BTK Case

The Bind Torture and Kill (BTK) case is one of the high profile criminal cases that illustrate the use of computer forensic evidence presented at court during the trial. The case involved Dennis Lynn Rader, an American serial killer. Over the years since 1974, he murdered approximately ten people in Sedgwick County, Kansas. At the particular time, he used to write letters to the police describing how his victims were murdered. Later, he abandoned his acts for almost two decades before he resumed detailing to the police about the murders. In 2004, he sent letters to the police on a floppy disk, where a thorough analysis of the documents using high-tech forensic techniques proved that he was guilty. Under his metadata, he had incriminated “Dennis” at the Christ Lutheran as the villain of the murders. Through the adoption of the cost-driven analysis, forensic experts were able to link Dennis Rader to the crimes that had occur over a period of sixteen tears involving ten different victims. The forensic report presented at court helped the jury in concluding on their verdict, where Dennis Rader was sentenced to life imprisonment (Singular, 2006).

The forensic techniques utilized in the analysis of the process included cross-drive analysis and deleted files

After receiving the floppy disk from the villain, analysts checked for the documentation of the letters with regard to the IP address of the computer from which they initially originated. In this event, a thorough analysis of the procedure used and the intention of the villain in documenting what had happened were undertaken. Based on the evidence presented by the analysis, Dennis Rader was linked to the case. A thorough investigation was done on the past occurrence to determine what had happened. On the other hand, the deleted files recovered from the floppy disk revealed Dennis Rader’s connection to the crimes executed around the late 1970s. After the investigations were over, the results revealed that Dennis Rader was a serial killer and had murdered ten different people. In this regard, the court found him guilty of murder and sentenced him to life imprisonment.

The forensic techniques adopted in the investigation of the BTK killer were considerably flexible and presented a lot of accuracy as long as the documents were not forged. Using methods of the cost-driven analysis and deleted files, the forensic experts realized that there was a link between the person who documented them and the villain of the crimes. The high-tech techniques pose a challenge for the forensic experts to analyses previous scientific reports and letters that create a link for further interrogation. Regarding the deleted files, they were restored and gave an insight to the practices of Dennis Rader in the course of the crime occurrence. These methods provided a good basis for forensic report documentation. However, they could be subject to invalidity with the advancement of technology. This implies that new technologies would pose a threat to validity since people may forge such documents leading to wrong conclusions from the forensic reports.

To cope with the dynamism of the changing technology, it is crucial to consider other forensic techniques such live analysis and Steganography (Johnson, 2006). These methods adopt high-tech techniques that critically analyze data based on the operating systems used and the manner in which data is documented with the specific time of documentation. In this regard, it considerably essays to retrieve encrypted data as well as plain data for analysis purposes. Similarly, any form of hidden data that is difficult to access through the traditional methods can be retrieved. If the forensic experts had adopted this form of forensic methods, the investigation would have become considerably simple with minimal time wastage. In addition, chances of exposure to biasness would be minimal.