BTK killer makes public apology

Wichita, Kan. Confessed BTK serial killer Dennis Rader made his first public apology for the murders that horrified a community for a quarter-century, blaming a “demon” that got inside him at a young age.

“I have a lot of remorse. I’m very sorry for them. It is something I wouldn’t want to happen to my family,” he told KAKE-TV. The interview was conducted Saturday; some of it was aired Wednesday night with additional portions aired Thursday.

Rader, who pleaded guilty last week to 10 first-degree murders in the Wichita area from 1974 to 1991, nicknamed himself BTK, for “Bind, Torture, Kill,” as he taunted media and police with cryptic messages about the crimes. He faces sentencing Aug. 17.

“I just know it’s a dark side of me. It kind of controls me. I personally think it’s a – and I know it is not very Christian – but I actually think it’s a demon that’s within me. … At some point and time it entered me when I was very young,” said Rader, who was once president of his Lutheran church.

Rader, 60, said his problems began in grade school, with his sexual fantasies that were “just a little bit weirder” than other people’s.

“Somewhere along the line, someone had to pick something up from me somewhere that there was a problem,” he said. “They should have identified it.”

Mailing fake anthrax gets man 19 years

Philadelphia A man who once claimed to be on a mission from God to kill abortion providers was sentenced Thursday to 19 years in federal prison for mailing hundreds of letters with fake anthrax to women’s clinics.

Clayton Lee Waagner, 48, was convicted in 2003 of mailing the letters and of posting a message on an anti-abortion Web site claiming he’d been following clinic employees and was “going to kill as many of them as I can.”

At his trial, Waagner called himself a terrorist and said people who provide abortions deserved to be shot.

Waagner sent many threatening letters from a FedEx facility in Philadelphia in late 2001 – during the height of the anthrax scares following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks – and after he’d escaped from prison. He spent 10 months on the run before he was recaptured. As a fugitive, Waagner was placed on the FBI’s most-wanted list.