The Home Depot where BTK left one of his letters

This is the Home Depot store where the BTK killer, Dennis Rader, left an anonymous package for the police.

It is situated at 3350 North Woodlawn Boulevard in Wichita, Kansas.

In March 2004, Rader unexpectedly resumed contact with the media after a decade-long hiatus. By that point, more than 13 years had passed since he murdered Dolores Davis.

On January 8th, 2005, Rader wrote the words "BTK" and "Bomb" on a Kellogg's Special K cereal box and placed it in the bed of a pickup truck that was parked outside of this Home Depot store.

The owner of the truck was an employee at the store. When he saw the box, he didn't believe that it was anything important. Consequently, he decided to toss it into a trash can at his house.

A week or two later, Rader sent a letter to KAKE TV in which he asked if the police had found his package at Home Depot.

The detectives on the case knew that their best chance of catching the BTK killer was to continue communicating with him. That way, there was a chance that he'd eventually slip up.

When they learned of the existence of this package, they immediately rushed over to North Woodlawn to see if they could find anything. From their perspective, it was another potential lead in a serial killer case that had gone unsolved for more than 30 years.

After failing to locate the box, they put up fliers asking employees to come forward if they had seen anything unusual.

Shortly afterwards, one of the lead detectives received a welcome late-night phone call. A man who worked at the store had found a strange cereal box in the back of his pickup truck.

Fortunately, he had forgotten to put his trash out for collection that week. As a result, he was able to fish the box out of the can and call 911.

Inside the cereal box, there was a short letter:

"Can I communicate with floppy [discs] and not be traced to a computer. Be honest. Miscellaneous Section, 494, (Rex, it will be OK), run it for a few days in case I'm out of town, etc. I will try a floppy for a test run in the near future. February or March."

After speaking to the employee who discovered the box, the police were able to determine that BTK had dropped it off on January 8th, 2005.

Although the surveillance footage was extremely grainy, they were able to make out a figure in the parking lot. More importantly, they managed to catch a glimpse of the vehicle that he was driving.

When the police forensic unit scrutinized the footage, they quickly established that the BTK killer owned a black Jeep Cherokee.

The letter at Home Depot proved to be the beginning of the end for Rader, as he would later send the authorities a floppy disc that had his name and church embedded in a deleted file.

After honing in on him as a suspect, investigators drove by his house on Independence Street.

While they were passing by, they noticed the one thing that they had hoped to see—a black Jeep Cherokee.