Wichita ? 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.

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.

Questions persist

Charlie 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 whether 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.

Shattered family

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.”

“Come get me”

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.”

What’s ahead

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.