that betrayed him. In 2004, after a 13-year silence, Rader began sending messages to local media again, asking whether a floppy disk he mailed could be traced back to him.

The answer was yes. The metadata on that disk led police straight to the computer at his church — and to Dennis Rader himself.

😱 The Fallout

Rader’s arrest shattered his family. His wife quickly filed for divorce. His son retreated into silence. And Kerri Rawson — once “the pastor’s daughter” — became the unwilling daughter of a monster.

She spent years in therapy, fighting nightmares and guilt. “It’s a grief that never leaves you,” she has said in interviews. “You grieve the dad you had and the man you never knew at the same time.”

In 2019, Rawson published her memoir, A Serial Killer’s Daughter, laying bare her experience. Borgman’s Netflix documentary takes that story further — weaving archival footage, new interviews, and haunting recreations into a portrait of inherited trauma and reluctant forgiveness.

🎥 Skye Borgman’s Approach

Known for her compassionate yet unsparing style, Borgman refuses to sensationalize Rader’s crimes. Instead, she centers Rawson’s emotional reckoning.

“I didn’t want to make a story about a serial killer,” Borgman explains. “I wanted to make a story about a daughter — about what it means to love someone who’s done the unforgivable.”

The result is a film that’s less about violence and more about the scars it leaves behind.

💔 A Question Without Answers

As My Father, the BTK Killer unfolds, one question lingers: Can Kerri Rawson ever truly separate the man who raised her from the killer who destroyed so many lives?

Her answer is heartbreaking in its simplicity.

“He’s my dad,” she says quietly in the film. “And he’s BTK. Both things are true. And I have to live with that.”

It’s a line that stays with you long after the credits roll — a reminder that evil doesn’t always come from strangers in the dark. Sometimes, it lives right across the dinner table.