An Oklahoma sheriff working on a BTK crossword puzzle in the middle of the night may have figured out another victim of the infamous serial killer.
Dennis Rader, 79, whose self-given moniker stands for "Bind, Torture, Kill" because of the method in which he murdered his victims in the Wichita, Kansas, area, has been tied to at least 10 slayings. He first struck in 1974 and terrorized the community for three decades. He was arrested in 2005.
"There's hints all the way through that can't be overlooked," Osage County Sheriff Eddie Virden said of a 20-year-old word puzzle Rader mailed to the media, according to KFOR-TV.
The puzzle spells out the names of his 10 victims and his home address.
Virden said the puzzle also contains the name of Cindy Kinney, a 16-year-old cheerleader who vanished from a laundromat in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, in 1976.
If positively confirmed, the revelation would expand Rader's hunting radius beyond Kansas.
"It's pretty hard to get around the fact that Cindy Kinney's name is in there, that Osage Laundromat is in there, that Pawhuska is in there," Virden told the outlet Tuesday.
"It's up to us to figure out everything that he gave us and put those together, connect the dots, and then get the answers we're looking for," the sheriff explained of the decades-long cat-and-mouse game Rader would play with investigators and the media. "We're still in the process of trying to evaluate that and sending them out, trying to get some expert opinions on it to see what we can get."
Rader – a divorced father of two – has ties to Oklahoma.
He documented traveling to the state eight times for vacation, a boy scouts trip and business.
"We have searched many locations. We've found items that we believe are evidence and we've found carvings, markings in barns, things that we believe are 100% proof that he's operated within our area," said Virden.
In 2005, Rader pleaded guilty to 10 counts of first-degree murder. He's currently serving 10 consecutive life-terms at a Kansas maximum security prison.
On Tuesday, his daughter, Kerri Rawson, wrote on X, "I am legally unable to comment at this time on the ongoing cold case investigation's into my father."