History > 2005 > USA > Violence, Crime

Dennis Rader, 60,

who pleaded guilty in June,

sat glumly today as his sentencing hearing got under way.

NYT > Reuters

In Gory Detail,

Prosecution Lays Out Case for Tough Sentencing of B.T.K. Killer

NYT        August 18, 2005

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/18/national/18btk.html

Gigante, Mafia Boss,

Is Mourned and Buried

With Little Fanfare

December 24, 2005
The New York Times
By WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM

Sometimes the lines of funeral cars stretched for miles. The floral tributes were crafted with the ambition of sculpture. The mourners hailed from all walks of society, including Hollywood, the sports world, government.

The funerals of organized-crime bosses have often been De Mille-esque spectacles. But Vincent Gigante, one of the leading crime figures of the last century, was buried yesterday largely with the anonymity he sought, unsuccessfully, in life.

The 77-year-old boss of the Genovese crime family was a throwback to an earlier era of low-key mob chieftains who did not seek majestic trappings of Mafia royalty. While Paul Castellano built a white-columned Staten Island mansion and John J. Gotti preened in his $2,000 suits and reveled in the limelight at Regine's, Mr. Gigante shuffled along the streets of Little Italy in a bathrobe and slippers, part of a roughly 40-year effort to feign mental illness and avoid prosecution.

Perhaps fittingly, then, there has been little speculation and little fanfare surrounding his passing.

Many factors explain this - the transit strike for one, and Mr. Gigante's preference for a low profile for another. But beyond that, there is a sense that the mob, if not Mr. Gigante himself before his death, has seen much of its power and influence fade. It is there - still fiercely there at times - but decidedly on the wane as the city's five families suffer from the diminution of authority brought on by the successful use of government wiretaps.

Mr. Gotti's funeral, a pageant of pomp and excess, was a gangland spectacle. Nineteen flower cars, 22 black limousines and hundreds of private cars snaked through the streets of Maspeth, Howard Beach and Ozone Park, Queens.

But the rites yesterday for Mr. Gigante were in marked contrast, a funeral Mass celebrated by his brother, the Rev. Louis Gigante, a retired Roman Catholic priest and a former city councilman.

The service, at the St. Anthony of Padua Church, two blocks from the Greenwich Village tenement where the men grew up, was largely attended by Mr. Gigante's family and friends from the tightly knit neighborhood along Sullivan Street, where his faction of the Genovese clan held sway.

Aside from Mr. Gigante's brother Mario, who federal authorities have identified as a Genovese family capo, few mob figures came to the church, and those who did were close childhood friends of Mr. Gigante's, one investigator said.

The large church, with green marble columns and blond wooden pews, was nearly full with friends and family, greeting one another with tears and kisses at the beginning and end of the service.

During it, there was some anger. Father Gigante, who for many years built low-income housing in the Bronx, blamed the United States Bureau of Prisons for his brother's death, saying that he had visited him 19 times in prison over eight years and that "there wasn't a day he didn't suffer."

He said that the officials at the United States Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Mo., would not move the ailing Mr. Gigante into an outside hospital until the family obtained a court order from a federal district judge. He was later moved back to the prison hospital, where he died. "They didn't take care of him," Father Gigante said. "They allowed him to die."

Al Quintero, a spokesman for the prison hospital, defended Mr. Gigante's care. "Our staff have done everything they could and I think they've done it appropriately," he said.

The results of an autopsy have not yet been released, but Mr. Quintero suggested that Mr. Gigante had a history of coronary disease. Father Gigante said that his brother had been misjudged by the news media and the government and that his family and friends knew him as a "gentle man," a "just man" and "man of God."

Yesterday, after Mr. Gigante's polished wooden coffin, covered with poinsettias and white roses, was loaded into a gray hearse and the family climbed into three black limousines, the quiet street outside the church quickly emptied under an overcast December sky.

The F.B.I. and federal prosecutors, mostly using informers along with the wiretaps, have successfully prosecuted dozens of mob chieftains and captains over the last two decades, including the leaders of all of the city's five families, using their own words against them.

But not Mr. Gigante. He was arrested and successfully prosecuted and sentenced to 12 years in prison for racketeering and murder conspiracy in 1997. Unlike many of his fellow bosses, however, he was not truly trapped by his own words until he went to prison. There, secret recordings were made and later used to win a conviction on obstruction-of-justice charges for trying to mask his leadership of the Genovese clan by pretending to be mad.

Indeed, federal investigators said that the canny Mr. Gigante, who was known as the Chin, was almost impossible to capture on wiretaps, speaking softly, eschewing the phone and even at times whistling into the receiver, part, prosecutors would later argue, of his "crazy act."

He almost never left his home unoccupied because he knew F.B.I. agents would seek to break in and plant a bug, several investigators said. His discipline and care differed sharply from that of many other mob figures, most notably his nemesis, Mr. Gotti, the Gambino boss, whom Mr. Gigante was convicted of trying to kill.

Mr. Gotti's recorded rants sealed his own fate and helped prosecutors win his murder and racketeering conviction in 1992 and a life sentence. Mr. Gotti died 10 years later in the same federal prison hospital where Mr. Gigante died Monday.

Two blocks from the church, the ground floor of the unremarkable building on Sullivan Street where he grew up now houses a trendy bar and cafe, the trim of its large windows painted violet.

One longtime resident of the building where Mr. Gigante grew up, a woman carrying what looked like Christmas shopping, recalled him fondly and remembered that several members of his family had played basketball on a nearby roof.

"In spite of his reputation, he was a very colorful person," the woman recalled, adding, "When I saw him in the street, he used to tip his hat."

Gigante, Mafia Boss, Is Mourned and Buried With Little Fanfare, NYT, 25.11.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/24/nyregion/24chin.html

Murder rate in small cities jumps 13%

Posted 12/19/2005 11:33 AM Updated 12/19/2005 11:33 PM
USA TODAY
By Kevin Johnson

WASHINGTON — Murder increased by 2.1% across the USA during the first six months of 2005 and was on track to nearly reverse a 2.4% decline recorded last year, according to preliminary FBI figures released Monday.

The largest spikes over the same period in 2004 occurred in some of the nation's smallest cities — population 10,000 or less — where homicides were up 13%, the report found.

Murder and robbery were the only major crimes to increase in the preliminary review of 10,374 agencies. The review showed overall decreases in violent and property crimes, continuing a decade-long decline.

Crime analysts on Monday were struggling to explain the sudden spike in small-town homicide.

The FBI could not immediately provide a breakdown of the locations where murders were rising, leading some experts to suggest that the ills that have long plagued urban America — gangs, drugs and the proliferation of weapons — were taking root in the suburbs.

"Unfortunately, it looks like the small towns are playing catch-up with the big cities," said Jack Levin, a professor at the Brudnick Center on Violence and Conflict at Northeastern University in Boston. "What starts in Detroit or Chicago eventually becomes a problem in the suburbs. Crime moves where the population goes."

Mary Ann Viverette, police chief in Gaithersburg, Md., and president of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, said that police in small and large cities are seeing people increasingly respond with violence to even minimal provocation. "Because of a lack of resources in some of these places, police are often forced to react to incidents rather than be in a position to disrupt them," Viverette said.

Explaining fluctuations in crime, especially violent crime, has proved to be difficult. While murder increased 13% in towns with fewer than 10,000 people, murder declined 16% in towns only slightly larger, between 10,000 and 24,999 residents.

Murders declined last year after three successive years of increases. The increases had been blamed on a resurgence in gang activity and illegal drug sales, combined with a faltering economy.

This year, Charlotte police, for example, are at a loss to explain a jump in killings. Last week, the murder count stood at 83, compared with 56 at the same time last year.

Killings related to domestic violence, gang activity and robberies are all up this year.

"It's very difficult to explain," said Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department spokesman Keith Bridges. "There are increases all across the board."

    Murder rate in small cities jumps 13%, UT, 19.12.2005, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2005-12-19-crimerate_x.htm

FBI reports murder rate increases

Mon Dec 19, 2005 12:47 PM ET
Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Murders across the United States increased by more than 2 percent from January through June while the overall crime rate continued its downward trend, the FBI reported on Monday.

The federal law enforcement agency said the largest jump in murders, totaling 13 percent, occurred in cities with fewer than 10,000 people. The number of murders went up by 2.3 percent in metropolitan areas.

Murders increased in all regions of the nation, rising 4.9 percent in the Midwest, 2.2 percent in the South, 1.9 percent in the Northeast and 0.2 percent in the West.

The other violent crime category that showed an increase in the first half of the year was robbery, which rose by 0.6 percent. For the remaining two categories of violent crimes, rapes decreased by 4.7 percent and aggravated assault declined 0.7 percent.

For property crimes, the FBI said larceny-theft offenses decreased by 3.5 percent, motor vehicle theft dropped by 2.1 percent and burglaries fell by 1.1 percent. Reported arson offenses went down by 5.6 percent.

    FBI reports murder rate increases, R, 19.12.2005, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2005-12-19T174736Z_01_SPI958203_RTRUKOC_0_US-CRIME-FBI.xml

 

NYT        December 4, 2005

 In the Killings of Black Officers, a Somber Reflection of Diversity        NYT        4.12.2005

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/04/nyregion/04cop.html

The Police Department mourned Detective Robert Parker

in September 2004 in Canarsie, Brooklyn.

Ángel Franco/The New York Times        December 4, 2005

 In the Killings of Black Officers, a Somber Reflection of Diversity        NYT        4.12.2005

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/04/nyregion/04cop.html 
 

In the Killings of Black Officers,

a Somber Reflection of Diversity

December 4, 2005
The New York Times
By MICHAEL WILSON

Maybe they are only numbers: Four out of five.

Five times since the terrorist attacks of 2001, police officers have been shot dead in the line of duty. Four of those times, the families of black officers have taken front-row seats for the funerals.

The number of black people in the 37,000-member Police Department has risen slowly over the decades, but more rapidly in recent years. Blacks now make up 17.4 percent of the force - up from 9.2 percent in 2001 in a city where more than 25 percent of the population is black. Since 2001, though, the names of black officers and detectives have all but filled the list destined for permanent inscription in gilded bas-relief above the Police Headquarters entrance: "Those Who Died in Performance of Duty," as the plaque says.

"There were years where the Honor Roll read like the Emerald Society roster," said Paul J. Browne, a police spokesman. "Now it reflects a more diverse department. The faces change. The courage doesn't."

After Dillon Stewart, a 35-year-old black patrol officer, was shot to death on Monday morning, his colleagues stood outside the hospital where he died and inside the courtroom where a man accused of shooting him was arraigned. Men and women, black, white, Asian and Hispanic, investigators and ticket writers, they stood together.

Still, some of Officer Stewart's colleagues could not help but remark on those numbers - four out of five. Indeed, of the last 10 New York officers killed in violent encounters on the job, 6 were black.

"Patrol, it can be like just routine and then all of a sudden it can escalate to a life or death situation," said Sgt. Vernon Wells, a black officer who, after 20 years, worked his last day last week. "The more African-Americans that come on the job and Latinos that come on the job, they'll be exposed to these life or death situations."

Department officials and others, from criminal justice experts to officers on the street, said there was no single answer for what put any officer in harm's way on the day or night of his death.

Some have theorized that the deaths of black officers might be explained by a mix of bad luck and department demographics. In a department where the top jobs are still dominated by whites, each new police academy class is filled with more black, Hispanic and Asian-American officers, all of whom start their careers on the front lines of patrol. The police academy class that graduated in July, for instance, was 18.3 percent black, a figure that, together with the Hispanic and Asian-American recruits, made it the first mostly minority class in the history of the department.

The department did not provide precise numbers but said that of the slightly more than 4,000 black police officers now in the department, most served on patrol - whether in radio cars, on public housing beats or in the transit system.

Thomas Reppetto, executive director of the Citizens Crime Commission and a New York police historian, had a simple explanation. "Street patrols are going to have a higher portion of younger officers. After people are around a while, they move to special units and higher in rank," he said. "Since a lot of minority officers have been hired in recent years, not only have we increased the number of minority officers, but you've probably increased the number of those at an operating level."

Whatever the appeal of such an explanation, federal statistics show that the New York officers killed over the years have tracked with national trends, and one of those trends is that more often than not it is a veteran officer who is killed as opposed to new or less experienced officers. None of the four black officers killed since 2001 were young or new to the force, and indeed three were detectives with considerable experience.

Black detectives have also risen in number in the department in recent years, and many of those detectives, along with Hispanic colleagues, now work in dangerous undercover positions. The department does not disclose numbers of undercover officers, but veteran officers estimated the ranks were mostly nonwhite.

"Narcotics and guns - the majority of undercover officers will be black and Hispanic," said Anthony Miranda, a retired sergeant and executive chairman of the National Latino Officers Association and a former undercover narcotics officer.

Others seeking to make some sense of the recent police deaths point to a longstanding truth in the department - that officers gravitate toward neighborhoods that are familiar to them, both ethnically and geographically. Officers routinely seek assignments in precincts that require the shortest commute, the only restriction being a ban on working in the precinct where they live.

Capt. Eric Adams, president of 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, a fraternal organization, pointed to the number of black officers patrolling the so-called impact precincts where violent crimes have not dropped as radically as in other areas. He said he thought that might have had something to do with the grim recent catalog of slain officers.

"I think that one of the awful byproducts of living in communities where you inflict violence on people who look like you, at such an easy and confident rate, what may spill over is the comfort to do so whether that person is wearing a bus uniform or a police uniform," he said.

Officer Stewart, for example, had spent years living near Flatbush, the Brooklyn neighborhood where he worked and died, which is one of the city's more violent.

The department, for its part, says that it does not assign patrol officers on the basis of race or ethnicity, except in instances in which language skills are vital.

But almost everyone agrees that any attempt to divine too much from statistics and staffing, particularly with so small a sample, can be flawed.

Of the seven officers injured, but not killed, by gunfire this year, five were white. Any of them could have fared worse. And when Officer Stewart was shot behind the wheel of his unmarked patrol car, the partner next to him was white.

A longtime police supervisor who is black and who spoke on the condition of anonymity because to do otherwise is a violation of department policy, said: "I don't see any pattern. It's just the luck of the draw."

To back up and examine the last 20 officers slain on duty, the number of black victims rises only one more, to seven.

Still, he added that the numbers sent a message.

"It says to me that we're just as dedicated and hardworking as the next guy," the supervisor said. "That's what I see. This clearly validates that we're as willing to put our lives on the line as much as everyone else."

Even if the recent numbers are just a statistical blip, the stories behind them are excruciating.

In 2003, two black detectives working undercover, Rodney Andrews and James Nemorin, were fatally shot while trying to buy illegal handguns on Staten Island.

A year later, a black detective named Robert Parker was killed alongside his white partner, Patrick Rafferty, both of them shot to death by a suspect fleeing arrest.

Lee Brown, 68, the former mayor of Houston and the police commissioner under the administration of Mayor David N. Dinkins from 1990 to 1992, praised the department's success in increasing its number of minority officers, and noted the many consequences.

"When you have success in that area, you can logically conclude that minorities will be part of everything happening in the department," Mr. Brown said, "and that includes those losing their lives."

Wilbur Chapman, 58, a former chief of patrol in the department, said race was irrelevant in a gunfight.

"The lawless element doesn't think twice about whether someone's black, white, male, female, gay, straight, whatever," Mr. Chapman said.

Captain Adams said that any good police officer would relish the chance to work the beats that the fallen officers once did. "If the neighborhoods are dangerous, they're not going to shy away," he said. "Cops of any ethnicity, they want to be where the danger is."

Reporting for this article was contributed by Al Baker, Michael Brick, Corey Kilgannon and William K. Rashbaum.

    In the Killings of Black Officers, a Somber Reflection of Diversity,  NYT, 4.12.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/04/nyregion/04cop.html

For Raymond W. Kelly,

continuing as police commissioner,

there is some concern his reputation is so great,

it has nowhere to go but down.

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times        November 15, 2005

N.Y. Police Chief Has a Tough Act to Follow, and It's His Own

NYT        15.11.2005
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/15/nyregion/15kelly.html

Mr. Kelly with members of his senior staff at 1 Police Plaza.

His leadership style has been criticized, but his success is hard to argue with.

Ting-Li Wang/The New York Times        November 15, 2005

 N.Y. Police Chief Has a Tough Act to Follow, and It's His Own

NYT        15.11.2005

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/15/nyregion/15kelly.html

N.Y. Police Chief Has a Tough Act to Follow,

and It's His Own

November 15, 2005
The New York Times
By WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM

Raymond W. Kelly built the Police Department's counterterrorism program from scratch. He drove crime down further, against predictions and beyond national averages. He has improved relations with the city's black and Latino populations. And, a decade after his first, abbreviated term as New York City police commissioner, he did it all with a shrinking number of officers.

Now, as Mr. Kelly makes good on his pledge to stay on for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's second term as the man widely seen as the second most powerful person in city government, people close to him say he will not be satisfied at having gone from underestimated to vindicated. He is, they say, intent on cementing his successes - in fighting terror and in working to bring the department's technology into the 21st century, among others.

Some, including admirers, question his decision to stay, noting that his carefully restored reputation, which came under harsh criticism during the administration of Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, could suffer if crime goes up or terrorists attack. Others suggest he might have his eyes on a bigger prize - City Hall. Mr. Kelly, for his part, insists he has no political ambitions, and no great fear of setbacks to his reputation.

"It sounds corny, but I never have avoided the challenges - I relish them - I think it's what make me tick, to a certain extent," Mr. Kelly, 64, said in an interview. "That would be the last reason I would leave, because things would turn bad; that would be reason I would stay, quite frankly."

Some, however, who follow city government see Mr. Kelly's legacy, if not his accomplishments, at risk in a world where a terrorist attack may be inevitable, and an economic downturn could stall or reverse crime's decline.

"You're really gambling against yourself at this point," said William B. Eimicke, a professor of public administration at Columbia University, "because your chances of improving against your track record to date seem to dwindle by the day. If you wait long enough, something bad is going to happen no matter how good you are."

It is less of a mystery why Mr. Bloomberg, after being re-elected by a wide margin, wants Mr. Kelly at his side for another term. The commissioner provides bedrock credibility on crime and terrorism, two of the most important issues of Mr. Bloomberg's mayoralty.

But theories abound on Mr. Kelly's thinking, and they are as multifaceted as the man himself.

He wants to run for mayor: Mr. Bloomberg has mentioned him as a potential candidate.

He needs action: After decades at the highest ranks of the Police Department and the federal government, Mr. Kelly has had a seat at the table of power for much of his adult life.

He wants to institutionalize his initiatives: Mr. Kelly has created a counterterrorism operation that is probably unmatched by any municipal police agency in the world. But much of it was built on his relationships and federal experience, and may not survive his departure.

He is the duty-bound captain who does not want to leave the bridge: Mr. Kelly often talks in personal terms about protecting New York. He and his wife, Veronica, who have long lived in Battery Park City, watched their neighborhood collapse into a smoking ruin on Sept. 11, 2001. The sight, he has often said, propelled him back into public service from a job overseeing global security for Bear, Stearns & Company.

Divining the true motivations of any person is seldom a matter of science. In Mr. Kelly's case, the endeavor is even more complicated. An intensely driven man, he is someone who both cares deeply about his image and who generally reveals little about himself.

The son of a milkman, Mr. Kelly rose to acclaim by long hours working, negotiating and networking his way through a succession of police and increasingly demanding government posts. Along the way, he earned a series of graduate degrees: two in law, from New York University and St. John's, and a master's in public administration from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.

Yet his demeanor at the peak can sometimes be both moody and imperious, and his get-out-of-my-way-if-you-want-me-to-save-New-York attitude has alienated some federal officials who are angry that the New York Police Department now often acts like its own nation-state.

"If the stereotype is the grit of the New York cop who has been around the world and now comes home, his professional personality is much more complicated than that," said Christopher Stone, a professor at the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government, who knows Mr. Kelly well.

In an interview in his office, Mr. Kelly rejected the notion that his crime fighter's mien of pug nose and square jaw conceals a man of mysterious intentions. In short, he said, he has no interest in running for mayor.

After a tour as a Marine commander in Vietnam and a career in law enforcement, he said, he is unaccustomed to the sort of compromise that comes with elective office. "Maybe I don't have enough flexibility in my DNA," he said.

In fact, Mr. Kelly seemed puzzled why anyone would think he would want to leave.

He is staying, he said, for a combination of reasons: a sense of duty, the thrill of a challenge, the idea that he is well suited to deal with whatever may befall the city, and the prospect of codifying changes to the department that aim to prevent or prepare for terrorist attacks.

"I have no desire to declare victory and move on to something else - I think this is the greatest job in the world," he said. "And I'm going to be where the action is."

Following the News

It's not clear that Mr. Kelly is quite as blithe about news, good or bad, as his comments might suggest. In fact, colleagues and friends say he is intensely sensitive to how he and the department are perceived.

He closely follows news media reports and can be surprisingly thin-skinned. His battles with one often critical columnist, Leonard Levitt, who recently left Newsday and continues to write largely about internal Police Department intrigues, are legend among police reporters. At one point two years ago, Mr. Kelly, whose son is a television journalist, went so far as to drive out to Newsday's offices on Long Island to complain to the editors about Mr. Levitt.

"He's clearly hypersensitive to criticism, and that hypersensitivity has prevented him from dealing constructively with some of the significant civil rights violations that have happened under his command," said Christopher Dunn, the associate legal director for the New York Civil Liberties Union.

The organization has been a regular critic of the commissioner and has sued the department over a number of policies, including mass arrests during the 2004 Republican National Convention and antiterror subway bag searches.

Paul J. Browne, the department's chief spokesman, said Mr. Kelly was neither thin-skinned nor imperious. "I have been with him probably a hundred times or more when he's entered a room to the sound of 'Ten-hut,' and in each and every instance he's motioned to the troops to remain seated," Mr. Browne said. Mr. Kelly strictly observes the Marine Corps dictum that officers eat last, Mr. Browne said, and in Haiti years ago he passed on an offer to stay at a deposed strongman's mansion to quarter himself instead in a "fleabag hotel that had seen better days, even by Haitian standards."

As his busy public schedule suggests, Mr. Kelly often enjoys the spotlight, even though his downturned mouth sometimes projects an image of dutiful routine. He attends high-profile events like the Alfred E. Smith political dinner last month and a reception for the Canadian prime minister and he makes regular appearances at community and police functions and on TV news shows.

He is seldom expansive on camera, hewing closely to the facts and always on message: New York has been the target of terrorists four times - two of the attacks succeeded; federal counterterrorism money should be distributed according to need; New York is putting measures in place to respond to the latest threat; crime continues to decline.

In most of these settings, he dresses immaculately in dark, hand-tailored, three-button suits, ties from the French shirt-maker Charvet, white pocket handkerchiefs and black shoes polished to a blinding sheen.

"Ray Kelly doesn't wrinkle," said Mitchell L. Moss, a friend and a professor of urban policy at New York University.

Attention to Details

Mr. Kelly is similarly fastidious, co-workers say, in the way he delegates responsibility, choosing to monitor seemingly insignificant details like minor staff changes. Allies contend that Mr. Kelly's approach eliminates cronyism and irks only those who seek unfair advantage. But few dispute that Mr. Kelly is an executive who distributes power sparingly and relies on a tight circle of loyal, largely civilian aides to make decisions.

Critics describe Mr. Kelly's approach as micromanaging and complain that he creates a management bottleneck, an assertion that Mr. Kelly denies. He calls himself "a situational manager" and maintains that the Police Department, with its 51,000 officers and civilian employees, cannot be micromanaged.

Not that micromanagement is a pejorative term, he said. "I see it as paying attention to detail when it's needed most," he said.

In private, Mr. Kelly sometimes takes vacations from his buttoned-down style. Jeremy Travis, a former aide who is the president of John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said he recalled walking into Mr. Kelly's office in 1992 to find him cooking jambalaya with calypso music blaring. These days, Mr. Kelly said, he enjoys cooking squid "in a very good red sauce," which he sometimes does in a small kitchen attached to his office. He also has fun playing the drums. He swung the sticks the other night at a Police Foundation cocktail party, switching off to play the bongos on other numbers. He wore a suit throughout.

Mr. Kelly may need every ounce of his management skills in the coming years. Some experts believe that crime could be driven back up by an economic downturn, and that another terrorist strike on New York is inevitable. But to be fair, they said, an attack would no more indicate a flaw in Mr. Kelly's policies than the absence of one would prove they were faultless.

Either way, Mr. Kelly is intent on institutionalizing his antiterrorism initiatives, such as stationing officers in foreign cities like Tel Aviv, so that they continue after he has gone. This may be difficult since so much of the program has been built by two aides with unique experience who are likely to leave with Mr. Kelly, if not before.

Michael Sheehan, the deputy commissioner for counterterrorism, is a retired Army Special Forces colonel who served on the National Security Council, at the State Department and at the United Nations. David Cohen, the deputy commissioner for intelligence, rose to the highest ranks in the Central Intelligence Agency after 35 years there.

Under them, the department gets real-time intelligence from the C.I.A. and from National Security Agency communications intercepts, and police officers troll the Internet for potential threats.

When Mr. Kelly does leave, he will be walking away from a law enforcement career that began more than 40 years ago when, as a police cadet, he sat at an enormous wall-size switchboard in the old police headquarters on Centre Street, learning the structure of the department, phone number by phone number, as he connected calls to precincts around the city.

Since then, he has run the department twice - the first time in 1992 and 1993 under Mayor David N. Dinkins - and worked in 25 commands. He has served in Washington, first overseeing the Treasury Department's law enforcement agencies and then running the Customs Service, where he worked with Congress and the executive branch, as well as doing a stint on the executive committee at Interpol.

A Depth of Influence

Today, no Bloomberg aide can match his power or influence. Unlike most other commissioners, he reports directly to the mayor, rather than through a senior mayoral aide. In the spring, two commissioners, Nicholas Scoppetta of the Fire Department and Joseph F. Bruno of the Office of Emergency Management, saw the depth of Mr. Kelly's influence when the mayor completely adopted his view in a dispute over who should control the scene at terrorist attacks and other emergencies.

Supporters of Mr. Kelly's say they believe that most New Yorkers are happy that he has the self-confidence to use power as a tool.

"There are others who feel they're being displaced by that, by his claim of responsibility, but I think most New Yorkers are delighted that they have a police commissioner who takes this seriously and is willing to go to bat for us," said Mr. Travis, the John Jay College president.

In Washington, Mr. Kelly's personality, achievements and federal experience also serve to give him special standing in comparison with other municipal police officials. In some ways, his stature and innovations have altered the very way city and federal law enforcement officials interact. Consider, for example, how times have changed since the days when police officials complained that the F.B.I. did not share its intelligence. This year, a senior F.B.I. official complained in a report that it was the Police Department that was not sharing the intelligence it generates.

Mr. Kelly says that collecting such intelligence is essential to thwarting a foe like Al Qaeda and like-minded terrorist groups, which he says often take the long view in their plotting and think of tactics in terms of decades. Long enough, it would appear, to wait out Ray Kelly.

But he's not ready to go just yet, Mr. Kelly says, committing to stick around for all of the next four years.

What will he do after the next mayor is inaugurated? Mr. Kelly sidestepped the question. "I don't like to think that far ahead," he said.

    N.Y. Police Chief Has a Tough Act to Follow, and It's His Own, NYT, 15.11.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/15/nyregion/15kelly.html

An undated Pennsylvania State Police photo shows David G. Ludwig,

who is accused of killing his girlfriend's parents

after a dispute about the underage girl's curfew.

He was captured in Indiana on Monday, police said.

REUTERS/Pennsylvania State Police/Handout

Accused teenage killer arrested        R        Mon Nov 14, 2005    5:33 PM ET

http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=
2005-11-14T223318Z_01_BAU469370_RTRUKOC_0_US-CRIME-BORDEN.xml 

Accused teenage killer arrested

Mon Nov 14, 2005 5:33 PM ET
Reuters

PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - A Pennsylvania teenager accused of killing his girlfriend's parents after a dispute over the girl's curfew was captured in Indiana on Monday, police said.

David Ludwig, 18, was arrested in Belleville, Indiana, after crashing his car into a tree during a high-speed police chase. He was taken into custody with almost no struggle and did not appear to be carrying a gun, Indiana State Police said.

Neither he nor his girlfriend Kara Beth Borden, who was riding in the car with him, was injured.

"He has cooperated" with investigators but no other information was being released, Sgt. David Burstin of the state police told a briefing. He said the girl had not been questioned, but "she suffered no physical harm" and no information was available on whether she had been abducted or went with Ludwig voluntarily.

Ludwig had fled from Lititz, Pennsylvania, on Sunday with the girl after he allegedly shot dead Borden's parents -- Michael and Cathryn Lee Borden -- both 50.

Ludwig and Kara Beth Borden stayed out all night Saturday and were confronted by her father early Sunday. After a long argument, Ludwig is said to have shot both parents with a single bullet to the head, and then fled with Borden.

Two siblings survived the attack and raised the alarm, police said.

    Accused teenage killer arrested, R, Mon Nov 14, 2005 5:33 PM ET, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2005-11-14T223318Z_01_BAU469370_RTRUKOC_0_US-CRIME-BORDEN.xml

After 3 Decades,

Guilty Verdict in Rape Case,

With Help From DNA

November 10, 2005
The New York Times
By JULIA PRESTON

Thirty-two years after a young woman was raped at knifepoint in a Manhattan apartment, the man accused at the time was convicted yesterday for the assault, in a case that displayed the power of DNA testing to identify elusive criminals.

The guilty verdict against Fletcher A. Worrell, which a jury reached after deliberating less than two hours, closed a circle of justice for the victim, Kathleen Ham, now 58. Mr. Worrell's 1974 trial for the rape ended in a hung jury after his defense lawyer suggested that Ms. Ham was a prostitute and tried to cast doubt on whether she had been violently assaulted.

More than three decades later - after Mr. Worrell was arrested last year after trying to buy a gun in Georgia - Ms. Ham took the witness stand last week. She retold the story of the assault, and of the insomnia and painful personal isolation she had lived with virtually every moment since.

"I feel very, very vindicated," said Ms. Ham, with a smile of relief, at a news conference after the verdict. "It's taken a long time." Ms. Ham, now a lawyer living in California, has insisted that her name be published along with accounts of the trial, saying that she is not ashamed to have been a victim of rape.

Mr. Worrell, 59, who was tried the first time under the name Clarence Williams, was convicted in State Supreme Court in Manhattan of one count of first-degree rape and one count of robbery. Police found four dollar bills, which he had taken from Ms. Ham's purse, in his pocket when they first arrested him just a few minutes after the rape, at dawn on June 26, 1973.

Mr. Worrell faces 8 to 25 years in prison on each count, and is scheduled to be sentenced on Nov. 28. But this trial was just the beginning of multiple charges being brought against him. The authorities say he has been linked by DNA evidence to at least 21 other sexual assaults in Maryland and New Jersey, including a string of rapes in Montgomery County, Md., attributed to an attacker the police called the Silver Spring rapist.

Mr. Worrell jumped bail in 1975 before he could be tried again for Ms. Ham's rape, and left New York. He was arrested in Georgia in May 2004 after he tried to buy a shotgun, and a background check turned up the open warrant. But the biggest break in the case came when a DNA sample was recovered from the underpants that Ms. Ham wore on the day of the crime, which were found stuffed in the files in the Manhattan district attorney's cold case unit.

In her closing argument this morning, a prosecutor, Assistant District Attorney Melissa Mourges, said that the DNA profile recovered from the underwear and Mr. Worrell's DNA profile were "identical in every way." Ms. Mourges told the jurors that Yankee Stadium could be filled with 50,000 people once a day for 54,000 years and there would not be another person who would match Mr. Worrell's profile.

Mr. Worrell's attack, Ms. Mourges said, was his attempt to impose his "total domination" and to "reduce Kathleen Ham to nothing but a piece of meat."

But, Ms. Mourges told the jurors, in the new trial, "it was her turn to hold the power - her turn, because DNA works."

Ms. Ham was not able to identify Mr. Worrell in the first trial because he pulled a sheet over her head during the attack, so she never saw his face.

In a 57-minute summation, Mr. Worrell's lawyer, Michael F. Rubin, argued that the DNA analysis done by the chief medical examiner's office was incomplete. Mr. Rubin said there might have been genetic mutations that could have disqualified his client.

The jurors were not convinced.

"Everybody agreed that the DNA evidence was so strong," said the jury foreman, Celestino Gregorio, 57, a sales manager for a pharmaceutical company. "That's why everybody voted guilty in this case."

Mr. Gregorio said that if Mr. Rubin had intended to challenge the science of the DNA testing, he should have called an expert witness rather than make the argument himself.

Mr. Rubin did not call any witnesses.

Mr. Worrell, in a brown cap and a bushy salt-and-pepper beard, sat impassively as the jury announced its verdict. He exhibited no emotion throughout the two and a half days of trial.

Several jurors said they were shocked when they learned, after the trial, that Mr. Worrell had been linked to other rapes. Robert L. Jones, 56, an illustrator who lives in Harlem, said, "It makes me feel better about taking him off the street and putting him away for rest of his life."

The verdict, and the role of DNA, prompted District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau of Manhattan to propose a change in state law to eliminate the statute of limitations for violent sexual assault and to elevate those crimes to the highest level of felony, a Class A felony.

"I felt such horrible guilt," Ms. Ham said of the first trial. "I knew a monster had been unleashed on the city." She, too, supported an end to the statute of limitations.

"DNA doesn't fade away," Ms. Ham said, "and DNA doesn't lie."

Anemona Hartocollis contributed reporting for this article.

    After 3 Decades, Guilty Verdict in Rape Case, With Help From DNA, NYT, 10.11.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/10/nyregion/10rape.html

Child-killer Yates to face new trial

Wed Nov 9, 2005 3:08 PM ET
Reuters
By Matt Daily

HOUSTON (Reuters) - Andrea Yates, the Texas mother who drowned her five children in 2001, will face a second trial after the state's highest criminal court refused on Wednesday to reinstate the murder convictions against her.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals upheld a lower appeals court's ruling issued in January that overturned jury verdicts against Yates because of errors in the testimony of an expert witness.

Harris County District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal said he would try Yates again as soon as possible.

"She killed a bunch of kids, and you don't do that in Harris County," Rosenthal said.

During the trial in 2002, prosecutors' expert witness Dr. Park Dietz told the jury Yates had patterned the killings on an episode from the television drama "Law & Order," for which he worked as a consultant.

However, defense lawyers later discovered the episode never existed.

Rosenthal said he disagreed with the appellate court and would put Dietz back on the stand as an expert witness in a new trial.

The case brought the Texas justice system under scrutiny for its stance on insanity as a legal defense. The law requires defendants diagnosed with mental diseases to show they do not know right from wrong.

A jury originally rejected Yates' insanity defense and found her guilty of three of the deaths of her five children. She was sentenced to life in prison.

Yates, who admitted to drowning her children, ages six months to five years, in the bathtub in the family's home in suburban Houston, had been diagnosed as suffering from severe postpartum depression after the birth of her fifth child and prescribed anti-psychotic medication.

She had told police she killed the children to save them from the devil. Her husband was at work at the nearby NASA Johnson Space Center at the time of the murders.

Yates' lawyer George Parnham has suggested that prosecutors could agree to a deal that sends Yates to a state mental hospital.

Yates, 41, is being held at the Skyview prison in Rusk, Texas, which is the Texas psychiatric hospital for convicts. Yates is kept on heavy medication to prevent psychotic episodes, her family and lawyers have said.

(Additional reporting by Erwin Seba)

    Child-killer Yates to face new trial, R, Wed Nov 9, 2005 3:08 PM ET, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2005-11-09T200822Z_01_SPI960173_RTRUKOC_0_US-CRIME-YATES.xml

Violent crime in US stays at historic low: report

Sun Sep 25, 2005 4:36 PM ET
Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Reports of violent crime in the United States in 2004 stayed at the lowest level since the government began compiling statistics 32 years ago, but males, youths and those of more than one race were victimized at higher rates than others, the Justice Department said on Sunday.

There were 24 million violent crimes and property crimes in 2004, about the same rate as the previous year, according to an annual study by the government's Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Guns were used in 6 percent of all robberies, assaults, rapes and other nonlethal crimes, according to the report. That was down from 11 percent a decade earlier.

But guns were used in 71 percent of murders committed in 2003, the most recent year with comprehensive data.

The highest victimization rate -- the number of victims of violent crime for every 1,000 people 12 and older -- was for people of two or more races, with a level of 51.6 per thousand. Blacks had a higher victimization rate, 26 per thousand, than whites, at 21 per thousand.

In terms of age, youths aged 12 to 15 had a victimization rate of 49.7; the next-highest rate for an age category was 45.9 for those aged 16 to 19. The lowest rate, 2.1, was for those 65 and or older.

Males had a victimization rate of 25, compared with 18.1 for females, the study showed.

The report said 49 percent of murder victims in 2003 were black, the same rate as whites. Murder statistics were not available for 2004. According to Census Bureau figures, blacks made up 12.1 percent of the population in 2000.

Violent crimes against victims earning $50,000 to $74,999 shot up 13.3 percent, while those earning $7,500 to $14,999, experienced a 1.7 percent rise in such crimes. The crime rate for all other income groups fell, the survey said.

The report said the violent crime rate fell 57 percent and the property crime rate fell by 50 percent from 1993 through 2004.

The nonprofit Justice Policy Institute said the statistics underscored the need to shift the emphasis away from "overzealous spending on incarceration" to "what states and localities are doing to reduce incarceration, reduce crime and build communities."

    Violent crime in US stays at historic low: report, R, 25.9.2005, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-09-25T203622Z_01_DIT574161_RTRUKOC_0_US-CRIME-USA.xml

10 Life Terms for B.T.K. Strangler as Anguished Families Condemn Him in Court

August 19, 2005
The New York Times
By JODI WILGOREN

WICHITA, Kan., Aug. 18 - A judge sentenced Dennis L. Rader to 10 consecutive life terms on Thursday, capping a wrenching hearing in which victims' families, mixing vengeance with grief, confronted the man who had spent decades tormenting them and this city as the strangler called B.T.K.

"I want him to suffer as much as his victims suffered," declared Beverly Plapp, the sister of Nancy Fox, who was 25 when Mr. Rader squeezed the life out of her in 1977. "This man needs to be thrown in a deep, dark hole and left to rot."

Carmen Montoya, whose parents and two younger siblings were Mr. Rader's first victims, in 1974, stared at him and fairly hissed: "You are such a coward."

Mr. Rader, the Cub Scout leader and church council president who nicknamed himself in missives to the news media "B.T.K.," for his bind-torture-kill methods, was not eligible for the death penalty. Judge Greg Waller of Sedgwick County Court imposed the most severe sentence possible, including the so-called hard 40 years without the possibility of parole for the final murder, that of Dolores Davis in 1991, deeming it particularly "heinous, atrocious or cruel."

District Attorney Nola Foulston, the lead prosecutor, said Mr. Rader, 60, would certainly die in prison, with the sentences lining up like boxcars to prevent parole for 175 years.

His ankles in shackles - though not nearly as tight as his victims' - Mr. Rader, who had pleaded guilty and provided an exhaustive confession to the police, removed his glasses to wipe several tears as a dozen relatives of his victims chastised him for a total of 40 minutes. Most of them left the courtroom as he rose to deliver his own meandering monologue, saying he had been selfish and dishonest, but hoped now to "start a new chapter in my life" and that "someday God will accept me."

In a surreal speech, Mr. Rader read notes from yellow legal paper about what he had in common with his victims: like Kathryn Bright, he spent time on a grandparent's farm; Dolores Davis shared his love for dogs; he and Marine Hedge were both gardeners; Joseph Otero was a fellow veteran of the Air Force.

"She liked to write poetry - I liked to write poetry," he said of Mr. Otero's 11-year-old daughter, Josephine, in a macabre reminder of the depraved poems and sketches the police found in his home. "She liked to draw, I liked to draw."

Mr. Rader quoted Scripture and made a few corrections to the evidence presented by prosecutors. He thanked lawyers, police officers and prison guards as though accepting an award. He asked to retrieve personal photographs from his wallet.

And, finally, he apologized to his victims' families, saying, "There's no way that I can ever repay them."

The sentence came after an extraordinary two-day hearing in which prosecutors and police officers clinically chronicled Mr. Rader's gruesome career in a sort of mini-trial broadcast live on local television and national cable channels. In addition to the maximum sentence, prosecutors urged the judge to recommend restrictive prison conditions that would deny Mr. Rader access to magazines and newspapers, or even crayons and paper, to prevent him from using pictures of girls and women to stimulate himself sexually. Judge Waller said he would decide that in 30 days.

Among the evidence presented Thursday were index cards and three-ring binders containing cutouts of girls and women, including actresses like Halle Berry and Meg Ryan, from magazines and catalogs. Also seized by the police were lewd Polaroids of Mr. Rader's "self-bondage" in his victims' clothing, an extensive collection of Barbie-style dolls he would paint and pose in sexual positions, and books on serial killers, one subtitled "The Methods and Madness of Monsters" that had a mention of B.T.K. highlighted.

Mrs. Foulston made her own dramatic display to demonstrate the horror of Mrs. Davis's death. Noting that Mr. Rader said he had held pantyhose tight around Mrs. Davis's neck for two to three minutes, Mrs. Foulston fell silent, staring at the courtroom clock. She took a sip of water and waited, the only sounds the clicking of a lone photographer's camera and Judge Waller drumming his fingers on his desk.

"One minute has passed," she said finally. "So three times that length was the length of time in which Dolores Davis struggled for her life."

But after hours of detail about the crimes, it was the emotional speeches from the victims' relatives that made Mr. Rader's legacy clear.

They called him monster, devil, predator, pedophile, "rabid animal," "social malignancy" and worse. They shook with anger and sobbed in agony. They spoke of missing sisters, aunts, wives, mothers and grandmothers.

"Every day is a struggle to get through without her," said Stephanie Clyne, who was 10 when her mother, Vicki Wegerle, was killed in 1986. Displaying snapshots of three smiling toddlers on the courtroom screen, Ms. Clyne added, "It's not fair that her three grandbabies never get to see her."

Jeff Davis, the son of Mr. Rader's final victim, said that he had been waiting 5,326 days to "confront the walking cesspool" and that "there could be no justice harsh enough or pain bitter enough."

"This world would have been much better off had your mother aborted your demon soul," Mr. Davis spat. "You have now lost everything, and you will forever remain nothing. May that torment you for the rest of your tortured existence."

Ms. Plapp noted that Mr. Rader had jotted in his vast journals fantasies of how each victim might serve him in the afterlife.

"I have an afterlife concept for him," she said. "On the day that he dies, Nancy and all of his victims will be waiting with God and watching him as he burns in hell."

    10 Life Terms for B.T.K. Strangler as Anguished Families Condemn Him in Court, NYT, August 19, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/19/national/19btk.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1124424095-MeMmyZn9YlhClfqdQt7Qug

    Voir aussi : http://news.findlaw.com/cnn/docs/btk/karader30105inf.html

Dennis Rader listening to testimony in the sentening phase of his trial.
Pool photo by Bo Rader

10 Life Terms for B.T.K. Strangler
as Anguished Families Condemn Him in Court
NYT, August 19, 2005
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/19/national/19btk.html?
adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1124424095-MeMmyZn9YlhClfqdQt7Qug

A Pastor Who Stayed by a Serial Killer's Side

August 19, 2005
The New York Times
By JODI WILGOREN

WICHITA, Kan., Aug. 18 - As he left the courtroom Thursday afternoon to face the rest of his days behind bars, Dennis L. Rader flashed a thumbs-up to the second row, where the Rev. Michael G. Clark sat clutching a small Bible.

"Pastor Clark, he has been my main man," Mr. Rader had told the court a few moments earlier. "If there's anybody I was dishonest to, it's that man right there."

Mr. Rader had just taken over as president of the council at Christ Lutheran Church, led by Pastor Clark, when the police showed up to search the church offices here in February. A floppy disk Mr. Rader sent anonymously to the police had been traced to a church computer.

Upon his arrest the next day, Mr. Rader confessed and told the police that the church where he had been a member for 30 years was itself connected to the murders.

Over the past two days, Pastor Clark sat stoically as prosecutors presented evidence that Mr. Rader had dragged one woman's body to the church to take photographs of her in bondage positions, taping black plastic over the windows for privacy. The pastor hardly cringed as detectives detailed how Mr. Rader had stolen untold sums from church coffers and had stashed some of his torture tools in a church shed.

Instead, during breaks, Pastor Clark studied Psalm 51, a penitential lament that prays for God to cleanse the sinner from evil.

"After yesterday, his life is not worth a plug nickel in prison," Pastor Clark said before the sentencing, hoping that Mr. Rader would end up in El Dorado Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison he sees as the safest in the state. "There's a code in the criminal system, and there's no tolerance for the kinds of things Dennis has done."

Mr. Rader's wife of 30 years, Paula, obtained an emergency divorce last month. His two children, Mr. Rader said Thursday, have not been in touch. But Pastor Clark has visited him in jail twice a week since his arrest and sat to hear his confession on Tuesday.

"I just tell people," Pastor Clark said softly in an interview in the courtroom, "would you want me to stop coming to see you if I were your pastor?"

    A Pastor Who Stayed by a Serial Killer's Side, NYT, August 19, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/19/national/19pastor.html

In Gory Detail,

Prosecution Lays Out Cas

for Tough Sentencing of B.T.K. Killer

August 18, 2005
The New York Times
By JODI WILGOREN

WICHITA, Kan., Aug. 17 - Josie Otero had already watched the man strangle and suffocate her parents and younger brother when he led her to the basement he would later describe as his dungeon. There, he hanged her from a sewer pipe and yanked her white cotton panties down over her rope-bound ankles and the black Mary Janes below.

Her long hair got in his way as he tried to strangle her. She squealed "Momma, Momma!" And then Josie, all of 11, asked what would become of her.

"I said, 'Well, honey, you're going to be in heaven tonight with the rest of your family,' " Dennis L. Rader told investigators after his arrest, recounting how he let the girl's toes dangle a fraction of an inch from the floor to slow her death, then masturbated. "That's pretty cold blooded."

Such horrifying details, along with grotesque photographs and evidence of depraved sexual fantasies, emerged Wednesday in the opening day of an unusually lengthy sentencing hearing for Mr. Rader, who terrorized this central Kansas city for three decades as "B.T.K.," a name he chose for his methods - bind, torture, kill.

Mr. Rader, 60, is sure to spend his remaining days in jail, facing consecutive life sentences for each of 10 murders, including 40 years without the possibility of parole for the last one, in 1991. Kansas did not have the death penalty in the 17 years of his rampage.

But his guilty plea on June 27 pre-empted a much-anticipated trial. So prosecutors and police officers have seized on the sentencing as a substitute, recounting the gory saga in all its excruciating detail for a public that had been harshly critical of their inability to capture the killer. For nearly seven hours, four lawyers methodically walked eight detectives through gruesome crime-scene photographs, flashed PowerPoint slides highlighting Mr. Rader's confession, and offered decades-old evidence - a knife and a semen-stained nightie - for official identification.

Acknowledging that the two-day hearing might sexually satisfy the attention-seeking Mr. Rader, District Attorney Nola Fouston, the lead prosecutor, said outside court, "Sometimes you have to feed the dragon before you can put its fire out."

The parade of R-rated puzzle pieces made Mr. Rader's own shockingly graphic courtroom account six weeks ago seem sanitized.

One detective pulled from a brown-paper bag the plastic airplane, fire truck and van that Mr. Rader gave to Shirley Vian Relford's three small children to occupy them while he murdered her on the other side of a partly open door. Another detective told how Mr. Rader worked out with a squeeze ball to strengthen his hands for strangulation. The photos of victims' badly bruised faces, tongues protruding and lips swollen, carried black bars over bulging eyes and warnings that they were "not for viewing by all audiences." Local television stations kept their cameras on Mr. Rader's emotionless face.

A macabre cache of memorabilia that Mr. Rader called the "mother lode," kept in a file drawer in his office, held the stuff of a horror movie - a Polaroid of himself wearing pantyhose and bra, strung up in a mock hanging in his parents' basement; line drawings of his fantasy of turning a barn into a torture chamber and naked women in bondage positions; underwear taken from victims; news clippings about the killings; and essays describing them in minute detail.

Also in that stash were notes filed under AFLV, for afterlife concept for victims - Mrs. Vian, 26, would be his "house servant," Mr. Rader wrote, and Josie "my star young maiden that I will teach sex" to.

Wearing a gray suit, his beard shaved, Mr. Rader sat stoically at the end of a long table full of lawyers, dropping his eyes when the close-ups of his victims' wounds were shown. His brother and pastor were also in the courtroom, along with nearly two dozen relatives of the victims.

Charlie Otero, Josie's brother, leaned forward and put his head on his knees upon seeing the picture of her hanging with a T-shirt stuffed in her mouth and hair matted against her face, and left wadded tissues in his wake at the break.

Jeff Davis, the son of Mr. Rader's final victim, Dolores Davis, said outside the court, "What do you expect from a demon?"

"This gives me a sense of justice," Mr. Davis said. "No closure, but some sense of resolution."

Arguing for the maximum possible sentence, including the so-called "hard 40" reserved for particularly heinous acts, Aaron Smith, one of the prosecutors, told Judge Greg Waller of Sedgwick County Court that "there is nothing to excuse the crimes."

"You will find, as the state has found, that in this case there are no mitigating circumstances," Mr. Smith said. "We will be able to close the chapter on him and move our attention to those that the attention should be focused upon - the victims, and their memories and the families that love them."

If prosecutors hoped to vindicate law enforcement with the exhaustive review, it instead only heightened incredulity that Mr. Rader was never caught. He seemed a sloppy, bumbling killer - seen by several victims' relatives - brazenly revisiting one woman's body as it decomposed in a ditch to take photographs, and keeping stores of evidence at home, in his church basement, and at his workplace.

He wormed his way into one woman's home by bringing books to pose as a fellow university student, and into another's by pasting a Southwestern Bell logo on a yellow hard hat. He whispered in one particularly feisty victim's ear that he was the notorious B.T.K. and promised to rape her and take pictures. He said two of them fought "like a hellcat," one squeezing his genitals and another scratching his neck.

Interrogated after his February arrest, Mr. Rader bragged about tying a woman's hands behind her back, because "in the bondage world that's really high stuff," but said he grew "lazy" in later years, killing in his own neighborhood, which is "not good serial killer business." He mimicked his victims' protests as "yada yada yada."

"He commented to me at one point, he said, 'I'm sorry, I know this is a human being, but I'm a monster,' " testified Clint Snyder, a Wichita detective. Another detective, Kelly Otis, recalled of the interview, "It was like we were talking over a coffee, as if he were relaying a fishing story."

On Thursday, several relatives of the victims are expected to testify, and Mr. Rader himself is likely to speak before the judge decides his fate. It is, in some ways, a day he has been waiting for.

"I thought if I ever had to be put away, I wanted to be hung," Mr. Rader, who said he hanged stray cats and dogs in barns when he was younger, told investigators, according to excerpts quoted in court. "But I guess they don't do that anymore."

Bud Norman contributed reporting for this article.

    In Gory Detail, Prosecution Lays Out Case for Tough Sentencing of B.T.K. Killer, NYT, August 18, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/18/national/18btk.html

Serial killer worked out to prepare for slayings

Wed Aug 17, 2005 4:49 PM ET
Reuters

WICHITA, Kansas (Reuters) - Confessed Kansas serial killer Dennis Rader worked out to build up his strength because he found killing people physically hard, law enforcement agents told his sentencing hearing on Wednesday.

The 60-year-old Rader, who called himself BTK, for "bind, torture and kill," showed little emotion on the first day of the hearing.

But relatives of those he killed sobbed and hung their heads as they listened to how Rader stalked and slowly killed his victims, largely for sexual gratification, in a 17-year murder spree.

The testimony included photos of many of the bodies.

The agents told the courtroom that shortly after his arrest last February Rader confessed to 10 murders, telling them that in one killing Rader used toys to try to distract three small children as he bound and strangled their mother.

In another he pulled a chair next to a bed so he could relax while 9-year-old boy suffocated in the plastic bag Rader wrapped around his head. And in yet another, he took his victim to a church at night where he photographed her in various sexually explicit ways.

Rader had told law enforcement agents that he found killing people was harder work than he had expected so, as he continued killing, he worked out to improve his strength.

His first victims were four members of the Otero family, whom he killed in their Wichita-area home in 1974. Rader said he went after the Oteros because he was attracted to the Hispanic features of 11-year-old Josephine.

He killed her parents and younger brother while Josephine wept and called for her mother. Then he led the girl to the basement, telling her she would soon join her family in heaven, Kansas Bureau of Investigation agent Larry Thomas testified.

Rader removed some of the girl's clothes, groped her and hung her from a sewer pipe, masturbating alongside her body as she died, according to Thomas.

Throughout the testimony, the bespectacled, balding Rader was largely expressionless, absently scratching his forehead or resting his chin on his palm.

Victims' relatives were expected to testify during the sentencing hearing, which could last three days, according to Sedgwick County District Court officials.

Rader could be sentenced to up to 175 years in prison. He will not be executed because Kansas did not reinstate the death penalty until after his crimes, which occurred between 1974 and 1991 and spread a wave of terror through the Wichita area.

Rader was a one-time Boy Scout leader and before his arrest earlier this year was lay president of the congregation at Wichita's Christ Lutheran Church where he was a regular Sunday worshiper.

    Serial killer worked out to prepare for slayings, R, Wed Aug 17, 2005 4:49 PM ET, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2005-08-17T204916Z_01_EIC762803_RTRIDST_0_USREPORT-CRIME-BTK-DC.XML