R.J. Parker - The Serial Killer Compendium

He was never a suspect for this crime and once again, he stopped killing until the following year. On September 16, 1986 he knocked on the door at the home of Vicki Wegerle, twenty-eight, a young mother of two children, with the pretext of phones being out in the area and he needed to check hers. She let him in as he looked the part, hardhat and all. Once inside he told her that he was going to tie her up, and led her to the bedroom where he bound her using ropes and then strangled her with a pantyhose. He took off in her car just as her husband was coming around the corner. The husband, seeing his car being driven away, entered the house and found his wife. He called 911 but she died on the way to the hospital. The BTK Killer once again was never a suspect. Unfortunately when a spouse is killed, the other is always a person of interest, and although Bill Wegerle was never charged, until the BTK Killer was captured many years later, there was always suspicion hanging over his head. In my opinion, this is quite sad, as he already had enough to cope with. Author’s note: After researching so many crimes and writing several true-crime books, I have noticed a great deal of injustice in our system – as I’ve pointed out previously.

Dennis Rader never killed for another five years, which happened to be his last known victim. On January 19, 1991, Dolores Davis, 62, was reading in bed when she heard a glass break in her sliding backdoor. When she came out to investigate the noise, Rader was there pointing a gun at her. He took her to the bedroom and strangled her; brought the body out to the truck of her car, dumped her body out by the lake, returned the car and went home.

Arrest

Over the next fourteen years, Rader supposedly never killed again. He was active in his community on various committees and boards, and involved on the board at the Christ Lutheran Church in Wichita. But in 2004 and 2005 he began sending messages and packages with evidence in it from past crimes to the police, taunting them, letting them know the BTK was still alive. His last package, actually the 11 package, was a floppy disc, letter, and some jewelry he sent to KSAS-TV on February 16, 2005.

This last package proved to be sloppy on Rader’s part. He thought he’d erased everything on the disc except the letter, but erasing a disc will not cut it; if you want to truly delete all information from a disc, you have to format it. So, when the investigators analyzed the disc, on it was software from the church, as well as the name, “Dennis.” The detectives drove by Rader’s house after doing an internet search and finding out that Dennis Rader was the president of the Christ Lutheran Church. They did not want to spook him, and very secretly obtained a warrant for DNA sampling. The results were startling yet exciting: they matched semen from several crime scenes. The police now conclusively knew the identity of the BTK Killer.

On February 25, 2005, with a warrant in hand, police arrested Dennis Rader as he was leaving his office to go home for lunch. He would spend the next thirty hours confessing to all his crimes. He pleaded guilty to the ten murders and on August 18, 2005, he was sentenced to one hundred and seventy five – yep, 175 years in prison – but he is eligible for parole in the year 2180. I guess he will be old when he gets out. He currently resides at the El Dorado Correctional Facility in Kansas.

David Berkowitz

The Son of Sam

Victims (13)

Background

Richard David Falco was born on May 9th, 1953 in Brooklyn, New York, to Tony Falco and Betty Broder, who were separated at the time. His real father, however, was a man named Joseph Kleinman, as his mother had had an affair while she was married. The baby’s mother put him up for adoption right away and he was legally adopted by Nathan and Pearl Berkowitz, who named their new son, David.

At eighteen years old, Berkowitz enlisted with the Army and served stateside and in South Korea until he was discharged three years later. As his adopted mother died when he was thirteen, he decided that twenty-one was a good time to search for his real mother. When he found her, she told him the details of his illegitimate birth, which upset him. After that, Berkowitz stayed away from his birth mother, but continued to have a relationship with his half sister, Roslyn.

Murders

Berkowitz was twenty-three when he started killing for reasons unknown. On July 29, 1976, Rose and Mike Lauria and their daughter Donna, eighteen, and her friend, Jody Valenti, age nineteen, arrived home after midnight after a night out. They were just getting out of their car when Donna noticed a man rushing up to them. He pulled a handgun out of a paper bag, shot Donna in the chest and hit Jody in the leg. The shooter then quickly ran off. Donna’s shot to the chest killed her instantly. The man was later described to police as being in his mid-thirties, almost six foot tall, about 160 pounds, with short, curly dark hair.

The police believed at the time that it was an attempted mob hit as the father, Mike Lauria, was with a teamsters union, or that it was gang related violence, common in New York at the time. They did discover through ballistics that the gun was a .44 Charter Arms Bulldog revolver. Just a few months later on October 23, 1976, there was another shooting. Around 1:30 a.m., Rosemary Keenan, thirty-eight, and Carl Denaro, twenty-five, were parked in Keenan’s car in a secluded area in Queens when their windows exploded. Someone was shooting at them and she took off in the car. Both were bleeding and injured. However, neither of them were killed. Carl had to have surgery and required a metal plate in his head. They never saw the gunman. A police investigation was conducted thoroughly as Rosemary was the daughter of an NYPD police detective. Police, however, had nothing to go on, and the .44 bullets that were removed from the car were too damaged to do any comparisons.

Just one month later, Joanne Lomino, eighteen, and Donna DeMasi, sixteen, were walking home from a movie on November 26, 1976 when a man approached them. He drew a revolver and shot both of them, but both survived. Joanne is now a paraplegic. Donna was not permanently severely injured. Besides the two girls, another witness described the man as close to six-foot tall, slim, about 160 pounds, with dirty blond straight hair wearing a long coat that looked to be military.

John Diel, thirty, and Christine Freund, twenty-six, were recently engaged. On January 30th, 1977, they went to see the new release of the movie, Rocky. When they got into their car, someone shot through the window, killing Christine. John, however, managed to drive away with minor injuries. He never even got a glimpse of the shooter. As ballistics verified that the bullets came from a .44 Bulldog caliber, police made the connection with earlier shootings and suspected they had a serial killer on their hands.

Just two months later in Virginia on March 8, 1977, Virginia Voskerichian, nineteen, was shot in the head on her own street. Just as she was shot, a resident came around the corner and almost collided with a young boy whom she described as about eighteen years old, short and tubby. The young boy said, “Oh, Jesus,” and ran off. However, another witness saw the chubby teenager, but also saw another man who resembled the description of the man the media accused of other killings. Berkowitz later said that he was there, but he designed the shooting to throw off the police by changing his MO.

On March 10, 1977, the Mayor of New York City, Abraham Beame, and the NYPD, announced that the same .44 was used to kill Virginia as was the previous murders, and added that a task force was now set up: Operation Omega, led by Deputy Inspector Tim Dowd and a force of over three hundred officers dedicated solely to the purpose of catching the suspect.