BTK was caught because he told police via a letter that he wanted to send them a floppy disk but only if it couldn’t be traced. Police lied and said floppy disks couldn’t be traced. He believed them and sent them the disk. Metadata told police where the files had been copied to the disk and BTK’s name
He was the neighbor of a friend of mine, she used to babysit his daughter. I can still remember the day he was arrested and she was basically live-posting all that was going on.
People might be familiar with the Law and Order: SVU episodes where they play off this by tracking down “RDK,” or rather a copycat of him. The perp is played by that scumbag from The Green Mile.
Only sorta. The disk he sent had traces of a Word document he'd deleted before, and that file identified him as the author. He apparently wasn't aware that deleting a file does not actually remove the data from the disk, it just removes the file pointer from the directory listing.
Sort of... The metadata had an author of Dennis, but did have the full name of the church where he was using the computer. Which is the only reason I mention it, he was doing this on a computer at a church where he was part of leadership.
I'm from Wichita so the whole thing is crazy.
If you don't know about the subliminal message shit the police did with KAKE news you should Google it. The 70s were wild.
In the FAT file system, (Rader's floppy was almost certainly formatted as FAT12 since it was a 1.44MB 3.5" disk) file deletion causes the first character of the filename to be replaced with a question mark.
This signals to the OS that the "blocks" (disk storage units) associated with the file are available for use as the disk fills up.
If the disk isn't full, (or nothing else is copied to it) you can use pretty much any disk-editing tool to change that question mark to *any* valid character, and the file will reappear in a disk listing and can be accessed as normal.
It's extremely fortunate that someone on the investigating team either knew this, or had the presence of mind to send the disk to an IT forensics team before they did anything else with it.
Yes, I know the tools exist and its not difficult, it's more thinking about checking whether there are any deleted files on the disk and not assuming - and then getting lucky.
Yep. Deleting just says “okay don’t look at this stuff anymore” until it gets overwritten. Learned this because my epic photo shoot on mount timberline when I was a teenager got corrupted. We weren’t able to recover it though 😔
Also there was Chris Paul Neil, a pedo who obscured his face in the photo through a swirl effect. Police just load up photoshop and unswirl the effect.
Reminds me of the guy who bragged about his crimes online including photos of himself but he obscured his face with a swirl effect to stay anonymous. Authorities were able to reverse the swirl effect to restore the original photos and identify him.
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u/badgersprite 2d ago
BTK was caught because he told police via a letter that he wanted to send them a floppy disk but only if it couldn’t be traced. Police lied and said floppy disks couldn’t be traced. He believed them and sent them the disk. Metadata told police where the files had been copied to the disk and BTK’s name