Mike Fisher, district attorney for Osage and Pawnee, left; Osage County Sheriff Eddie Virden, right; Bottom inset Cynthia Kinney and Dennis Rader, top inset (Kinney photo from Osage County Sheriff’s Office; Rader photo from Travis Heying/The Wichita Eagle via AP, Pool, File; Virden and Fisher screenshots from ABC Tulsa, Oklahoma, affiliate KTUL)
A sheriff in Oklahoma accuses a district attorney in a lawsuit of making “uninformed and ignorant comments” about a lack of information to press charges against a serial killer in the disappearance of a 16-year-old girl nearly 50 years ago.
Osage County Sheriff Eddie Virden alleges Mike Fisher, the district attorney for Osage and Pawnee, made the comments at a news conference last month about an investigation the Sheriff has been conducting since 2007 into mass murderer Dennis Rader, the BTK Killer, a name he gave himself which stands for “bind, torture, kill.”
Virden accuses Fisher of surreptitiously contacting elderly families of murder victims, telling them the Sheriff was only conducting his investigation for publicity and political purposes and suggesting they not cooperate with him, the lawsuit said.
“Defendant Fisher’s actions have also been cruel to the surviving family(ies) by dashing their hope of bringing their family member’s killer to justice,” the lawsuit said.
His actions, the lawsuit added, have caused the “BTK investigation to be delayed, hampered and irreparably compromised, allowing Mr. Rader to escape justice and opened the door for Mr. Rader to initiate his own publicity campaign against the very person trying to bring him to justice … Sheriff Virden.”
Fisher told the Pawhuska Journal-Capital that Virden is pursuing a vendetta.
“It’s just sad,” Fisher said. “It’s just unfortunate that he continues to pursue whatever vendetta he has against me. I’ve tried to take the high road with him, but he doesn’t seem interested in that.”
The lawsuit, filed on Friday, alleges Fisher’s statements “intentionally disparaged the motivation, integrity, and reputation of Sheriff Virden and the Osage County Sheriff’s Office at a time when public support for law enforcement is waning nationwide.”
It alleges he acted with malice and reckless disregard for the truth and with the desire to “disparage and tarnish” Virden’s name and image and to influence the Sheriff’s election in 2024. It also alleges malicious interference with Osage Sheriff’s Office operations and oppression in office for the political gain of the defendant and his political allies.
The accusations stem from the investigation into Rader in the 1976 disappearance of 16-year-old cheerleader Cynthia Dawn Kinney. She vanished from a laundromat in Pawushka on June 23, 1976. Kinney’s remains have not been found, but Virden’s office announced a major development linking Rader to the case in August.
Virden said his investigators searched Rader’s former Park City home and recovered “items of interest” — such as “personal effects” in ongoing investigations in Oklahoma and Missouri.
“At this stage, Dennis Rader is considered a prime suspect in these unsolved cases, including the Cynthia Dawn Kinney case from Pawhuska,” the Sheriff’s office said.
The Sheriff’s office revealed that an entry in Rader’s journal from 1976, written the year Kinney disappeared, made reference to “PJ-Bad Wash Day” — “PJ” standing for “project” — and a brunette he was stalking.
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“The Brunette was the target. I would watch the near by Laundry Mat for possible victim see C-9 [chapter 9 of his unpublished book on the murders],” the entry said. “Laundry Mat were a good place to watch victims and dream, sometime I have a pair of women underwear on and after watching a girl or lady rerieve [sic] myself in bathroom with masterbations [sic] thoughts.”
In an interview with the New York Times, Virden said it dawned on him while watching a true crime series that Rader’s Kansas murders weren’t far from Osage County.
That series, which Law&Crime confirmed is “Catching Killers,” and its Season 2, Episode 1 on BTK, sparked the Sheriff to visit Rader in state prison. During that visit, the Times story says, Rader claimed he had never fulfilled the “fantasy” of a laundromat kidnapping.
Aware that Kinney was kidnapped from a laundromat, investigators pored over the serial killer’s journals, which were “intact and recovered by Wichita PD at the time of his 2005” capture, after the search of his place of work and residence, Undersheriff Gary Upton told Law&Crime.
“Those journals were made available to us,” Upton said.
Upton commented on the irony of a meticulous serial killer potentially being tripped up again, as in his floppy disk downfall, by simply revealing too much. The undersheriff surmised that Rader would have destroyed the journal evidence “if he had known he was going to be arrested.”
“We connected the dots by way of his timeline in the journal,” examining Rader’s movements “in the tri-state area that looked like where he had touched and where he had been,” Upton said.
The undersheriff called it “speculative with 80% certainty” that Rader was in Osage County for work on the day Kinney disappeared. He noted that a bank was under construction across the street from the laundromat at a time when ADT dominated the alarm system market across the nation.
Upton, noting that Kinney’s disappearance occurred two years after BTK was known to have committed five murders in Wichita, suggested that an Osage County work trip would have been a way for him to kill again and lie low for a while outside of Kansas.
Rader is serving 10 consecutive life sentences in the Kansas Department of Corrections for 10 murders to which he confessed.
The Sheriff said he has interviewed Rader and has potentially developed leads that may solve other murders in Oklahoma, Kansas, and Missouri, the court document said.
The DA has said he has asked the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation to examine the Kinney case.
Law&Crime’s Matt Naham contributed to this report.
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