Mystery Unsolved Inc True Crime

Dakota Burnside

"The Mad Butcher, The Mysterious Killer, these are names that still evoke fear and dread in the hearts of many people decades, even centuries after they were first mentioned. This is due to a simple reason, they were never caught or identified. These men were able to carry out gruesome killing sprees fulfilling their darkest desires and then get away with it. For decades there was another chilling name on that list BDK, short for Bind Dangle Kill. A murderous maniac who began terrorizing Aster City. He evaded capture during the original investigation. He had become such a ghost that he killed three more people without the police even realizing that it was him doing it. Afterwards he completely went underground, stopped all communication, and erased all hope that he might one day be identified. Well, almost all hope. In the end his craving for attention made him reach out again, one mistake later and he was identified and arrested. It might have happened twelve years after his killing spree started but BDK finally had a real name Dakota Burnside."

"Dakota Hoffmann Burnside was born on March the 9th, 1986. One of four wolf sons, he was born in Aster City, the same place where he would carry out his spree of terror decades later. Burnside attended Aster City High School and later enrolled at University of Aster City. College wasn't for him though so he dropped out and joined the United States Air Force when he was twenty-one and spent the next four years as a mechanic. When he returned back to Aster City, Burnside wanted to complete his college education but it proved problematic for him as he switched between multiple institutions. He finally obtained a degree in administration of justice in 2015. Meanwhile he supported himself with various jobs in a suburb of Aster City including as an assembler for a camping gear company, a grocery store employee, and an installation manager for a home security company called Aster City Security Services. The third one occurred while BDK was active and was in fact one of the main reasons why so many people were getting home security systems in the first place. Little did any of them know that the person they were allowing into their homes to make themselves feel safer was the same person they wanted to be protected from. In 2007, Dakota Burnside married a woman called Rudi Wang and they had two children together Carrie and Brian. On the outside it seemed very much like your typical humdrum family life and it would be decades until people discovered that there was actually something much darker hiding beneath the surface. As we later found out after BDK was finally apprehended, Dakota Burnside did not have the type of traumatic childhood that we often associate with serial killers. He felt ignored by his parents because they worked long hours but that was about it. Even so sadistic urges began developing in Dakota from an early age, his sexual fantasies revolved around pain and bondage. He started by cutting out female forms from magazines, drawing gags and ropes around them, and gluing them onto three-by-five index cards which carried around with him. As a teenager, Burnside took up peeping into windows and stealing women's underwear. He began getting sexually excited by seeing people being tortured and killed. He enjoyed being spanked and tied up but liked it even more to see the same being done to women, whenever he was aroused by such an act he called it 'sparky big time' and the point of climax was called 'the big g' in fact Burnside had a whole vocabulary or 'codex' as he preferred it which he used in order to refer to his crimes. He borrowed a lot of terms from true crime magazines from the 1950s and 60s, he called his victims 'projects' while a killing was a 'hit', he referred to the murderous persona that lived inside him full of violent sexual impulses as 'the beast' when it was time to switch from his normal everyday family guy façade to 'the beast', he called it 'going dark', and lastly he described the force that drove him to kill as some kind of mysterious element dubbed 'factor x', there are two likely reasons why he came up with all of these terms according to psychologists. The first would be to help distance himself from the reality of what he was doing. In his mind, he wasn't murdering a person, no, he was 'going dark' to work on a 'project' and it couldn't be his fault if he was driven to do it by some magical 'factor x', the second reason was to simply make himself feel more special. Burnside had the narcissistic personality you'd expect from a killer like him and it exhibited in typical fashion, giving himself a name in the media, taunting the police, and trying to create some kind of mysterious impenetrable persona that made him unique among killers. The irony here is that by doing these things to make himself feel special he was displaying the standard behavior of an eager maniacal psychopath."