Dennis Rader, the serial murderer who became known by his self-chosen acronym, BTK (bind, torture, kill), says he never touched Cindy Kinney.
Now, BTK admits to killing ten people. But Rader swears he had nothing to do with the disappearance and possible death of the teenager in Oklahoma nearly five decades ago.
The girl in question is Cynthia Dawn Kinney, an attractive 16-year-old high school cheerleader who finished her work for the day at the Osage Laundromat on June 23, 1976. She walked away, leaving behind a half-finished donut and a soft drink.
Cindy was a good girl, a popular high-school junior, earned good grades, and had just made the varsity cheerleading team.
After leaving the laundromat her aunt and uncle owned, the 5 foot 1 inch, 97-pound teen squeezed into a faded beige Plymouth Belvedere with two other people.
One witness who watched Cindy get into that car says the two others in the vehicle were a man and a woman. Another eyewitness says they saw two women in the Belvedere.
Whoever was in the Plymouth must have been the last to see her alive.
Cindy vanished.
Maybe she just wanted to get the hell out of Osage, Oklahoma.
Police have never believed she ran away. Even back in 1976, they were convinced she’d been taken against her will.
District Attorney Bill Hall said the brown-haired teenager couldn’t be a runaway.
“She was a friend of my daughter,” Hall told a reporter from Tulsa World. “Knowing Cindy, it is impossible to conceive that she went with these people voluntarily. Cindy was happy — not the runaway type at all.”
Cindy’s mother said her daughter had plans for the day. “She had a (cheerleading team) practice scheduled for 11 a.m., and it would have taken wild horses to have kept her from that.”
Over the years, others have claimed to have seen Cindy in southern Kansas. Reportedly she was traveling with a religious group. But police investigators have never been able to confirm those reports.
A witness said she saw a man named Hobart Green with Cindy just minutes before she disappeared.
Hobart Green had a shady past. In 1986, he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in the death of his baby son. The child, James Allen Detain, had not been seen since the summer of 1984. His body was found buried on a Jasper County, Missouri, a farm owned by Hobart in November 1985.
The baby had been beaten to death.
And that’s not all. In 1961, Hobart's ex-wife Maxine Beatrice Green disappeared, and police looked at Hobart as a leading suspect.
The couple’s 12-year-old daughter, Norma, told police detectives she saw Hobart kill her mother and then watched as he buried Maxine’s body. But she didn’t tell her story until what Norma described as a suppressed memory surfaced after she learned of her father’s conviction.
Maxine was last seen in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, on October 30, 1961. She cashed a $60 welfare check and was never seen again.
Hobart, divorced from Maxine in 1959, was scheduled to appear in court the following week. However, he failed to appear to face a charge of failing to pay child support, and a bench warrant was issued for his arrest.
Norma said when Hobart returned to town for that court appearance, her mother, Maxine, was so nervous about what he might do that she locked all the doors and windows of their home. But when Hobart showed up, he convinced Norma to open the door.
When the door opened, Hobart burst inside, forcing Norma, her younger sister, and Maxine into a car. Norma said Hobart’s girlfriend was also inside the vehicle.
Norma said they drove to the swinging bridge across Bird Creek, south of Pawhuska. There, Hobart forced Maxine out of the vehicle.
Norma remembers hearing Hobart and her mother arguing and fighting and then saw Maxine lying on the ground with blood coming out of her mouth. Hobart then began, Norma said, sexually assaulting Maxine and beating her and choking her.
When Maxine stopped moving, Norma said, Hobart and his girlfriend took her body to the creek bank and dumped the corpse in a hole left after the removal of a bridge piling.
Norma said that she and her sister were hysterical. But Hobart’s girlfriend fed them tranquilizers and took them home.
She told the story to the police in 1986. They didn’t believe her. So, five years later, she hired a private investigator who found several bones and some dress buttons where Norma remembered her mother being killed. But the bones turned out not to be human.
Hobart was never charged in the case, and Maxine — dead or alive — has never been found.
Nor was he charged in Cindy’s disappearance. Police never verified that he was seen with the girl. And they’ve never named Hobart as a suspect.
Police are not naming Dennis BTK Rader as a suspect in this case, although they have questioned him twice about the crime.
“The sheriff has what I call a complete lack of solid evidence,” Rader told Fox News Digital.
Rader is so confident in his innocence, claiming he was nowhere near Oklahoma when Cindy disappeared, that he waived his Miranda rights for both questioning sessions.
Osage County Sheriff Eddie Virden isn’t discussing what evidence or theory might have led them to Rader’s cell door. He’s only calling it “an open investigation.”
“We won’t leave anything uninvestigated,” Virden promised. “We hope we come up with something for closure and justice for victims. But an investigation is an investigation; sometimes, they go places. There may be some things that we felt we needed to look into, and we are following up on those.”
Survival. Justice. Hope.
A thirteen-year-old girl is kidnapped, ripped from the arms of her murdered mother by a man who fantasized about someday abducting a girl, any girl, and making her his own.
Living under a bed for most of her eighty-eight days of captivity, the girl never gives up hope. Then one day, left alone, she seizes her opportunity and runs to freedom.
Will she make it? If she does run to freedom, can her life ever be the same again?
88 Days: The Abduction of Jayme Closs is the most compelling, shocking true crime story you’ve ever read.Previously published as part of a short story collection titled Kalamazoo’s Suitcase Killer, author Rod Kackley has republished this amazing true crime thriller as a stand-alone true crime novel, and packed it with new information.
88 Days: The Abduction of Jayme Closs is more than a shocking true crime story; it’s a thrilling story of survival, justice, and above all, hope.
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