Charlie Otero Interview About BTK

A transcript of Catherine Crier’s interview with Charlie Otero on Feb. 3, 2005:

CRIER: Charlie, even now this has got to be so horrific, but can, can you for the viewers who don’t know the story, take us back to that day when you came home from school?

OTERO: Yes, umm. It was uh January, 1974 and I had just uh finished testing in school and came home and se… found my family murdered, tied up, tor… they had been tortured and killed. My mother and father were in their bedroom. Um I could sense and feel the terror and the fear that they had felt. I saw my mother as I had never seen anyone before not even on TV and uh it was pretty horrible. It was quite the life changing experience for me.

CRIER: Now you, you never had to confront the rooms that held your brother and sister because you went for the police and the they later told you what they found. What did you understand that situation was?

OTERO: Well it had…Well when I first found my parents my younger brother and sister were already in the room, crying and yelling for me when I first come in the house so my first uh priority was to get them out of the house and uh that I did and uh I didn’t really have a chance to look through the rest of the house. I was under the impression at that time that my, my baby brother and sister had gone to school and were still there and uh my most important thought was to keep them from coming home and finding the scene, so uh that’s how.

CRIER: All right but in fact they had been, they had been killed and and uh killed in relativity brutal fashion, we don’t have to discuss.. but, but in various ways very brutal fashion. Let me ask you something. Let’s get to some of your suspicions about this. Your dad… ex-military?

OTERO: Yes, he had recently retired from the United States Air Force where he had been an air commando and an instructor for the Inter-American Air Force Academy.

CRIER: All right, you’ve mentioned before that you wonder if this wasn’t somehow related to his military service. What about his service that you know would make you think that there could be a connection?

OTERO: Well, as far as officially, um what I know about my father’s uh activities in the Air Force, um is not very much, but… prior to the murders I had overheard a conversation my father had made on the phone one night and he had asked me to leave my room so that he could use my room for a private call which was totally uncharacteristic of him and being the nosy little kid that I was at the time I put my ear to the door and heard a conversation that pretty much shocked me, scared me back to where I had been sent.

CRIER: Well tell me what it, what, what was said?

OTERO: So um I have reasons…

CRIER: What was said?

OTERO: I heard. I heard my father tell the other person on the .. on the other end of the line that he needed to tell somebody what he had been doing for the last several years and that he had worked for a certain organization that I am not uh uh allowed to talk about right now. They know who they are. They’ve denied it all these years but they know who they are and they know who he worked for.

CRIER: All right, what we have though after the fact, uh after the murder of a good portion of your family then we’ve got individual murders in the 70s and now we’ve got this link to one in 1986, but these seem very different. If that was some sort of retaliatory killing or trying to keep your father quiet, slaughtering the family like that then why would this individual move on to … a much more, I hate to say traditional serial killer pattern?

OTERO: Well that’s one of the problems with this case and uh the problem that the police are having in tying all this is in … there are no ties between the, the other uh murders and my family. I believe sincerely with all my heart that my family was killed for information that my father had. Um for reasons um known to uh the authorities and to myself, uh my father was uh untied and made to write something in the middle of the session, I do believe. And um once they got that information that the, they went ahead with the killing. And my theory and my thoughts are that one of the killers if there was more than one which I believe there was more um got off on it. He liked it and uh he decided to go off on his own uh little journey through life as being a serial killer.

LATER IN THE SEGMENT--After Crier speaks to Larry Hatteberg, reporter, Crier goes back to Charlie Otero and allows him to issue a challenge to BTK to meet him “anytime, anywhere, anyplace” and “let’s finish this story.”