Nancy Fox was killed on December 8, 1977. Her death formed Count Seven, the second charged killing that year. When Waller asked Rader about it, the defendant again began with selection: he had noticed Fox entering her home and had subsequently watched her. The account placed deliberate attention before the intrusion. It also introduced a brief misunderstanding in the courtroom, one that had to be resolved before his language could leave a misleading impression about the authority under which he had acted.
Waller understood him to have said he was patrolling the area. The judge asked what he meant and whether he had been working. District Attorney Nola Foulston intervened to clarify that the word was trolling. Rader confirmed that he was describing a search for victims and that he was not working. The correction was substantive. Patrolling can imply an assigned duty and a legitimate reason to observe a neighborhood. Rader was admitting private predatory conduct. No official task explained or authorized his attention to Nancy Fox.
He expanded on the terms he used for different stages of selecting and watching people. That explanation belonged to him; the hearing did not establish it as a scientific model or a complete account of serial murder. Its immediate value was more concrete. It clarified that he had distinguished between looking for someone to attack and concentrating on a particular person. In Fox’s case, he acknowledged the latter. His choice of vocabulary could not turn the conduct into a professional process or make the person he watched disappear behind a label.
Among the few details of Fox’s ordinary life in this portion of the transcript was her employment at Helzberg. Rader said he had gone there. The record does not supply a fuller account of her workday, her colleagues, or her plans, and none is needed to give the employment detail its proper place. She had a life beyond the attack and beyond the defendant’s account. The workplace reference is a small documented connection to that life, even though it entered this hearing through his admission that he had watched her.
Rader told Waller that he entered Fox’s home before she returned and waited inside. When she arrived, he confronted her. He then described restraining and killing her. The court’s questions established the acts underlying the charge, while his narrative included supposed conversation and intimate details that are unnecessary to the legal sequence. Repeating words he assigned to Fox would give the appearance of hearing from her when the only speaker was her killer. Her name and the charged date remain firmer ground than a dramatization built from his recollections.
He also admitted taking personal items before leaving. That acknowledgment added conduct after the killing to the factual account, without establishing why each item was taken or what later happened to it. The transcript does not support turning the removal into an inventory of recovered evidence. At this stage, the court was asking the defendant what he had done. The boundaries of that inquiry matter: an admission that he took something and an independently documented history of that object are different kinds of information.
Near the end of the exchange, Foulston asked that the address be placed on the record. Rader remembered South Pershing but offered uncertain numbers. The prosecutor supplied 843. Waller emphasized the location within Wichita and Sedgwick County. The correction preserved the actual address, 843 South Pershing, while leaving visible the defendant’s difficulty recalling it. There was no reason to choose one of his guesses for the sake of narrative fluency. A transcript that preserves a correction is more useful than a smooth account that quietly conceals it.
Fox’s count completed a particular stage of the chronology. Seven people had been killed across four charged dates: the four Oteros in January 1974, Kathryn Bright in April 1974, Shirley Vian in March 1977, and Nancy Fox in December 1977. The number of incidents and the number of victims were different because one household contained four people who were murdered. Maintaining that distinction keeps the four Otero counts visible while also showing how the case extended to other homes and other years.
The next charged death lay in 1985. Nothing in this portion of the record explains the interval or permits a conclusion about what ended it. What the next admission would establish was a different relationship between Rader and the person he attacked. Marine Hedge lived down his street. He would describe ordinary neighborly familiarity before admitting that he entered her home and killed her. The chronology moved beyond the victims he claimed to have selected from a distance.