Stream It or Skip It?

“He didn’t just fool his family. He fooled his church. He fooled an entire city.” The Netflix true crime documentary My Father, The BTK Killer, directed and executive produced by Skye Borgman, is based on the 2019 book A Serial Killer’s Daughter: My Story of Faith, Love, and Overcoming by Kerri Rawson, who details in the doc her yearslong struggle to reconcile an an upbringing and early life lived in the shadow of a secret mass-murderer. The BTK story is infamous, and many parts of it have been told before. But with Rawson’s unwilling, close-up insight, My Father, the BTK Killer doesn’t stop at true crime. It becomes truest crime.

The Gist: “I mean, even today, I can talk about it down to the detail of what my father has done. My father has done what we know. But to actually believe it, it still goes in and out now.” Kerri Rawson speaks directly to the camera throughout My Father, The BTK Killer, as she travels back to her hometown of Wichita, KS, revisits the street where she grew up – the house was demolished, “to prevent people selling it on eBay, piece by piece” – and still feels the sting of both locals and social media trolls associating her with her father’s terrible crimes. Rawson describes going to Wichita as like re-entering a world of trauma. 

Dennis Rader, Kerri Rawson’s father, killed at least 10 people between 1974 and 1991, binding and sexually torturing them, all while living in the same community as a husband, father, devoted churchgoer, and Boy Scout leader. As My Father, The BTK Killer gives space to Rawson’s story, it also plots a timeline of Rader’s murders, interviews police authorities involved in the investigation, and consults local media figures who covered the crimes. The doc accesses a load of archival news footage along the way, and includes a bit of reenactment. But besides Rawson’s first-person reflections on her experience, what’s most startling here are the recordings of phone calls the killer made to police, shots of the letters he wrote to local news outlets, and later, video of his interviews with the cops after he was caught. Rader never apologized once, and spoke easily of his ghastly “projects” in a flat Midwestern accent. He could have been describing a camping trip or a work room hobby, just like the dad he also was.

“The trauma of my father imploded us.” Rawson is estranged from her mother, and no one else in her family appears in this documentary. She describes her life in the years after her father’s arrest, how she tried to push her proximity to his double-life down someplace inside, and just move on. But it made her rot in there. Rawson credits the writing of her book, and My Father, The BTK Killer itself, as mechanisms for her to confront and work through what she experienced. But that does not mean she’s reached a place of peace. “The never-ending show of Hell” that was Dennis Rader’s 2005 trial, where the awful depths of his sexual sadism were revealed, was terrible. But with every fact of his crimes, alongside nearly every murder, Rawson can insert details from her own life into the narrative. How could she have known that the family wagon she drove to high school had also carried the bodies of Rader’s many victims?

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Filmmaker Skye Borgman deserves her own tab under Netflix’s true crime heading. In addition to My Father, The BTK Killer, Borgman’s work on the streamer includes Abducted in Plain Sight, Girl in the Picture, and a big splash from earlier this year, Unknown Number: The High School Catfish.     

BTK is also no stranger to the booming true crime genre. Season 2 of the Netflix docuseries Catching Killers detailed Dennis Rader’s capture from a police perspective, his crimes were fictionalized in Mindhunter, and he was the inspiration for at least two different films, A Good Marriage – written by Stephen King, and based on his novella that’s referenced in My Father, The BTK Killer – and The Clovehitch Killer, where Dylan McDermott plays a creepily mustached, similarly binding torture-obsessed, plainsight-hiding version of Rader.

Performance Worth Watching: The footage included here from Rader’s August 2005 sentencing hearing in Kansas, as the families and loved ones of his victims read their personal statements directly to him in the courtroom, is truly heartbreaking.  

Memorable Dialogue: Wichita journalist Larry Hatteberg: “Kerri Rawson got a gig she didn’t sign up for. Everywhere she goes, when people understand that BTK was her father, then she becomes BTK’s daughter. How do you outlive that?”

Sex and Skin: In My Father, The BTK Killer, the sexual violence of Dennis Rader’s appalling crimes are described in detail, sometimes by the murderer himself. The documentary includes links to resources and support for victims of sexual abuse.

Our Take: True crime has become such an industry unto itself, it’s like we’re all inside of it all the time. If it’s not one of the numerous documentary films and series devoted to serial killers, terrible murders, or bloody family violence, it’s a fictional setting either derived from these stories or inspired by them. But feeling media-adjacent to this stuff is nothing compared to Kerri Rawson’s story. She was made by her father, the secret “Bind Torture Kill” murderer. Raised by him. As she says in the doc, she even resembles him. She can’t outrun these facts, her face, no matter how it makes her feel, and even now, Rawson’s interviews in My Father, The BTK Killer feel like they exist just on the edge of her still-quaking PTSD. For any of us, the viewers, we can stay separate from the true crime onslaught, even as we contribute to its surge. For Rawson, true crime will forever be a lived experience.

We’ve illustrated where BTK has surfaced in documentaries and scripted drama. But it’s actually really crazy how much Dennis Rader can resemble the template of what we’ve seen. In the post-capture segments of My Father, The BTK Killer, the cops straight-up ask him: “Why don’t you say it? Tell us who you are?” Almost word for word, it’s what Jurnee Smollett’s detective in the recent Apple TV+ drama Smoke asks Taron Egerton’s deadly fire-setting arson investigator, a guy who was also hiding in plain sight. With the brave participation of Rawson, My Father, The BTK Killer is likely the most complete documentary to cover Dennis Rader’s secret, murderous double life. But we cannot think it’s the last word. Right now, there’s probably somebody somewhere developing BTK into another fictional version. True crime rolls on.

Our Call: Stream It. It’s a powerful, terribly personal story Kerri Rawson shares in My Father, The BTK Killer. As true crime goes, the documentary is too close to the point of discomfort.

Johnny Loftus (@johnnyloftus.bsky.social) is a Chicago-based writer. A veteran of the alternative weekly trenches, his work has also appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Pitchfork, The All Music Guide, and The Village Voice.