10. Lifelines

Heidi's mom. So one rainy afternoon, the two of them took me there. It was a spooky place, part junkyard, part bone yard, and the ominous thunderheads and vale of rain didn't help. So what kind of place is this? So we were I'm laughing because we were talking to a caretaker and just like he's pretty quirky. But he was a friend of my grandparents. Also, there's like a pet cemetery over there. This is a human cemetery. We walked over to a large rock with a plaque that

said Schunhoven, Jean's maiden name. Jean's name was centered between her parents on its own plaque. I asked Kirsten to read it, sure, Jean M. Rayler Schunhoven nineteen forty two to nineteen seventy six, and the amas for Marguerite. I remember my grandpa telling me that they got a He showed me this stone and he said that he put my mom's name on there because her ashes were spread in the ocean. They just wanted a place to remember

her by. Yeah, I don't feel her here or like feel the need to come here, even for our grandparents. Like that's what being at the ranches is, all those memories there. Do you feel your mom at the ranch?

I don't know if I would say that I feel her there, but I'd think about the history, like you know that she grew up here and the memories there, And actually I think about like like that our dad has been there, and like he's taken a bath in this tub, like he talks about taking you know, taking baths there, and so just knowing that they were there. But it's not like I feel her presence or anything. It's more just right. They were so young when Jean died.

Kirsten was in diapers. Hoti was barely six. Jean is understandably abstract to them. She's another loss, one they can't quite process, because to process that loss might make their pain unbearable. To most people who hear Fred's story, the rhyme of Jean's drowning and Verna's is uncanny, like something out of Edgar Allan Poe. It's so on the nose,

it's practically clunky. It's definitely the hardest circumstance. To give Fred the benefit of the doubt about the mysterious death of the first wife makes the second wife's death suspect, and his conviction in the killing of the second wife makes the first wife's death seem like murder too, But not to the sisters. They don't see it at all.

Here's Kirsten. I've definitely had hard conversations with my dad about Jean's death and just really finding out what happened because I was a baby, and just like the details, and also like were their investigations, you know, like supposedly Jean's dad like had it looked into, but it wasn't, like there wasn't a formal investigation. But I've definitely asked probing questions about it. But I kind of see it as like, look at my dad's history, and I mean

I compare him to one of the Kennedy's. I mean, look at all just all of the horrible accidents that can happen to one family, like fires, bike accidents, car accidents, tractor accidents, just like accident prone or you know, whatever you want to say. Then Kim Verna's daughter said something totally surprising. She said she didn't know how Jean died. I mean, didn't she die of an aneurysm? No, see that it wasn't that. So our grandma kept telling us

for some reason, how did she die? So she drowned in the swimming pool, but her ultimate cause of death was brain swelling and pneumonia from the drowning. But yeah, we were told that she had an aneurism. I mean, and I think that's medically. That is what people have proposed, you know, they're theories that because she was a flight attendant and the altitude and then she had just come back from a flight and they were drinking in the hot tub and then she got in the cold pool.

So like vessels expanding and contracting, I mean, those were the theories, But I mean, ultimately she died of pneumonia and brain swelling. And I think the Corners report refers to occidental drowning. I mean drowning was the cause of death. Yeah, gotcha. I'm Dana Goodyear and this is Lost Hills episode ten Lifelines. Back in nineteen seventy six, the La County Coroner said that Fred's first wife, Jean, had died as a result

of accidental drowning in the family pool. Her husband, the only witness, said he found her face down in the shallow end. Okay, case closed. Fred hinted at various reasons Jean might have drowned. She lost a lot of weight, She'd gone from a very hot, hot tub into an unheeded pool. She was deep into Life Spring, a potentially dangerous self improvement group. She was having visions of her

own death involving water, but her death was unexplained. It wasn't until nineteen eighty one that Jean's drowning was investigated as a homicide by the Santa Barbara detectives, who were looking into Verna and Doug's drownings at Rock. At Fred's trial for the murders of Verna and Doug stan Rowdin. The DA was blocked from introducing testimony about Jean until the penalty phase, So while the jury was considering whether Fred should be sentenced to death, Rodin put on a

mini trial for Jean. She was an aggravating factor, a reason in San Rowdin's mind to sentence Fred to death. Rowden told the jury that Jean's death was a murder quote a homicide done for the motive once again of enhancing this defendant's standard of living. This time, Fred didn't take the stand, but he'd certainly told his Jean's story before. He'd long been in the habit of buttonholing people and recounting the events of October fifteenth, nineteen seventy six. He

cornered Jean's friend Barbara Warner at Jean's memorial service. I really think he had that story so down patch. He rattled off so bad with so little emotion, that I thought with him. He told the story repeatedly to his friend Mike Colleen. When Jean died. Fred spent an awful lot of time at our house. He would come over in the evening and cry, he if we went through it once, we went through it fifty times. Every step

he took from the hot tub to the house. The way I recall the story was that one of the babies was crying in the background, and that when Fred went, Fred said, you know, like you stay here algi quay the baby and take care of the baby and get you a glass of wine, which he requested. So I believe he sais on the next seven minutes he was gone or something, because he'd stepped it out and timed it,

and when he came back. Everybody knows the story. Jeanne's face out of the pool and all the terrible things had happened at that point. Fred even told the story to Santa Barbara detectives Fred Ray and Claude Tell when they came to talk to him about Verna and Doug's drownings in January nineteen eighty one. While discussing what had happened to Verna and Doug, detective said Fred quote continually referred to a handwritten set of notes that was weird.

Fred also told the detectives he had notes on Jean's death, which they found later when they searched his house that was extra weird. Telling his gene story, Fred has always made a point of mentioning the alcohol he and Jean were drinking, and because he was the only witness. It features in other people's tellings too, A story with one

source repeated so often it comes to resemble truth. She had already poured a glass of wine, even in the house to get her glass of wine to him, Would you mind bringing back to get your glass of wine. We sort of sold off that bottle, and then I got another bottle. The neighbor boy who ran over when he heard Fred calling for help that night, said he'd noticed wine glasses and a pair of unsmoked joints in the backyard, like a stage complete with props. But these

were not incidental period details. They served a very important purpose. I believe they were intended to introduce doubt, reasonable doubt about how Jean ended up in the pool. And the reason I think this is Jean was not intoxicated, not even a little bit. Stan Rowdin the DA presented evidence that showed her blood alcohol level was point one milligrams per desolator, one one thousandth of the legal limit for driving,

and there were no other drugs in her system. The fact of her sobriety is meaningful, and it could mean the La County coroner's report was wrong, and it can't be accident. Okay, this is doctor Ronald Wright, a forensic pathologist who's also a scuba diver. Adult humans that are not intoxicated won't drown in a swimming pool. It doesn't happen. If it does happen, they either committed suicide or they

are a victim of homicide. Okay, it's easy. He testified at the mini trial, the Jeen's death was not due to natural causes. It was unnatural, and unnatural deaths are either accidents or suicides or homicides. I didn't see any evidence that she was suicidal, so therefore it looks like a homicide to me. But there were no signs of

trauma to Jean's body. So during the mini trial, Rodin asked another witness, a pathologist who'd reviewed Jean's file, if it was possible for a person to hold another person underwater law enough to drown them without leaving marks. It is possible, was the response. In the end, though the judge ruled that the DA hadn't sufficiently made his case.

He hadn't proved Fred's involvement with Jean's death. Beyond a reasonable doubt, and that's where Jean was left in a kind of limbo, unresolved, not likely an accident or a suicide, and not approvable homicide. Before we got off the phone, I asked doctor Wright about another part of his testimony which had caught my attention. Fred Rayler described having found his wife Jean, in the pool, face down, arms outstretched, and you said, that's impossible. That's not the way dead

people float. Okay, when you lose consciousness from whatever you've lost consciousness, you know gravity works. Their arms aren't outstretched. They actually goes straight down in there. It's called a dead man's float. They teach people to do that in swimming lessons. So you found that to be suspicious that that's what his description of his wife. He's incorrect, Okay, she wasn't. That's not the way humans are when they grown.

Did that make him seem like he was lying? I would think that's highly probable, although that is a jury determination, not mine. I'm just telling you you can't do it the way he said it happened. It was improvable. But it was so obvious. Fred the waterman, the navy diver had misdescribed the dead man's float. He says he didn't kill Jean. I asked him, just like I asked him about Verna and Doug. Fred, I have to ask you, did you kill Jean? I did not, but I don't

believe him. And if it's possible to kill someone in water and leave no mark, that means those second secret autopsies of Vernon and Dug don't really matter. The findings of pre mortem trauma could be totally invalid, the bodies could present no traumatic wounds, and Fred could still be the one who killed them. In the search of Fred's house on Sea Level Drive, the Santa Barbara detective seized an eleven page document detailing plans for a sailing trip

to Santa Island. It included an incredibly detailed hand drawn map of the island, including flora and fauna and shipwrecks, and all the spots to drop anchor. The guy was a planner. Fred told the detectives he had often sailed his boat Perseverance to Santa Cruz Island and had the dory out there at least a dozen times. He got to know the island and its features inch by inch, clocking every cove and inlet. How the shadows fell at the dot representing Bird Rock on the map, it says

tunnel through rock. That's because the sea cave on the western end of Bird Rock at low tide becomes a passage through are on the John will help you, guys. On a month after we walked around Sea Level Drive together on a crisp clear October morning, John Lytell and I took a boat out to Santa Cruz Island. So welcome to board Blue guys. Glad to have you here. Um again, Captain Randy fun Fact on the boat, John McVie the basis on Fleetwood. Mac owned this boat for

ten years. At the time of Doug's death, when they were both eight, John was Doug's best friend. Now he's a detective with the La County Sheriff's Department. I'm a deputy sheriff. You want me to not bring a gun on the boat. Sorry. For forty years, Doug's death has tormented him, but he'd never seen the place where it happened. Now he was ready to face it and hopefully get some resolution. Crossing the channel, John was chewing everything over.

He takes him out there. Um, he knows when he's gonna do it, he knows why he's gonna do it, he knows where he's going to do it. Because this is the best scenario. I have to make it look like an accident. Well, this is what I got. He's a chatty guy, but as we approached the island, he got Captain Randy filled the silence. So Santa Cruz Island is about twenty eight miles long. It's the largest island off the California coast. So we'll just be seeing a

very small, little, little tiny bit of the island. And then a bird rock loomed, craggy and imposing with creases and shadows that reminded me of he Man's Castle Gray Skull. At its western end was Scorpion Anchorage. We were heading to the other end to Little Scorpion Anchor. Just entering into the little Scorpion Anchory, the Perseverance anchored on January second, nineteen eighty one, rock is off to our starboard quarter.

It was noon. We were right on time, and we'll come in here and circle around and find a find a good spot to set the anchor verna. Fred and Doug ate their lunch sandwiches and chips then got in the door. Between one and one thirty, Kirsen went below deck to take a nap with her grandparents. Heidi and Kim went with Fred's brother and his wife in the inflatable boat to explore the beach at Santa Cruz Island. John and I got in Captain Randy's motorized dinghy and

powered toward Bird Rock. So if we get around, what we have now is a lot to lobster season, so we got to negotiate through this might feel the traps. There's a lot of kilp on the other side, so we'll see how close we can get. The criminalist Duane Moza had speculated that Fred killed Verna and Doug inside the sea cave on the western end of Bird Rock, so we headed there to see if the sea cave theory made sense. Cave entrances right around the quartery. I've

been thinking the sea cave was too exposed. Anyone on the beach, including Heidi and Kim, could have seen Fred row the dory in or out of the cave, but the mouth of the cave was deep black with an aura of darkness around it. You can't see anything. You're not gonna see anything happening there, Pass up first rock, these people on shore work, and you see, you gotta think angles out here. Everything around the cave is dark. You really can't see even an orange the dory going

in there. I told John about an earlier trip Fred and Verna had made to Santa Cruz Island six months before the fatal one. It was Fourth of July weekend nineteen eighty. They took the kids on perseverance and spent four days out there with get this, the lawyer Bill Fairfield and his family, and Fred's old sailing buddy, Jean's old flame Dick Philthowen and his wife and kids. It was the hot Tub Sextet reunited with Verna in place of Jean. They had a blast hiking to waterfalls, shooting

off fireworks, belting out rounds of God bless America. It was the most perfect Fourth of July ever. Wrote later. He and Verna rode all around exploring in the dory. Fred commended her for her attitude. That's casing the joint. He understood exactly what he needed to do to get his job done without anybody knowing. That's what like technicians will do. The like I don't. A week after the July fourth cruise, Fred and Verna had their secret official wedding,

solidifying the financial connection between them. If she died, everything she had and more the insurance they'd soon buy would be his outright or in a trust that he controlled. After looking at it, I didn't buy the sea cave theory. Too risky, no matter how low the visibility, and it was too different from the story Fred presented to authorities. Fred was methodical a planner. He liked to simplify hone control. So I asked Captain Randy to take us to the place.

Fred said the dory had capsized in the open ocean on the north side of Bird Rock. So according to the drawings, the boat capsized right in here, out front of the rock. That's where. That's where, according to Fred, Lady jumped at the birds and they all lunged and toppled, and the dory overturned. He said he could see Perseverance anchored at Little Scorpion the entire time. That was the point, he said, to get a picture of Doug holding Lady in the dory with Bird Rock in the near ground

and Perseverance in the distance. But as we moved toward the spot in front of Bird Rock, I noticed that Captain Randy's sailboat in Little Scorpion Anchorage was slipping out of view. The north face of Bird Rock is cupped, so when you're close to it, the sides of the rock block both anchorages from view, meaning you can't see or be seen by the boats on either side. If you're in this cove, you cannot see Scorpion Anchorage at all. All those boats on that side wouldn't see any Lady,

where's that? If he doesn't right in here, nobody can see him. In front of the rock, there was an explosion of white water, a geyser that shot into the air as the waves pounded into an underwater cavern. Oh, yes, that's the blow hole. Go as close to that as we can. Fred said that after the cap size, he collected Verna and Doug and swam with them to Bird Rock with Lady on his shoulders, clawing at his head. He described maneuvering past the blowhole with difficulty to hoist

Lady up. John stared up at the rock, the sixty foot cliff face. The dog up on this side. That's a dog, right, not a moungoat. This is a dog, okay, our eagle Popey, whose legs can't be more than you know, three inches block is all like muscles and stuff, and it's like it's sharp. The d did get him on the island on the side. No way, no way. We idled in our dinghy, looking up at the sheer rock wall. The blowhole went off again, and it all started coming

together for me like a story. Fred would have rode them here, knocked them out, drowned them, flipped the doory and shoved it away, swum a short distance to the rock, and waited for rescue. Maybe he offloaded lady on his way to the spot on that gentle ledge on the eastern side, like the Santa Barbara Day thought making excuses to Verna and Doug about why or maybe lady he was still in the door until the murder, and she made her own way over to the eastern ledge, her

survival instincts kicking in her little legs, paddling furiously. Verna, he would have killed for the money, Doug, because he was the witness. We went back to our boat and got ready to head home. From the back deck, John squinted out at bird rock. Doug's ashes had been scattered at sea, and there was no marker for him anywhere on land, so this was it. Bird Rock was his grave. I'm looking at that, and I see all the rocks. I'm like, those are all tombstones. That's all death. That's

how I look at it. I just this is a weird I got a creepy feeling. This whole place is not what I thought it would be. Before Christmas, in December of nineteen eighty, John had said goodbye to Doug, thinking he'd see him again in a few months or whenever the railers got back from their sailing trip to Mexico. Instead, over the holidays, Doug had died here. John looked ill and kept turning his face away from the rock, only to have his gaze pulled back to it. This is

like death. You just feel death. I don't. I know it's not like that for everybody, but I don't. I'll probably never ever come back here again. No way we're worth it. I don't know. That affects me so much. I don't know if I don't know. Back then, I wasn't like I want to be in law enforces to solve crimes. But more helping people that are helping people that are getting drowned and getting killed. Just say it's

not fair. It's not fair. It's bullshit, like he didn't he didn't kill, just that he like killed part of our lives. We turned around and headed back across the channel, with hundreds of dolphins leaping in our wake. I asked John if the trip had brought him clarity, and he said, yeah, he felt he knew where Doug had died. It's a great place to kill somebody. Nobody can see you, nobody can hear you. But where that happened, Where that that little co is. It's like Professor Plum with the candlestick

in the conservatory. Nobody saw it, but you know what happened, and that when you look at it that way, it's scary, Like that area is scary because it's perfect. The case against Fred Rayler, in spite of all that scientific evidence, was largely circumstantial if you looked at it one way. Fred was a victim of unfathomably bad luck. That's been the subtext of every conversation I've had with him. His persona is built around this idea of steadfast, stoic perseverance

in the face of hardship. Looked at another way, the authority's way. Fred's a devious and malicious killer. From that point of view, it's no coincidence that people close to him kept drowning. He was drowning. But that's the thing about circumstantial evidence. It doesn't look the same to everyone. The first time I went up into the hayloft in Colorado,

I saw something really strange. It was a kiddie pool with a plastic skeleton in it and an oar and a headless dummy dressed in boy's clothing and not attached, a painted pumpkinhead, a skeleton with an oar, A dummy with no head. Law enforcement thought Fred had stunned Verna with the door's oar. A dug sized dummy and a dummy head had been used in the trial and helped to convict Fred. Clearly, this was someone's morbid idea of a joke. Wait, Heidi, can you come over here and

tell us about this? So what is this situation here? At first, she had no idea what I was talking about. She couldn't see it. It was a random collection of stuff, disconnected, not meaningful, unrelated, you're looking at a kiddie pool with there's a skeleton in it, and then there's also it looks like a scarecrow, and then there's paddles. The paddles are for a stepboard that's not up here right now,

and the scarecrow my daughter's built for Halloween. We put it down at the then, like an optical illusion where a hidden picture emerges only after you stare at it a while. She saw what I saw, but it does now that I'm looking at it. It's bizarre. Yeah. No, it's just a pile of junk with a few skeletonstone in Yeah. I considered whether her explanation was reasonable, that these things would have ended up together completely unintentionally. No way.

She had a plausible explanation for everything, but it didn't pass a gut check according to the law. Though I would have to give Heidi the benefit of the doubt. It was just an accident. The kittie pool moment illustrated something else for me too, how much Fred's daughters need him to be innocent, and how blinding that need is. Kim's father, Bill, died after falling from a rooftop in nineteen seventy five. Her mother died with her little brother

at Bird Rock in nineteen eighty one. Heidi and Kirsten's mother, Jean, drowned in the family pool in Malibu in nineteen seventy six. Fred is all they have. Sometimes, when you love and need someone that badly, you can't see what's right before your eyes. And if they want to keep him, they must believe him. A few years ago, Kirsten, the youngest of the sisters, Fred's favorite prime kid, spearheaded a petition to ask Jerry Brown, the governor of California at the time,

to grant her father clemency. The Governor's office sent someone to interview Fred in prison, and then the Santa Barbaradier's office began reaching out to victims, which meant they called Kim, Verna's daughter, Doug's older sister. Of the three sisters, Kim is the most secretive. Almost no one in her life knows the story of her childhood. The whole time we were in the hayloft, she rarely volunteered anything other than

quiet agreement with her sisters. Now she spoke up when that happened, I mean, I was surprised by it, but then also like you know, her and offended that they even did that. You know, I got his voice message and then called him back the next day and then flat out told him that I support my dad's clemency and all this procedure and stuff like that, and then didn't hear from their office again. But ah, this is Kirsten.

But then, I mean, we doubled down and sent another, you know, batch of probably twenty letters of everyone saying like, yeah, you may consider us the victim's family, but we love and support him to this day. We you know, want you to release him. I mean, how many times can the victim's family say that? And it doesn't matter. I mean, he's seventy eight years old with health problems. He's not a risk. You know, he's not a risk to anybody.

If he ever was, he's not. Now they're accusing him of killing family members and we're his family, so yeah, we'll take the risk of him possibly killing us. Fred was the perfect father who designed the perfect crime murder with no witnesses that left no marks once authorities believed he got away with it the second time he got caught. On the surface, his family was perfect, but the real story was what happened below. The surface where he held

them under and no one saw. I don't think the trial or even the investigation was necessarily fair, but I do think the jury sent a guilty man to prison. But Fred, he's still keeping up appearances. In the tapes from forty years ago. He sounds kind of numb, but also irritated, as if he's explaining things through gritted teeth

to a dimwitted kid. In our conversations, he's mister Malibu again, genial, affable, chuckling like a shopping mall Santa Claus, who you know, is just an out of work actor in a polyester suit. Good morning, How are you? I feel contained? So for some reason contained, Yeah, that's a joke. This conversation was just a couple of weeks ago. On December eighth, it was our twenty fifth phone call. Fred said he was

still working on his case. His appeal back in nineteen eighty five hadn't worked because even though all three judges felt that Duane MOS's testimony about the experiments with the dummy and the dory should not have been allowed, they didn't agree on how much it had influenced the jury's decision. Two of the judges said that even without Moses's testimony, the outcome of the trial would have been the same.

And then the third one wrote a shepherd dissenting opinion where he went into the whole thing and said, no, this is primarily the reason we've got this gut. In recent years, California law has changed to reflect growing skepticism about forensic science, which can be so persuasive to juries but is also often total bunk. Now there's an appetite to take another look at cases where junk science may have played a role in conviction. So Fred's forging ahead,

serving as his own lawyer. So I've been basically pressing that issue along with some others, all the way through the court system. So I started out with the Superior Court in Santa Barbara and then went all the way up to the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court of California, and that one's just done this year. I had a feeling this would be the last time I'd talked to Fred, and I wanted to understand something that had been bothering me all along. That his love for his daughters seems

so real. It's the one part of his facade I just can't see through. I don't think it is a facade. So I asked him about his relationship with them and what they're unfaltering support has meant to him. Oh, it means absolutely everything. I'm fortunate that they're astute enough and old enough now to really comprehend both situations and to understand the legal process. And basically they're my lifeline at the moment, because if I, if I didn't have my daughters,

I'd be in a lot of trouble. What would happen if one of them questioned either of those stories that you've told them? Sure, well, I would try my most to figure out why they had changed their mind and to do everything that I could to, you know, help them understand it even better. It's one of those It's one of those things that, knowing the three women, it would be hard for me to grasp, it would be hard for you to grasp why they might have questions.

Oh exactly. In other words, there's a lot of things that none of us know, and that'll always be the case. But what they do know basically has led them to stay with me and be with me, you know, the entire time, and bring husbands up and bring babies up, and you know, visit me at all different funny places.

They'll old folsome. We actually had family visits in the hospital, and so I had these three little girls basically visiting me for a weekend in prison, which is, you know, rather astounding that as they had the fortitude to be able to face that and basically for us to have a pretty good Do you think your identity remaining? Is your identity at root that you are a good father? Yeah? And the thing that we say over and over is that I'm probably better as a father in here than

I would have been out there. Being in here, I followed them at every step of their lives and listened and shared letters, and you know, it's I've got them to know them and them to know me. So it's one of those little twists of irony. Do you think you'll get out? I do yes, because I know that what they did wasn't fair and it violated the rule of law. And at some point the line had gone dead. I talked to Fred twenty five times for a total of six hours, forty five minutes and forty seven seconds.

He told me about Jean, that they were working things out. He told me about Verna, that she was the love of his life. He told me about their life in Malibu, that it was perfect, wholesome, sweet, a dream. But it was right there when Fred was talking about his daughters and the kind of father he's been, how they're his lifeline. That was the one moment, maybe the only moment, when I knew Fred was telling the truth. Lost Hills is reported, written and hosted by me Dana Goodyear. The editor is

Ben Adair. Our senior producer is Hayley Fox, who contributed a ton of additional reporting. Producers are Nicole McNulty, Cameron Kell, and Savannah Wright. Mika Hauser is our fact checker. Our composer and sound designer is Dan Leone. Our mix engineers are David Hermann and Michael Raphael. Our cover art is called for a Kid, and It's by Francesca Gabiani. Bena Dare and I are the creators and executive producers. Executive producers for Pushkin Industries are Jacob Weisberg, The Tal Mullad

and Jacob Smith. Thanks also to the Pushkin team Mia Lobell, Heather Faine, John Schnars, Carly mcgliori, Amy Gaines, Maggie Taylor, Nicole Morano, Eric Sandler, Mary Beth Smith, Brant Haynes, Jake Gorsky, Sean Carney, Royston Bezerv, Maya Koneg, and Daniella Lacan. Lost Hills the production of Western Sound and Pushkin Industries. You can sign up for Western Sounds newsletter at Western Dashsound

dot com. Pushkin's newsletter is at Pushkin dot fm. Follow at Lost Hills Pod on social media, and please remember to rate and review the show in your podcast app. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts,