Kerri Rawson says her father, the BTK killer, probably sexually abused her

Kerri Rawson (Travis Heying/Wichita Eagle/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)

(NewsNation) — Kerri Rawson, the daughter of Dennis Rader, known as the “BTK Killer,” said in an interview with NewsNation that several experts told her it was “very possible” her father sexually abused her.

Therapists, criminologists and other experts had previously stated that she had likely been sexually abused, but Rawson said this was confirmed by a diary entry found by the Osage County Sheriff’s Office in Oklahoma.

Watch the full interview with Kerri Rawson on NewsNation’s “Banfield” tonight at CrimeCon at 10/9c. Need help finding your channel? Click here.

Rawson said one of her father’s diary entries includes a term that reads “1981” and then in capital letters “KERRI/BND/GAME.” BND stands for “bondage,” Rawson said.

“We knew immediately that it essentially symbolized that my father sexually abused me when I was two, two and a half years old,” Rawson said Friday in an interview at CrimeCon in Nashville, Tennessee.

After her trauma therapy, Rawson confronted her father about what she had learned during her visit with him. During her visit, she showed him a Polaroid photo of Rader dressed as a woman and strangling a doll.

“When I saw the photo this summer, I knew that’s what he had done to me,” Rawson said. “And the image of something that happened to me as a child stuck with me. And I’ve always had a problem with my neck.”

However, Rader denied ever harming his family and said it was a “fantasy.”

“But we know that he strangled my brother twice when he was a young adult. I saw that. I witnessed that,” Rawson said. “So given the trauma that I had, this thing that stuck with me, the dissociation, the night terrors, I’m 100 percent sure that he hurt me when I was little.”

Rader nicknamed himself “BTK,” which stands for “Bind, Torture, Kill.” His first strike came in 1974, and he stoked fear in the Wichita, Kansas, area throughout the 1970s. Rader, a former Air Force sergeant who was married with two children, lived in the Wichita area nearly his entire life.

Before he was convicted in 2005 of killing 10 people between 1974 and 1991, he led investigators and the media into a game of cat and mouse. Authorities still believe several missing persons cases are connected to him. Rawson assisted law enforcement in their investigations and worked as a victim advocate. She has written two books: “A Serial Killer’s Daughter: My Story of Faith, Love and Overcoming” and “Breaking Free: Overcoming the Trauma of My Serial Killer Father.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.