Confession of a Serial Killer: The Untold Story of Dennis Rader, the BTK Killer #BTKConfession

Confession of a Serial Killer: The Untold Story of Dennis Rader, the BTK Killer.

In 1974, Dennis Rader stalked and murdered a family of four in Wichita, Kansas. Since adolescence, he had read about serial killers and imagined becoming one. Soon after killing the family, he murdered a young woman and then another, until he had ten victims. He named himself “B.T.K.” (bind, torture, kill) and wrote notes that terrorized the city. He remained on the loose for thirty years. No one who knew him guessed his dark secret. He nearly got away with his crimes, but in 2004, he began to play risky games with the police. He made a mistake.

When he was arrested, Rader’s family, friends, and coworkers were shocked to discover that B.T.K. had been among them, going to work, raising his children, and acting normal. This case stands out both for the brutal treatment of victims and for the ordinary public face that Rader, a church council president, had shown to the outside world. Through jailhouse visits, telephone calls, and written correspondence, Katherine Ramsland worked with Rader himself to analyze the layers of his psyche. Using his drawings, letters, interviews, and Rader’s unique codes, she presents in meticulous detail the childhood roots and development of one man’s motivation to stalk, torture, and kill. She reveals aspects of the dark motivations of this most famous of living serial killers that have never before been revealed. In this book Katherine Ramsland presents an intelligent, original, and rare glimpse into the making of a serial killer and the potential darkness that lives next door.

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Coming to #Hulu - The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Chicago World's Fair That Changed America by Erik Larson @exlarson #Chicago

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The true tale of the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago and the cunning serial killer who used the magic and majesty of the fair to lure his victims to their death.

“Relentlessly fuses history and entertainment to give this nonfiction book the dramatic effect of a novel .... It doesn’t hurt that this truth is stranger than fiction.” —The New York Times

Combining meticulous research with nail-biting storytelling, Erik Larson has crafted a narrative with all the wonder of newly discovered history and the thrills of the best fiction.

Two men, each handsome and unusually adept at his chosen work, embodied an element of the great dynamic that characterized America’s rush toward the twentieth century. The architect was Daniel Hudson Burnham, the fair’s brilliant director of works and the builder of many of the country’s most important structures, including the Flatiron Building in New York and Union Station in Washington, D.C. The murderer was Henry H. Holmes, a young doctor who, in a malign parody of the White City, built his “World’s Fair Hotel” just west of the fairgrounds—a torture palace complete with dissection table, gas chamber, and 3,000-degree crematorium.

Burnham overcame tremendous obstacles and tragedies as he organized the talents of Frederick Law Olmsted, Charles McKim, Louis Sullivan, and others to transform swampy Jackson Park into the White City, while Holmes used the attraction of the great fair and his own satanic charms to lure scores of young women to their deaths. What makes the story all the more chilling is that Holmes really lived, walking the grounds of that dream city by the lake.

The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America, draws the reader into the enchantment of the Guilded Age, made all the more appealing by a supporting cast of real-life characters, including Buffalo Bill, Theodore Dreiser, Susan B. Anthony, Thomas Edison, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, and others. Erik Larson’s gifts as a storyteller are magnificently displayed in this rich narrative of the master builder, the killer, and the great fair that obsessed them both.

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Mobsters Louis Manna and Richard DeSciscio, Who Conspired to Kill John Gotti, Attempt to use Former President Donald Trump's First Step Act to Gain Release from Prison

A pair of mobsters who conspired to kill Gambino crime boss John Gotti are trying to get sprung — and their fates are inextricably tied to the Trump family.

Louis Manna, 92, and Richard DeSciscio, 79, have been behind bars since being sentenced to 80 and 75 years respectively in 1989 for racketeering and murder conspiracy. Manna had been the consigliere of the Genovese crime family.

The mobsters are now hoping the First Step Act, former President Trump’s landmark criminal justice reform bill, will be their ticket to securing a compassionate early release. The law allows for certain prisoners to be granted early release from federal penitentiaries in an effort to reduce the prison population.

In an ironic twist, both men were put away by presiding Federal Judge Maryanne Trump Barry — the former president’s older sister — who called the jury’s guilty verdict “courageous” and said the evidence “fairly shrieked of the defendants’ guilt.”

Lawyers for the elderly dons hope the justice system has softened since then.

“Former President Trump’s expansion of the First Step Act was one of his great actions toward criminal justice reform that not only recognizes the importance of a tough-on-crime stance, but also the importance of rehabilitation and reward for good behavior and positive change,” DeSciscio attorney Marco Laracca told The Post.

Laracca said his client was in ill health, citing a past bout with prostate cancer.

Manna’s attorney Jeremy Iandolo — who followed in the long tradition of mob lawyers by denying the existence of La Cosa Nostra — insisted his wheelchair-bound client was no threat to anyone and also deserved compassionate release.

“There is no [alleged] Italian American mobster who has been released under the First Step Act. And this case would set precedent,” Iandolo said. He angrily cited the case of Eddie Cox, 86, who was released earlier this year. Cox — a white man who improbably led the “Black Mafia” of Kansas City during the 1960s and 70s — was linked to 17 murders, the Kansas City Star reported.

So far, things haven’t gone their way. Last month Senior U.S. District Judge Peter G. Sheridan again denied release to Manna stating, “His numerous crimes were extremely serious and heinous.”

Iandolo said he plans an appeal. DeSciscio’s case before the same judge is pending.

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Check out - What Next, Chicago?: Notes of a Pissed-Off Native Son - by Matt Rosenberg @ChicagoSkooled #Chicago

In the fall of 2020, amidst riots, looting, and an alarming uptick in senseless killings, journalist Matt Rosenberg returns to his native Chicago to see if the city can dig itself out of the hot mess it’s become after decades of liberal governance.

Our nation’s big cities are broken. Urban progressive government badly undermines those it claims to lift up. Matt Rosenberg lived in Chicago for thirty years, and came back to live there again amidst the turmoil of 2020. What Next, Chicago?: Notes of a Pissed-Off Native Son, exposes the roots of Chicago’s violent crime, failing courts and schools, rotten finances, and ongoing Black exodus, and proposes a rescue plan for this emblematic American city.

“What has happened to Chicago? That’s Matt Rosenberg’s question, and mine as well. His loving tribute to our hometown is a moving, sensitive, humane, and trenchant critical assessment. Read it and weep.” —Glenn C. Loury, Professor of the Social Sciences at Brown University, and author of One by One from the Inside Out : Essays and Reviews on Race and Responsibility in America.

“Matt Rosenberg writes about the Chicago Way in the Chicago Style of a Mike Royko…. It’s a coherent, honest, and balanced tour of the city’s perpetual corruption, unsafe streets, gawd-awful schools, ghost neighborhoods, financial legerdemain, and the false Unified Theory of Systemic Racism that cloaks it all. Yet, What Next, Chicago? is no helpless, hopeless wail, but a powerful and useful roadmap for a rebirth of a once-great city, based on the voices of Black families and others who don’t need academia to know what to do. Must reading for Chicago lovers.” —Dennis Byrne, former Chicago Sun-Times editorial board member.

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Presidential Executive Order on Establishing the US Council on Transnational Organized Crime #OrganizedCrime

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, I hereby order as follows:

Section 1. Purpose. 

Transnational organized crime (TOC) poses a direct and escalating threat to public health, public safety, and national security. Transnational criminal organizations engage in a broad range of criminal activities, including drug and weapons trafficking, migrant smuggling, human trafficking, cybercrime, intellectual property theft, money laundering, wildlife and timber trafficking, illegal fishing, and illegal mining.

These networks continue to expand in size and influence in the United States and abroad. Transnational criminal organizations contribute directly to tens of thousands of drug-overdose deaths in the United States each year and adversely affect American communities and economic prosperity. They also threaten United States national security by degrading the security and stability of allied and partner nations, undermining the rule of law, fostering corruption, acting as proxies for hostile state activities, directly or indirectly funding insurgent and terrorist groups, depleting natural resources, harming human health and the environment, contributing to climate change through illegal deforestation and logging, and exploiting and endangering vulnerable populations. In some regions, transnational criminal organizations wield state-like capabilities, disregarding sovereign borders, compromising the integrity of democratic institutions and threatening the legitimacy of fragile governments, and securing their power through intimidation, corruption, and violence. For these reasons, it is in the national interest of the United States to counter TOC. Addressing TOC requires a coordinated Federal framework accompanied by a cohesive whole-of-government effort executed in collaboration with State, local, Tribal, territorial, and civil society partners in the United States and in close coordination with foreign partners, international and regional organizations, and international and local civil society groups abroad.

Sec 2. Policy.
Executive departments and agencies (agencies) shall take actions within their respective authorities, including, as appropriate, through the provision of technical and financial assistance, to enhance efforts to counter TOC. It is the policy of the United States to:

(a) employ authorized intelligence and operational capabilities in an integrated manner to target, disrupt, and degrade transnational criminal organizations that pose the greatest threat to national security;

(b) collaborate with private entities and international, multilateral, and bilateral organizations to combat TOC, while also strengthening cooperation with and advancing efforts to build capacity in partner nations to reduce transnational criminal activity;

(c) improve information sharing between law enforcement entities and the Intelligence Community to enhance strategic analysis of, and efforts to combat, transnational criminal organizations and their activities, while also preserving our ability to speedily bring TOC actors to justice;

(d) expand tools and capabilities to combat illicit finance, which underpins all TOC activities; and

(e) develop and deploy new technologies to identify and disrupt existing and newly emerging TOC threats.

Sec. 3. Establishments.

(a) There shall be established a United States Council on Transnational Organized Crime (USCTOC), which shall report to the President through the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs. The USCTOC shall monitor the production and implementation of coordinated strategic plans for whole-of-government counter-TOC efforts in support of and in alignment with policy priorities established by the President through the National Security Council.

(i) The USCTOC shall replace the Threat Mitigation Working Group, previously directed to lead whole-of-government efforts on TOC under Executive Order 13773 of February 9, 2017 (Enforcing Federal Law With Respect to Transnational Criminal Organizations and Preventing International Trafficking). Accordingly, section 3 of Executive Order 13773 is hereby revoked.

(ii) The USCTOC shall consist of the following members or their designees:

(A) the Secretary of State;

(B) the Secretary of the Treasury;

(C) the Secretary of Defense;

(D) the Attorney General;

(E) the Secretary of Homeland Security; and

(F) the Director of National Intelligence. 

(iii) The USCTOC may request other agencies to contribute to the USCTOC’s efforts as necessary, including by detail or assignment of personnel consistent with subsection (b)(v) of this section.

(iv) The USCTOC shall meet not later than 60 days from the date of this order and periodically thereafter. 

(b) There shall be established a USCTOC Strategic Division (Division), an interagency working group housed at the Department of Justice, comprising personnel from agencies designated in subsection (a)(ii) of this section. 

(i) The Division shall produce coordinated strategic plans for whole-of-government counter-TOC efforts in support of and in alignment with policy priorities established by the President through the National Security Council. These strategic plans shall be informed by intelligence assessments, be developed in coordination with agencies, and include recommendations for actions by agencies. The Division shall submit its completed strategic plans to the USCTOC.

(ii) The Division shall be chaired by a senior official from the Department of Justice or the Department of Homeland Security. The Chairperson shall serve a 2 year term. The Attorney General and the Secretary of Homeland Security, or their designees, shall alternate every 2 years selecting the Chairperson.

(iii) The Division shall be established for administrative purposes within the Department of Justice, and the Department of Justice shall, to the extent permitted by law and subject to the availability of appropriations, provide administrative support and funding for the Division.

(iv) Agencies designated in subsection (a)(ii) of this section are hereby directed, consistent with their authorities, budget priorities, and mission constraints, and to the extent permitted by law and consistent with the need to protect intelligence and law enforcement sources, methods, operations, and investigations, to provide to the Division:

(A) details or assignments of personnel, who shall be qualified subject-matter experts and strategic planners, and who shall serve on full-time assignments of not less than 1 year;

(B) relevant information, research, intelligence, and analysis; and

(C) such other resources and assistance as the Division may request for the purpose of carrying out the responsibilities outlined in this section.

(v) To the extent permitted by law, agencies designated in subsection (a)(ii) of this section are encouraged to detail or assign their employees to the Division on a non-reimbursable basis.

(vi) The Division, within 120 days of the date of this order, shall submit to the USCTOC a report describing a process that the USCTOC can implement on an ongoing basis and as necessary to identify and prioritize the most significant TOC threats in alignment with policy priorities established by the President through the National Security Council.

Sec. 4. Report. 

The Director of National Intelligence, within 120 days of the date of this order and annually thereafter, shall submit a report to the President through the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs assessing the Intelligence Community’s posture with respect to TOC-related collection efforts, including recommendations on resource allocation and prioritization.

Sec. 5. Definitions.

For the purposes of this order: (a) the term “Intelligence Community” has the meaning ascribed to it under 50 U.S.C. 3003(4); and (b) the term “transnational criminal organizations” refers to groups, networks, and associated individuals who operate transnationally for the purpose of obtaining power, influence, or monetary or commercial gain, wholly or in part by illegal means, while advancing their activities through a pattern of crime, corruption, or violence, and while protecting their illegal activities through a transnational organizational structure and the exploitation of public corruption or transnational logistics, financial, or communication mechanisms.

Sec. 6. General Provisions.

(a) Nothing in this order shall be construed to impair or otherwise affect:

(i) the authority granted by law to an executive department or agency, or the head thereof; or

(ii) the functions of the Director of the Office of Management and Budget relating to budgetary, administrative, or legislative proposals.

(b) This order shall be implemented consistent with applicable law and subject to the availability of appropriations.

(c) This order is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.

JOSEPH R. BIDEN JR.

THE WHITE HOUSE

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