Vicki Wegerle was killed on September 16, 1986. In Count Nine, the State charged Rader with her deliberate and premeditated murder in Sedgwick County. His response to Waller’s questions began with another account of prior attention and a decision to approach a home. This time he admitted using a false occupational identity. He presented himself as a telephone repairman. The pretense placed an appearance of ordinary service between the person at the door and the violence he intended to bring inside.
Rader said Wegerle allowed him to enter under that false identity. Admission to the home under a deception does not suggest acceptance of what followed. His own account drew the line clearly: after pretending to examine the telephone, he produced a handgun and directed her into another room. The relevant facts are the deception, entry, and armed coercion. The transcript’s additional details about clothing and equipment are unnecessary to understand the crime and would turn the account toward practical mechanics rather than the responsibility the hearing was establishing.
Waller asked about the weapon and about what happened after Rader brought Wegerle to the bedroom. Rader acknowledged trying to restrain her and said she resisted him physically. The judge sought confirmation that she had fought him, and Rader confirmed it. That acknowledgment belongs in the record because it rejects any suggestion of acquiescence. It does not authorize a staged struggle with invented movements, sounds, or thoughts. The hearing provides the attacker’s admission that she resisted, with no direct account from Wegerle herself.
Rader admitted continuing the attack and causing her to become unresponsive. He said that he believed at the time that she was dead. That belief would soon require clarification. A defendant’s impression during an assault cannot establish a medical time of death. Even within his own account, what he thought when he left and what he later learned were different. Preserving that distinction avoids converting an admitted observation into a clinical conclusion the transcript does not support.
He also admitted taking photographs and leaving in Wegerle’s car. Those acts added to his acknowledgment of the attack. They need no sexualized description and no imagined account of how the images were later used. His recollection included activity and noise that he associated with the need to depart, as well as words he attributed to Wegerle about someone returning. Such reported speech is unnecessary to reproduce. The factual endpoint is that he said he left the house using her vehicle after attacking her.
Waller then returned to the statement that Rader had thought she was dead. Had he subsequently learned otherwise? Rader said yes and referred to emergency personnel trying to revive her. He could not remember whether she died at the house, while being transported, or at the hospital. These were his recollections of information received later. The transcript does not make him a witness to the emergency response, and the uncertainty cannot be repaired by choosing a location from the alternatives he listed.
The judge’s next question resolved the issue necessary to the murder count. Waller asked whether Rader later learned that Wegerle had died as a result of the attack. Rader acknowledged that she had. The answer established his acceptance of the causal connection between his acts and her death. It left the precise place of death unsettled within his account. A court can obtain a factual basis for a charge without the narrator filling every gap in a defendant’s memory, and that is what the exchange demonstrates here.
Wegerle’s count therefore contained a different kind of limit from the address corrections earlier in the hearing. The uncertainty involved events after Rader’s departure, when other people were attempting to help her. Their work cannot be narrated through him as though he had watched it. Keeping his admission within its proper scope also preserves the significance of the assistance he referred to. The fact that efforts were made to revive Wegerle is not evidence that he spared her; he admitted the attack that caused her death.
By this point, the factual examination had covered nine named victims across six charged dates. Wegerle’s resistance and the attempted emergency care remained distinct parts of the account, neither reducible to Rader’s first assumption about the outcome. The tenth count would move the chronology to January 1991 and Dolores E. Davis. It would also bring a legal difference into view. Because the law had changed by the time of that killing, the court would face an additional sentencing question beyond the findings needed to accept a guilty plea.