Where the hell did he come from?
he wondered.
Why didn’t I know about him?
The man stood there watching Rader with a grin on his face.
In his account of the murder penned a few days later, Rader recalled Otero saying, “Did my brother-in-law put you up to this? Come on, tell me.”
Rader held up his pistol and took aim at his head. His wife shrieked.
“Don’t hurt us,” she stammered. “We . . . we don’t have any money. Take anything you want. Anything. Just don’t hurt us.”
The little boy stood beside his parents, his mouth hanging open, looking as though he’d just seen the devil. Tears were beginning to streak down his sister’s cheeks. Rader ordered them to walk into the front room, then told them the story he’d cooked up to keep them calm.
“I just broke out of the penitentiary,” he said, as the children started crying. “The cops are after me. I need a car, money, and food.”
His gun hand was shaking. He was nervous, and the father knew it. So Otero tried to quiet his family down, telling them that everything would be okay if they’d settle down. Rader ordered the father to place his wallet on the washing machine, then motioned for them to go into the family room. From out of nowhere, a mean-looking Heinz-57 mutt came running into the room, barking.
“Get the dog out of here,” he told the father. “But don’t even think about trying any funny tricks. This is an automatic, filled with hollow-points. You ever seen what they can do to someone?”
I read how Mr. Otero tried to reassure Rader that if he’d let him put the dog out, everything would be fine.
“He hates the cold,” he said, grabbing the animal by the scruff of his neck. Rader allowed him to open up the kitchen door and dump the dog into the backyard, but he watched Otero like a hawk all the while. At first he wanted to tie them up in the family room, but when he spotted the back bedroom, he ordered the family to walk back there and lie down on their stomachs on the bed with their hands behind their backs.
Landwehr told me that Rader originally had fantasized about having sex with the mother and daughter, then strangling them. But as Rader stood there in the family’s home, he wasn’t so sure. He knew only that he needed to do something, fast. Lying there face down on the bed, they were beginning to panic again, and it scared him to think what might happen if he lost control of the situation. He couldn’t let that happen. He stood behind them, watching them, especially the father. At any moment, they were going to turn on him. He could feel it.
“I gotta get out to California,” he said while fumbling around in his oversized pockets for his rope, gags, and tape. “If I can get out there, I’ll be safe . . . I’m gonna have to take your car.”
“Take it,” the mother pleaded. “You can have it. We want you to have it.”
He was desperate to keep things from unraveling, to stay in control. That was what he wanted more than anything else—to finally have absolute and total control over another human being, to bind another person up the way he felt bound and hemmed in by his rotten life, then to cinch those ropes up tight. It was what he’d always dreamed about. And at that moment, after more than two decades of fantasizing, he realized that all his dreams and more were on the verge of being realized.
He worked on the father first, ordering him off the bed and onto the floor. He wrapped tape around his wrists, over and over again. When he was confident that Otero couldn’t break free no matter how hard he tried, he moved his attention to the mother. Rader knew there was little risk of the father’s attempting to run from the house for help. Because Otero feared for the safety of his wife and children, the last thing he’d want to do was be seen as a threat to the man who’d burst into his home brandishing a pistol. And this made Rader feel just a bit calmer. With the father out of commission, he felt his confidence return. And as he wrapped the tape around the mother’s delicate wrists and ankles, he began to talk to them, asking them to tell him their names, where the father worked, and what was the best way to get out of town.
The mother’s name was Julie. Her husband was Joseph. Their children were Josephine and Joey. Knowing their names made Rader feel better. They felt more real that way, more vulnerable. For as long as he could remember, whenever he fantasized about all the terrible things he yearned to do to his victims, he had known that details like names were important.
For the children, he employed cotton cord, the type used for venetian blinds, purchased at a hardware store near his house. The kids were both crying, but trying their best to act brave. Afterwards, he tied what was left of the cord around Joseph’s wrists and ankles.
When he finished, he stepped back and stared down over the family lying beneath him, tied up like farm animals. Nobody was going anywhere, he thought.
“My . . . my hands are going numb,” Julie told him. “Is there any way you could loosen this just a bit?”
According to his journal entry, Rader apologized, somewhat embarrassed that he’d resorted to so much force. He peeled off the tape and asked her to wiggle her fingers a little. In his pocket, he located another cord and wrapped it around her wrists. Joseph explained that his ribs hurt because of a car accident he’d just had. He wondered if there was some way Rader might let him change his position on the floor. Dennis untied him and let him scoot across the floor just a bit. He placed a coat beneath Otero, then retied his wrists together.
“You can tie my feet up to the bedpost,” Joseph suggested. And that was just what Rader did. He gagged the family with strips he cut from a pillowcase he found in a closet. The little girl was sobbing now, tears rolling down her cheeks. Her hair was so long that he had a tough time tying the gag into place. No matter how he tried, her locks kept getting tangled up in the strip as he tried to tie it off.
“I’m sorry for pinching your hair,” he wrote that he told the young girl.
Most people reading Rader’s words might be struck by what appeared to be an almost gentle, compassionate streak, as if perhaps he was somehow concerned about the well-being of his victims. Unfortunately, that would be the wrong assumption. Rader’s tactic was the same calculated MO used by other violent offenders I’d spoken with. The goal is to lull victims into believing that if they’ll cooperate with their attacker, they won’t be hurt. Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth.
Julie’s purse sat on the dresser, and he began rifling through it, searching for her car keys. Things were becoming clearer now. He could feel the ideas jelling inside his head. He’d entered into this thing with a vague idea of the outcome, but now things were taking shape faster than he could control them. One thing was certain—when
this
was all over, he’d escape from their house using their car.
“Take whatever you want,” Julie called to him from the bed. “We have a typewriter. Take that. You can pawn it.”
He didn’t say a word. He just walked over and fished out the car keys he’d spotted in Joseph’s front pocket. Joseph tried to make eye contact with him as he removed the keys, and Dennis stared at him, unblinking.
In his journal, Rader described walking out into the living room and standing there, staring at their belongings, much of which were still packed up in cardboard moving boxes, as if the family had just moved into the house. It was quiet out here, away from the chaos and panic in the bedroom. He could hear himself breathing and the thumping of his heart.
Decision time,
he told himself, drumming his fingers on the side of his head.
Decision time . . . Decision time.
He plunged his hands into his pockets and dumped everything out onto the sofa—the plastic bags, the cords, his knife and gun.
They’re going down . . . They’re all going down.
He grabbed what he needed and hurried back into the bedroom. Everyone except Joseph was sobbing. Rader walked over to Joseph, pulled a plastic bag down over his head, looped his preknotted cord around his neck, and pulled tight. He did the same thing to the boy. Joseph was attempting to shout at him through his gag. His words were horribly muffled, but Rader could still make out what he was saying.
“What are you doing?” Otero cried. “What are you doing?”
And that was when all hell started to break loose. They were on to him now. There was no use pretending any longer. Everyone began screaming.
“BE QUIET,” Rader ordered. “EVERYBODY SHUT UP.”
Dennis didn’t like this one bit. Nothing he’d read in those detective magazines of his had prepared him for this. He’d always considered those articles to be vocational primers for the kind of work he’d dreamed about doing. But now it turned out that all those stories had been painted with deceivingly broad strokes.
Why was this turning out to be so difficult?
The boy was thrashing about on the floor, and so was Joseph. His head was rocking back and forth in quick, violent spasms. If his feet hadn’t been tied to the bedpost, there’s no telling where he would have moved to.
Meanwhile, up on the bed, the mother and daughter shrieked so loudly that the noise seemed to fill every inch of the house. Rader slammed his gloved hand down on top of them, then attempted to cover their gagged mouths with his hands. They both begged him to take the bags off Joseph’s and Joey’s heads. For some reason, Rader reached down and yanked the bag off the boy’s head. Joey’s eyes were closed, and he was still. The father appeared to have rubbed a hole in the bag. Vomit was smeared around his face, and his chest was moving up and down in slow, labored movements. When Rader glanced over, he was surprised to see that the boy’s eyelids were fluttering open.
“Please,” Josephine cried. “Please go. You can leave. We won’t tell. We won’t tell anyone. Nobody will say a word.”
He stood there and surveyed the scene, trying to catch his breath and calm his head. For a brief instant, he thought about getting the hell out of there. But then he realized they could identify him. They’d seen his face. If he left now, he might as well drive straight to the cops.
From out of his pocket, he pulled a coil of thin rope. When Julie saw it, she began screaming again, begging him to stop all this. He quickly looped the rope around her neck, pulled tight, and began to strangle her slowly.
“Mommy,” Josephine cried out. “Mommy, I love you.”
“Be calm,” Rader told the girl, according to his journal. “She’ll pass out soon . . . She’ll go to sleep.”
Julie was gasping now, staring straight up into his eyes. Not blinking. “Mama,” the little girl cried out. “What are you doing to my mama?” Then, all at once, Julie’s eyes shut, and she passed out. Afterwards, Rader removed the rope, slipped it around Joseph’s neck, and yanked it tight.
“Be careful,” the little girl whispered when she saw what he was doing. “Please be careful.”
“He’ll go to sleep, too,” he told the girl. “Once he stops fighting the rope, he’ll go to sleep.”
Rader wrote that his hands hurt by the time he finally finished off the father. And that surprised him. He never thought that killing someone would be so difficult.
The little girl, he noticed, watched without a trace of emotion as he yanked the rope from her father’s reddened neck, then looped it over hers. Her eyes began to bulge as he pulled on it. Rader recalled that she called out, “Mama . . . Mama . . . Mama.” Then her tiny lids dropped, and she passed out. He was staring down at the girl’s body when he noticed that her mother’s head was moving from side to side. He tied a clove hitch in the rope, then slipped it over Julie’s head. Just as he was about to tighten it, her eyes fluttered open wide and stared straight into his.
“May God have mercy on your soul,” she whispered.
He couldn’t believe what he’d heard. What a helluva thing to say, he thought while tugging on the rope with all his strength. Blood vessels burst in her eyes from the pressure. Blood trickled from her mouth and nose. The sight spooked him so that he grabbed a nearby pillow and covered her face.
In the corner of the room, he spotted the boy’s body, twitching. It struck him that Joey was pretending to be asleep. Rader walked out into the living room, found two more plastic bags, and returned to the bedroom. After wrapping a T-shirt around Joey’s head, he covered the boy’s head with a plastic bag, then another T-shirt. He finished the job off with a rope and clove hitch.
“I can’t breathe,” Joey shouted when Rader tightened his makeshift noose. “I can’t breathe.”
Picking the boy up, Rader carried him into his bedroom and lay him down on his bed so that he could watch him suffocate and not be disturbed by the others in the bedroom. But Joey’s body was convulsing so, struggling against the inevitable, that he quickly rolled off the mattress and dropped onto the floor. Rader didn’t bother picking him back up and decided to let him die there. Afterward, he returned to the others and decided that the prudent thing to do would be to place a plastic bag over Joseph’s head, which he then cinched tight with a belt. The little girl was still lying motionless on the bed. Rader watched her for a moment and then got an idea.