Joseph Otero, his wife Julie, and their children Josephine and Joseph Otero Jr. were killed at the family's home at 803 Edgemoor in Wichita on January 15, 1974. Thirty-one years later, the charges read to Dennis Rader named each person separately. Joseph Otero was the victim in Count One, Julie Otero in Count Two, Josephine Otero in Count Three, and Joseph Otero Jr. in Count Four. The shared date and address connected the charges without making any one name stand for the others. Before turning to the six later victims, the court would examine Rader's responsibility for all four deaths.
At the June 27, 2005, hearing, Waller first read those four murder charges individually and obtained Rader's acknowledgment of each. The judge later returned to Count One for an account of what Rader had done. This was the factual-basis examination that followed the discussion of rights and possible punishment. Its purpose was to give the court grounds to assess the guilty pleas. The transcript records the defendant answering questions about his conduct; it does not provide testimony from the people he killed or a complete collection of the evidence investigators had gathered.
Rader initially answered the question about Count One with a formal admission that he had intentionally and with premeditation killed Joseph Otero. He then began moving to Count Two. Waller interrupted because he needed more information. He asked where Rader had gone, approximately when he had arrived, and whether he knew the people there. Rader gave an address, placed his arrival between seven and seven-thirty, and said he had not known the family. These details appear in the hearing transcript reproduced by the Wichita Eagle. The questioning moved from a declaration of guilt toward an account the judge could evaluate.
Rader said that he had selected the household and had planned his actions to some degree. He also claimed that events escaped his control after he entered and that he had not expected Joseph Otero to be home. Those qualifications were his explanation of the intrusion. They did not withdraw his admission of deliberate killing. He acknowledged entering the house and confronting the family while armed. Waller continued asking what happened, eventually obtaining admissions concerning each of the four deaths. The account can be followed without repeating the mechanisms or arranging the family's final experiences into a scene. His answers establish what he admitted; they cannot establish what the Oteros thought, felt, or understood. The hearing also recorded his admission that he took property and left in the family's car. Those subsequent acts extended his account beyond the killings, while leaving the four murder charges as the central questions before the court.
At the end of the account, Waller asked whether the facts Rader had described applied to all four counts. Rader said they did. Prosecutor Kim Parker then corrected the address he had supplied earlier: the house was at 803 Edgemoor, rather than 1834 Edgemoor. Waller observed that he had asked whether the events occurred in Sedgwick County and that the exact address was not important to the inquiry. The correction nevertheless remained in the record. It identifies the real location while preserving a concrete error in Rader's recollection, without requiring a broader claim about how investigators checked every part of his account.
Waller then moved to Count Five. The formal findings accepting all ten pleas came later, after the remaining factual accounts had been heard. At that point, the judge found factual bases for each plea and adjudged Rader guilty on every count. For the Oteros, the result remained four separate first-degree murder convictions: one for Joseph, one for Julie, one for Josephine, and one for Joseph Jr. The hearing's progression matters here. Rader's acknowledgment that his account covered four counts preceded the court's ultimate findings; it was not itself four separate rulings announced during the description of the household intrusion.
The Oteros were the first four names on an Information that would eventually carry ten. Less than three months after their deaths, Rader would return to another part of Wichita, and investigators would eventually connect that second crime to the same unidentified man responsible for the first.