The Otero Family [1]

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I remember that day like it was yesterday. I was walking home. The snow is knee deep and the wind was blowing pretty hard, and I walked into the backyard.

We had a wood fence with a gate, so I went through the yard and.

My dog, Lucky, he was outside in the snow and he was never outside.

I'm like, what are you doing out here?

Boy?

He looked at me and wagged his tail, and I opened up a kitchen door and went into the back.

When I walked to the house, I looked at the stove. It had my mom's purse on it. All the stuff was stowed out.

That's not how my mom kept the house. She was very adamant about keeping our house super clean. I yelled out, anybody home, and I heard a voice yelled, Charlie, come quick, Mom and Dad are playing a bad trick on us. I ran down the hall and I could just sense something was wrong already.

I could just feel it.

And I opened up the door and saw my mom and my dad, and I saw my mom on the bed, and my heart broke. It felt like somebody had actually ripped my chest open and pulled my heart out. It was a physical pain. I tried to undo the ropes that were on him. My dad's tongue was half bit off hanging. The ropes were so tight there was no way to untie them.

To this day, I can smell fear and death.

I can smell fear on a person because when you walked in the house, you could smell it.

You could smell the death in the house.

My name is Susan Peters. I'm a journalist and former news anchor for Kake TV also known as Cake TV, in Wichita, Kansas. I started out as a reporter in Illinois and then anchored the news in San Diego. When I moved to Kansas in nineteen eighty three, people would ask me if I knew about the serial killer BTK. At the time, I didn't know much, but my coworkers told me about the seven people he killed in the nineteen seventies. His first victims were the Otero family.

We moved to Puerto Rico to stay with my grandparents while my dad looked for his future. He just spent twenty years of his life in the Air Force since he was seventeen, and he was searching for the best opportunity. My name is Charlie O'tero. I am a surviving son of Joseph and Julia O'tero. One day he got ahold of us and said, you're coming to Wichita. You'd found the job here at a small airfield, Cook Airfield, And

And we were just getting used to the neighborhood. It was totally different from what I was used to.

It was January of nineteen seventy four. The Otero family had recently moved into a small home at eight oh three North Edgemore on the east side of Wichita. In some ways, it was the picture perfect American dream, with a fenced in backyard, for the children and the dog to play in. The parent were Julie and Joseph and they had five children from oldest to youngest. There was Charlie, Danny, Carmen, Josephine nicknamed Josie, and Joseph Junior, who they also called Joey.

You really hadn't got a chance to meet other people in the neighborhood yet, and it was winter, so we were pretty home bound and we just spent a lot of time together. Don't get me wrong. We had our moments, but there was always love in the house.

Always.

My mom didn't cause he was in the church. I mean, she was a kind of woman that would bring orphans home for Christmas to our house.

Over the years, I've developed a deep relationship with Charlie. He's told me all about his mother and how she kept the family together. When they were new to Wichita. Wichita was a quiet and calm town for the family to settle into. It was a stable community, or so it seemed. As the Otos made their home, evil was brewing and it was about to boil over. A monster was watching them, stalking them and learning their daily routine.

I remember asking my father to take me to school early that day. My mom used to usually give me a ride because it was like two miles away Southeast High from where we lived. That day, my dad stayed home because he had an appointment with somebody or some thing, and so he gave me a ride.

He also took me to school early because I.

Asked him to because it was finals day for the nine week period and I wanted an extra study hall to bone up a little bit more on some of the classes I.

Was taking tests in.

And that's probably what saved me Ang, Danny, and Carmen's lives, because they had to go with me.

Joseph Otero Senior dropped his three eldest children off and returned home in his wife's car. No matter how many times I walk through this story, it's very hard to talk about what happened next as Julie and joe Otaro got their youngest Josie and Joey ready for school that day. It was twenty degrees in Wichita and snow coated the frozen ground. Around eight twenty am, as planned, the stalker unlatched the door on the family's wooden gate and let himself into the back yard of the Otero's home on

I took all my tests, aced all of them, and then I was walking home. I remember walking through the snow, thinking this really sucks. Kansas sucks. I get across the street from my house. The garage door was up and the car was gone. So I'm like, here's my chance to rag my mom. Because I never get to rag my mom. You didn't get to say anything bad to her, and this is my chance to say, why do you the garage door open? Now I got to clean the snow out, so I'm already practicing my spiel.

This is when Charlie and his siblings entered the home to the gruesome scene you heard about at the top of the episode. I can imagine the horror as they pieced together that their parents were not in fact playing a cruel trick on them, the fear as they figured out what to do next.

You try to use a phone. It was dead.

Me and Danny and Carmen went outside and I told Danny to go next door to the neighbor's house and use their phone to call the police. And we waited outside together in the snow, huddled up, and a police officer came and he goes, what's going on here?

I said, go inside, you'll see.

Officers Robert Bulla and Jim Lindeberg of the Wichita Police Department arrived at the Otero household at three forty two pm. The police report describes what the officers initially found. Read here by a voice actor.

Officers checked the bedrooms. The door to the southwest bedroom stood halfway open. The officers pushed the door open and saw a man on the floor. A cut white rope and a butcher's knife were on the floor next to them, and the woman was on the bed. The woman's legs were bent and hanging over the edge of the bed. The officers noticed blood on her nose and mouth. Officer Bulla found no pulse. The woman's hands appeared to be

Officers Bulla and Lindabergh found Joseph and Julie in the main bedroom. They radio dispatch two possible homicide victims. Then Officer Lindenburgh left the house to check back in with the children.

He came back out and looked at me and said, could your father have done this? I knew what he was insinuating right away. He was insinuating that.

My dad had come home and found my mom with another man.

Because my dad was dark, dark, dark, almost Negro, and my mom was white, white, white, as white as you can be without.

Being seen through. My Dad's in there, his hands tied and he's dead. How could he have killed himself and tied himself up? I knew it was insinuating. I had that knife in my hand when he said that, and I almost stuck.

It in him.

And at that instant I lost all respect for authority. I hated the police. I hated the world.

At that moment when I first saw my mother, I lost my religion instantly.

I hated God.

We were in a state of shock, and I kept telling the police officer I said, I got to stop Joey and Josie.

From coming home.

He called the station and had a bunch of cops coming, and I told himself, I do not want Joey and Josie to get here and see all these cops.

And I want him here with me.

Now, I knew it was my job to take over and take care of my siblings, and I didn't know Joey and Josie in the house, so I.

Kept telling him I need Joey and Josie with me, over and over.

Again, seemingly, all of Whichitas police force made their way to the Otero household on North Edgemore in what was generally a quiet neighborhood, to begin solving a quadruple homage side. The children told the officers that when they arrived home to find their parents, they attempted to cut the ropes and desperately tried to perform CPR. As Officer Bulla interviewed the Otero children, Lieutenant Jack Watkins arrived at the house. It was he and Officer Bulla who discovered little Joey

While Officer Bulla was outside of the home, Lieutenant Jack Watkins discovered the body of Joseph Otero Junior in another upstairs bedroom. Lieutenant Watkins and Officer Bulla searched the rest of the home. Josephino Taro was found in the northwest storage area of the basement. Josephino Taro was hanging by a rope that had been tied to a sewer pipe. A white cloth was tied around her mouth. Josephino Taro was wearing a blue, short sleeved knit sweater and was naked from the waist down.

As the eldest, Charlie pleaded for answers about his little sister and brother, Josie and Joey. It's Charlie's nature to protect his family, and he wanted to protect the two youngest from what the three of them had already seen.

I kept telling him when we got to the police station, I kept saying, where's Joey and Josie. I need him here now, I need him here now. I can't even tell you how long we were there. It could have been an hour, it could have been ten hours, it could have been ten seconds. At that point, the world is upside down inside out for me. Finally, police chaplain pulled me over and says, Charlie.

We got to tell you Joey and Josie were in the house. They're dead too. After that, I pretty much went blank.

Back in East which a tall local police officers, detectives, and other officials were gathered in mass at the Oteo household. They immediately set up a headquarters in the school across the street from the Otero home. The police report states that Chief of Police Floyd Hannon assigned ten teams of detectives to investigate the murders and search for the family's missing car. Again. Here is an excerpt from the police report.

At five forty six pm, Detective Lewis Brown located the Otero car in the parking lot of the Dylan's Grocery store at Central and Oliver. The keys to the Beiges nineteen sixty six Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser were missing. Steve Christian, the brother of the former owner of the Otto home, reported seeing the car backing out of the driveway at approximately ten thirty am.

At the Otero home. Officer Bulla assisted lab director Ron Eggleston in processing the scene. Notably, Eggleston found stains on the concrete floor directly in front of young Josephine in the basement. He collected samples of those stains. The local newspapers and television stations caught wind of the killings and also set up shop by the O'to home. They had very little to go on.

Back in that day and to this day, we monitor the police frequencies, the fire frequencies and that type of thing. We didn't know what had happened, but we knew that they had sent a lot of detectives to this one particular address in East Wichita. Nobody was talking about it on the frequencies that we were monitoring, so we didn't know what was going on, but we thought, you know, there's something going on there, and I was sent out to see what was happening.

This is my longtime colleague and friend Larry Hatdiberg, who was on the scene reporting for KKE TV on the day the Otaros were murdered.

None of the detectives, no one would talk to me. They just say, you know, we'll have information later, But no one would talk to me. And it was until hours and hours and hours after I arrived that we found out that there were four dead bodies inside the house.

And it wasn't.

Until later that we found out that two of those bodies were children, and it was shocking. All we knew is that some crazy person had gone in and killed an entire family. That was the shocking part that just didn't happen in Wichita, Kansas. Even the police department, I think, were shocked by the murder. They never had really a murder of that size happened before.

Detectives went to work studying the crime scene. For ten days, seventy five officers and detectives worked eighteen hours a day. At the end of the first week, sleep deprived, out of energy and out of ideas, the police and all of Wichita were left with the same questions.

We wondered, what kind of crazy person do we have? Is it somebody on drugs that did it, as somebody who had a vendetta against this people.

During the investigation, police Chief Floyd Hannen held press conferences at least twice a day where he would disclose specifics, speculate about motives and possible suspects. Newspapers like the Wichita Eagle and The Beacon covered every development. The police began with a handful of different possibilities. The first was that the killer could be someone within the family, as Officer Bullet suggested to Charlie upon initially securing the scene. Investigators

Usually there's a connection of something, and in this particular case, there was no connection. We didn't know anything. What caused this, what's the background of the Oteo's, who would do this? What was it? The investigators their immediate reaction was this was a revenge killing of some kind, whether it be drug related, whether it be a business thing. We didn't know what it was. My name is Richard Lamunion. I'm

Leamunion says they did have very much to go on at the start of the investigation, but that from the get go police could tell this had not been a random killing.

It was a planned scenario. There was a script at least if not written in this individual's mind. Are individuals. We didn't know if it was one two or twenty two, but there was definitely a plan premeditated and that's why it threw us back to this has to be a revenge. The Chief authorized some of the detectives to make some trips. One of them was even made to Mexico, so there

A week had passed since the Otero murders, and the investigators assigned to the case weren't getting any answers. Chief Hannah pulled out all the stops, signing off on any and all ideas detectives came up with for solving the murders. One night, detectives Gary Caldwell and Bernie Drowotsky hired a psychic to stay in the house with police. The detectives were desperate, and the psychic had claimed she helped solve a crime by leading police to a body and a trunk.

You know, police officers, even though you deal with tragedy every day and everything, you're still a human being. When you see a situation like this, you see the victims laying there with plastic bags over their head, strangled, and then you see children. In your mind you think back, well, I have children, I have sisters, I have brothers, I have other things. So it does impact you, but you can't let that influence you at the time.

The first week of the investigation was difficult. In hindsight, we can say that the Witchital Police Department was not equipped to deal with this kind of murder in nineteen seventy four. In fact, they made multiple mistakes. Someone in the department lost several crime scene photos and most of the autopsy photos. Through crime scene photographs, they discovered that a responding officer opened to the Otero freezer and left

When it came to preserving evidence. You know, we had preserved evidence before. In this particular case, there was semen found on the little girl in the basement where he had literally brushed up against her, and there was a little bit of her leg. Now, how do you preserve that? And this is nineteen seventy four. We didn't have computers, we didn't have DNA, we didn't have any.

Of that stuff.

However, our crime investigation unit, what they ended up doing was they did three things. Number One, they dried part of it, they kept part of it and fluid, and then they froze part of it, all three of them.

As the investigation unfolded, tensions were understandably high in the city. The close knit community of Wichita was starting to fall apart. People were becoming suspicious of their names, fearing that the killer could live next door. Following the murder, the O'tero children were once again swept off to a new location, leaving a city in which they had not spent long enough to consider home, one that would remind them only of darkness for decades to come.

We had known a family in Panama that was stationed at McConnell, Sergeant Joques. So we called them up and they said, yeah, I get your butts over here. So police took us to McConnell. I remember being in the Jaquesz house with armed guards all around, and I remember getting a phone call and it was Senator Kennedy's office. He was determined the Armed Forces Committe at that time, and they called and said, well, what can we do for you?

I told him, I.

Said, I have four bodies to bury, and I don't want him in Wichita. I'll be damned if I'm bury my family here in Wichita. So he said, what do you want to do. I said, I want my family buried in Puerto Rico. And he said done, And they buried my family in a national military cemetery in Puerto Rico, in my dad's hometown of Santurse.

At just fifteen years old, Charlie took on this responsibility, shouldering the immense weight of this tragedy. Out of love for his siblings.

I kept telling myself, you know, if I came on glued, what would Danny and Carmen do. I had to be that pillar of strength for them to hold on to because we.

Didn't have anything at that point. You got to remember, we.

Had just spent our whole lives as the family unit, traveling all over and now there wasn't one.

We had no mom.

One minute, my mom is bringing orphans and giving him my bedroom for Christmas, and the next minute, I'm the orphan. So I got on the phone. I called my uncle John. He became my guardian, our guardian. To this day, I'm still very close to them in the family.

He was there. The next day I called them.

They got in the car and drove straight to Wichita from New Mexico from Albuquerque. And that's when our life turned around again.

After the funeral, the surviving Otarot children tried to settle into life in New Mexico with their parents and siblings gone. It was understandably difficult to adjust.

We had a hard time. PTSD was kicking in, Danny was acting up. I started racing motorcycles to release my aggression. I was very aggressive, very careless with my life, with my body.

I got in a bike wreck right.

After I graduated from high school and I had a handlebar go through my helmet and down my throat. Saw my whole life pass before me, and my life kind of changed at that point.

Its like, who cares? Why build a future if somebody's just going to come take it from you just maintained an existence.

While Charlie and his siblings carried on, the city of Wichita was still in shock. As Cake anker Larry Haddiberg says, this was a level of violence that seemed inconceivable in a small town like Wichita, Kansas.

And that in itself, I think turned this quiet town that never had anything happen into a town that for a period of time was really on edge because they didn't know what was going to happen next. They didn't know who was going to be next, and it was a terrifying time for an awful lot of people. Someone killed four members of a family, two children and two adults, and that had really never happened before in Wichita, particularly

But this was just the beginning. Over the next five years, the killer would continue to terrorize witch It tak He targeted dozens of women and stalked them at night. He watched them come and go from work, and for many of them, he broke into their homes and murdered them. In the seventies alone, he killed seven people. But even that wasn't enough for him. He also started writing taunting letters to the media. Larry Hattiburd talks about one letter

Eight, KTV received a postcard from someone who indicated that they had information about the killing.

I will never forget this.

It was a Saturday morning and the postcard had come into our mail room.

How many people do have to kill before I get my name in the paper or some national attention. I am compelled to kill by factor X, the same factor the motivated son of Sam in New York, Jack the Ripper in London, and the Hillside Strangler in Los Angeles. It seems senseless, but we cannot help it. There is no help, no cure except death or being caught and put away. A little paragraph in the newspaper would have been enough.

In one of these letters, he even named himself BTK, which stands for buying torture Kill. Then, in April of nineteen seventy nine, BTK seemingly disappear. He committed his last murder and cut off all communication, or so we thought.

For a period of time, everything just shut down, weird. Nothing from BTK, not a word, and so all of the rumors started to fly.

What has happened to BTK? Is he dead? Is he incarcerated? What's the deal with BTK?

As suddenly as he appeared, he was simply gone. To outsiders, it may have seemed as though Wichita had finally been freed of its boogieman, but the presence of BTK was always felt. I initially moved here in the eighties. People no longer left their doors unlocked, and there were always nervous whispers. No one felt safe in Wichita anymore.

This was not a community that locked its door so much after BTK. This was a community that locked its doors. This is a community where young women were terrified. They didn't go out alone at night. If they were going out, they let everybody know where they were going and what time they would be arriving.

It turns out that feeling was justified because BTK hadn't gone anywhere. He was just lain dormant, waiting for his time to rise again. In this case, it would be decades later. Fast forward to two thousand and four, when this story culminated in one of the most dramatic turn of events in Kansas history.

Eight minutes past.

Now in decades after a serial killer terrorized Wichita, Kansas cops say the case that was once cold may be warm yet again. Today. Wichita paper says it received another letter claiming responsibility for an eighth victim who was killed in nineteen eighty six.

It was spring of two thousand and four. No one had heard from BTK in twenty five years. Most of us had moved on with our lives assuming he was gone. But on March nineteenth, two thousand and four, the Wichita Eagle received a letter from someone claiming to be Bill Thomas Kilman initials BTK. In it, he claimed to have killed a new victim. Investigators believe the letter is from BTK because it has information about a two decade old homicide link to BTK that only the killer would know.

He started writing to us. He wrote to k TV my employer. We knew that he was watching us every night, which was a little terrifying, and for the female anchors at our television station, it was getting pretty close because we were concerned that he could strike them, that he could kill them, make them a target.

One of those people was me, as the most visible female anchor at CAKE. I knew I was at high risk. In fact, in one of his letters, BTK even mentioned my name. This is from the BTK letter received on February third, two thousand and five.

Thanks to the news team for their efforts. Sorry about Susan and Jeff's coolds.

During a newscast, I had mentioned on the air that my co anchor and I were feeling under the weather. Just two days later, this letter arrived. It hit me like a punch to the gut, because that meant he was watching me.

So we had extra security on our on air females. It was a terrifying time.

I know.

I would walk co anchor out to the station, out to the parking lot every night and get her in her card, just to make sure that there wasn't anybody waiting around there. It was a scary time, particularly for the women in our television.

Station throughout two thousand and four. In early two thousand and five, BTK continued to send letters threatening to kill again, presumably at random. His letters made it very clear he was once again targeting women across Wichita. Here is his letter from July seventeenth, two thousand and four, a poem id, oh death to Nancy.

I'll stuff your jaws till you can't talk. I'll bind your legs till you can't walk. I'll tie your hands still you can't make a stand. And finally I'll close your eyes so you can't see. I'll bring sexual death one too you for me.

I mean it when I tell you every woman in Wichita was scared to death. You can imagine how terrified everybody was looking behind themselves wondering if they were going to be next afraid to walk out of the grocery store at night, afraid to be alone in their own homes.

February twenty, fifteen, thousand and five. I was home. It's snowy, and I see that dad. So I'm home in these mint green fuzzy pajamas. It's like getting close to noon, and I see this strange car parked out underneath this window. It was maroon for a door, like a old cow lac or something. You know, it seemed out of place. It was parked there for a long time. I'm getting scared because, like my dad had instilled such a stranger danger fair into me. You know, be wary of strangers.

I said, should I.

Call the police? It almost felt like he was there for me. I hare a knock on my door, and it was like something in me knew that the man in the car was now on the other side of the door, and then he said, on the other side of the door, I'm with the FBI and I need to question you. And so that can I see your badge and so he like clashes his badge.

It looks legit.

He didn't have a gun, which I thought was weird. BALI had was like a yellow legal pad and like a pencil. It was a very small apartment, very narrow hallway, and I remember I was comfortable enough that I turned my back to him to walk the few steps into the kitchen, and he just drops it. He's like, do you know about BTK? And now I'm thinking, like what I knew BTK had been active in like the seventies, but I knew that BTK murdered women that lived alone.

Your dad is.

Someone killed four members of a family.

Had you vanished from her home suddenly last weekend? Her phone lines had been cut, her door left open.

You see the victim playing there with plastic bags over their heads, strangled. You could tell there was a plan scenario.

Well, police have said no more about the contents of the letter. It does contain some sort of threat and implies the killer may strike again.

He's going to play with these victims.

He'd get him to the point of death and then bring them back.

And then brings them back to the point of death.

From My Heart Podcasts and Tenderfoot TV. I'm Susan Peters and this is Monster BTK.

Monster BTK is a production of Tenderfoot TV and iHeart Podcasts. The show is written by Nomes Griffin, Trevor Young and Jesse Funk. Our host is Susan Peters. Executive producers on Behalf of Tenderfoot TV include Donald Albright and Payne Lindsay, alongside supervising producer Tracy Kaplan. Executive producers on Behalf of iHeart Podcasts include Matt Frederick and Trevor Young, alongside producers