December 8, 2021 • 32 mins
It’s 1976 and Jeanne is in thrall to Lifespring, a self-improvement group, or, some would say, a cult. She is manifesting her future—without Fred. This alternative reality never arrives. Instead, Jeanne dies. And the similarities to Verna’s death are eerie.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:14):
Pushkin. In September nineteen seventy six, a month before her
thirty fourth birthday, Jean found the thing she was sure
would save her. It was called life Spring, and Jean's
parents Colorado Baptists did not approve. Life Spring was part
(00:39):
of the Human Potential Movement, a for profit self improvement
group like Landmark or ast, the promise to help its
followers attain the heights of happiness and success. Jean signed
up for a five day basic training course. There would
be lectures and guided meditations, and she hoped to come
away with clarity. Fred was in a long haul in Hawaii,
(01:01):
overseeing a bunch of knuckleheads trying to dig a trench
on the ocean floor. His marriage to Jeanne was at
an all time. She told her friend Barbara Warner that
she'd already broken things off with Dick. It was just
too destabilizing given how volatile things were with Fred. What
(01:22):
possibly was the camp more than affair? And not possibly
could camp or all hostituation better pull out of that
because becoming a little fright and they decided to which
they did do. Jean filled out her Lifespring forms in
(01:42):
big loopy handwriting. Her main goal was to decide quote
whether or not to dissolve my marriage of seven years unquote.
She was also hoping to disentangle herself emotionally from Dick.
She noted that the affair had been going on for
three years, but that she'd stopped the physical part of
the relationship three months earlier, and one more thing, the
(02:04):
affair was not the reason she was doubting her marriage.
Life's encouraged people to tune into exactly what they wanted
to rest back control of their lives and experiences. Through
meditation and insight training, they would realize they weren't lost.
They already had the answers. The answers were inside them.
(02:27):
The first step is to create a vision. A vision
brings the future to life and provides a structure for
laying new track. Declaring your vision is an act of
freedom which releases you from the past. Jean was hoping
that Lifespring would be transformational, and it was so much
so that soon after completing the basic course, she signed
(02:50):
up to do the advanced The clarity she'd been after
she'd found it, she was dialed in on the life
she wanted. How would your relationships be different if you
lived your life based on your own heartfelt vision. What
concern Forget what she'd said about moving on from Dick.
She'd meditated on it, and she knew she wanted him back.
(03:14):
The number one thing she wanted to work on it.
The advanced training was quote setting myself up for my
future with Dick fell Tholen. Unte Number two was quote
getting out of my marriage as pleasantly as possible. Unquote.
She continued, in full blown fantasy and self actualization mode.
(03:35):
Quote I will eventually be married to Dick, have his
present three children, and will totally be happy. Of course,
I plan on him attending Life Spring unquote. She flew
her daughters to the Midwest and dropped them off with
Fred's parents. She had the answer. It had been inside
her all along. Now she just needed to execute the plan.
(03:59):
I'm Dana Goodyear and this is Lost Hills, Episode four,
(04:31):
The Shallow End, Part two. Life Spring was founded in
nineteen seventy four by a man named John Hanley. Life
Spring was slick and corporate self actualization for yuppies. Participants
would pay several hundred dollars for a training, which was
(04:52):
five days of lectures, group work, and meditation. There's a
whole network of these training programs that were all kind
of the same approach, which was, take people who are
really vulnerable, who are looking for some meaning in their
life or trying to put themselves together, bring them together
(05:14):
in a big room, tear them apart, bring them down
to just zero, and then rebuild them. This is Mark Fisher,
an editor at The Washington Post who wrote about Life
Spring in the eighties. He actually went through the basic
training as a reporter. The cell is you've got all
(05:34):
kinds of problems in your life, you're really not happy.
We're going to guide you to understanding who you really are,
what you're about, and how you can succeed in every
way that you want to live. Spring would consider it
an honor to assist you in creating and implementing your vision.
Our commitment is that you experience a profound shift and
(05:56):
your ability to relate to yourself into others. It says,
we're going to get rid of all the stuff that
weighs you down, that makes you unable to be happy,
unable to succeed, and once we trash that, we're going
to get to the core of who you really are,
which is something good, and we're going to build on that.
Lifespring was different from some of its competitors and fellow
(06:19):
children of that world of training, in that Lifespring was
much rougher, especially in its early years. It was an
often brutal kind of approach. There were confrontational encounters involving
personal insults and humiliation, but then on the other side
(06:39):
of that, there were guided meditations that could be extremely powerful.
You're in a room with a couple hundred people and
everyone closes their eyes and there's some soft music and
you're taught to relax, and it almost kind of a
kind of a hypnosis procedure, and then the leader, the trainer,
(06:59):
tells you a story, a very emotionally evocative story, usually
about something in someone's childhood that gets people really heary,
and you get this sort of group cry going on
in the room, and you build as the music builds
to a moment of extraordinary catharsis, and it's kind of
(07:20):
a weep arama, and it's a hugely powerful moment in
the room. For some people, it was great. For others,
it was devastating. One of the trainees told me when
I was in the program that Lifespring was an enema
of your emotions, and for some people that's enormously dangerous,
(07:44):
and that's where some of the casualties come from. That
was Lifespring's term for people who had tremendous emotional and
physical damage from the program. They called them casualties. They
also called them wackos and basket cases, and those were
their terms for people who suffered really ill effects from
the Lifespring training. By the early eighties, dozens of trainees
(08:07):
had sued Lifespring. Six trainees had died. At the end
of each training, the trainer would have to file what
Lifespring called incident reports, and those would describe trainees who
became panicky, who had visions or regress to the womb,
(08:28):
and so some of those people ended up in psychiatric hospitals,
and some of them became suicidal. After trainings, people sometimes
experienced a Lifespring high, a kind of manic state that
could spiral precipitously into depression. Many trainees lost extreme amounts
(08:49):
of weight. Weight loss was actually kind of a promise
of the program, an outward sign of self mastering. Jean
was always slim five eight one hundred and twenty pounds,
but in the weeks between her basic training and the
advanced she was down to one O nine. Then Fred
says she dropped it under a one hundred hounds and
(09:10):
she started saying strange things about out of body experiences
and seeing the future. She would say things to me like,
you know, I don't have to look in the rearview
mirror of the car anymore, because I know when there's
a car behind me, And I would say that's fine,
but for me, Heidi and Kirsten and you, would you
(09:33):
please look in the room mirror before you James, Wayne's
just to confirmed, would you already believe? Gene was nagging
him to try Lifespring to make the divorce go more smoothly,
and he had noticed some benefits. She'd become more loving
toward the kids, he wrote, and also quote less materialistic.
She tried to sell the Jaguar after she wrecked it
(09:55):
and had it fixed, and then I finally gave up
and said, Okay, sign me up. I'll go too. And
so I was scheduled to do that, and I think
November or December of that year. In early October, right
after Jean completed her second life Spring course, Fred returned
(10:15):
from Hawaii to celebrate Jean's birthday. A few days later,
Jean wrote to her sister Carol. Her tone was giddy.
Carrol was into Life Spring too and knew the lingo.
Jean confided that she'd done some extracurricular meditating and quote
asked if I would see Dick this year. Got a
(10:35):
yes answer, so I proceed to ask when the answer,
Jean wrote, came in a vision involving white specks and
the number twenty two. Then she wrote, out of nowhere,
she'd started singing sleigh bells ring? Are you listening? Did
that mean she'd be with Dick by Christmas? As for Fred,
(10:57):
it seemed like problem solved. It's all out with Fred
and I, she wrote. He came out and asked where
we stood, so I laid it all on him. He
had tears in his eyes, but the whole situation is
progressing fantastically. He's terrifically understanding. Just knew it anyway, but
wouldn't admit it to himself. She told her sister they'd
(11:18):
planned to do the divorce cheaply through UCLA aid. They'd
still spend holidays together and share childcare. She told another
friend that Fred had unexpectedly conceded to her on every point.
They'd sell the house, split the money, and she would
be free. He even told her she could have custody
of the kids. Of course, it would mean a shift
(11:41):
in lifestyle. She told her friend Patty Letell that supporting
two households in Malibu on their salaries would be out
of the question. Here's Patty speaking to an investigator. And
another thing that she told me is that they split
up the moment they could apt to beach at Halls.
I think that he, you know, he liked living near
(12:03):
anything like the house separately. That's what she told me.
She's to be back getting her roommate. You know, I'd
have to get to tell to live in an engine
or truly lived yeah or whatever. In the letter to
her sister, Jean explained that Fred would be moving out
soon to a rental property they owned an Oxnard. Coincidentally,
(12:24):
it was four blocks away from Dick and Linda ville
Thowen's house. I guess that's the way it's supposed to be,
she wrote. Around this time, Jean's friend Candy Henman says
she ran into Jean at the bank. She said she
finally made her decision and I was so proud of
her and happy for her that she was going to leave.
(12:45):
She says that Jean told her her marriage was over
and that she would soon be free. This whole time,
(13:09):
Fred says he and Jean were not on the brink
of divorce. He was not about to move out. They
were working things out for him to stay. So add
that to the list of things he says Jean's friends
got wrong. No choking, no violence, no imminent divorce. Oh,
and the gun, which Jean reportedly moved over to Verna's house.
(13:32):
Fred later wrote, quote, my only pistol was still in
my house on Calpine when Jean died on October fifth,
nineteen seventy six. Jean turned thirty four ten days later,
on October fifteenth. She left the house early to fly
a turnaround to Chicago. All the way from la to
(13:53):
Chicago and back in one long, twelve hour stretch. So
she flew to Chicago and then flew back in the
same day. And so she got back that night. After
Hyden had his surgery, their older daughter, Heidi was in
the hospital getting her tonsils removed. Fred had spent the
(14:14):
day with her there. Heidi had to stay at the
hospital that night, after Jeane got home from Chicago and
they put their toddler, Kirsten, to bed, she and Fred
had the evening to themselves, and Jean asked me to
go ahead and turn on the hot tub, and she
had already poured a glass of wine, and I carried
(14:36):
the other wine out to the to the tub. Fred
liked the hot tub hot. He cranked it up to
one oh four, one oh five, he says, and got in.
He filled his glass and started to drink. Jean was
still inside talking on the phone with a friend, a
pretty normal conversation for Jean in those heavy days when
(14:56):
she believed she had psychic powers. She told her friend
she'd tried to see what her friend's X was up
to the next time she meditated. Then, according to her friend,
Jeane said she had to go. Fred was waiting in
the hot tub, and she said, you know how he
gets when he has to wait. Fred says he and
Jean finished the bottle of wine together in the tub,
(15:19):
and I was out there when she came out, and
we sort of killed off that bottle. Jean wanted more wine,
he says, and asked him to go inside for another
bottle and change the baby while he was at it.
He left her in the hot tub and went to
Kirsten's room. So it was a fairly warm night, and
(15:41):
you know, like the windows in Kirston's bedroom were open.
Everything was quiet. We had a German shepherd that was ours,
called utah Uta, and then we had we had basically
inherited a docun from the people across the street, the Morgansterns.
(16:03):
Their little docun mail was named Geronimo, and he was
infatuated with Uta, who was a female. So they hung
out together and sometimes he stayed over there and with us.
So I went in and changed Kirsten, and then I
got another bottle of wine. And when I walked out,
(16:27):
there was Uta and Geronimo both with their paws on
the edge of the pool, and Jeane was floating face
down in the pool. And I was stunned. I just
you know, it was just the wrong picture. I couldn't
imagine that Jeane. He said, I had left the hot
tub and walked ten or twelve feet over to the
(16:48):
swimming pool, and now she was faced down in the
shallow end. He said he found her with her arms
spread wide and floating on the surface. So I pulled
her out and yelled for our neighbor. Their bedroom was
closest to our property line, so he heard me and
I said, you know, Paul Leon Quick Leon Morgenstern, a
(17:13):
spleen surgeon at Cedar SINAI was awakened by a knock
at the door around ten forty five. He put a
bathrobe on over his pajamas and hurried to the railers,
where he found Fred giving Jean's CPR by the side
of the pool. They were both naked. He came over
and helped me with the CPR, and then the fire
(17:35):
department game and loaded us up and took us to
the hospital. When they left for the hospital, Jean's heart
was beating, but she wasn't breathing. She was comatose. Yeah,
she was. She was breathing with the machine to start with,
(17:57):
or later. I think she was on the eventI latter,
but she you know, she didn't come out of the coma.
She was. She looked like she was sleeping. And you know,
when I would sit with her an older hand, her
hands were warm, it would be just like she was sleeping.
(18:20):
And what was going through your mind during that time
sitting with her? Oh? Everything in the world, all the
way from you know what happened? How could this have happened?
Why didn't the dogs bark? I could only assume that
she had told them to be quiet, or else they
(18:41):
would have been barking if she should have been if
I think, if they would have sensed that she was
in distress, they would have been barking. I never really
understood that, and then I didn't get much sleep that
first night. I vaguely just sat in the waiting room
and cried, when did you know in your heart she
(19:02):
was going to die? Well? When the neurologist was a
young man, very nice. He basically said, took us to
one side and said, look, you know, this is considered
brain death. Jean was taken off the ventilator on October
(19:22):
twenty first. The official cause of death was pneumonia as
a result of drowning in the family pool. She had
no other injuries, and, just like with Erna, Fred was
the only witness unless you count the family dog. The
(20:01):
LA coroner said Jean's death was an accident, no foul play,
but there were plenty of people who had their doubts.
One of the doctors who treated Jean at the hospital
later said he felt suspicious of Fred. He didn't understand
why this woman had drowned. Her family and friends felt
the same way. Jeanne was an excellent swimmer, a good
(20:22):
athlete in general. It was the small details that didn't
sit right. For instance, there was talk that the shock
of going from a very hot tub into a cold
pool could have somehow contributed to her death, but plunging
in the pool did not seem like something Jeanne would do.
The begging convenience. I have never owned Jane in my
life to jump in a pool. We lived right across
(20:46):
the pool and we were an apartment. I am from
a life of me. I'll never figure that one out.
How she got in the pool. That's Barbara Warner, her
old roommate, and the dogs. Their presence in the story
seemed odd, unbelievable to people who knew the family. I
(21:08):
thought it was an unusual because here had always put
the dogs tight up. Patty Littell didn't understand what the
dogs were doing at the pool in the first place. Yeah,
because they were tied up by the back door. And
I could be wrong when I always got the impression
that the cred wasn't too crazy about the dogs. And
after his wife dies, I think one of them got
killed and the other was given away. Fred had Jean
(21:30):
cremated and he scattered her ashes at sea, though her
family was afraid to go on the water. Jean's parents
held a memorial service on land. Barbara Warner remembered Fred's
behavior at the service as noticeably strange. After the memorial service,
I went through the reception and he he had me
(21:51):
very tightly, and that I have to talk to you.
I have to talk to you. And I said fine,
told me as fine, and virtually told me who ate him?
What halfen? That? At least that was hand rendered what happened? Um,
As I think back on at the time I was,
I was, of course, I was so emotionally upset. At
(22:12):
the time, I thought, oh, okay, wonderful. You know that
doesn't tell much. Um. I really think he had that
story so down pat He rattled it off so bad
with so little emotion that I thought there's something wrong
with him. But see, in my mind I always thought
something was wrong with him anyway, So I was preconditioned,
(22:35):
and I think he had to make sure I was
buying his story. And I believe that to this day
that he had to be sure. I wasn't going to
question thank you, It's going on to Candy Henman, there
was no question as to his guilt. When I knew
for sure that he did do it was when I
(22:55):
went to Jean's funeral and he walked up in his hole.
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,
(23:17):
an evil funeralists, 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.
Jean's sisters, Carol and Linda, were the most unnerved. Carol
later said she'd reached out to the District Attorney's office
to ask them to investigate, but the office scared her
(23:38):
by saying that Fred could sue for defamation of character.
She gave it up. There was one more person who
was deeply disturbed by all of this, Verna Johnson, the
woman who would become Fred's second wife. Michelle Williams went
to see Verna when they found out Jean was in
(23:59):
a coma in the hospital, Verna, Jane's very closest friend
at that time in Vernon eye rolls. Verna's husband, Bill
had been an electrical contractor. He'd died less than a
year earlier after falling from the roof of an eighth
story building in Westwood where he was working. He had
been depressed and it looked like a suicide, but no
(24:22):
one really knew for sure. I went down and sat
with Verna because I knew how close she was to Jane,
and Vernon had losses. Verna was really spooked. The whole
thing with Jean reminded her of some of the exercises
from the Life Spring training. Jean couldn't stop talking about
guided meditations involving water and death. When I went down
(24:46):
to talk to Vernon that night that Jeane, you know,
or the night after whatever Jane had become unconsciously, you know,
I had drowned, Verna told me that Jeane had gone
to this Life Spring weakened and that Jane had told
Verna that she had imagined her own death over a water,
(25:08):
and that troubled Vernon. Now that Jean had drowned. It
was an eerie resonance, and one Fred would circle back
to repeatedly. He noted that Jean had spoken about a
guided meditation she'd done in her Life Spring workshop that
was focused on death and dying. She told him she'd
envisioned a quiet pool of water and a tombstone with
(25:30):
no date on it. Jean believed she could see the future,
and it turned out she could with one small caveat.
She thought the vision meant she would never die. Candy
(25:58):
Henman didn't stay mad at Fred for long. She noticed
he did have some good attributes. Tall, good build, dark hair,
just a handsome man. She thought an adventuresome friend of hers,
Gail Carmichael, might like him, despite the drama over Jean's death.
(26:20):
He was. He was very attractive, and he had such charisma,
and she also was that way. Nothing scared her. I
had told her what I thought had happened prior, but
that everybody else thought he was innocent. Everybody in town
was just so upset over what happened to Jean, and
(26:40):
nobody had any idea that it was related to Fred,
and everybody at that time was touting how wonderful he was.
Fred told an investigator how Candy had played matchmaker with Gail.
And let's be clear This is Fred's version of their
wild first date shortly after Jean died. She said, you know,
(27:02):
when you're ready to ask them to get back in
the circulation so forth. But me now, she said, well,
why don't you consider coming over dinner? And I said, okay,
I said, this is a kids think, But the kids
she said, oh yeah. So I went over with the kids.
And so I went over and this blond parking hour
of the forward lady pulls up her pink Cadillac said,
(27:24):
bll whatever, the hear was brand new win. She got
out of kind of lights. Your still warm, So I said,
you know the light you still watch? She said, you
had a Carlton A long time. A minute. Things like
that went on. So we went in and had a
fairly still initial type of things. She's smoked and I
(27:44):
don't smoke, and it's one of those things. And she
seemed to be a little bit of loop and I
was a little bit apathetic, and well, eating went on,
and as the liquor we got quicker and more or less.
Uh you know, we had wine to start with, and
we had warm fuzzies, which is like a cappuccino type
(28:06):
of the thing went cool in it and cream and everything. Yeah,
they were wonderful and and we had a little bit
of marijuana, a couple of joints, and then the rest
of it got really great until we were taking each
other's clothes off and we can thrashing about under the
(28:27):
coffee table. I'm going on, I don't really believe this
is going on, and the other people have already left,
and the kids are obviously already in Bedess just you know,
in the three hours of the morning. And we tried
to get in in the hot time, in the hot time,
it was too hot. What could you get in? I'm
like a screwed up the promise. So we drove up
(28:47):
to my place and spent the rest of the morning
and so forth. I guess it was probably around new
when she finally went. And I can still remember saying,
do you think we know each other well enough that
I could get your phones pretty call you? And we
talked a lot that morning about our lives and where
(29:11):
we were coming from and all these stypes things, And
it was very unusual, I mean, needless to say, to
have it happened like that. And then Gail fred said
introduced him to her psychiatrist, doctor Paul remis, and she
was telling me that she was in therapy with an
(29:33):
analyst who was really good. Thought that I should do
that because the guy was a really an interesting person,
and I he started taking Wednesdays off, he told the investigator.
So I was taking off Wednesdays every wee and I
would go down and see Gail and have an omelet
(29:54):
with her when he would normally have sex, and then
in the afternoon I would go over and have my
head worked on by a remiss and I would go
home in the afternoon. Tough schedule, quite nicely. I actually
know what the cost schedule. It would be a brush
and she had a hot tub. According to Candy, the
(30:24):
relationship ended abruptly, and she said that at one point
they weren't having conversation. And I think this is after
she had seen him one or two times and they
were intimate one morning, and he said, have you ever
done anything that you couldn't change and you felt bad
about but you could never change it. She thought he
was confessing to killing his wife, and she just said
(30:48):
she just froze with that and did not go on
anymore with that conversation, and was pretty sure that what
I thought was right and she didn't see him anymore.
But Fred says that's not true. There was a different
reason things didn't work out with Gail. It was just
(31:10):
too much to juggle. The hard part was trying to
keep Gail and Verna separate in a physical sense and
in a mental thing, trying to really decide which of
these two people I really wanted to pursue my life with.
Very heavy. Fred was in a dilemma because just months
(31:32):
after Jean's death, he wasn't only seeing Gail, he was
dating Verna too. Coming up on the next episode of
(31:54):
Lost tells Verna's sister has concerns. I said, are you
sure things you know are okay? And she said yes,
she said, friend and I have talked at length about it.
He's gone over the bass me. But I'm just concerned
to my sister because I thought, you know, I don't
want her to get involved with something good, you know,
(32:17):
would be terrible from apart later on, that's next in
episode five, Who Would You Take? Lost Tails is written
and reported by Me Dana Goodyear. It's created by me
and Ben Adair and produced by Western Sound and Pushkin Industries.
(32:38):
Subscribe to Pushkin Plus and you can hear the whole
season add free and get early access to the final
two episodes. Find Pushkin Plus on the Lost Hills Show
page in Apple Podcasts, or at pushkin dot fm.
Pushkin. In September nineteen seventy six, a month before her
thirty fourth birthday, Jean found the thing she was sure
would save her. It was called life Spring, and Jean's
parents Colorado Baptists did not approve. Life Spring was part
(00:39):
of the Human Potential Movement, a for profit self improvement
group like Landmark or ast, the promise to help its
followers attain the heights of happiness and success. Jean signed
up for a five day basic training course. There would
be lectures and guided meditations, and she hoped to come
away with clarity. Fred was in a long haul in Hawaii,
(01:01):
overseeing a bunch of knuckleheads trying to dig a trench
on the ocean floor. His marriage to Jeanne was at
an all time. She told her friend Barbara Warner that
she'd already broken things off with Dick. It was just
too destabilizing given how volatile things were with Fred. What
(01:22):
possibly was the camp more than affair? And not possibly
could camp or all hostituation better pull out of that
because becoming a little fright and they decided to which
they did do. Jean filled out her Lifespring forms in
(01:42):
big loopy handwriting. Her main goal was to decide quote
whether or not to dissolve my marriage of seven years unquote.
She was also hoping to disentangle herself emotionally from Dick.
She noted that the affair had been going on for
three years, but that she'd stopped the physical part of
the relationship three months earlier, and one more thing, the
(02:04):
affair was not the reason she was doubting her marriage.
Life's encouraged people to tune into exactly what they wanted
to rest back control of their lives and experiences. Through
meditation and insight training, they would realize they weren't lost.
They already had the answers. The answers were inside them.
(02:27):
The first step is to create a vision. A vision
brings the future to life and provides a structure for
laying new track. Declaring your vision is an act of
freedom which releases you from the past. Jean was hoping
that Lifespring would be transformational, and it was so much
so that soon after completing the basic course, she signed
(02:50):
up to do the advanced The clarity she'd been after
she'd found it, she was dialed in on the life
she wanted. How would your relationships be different if you
lived your life based on your own heartfelt vision. What
concern Forget what she'd said about moving on from Dick.
She'd meditated on it, and she knew she wanted him back.
(03:14):
The number one thing she wanted to work on it.
The advanced training was quote setting myself up for my
future with Dick fell Tholen. Unte Number two was quote
getting out of my marriage as pleasantly as possible. Unquote.
She continued, in full blown fantasy and self actualization mode.
(03:35):
Quote I will eventually be married to Dick, have his
present three children, and will totally be happy. Of course,
I plan on him attending Life Spring unquote. She flew
her daughters to the Midwest and dropped them off with
Fred's parents. She had the answer. It had been inside
her all along. Now she just needed to execute the plan.
(03:59):
I'm Dana Goodyear and this is Lost Hills, Episode four,
(04:31):
The Shallow End, Part two. Life Spring was founded in
nineteen seventy four by a man named John Hanley. Life
Spring was slick and corporate self actualization for yuppies. Participants
would pay several hundred dollars for a training, which was
(04:52):
five days of lectures, group work, and meditation. There's a
whole network of these training programs that were all kind
of the same approach, which was, take people who are
really vulnerable, who are looking for some meaning in their
life or trying to put themselves together, bring them together
(05:14):
in a big room, tear them apart, bring them down
to just zero, and then rebuild them. This is Mark Fisher,
an editor at The Washington Post who wrote about Life
Spring in the eighties. He actually went through the basic
training as a reporter. The cell is you've got all
(05:34):
kinds of problems in your life, you're really not happy.
We're going to guide you to understanding who you really are,
what you're about, and how you can succeed in every
way that you want to live. Spring would consider it
an honor to assist you in creating and implementing your vision.
Our commitment is that you experience a profound shift and
(05:56):
your ability to relate to yourself into others. It says,
we're going to get rid of all the stuff that
weighs you down, that makes you unable to be happy,
unable to succeed, and once we trash that, we're going
to get to the core of who you really are,
which is something good, and we're going to build on that.
Lifespring was different from some of its competitors and fellow
(06:19):
children of that world of training, in that Lifespring was
much rougher, especially in its early years. It was an
often brutal kind of approach. There were confrontational encounters involving
personal insults and humiliation, but then on the other side
(06:39):
of that, there were guided meditations that could be extremely powerful.
You're in a room with a couple hundred people and
everyone closes their eyes and there's some soft music and
you're taught to relax, and it almost kind of a
kind of a hypnosis procedure, and then the leader, the trainer,
(06:59):
tells you a story, a very emotionally evocative story, usually
about something in someone's childhood that gets people really heary,
and you get this sort of group cry going on
in the room, and you build as the music builds
to a moment of extraordinary catharsis, and it's kind of
(07:20):
a weep arama, and it's a hugely powerful moment in
the room. For some people, it was great. For others,
it was devastating. One of the trainees told me when
I was in the program that Lifespring was an enema
of your emotions, and for some people that's enormously dangerous,
(07:44):
and that's where some of the casualties come from. That
was Lifespring's term for people who had tremendous emotional and
physical damage from the program. They called them casualties. They
also called them wackos and basket cases, and those were
their terms for people who suffered really ill effects from
the Lifespring training. By the early eighties, dozens of trainees
(08:07):
had sued Lifespring. Six trainees had died. At the end
of each training, the trainer would have to file what
Lifespring called incident reports, and those would describe trainees who
became panicky, who had visions or regress to the womb,
(08:28):
and so some of those people ended up in psychiatric hospitals,
and some of them became suicidal. After trainings, people sometimes
experienced a Lifespring high, a kind of manic state that
could spiral precipitously into depression. Many trainees lost extreme amounts
(08:49):
of weight. Weight loss was actually kind of a promise
of the program, an outward sign of self mastering. Jean
was always slim five eight one hundred and twenty pounds,
but in the weeks between her basic training and the
advanced she was down to one O nine. Then Fred
says she dropped it under a one hundred hounds and
(09:10):
she started saying strange things about out of body experiences
and seeing the future. She would say things to me like,
you know, I don't have to look in the rearview
mirror of the car anymore, because I know when there's
a car behind me, And I would say that's fine,
but for me, Heidi and Kirsten and you, would you
(09:33):
please look in the room mirror before you James, Wayne's
just to confirmed, would you already believe? Gene was nagging
him to try Lifespring to make the divorce go more smoothly,
and he had noticed some benefits. She'd become more loving
toward the kids, he wrote, and also quote less materialistic.
She tried to sell the Jaguar after she wrecked it
(09:55):
and had it fixed, and then I finally gave up
and said, Okay, sign me up. I'll go too. And
so I was scheduled to do that, and I think
November or December of that year. In early October, right
after Jean completed her second life Spring course, Fred returned
(10:15):
from Hawaii to celebrate Jean's birthday. A few days later,
Jean wrote to her sister Carol. Her tone was giddy.
Carrol was into Life Spring too and knew the lingo.
Jean confided that she'd done some extracurricular meditating and quote
asked if I would see Dick this year. Got a
(10:35):
yes answer, so I proceed to ask when the answer,
Jean wrote, came in a vision involving white specks and
the number twenty two. Then she wrote, out of nowhere,
she'd started singing sleigh bells ring? Are you listening? Did
that mean she'd be with Dick by Christmas? As for Fred,
(10:57):
it seemed like problem solved. It's all out with Fred
and I, she wrote. He came out and asked where
we stood, so I laid it all on him. He
had tears in his eyes, but the whole situation is
progressing fantastically. He's terrifically understanding. Just knew it anyway, but
wouldn't admit it to himself. She told her sister they'd
(11:18):
planned to do the divorce cheaply through UCLA aid. They'd
still spend holidays together and share childcare. She told another
friend that Fred had unexpectedly conceded to her on every point.
They'd sell the house, split the money, and she would
be free. He even told her she could have custody
of the kids. Of course, it would mean a shift
(11:41):
in lifestyle. She told her friend Patty Letell that supporting
two households in Malibu on their salaries would be out
of the question. Here's Patty speaking to an investigator. And
another thing that she told me is that they split
up the moment they could apt to beach at Halls.
I think that he, you know, he liked living near
(12:03):
anything like the house separately. That's what she told me.
She's to be back getting her roommate. You know, I'd
have to get to tell to live in an engine
or truly lived yeah or whatever. In the letter to
her sister, Jean explained that Fred would be moving out
soon to a rental property they owned an Oxnard. Coincidentally,
(12:24):
it was four blocks away from Dick and Linda ville
Thowen's house. I guess that's the way it's supposed to be,
she wrote. Around this time, Jean's friend Candy Henman says
she ran into Jean at the bank. She said she
finally made her decision and I was so proud of
her and happy for her that she was going to leave.
(12:45):
She says that Jean told her her marriage was over
and that she would soon be free. This whole time,
(13:09):
Fred says he and Jean were not on the brink
of divorce. He was not about to move out. They
were working things out for him to stay. So add
that to the list of things he says Jean's friends
got wrong. No choking, no violence, no imminent divorce. Oh,
and the gun, which Jean reportedly moved over to Verna's house.
(13:32):
Fred later wrote, quote, my only pistol was still in
my house on Calpine when Jean died on October fifth,
nineteen seventy six. Jean turned thirty four ten days later,
on October fifteenth. She left the house early to fly
a turnaround to Chicago. All the way from la to
(13:53):
Chicago and back in one long, twelve hour stretch. So
she flew to Chicago and then flew back in the
same day. And so she got back that night. After
Hyden had his surgery, their older daughter, Heidi was in
the hospital getting her tonsils removed. Fred had spent the
(14:14):
day with her there. Heidi had to stay at the
hospital that night, after Jeane got home from Chicago and
they put their toddler, Kirsten, to bed, she and Fred
had the evening to themselves, and Jean asked me to
go ahead and turn on the hot tub, and she
had already poured a glass of wine, and I carried
(14:36):
the other wine out to the to the tub. Fred
liked the hot tub hot. He cranked it up to
one oh four, one oh five, he says, and got in.
He filled his glass and started to drink. Jean was
still inside talking on the phone with a friend, a
pretty normal conversation for Jean in those heavy days when
(14:56):
she believed she had psychic powers. She told her friend
she'd tried to see what her friend's X was up
to the next time she meditated. Then, according to her friend,
Jeane said she had to go. Fred was waiting in
the hot tub, and she said, you know how he
gets when he has to wait. Fred says he and
Jean finished the bottle of wine together in the tub,
(15:19):
and I was out there when she came out, and
we sort of killed off that bottle. Jean wanted more wine,
he says, and asked him to go inside for another
bottle and change the baby while he was at it.
He left her in the hot tub and went to
Kirsten's room. So it was a fairly warm night, and
(15:41):
you know, like the windows in Kirston's bedroom were open.
Everything was quiet. We had a German shepherd that was ours,
called utah Uta, and then we had we had basically
inherited a docun from the people across the street, the Morgansterns.
(16:03):
Their little docun mail was named Geronimo, and he was
infatuated with Uta, who was a female. So they hung
out together and sometimes he stayed over there and with us.
So I went in and changed Kirsten, and then I
got another bottle of wine. And when I walked out,
(16:27):
there was Uta and Geronimo both with their paws on
the edge of the pool, and Jeane was floating face
down in the pool. And I was stunned. I just
you know, it was just the wrong picture. I couldn't
imagine that Jeane. He said, I had left the hot
tub and walked ten or twelve feet over to the
(16:48):
swimming pool, and now she was faced down in the
shallow end. He said he found her with her arms
spread wide and floating on the surface. So I pulled
her out and yelled for our neighbor. Their bedroom was
closest to our property line, so he heard me and
I said, you know, Paul Leon Quick Leon Morgenstern, a
(17:13):
spleen surgeon at Cedar SINAI was awakened by a knock
at the door around ten forty five. He put a
bathrobe on over his pajamas and hurried to the railers,
where he found Fred giving Jean's CPR by the side
of the pool. They were both naked. He came over
and helped me with the CPR, and then the fire
(17:35):
department game and loaded us up and took us to
the hospital. When they left for the hospital, Jean's heart
was beating, but she wasn't breathing. She was comatose. Yeah,
she was. She was breathing with the machine to start with,
(17:57):
or later. I think she was on the eventI latter,
but she you know, she didn't come out of the coma.
She was. She looked like she was sleeping. And you know,
when I would sit with her an older hand, her
hands were warm, it would be just like she was sleeping.
(18:20):
And what was going through your mind during that time
sitting with her? Oh? Everything in the world, all the
way from you know what happened? How could this have happened?
Why didn't the dogs bark? I could only assume that
she had told them to be quiet, or else they
(18:41):
would have been barking if she should have been if
I think, if they would have sensed that she was
in distress, they would have been barking. I never really
understood that, and then I didn't get much sleep that
first night. I vaguely just sat in the waiting room
and cried, when did you know in your heart she
(19:02):
was going to die? Well? When the neurologist was a
young man, very nice. He basically said, took us to
one side and said, look, you know, this is considered
brain death. Jean was taken off the ventilator on October
(19:22):
twenty first. The official cause of death was pneumonia as
a result of drowning in the family pool. She had
no other injuries, and, just like with Erna, Fred was
the only witness unless you count the family dog. The
(20:01):
LA coroner said Jean's death was an accident, no foul play,
but there were plenty of people who had their doubts.
One of the doctors who treated Jean at the hospital
later said he felt suspicious of Fred. He didn't understand
why this woman had drowned. Her family and friends felt
the same way. Jeanne was an excellent swimmer, a good
(20:22):
athlete in general. It was the small details that didn't
sit right. For instance, there was talk that the shock
of going from a very hot tub into a cold
pool could have somehow contributed to her death, but plunging
in the pool did not seem like something Jeanne would do.
The begging convenience. I have never owned Jane in my
life to jump in a pool. We lived right across
(20:46):
the pool and we were an apartment. I am from
a life of me. I'll never figure that one out.
How she got in the pool. That's Barbara Warner, her
old roommate, and the dogs. Their presence in the story
seemed odd, unbelievable to people who knew the family. I
(21:08):
thought it was an unusual because here had always put
the dogs tight up. Patty Littell didn't understand what the
dogs were doing at the pool in the first place. Yeah,
because they were tied up by the back door. And
I could be wrong when I always got the impression
that the cred wasn't too crazy about the dogs. And
after his wife dies, I think one of them got
killed and the other was given away. Fred had Jean
(21:30):
cremated and he scattered her ashes at sea, though her
family was afraid to go on the water. Jean's parents
held a memorial service on land. Barbara Warner remembered Fred's
behavior at the service as noticeably strange. After the memorial service,
I went through the reception and he he had me
(21:51):
very tightly, and that I have to talk to you.
I have to talk to you. And I said fine,
told me as fine, and virtually told me who ate him?
What halfen? That? At least that was hand rendered what happened? Um,
As I think back on at the time I was,
I was, of course, I was so emotionally upset. At
(22:12):
the time, I thought, oh, okay, wonderful. You know that
doesn't tell much. Um. I really think he had that
story so down pat He rattled it off so bad
with so little emotion that I thought there's something wrong
with him. But see, in my mind I always thought
something was wrong with him anyway, So I was preconditioned,
(22:35):
and I think he had to make sure I was
buying his story. And I believe that to this day
that he had to be sure. I wasn't going to
question thank you, It's going on to Candy Henman, there
was no question as to his guilt. When I knew
for sure that he did do it was when I
(22:55):
went to Jean's funeral and he walked up in his hole.
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,
(23:17):
an evil funeralists, 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.
Jean's sisters, Carol and Linda, were the most unnerved. Carol
later said she'd reached out to the District Attorney's office
to ask them to investigate, but the office scared her
(23:38):
by saying that Fred could sue for defamation of character.
She gave it up. There was one more person who
was deeply disturbed by all of this, Verna Johnson, the
woman who would become Fred's second wife. Michelle Williams went
to see Verna when they found out Jean was in
(23:59):
a coma in the hospital, Verna, Jane's very closest friend
at that time in Vernon eye rolls. Verna's husband, Bill
had been an electrical contractor. He'd died less than a
year earlier after falling from the roof of an eighth
story building in Westwood where he was working. He had
been depressed and it looked like a suicide, but no
(24:22):
one really knew for sure. I went down and sat
with Verna because I knew how close she was to Jane,
and Vernon had losses. Verna was really spooked. The whole
thing with Jean reminded her of some of the exercises
from the Life Spring training. Jean couldn't stop talking about
guided meditations involving water and death. When I went down
(24:46):
to talk to Vernon that night that Jeane, you know,
or the night after whatever Jane had become unconsciously, you know,
I had drowned, Verna told me that Jeane had gone
to this Life Spring weakened and that Jane had told
Verna that she had imagined her own death over a water,
(25:08):
and that troubled Vernon. Now that Jean had drowned. It
was an eerie resonance, and one Fred would circle back
to repeatedly. He noted that Jean had spoken about a
guided meditation she'd done in her Life Spring workshop that
was focused on death and dying. She told him she'd
envisioned a quiet pool of water and a tombstone with
(25:30):
no date on it. Jean believed she could see the future,
and it turned out she could with one small caveat.
She thought the vision meant she would never die. Candy
(25:58):
Henman didn't stay mad at Fred for long. She noticed
he did have some good attributes. Tall, good build, dark hair,
just a handsome man. She thought an adventuresome friend of hers,
Gail Carmichael, might like him, despite the drama over Jean's death.
(26:20):
He was. He was very attractive, and he had such charisma,
and she also was that way. Nothing scared her. I
had told her what I thought had happened prior, but
that everybody else thought he was innocent. Everybody in town
was just so upset over what happened to Jean, and
(26:40):
nobody had any idea that it was related to Fred,
and everybody at that time was touting how wonderful he was.
Fred told an investigator how Candy had played matchmaker with Gail.
And let's be clear This is Fred's version of their
wild first date shortly after Jean died. She said, you know,
(27:02):
when you're ready to ask them to get back in
the circulation so forth. But me now, she said, well,
why don't you consider coming over dinner? And I said, okay,
I said, this is a kids think, But the kids
she said, oh yeah. So I went over with the kids.
And so I went over and this blond parking hour
of the forward lady pulls up her pink Cadillac said,
(27:24):
bll whatever, the hear was brand new win. She got
out of kind of lights. Your still warm, So I said,
you know the light you still watch? She said, you
had a Carlton A long time. A minute. Things like
that went on. So we went in and had a
fairly still initial type of things. She's smoked and I
(27:44):
don't smoke, and it's one of those things. And she
seemed to be a little bit of loop and I
was a little bit apathetic, and well, eating went on,
and as the liquor we got quicker and more or less.
Uh you know, we had wine to start with, and
we had warm fuzzies, which is like a cappuccino type
(28:06):
of the thing went cool in it and cream and everything. Yeah,
they were wonderful and and we had a little bit
of marijuana, a couple of joints, and then the rest
of it got really great until we were taking each
other's clothes off and we can thrashing about under the
(28:27):
coffee table. I'm going on, I don't really believe this
is going on, and the other people have already left,
and the kids are obviously already in Bedess just you know,
in the three hours of the morning. And we tried
to get in in the hot time, in the hot time,
it was too hot. What could you get in? I'm
like a screwed up the promise. So we drove up
(28:47):
to my place and spent the rest of the morning
and so forth. I guess it was probably around new
when she finally went. And I can still remember saying,
do you think we know each other well enough that
I could get your phones pretty call you? And we
talked a lot that morning about our lives and where
(29:11):
we were coming from and all these stypes things, And
it was very unusual, I mean, needless to say, to
have it happened like that. And then Gail fred said
introduced him to her psychiatrist, doctor Paul remis, and she
was telling me that she was in therapy with an
(29:33):
analyst who was really good. Thought that I should do
that because the guy was a really an interesting person,
and I he started taking Wednesdays off, he told the investigator.
So I was taking off Wednesdays every wee and I
would go down and see Gail and have an omelet
(29:54):
with her when he would normally have sex, and then
in the afternoon I would go over and have my
head worked on by a remiss and I would go
home in the afternoon. Tough schedule, quite nicely. I actually
know what the cost schedule. It would be a brush
and she had a hot tub. According to Candy, the
(30:24):
relationship ended abruptly, and she said that at one point
they weren't having conversation. And I think this is after
she had seen him one or two times and they
were intimate one morning, and he said, have you ever
done anything that you couldn't change and you felt bad
about but you could never change it. She thought he
was confessing to killing his wife, and she just said
(30:48):
she just froze with that and did not go on
anymore with that conversation, and was pretty sure that what
I thought was right and she didn't see him anymore.
But Fred says that's not true. There was a different
reason things didn't work out with Gail. It was just
(31:10):
too much to juggle. The hard part was trying to
keep Gail and Verna separate in a physical sense and
in a mental thing, trying to really decide which of
these two people I really wanted to pursue my life with.
Very heavy. Fred was in a dilemma because just months
(31:32):
after Jean's death, he wasn't only seeing Gail, he was
dating Verna too. Coming up on the next episode of
(31:54):
Lost tells Verna's sister has concerns. I said, are you
sure things you know are okay? And she said yes,
she said, friend and I have talked at length about it.
He's gone over the bass me. But I'm just concerned
to my sister because I thought, you know, I don't
want her to get involved with something good, you know,
(32:17):
would be terrible from apart later on, that's next in
episode five, Who Would You Take? Lost Tails is written
and reported by Me Dana Goodyear. It's created by me
and Ben Adair and produced by Western Sound and Pushkin Industries.
(32:38):
Subscribe to Pushkin Plus and you can hear the whole
season add free and get early access to the final
two episodes. Find Pushkin Plus on the Lost Hills Show
page in Apple Podcasts, or at pushkin dot fm.
Host
Dana Goodyear
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