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On January fifteenth, nineteen seventy four, fifteen year old Charlie A Terror and two of his four siblings arrived home in Wichita, Kansas, and immediately they know something's not right.

Their dog Lucky's outside, and that never happens.

He went in through the back door, saw his mum's purse flipped up on the stove in the kitchen and things were tossed around.

It's a mess.

He knows his mother would never willingly leave behind.

She was so neat and tidy.

Is anyone home, Charlie yelled to the eerily quiet house.

The only response was one of his siblings, who yelled for him from another room to come quick, that it looked like their mom and dad were playing a really awful trick on them.

It wasn't a trick.

Charlie's mother, Julie, was lying tied up on the bed, his father Joseph, on the floor, a belt.

Wrapped around his neck.

In that instant, Charlie says his heart was ripped from his chest.

After police arrived, they also found two of Charlie's other siblings, little eleven year old Josephine in the basement and nine year old Joey Junior in another room.

All four had been bound, tortured, and killed, a mantra that would haunt the Wichita community for decades to come by the man known as.

B t K.

The BTK Killer would eventually be revealed, but it would come with taunts to police from the killer himself while for decades he.

Remained a free man.

Once it all came undone, though his identity would shock everyone.

I'm Claire Murphy and This is True Crime Conversations, a podcast exploring the world's most notorious crimes by speaking to the people who know the most about them.

The BTK killer.

Didn't stop at the members of the Ottera family, and he wanted people to know about it.

After three men were taken into custody accused of the Otero family murders, BTK decided it was time to let everyone know that they had the wrong guys.

He didn't want them taking credit for his work, so he sent a letter to the Wichita Eagle, a local newspaper, describing the four murders in detail.

In it, he claimed he did it all by himself, with no one's help.

He also explained that he struggled sometimes with urges and that he had an alter ego he referred to as the Monster.

These letters would continue as the bodies piled up.

Twenty one year old Katherine Bright was killed after the man broke into the home she shared with her brother Kevin.

He tried to strangle Kevin, but Kevin fought back and ended up being shot in the head.

He miraculously somehow survived and sought help.

Sadly, his sister didn't make it, but when police arrived, the killer was gone.

Years later, on March seventeen, nineteen seventy seven, five year old Stephen had been sent to the shop to get a few things for his mum, Shirley Ryan, who was unwell.

On his way, he was intercepted by a man who convinced Stephen to let him inside the house.

Grown up Stephen, when the man who would go on to murder his mother, was eventually caught and said to jail, would tell reporters that he would carry the guilt of that day.

In his heart forever.

As the man locked him and his two siblings in the bathroom, where they were forced to hear their mother's screams.

They did eventually escape through a window and alerted neighbors, but by that time the killer was gone.

In December nineteen seventy seven, Nancy Fox would become victim number seven.

A man believed to be the killer called police from a phone box, alerting them to her body's location, and this would become part of btk'sm He wanted people to know what he'd done.

Years would pass before btk's eighth victim came across her killer, this one much closer to home.

His family would later find out that their father and husband had killed their neighbor, Marine Hedge.

But then BTK seemed to go quiet.

Police presumed he was either in jail for another crime or dead, and so the people of Wichita went back to feeling safe again, but it wouldn't last years after.

In March two thousand and four, after the anniversary of his first killing, the media speculated about the fate of the man who called himself BTK.

A month later, another letter arrived at the Wichita Eagle, and this one included the driver's license of a young woman that police didn't even realize was connected to the BTK murders, and not only was it an unsolved homicide, the nineteen eighty six murder of Vicki Wegger happened in the time that police thought he was dormant.

More letters followed at tip off from the killer led a news team to a serial box left under a sign on a country road that had a barbie doll tied up like his victims.

Another victim, Dolores Davis, bring the BTK killers total to ten.

Then BTK asked if he could switch from writing letters that he believed could be traced to sending police a floppy disc.

He asked officers to be honest when they responded about whether it would lead them straight to him, asking for them to post in the local paper that it would be fine, after which BTK sent them that floppy disc, which investigators immediately linked to being in use at a local church and library.

When they checked who logged into those computers, one name crossmatched Dennis Raider.

Dennis Rader was employed by the city as a compliance officer.

He checked things like when properties got overgrown weeds and caught stray dogs.

He was married, two kids, all living the quiet suburban life with family trips to the Grand Canyon in pictures of the four of them on the walls, but that evidence alone wasn't enough to bring him in.

One officer noted, though, that his daughter Kerry had attended alone university, and he wondered if she'd ever been checked at the medical facility.

He found she had.

She'd done her perhaps mere there.

The lab handed over her DNA and it showed that she was the daughter of the BTK killer, an unassuming man in his fifties, the president of his local church association, and a Scout leader.

His family was shocked, his community was shocked.

The media, who'd been reporting on this monster for thirty years, was shocked when in two thousand and five, Dennis Raider was arrested and charged with the murders of ten people.

His daughter, Kerry is the only member of her family who's spoken out about her father's crimes, defending her family from those who believed they should have known, especially when Dennis led police to his office filing cabinet where photos, drawings, and notebooks documenting the killings were stored unlocked for anyone to access, and when he stood up in court, he revisited every one of those murders, outlining the details down to how he would have to change tax sometimes when strangulation didn't work, how his victims begged for their lives, and how he would cruise around just waiting for that feeling to come over him that this was a perfect next one.

He seemed proud of his crimes, wanting to make sure everyone knew what he'd done.

When it came to delivering his final speech in court, the victim's families finally got their moment in unison.

They stood and left the room, ensuring Dennis Rader would not get the chance to revel in his murderous pass in front of them again.

Kerry wasn't there that day.

She wanted to ensure that the victim's families were able to go through this without their story getting in the way.

But many years later, she broke her silence and wrote a book about her father's crimes and the impact it's had on not just the victim's families, but on hers too, and struggled to relate the man she knew was her dad to the BTK Killer.

Her story is the focus of a new Netflix documentary called My Father the BTK Killer, directed by Sky Borgman who also made Unknown Number the story of Lauren Lacari and her boyfriend Owen, who were trilled for more than a year by her own mother.

Sky spent two years working alongside Carrie as she tries to work out whether her father had any more victims and how she lives with the shame of her father's actions.

More than twenty years later, Sky joins us, Now, how did you, first of all, get into directing true crime documentaries?

What was that journey like for you?

I mean, I started out in the industry as a director of photography, and I was sort of doing both scripted and documentary work as a DP, and had always loved real stories and real people and the opportunity to kind of go and talk to people who I would not normally in my everyday life get the opportunity to talk to, and so more and more and more started doing documentaries, and the crime element of the documentaries really happened by chance.

The first documentary I did that got a lot of attention called Abducted in Plain Sight, And when I was making that documentary, I didn't really even know that it was a true crime documentary or that it would be thought about as a true crime documentary.

It was really a story about a family whose daughter is abducted twice by their best friend and neighbor, and I wanted to tell the complexity of the family dynamic and of how a perpetrator can sort of implement himself into people's lives and groom not just the victim, but the parents and the family in a community.

And so that one got a lot of attention, and from that moment on, really people started looking at me as a director who deals with sensitive subject matter, who can craft a pretty good story with some pretty good twists and turns, and that kind of naturally led its way to the true crime genre.

Well, that's something that seems to be a thread throughout all of your documentaries is your ability to connect with the victims and the victim's families and in the case of BTK, the murderer's family too, which is often a side we don't see when we know in the aftermath of these terrible crimes.

What is it do you think about your approach and the way that you handle it that's giving you this ability to really make that connection with people comfortable enough to tell their stories to you the way they do.

I mean, I think it really is an unending curiosity on my part to know about people, to hear people's stories, to really listen to what they have to say without sort of interrupting or trying to trying to force a narrative, and to really hear their stories and have a willingness to look at all the different layers that exist there.

And that's part of what I like so much about what I do is just being able to sit with people and talk about some of the things that are are kind of the deepest, darkest, most compelling parts of their lives, and to be able to sit across from them and have a camera rolling on that creates this really interesting environment where they feel really listened to, and for that I'm really grateful.

Well, let's talk about Carrie.

She really is the focus of this current documentary, my father, the BTK Killer.

She is a daughter of Dennis Raider, who murdered at least ten people as far as we know.

What was that like to sit down with Carrie and really get the perspective of someone whose family member is the criminal in this case, rather than speaking to say, the victims' families.

Yeah, it was.

Karen and I spent a lot of time together, so it went beyond just kind of one sit down interview with one person.

And this story is really hers to tell.

I mean, she I think represents a sliver of victims whose stories aren't told that often, or even who aren't really thought about as being victims because they're family members.

And so I really wanted to talk to her and find out what it was like to be the daughter of Dennis Rader and what it is that she does.

And Carrie specifically is incredibly active in advocating for other people, and she has found her pathway forward by trying to really advocate for others expose kind of what it is like to be the daughter of a serial killer or the family member of a perpetrator.

And so she's taken this step of being incredibly public for a lot of different reactions.

Right, some people think she's amazing, some people think she's horrible because she's profiting off of her father's name, and so she's gotten such incredible sort of divisive reactions, and so I just really appreciate what she's been through.

I didn't when we first started making this film.

I didn't realize the negative sort of backlash that she's gotten her entire life since her father was arrested.

Really, so it's from two thousand and five.

How negatively some people reach out to her online, and I was so surprised by that and really wanted to put that forward so that maybe people will have a little bit more insight into what it's like to be the daughter of a serial killer.

There's a really interesting moment in the documentary.

Where you follow her back to where her home was that she shared with her father at the time where he was committing these murders.

It's been demolished now so that she says.

People can't profit from taking pieces of a serial killer's home.

But you can see the reaction from the neighbors is really quite shocking.

Like you would think that the people that she grew up and around would be supportive of her, but they were very much not.

So very much not so they really did not like us coming to the property.

I would imagine that we're not the first people to come there, that there are many many people who drive by, who get out, take pictures, who do various different things.

So I can imagine that it's quite a burden on the neighborhood.

What's interesting to me about what she says is that she says, you don't have to live with us every day, and it's just so wrong because I mean, Carrie does have to live with us every day, maybe not people showing up to her doorstep, but she has to live with who her father was every day.

And so it is it is really interesting that interaction that we had.

Can we talk about Dennis Ryder he started his healing spree in the early nineteen seventies.

Do we get an understanding really as to what started him down this path because it seems just from looking at him and his life that it kind of came out of nowhere.

I mean, that's what it seems.

It seems that it came out of nowhere.

There are there are various different psychologists who have sort of made their thoughts and feelings about where Dennis came from or how he got to be who he was, you know, open to the public.

But really we don't know.

I mean, we know a little bit about his history, but we don't have a really clear insight of Like, I don't think there was one specific thing that sort of happened to him that led him on this path.

Do you think what makes his crimes.

So much more shocking is just how normal he seemed from the outside, and the fact that he wasn't some creepy loaner in a basement somewhere.

I mean, I think it's a lot easier to think of them as creeps in the basement who are sort of unknown to us.

And I do think that his crimes and his ability to sort of separate that BTK killer and himself as Denis Rader, the father, the family man, that the church goer, the scout leader, you know, that is terrifying.

And I think it is because we think we know who our family is, we think we know who our friends are, and to have this man sort of representative that maybe we don't know exactly who we're living with or who our neighbor is, that's a scary thought.

I think what's also so wild is just how much evidence was laying around ready to be discovered when you, you know, discover that he had a keell kid kind of stashed in the front hallway, you know, with gaffe tape and rope and various other implements, and it just seems like he was so blase about keeping so much evidence, Like I guess that's why people maybe don't believe that his family didn't realize what he was doing.

Yeah, but I also kind of wonder, like if I think about myself and I'm like, if there was a locked cabinet, I would be super suspicious.

Like in my household, I would what's locked up in that cabinet, Whereas there was just a closet with a bunch of crap in it that I need to go out, and I'm like, oh my gosh, You've got to clean this closet.

I'm not super suspicious about that.

So I think you're right.

I think it is part of the reason why people think that Carrie's mom or Carrie herself may have known something, But I don't think they had any reason to.

I mean, I think that Dennis went away to work, he came home for dinner, they went on family vacations together.

Like the man that he presented himself to be to his family was a dad who arguably had some emotional outbursts, had some fits of anger, but was also a loving dad and would take them to do really normal things together.

What's it like for you, and not just in this case, but in others that you've covered, because you would have to sift through quite a bit of actual evidence, I mean crime scene photographs, looking through the actual interviews that Dennis gave to police, and listening to the things that he said.

And something that's different about the US as opposed to hear is that cameras aren't generally allowed in the courtroom here, and very rarely do we ever see the person who's been charged with any crime.

We might see a judge in that, but never anyone else.

So to watch back Dennis raided describe his crimes in such intimate detail, but in a way that seems like he was just reading off a list.

What's it like for you to go through all of that?

Does that impact you at all?

To expose yourself to all of that evidence?

I mean, it's definitely disturbing, and I think that there's I think there's always safeguards that I take for myself that I try to implement for my team.

I'm not the only one looking at all of this stuff.

You know, they're editors, there are producers, there are story folks, there are assistant editors who are looking through this and having to gather things.

So it really is just just trying to create an open environment to say hey, if you need to take a break, we'll take a break.

Somebody else can take over.

It is impacting stuff, and I think it's really important to set those limits, set those boundaries to make everybody feel like they can take a break if they need to, and for me myself to sort of be able to walk away if I need to and just say hey, can you take over for this for a little bit, and then I'll be able to come back to it in a day or two.

What's it like for the people that you speak to?

I mean, in this instance, you speak to police officers who were there and investigating at the time.

You speak to news anchors who were the recipients of some of the letters that BTK wrote during his time taunting them and telling them about other victims.

How is the experience for those people?

Is there a little bit of I mean, Carrie often speaks about what a release it's been for her to be able to just tell the story and get it out.

Do other people feel the same way when they sit down and talk about these awful things in times of their lives.

I think some people feel some relief, and I think others, because they've been asked to do it for many years.

I think about Larry Hadiberg and I think about Susan Peters, and I really respect them because they spent their life really or a large part of their professional career talking about this man, and so I can imagine they get to a point now where they're just like another BTK dog.

I don't know if I really want to do this, and maybe they felt a little bit that way, but they did specifically say that our perspective and sort of telling this story really from Carrie's experience was something that was really powerful to them and what really had them on board to talk and tell their stories.

Do you feel like you get to know the person behind the crimes a little better after you finish a documentary like this, Like do you have an understanding of Dennis Raider's motivations or even just a way he acted in the aftermath of being caught in that he was very open about where all the evidence was, took police through, it explained everything, Like do you get a better understanding of who that man is after you make a documentary like this?

I think I'd get a better understanding of the events of the documentary, of the or of the story or of the crimes, of the impact that it had on various different people.

I don't know that I necessarily have a better understanding of why a serial killer does what they do, and I don't know that we'll ever have a complete understanding.

I mean, we can look at history, we can look sort of forensically at things, and we can make guesses, but Dennis Raider's not been able to articulate in a way that I can understand why he did the things he did, So yes and no, I mean I can understand the circumstances, I can understand the various different points, but not the motivation behind it.

Kerrie talks about going in and sitting with her dad when police essentially ask her to almost investigate another couple of murders that they think may be connected to BTK, and she says that he really made it like gas lighting for her, and that he was essentially saying she'd brought this all on herself and she was the one responsible for how she felt in this situation.

Does that kind of go some way to really explaining who this man is?

Once all of the.

Family man, good citizens stuff kind of falls away that realistically there's a sociopath kind of living behind that facade.

It's possible.

Look, I'm not a psychiatrist.

I can't exactly diagnose Dennis Rader, but I think he's a master manipulator, and I think that he has He has been at least two different men with Carrie, and that's who she experiences in the prison cell with him, is she sees that he can flip between who she knows as her father and who she hadn't spoken to in a very long time, and so she's able to go back in and see this man, this older man sitting there and she can recognize her father and him, and then she sees him sort of switch and turn into a killer.

And so I think that's a really interesting thing for Carrie to experience, and I know she walked out of that sort of having a little bit of an understanding of how he could be these two different men while she was growing up, and who he is now is still representative of who he was back then.

What's really hard to watch is her talk through the diary entries that he's made, essentially documenting all his crimes and not just the murders, but you know, stalking people and you know, thinking about stalking people and her name comes up in those diaries.

That's really hard to watch.

Was that hard for you to listen to Carrie talk about the fact that she may as a child been a victim of his also and just doesn't remember.

Yeah, it's also a very new revelation for Carrie.

I mean, let's remember that she's had quite a few years to process as much as she can.

I'm not saying that she's ever going to be fully able to process what her father did, but she's had a number of years to go through it, to process as much as she can the murders that happened.

And it's been a very recent thing where she finds her name in these documents in these you know, three spiral notebooks that her father kept, and knows his code words and knows what he uses, and knows how he writes and puts that together with sexual abuse, and I think it's been sort of tugging at some of her memories and really she started to question, like did it happen?

Did I forget about it?

And I think she's been doing a lot of work in that area.

It's really interesting the correspondence that he kept and sent out to various media outlets and police.

And there's this one moment in the documentary where Carrie's mum, Dennis's wife made a comment that, oh, he seems to write like you.

Because they're broadcasting this on news services over and over and everyone's got an understanding of what this man is saying, Like, it seems like there was this one moment where things could have gone so differently had that been explored further.

But the police say they believe if she had pushed that she would no longer be with us.

Yeah, I mean, I agree with that, and I think I think it's something to say, you know, oh, his writing looks as like chicken scratchy as yours does.

And another thing to sort of start putting an actual investigative timeline together charity in your husband's movements and where he is and when these crimes are happening, and putting those two things together was something that she just never did.

That is something really that Carrie does now though, right so retrospectively, she's really going back in time to see if she can find other victims.

Yeah, yeah, and she actually goes back.

She's searching for some kind of meaning, I think, or some sort of reason for why he did what he did, and so she does that.

She's done that many many years ago where she put a timeline together of his crimes and then also from her memories like where she was, what was happening, and points to certain events that were kind of happening in her life, and also just recollections of how her father was acting before and after and is able to kind of piece together this emotional sort of family timeline that really coincides with the crime timeline that her father existed on.

Now, well you are really successful and bringing in Kerry and those other people to talk about this crime.

It does mention that none of the families of the victims wanted to speak about this.

What's that delicate process like reaching out to people who've lost a loved one in a tragic way such as this.

It must be a very tough thing to do to reach out to people and ask if they want to speak about this kind of thing.

Yeah, it's tough, and it really is up to them on whether or not they want to speak about this or not.

I mean, I think that people feel sometimes that they do want to come forward and speak about what they've been through with a lot of the families I think of Dennis Reader's victims, they have spoken publicly this in the film, some of the archive that we have, and sometimes they feel like they just want to leave this in the past and don't want to talk about this anymore.

So I think it's a very individual thing for each and every person that participates in a documentary.

There is quite a bit of archival footage in this one, and some of those people, as you mentioned, do speak.

How long does it take you to comb through archives like that and find all of this and bring it all together, because there is in this case in particular, there was just such a volume of it, both from Denis Raider himself and from the news reports at the time.

Yeah, it's a lot.

I mean, it's a lot to comb through the footage.

It's also a lot to find the footage, and you know there are sometimes you can find it really easily, but it's a big process where you're reaching out to new stationans who were covering the crimes when they were happening, then news stations who were covering Dennis Raider's arrest in two thousand and five, and so there's a lot more news coverage in two thousand and five than there is necessarily from the seventies, eighties, and nineties when these crimes were happening, and before even they were linked together.

So it's an incredibly large undertaking to find all of this archive, and then a lot of work spent sort of calling through it and finding those moments that really do help to sort of lift our story, opup or speak to the moments in our story when we're near that archival to kind of really cut through and speak to the heart of the matter.

You're listening to True Crime Conversations with me, Clare Murphy, I'm speaking with director Sky Borgman about the infamous BTK killer.

Up next, Sky shares carries reaction to the intrusive way that her father.

Was discovered by the police, and.

We dive into Sky's other popular documentary No Number.

What do you think we learn from this documentary?

Sky?

I feel like when we're watching true crime, we're seeking answers to something, and maybe it's more a sense of security in that we're looking for ways to avoid ourselves becoming victims in these situations.

But what do you think we learn from this documentary in particular, and maybe from watching true crime in general.

I think you're totally right that in true crime in general, we're looking for ways to protect ourselves, and especially because a large percentage of the audiences are women, and we have to be thinking all the time about how we protect ourselves from this particular documentary.

What I'd love for people to walk away with is a sense of compassion, I think, and a sense of understanding that somebody can be a victim and they don't necessarily have to be fit into this sort of victim shaped whole I guess, or this victim shaped size, and that there are many victims and the ripples are very far reaching, and that Carrie herself was victimized by her dad simply by being his daughter and by learning of the horrible things that he did, and even Carrie's friends are victims, and so it's sort of broadening our perspective on who's affected and how people are affected, who are surrounding and sort of in the hemisphere of any particular crime.

The main the thing that stands out about Dennis Ryder too is that eventually, when he is found out, he's found out in a way that is so intrusive to Kerrie, in that police have accessed the DNA from her perhapsmea in order to link it to him.

It feels incredibly.

Illegal to do that because Carrie is not the person who is being investigated at this point, Like does she have any recourse to say, like this is like, how can you access my medical records in order for you to you know, link me to my dad and to these murders?

Like that feels like the most intrusive way to find DNA.

I think it is, too, And Carrie has moments of feeling that way, and then she also has moments of feeling that that really was such a critical element in inconclusively or conclusively finding a link to Dennis Reader and so so she does have a bit of a push and to Paul when it comes to that, she's very much behind law enforcement.

She accepts the decision that they made to go into to get her DNA, but it is an intrusive act.

So she has both of those feelings simultaneously.

Scott, I'd like to switch over and talk a little bit about Unknown Number.

Now, what's the response been like to that documentary?

It was at one point the most watched documentary here in Australia on Netflix and the absolute avalanche of opinion that came after that was pretty intense.

What was the experience like for you after that actually went to air, because a lot of people have a lot to say about Kendra in the aftermath of this.

Yeah, it was really interesting because Unknown Number was certainly a film that sparked a chord with a lot of people.

And I think the people understanding that a mother was doing this to her daughter, which is outraged, and they should be outraged.

I mean, it's an outrageous thing that a mother could do this to her own daughter.

So I understand how people feel that way.

I felt that way as well, and so I think that all of the different feelings out there that came from Unknown Number are a good thing because part of what I love to do in my work is start a conversation, and there were so many people after that film talking about that film and talking about many different elements of that film, and so in so many regards, I think it's really a great thing to get people talking.

Was it quite intentional from you in making Unknown Number to have Kendra appear as if she was a concerned mum to start with, before it's revealed that she's the one actually committing the crime, because as you go into that documentary, you see her as this kind of you know, concerned mother who's worried about her daughter and who's doing everything she can to help her discover who's behind this and what's happening, Like, was it intentional to kind of put her forward before the sort of shock that she was behind it all in the same way that her own friends and family were quite shocked by.

I mean, it really was led by Kendra's interview, you know, when we sat down to talk to her, which was very late in the process because she had been incarcerated for a lot of the filming and the editing of the project, and so we got an interview with her very late, and we didn't exactly know what she was going to say, And so we sat down, and when I was talking to her, it became very clear that her stance is that she didn't start sending these messages until much later.

It's still unclear to me when she sort of takes responsibility for starting those messages, but she absolutely believes that she started them later.

That's what she's telling everybody at least.

And so when she was talking about the school and how they handled things, and she was living in that reality.

It started becoming something that I thought was an interesting story point, And this manipulation that happens, especially from her in that story point was keenly felt.

When it's revealed that she was the one sending the text messages.

How do you convince someone like Kendra to sit down and tell their story when like, it's a pretty terrible thing that she's done, and she has sort of taken responsibility for it, maybe not completely, but how do you convince someone to discuss their own and she like, it seems like such a shameful thing to have done, Like, how do you convince her to talk about that?

You know, we started reaching out to Kendras very early on and we were writing her letters and I don't know what it is ultimately or why ultimately Kendra decided to be a part of the documentary.

There's part of me that thinks she wanted to tell her story from her mouth.

There's part of me that feels like she may have done it for Lauren.

I don't really know why she ended up doing it.

I know that we reached out many times and sort of said we wanted to sit down and hear what her perspective was on everything that happened, and I think perhaps that's what she wanted.

So the moment in the documentary that I think many of us talk about it.

In fact, I was just chatting to my sister about it the other day, was when the police come to tell Lauren that it's her mum sending those messages, that they don't separate them, and that she's there hugging and touching her daughter like she's worried about her when she was the one doing the crime.

It's such a shocking thing to see.

Were you shocked by that when you watched that?

Yeah?

I mean watching that body cam footage is I have so many different emotions when watching it.

I look at how Lauren's reacting.

I look at how Can is sort of clinging to Lauren.

I look at how the cops don't separate thing.

I mean, there's so many different elements.

When Sean comes in, you know how he responds to the situation.

What's interesting to me is like a lot of people said, I don't understand why he wasn't more mad, or why Lauren wasn't more mad, or why people weren't more mad.

And it's always curious to me because I don't know that we have the right to tell people how they're supposed to feel.

And I can imagine in a place of shock or learning something so outside of what you think is normal, I don't know how you're supposed to react.

I don't know that anybody can prescribe how you're supposed to react.

So that body cam was was really fascinating, and every single time I watched it, I would see something different, and so I think, I think it's I could go back and revisit it over and over and over again and see something different.

Lauren's rolling this two is really interesting because you speak to her on two different occasions, and she seems to be two different people in those interviews.

So the first one, she's obviously still trying to process what her mom has done to her, and her mom is in jail at that time, and so she's still very much like, I love my mom and I want to have a relationship with my mom and then let her on down the track.

She seems to have finally at least semi processed what's happened, and she's a little bit stronger, and she's a little bit like, I don't know if I can have a relationship with my mom.

It's really interesting to watch her sort of progress over that time.

Was that an interesting process for you watching her kind of shift from one to the other.

It's definitely interesting.

And I think you know she even from the time when we did our first interview and the first time I talked to her, which had been months before that, you know, she's growing up and she's hearing all the things that everybody is saying about her mom.

She's living with her dad, away from her mom.

She still got contact with her mom while she's in prison, but she's formulating all these thoughts and ideas and opinions, and she's in a very complex place.

I mean, she wants her mother, as any young woman would want her mother, but she also understands that her mom did something to her that it's up to Lauren whether or not she can move into a relationship that's undoubtedly going to be very different than what her relationship was before.

But it really is up to Lauren, and she gets to feel however she wants to feel.

She gets to love her mom if she wants to, and she gets to never see her again if she wants to.

So that's completely up to Lauren.

Jan was thinking about you guys making unknown number is having to read through I don't know how many tens of thousands of text messages and then having to make the decision about which ones you include and which ones you don't.

Was there a process for you guys behind the scenes where you filtered out the ones that you were and weren't going to use, because like the sheer volume of content you had to choose from there would have been immense.

Yeah, there were a lot of text messages, and we I mean huge part of the process was sort of cataloging the text messages when they happened, who they were going to, who was receiving them, who wasn't, you know, which ones were group messages, which ones weren't, and so there was a lot of that, so we could kind of see the story told in text messages only you know, in the progression of the text messages.

And then there were a lot of messages that were just that sort of just tipped into being a little bit too graphic, that felt gratuitous in a way that it was just say, we just don't need to use those.

Our stories are coming our stories coming through with the messages that we have in a perfectly fine way, and so there's always that editing process that's happening, and especially that was happening.

And look if names were mentioned in the text messages that were that were people that we weren't talking to, like, we were always very conscientious about that.

Next, Sky talks about her conversation with Kendra and whether Kendra feels remorse for the lives and relationships she ruined.

What's wild I think too about this story.

I mean, aside from the fact that Kendra did what she did, is just how many people got caught up in the web of it all.

And I feel like this is something that we're probably going to be dealing with more and more as technology is so invasive.

But you see how this ruined relationships and lives of so many young people involved in this.

When you were talking to Kendra, did she ever seem remorseful at all the other people that got caught up in all of this?

Yeah, she definitely seemed a little bit remorseful.

But I mean, Kendra is such an unreliable narrator.

You know that you don't know that she understands the full extent of what she did.

Or the impact of what she did and how that had an impact on Owen and Chloe and all of the people involved in this.

I don't know that she has a full realization of what that impact truly was.

The impact then also extends not just of those kids, with those kids' families as well, it seems like in the documentary.

And it's hard when you don't have that full immersed backstory because Chloe's parents, for example, are really angry, and they came across as pretty unfeeling and not understanding, and I guess they've copped a little bit of, you know, flak from how sort of mad they seemed about the whole thing.

But it's like you have to take into account so many different emotions when you're speaking to those people.

Do you ever speak to them in the aftermath of their interviews and let them know like how people might take some of the things that they've said.

I mean, look, I think the Wilsons are a perfect example of that.

I mean, they what they went through made them mad, and they were angry at it, and they wanted to talk about that, and so we gave them this place to talk about that.

And I think that you know, they I don't know.

Do they regret it?

I don't know, but I think that they were very much in this line of emotion and what they said in the documentary was very truthful.

Do you have a think about because there are people who tell their stories and who then eventually do regret telling their stories.

Is that a tough thing to kind of juggle When you are sitting people down to talk about some pretty intimate times in their lives or some pretty shocking times of their lives, there's like a real responsibility to make sure those people don't regret what they say eventually.

I mean, there is a huge responsibility, and I think the responsibility is what we all feel when we go out and do these types of stories.

And to me, this responsibility lies and sort of giving people a place to tell their story.

I was very interested in hearing from the young adults in this movie and giving them their voice, and they were very committed to telling a story about what cyber bullying is like, how it is just such a crushing sort of feeling, and how it's ever present and it's surround them.

It's not like they can go home from school and they're not bullied anymore.

It's like on their phone, and it's messages popping up, popping up, popping up, popping up, and to really sort of give them the place to tell the story of how this happened.

And for that, I think they did an amazing job.

I think they're really brave kids, and I think that they told the story in their own words.

That's the thing too, when we talk about cyberbullying, often it's a lot of adults having conversations up the chain.

We don't often hear unless it goes to the extreme extreme, which in this case obviously it did.

But we don't often hear from the kids who are dealing with it every single day.

No, we don't.

And that's what I thought was so amazing about these kids who were telling this story.

And it's from so many different perspective.

It's about who would actually happened to, which is Lauren and Owen, and these messages were coming to them, but then it sort of it sort of seeps out and this target starts getting painted onto to Chloe, and so now it's affecting Chloe, and then Chloe's circle of friends, and now it's affecting all of her circle of friends, and then it's Owens starts seeing somebody else and it goes to her, and then you know, this very small community is everybody's talking about it, everybody's pointing fingers, and there's this unrest in this community, and so it's seeping out into this community.

And so this one couple that these cyber messages were targeted at all of a sudden is affecting everybody.

And that's what happens.

And that's how this is so such an invasive kind of bullying.

And it really is the kids who wanted to come forward and tell their story from their perspective.

And that's what I think is part of the most amazing thing about this documentary.

How do you keep your own feelings from interfering in the documentaries that you're making, Because I mean, we all had thoughts and feelings after watching Unknown Number, but you're in the midst of it and making it.

And we sometimes get this on this show too, when we allow people to tell their stories and people say, why didn't you hold them more accountable for the things that they said, And our response is always, well, it's not our story to tell.

We're just kind of the conduit to bring you the story.

So how do you keep your feelings and emotions about these people's behavior out of your narrative when you're trying to tell the story.

I mean, honestly, it's surrounding myself with a really great team of people who are really good sounding boards, and that exists sort of in the immediate circle where we're really talking to each other about how this lands, this is what's happening, how this is feeling, goes to the production company level, goes to the network level, and so it's it's really sort of asking people the tough questions and asking ourselves the tough questions, and having a group around a really dedicated, solid team that has the best interest of everybody at heart, and that also knows what kind of text we need to put out there for telling the hard truths and for putting the hard things forward.

Are you still in contact with people that you've made these documentaries with.

I know I spoke to another true crime documentary maker a few years ago, and he said that he's got long term relationships with these people, and especially for those who've still got ongoing cases, they often check in and check on progress.

Do you have long term relationships with the people you end up making these stories about With.

Some of them yes, and with others no.

I mean, and again it's a really it's a really individual thing.

I've talked to somebody just the other week that I made a film with years ago, and with other people, I think it can be the end of the journey for them.

These shows, They're like, this is the last I'm going to speak of it.

This is my sort of putting the lid on the box and me walking away.

And so, you know, sometimes I feel like that's that's how people respond, and other times people have a very cathartic sort of experience and want to maintain a relationship.

And so both of those things are true.

Thank you to Skuy for helping us tell this story.

You can stream My Father, The BTK Killer, and Unknown Number The High School.

Catfish now on Netflix.

If you want to see images from this story, head to our Instagram page at True Crime Conversations, give us a follow and have a look at our case explainers as well.

If you enjoyed this episode, please review our show on Apple Podcasts or leave a comment on Spotify.

True Crime Conversations is hosted by me Claire Murphy.

Our senior producer is Talie Blackman.

The group executive producer is A.

Laria Brophy, and there's been audio designed by Jacob Brown.

Thanks so much for listening.

I'll be back next week with another true crime conversation.