Puzzle By Serial Killer BTK Spells Out Missing Girl’s Name In Unsolved Case: Police

A newly uncovered word puzzle written by infamous serial killer Dennis Rader, known as BTK, spells the name of a missing Oklahoma girl and the location she was last seen, authorities said.

The Osage County Sheriff’s Office received the annotated puzzle in a package last month, Sheriff Eddie Virden told KFOR , highlighting words that can be connected to the disappearance of 16-year-old cheerleader Cynthia “Cindy” Dawn Kinney. She was last seen in June of 1976, leaving the laundromat owned by her family in Pawhuska, Oklahoma.

Rader originally sent the puzzle to a Kansas news station in 2004. It has since been posted elsewhere, including a website devoted to the Zodiac Killer’s ciphers , with different “solutions.”

The new puzzle, marked in red pen, follows the guidelines of a “path finder” puzzle — letters connected by crisscrossing lines. The puzzle had previously been interpreted as a more straightforward word finder, solved by circling consecutive letters.

The woman who sent the package, and wishes to remain anonymous, told the sheriff in a letter not to “view it as a puzzle.”

“View the puzzle as a map that Rader created to plot his victims,” she wrote, according to KFOR.

Last August, sheriff’s officials named Rader as a prime suspect in Kinney’s disappearance and dug up the property where his family once lived in Park City, Kansas. They believe his job as a security system installer at the time and one of his journal entries could place him at the scene where she vanished, the sheriff said in a press release.

“This journal entry alludes to a significant event marked as ‘PJ-Bad Wash Day’ during a period in which Rader acknowledged being outside the Wichita area,” the press release says, noting that “PJ” is Rader’s