Post-arrest Notoriety and Profit
- On July 22, 2005, a controversy erupted on CNN's Nancy Grace show over a poem that Dennis Rader had written that was passed on to someone who then sold it on an auction site that specializes in serial killer memorabilia. The poem was titled "Black Friday," an ode to the day he was arrested. The poem expressed Rader's unhappiness about being caught, with one of the verses proclaiming, "The dark side of me has been exposed."
- On August 12, 2005, Dateline NBC aired Confessions of BTK.
Massachusetts psychologist Robert Mendoza, who had been hired by Rader's court-appointed public defenders to conduct the psychological evaluation earlier in the case to determine if an insanity-based defense might be viable, conducted an interview after Rader pled guilty on June 27. NBC claimed Rader knew the interview might be on TV, but that was a false statement according to the Sedgwick County Sheriff's Department. Rader mentioned the interview during his sentencing statement. On October 25, 2005, the Kansas attorney general filed a petition to sue Robert Mendoza and Tali Waters, co-owners of Cambridge Forensic Consultants, LLC, for breach of contract, claiming they intended to benefit financially from the use of information obtained from involvement in Rader’s defense. On May 10, 2007, Mendoza settled the case for $30,000 with no admission of wrongdoing. The Kansas Attorney General's office arranged for the settlement money to be distributed to families of the victims.
Read more about this topic: Dennis Rader
Famous quotes containing the words notoriety and/or profit:
“Our books are false by being fragmentary: their sentences are bon mots, and not parts of natural discourse; childish expressions of surprise or pleasure in nature; or, worse, owing a brief notoriety to their petulance, or aversion from the order of nature,—being some curiosity or oddity, designedly not in harmony with nature, and purposely framed to excite surprise, as jugglers do by concealing their means.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“... when you make it a moral necessity for the young to dabble in all the subjects that the books on the top shelf are written about, you kill two very large birds with one stone: you satisfy precious curiosities, and you make them believe that they know as much about life as people who really know something. If college boys are solemnly advised to listen to lectures on prostitution, they will listen; and who is to blame if some time, in a less moral moment, they profit by their information?”
—Katharine Fullerton Gerould (1879–1944)