Category: Today in Religion History

On August 18, 2005, a judge in Wichita, Kansas sentenced BTK serial killer Dennis Rader — a former Cub Scout leader and president of his Lutheran church — to ten consecutive life terms, the maximum the law would allow.

On August 9, 1969 actress Sharon Tate and four other people were found brutally slain at Tate’s Los Angeles home; cult leader Charles Manson and a group of his followers were later convicted of the crime.

And in 1995 Grateful Dead lead singer Jerry Garcia — a cult figure of a different kind — died in Forest Knolls, Calif., of a heart attack at age 53, AP writes.