Speaker 1: Pushkin. I'm Dana Goodyear. Lost Hills is back with another
Speaker 1: season two bonus episode. This one comes courtesy of our
Speaker 1: tip line, where a few months ago, I got the
Speaker 1: kind of email from a stranger that I live for.
Speaker 1: Will there be more episodes? Regarding Fred Railer? The sender asked,
Speaker 1: I worked with Jean the dacy drowned Jean as in
Speaker 1: Jean Railer, Fred's first wife, the mother of his daughters,
Speaker 1: Heidi and Kirsten. I'd been searching for someone who could
Speaker 1: shed light on that day, Friday, October fifteenth, nineteen seventy six,
Speaker 1: when Jean, a flight attendant for United, flew from lax
Speaker 1: to Chicago O'Hare and back, went home to Malibu, got
Speaker 1: in the hot tub with Fred to unwind, and then
Speaker 1: somehow ended up drowning. Her death wasn't investigated as a
Speaker 1: homicide until Fred's second wife, Verna, and his eight year
Speaker 1: old steps on Doug, drowned under equally suspicious circumstances less
Speaker 1: than five years later. My name's Karen McLean and I
Speaker 1: was a flight attendant for United Airlines. Karen mcclean's the
Speaker 1: one that wrote that letter. She told me she'd stumbled
Speaker 1: on the podcast totally by accident. My daughter put Spotify
Speaker 1: on my phone and I am so lacking in technology
Speaker 1: and stuff, and I was just kind of browsing through
Speaker 1: and I came across this and I saw Verna and
Speaker 1: Doug and I thought, I wonder if this is about Jeane.
Speaker 1: Karen flew with Jean just twice, once the Sunday before
Speaker 1: her drowning, and then on the very day she drowned,
Speaker 1: we flew Chicago. Turns it was when we were first
Speaker 1: able to be moms, and we only worked two days
Speaker 1: a week and we were home every night, so it
Speaker 1: was a great way to be a mom and still
Speaker 1: have a job. But we'd check in like a six
Speaker 1: forty five in the morning and fly to Chicago at
Speaker 1: seven forty five, sit there for a couple hours, and
Speaker 1: then fly back the same day. So we were gone
Speaker 1: for about twelve hours, and then we'd get on the tram,
Speaker 1: go over to the parking lot, and go home. I
Speaker 1: normally got home about seven thirty at night, so you know,
Speaker 1: it was just a long day. Most of us were
Speaker 1: young moms that did the Chicago churns. It was pretty
Speaker 1: much I don't remember anybody that wasn't a mom. You know,
Speaker 1: flying those trips, those flights Flight one hundred from Lax
Speaker 1: to Chicago and flight one eleven from Chicago back to
Speaker 1: Lax were always packed. It was mostly businessmen at that time.
Speaker 1: You know, it was before computers, so every you know,
Speaker 1: there was a lot of business travel. In fact, in
Speaker 1: the sixties we had trips that were just primarily men
Speaker 1: from Chicago to Newark and they were all men trips,
Speaker 1: and United catered to them. They'd have all these little
Speaker 1: gifts that they'd give all these men and stuff, but
Speaker 1: it was basically a businessman that traveled back and forth
Speaker 1: all the time in first class. Karen remembers that the
Speaker 1: Sunday before Jean drown, Jean was working in coach. It
Speaker 1: was the first time they'd met, and they started to
Speaker 1: chat and Karen got a little window into Jean's world.
Speaker 1: She was working the lower deck galley on A seven
Speaker 1: forty seven and I went down and the first time
Speaker 1: I had ever talked to her, and I went down
Speaker 1: for a break and we were just talking about our kids.
Speaker 1: At the time, Jean and Fred's older daughter, Heidi was
Speaker 1: six and Kirsten was two. The family was living on
Speaker 1: Colpine Drive in Malibu, and there was a lot going on.
Speaker 1: Jean was telling friends she was madly in love with
Speaker 1: Fred's friend Dick fell though In, and that she was
Speaker 1: miserable with Fred, and that Fred had threatened to kill
Speaker 1: her if he ever caught her cheating. Jean was stretched thin,
Speaker 1: falling headlong into a radical self improvement group called Life Spring,
Speaker 1: rapidly losing weight, manically planning her future without Fred, working
Speaker 1: twelve hour days for United Airlines, and in the gaps
Speaker 1: being mom to two young girls. She didn't say any
Speaker 1: of this to Karen, but she did ask her for
Speaker 1: some advice, and she said that Heidi was going to
Speaker 1: have her tonsils taken out the following Friday, And she said,
Speaker 1: do you think I should take the day off? And
Speaker 1: I said, well, if it were my daughter, I would.
Speaker 1: But Ge didn't take Karen's advice. On Friday, she showed
Speaker 1: up for work to fly the Chicago Turn again. And
Speaker 1: Friday came and she was there and I said, I
Speaker 1: thought Heidi was getting her tonsils out. This time, Jean
Speaker 1: was working in the first class galley, preparing multi course
Speaker 1: meals for a couple dozen passengers. She was acting normal,
Speaker 1: According to testimony later given by her supervisor on the flight,
Speaker 1: but the fact that Jean was there at all struck
Speaker 1: Karen as strange to be a mom of a six
Speaker 1: year old in a hospital. I think that I would
Speaker 1: have been more active, you know, or concerned, and she
Speaker 1: didn't seem to be that now that I think of it.
Speaker 1: She was kind of distant, and she said, well, Fred
Speaker 1: was taking care of it. Fred was taking care of it.
Speaker 1: He had it handled. That was his style, organized, meticulous rolling.
Speaker 1: Later on, Jean's fellow stortises and many of her friends
Speaker 1: would question what Fred was taking care of and what
Speaker 1: his motives were. Picture Jean. When she met Fred, she
Speaker 1: was in her late twenties unmarried. According to one of
Speaker 1: her friends, she was starting to wonder if she would
Speaker 1: get married. She was a knockout, dark hair, slim, athletic frame,
Speaker 1: fun loving, if a bit high strung. She would probably
Speaker 1: have been wearing a blue flower patterned mumu when she
Speaker 1: met her future husband on his way back from Hawaii.
Speaker 1: That was the uniform for United's Honolulu route, which Jean
Speaker 1: was working at the time. Back then, the airlines nakedly
Speaker 1: catered to mail business travelers, selling the attentive women on
Speaker 1: the flight as one of the attractions of air travel.
Speaker 1: On Southwest the storedis uniform was hot pants and go
Speaker 1: go boots, and pretty much across the industry, the rules
Speaker 1: stipulated no wedding rings. Here's Karen McLean again. When we
Speaker 1: first started flying, we couldn't be married, and we couldn't
Speaker 1: have kids. While you could have kids, they would put
Speaker 1: them up for adoption, but you couldn't be married and
Speaker 1: you had to quit when you were thirty two. Ironically,
Speaker 1: the profession was full of ambitious young women who found
Speaker 1: freedom and independence, financial and otherwise through working for the airlines.
Speaker 1: This is Becky Sprecker. She started working for PanAm in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy two, two weeks after graduating from UNC Chapel Hill.
Speaker 1: Back then, women were just starting to delay marriage and
Speaker 1: they were thinking about maybe going to medical school or
Speaker 1: law school. The major careers that existed during those days,
Speaker 1: of course, were being a secretary, or being a nurse,
Speaker 1: or a teacher or a stewardess. We lived kind of
Speaker 1: like little rich girls without the trust fund. We stayed
Speaker 1: in intercontinental hotels, which were wonderful upscale hotels because PanAm
Speaker 1: owned intercontinental hotels. We were young we were high spirited.
Speaker 1: We had I would say, the ideal prescription for a
Speaker 1: pretty freewheeling lifestyle in the seventies. I mean, we had educations,
Speaker 1: we had a job, we were making some money, We
Speaker 1: could fly anywhere in the world. We wanted to go
Speaker 1: on a discount, and we had birth control. Flying for
Speaker 1: the airlines was glamorous. Well back then, in the nineteen seventies,
Speaker 1: famous people did fly commercially. That's a big difference between
Speaker 1: then and now because now they have their own private aircraft.
Speaker 1: Becky said, a friend of hers on the La to
Speaker 1: Tahiti route had an unforgettable star sighting. She reported for
Speaker 1: briefing and poppierte to come back to Los Angeles and
Speaker 1: they said, well, you have Marlon Brando in first class,
Speaker 1: and he was married to a Tahitian actress and I
Speaker 1: think they had a child. He had filmed Mutiny on
Speaker 1: the Bounty down there and had met her. She was
Speaker 1: his love interest in the movie, and he flew frequently
Speaker 1: on pan Am to La. So she only had four
Speaker 1: people in the front. So when they took off, she
Speaker 1: sent the other stewardess to the back to help out
Speaker 1: back there because they were they had a heavier load
Speaker 1: back there, and she was getting ready to do eggs
Speaker 1: to order for the passengers, and the next thing she knows,
Speaker 1: mister Brando comes into the galley and said, well, I
Speaker 1: know how to scramble eggs. I'll help with that, which
Speaker 1: he did, and of course the passengers were delighted. And
Speaker 1: after the service was complete, he said, well, why don't
Speaker 1: you sit down and chat. So she sits down beside him.
Speaker 1: All of our famous people were always in one egg
Speaker 1: And she sits down beside him, and he gives her
Speaker 1: a shell leat that he had on and she still hasn't,
Speaker 1: by the way, and he lit her cigarette. Now this
Speaker 1: was in the days when you could smoke on the plane,
Speaker 1: and somebody took a picture of him, and it's absolutely
Speaker 1: the cutest thing in the world. But that kind of
Speaker 1: thing happened a lot. Then there was the time Becky
Speaker 1: found herself on a movie set. I was flying with
Speaker 1: my ring mate and we had some movie producers on
Speaker 1: the flight out of Los Angeles. They'd come through Honolulu,
Speaker 1: they had to connect and they I said, well, you know,
Speaker 1: what are you guys doing. Well, we're making a movie
Speaker 1: that's being directed by Francis Ford Coppola, and I said, oh, okay,
Speaker 1: you know, well what is it? And they said, well,
Speaker 1: it's based on Joseph Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness, and
Speaker 1: it was it was apocalypse Now, and they invited us
Speaker 1: up to the set. If you can imagine, it was
Speaker 1: supposed to be Neutraang and this young actor who had
Speaker 1: just arrived it was his first day on the set.
Speaker 1: We flew up there with him and it was Martin
Speaker 1: Sheen and I've never been on a movie set before
Speaker 1: or since, but that was an incredibly educational experience. Let's
Speaker 1: say it was a crazy kind of environment. And of
Speaker 1: course we all know that in the seventies there was
Speaker 1: a lot of cocaine and a lot of drugs on
Speaker 1: movie sets, and this was no exception. According to Becky,
Speaker 1: even though the airline industry trafficked in stereotypes about women
Speaker 1: and catered to mail clientele, it was also a hotbed
Speaker 1: of second wave feminism. It used to be that you
Speaker 1: could you could not be married and fly, and they sued,
Speaker 1: and they got that changed. You couldn't have children and fly,
Speaker 1: so they sued and that was changed. So I think
Speaker 1: that they were really sort of trailblazing and in a
Speaker 1: profession where you had to be put on the scales
Speaker 1: and you were hired for how you looked, and you
Speaker 1: had to wear makeup and all of that. It was
Speaker 1: a very It was a big contradiction, and we were
Speaker 1: the most independent of women because we could go anywhere
Speaker 1: in the world that we wanted to go. So wait
Speaker 1: a minute, you guys had to get weight in. We did.
Speaker 1: That did go by the wayside later on, but they
Speaker 1: put you on the scales every now and then to
Speaker 1: make sure you weren't getting too heavy. I was five
Speaker 1: three and the weight maximum I think was one hundred
Speaker 1: and fifteen with your clothes on. So we would starve
Speaker 1: for a few days when we knew we were meeting
Speaker 1: with our supervisors. To make sure that we, you know,
Speaker 1: weren't over the maximum. They put would put you on
Speaker 1: weight check and you had to go in and weigh
Speaker 1: every two weeks. Jean, who gave birth to Heidi in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy, was a pioneer of the new policy that
Speaker 1: allowed women to resume flying after they'd had kids. I
Speaker 1: remember they were called the returning mothers, and I the
Speaker 1: first ones maybe I saw were in seventy two seventy three,
Speaker 1: right around in there. That turned the job into a
Speaker 1: career because people could combine having families with flying. Before
Speaker 1: it had been sort of a lark for a year
Speaker 1: or two to find a husband and get married and leave,
Speaker 1: you know, and quit. But now they were combining it
Speaker 1: with raising their families, having a decent paying job with
Speaker 1: good benefits. That would have been a source of stability
Speaker 1: for Geene as she contemplated leaving Fred. She had a
Speaker 1: career and some financial wherewithal through United. Jean also had
Speaker 1: a twenty four thousand dollars life insurance policy, which five
Speaker 1: months before her death had been changed to make Fred
Speaker 1: the beneficial and if he predeceased, her named Heidi and
Speaker 1: Kirsten co beneficiaries. When Jean died, there were a number
Speaker 1: of women who knew how troubled her marriage was and
Speaker 1: how scared she was it. Fred. Jean was a sharer,
Speaker 1: and back then being a flight attendant, you were part
Speaker 1: of a sisterhood. We called it jump seat therapy, you know,
Speaker 1: when everybody was asleep and you finally sat down with
Speaker 1: a cup of coffee on the jump seat and started
Speaker 1: talking to a friend of yours. That you hadn't flown
Speaker 1: with for a long time, and you got caught up
Speaker 1: on their families and how things were going or who
Speaker 1: they were dating. Jean's flight attendant friends were saddened and
Speaker 1: confused by her death, and more than that, they were
Speaker 1: alarmed had Fred done this to her and made it
Speaker 1: seem like an accident. When homicide detectives went to interview
Speaker 1: Fred about the deaths of his second wife, Verna and
Speaker 1: his stepson Doug in nineteen eighty one, one of the
Speaker 1: many things they found strange was that Fred wanted them
Speaker 1: to read a document he'd typed up about the death
Speaker 1: of his first wife, Jean. I'm going to read a
Speaker 1: little bit of it because it's so deliberate, so oddly specific.
Speaker 1: It uses military time, like Fred is writing out a
Speaker 1: report for his day job at the naval base at
Speaker 1: Point Magoo. The document is titled Accident Narrative. October fifteenth,
Speaker 1: seventy six, zero four hundred hours, Jean and I woke
Speaker 1: up to the alarm clock. She got dressed and started
Speaker 1: her makeup. I put coffee on and sat in her
Speaker 1: bathroom talking as she put her makeup on. Zero five
Speaker 1: thirty Jean left for a Los Angeles International Airport for
Speaker 1: a turnaround flight to Chicago. I showered, feed dogs, and
Speaker 1: prepared a bag for Kirsten to take to babysitters. Zero
Speaker 1: seven thirty. Took Kirsten to babysitters and went on to
Speaker 1: Rogue Lays Hospital in Thousand Oaks to be with Heidi
Speaker 1: while she had her tonsils and adenoids removed. Seventeen hundred hours,
Speaker 1: feed Heidi popsicle, jello and more fruit juice, read to her,
Speaker 1: then put her back to bed. Nineteen thirty in process
Speaker 1: of changing Kirsten into pajamas when Jean got in from
Speaker 1: her trip twenty hundred Jean played with Kirsten and finished
Speaker 1: putting her to bed. Jeane and I sat in kitchen
Speaker 1: and I gave her my report on Heidi discussed her
Speaker 1: trip while I fixed myself some soup. While the soup
Speaker 1: was heating, I went out and turned on the tub heater.
Speaker 1: And then Fred's clipped matter of fact description of parenting
Speaker 1: and spousing shifts into a more expansive register. Twenty two
Speaker 1: hundred hours. Jean shut off the house lights and came out.
Speaker 1: We sat in the There's a word missing here, and
Speaker 1: I assume he forgot to write hot tub, discussing the
Speaker 1: phone call and Heidi for about fifteen minutes. Jean sat
Speaker 1: up on the edge of the tub and said she
Speaker 1: was hot, then asked what I was drinking. I said
Speaker 1: I had a swallow of beer left, and she drank it.
Speaker 1: She then said she would really like a glass of wine.
Speaker 1: I said okay and got out of the tub. She said,
Speaker 1: would you mind checking Kirston as she does not have
Speaker 1: her usual three diapers on? I said okay, and she
Speaker 1: kissed me and said thank you, honey. Jean was still
Speaker 1: sitting on the edge of the tub when I walked away.
Speaker 1: Walked up to the house and into Kirston's room. She
Speaker 1: was soaked, so I changed her and put her back
Speaker 1: to bed. Went into the kitchen and pulled a new
Speaker 1: bottle of wine, used a cork puller to open it,
Speaker 1: grabbed two glasses and some ice, turned off the kitchen light,
Speaker 1: and went outside. At this point Fred's style becomes almost novelistic.
Speaker 1: My eyes were not used to the darkness, and I
Speaker 1: slowly scuffed along the walk towards the tub. I called
Speaker 1: out softly Jean for no real reason. When I was
Speaker 1: halfway there. I was not surprised when I heard no answer,
Speaker 1: as the low bubbling of the tub usually masked low conversation.
Speaker 1: Then I went over to the tub, saw she was
Speaker 1: not there, and saw the German shepherd and jean at
Speaker 1: the same time. Jeanne was faced down in the pool
Speaker 1: with her arms outstretched hands a few feet away from
Speaker 1: the wide built in steps of the pool. The dog
Speaker 1: was crouched down, just looking at her, not making a sound.
Speaker 1: After pulling jean out of the pool, Fred started mouth
Speaker 1: to mouth. The paramedics arrived and took her to Westlake Hospital.
Speaker 1: She was brain dead. Fred's friends and supporters would call
Speaker 1: it the United Airline's rumor mill, this engine of disquiet
Speaker 1: that started to hum. Saturday morning, Karen mcclean's phone rang.
Speaker 1: She'd flown with jean the day before, and she happened
Speaker 1: to live near the hospital where Jeanne was being treated
Speaker 1: in the ICU. I was living in Westlake Village and
Speaker 1: a friend of mine called and she said, have you
Speaker 1: heard about jean And I said no. She said she
Speaker 1: drowned last night, and she said she's supposed to be
Speaker 1: it's Westlake Hospital. Can you go over and see if
Speaker 1: you can find something out Karen was shocked, but things
Speaker 1: only got more confusing once she got to the hospital.
Speaker 1: So I went over to the hospital and I ended
Speaker 1: up talking to a nurse and I just said, you know,
Speaker 1: could you tell me what room Jean Roller is in?
Speaker 1: But she couldn't get in to see Jean, who was
Speaker 1: being kept alive on a respirator, And she couldn't find
Speaker 1: any of Jean's family. And Jean's dad was a pilot,
Speaker 1: and I think her sister, Linda was a flight attendant.
Speaker 1: So I went over to the hospital thinking that somebody
Speaker 1: would be there, and nobody was there. Jean's sisters later
Speaker 1: told detectives that Fred was running point, making the medical
Speaker 1: decisions and keeping them out of the loop. So Karen
Speaker 1: came back from the hospital empty handed, no information to
Speaker 1: share with the other flight attendants, and then nothing was
Speaker 1: ever said. It was very hushed up. Barbara Warner, a
Speaker 1: fellow flight attendant, feared the worst. She had been roommates
Speaker 1: with Jean before Jean's marriage, and they were still extremely close.
Speaker 1: She told investigators in nineteen eighty one that Jean's death
Speaker 1: five years earlier still didn't sit right with her. She
Speaker 1: knew too much to take Fred's story at face value.
Speaker 1: Here's Barbara talking to an investigator about the morning after
Speaker 1: Jean's drowning. I got home for a trip on Saturday
Speaker 1: after the Friday incident drowning, and my first question to
Speaker 1: whether was mother with Red Spans and Marma at the point,
Speaker 1: I don't know. I'm at the airport, I had attat
Speaker 1: I don't know anything. Jean had told Barbara and others
Speaker 1: that Fred was threatening her, saying if she cheated on him,
Speaker 1: he'd kill her, and she was cheating on him. She
Speaker 1: was in love with his friend Dick. Well, if excuse me,
Speaker 1: I said he was going to kill her favorite Carter
Speaker 1: fooling around. You don't think he had an idea that
Speaker 1: she was fooling around. He may have been, I would say,
Speaker 1: touring the end before her death. I would say that
Speaker 1: he was beginning to feel helpless because he knew at
Speaker 1: that point that the marriage was so bad. Then Fred
Speaker 1: left for Hawaii on a long work trip. And I
Speaker 1: think that when Fred went to Ka, I knew. I
Speaker 1: think he really knew to think her in desperate strings.
Speaker 1: Barbara told the investigator that Jean had visited her the
Speaker 1: month before she died and had told her she was
Speaker 1: going to leave Fred when he got back. I do
Speaker 1: think that they had talked about separate before Fred with
Speaker 1: haiming did you do with it? Was it possible that
Speaker 1: on the night of October fifteenth, before she drowned, Jean
Speaker 1: had raised the subject with Fred again, this time saying
Speaker 1: her decision was final. Yeah. She's the kind of person
Speaker 1: that once she sat down to talk to Fred that
Speaker 1: she would tell him that she had been having an
Speaker 1: affair and everything, or I to be honest with you guys,
Speaker 1: often wondered that myself is that fatal night She was
Speaker 1: so tired she flung that Chicago turnoound on a Friday,
Speaker 1: which I can't tell you whether it does your body
Speaker 1: in your mind, she could see how Jean, in exasperation,
Speaker 1: might have just blurted out the truth about her feelings
Speaker 1: for Deck with horrifying consequences. But no one will ever
Speaker 1: know that any morning. Fred was never charged with killing Jean.
Speaker 1: He maintains his innocence, and he continues to serve a
Speaker 1: life sentence without the possibility of parole. For the murders
Speaker 1: of Verna and Doug. Lost Hills is written and reported
Speaker 1: by me Dana Goodyear It's created by me and Ben
Speaker 1: Adair and is a production of Western Sound and Pushkin industries.