The charge concerning Marine Hedge covered April 27 through April 28, 1985, and identified her death as occurring on April 27. Both formulations appeared when the court read Count Eight. The charging window and the stated date of death should remain separate; neither requires a reconstructed hour-by-hour account. Nearly eight years had passed since Nancy Fox’s death. When Rader answered questions about Hedge, he introduced a fact that changed the relationship between himself and the victim: she lived down the street from him.
Rader said that he and Hedge knew one another casually. They would pass and wave, and both worked in their yards. The details are ordinary, and their ordinariness matters. They place her in the neighborhood as a person he recognized through routine contact. His later use of a dismissive phrase about her being simply a neighbor did not diminish that familiarity. He was acknowledging that the person he selected was someone whose home and daily presence were already known to him.
His account began with travel back from another commitment and a taxi ride to Park City. It then placed him inside Hedge’s home before she returned. The relevant development is that he admitted arranging his movements and entering the residence in advance of the attack. The transcript contains more logistical detail, but following every transfer and pretense would add little to the question of responsibility. Nothing in the admission establishes that the taxi driver knew his purpose or had any part in the crime.
Rader said Hedge returned with a visitor and that he remained hidden until after the visitor left. The visitor’s presence is part of his account, not a basis for assigning that person knowledge of an intruder. The same limit applies to others mentioned in connection with his movements. His ability to travel, attend commitments, or enter familiar places does not establish that anyone around him understood what he intended. The defendant’s actions must remain his own rather than spreading suspicion through every ordinary contact he described.
When Waller asked about the attack, Rader admitted entering Hedge’s bedroom and killing her. The judge obtained an explicit acknowledgment that she died. The questioning also returned to whether she knew him, producing the account of their casual acquaintance. That exchange gave Count Eight a distinct factual setting. This was a killing within the neighborhood where he lived, involving a person he recognized, rather than a charge that could be understood solely through his generalized descriptions of watching strangers around Wichita.
He further admitted removing Hedge’s remains from the house and taking them to the older Christ Lutheran Church building, where he photographed her. Those facts can be stated without repeating the degrading details in his account. The location later acquired investigative significance because the church’s name also appeared in the digital trail that helped identify him. At this point in the chronology, however, the supported fact is his admitted use of the older building. The transcript does not implicate the congregation in what he did there.
Waller asked whether Rader had kept the photographs. Rader answered that he had and suggested that police probably possessed them. His qualification should remain visible. It is an admission of retention, coupled with his belief about their later custody; it is not an evidence inventory supplied by an examiner. The distinction also prevents this passage from manufacturing a connection between these photographs and every later image mentioned in the investigation. Separate references to photographs require their own support before they can be treated as the same objects.
Rader then described taking Hedge’s remains away from the church and leaving them outside. His location recollection involved uncertainty and assistance with a road name. A restrained account does not need the route or the concealment details to establish what changed: he admitted conduct extending beyond the home where he killed her. The court had obtained his acknowledgment of the killing, removal, and subsequent acts. Marine Hedge’s count therefore included both a neighbor’s death and the defendant’s admitted misuse of another familiar place.
The institutional connections in this account must be kept within those limits. A church building was a location he said he used; a taxi was transportation he said he hired. Neither statement supplies an accomplice. Hedge remained the eighth person named in the murder charges, with her own relationship to the neighborhood and her own separate count. The hearing next moved to Vicki Wegerle in September 1986, where Rader’s uncertainty would concern something more consequential than an address: where, after his attack, her death occurred.