He’s overseen the fight against methamphetamine in Kansas and lent agents to the effort to catch the BTK serial killer.

But after more than 12 years as head of the state’s top crime-fighting agency, Kansas Bureau of Investigation director Larry Welch says he will resign later this year. Welch, a Lawrence resident, announced Friday that he had notified Attorney General Paul Morrison of his intention to step down from the KBI at the end of May.

Welch, a former FBI agent and a graduate of the KU School of Law, has been KBI director since July 18, 1994.

“It is time for another to experience the privilege of leadership of the remarkable men and women of the KBI,” Welch wrote.

Morrison issued a statement Friday thanking Welch for his service.

“Director Welch helped make Kansas a safer place to live through hard work and steadfast dedication,” Morrison said.

Welch said he’s looking into opportunities for another full-time job and is considering writing a book about the history of the KBI, which formed in 1939 to provide expertise and support for Kansas law enforcement agencies statewide.

The agency gained notoriety after the publication of Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood,” which documented the KBI’s efforts to solve the killings of the Clutter family in 1959 in the rural town of Holcom. Even though Welch was still in law school when the killings happened, he later became friends with Alvin Dewey Jr., the lead KBI detective in the case.

“I worked cases with him when I was an FBI agent and he was a KBI agent,” Welch said.

Welch, who is married with three grown children, spent 25 years as a special agent and supervisor with the FBI in places including Miami and San Juan, Puerto Rico. Before becoming KBI director, he was head of the Kansas Law Enforcement Training Center in Hutchinson.

Changes to the KBI during Welch’s tenure include the addition of staff to the KBI lab in Great Bend, as well as new forensic labs being created in Kansas City, Kan., and Pittsburg.

Welch said he knew little about methamphetamine when he first became KBI director. In 1994, the KBI seized four meth labs, but by 2001, there were more than 800 seized. The number of labs seized each year in Kansas has declined steadily since then, in part because of laws that made it harder to buy over-the-counter pills used in making methamphetamine.

“In law enforcement, we always have to address whatever threat is confronting us at that time,” Welch said. “Certainly in the last 12 years, the beast in our face has been methamphetamine.”

Welch said he’s proud of his agents’ work with a task force that formed in 2004 when the BTK serial killer – eventually identified as Dennis Rader – re-emerged in Wichita. Of the 10 people assigned to the BTK task force, two were KBI agents.

“It was a KBI biologist that did the initial connection of Rader’s DNA to three of his victims, which confirmed we were looking the right way,” Welch said.