Speaker 1: Pushkin. Lying to Hawaii and United seven forty seven can
Speaker 1: be a real adventure. Whatever your pleasure, you will find
Speaker 1: it on United seven forty seven Our Friendship to Hawaii.
Speaker 1: It was nineteen sixty nine. Fred was living on the
Speaker 1: houseboat working at Point Magoo and he was going back
Speaker 1: and forth to Hawaii Jean's route, Jean, who would go
Speaker 1: on to become Fred's first wife. That's how we actually
Speaker 1: met is I was coming back from Hawaii to California
Speaker 1: on a red eye and she was the one of
Speaker 1: the flight attendants and I noticed her light off because
Speaker 1: she was just a knock very beautiful woman. She was
Speaker 1: tall and slender with dark hair, and Ali McGraw type
Speaker 1: is how she sometimes described herself. She reminded Fred of
Speaker 1: Mindy from Mork and Mindy, and interestingly enounced halfway through
Speaker 1: there was a guy who fell down in the aisle
Speaker 1: and they thought there wasn't going to be an emergency.
Speaker 1: And I remembered him as a drunk in a bar
Speaker 1: where we were getting ready to fly, and I said,
Speaker 1: I'm pretty sure that guy's just drunk. Let me, let's check.
Speaker 1: And then Gine and I had our first argument because
Speaker 1: she wanted up feed him black coffee, and I said, look,
Speaker 1: do you want a sleepy, quiet guy or do you
Speaker 1: want a wide away drunk. You know this is this
Speaker 1: is a no brainer. So anyhow, that was our first
Speaker 1: fuss when we when we got ready to get off
Speaker 1: the plane, I said, you know, I know we didn't
Speaker 1: get off to a really great start, but could I
Speaker 1: get shure an address you on phone number? I'd like
Speaker 1: to see you. You don't want to get back. Jean
Speaker 1: had grown up Baptist on a working cattle ranch in Evergreen, Colorado,
Speaker 1: the eldest of three sisters. Describing herself later, she'd list
Speaker 1: her hobbies as piano, horseback riding, boating, and swimming. She
Speaker 1: loved the mountains and the beach. After graduating from Colorado
Speaker 1: State in nineteen sixty four with a degree in music education,
Speaker 1: Jean decided to become a flight attendant. When Jean met Fred,
Speaker 1: she was living in an apartment near Lax with her
Speaker 1: friend and fellow flight attendant, Barbara Warner. Barbara said Fred
Speaker 1: and Jean's relationship was bumpy from the start. Here she
Speaker 1: is talking to an investigator, but this moves throughout MATTHI
Speaker 1: because of their schedule. He was out of sea some
Speaker 1: time that she was gone some time, but after weathering
Speaker 1: a pregnancy scare, they decided to make it official. I
Speaker 1: think we were both about twenty seven or twenty eight
Speaker 1: at the time, and Fred, I think you ever get married?
Speaker 1: She thought this might be my last him. They canna,
Speaker 1: but believed it because they were tim many men who
Speaker 1: liked her. She really thought he was a very nice person. Again, Yeah,
Speaker 1: he had never been married and had good background, all
Speaker 1: of those nice things. They had potential, and he wasn't dumb,
Speaker 1: and neither was Jeane. They had compatible intellectual time. They're too.
Speaker 1: Fred and Jean got married in nineteen seventy at a
Speaker 1: Baptist church in Denver and had the reception at her
Speaker 1: parents country club. They were an impressive young couple destined
Speaker 1: for a glamorous, adventurous life. By nineteen seventy four, they
Speaker 1: had two adorable little girls and had settled in Malibu,
Speaker 1: which was already thanks to Malibu Barbie and the Chevy,
Speaker 1: Malibu becoming something more than just a semi rural beach
Speaker 1: town at the western edge of la It wasn't so
Speaker 1: much a place as it was a massed projection, a
Speaker 1: collective dream Anyone who'd known them back in Evergreen or
Speaker 1: Centerville would have thought they'd made it. They owned a
Speaker 1: Jaguar then two. Life was good, or at least it
Speaker 1: looked good from the outside. I'm Dana Goodyear And this
Speaker 1: is Lost Hills, Episode three, The Shallow End, Part one
Speaker 1: and Doug drown Family friend Candy Henman had called the
Speaker 1: Santa Barbar Sheriff's apartment. She told them they really needed
Speaker 1: to look into what happened to Jean. She thought Fred's
Speaker 1: first marriage might shed some light on the deaths of
Speaker 1: Verna and Doug. There were tensions in Fred and Jean's
Speaker 1: marriage right from the beginning. Jean was ebulliant, extroverted, and fiery.
Speaker 1: Fred was more withdrawn, controlled, exacting a slow burn. This
Speaker 1: is Patti lytell a friend from Malibu. She's being interviewed
Speaker 1: by an investigator after the drownings. She's on break from
Speaker 1: her job at a bank in Santa Monica. I mean
Speaker 1: the nice home. They had very good jobs, making good money,
Speaker 1: so very very well off, and they were both attracted people.
Speaker 1: Fred is an attracted very good to me. You know,
Speaker 1: looking at them at that time, you know they've seen
Speaker 1: like they had everything going for them, but something was wrong. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean Fred and Jean had bought a house on
Speaker 1: a street called Calpine, in a quiet neighborhood across PC
Speaker 1: from Point Doom. It was so sweet that no one
Speaker 1: will ever believe me. There was a pool, and then
Speaker 1: later on when we went to some friends place and
Speaker 1: they had a hot tub in the Jeane and I
Speaker 1: looked at each other after that evening and said, we
Speaker 1: need a hot tub. So then some other friends were
Speaker 1: He was a shipbuilder, and so long story short, he
Speaker 1: and I started building hot tubs, and the one for
Speaker 1: our house was the first one. Fred loved it there.
Speaker 1: You could hear the distant sound of the ocean and
Speaker 1: the occasional owl when we first got there, and the
Speaker 1: gene and I want to be the first time we were. Boy.
Speaker 1: This is really dark, you know, because there's no street
Speaker 1: lights or anything, so when you turn out the lights
Speaker 1: in your house, it's dark. Fred remembers this as a
Speaker 1: relatively good period in the marriage, and I think Jean
Speaker 1: was basically quite happy. She enjoyed the house, she enjoyed
Speaker 1: the kids. I was probably second or third, but you know,
Speaker 1: basically we weren't they unhappy. They were a two career
Speaker 1: couple trying to figure out middle class domestic bliss when
Speaker 1: all the rules were changing, women's lib had happened, and
Speaker 1: the sexual Revolution. They were supposed to be free, fulfilled,
Speaker 1: self actualized, but they both traveled a lot for work
Speaker 1: and they had young kids. So did they fight. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they fought. The issues were, you know, primarily the three
Speaker 1: big were sick. He wanted more, financeers, she wanted more
Speaker 1: and you know, basically, how to deal with the kids.
Speaker 1: Fred was an involved father, incredibly so by the standards
Speaker 1: of the day. He worried about the potty training, what
Speaker 1: the kids ate, getting them to school on time. When
Speaker 1: Jean was flying, he'd packed the girls lunches and make
Speaker 1: them dinner. Maybe it's the double standard, or maybe he
Speaker 1: was an extra amazing dad. One of his friends even
Speaker 1: said later quote he was a mother to those girls.
Speaker 1: In nineteen seventy five, Fred was working for the Navy
Speaker 1: on Midway atoll Way out in the Pacific with a
Speaker 1: guy named Dennis O'Gorman. He spoke to investigators it was
Speaker 1: really evident that he and Jean weren't getting along. O'Gorman
Speaker 1: recalled one particularly cold moment about a month into the
Speaker 1: time on Midway, Jean had been writing to Fred and
Speaker 1: not hearing back. One day, she called extremely upset. She
Speaker 1: didn't know if he's alive or dead, or when he
Speaker 1: was coming home or a damn thing. The next morning,
Speaker 1: he's got this big grin on his face and he's
Speaker 1: got this letter about this thick and he says that
Speaker 1: Continent one wants to hear from me. She'll hear from me,
Speaker 1: all right. So he opened it up and it's what
Speaker 1: they call sit reps, and all they are is their
Speaker 1: navy messages, and it says recommend send money, recommend sending food,
Speaker 1: recommend send you know whatever. So he just packaged up
Speaker 1: all his copies that he had of these things for
Speaker 1: the last thirty days and he wanted him up sent
Speaker 1: them off to her. And he thought that was really funny.
Speaker 1: I thought it was kind of pathetic, you know. So that,
Speaker 1: along with other little things he said, I began to
Speaker 1: realize that he and his first wife are not getting
Speaker 1: along very well. Okay. When Jean's sister Carol visited them,
Speaker 1: she found the atmosphere stifling. She thought Fred was sullen
Speaker 1: and surly, even anti shut down. She hadn't seen him
Speaker 1: in eight months, and he didn't even greet her with hello,
Speaker 1: and she was alarmed to hear the way he belittle
Speaker 1: Jean addressing her as wife. Carol even asked Fred had
Speaker 1: he forgotten her sister's name. But things for Jean and
Speaker 1: Fred were about to go from bad to worse because
Speaker 1: there was a secret in their marriage and Jeanne had
Speaker 1: started spreading it all over town. There might be at
Speaker 1: least a partial explanation for Fred's incredibly awkward behavior deep
Speaker 1: embarrassment because Jeanne was pretty uninhibited when it came to
Speaker 1: expressing her discontent, and her problem with the sex wasn't
Speaker 1: his insatiable appetite. I noticed that it was described in
Speaker 1: the report here that Jane called Fred the mint a
Speaker 1: man because he couldn't last very long. Yeah, she did.
Speaker 1: This is Barbara Warner again, Jean's old roommate, speaking to
Speaker 1: the investigator. Barbara also mentioned Fred and Jean's tussles of
Speaker 1: her finances. Jean was used to making her own money
Speaker 1: and spending it how. She pleased extremely highly his money,
Speaker 1: at least she thought so, because she wanted something she
Speaker 1: charged his guy for later, She's never played on her
Speaker 1: bills or anything, because she just wouldn't had charged bought
Speaker 1: that saint she got to cash perfecting. At some point,
Speaker 1: Jean started to outright hate her husband Fred. Talking about him,
Speaker 1: she'd shut her and say, I can't stand him. This
Speaker 1: is Candy Henman. There. There was this part of her
Speaker 1: that when she wasn't around Fred and she wasn't thinking
Speaker 1: about Fred, that was very vibrant and very very energetic
Speaker 1: and positive. And then she would revert into the other
Speaker 1: kind of personality if she was around him or talking
Speaker 1: about him, then she would become intimidated. Candy felt very
Speaker 1: strongly that Jean wasn't safe with Fred. I kept telling
Speaker 1: her she needed to get out of that marriage. In
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy, California became the country's first no fault divorce state,
Speaker 1: and soon everyone was doing it. Within a year, for
Speaker 1: every one hundred couples that got married in La County,
Speaker 1: seventy nine were filing for divorce. In Malibu. There was
Speaker 1: also another factor splitting up families, maybe some wife swapping.
Speaker 1: This is Michelle Williams, a friend of the Railers, and
Speaker 1: to be clear, she wanted me to know that she
Speaker 1: was not part of the swinging scene. But there was
Speaker 1: a group who, like me, had never slept with anybody
Speaker 1: else before we got married. It was just you just
Speaker 1: didn't do it. And so there was a little bit
Speaker 1: of a freedom for some people to you know, get
Speaker 1: intimate with other people. It was open marriage, and it
Speaker 1: ended in a couple of divorces. There was this one
Speaker 1: book everyone was reading about experimenting outside marriage and how
Speaker 1: fulfilling it could be. Carl Rogers, noted psychologist, came out
Speaker 1: with a book called Becoming Partners where he described what
Speaker 1: open marriage would look like, and everybody was reading that book. Yeah, no,
Speaker 1: that was a pretty popular book. Jean, unhappy and frustrated,
Speaker 1: had also begun to look outside her marriage for fulfillment.
Speaker 1: She told friends about a relationship she had at work
Speaker 1: with an inflight supervisor on her Honolulu root and then
Speaker 1: without meaning to, she fell in love with Fred's sailing buddy, Dick.
Speaker 1: Fell though in Dick, the same person who a few
Speaker 1: years later would help return Lady the Beagle to the
Speaker 1: family after her adventure on Bird Rock that same Dick,
Speaker 1: Jean and Fred spent a lot of time with Dick
Speaker 1: and his wife Linda, as well as with another couple,
Speaker 1: Bill and Donna. Fairfield. It was always the six of
Speaker 1: them sailing together and getting naked in the hot tub.
Speaker 1: Somehow along the way, Jean and Dick started to confide
Speaker 1: in each other. Here's Jean's friend Barbara Warner again. He
Speaker 1: was disenchanted at the time, and they had the trint
Speaker 1: for a long time. Both the couple of Linda Dick
Speaker 1: had the friends and Fred they had sailed together and
Speaker 1: it was one of the friendship things that had started
Speaker 1: out as a friendship affair. As she was having trouble,
Speaker 1: she would talk to Dick and then maybe camp more
Speaker 1: than friend or would they meet at would they most
Speaker 1: count Jean would check in under her own name to
Speaker 1: take advantage of her United Airlines discount, and that was
Speaker 1: not the only example of her indiscretion. This is Mike Killeen,
Speaker 1: a friend of Fred's, talking to an investigator. Jean let
Speaker 1: everybody know that Fred had premature jaculations in the embarrassing
Speaker 1: Jean let everybody know that she was having affairs. My god,
Speaker 1: I knew that she was having an affair with this
Speaker 1: Dick guy. I knew that, unlike her fling at work,
Speaker 1: Jean's relationship with Dick was a serious affair. It went
Speaker 1: on for several years, and as she grew more consumed
Speaker 1: with it, she told more and more people. The more
Speaker 1: she hated Fred, the more she wanted to be with Dick,
Speaker 1: and the deeper she fell in love with Dick, the
Speaker 1: more she wanted to extricate herself from Fred. To this day,
Speaker 1: though Fred denies that he knew about their relationship, I'll
Speaker 1: never know about Jean. You know, there was no outward signs,
Speaker 1: there was no discussions, there was no anything that would
Speaker 1: lead me to believe that. And he insists he didn't
Speaker 1: cheat either, And I know for myself that I didn't.
Speaker 1: I was quite happy and wanted to settle down with
Speaker 1: one person. But one person who almost certainly did know
Speaker 1: about Jean's affair with Deck was Verna Johnson. Before she
Speaker 1: was Fred's second wife, Verna was one of Jean's best friends.
Speaker 1: She taught at the preschool at the Methodist church where
Speaker 1: Jean and Fred sent Heidi, and she often looked after
Speaker 1: the girls when Jean was flying. Jean and Verna were
Speaker 1: extremely tight, sharing secrets, gossip fears. Verna knew all Jeans start.
Speaker 1: Verna's sister, Julianne, recalled spending a day at the amusement
Speaker 1: park Magic Mountain with Verna and Jean and all the kids.
Speaker 1: Julianne told an investigator that Jean ignored the children. She
Speaker 1: was just totally preoccupied with dishing about Fred. She didn't
Speaker 1: say really nice things about him, and she talked like
Speaker 1: a gossips talking. She would say one thing and then
Speaker 1: turn around and say, well, I told so and so
Speaker 1: of his part, and she would clerk. She would talk
Speaker 1: about a lot of other people, meaning she was saying
Speaker 1: something to burn him. She said, well, I told so
Speaker 1: and so the same thing about Fred. Warner was a
Speaker 1: confidant of Jeans to listen to her private blues about
Speaker 1: what a rat Fred was. Candy Henman and a lot
Speaker 1: of Jean's friends knew Fred kept a handgun in the house.
Speaker 1: I asked him about that. It was a three fifty
Speaker 1: seven Smith and Wesson his parents had given him for
Speaker 1: Christmas when he was at Purdue. He kept it loaded
Speaker 1: in the drawer of his nightstand. We were in the
Speaker 1: middle of nowhere, and it would do something. Hadn't see
Speaker 1: something happened. He told me the gun was there for
Speaker 1: Jean's protection as much as anything else. But the number
Speaker 1: one person, Jean wanted protection from was Fred. Patty Lytell
Speaker 1: remembered something even more unsettling. She told detectives that Jean
Speaker 1: had confided in her an verna that Fred was threatening her,
Speaker 1: saying if he ever caught her cheating, he'd kill her.
Speaker 1: There was one particularly bad night in the hot tub
Speaker 1: at Calpine that everyone remembers. It was the Sextet, the Railers,
Speaker 1: the Fairfields, the velf Owens naked. Of course, Jean, according
Speaker 1: to others who were there, was a little drunk or
Speaker 1: a little high, and she was getting a little loud.
Speaker 1: It was obnoxious. This was an ongoing thing. Jeane would
Speaker 1: get carried away. We would have wine with dinner, and
Speaker 1: when we went to parties and things. I think that's
Speaker 1: when she would get caught up in the in the
Speaker 1: party atmosphere and sometimes overdo it. She was kind of
Speaker 1: a lightweight when it came to alcohol and pot. I
Speaker 1: was bigger. I had a better way of hanging on
Speaker 1: to it and still, you know, be able to do
Speaker 1: long division. So that was sort of the difference. On
Speaker 1: the night in question, Jean drove head first into the
Speaker 1: hot tub, where everyone else, including Dick, was already hanging out.
Speaker 1: Fred was furious. He later wrote quote, I pulled her
Speaker 1: up by her hair and told her to get a
Speaker 1: hold of herself. When Fred's friend Mike Colleen, who wasn't there,
Speaker 1: heard about the incident, he thought it sounded overblown. His
Speaker 1: sympathies lay entirely with Fred. Must have been a situation
Speaker 1: where Jeane was probably mounting off about one thing and
Speaker 1: another and embarrassing everybody, and maybe Fred did something that
Speaker 1: we all do occasionally, he overreacted. According to Bill Fairfield's
Speaker 1: statement to detectives, everyone in the hot tub laughed about
Speaker 1: the absurdity of Fred yankee Jean out of the water,
Speaker 1: but this laughter probably did not include Jean. It became
Speaker 1: another story she confided miserably to her friends. Years later,
Speaker 1: after Verna's death, investigators interviewed Dick felt thown about Fred
Speaker 1: and Jean, and Dick also took Fred's side, his sailing
Speaker 1: buddy over his old lover. He mentioned that Fred and
Speaker 1: Jean fought openly in public and that it seemed to
Speaker 1: him Jean was the instigator. One day, according to a
Speaker 1: flight attendant friend of Jeans, she showed up at work
Speaker 1: in a state of distress. One incident, I remember the
Speaker 1: strength she came to work with her start tied up
Speaker 1: around her neck. She had the scarf from her uniform
Speaker 1: tied around her neck and asked for permission to keep
Speaker 1: wearing it throughout the flight because I was charge, you
Speaker 1: don't mind and lend our Today I think I've kind
Speaker 1: of said Widder tried to feel me and I said
Speaker 1: water And she said she tried to joke, told the
Speaker 1: stars down and did you call that pitting? There were
Speaker 1: marks on her necks where she tried to choke her.
Speaker 1: There's a feeling that I got from her that very up.
Speaker 1: You know, we're not at the band to know. Fred
Speaker 1: says this never happened, that he was never physical or
Speaker 1: violent with Jean, but Jeane told friends she was scared
Speaker 1: of him, so scared she was going to move Fred's
Speaker 1: pistol over to Verna's house. Also, I guess things start
Speaker 1: going down the hill to a point where you mentioned
Speaker 1: that Jean had told you several times had threatened to
Speaker 1: kill her. If you ever car fooling around. That's the
Speaker 1: investigator questioning, Barbara Warner. You're good and I never heard
Speaker 1: can't say that I only heard it true. Jena. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Jane would say something I can't like that. I would
Speaker 1: think good, but I think genuinely I remember her saying,
Speaker 1: you know, I think he's capable of him to be
Speaker 1: honest with you. I don't know. The Only thing I
Speaker 1: can do is just knowing thread and knowing his great
Speaker 1: pride is that his pride was hurt by possibly her.
Speaker 1: I think its towards the end, she was getting so
Speaker 1: fed up with it. Knowing teens, she probably would say,
Speaker 1: I can't stand it. Another minute's getting out of here.
Speaker 1: And it probably got to him after a while, and
Speaker 1: he was outward. But he was a very virile type
Speaker 1: macho man, and I don't think he really was, and
Speaker 1: I think he probably drew this up to him and
Speaker 1: it was tough on him to put it mildly. But
Speaker 1: early summer nineteen seventy six, Jane was growing desperate. I
Speaker 1: know she tried to get the two of them his
Speaker 1: accountlings and he had refused to go. And then finally,
Speaker 1: after she had thrested separation and divorced, she said, well, okay,
Speaker 1: let's try it. Jean found a therapist and they went
Speaker 1: a couple of times. It was a failure. The best
Speaker 1: part about it, Fred says is that he and Jean
Speaker 1: would get a baskin Robbins afterward, and I guess it
Speaker 1: got so bad to a point that she said, I
Speaker 1: don't no counseling in the world that's going to help
Speaker 1: us beyond hope. Fred was desperate too. The Navy was
Speaker 1: sending him back to Kauai that summer for an extended
Speaker 1: stay at the Pacific Missile Test Facility. He didn't want
Speaker 1: the marriage to end. He thought they could solvage it,
Speaker 1: but Jean seemed past caring. Jean called a lawyer to
Speaker 1: initiate the process of divorce. She was going to tell
Speaker 1: him that he was going to be kicked out of
Speaker 1: coul when he got home. By that point, by being
Speaker 1: away and thinking and trying to get her head straight,
Speaker 1: but she was waiting for him back. They had talked
Speaker 1: and both of them to that they had a definite problem.
Speaker 1: He was going to put her foot down and say
Speaker 1: I've had him separate. Yeah. She's the kind of person
Speaker 1: that when he got back from Hawaii in October, Jean
Speaker 1: would finally end the marriage. Barbara has speculated many times
Speaker 1: about what went on between Jean and Fred in that
Speaker 1: fragile moment when he returned. You have heartal situation. What
Speaker 1: exactly do you might do? But she may have been
Speaker 1: so exasperated, it's so tired of SETI I'll tell you
Speaker 1: what I have had him a fairy. I can't take
Speaker 1: a spirit any longer. It maybe not realizing him. Why
Speaker 1: don't he re love? Jean never did divorce Fred because
Speaker 1: shortly after he got home, unexpectedly and inexplicably, she died.
Speaker 1: Coming up on the next episode of Lost Tales, Jean's
Speaker 1: funeral gets people talking. Everything around him seemed black, dark,
Speaker 1: and his face, his look, his everything was just darkness.
Speaker 1: And I knew without a doubt that he had done it.
Speaker 1: He just looked wicked, an evil less dark face in
Speaker 1: my face and coming over and being friendly and chatty,
Speaker 1: and I was thinking, you're a murderer. Why are you
Speaker 1: even talking to me? That's next in episode four, The
Speaker 1: Shallow End, Part two. Lost Hills is written and reported
Speaker 1: by Me Dana Goodyear. It's created by me and Ben
Speaker 1: Adair and produced by Western Sound and Pushkin Industries. Subscribe
Speaker 1: to Pushkin Plas and you can hear the whole season
Speaker 1: add free and get early access to the final two episodes.
Speaker 1: Find Pushkin Plas on the Lost Hills show page in
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or at pushkin dot fm