BTK - Memory of BTK serial killer plagues family's survivor

[Lorraine]

Posted on Sun, Aug. 15, 2004

Memory of BTK serial killer plagues family's survivor

BY TIM POTTER

Knight Ridder Newspapers

WICHITA, Kan. - (KRT) - When he was 15, Charlie Otero remembers, he watched "In
Cold Blood," a chilling movie about the murder of a Kansas farm family.

He asked his father, Joseph, why someone would slaughter an innocent family. And
his father told him: "Thank God something like that hasn't happened to you."

Not long after came a day that haunts him still. Here is what he recalls.

That chilly morning, Joseph drove Charlie and two of his siblings, Danny and
Carmen, to their schools. Charlie wanted to get to Southeast High School early so
he could get in one more study hall. It was exams day, Jan. 15, 1974, and doing
well in school meant everything to him.

As he walked home later, he picked up a religious pamphlet on the ground. "You
need God for your life," it said. He dropped it.

His family had recently moved into a new house. As he neared it, he noticed the
garage door was up. Charlie was going to chide his mother for leaving it open.

Inside, he found disarray: an ice tray left out, his mother's purse dumped out.

And then, in his parents' room, he encountered something that would make him hate
God for 20 years: his father and mother, clothed, lying side by side on their bed,
tied up.

Instantly, he knew they were dead.

His 38-year-old father, a burly, muscular man with air commando training, who had
boxed his way into the Air Force, had a belt around his neck, cutting into his
throat.

His mother, 34-year-old Julie Otero, had torn and broken fingernails, as if they'd
been scraped against concrete.

Charlie grabbed his father's head and said, "What have you done!" He suspected the
killings had something to do with his father's military past.

He went to the kitchen, where his parents had enjoyed preparing exotic dishes,
grabbed a butcher knife and yelled out: "Whoever is in this house is dead!"

But he found no intruder. He saw no sign of a break-in.

One of the first uniformed officers at the scene asked Charlie a question that
still angers him: "You think your father could have done this?"

Later came a second blow: He thought his youngest sister and brother had gone to
school that morning. But police found 9-year-old Joseph II in another bedroom.
Eleven-year-old Josephine was hanging from a pipe in the basement, wearing only
socks and a sweater.

All four had been strangled with the kind of cord used in venetian blinds.
Although none of them was raped, police found semen in the basement.

The Oteros would become known as the first victims of BTK, the serial killer who
has haunted Wichita for 30 years and claimed at least eight lives.

Charlie didn't know anything about BTK yet. But he knew what he had lost: his
childhood, his family. Life would never be the same.

Charlie Otero is 46 now. The former altar boy is an inmate at the Western New
Mexico Correctional Facility in Grants. He is serving a three-year sentence for
felony aggravated battery in a case involving domestic violence. He expects to be
released in about six months.

He spoke to a Wichita Eagle reporter in a prison office for four hours last
Tuesday. It was the second time he has talked publicly about the killing of his
family.

Prison has aged him, he says. He has a slightly graying dark goatee. His head is
shaved down to his copper-colored skin. He left a wispy knot of dark hair on the
back of his head.

He doesn't smoke. He runs twice a week and works on a road crew.

He says police have not asked him about his family's deaths since 1974. He thinks
they could gain something by interviewing him.

He refuses to consider that someone randomly preyed on his family, even though
they lived on a well-traveled street, even though someone could have easily
watched them.

He wonders if his father's sometimes secretive life in the military had something
to do with the killings.

Joseph Otero had been in the Air Force for more than 20 years and had retired as a
master sergeant less than a year before his death. He had been away from his
family on missions overseas for months at a time.

To Charlie Otero, it doesn't make sense that one killer took over his house and
tied up and killed four people in three different rooms.

In his mind, it was too much for one killer to control.

In his mind, his father was too tough, too street smart, too protective to let
someone come in and wipe out his family.

In his mind, his father let someone in because he knew or trusted the person. An
accomplice must have rushed his father, caught him off-guard.

Joseph Otero, a mechanic and flight instructor at a Rose Hill airport, had fought
his way out of New York's Spanish Harlem by becoming a champion boxer.

Julie Otero, who worked on a Coleman assembly line, could fend off an attacker.
She knew judo. She had seen to it that her children learned self-defense. She
watched them win judo awards.

The family also had a mean shepherd-mix dog named Lucky. The dog had been put in
the back yard that day, which was odd to Charlie, because Lucky always stayed
inside.

Police said they thought the killer entered the home after 8 a.m., while Joseph
Otero was taking his three oldest children to school. The younger children started
school at 9.

But Charlie Otero believes his father was there when the attack began, based on
police records he says he has seen.

The only way his father would let himself be tied up, he says, is if he thought it
would save his wife and children.

The Otero family had lived in Camden, N.J., then in Panama for about seven years,
then a few months in Puerto Rico with relatives before coming to Wichita months
before the killings.

Charlie Otero, the oldest of five, remembers his family being happy. His father
once made a memorable event out of buying a snow sled. He pulled his kids on it
along the store floor.

Charlie was just beginning to bond with his father, who had been away so much in
the military.

He worshipped his mother.

He went to Puerto Rico briefly for the funeral, but didn't attend it. He has never
seen his family's graves.

He and his surviving brother and sister moved in with a "good, clean-cut, American
family" in Albuquerque, Charlie says. His parents had known the family from their
military days.

But Charlie felt hollow. He went from being a straight-A student to being
inconsistent.

When he turned 18, he left the family. He and his siblings went separate ways.

He went to college and graduated from technical school, dreamed of becoming an
astronaut and stayed in New Mexico. He bounced from job to job, place to place. He
was a small-engine mechanic, what he called one of his best jobs in years, when he
entered prison two years ago.

Although he and his brother and sister haven't talked much, he says, "I love them
dearly." He won't discuss their lives; he says he wants to protect their privacy
and shield them from harm.

When he moved to Albuquerque after the killings, his new family asked him what he
wanted to do. "I said be left alone."

He has never talked to a counselor or therapist or priest about what he
experienced that day 30 years ago.

"I didn't need them. What were they going to tell me?" he says.

Over the years, he has dreamed about what his family thought as they died.

His mother had wished for one thing. "She wanted to die peacefully, in her sleep.
That's the one thing she didn't get. I just hope God was with her when she left,
giving her some comfort."

He still wonders if her torn and broken fingernails were a defensive injury or
torture.

He feels guilty. If he had been home that day, he says, he could have fought back,
could have helped save his family.

For a time, he used illegal drugs to escape the terrible thoughts.

"Drugs wouldn't take it away."

He trained himself to think of something else. "I shut it out. But it only takes
an instant to relive it all. I don't let myself dwell on it, so I won't lose my
mind."

He smiles and becomes animated as he recalls the brother who was killed. Joey was
a handsome boy. "Girls adored him." Joey knew how to throw a grown man down with a
judo move.

His little sister, Josephine, was beautiful, thin with long hair. She drew,
painted and wrote poems. She could become emotional.

His eyes turn watery as he tells how she once became upset, telling him he didn't
love her as much as the rest of the family. He did love her.

When, years later, he learned details about how she had been killed - things he
hesitates to speak of - it broke his heart one more time.

To whoever killed his family, he says, "come get me." He has obsessed about such
an encounter. He has dreamed of taking revenge against the killer or killers, of
keeping them alive and cutting them up, piece by piece.

"He's out there again," he says of BTK. "I want him to go down."

He speculates that BTK is 50 to 65 and resurfaced with letters recently after
getting out of prison or a mental institution or returning from overseas.

Asked how BTK might be caught, he responds: "His arrogance. A lucky cop. A
concerned citizen."

When Charlie Otero leaves prison, he says, "I want to enjoy my freedom. I want to
spend the rest of my life on a Harley."

He wants to fish. He has always been an outdoorsman. He had gone far in Scouts,
almost reaching the rank of Eagle before his family died.

And about those exams he took, the tests that meant so much to him at the time? He
aced them.

But he lost his family that same day. And in a way, he says, he failed them.

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© 2004, The Wichita Eagle (Wichita, Kan.).

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