3. The Shallow End, Part 1

on to become Fred's first wife. That's how we actually met is I was coming back from Hawaii to California on a red eye and she was the one of the flight attendants and I noticed her light off because she was just a knock very beautiful woman. She was tall and slender with dark hair, and Ali McGraw type

is how she sometimes described herself. She reminded Fred of Mindy from Mork and Mindy, and interestingly enounced halfway through there was a guy who fell down in the aisle and they thought there wasn't going to be an emergency. And I remembered him as a drunk in a bar where we were getting ready to fly, and I said, I'm pretty sure that guy's just drunk. Let me, let's check.

And then Gine and I had our first argument because she wanted up feed him black coffee, and I said, look, do you want a sleepy, quiet guy or do you want a wide away drunk. You know this is this is a no brainer. So anyhow, that was our first fuss when we when we got ready to get off the plane, I said, you know, I know we didn't get off to a really great start, but could I get shure an address you on phone number? I'd like

to see you. You don't want to get back. Jean had grown up Baptist on a working cattle ranch in Evergreen, Colorado, the eldest of three sisters. Describing herself later, she'd list her hobbies as piano, horseback riding, boating, and swimming. She loved the mountains and the beach. After graduating from Colorado State in nineteen sixty four with a degree in music education, Jean decided to become a flight attendant. When Jean met Fred, she was living in an apartment near Lax with her

friend and fellow flight attendant, Barbara Warner. Barbara said Fred and Jean's relationship was bumpy from the start. Here she is talking to an investigator, but this moves throughout MATTHI because of their schedule. He was out of sea some time that she was gone some time, but after weathering a pregnancy scare, they decided to make it official. I think we were both about twenty seven or twenty eight at the time, and Fred, I think you ever get married?

She thought this might be my last him. They canna, but believed it because they were tim many men who liked her. She really thought he was a very nice person. Again, Yeah, he had never been married and had good background, all of those nice things. They had potential, and he wasn't dumb, and neither was Jeane. They had compatible intellectual time. They're too. Fred and Jean got married in nineteen seventy at a Baptist church in Denver and had the reception at her

parents country club. They were an impressive young couple destined for a glamorous, adventurous life. By nineteen seventy four, they had two adorable little girls and had settled in Malibu, which was already thanks to Malibu Barbie and the Chevy, Malibu becoming something more than just a semi rural beach town at the western edge of la It wasn't so much a place as it was a massed projection, a collective dream Anyone who'd known them back in Evergreen or

Centerville would have thought they'd made it. They owned a Jaguar then two. Life was good, or at least it looked good from the outside. I'm Dana Goodyear And this is Lost Hills, Episode three, The Shallow End, Part one and Doug drown Family friend Candy Henman had called the Santa Barbar Sheriff's apartment. She told them they really needed to look into what happened to Jean. She thought Fred's first marriage might shed some light on the deaths of

Verna and Doug. There were tensions in Fred and Jean's marriage right from the beginning. Jean was ebulliant, extroverted, and fiery. Fred was more withdrawn, controlled, exacting a slow burn. This is Patti lytell a friend from Malibu. She's being interviewed by an investigator after the drownings. She's on break from her job at a bank in Santa Monica. I mean the nice home. They had very good jobs, making good money, so very very well off, and they were both attracted people.

Fred is an attracted very good to me. You know, looking at them at that time, you know they've seen like they had everything going for them, but something was wrong. Yeah, I mean Fred and Jean had bought a house on a street called Calpine, in a quiet neighborhood across PC from Point Doom. It was so sweet that no one

will ever believe me. There was a pool, and then later on when we went to some friends place and they had a hot tub in the Jeane and I looked at each other after that evening and said, we need a hot tub. So then some other friends were He was a shipbuilder, and so long story short, he and I started building hot tubs, and the one for our house was the first one. Fred loved it there. You could hear the distant sound of the ocean and the occasional owl when we first got there, and the

gene and I want to be the first time we were. Boy. This is really dark, you know, because there's no street lights or anything, so when you turn out the lights in your house, it's dark. Fred remembers this as a relatively good period in the marriage, and I think Jean was basically quite happy. She enjoyed the house, she enjoyed the kids. I was probably second or third, but you know,

basically we weren't they unhappy. They were a two career couple trying to figure out middle class domestic bliss when all the rules were changing, women's lib had happened, and the sexual Revolution. They were supposed to be free, fulfilled, self actualized, but they both traveled a lot for work and they had young kids. So did they fight. Yeah, they fought. The issues were, you know, primarily the three

big were sick. He wanted more, financeers, she wanted more and you know, basically, how to deal with the kids. Fred was an involved father, incredibly so by the standards of the day. He worried about the potty training, what the kids ate, getting them to school on time. When Jean was flying, he'd packed the girls lunches and make them dinner. Maybe it's the double standard, or maybe he was an extra amazing dad. One of his friends even said later quote he was a mother to those girls.

In nineteen seventy five, Fred was working for the Navy on Midway atoll Way out in the Pacific with a guy named Dennis O'Gorman. He spoke to investigators it was really evident that he and Jean weren't getting along. O'Gorman recalled one particularly cold moment about a month into the time on Midway, Jean had been writing to Fred and not hearing back. One day, she called extremely upset. She didn't know if he's alive or dead, or when he

was coming home or a damn thing. The next morning, he's got this big grin on his face and he's got this letter about this thick and he says that Continent one wants to hear from me. She'll hear from me, all right. So he opened it up and it's what they call sit reps, and all they are is their navy messages, and it says recommend send money, recommend sending food,

recommend send you know whatever. So he just packaged up all his copies that he had of these things for the last thirty days and he wanted him up sent them off to her. And he thought that was really funny. I thought it was kind of pathetic, you know. So that, along with other little things he said, I began to realize that he and his first wife are not getting along very well. Okay. When Jean's sister Carol visited them, she found the atmosphere stifling. She thought Fred was sullen

and surly, even anti shut down. She hadn't seen him in eight months, and he didn't even greet her with hello, and she was alarmed to hear the way he belittle Jean addressing her as wife. Carol even asked Fred had he forgotten her sister's name. But things for Jean and Fred were about to go from bad to worse because there was a secret in their marriage and Jeanne had

started spreading it all over town. There might be at least a partial explanation for Fred's incredibly awkward behavior deep embarrassment because Jeanne was pretty uninhibited when it came to expressing her discontent, and her problem with the sex wasn't his insatiable appetite. I noticed that it was described in the report here that Jane called Fred the mint a man because he couldn't last very long. Yeah, she did. This is Barbara Warner again, Jean's old roommate, speaking to

the investigator. Barbara also mentioned Fred and Jean's tussles of her finances. Jean was used to making her own money and spending it how. She pleased extremely highly his money, at least she thought so, because she wanted something she charged his guy for later, She's never played on her bills or anything, because she just wouldn't had charged bought that saint she got to cash perfecting. At some point, Jean started to outright hate her husband Fred. Talking about him,

she'd shut her and say, I can't stand him. This is Candy Henman. There. There was this part of her that when she wasn't around Fred and she wasn't thinking about Fred, that was very vibrant and very very energetic and positive. And then she would revert into the other kind of personality if she was around him or talking about him, then she would become intimidated. Candy felt very strongly that Jean wasn't safe with Fred. I kept telling

her she needed to get out of that marriage. In nineteen seventy, California became the country's first no fault divorce state, and soon everyone was doing it. Within a year, for every one hundred couples that got married in La County, seventy nine were filing for divorce. In Malibu. There was also another factor splitting up families, maybe some wife swapping. This is Michelle Williams, a friend of the Railers, and to be clear, she wanted me to know that she

was not part of the swinging scene. But there was a group who, like me, had never slept with anybody else before we got married. It was just you just didn't do it. And so there was a little bit of a freedom for some people to you know, get intimate with other people. It was open marriage, and it ended in a couple of divorces. There was this one book everyone was reading about experimenting outside marriage and how

fulfilling it could be. Carl Rogers, noted psychologist, came out with a book called Becoming Partners where he described what open marriage would look like, and everybody was reading that book. Yeah, no, that was a pretty popular book. Jean, unhappy and frustrated, had also begun to look outside her marriage for fulfillment.

She told friends about a relationship she had at work with an inflight supervisor on her Honolulu root and then without meaning to, she fell in love with Fred's sailing buddy, Dick. Fell though in Dick, the same person who a few years later would help return Lady the Beagle to the family after her adventure on Bird Rock that same Dick, Jean and Fred spent a lot of time with Dick and his wife Linda, as well as with another couple,

Bill and Donna. Fairfield. It was always the six of them sailing together and getting naked in the hot tub. Somehow along the way, Jean and Dick started to confide in each other. Here's Jean's friend Barbara Warner again. He was disenchanted at the time, and they had the trint for a long time. Both the couple of Linda Dick had the friends and Fred they had sailed together and it was one of the friendship things that had started

out as a friendship affair. As she was having trouble, she would talk to Dick and then maybe camp more than friend or would they meet at would they most count Jean would check in under her own name to take advantage of her United Airlines discount, and that was not the only example of her indiscretion. This is Mike Killeen, a friend of Fred's, talking to an investigator. Jean let everybody know that Fred had premature jaculations in the embarrassing

Jean let everybody know that she was having affairs. My god, I knew that she was having an affair with this Dick guy. I knew that, unlike her fling at work, Jean's relationship with Dick was a serious affair. It went on for several years, and as she grew more consumed with it, she told more and more people. The more she hated Fred, the more she wanted to be with Dick, and the deeper she fell in love with Dick, the

more she wanted to extricate herself from Fred. To this day, though Fred denies that he knew about their relationship, I'll never know about Jean. You know, there was no outward signs, there was no discussions, there was no anything that would lead me to believe that. And he insists he didn't cheat either, And I know for myself that I didn't. I was quite happy and wanted to settle down with one person. But one person who almost certainly did know

about Jean's affair with Deck was Verna Johnson. Before she was Fred's second wife, Verna was one of Jean's best friends. She taught at the preschool at the Methodist church where Jean and Fred sent Heidi, and she often looked after the girls when Jean was flying. Jean and Verna were extremely tight, sharing secrets, gossip fears. Verna knew all Jeans start. Verna's sister, Julianne, recalled spending a day at the amusement park Magic Mountain with Verna and Jean and all the kids.

Julianne told an investigator that Jean ignored the children. She was just totally preoccupied with dishing about Fred. She didn't say really nice things about him, and she talked like a gossips talking. She would say one thing and then turn around and say, well, I told so and so of his part, and she would clerk. She would talk about a lot of other people, meaning she was saying something to burn him. She said, well, I told so

and so the same thing about Fred. Warner was a confidant of Jeans to listen to her private blues about what a rat Fred was. Candy Henman and a lot of Jean's friends knew Fred kept a handgun in the house. I asked him about that. It was a three fifty seven Smith and Wesson his parents had given him for Christmas when he was at Purdue. He kept it loaded in the drawer of his nightstand. We were in the middle of nowhere, and it would do something. Hadn't see

something happened. He told me the gun was there for Jean's protection as much as anything else. But the number one person, Jean wanted protection from was Fred. Patty Lytell remembered something even more unsettling. She told detectives that Jean had confided in her an verna that Fred was threatening her, saying if he ever caught her cheating, he'd kill her. There was one particularly bad night in the hot tub at Calpine that everyone remembers. It was the Sextet, the Railers,

the Fairfields, the velf Owens naked. Of course, Jean, according to others who were there, was a little drunk or a little high, and she was getting a little loud. It was obnoxious. This was an ongoing thing. Jeane would get carried away. We would have wine with dinner, and when we went to parties and things. I think that's when she would get caught up in the in the party atmosphere and sometimes overdo it. She was kind of a lightweight when it came to alcohol and pot. I

was bigger. I had a better way of hanging on to it and still, you know, be able to do long division. So that was sort of the difference. On the night in question, Jean drove head first into the hot tub, where everyone else, including Dick, was already hanging out. Fred was furious. He later wrote quote, I pulled her up by her hair and told her to get a hold of herself. When Fred's friend Mike Colleen, who wasn't there, heard about the incident, he thought it sounded overblown. His

sympathies lay entirely with Fred. Must have been a situation where Jeane was probably mounting off about one thing and another and embarrassing everybody, and maybe Fred did something that we all do occasionally, he overreacted. According to Bill Fairfield's statement to detectives, everyone in the hot tub laughed about the absurdity of Fred yankee Jean out of the water, but this laughter probably did not include Jean. It became

another story she confided miserably to her friends. Years later, after Verna's death, investigators interviewed Dick felt thown about Fred and Jean, and Dick also took Fred's side, his sailing buddy over his old lover. He mentioned that Fred and Jean fought openly in public and that it seemed to him Jean was the instigator. One day, according to a flight attendant friend of Jeans, she showed up at work

in a state of distress. One incident, I remember the strength she came to work with her start tied up around her neck. She had the scarf from her uniform tied around her neck and asked for permission to keep wearing it throughout the flight because I was charge, you don't mind and lend our Today I think I've kind of said Widder tried to feel me and I said water And she said she tried to joke, told the

stars down and did you call that pitting? There were marks on her necks where she tried to choke her. There's a feeling that I got from her that very up. You know, we're not at the band to know. Fred says this never happened, that he was never physical or violent with Jean, but Jeane told friends she was scared of him, so scared she was going to move Fred's

pistol over to Verna's house. Also, I guess things start going down the hill to a point where you mentioned that Jean had told you several times had threatened to kill her. If you ever car fooling around. That's the investigator questioning, Barbara Warner. You're good and I never heard can't say that I only heard it true. Jena. Yeah, Jane would say something I can't like that. I would think good, but I think genuinely I remember her saying, you know, I think he's capable of him to be

honest with you. I don't know. The Only thing I can do is just knowing thread and knowing his great pride is that his pride was hurt by possibly her. I think its towards the end, she was getting so fed up with it. Knowing teens, she probably would say, I can't stand it. Another minute's getting out of here. And it probably got to him after a while, and he was outward. But he was a very virile type macho man, and I don't think he really was, and I think he probably drew this up to him and

it was tough on him to put it mildly. But early summer nineteen seventy six, Jane was growing desperate. I know she tried to get the two of them his accountlings and he had refused to go. And then finally, after she had thrested separation and divorced, she said, well, okay, let's try it. Jean found a therapist and they went

a couple of times. It was a failure. The best part about it, Fred says is that he and Jean would get a baskin Robbins afterward, and I guess it got so bad to a point that she said, I don't no counseling in the world that's going to help us beyond hope. Fred was desperate too. The Navy was sending him back to Kauai that summer for an extended stay at the Pacific Missile Test Facility. He didn't want the marriage to end. He thought they could solvage it,

but Jean seemed past caring. Jean called a lawyer to initiate the process of divorce. She was going to tell him that he was going to be kicked out of coul when he got home. By that point, by being away and thinking and trying to get her head straight, but she was waiting for him back. They had talked and both of them to that they had a definite problem. He was going to put her foot down and say

I've had him separate. Yeah. She's the kind of person that when he got back from Hawaii in October, Jean would finally end the marriage. Barbara has speculated many times about what went on between Jean and Fred in that fragile moment when he returned. You have heartal situation. What exactly do you might do? But she may have been so exasperated, it's so tired of SETI I'll tell you what I have had him a fairy. I can't take a spirit any longer. It maybe not realizing him. Why

don't he re love? Jean never did divorce Fred because shortly after he got home, unexpectedly and inexplicably, she died. Coming up on the next episode of Lost Tales, Jean's funeral gets people talking. Everything around him seemed black, dark, and his face, his look, his everything was just darkness. And I knew without a doubt that he had done it. He just looked wicked, an evil less dark face in my face and coming over and being friendly and chatty,

and I was thinking, you're a murderer. Why are you even talking to me? That's next in episode four, The Shallow End, Part two. Lost Hills is written and reported by Me Dana Goodyear. It's created by me and Ben Adair and produced by Western Sound and Pushkin Industries. Subscribe to Pushkin Plas and you can hear the whole season add free and get early access to the final two episodes. Find Pushkin Plas on the Lost Hills show page in Apple Podcasts, or at pushkin dot fm