March 17, 1977, brought the charged chronology into another Wichita household. Shirley Vian was the person named in Count Six. When Judge Waller reached that count in June 2005, he again asked Rader to explain what he had done in Sedgwick County that made him guilty. The question brought the hearing forward nearly three years from Kathryn Bright’s death. It did not invite an explanation of those intervening years, and Rader’s response did not provide one.
Instead, he described an unsuccessful attempt to reach someone else before going to Vian’s home. He said he had approached another residence, received no answer, and continued through the neighborhood. His account included an encounter with a boy and further movement between houses. The supported development is narrow but consequential: Vian’s killing followed an earlier attempt elsewhere that had failed to produce access. Rader’s description of her selection as random referred to his own choice that day. It did not reduce the intention or responsibility he was admitting.
The court also heard him explain the private labels he assigned to potential victims. Those labels served his account of selection and preparation, but they offer little about the people themselves. Following his terminology too closely would allow his classifications to organize the record around him. Count Six required a different focus. Whatever name he had given an earlier plan, the person killed on March 17 was Shirley Vian, and the home he entered contained children whose presence he acknowledged.
Rader said that he gained entry by falsely presenting himself as a private detective and then forcing his way inside while armed. The pretense matters because it separates an apparent request for information from the coercion that followed. His account does not establish that anyone knowingly admitted a killer or accepted the violence he intended. Once he displayed a weapon, the household was under threat. Actions taken in that setting have to be understood within the restrictions he had imposed.
According to Rader, the children were confined in a bathroom while he remained with their mother. He also described Vian helping with arrangements inside the house. His wording sometimes cast those actions as cooperation. That description cannot erase the armed intrusion. The transcript supplies no basis for treating a mother’s constrained actions during an attack as willing assistance to the attacker. Responsibility for confining the children and attacking Vian remained his. The children’s presence requires acknowledgment without a reconstruction of what they heard, understood, or feared.
Waller’s questions then established Rader’s admission that he killed Vian. The exchange included details about physical restraint and the fatal assault that need not be reproduced to follow the case. What mattered to the count was his acknowledgment of an intentional attack and its result. His statements about Vian’s condition before the killing were recollections, often qualified. They do not provide an independent medical history, and they cannot tell the reader how she understood the danger in her home.
Rader next described increasing interruptions. He referred to activity from the children and a ringing telephone, and he said those circumstances prompted him to leave. The transcript also records his recollection of an earlier reference to someone checking on the household. That reported expectation is not proof that a neighbor arrived, witnessed anything, or knew what was occurring. The documented endpoint of his account is his departure and return to his car. There is no need to supply an invented discovery scene to make the crime’s consequences apparent.
Those consequences already extended beyond the single name on the charge. Shirley Vian was killed in a home where her children were present and confined. Their exposure to the crime is part of the record even though this hearing was not a proceeding to collect their accounts. Keeping them unnamed here preserves the distinction between acknowledging their presence and appropriating their experience. The court was obtaining a factual basis from the defendant. It was not hearing the children describe the loss of their mother.
By the end of the questioning on Count Six, Rader had admitted another household intrusion and another intentional killing. The circumstances differed from the Bright case: his own account placed an unsuccessful approach elsewhere before his entry into Vian’s home, and it established children inside the residence. The next count would concern Nancy Fox in December of the same year. In that exchange, the court would have to clarify a word that briefly made his search for victims sound like official work.