The Returning Mother

Heidi and Kirsten. I'd been searching for someone who could shed light on that day, Friday, October fifteenth, nineteen seventy six, when Jean, a flight attendant for United, flew from lax to Chicago O'Hare and back, went home to Malibu, got in the hot tub with Fred to unwind, and then somehow ended up drowning. Her death wasn't investigated as a homicide until Fred's second wife, Verna, and his eight year old steps on Doug, drowned under equally suspicious circumstances less

than five years later. My name's Karen McLean and I was a flight attendant for United Airlines. Karen mcclean's the one that wrote that letter. She told me she'd stumbled on the podcast totally by accident. My daughter put Spotify on my phone and I am so lacking in technology and stuff, and I was just kind of browsing through and I came across this and I saw Verna and Doug and I thought, I wonder if this is about Jeane.

Karen flew with Jean just twice, once the Sunday before her drowning, and then on the very day she drowned, we flew Chicago. Turns it was when we were first able to be moms, and we only worked two days a week and we were home every night, so it was a great way to be a mom and still have a job. But we'd check in like a six forty five in the morning and fly to Chicago at seven forty five, sit there for a couple hours, and

then fly back the same day. So we were gone for about twelve hours, and then we'd get on the tram, go over to the parking lot, and go home. I normally got home about seven thirty at night, so you know, it was just a long day. Most of us were young moms that did the Chicago churns. It was pretty much I don't remember anybody that wasn't a mom. You know, flying those trips, those flights Flight one hundred from Lax to Chicago and flight one eleven from Chicago back to

Lax were always packed. It was mostly businessmen at that time. You know, it was before computers, so every you know, there was a lot of business travel. In fact, in the sixties we had trips that were just primarily men from Chicago to Newark and they were all men trips, and United catered to them. They'd have all these little gifts that they'd give all these men and stuff, but it was basically a businessman that traveled back and forth all the time in first class. Karen remembers that the

Sunday before Jean drown, Jean was working in coach. It was the first time they'd met, and they started to chat and Karen got a little window into Jean's world. She was working the lower deck galley on A seven forty seven and I went down and the first time I had ever talked to her, and I went down for a break and we were just talking about our kids. At the time, Jean and Fred's older daughter, Heidi was

six and Kirsten was two. The family was living on Colpine Drive in Malibu, and there was a lot going on. Jean was telling friends she was madly in love with Fred's friend Dick fell though In, and that she was miserable with Fred, and that Fred had threatened to kill

her if he ever caught her cheating. Jean was stretched thin, falling headlong into a radical self improvement group called Life Spring, rapidly losing weight, manically planning her future without Fred, working twelve hour days for United Airlines, and in the gaps being mom to two young girls. She didn't say any of this to Karen, but she did ask her for some advice, and she said that Heidi was going to have her tonsils taken out the following Friday, And she said,

do you think I should take the day off? And I said, well, if it were my daughter, I would. But Ge didn't take Karen's advice. On Friday, she showed up for work to fly the Chicago Turn again. And Friday came and she was there and I said, I thought Heidi was getting her tonsils out. This time, Jean was working in the first class galley, preparing multi course

meals for a couple dozen passengers. She was acting normal, According to testimony later given by her supervisor on the flight, but the fact that Jean was there at all struck Karen as strange to be a mom of a six year old in a hospital. I think that I would have been more active, you know, or concerned, and she didn't seem to be that now that I think of it. She was kind of distant, and she said, well, Fred was taking care of it. Fred was taking care of it.

He had it handled. That was his style, organized, meticulous rolling. Later on, Jean's fellow stortises and many of her friends would question what Fred was taking care of and what his motives were. Picture Jean. When she met Fred, she was in her late twenties unmarried. According to one of her friends, she was starting to wonder if she would get married. She was a knockout, dark hair, slim, athletic frame,

fun loving, if a bit high strung. She would probably have been wearing a blue flower patterned mumu when she met her future husband on his way back from Hawaii. That was the uniform for United's Honolulu route, which Jean was working at the time. Back then, the airlines nakedly catered to mail business travelers, selling the attentive women on the flight as one of the attractions of air travel.

On Southwest the storedis uniform was hot pants and go go boots, and pretty much across the industry, the rules stipulated no wedding rings. Here's Karen McLean again. When we first started flying, we couldn't be married, and we couldn't have kids. While you could have kids, they would put them up for adoption, but you couldn't be married and

you had to quit when you were thirty two. Ironically, the profession was full of ambitious young women who found freedom and independence, financial and otherwise through working for the airlines. This is Becky Sprecker. She started working for PanAm in nineteen seventy two, two weeks after graduating from UNC Chapel Hill. Back then, women were just starting to delay marriage and they were thinking about maybe going to medical school or

law school. The major careers that existed during those days, of course, were being a secretary, or being a nurse, or a teacher or a stewardess. We lived kind of like little rich girls without the trust fund. We stayed in intercontinental hotels, which were wonderful upscale hotels because PanAm owned intercontinental hotels. We were young we were high spirited. We had I would say, the ideal prescription for a

pretty freewheeling lifestyle in the seventies. I mean, we had educations, we had a job, we were making some money, We could fly anywhere in the world. We wanted to go on a discount, and we had birth control. Flying for the airlines was glamorous. Well back then, in the nineteen seventies, famous people did fly commercially. That's a big difference between then and now because now they have their own private aircraft. Becky said, a friend of hers on the La to

Tahiti route had an unforgettable star sighting. She reported for briefing and poppierte to come back to Los Angeles and they said, well, you have Marlon Brando in first class, and he was married to a Tahitian actress and I think they had a child. He had filmed Mutiny on the Bounty down there and had met her. She was his love interest in the movie, and he flew frequently on pan Am to La. So she only had four

people in the front. So when they took off, she sent the other stewardess to the back to help out back there because they were they had a heavier load back there, and she was getting ready to do eggs to order for the passengers, and the next thing she knows, mister Brando comes into the galley and said, well, I know how to scramble eggs. I'll help with that, which he did, and of course the passengers were delighted. And after the service was complete, he said, well, why don't

you sit down and chat. So she sits down beside him. All of our famous people were always in one egg And she sits down beside him, and he gives her a shell leat that he had on and she still hasn't, by the way, and he lit her cigarette. Now this was in the days when you could smoke on the plane, and somebody took a picture of him, and it's absolutely the cutest thing in the world. But that kind of thing happened a lot. Then there was the time Becky

found herself on a movie set. I was flying with my ring mate and we had some movie producers on the flight out of Los Angeles. They'd come through Honolulu, they had to connect and they I said, well, you know, what are you guys doing. Well, we're making a movie that's being directed by Francis Ford Coppola, and I said, oh, okay, you know, well what is it? And they said, well, it's based on Joseph Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness, and it was it was apocalypse Now, and they invited us

up to the set. If you can imagine, it was supposed to be Neutraang and this young actor who had just arrived it was his first day on the set. We flew up there with him and it was Martin Sheen and I've never been on a movie set before or since, but that was an incredibly educational experience. Let's say it was a crazy kind of environment. And of course we all know that in the seventies there was a lot of cocaine and a lot of drugs on

movie sets, and this was no exception. According to Becky, even though the airline industry trafficked in stereotypes about women and catered to mail clientele, it was also a hotbed of second wave feminism. It used to be that you could you could not be married and fly, and they sued, and they got that changed. You couldn't have children and fly,

so they sued and that was changed. So I think that they were really sort of trailblazing and in a profession where you had to be put on the scales and you were hired for how you looked, and you had to wear makeup and all of that. It was a very It was a big contradiction, and we were the most independent of women because we could go anywhere in the world that we wanted to go. So wait a minute, you guys had to get weight in. We did.

That did go by the wayside later on, but they put you on the scales every now and then to make sure you weren't getting too heavy. I was five three and the weight maximum I think was one hundred and fifteen with your clothes on. So we would starve for a few days when we knew we were meeting with our supervisors. To make sure that we, you know, weren't over the maximum. They put would put you on weight check and you had to go in and weigh

every two weeks. Jean, who gave birth to Heidi in nineteen seventy, was a pioneer of the new policy that allowed women to resume flying after they'd had kids. I remember they were called the returning mothers, and I the first ones maybe I saw were in seventy two seventy three, right around in there. That turned the job into a career because people could combine having families with flying. Before it had been sort of a lark for a year or two to find a husband and get married and leave,

you know, and quit. But now they were combining it with raising their families, having a decent paying job with good benefits. That would have been a source of stability for Geene as she contemplated leaving Fred. She had a career and some financial wherewithal through United. Jean also had a twenty four thousand dollars life insurance policy, which five months before her death had been changed to make Fred the beneficial and if he predeceased, her named Heidi and

Kirsten co beneficiaries. When Jean died, there were a number of women who knew how troubled her marriage was and how scared she was it. Fred. Jean was a sharer, and back then being a flight attendant, you were part of a sisterhood. We called it jump seat therapy, you know, when everybody was asleep and you finally sat down with a cup of coffee on the jump seat and started

talking to a friend of yours. That you hadn't flown with for a long time, and you got caught up on their families and how things were going or who they were dating. Jean's flight attendant friends were saddened and confused by her death, and more than that, they were alarmed had Fred done this to her and made it

seem like an accident. When homicide detectives went to interview Fred about the deaths of his second wife, Verna and his stepson Doug in nineteen eighty one, one of the many things they found strange was that Fred wanted them to read a document he'd typed up about the death of his first wife, Jean. I'm going to read a little bit of it because it's so deliberate, so oddly specific. It uses military time, like Fred is writing out a report for his day job at the naval base at

Point Magoo. The document is titled Accident Narrative. October fifteenth, seventy six, zero four hundred hours, Jean and I woke up to the alarm clock. She got dressed and started her makeup. I put coffee on and sat in her bathroom talking as she put her makeup on. Zero five thirty Jean left for a Los Angeles International Airport for a turnaround flight to Chicago. I showered, feed dogs, and prepared a bag for Kirsten to take to babysitters. Zero

seven thirty. Took Kirsten to babysitters and went on to Rogue Lays Hospital in Thousand Oaks to be with Heidi while she had her tonsils and adenoids removed. Seventeen hundred hours, feed Heidi popsicle, jello and more fruit juice, read to her, then put her back to bed. Nineteen thirty in process of changing Kirsten into pajamas when Jean got in from her trip twenty hundred Jean played with Kirsten and finished

putting her to bed. Jeane and I sat in kitchen and I gave her my report on Heidi discussed her trip while I fixed myself some soup. While the soup was heating, I went out and turned on the tub heater. And then Fred's clipped matter of fact description of parenting and spousing shifts into a more expansive register. Twenty two hundred hours. Jean shut off the house lights and came out. We sat in the There's a word missing here, and I assume he forgot to write hot tub, discussing the

phone call and Heidi for about fifteen minutes. Jean sat up on the edge of the tub and said she was hot, then asked what I was drinking. I said I had a swallow of beer left, and she drank it. She then said she would really like a glass of wine. I said okay and got out of the tub. She said, would you mind checking Kirston as she does not have her usual three diapers on? I said okay, and she kissed me and said thank you, honey. Jean was still sitting on the edge of the tub when I walked away.

Walked up to the house and into Kirston's room. She was soaked, so I changed her and put her back to bed. Went into the kitchen and pulled a new bottle of wine, used a cork puller to open it, grabbed two glasses and some ice, turned off the kitchen light, and went outside. At this point Fred's style becomes almost novelistic. My eyes were not used to the darkness, and I slowly scuffed along the walk towards the tub. I called out softly Jean for no real reason. When I was

halfway there. I was not surprised when I heard no answer, as the low bubbling of the tub usually masked low conversation. Then I went over to the tub, saw she was not there, and saw the German shepherd and jean at the same time. Jeanne was faced down in the pool with her arms outstretched hands a few feet away from the wide built in steps of the pool. The dog was crouched down, just looking at her, not making a sound. After pulling jean out of the pool, Fred started mouth

to mouth. The paramedics arrived and took her to Westlake Hospital. She was brain dead. Fred's friends and supporters would call it the United Airline's rumor mill, this engine of disquiet that started to hum. Saturday morning, Karen mcclean's phone rang. She'd flown with jean the day before, and she happened to live near the hospital where Jeanne was being treated

in the ICU. I was living in Westlake Village and a friend of mine called and she said, have you heard about jean And I said no. She said she drowned last night, and she said she's supposed to be it's Westlake Hospital. Can you go over and see if you can find something out Karen was shocked, but things only got more confusing once she got to the hospital. So I went over to the hospital and I ended up talking to a nurse and I just said, you know, could you tell me what room Jean Roller is in?

But she couldn't get in to see Jean, who was being kept alive on a respirator, And she couldn't find any of Jean's family. And Jean's dad was a pilot, and I think her sister, Linda was a flight attendant. So I went over to the hospital thinking that somebody would be there, and nobody was there. Jean's sisters later told detectives that Fred was running point, making the medical

decisions and keeping them out of the loop. So Karen came back from the hospital empty handed, no information to share with the other flight attendants, and then nothing was ever said. It was very hushed up. Barbara Warner, a fellow flight attendant, feared the worst. She had been roommates with Jean before Jean's marriage, and they were still extremely close. She told investigators in nineteen eighty one that Jean's death

five years earlier still didn't sit right with her. She knew too much to take Fred's story at face value. Here's Barbara talking to an investigator about the morning after Jean's drowning. I got home for a trip on Saturday after the Friday incident drowning, and my first question to whether was mother with Red Spans and Marma at the point, I don't know. I'm at the airport, I had attat

I don't know anything. Jean had told Barbara and others that Fred was threatening her, saying if she cheated on him, he'd kill her, and she was cheating on him. She was in love with his friend Dick. Well, if excuse me, I said he was going to kill her favorite Carter fooling around. You don't think he had an idea that she was fooling around. He may have been, I would say, touring the end before her death. I would say that he was beginning to feel helpless because he knew at

that point that the marriage was so bad. Then Fred left for Hawaii on a long work trip. And I think that when Fred went to Ka, I knew. I think he really knew to think her in desperate strings. Barbara told the investigator that Jean had visited her the month before she died and had told her she was going to leave Fred when he got back. I do think that they had talked about separate before Fred with

haiming did you do with it? Was it possible that on the night of October fifteenth, before she drowned, Jean had raised the subject with Fred again, this time saying

her decision was final. Yeah. She's the kind of person that once she sat down to talk to Fred that she would tell him that she had been having an affair and everything, or I to be honest with you guys, often wondered that myself is that fatal night She was so tired she flung that Chicago turnoound on a Friday, which I can't tell you whether it does your body in your mind, she could see how Jean, in exasperation, might have just blurted out the truth about her feelings

for Deck with horrifying consequences. But no one will ever know that any morning. Fred was never charged with killing Jean. He maintains his innocence, and he continues to serve a life sentence without the possibility of parole. For the murders of Verna and Doug. Lost Hills is written and reported by me Dana Goodyear It's created by me and Ben Adair and is a production of Western Sound and Pushkin industries.