Five Decades Later, Family of BTK's First Victims Still Can’t Discuss the Murders With One Another: 'It’s Just Too Much’ (Exclusive) By Johnny Dodd

Charlie Otero’s life was shattered one snowy afternoon in January 1974 when he was 15—and he’s spent much of his life struggling to put the pieces back together.

Otero had just trudged through the snow and returned to his family’s home in Wichita, Kan., when he spotted his dog Lucky standing in the backyard, something that puzzled him. “‘What are you doing our here, boy?’ I remember asking him because we never put him outside unless he had to go to the bathroom,” recalls Otero, now 67. He led the dog back into the house and immediately noticed his mother’s purse on the stove, its contents dumped out.

“Is anybody here,” he shouted. He soon heard his siblings Danny and Carmen, who had arrived home before him, yelling, “Charlie come quick.”

He ran to his parents’ bedroom and witnessed a scene that over five decades later still haunts him. His mother, Julie, had been strangled with a rope. His father, Joseph, had been suffocated with a plastic bag over his head, held in place with a belt. Both of his parents arms and legs had been bound tightly with rope.

“Danny or Carmen had taken the bag off my dad,” Otero recalls. “I tried to undo the ropes but I couldn’t. He had a belt around his throat and his tongue was half bitten off.”

Police arrived minutes later and the siblings soon learned that their younger brother Joey, 9, had been suffocated with a plastic bag and their 11-year-old sister Josephine had been hanged from a rafter in the basement.

“It felt like somebody had grabbed my chest, ripped it open, and pulled my heart out — and it stayed empty forever,” explains Otero.

What no one knew at the time was that the four members of the Otero family were the first victims of the serial killer who would become known as “BTK” for “bind, torture, kill,” a name he’d created for himself while terrorizing Wichita, Kan., between 1974 and 1991.   

He was finally arrested in February 2005 and revealed to be 59-year-old Dennis Rader, a married father of two who worked as a compliance officer for the city of Wichita, served as president of his church and was a longtime Boy Scout leader.

Rader’s double life as a doting father and savage murderer is the subject of the new Netflix documentary My Father, the BTK Killer, based on his daughter Kerri Rawson’s search to make sense of the secret double life her father hid from his family.

Not surprisingly, Otero hasn’t had the stomach to watch the 93-minute doc. “I tried to watch it,” he says. “But it just made me mad. Seeing all those pictures of him being a daddy. It was all a lie. He just used his family to cover up who he really was. He says he loved them. I don’t believe it one bit. A person like that is not capable of true love.”

The toll that Rader’s killings took on Otero’s life was profound and devastating. He and his siblings went to live with a military buddy of his father in New Mexico and the once straight-A student, who had aspired to be an astronaut, soon became something of a drifter.

“I didn’t care about anything anymore,” he says. “I had no permanent address, no ID, no nothing. I started racing motorcycles and had more crashes than I can even count. I was a bad boy for a long, long time. I don’t want to think about that life any more.”

Otero had just been paroled after a four-year prison sentence in New Mexico for an aggravated battery conviction in 2004 when BTK — whom investigators believed might have died in the years since his last murder in 1991 — resurfaced. Over a period of 11 months he began taunting police with letters and parcels he sent to the local media, which included drivers licenses he’d stolen from some of his victims.

With BTK in the news, Otero began making the rounds on any TV program that would have him, from Good Morning America to America’s Most Wanted, talking about his family and hoping to get a reaction from the mysterious serial killer. “I knew he was watching these shows and reacting to them,” he says. “I was baiting him, convinced that he was going to slip up and make a mistake that would allow him to be caught.”

And that’s basically what happened. One of the parcels he sent to a local TV station contained a floppy disk that, unknown to Rader, included metadata with the words “Christ Lutheran Church” and “Dennis.”

After investigators determined that someone named Dennis Rader was president of the church, they tracked down an old Pap smear from his daughter Kerri (taken when she was attending Kansas State University) and compared it with semen found at the Otero residence after the murders.

Shortly after his arrest, Rader confessed to the ten murders. “At that point all I could think about was trying to figure out how I was going to get my hands around his neck and kill him in front of everybody,” Otero says, who claims he planned to attack Rader at his sentencing hearing in August 2005.

But that never happened. On the way to court, Otero learned that his 12-year-old son Joseph, named after Otero’s father and younger brother, had just been placed into an induced coma after being hit by a car.

Otero says he soon found himself asking God to help his son pull through and suddenly realized that his plans of killing Rader no longer made sense. “I realized, ‘How can I ask God to save my boy if I’m going to go commit a murder?’” says Otero. “That’s the day I found religion.”

His son survived, and three years later Otero moved back to Wichita with a woman he’d met after Rader’s arrest, who had helped raise funds to bring family members of BTK’s victims to court during Rader’s hearings.

Since 2008 he’s lived in the Wichita suburb of Park City, a mile from Rader’s former longtime home, which has since been demolished. And until recently, he worked at a motorcycle shop in nearby El Dorado, Kan., three miles from where Rader, now 80, is serving his ten life sentences at the El Dorado Correctional Facility.

“I would rather live anywhere else in the world,” says Otero. “But it turned out that this is where I needed to be.”

These days Otero — who is preparing to launch a podcast, called Zero Degrees of Separation, on his family’s murders with Brian Wegerle, the nephew of BTK victim Vicki Wegerle — is busy keeping the promise he made after his son’s accident.

“I promised the Lord that I would spread the word,” says Otero, who has spent years traveling to prisons and jails across the state, sharing what refers to as his story of “hope and redemption.”

Otero insists that he’s been to nearly every penal institution in Kansas except for the facility where Rader is currently incarcerated. A prison official there, he says, once told him that there’s “no crime I can commit that’ll get me in there.”

That’s okay with Otero. “I figure if I can keep one guy from getting out of prison and killing someone,” he says, “then I’ll have done what I promised.”

He also insists that the peace he’s found isn’t “closure” because the pain over Rader’s murders is still terribly real for both him and his surviving siblings. “I can’t tell you how they feel about it because we never talk about it,” he says. “We still can’t. It’s just too much.”