Some horror stories don’t need to be imagined — and few are as devastating as Kerri Rawson’s.
In 2005, she was living a quiet suburban life, newly married and expecting her first child, when the police knocked on her door with news that shattered her world: her father, Dennis Rader, was the BTK Killer — the man who had terrorized Kansas for nearly two decades.

“BTK,” short for Bind, Torture, Kill, was the chilling moniker Rader himself used in letters and cryptic messages sent to the media, even as he led a double life as a church president, a Boy Scout leader, a husband, and a father.

The new Netflix documentary, My Father, the BTK Killer, directed by Skye Borgman (American Murder: The Family Next Door), isn’t just a retelling of the crimes — it’s an exploration of what comes after. The film dives into Kerri’s journey not as the daughter of a murderer, but as a woman forced to rediscover who she is when every truth about love, faith, and family collapses at once.

The Daughter Searching for Answers

Handled with empathy and restraint, Borgman’s direction allows Kerri to reclaim her own story — one that for years was told by others. “She has lived much of her life under the weight of her father’s crimes and is understandably cautious about who enters that space,” Borgman explains. Gaining Kerri’s trust meant showing up with transparency and care, respecting the fragile boundaries she built through decades of pain.

In the documentary, Kerri revisits fragments of her childhood that now seem ominous: night terrors, fear of the dark, an unexplainable sense that danger lived under her roof. She wonders if, even as a little girl, her subconscious tried to warn her.

Her search for truth leads her to help investigators reopen potential cold cases tied to her father — a pursuit both noble and excruciating. Every revelation drags her back into the trauma she’s been trying to leave behind, testing the limits of her resilience.

Between Love and Horror

“My role was to create a framework of care and integrity around a story that has too often been defined by others,” Borgman says. The result is a portrait of a woman suspended between affection and disgust — the impossible tension of loving a father who embodies the unspeakable.

One of the documentary’s most haunting moments shows Kerri visiting her father in prison after nearly two decades apart. She presses him about other possible victims — and about disturbing notes he once wrote involving her name. His evasions and denials expose what she already knows: there will be no confession, no catharsis.

Since that meeting, Kerri has chosen to sever contact. It’s her way of surviving. “This isn’t a film about a crime,” Borgman emphasizes. “It’s about a woman trying to reconcile love, betrayal, and family — and what it means to claim ownership of her own life.”

A Life Reclaimed

Today, Kerri is determined to live beyond her father’s shadow. She works with trauma survivors and occasionally assists investigators, but she knows that her healing cannot depend on what Dennis Rader chooses to reveal. “I’m just me,” she says quietly in one of the film’s final scenes — a line that lands with extraordinary strength.

For years, she avoided cameras, interviews, and headlines. By choosing to tell her story now, Kerri isn’t reopening wounds; she’s closing a chapter. My Father, the BTK Killer, becomes, for her, an act of liberation — less about looking back, and more about finally walking forward.

A Portrait of Courage

Watching this documentary is an exercise in empathy and endurance. It poses a question as profound as it is painful: how far can love stretch before it breaks under the weight of truth?

Kerri Rawson’s answer isn’t simple — but it’s deeply human. She refuses to be defined by the man who destroyed so many lives, including her own. In telling her story, she reclaims her voice, her dignity, and the right to exist beyond the darkness that once named her.

My Father, the BTK Killer is now streaming on Netflix — a haunting, human story not about the killer, but about what survives in the aftermath.