December 20, 2021 • 32 mins
After Fred’s arrest, detectives start looking into his finances. How does a civilian employee of the Navy afford a beachfront home, on a gated road in Malibu, and a brand-new $150K sailboat? Also, they learn that the Roehlers owned large insurance policies. Could that be the motive the cops are looking for?
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
Pushkin. A week after his arrest in early April nineteen
(00:35):
eighty one, Fred took a polygraph exam. Surprisingly, it wasn't
ordered by law enforcement. It was ordered by Fred's defense team.
Polygraph tests are notoriously unreliable, but Fred's lawyers were hoping
that a successful polygraph would help prove his innocence. There
was a lot to go over. Fred had entered a
(00:56):
plea of not guilty, but the second autopsy showed trauma
to Verna and Doug, bruises and marks that seemed to
bolster the CoP's working theory that Fred had killed them violently.
The polygraph was meant to bring clarity. It was a
past failed test. Fred was either a liar or he wasn't.
(01:21):
If you didn't have any connection with their death other
than accidental, the believing you pass a pot. This is
the polygraph examiner explaining the process to Fred. I had
no idea if you're going to be lying to me
or tell me the truth. But after we get into
this for a couple of hours, you're going to find out.
I can tell when you lie, if you're responsible doing that,
(01:43):
or you tell a movie water or anyway. So of course,
and here by my way, and you will fail the polygraph.
After the examiner had established Fred's baseline how he reacted
to questions of various kinds, he started asking him about Verna,
Doug and what happened on January second, nineteen eighty one,
the day they drowned. Then I have lunch luncher? Did
(02:06):
you have on one? Because I was, as Fred this, No,
that's a bunch of bullshit. That's a bunch of bullshit.
How about Doug? Was he doing some time? That Vernon
has been swimming since we bought the boat and bought
our house and Malda. I think when we went to
my parents' house she went in the pool, but she
was really not a good swimmer. How did you get along?
(02:26):
There was everything okay in the bedroom. It was actually
a social Actually everything was terrific in the room. And
how about between the three that you had done yourself
and burn up? How was publish relationship that good? Bad?
(02:46):
Or very different? Yeah? I would say it would be
good with the qualification. The qualification was that they disagreed
about how to handle Doug. If there were going to
be points of concern between Burnie and I about the children,
that's working on my king. The examiner flipped the tape
(03:07):
over to the other side, then continue asking Fred about
the day of the drownings. Well, then you were tired
of how worn it so? Then forty fives two bodies
on worn? Yeah? Did you almost die? But keep you going, Fred,
that's okay. Just I realized were you a frame of diing?
(03:31):
He just couldn't stop, could you? Fred had started getting emotional.
Did you think he stopped, you would have died. I
just knew that I was wearing down. I didn't die
(03:54):
for for a long time. I know when I'm tired underwater.
I know when my breathing he screwed up and I
can't get my breath, and all those things were going on.
I was taken on water just at all turned to ship.
The exam lasted over an hour. Near the end, Fred
told the examiner he wasn't feeling so good. I'll see
(04:18):
how you do it first? Can pretty gooey? Oh you
are a sweaty answer? Is this normal? Abnormal? How awful?
Fred said? A few minutes later, the tape ends. When
(04:43):
I asked Fred the result of the polygraph, he told
me it was inconclusive. He didn't pass or fail, he said,
and the polygraph was never a factor in the trial.
But there was one question the examiner asked that seemed
to come almost out of the blue. It was abstract
and vague, and yet it drove right to the heart
(05:05):
of the investigation, right to the heart of Fred's motive.
Vaitions in life quest you loved the most? Love or Money?
That one. Fred didn't answer right away, and when he did,
his voice had the controlled, deliberate quality of a valedictorian
on graduation day. I think is most important. Okay, now,
(05:33):
you guys. But the question of money and how badly
Fred needed it, that was exactly what law enforcement had
been trying to figure out. I'm Dana Goodyear and this
is Lost Hells Episode seven, Love or Money. Fred and
(06:22):
Verna were supposed to be a love story. They'd both
overcome the tragic, untimely deaths of their first spouses to
find love again. But there were some irregularities in the
origin story. One it seemed like maybe they'd gotten together
before Jean died. When the Santa Barbara detectives asked around
(06:46):
about Fred and Verna, they heard one thing loud and clear.
Whether you approved or you didn't, It had been a
whirlwind romance. In handwritten notes Fred made around the time
of his trial, he laid out the way in which
his relationship with Verna changed babysitter, friend, lover wife. At
(07:07):
the line for lover, he writes da dates as if
he's trying to get a handle on what law enforcement knew.
That's because the detectives had started to suspect that Fred
and Verna were having an affair before Jean died. Verna's
friend and confidant, Patty Lytell, had told them as much,
(07:29):
and when Fred's investigator went to talk to her, she
doubled down. Here she is talking to the investigator. I
didn't ask this. She's having an affair with him. She
told me too. I realize Verna and I were very close,
leaving it close together. True, that would be a problem
(07:53):
were it ever to come out in court. Questioned by
the detectives, Fred's sailing buddy, Dick Felfoean admitted to his
affair with Jean, but Fred always denied knowing about it.
Even to this day, he denies it, and he denies
he and Verna got together before Jean's death, because if
he knew Jean was cheating and he wanted to be
(08:14):
with Verna. Those affairs would establish a powerful motive, not
just for him to kill Jean, but who knows, maybe
for him to kill Vernah's first husband too. So they
might have been together before they were together. But then
there was something else the detectives uncovered even more shocking
(08:36):
to their church friends. When they got married, they weren't
really married. Do you recall the married ceremony on the beach.
This is a private investigator hired by Fred's defense talking
to Verna's good friend Michelle Williams and her husband Dick.
(08:58):
Were you aware when that ceremony was held that they
were not legally married? That moving ceremony Christmas of nineteen
seventy seven, when Fred and Verna dressed, the kids been
matching outfits and they all exchanged rings, it wasn't actually
a wedding. Did that make any difference to you finding
that out two weeks ago they were not legally married
(09:23):
during this ceremony, that it was a religious ceremony. Where
I don't really understand the little thing. I just love
that out two weeks ago, a little late games. You know,
John Hagar, the minister from the Methodist Church, had performed
the ceremony, so the guests had assumed it was legit. Well,
John Hagar, it was the guy that was there on
the beach that day, and he's the guy who married him.
(09:44):
So I don't know what the difference is. But apparently
some of the people who have, you know, said some
bad things about Fred and Verna, thought that that was
just awful, that they had been deceived and sewing and
so forth. So I don't well, had had they not
applied for mary license, They don't know what the circumstances were.
I'm just asking the questions to try and find out.
(10:07):
I'm not sure exactly what it means either, because he's
an ordained instrum. You know what it could have been financial,
That's all I could think. That was exactly it. Fred
later wrote that the reason he and Verna hadn't married
then was economic, because if she remarried, Verna would stop
(10:30):
getting pension and social security benefits from her deceased husband Bill.
Fred and Verna kept it quiet, but in a handwritten will,
Verna spelled it all out. While I am not legally
married to Frederick George Riller the second because of financial
and tax purposes, she wrote, we are married in the
eyes of God, and that is what really counts. If
(10:55):
she died, she continued, she intended for Fred to raise
her children, Kim and Doug, and quote continue the finances
of my estate with no other appointed trustee or executor.
The wedding that wasn't raised a red flag for the
Santa Barbara detectives, and Verna's will was one of the
(11:17):
many items listed on the warrant they got in order
to search the house on Sea Level Drive. But in
that search they also found another suspicious document in a
desk drawer, a confidential record of another wedding, this one legal.
Fred and Verna had been married secretly by the same minister,
(11:40):
but it was more than two years after the wedding
on the beach. Their actual marriage date was July twelfth,
nineteen eighty, just five months before Verna's death. By the
time Verna died, the couple's assets had been transferred to
a trust they'd set up with help from Fred's old
friend and lawyer, Bill Fairfield. The purpose of the Johnson
(12:03):
Railer Trust, Fred said, was to prevent any gossip that
might arise about financial gain should he or Verna die.
The detectives found the flow chart for the trust in
the silver case underneath a desk in the living room,
along with a guide book for widows and what appeared
to be Fred's diary of the day that Verna and
Doug drowned. The Santa Barbara detectives, Fred Ray and Claude
(12:40):
Toller were talking to everyone in Malibu about every aspect
of Fred's life with Verna. Verna's old friend Patty Lytell,
told them that back when Fred and Verna first got together,
Fred had pressured Verna to get married right away. Patty
said Fred was trying to marry Verna just a couple
months after Jean died, but Verna seemed to worry what
(13:02):
people would think. Patty had advised Verna to take it slow,
maybe live with Fred. Awhile before deciding, and she told
Verna what she was really worried about. She didn't think
Fred loved her. She thought he was after her property
on Broadbeach. Even though they hadn't gotten married right away,
Fred did figure out a financially beneficial solution. While he
(13:26):
and Verna remained officially unmarried. She could continue to collect
her first husband's benefits, and then once they did marry officially,
their assets, including her house, would go into the trust
of which Fred and Verna were co trustees, of which
Fred became the sole trustee once she died. When the
(13:47):
detectives had interviewed Fred back in January, they'd asked a
lot of questions about his finances that before a year
and Verna gotten very pictured network before we gotten there. Yeah,
(14:12):
I'm probably in the order of half a million dollars
a piece. Hires her if in you work or with
her money real estate? Two? What rules too? Was it right?
(14:34):
She had some houses? There's a housing broad Beach or
any other houses that shield you know the lands? I
have two other houses. I have a house and on Calpine,
and then I have one I'm sorry, caliplines round here
(14:58):
somewhere Pacific coast. Timer. If you own any other houses?
Have you heard? Brighten this one? Fred's relationship with Verna,
their merger, he sometimes called it, began at a moment
when they had each inherited a modest fortune in real estate,
(15:21):
insurance money, and other benefits from their first spouses. When
Jean died, Fred received about seventy five thousand dollars in
insurance money. That's about three hundred and sixty thousand into
day's dollars. Her social security benefits threw off the equivalent
of another thirty eight thousand in today's money every year
(15:43):
when she was alive and talking about divorce. Jean and
Fred owned two properties, a house in Oxnard and the
Kalpine House in Malibu, but with Jeanne gone, Fred became
the sole owner at a time when Malibu home values
were spiking. The Oxnard house was also on the coast,
in an up and coming neighborhood called the Silver Strand.
(16:05):
He ended up turning both houses into income properties. The
insurance policy on Verna's first husband, Bill Johnson, paid Verna
a substantial sum, about two hundred and fifty thousand dollars
in today's money. She also got his generous pension and
social security benefits, and she became the sole owner of
(16:25):
the property on Broad Beach Road, a duplex with a
garage apartment right on the beach in a neighborhood Allie
mcgrawl would soon be priced out of. Outside of the
rental properties, the family's income was a hodgepodge. Fred only
earned about thirty thousand dollars a year from his job
as an underwater engineer at Point Magoo. That's just over
(16:47):
one hundred thousand in today's money. And according to his
colleague Denis O'Gorman, Fred's ambition had been in freefall ever
since Jean died. Here's O'Gorman talking to an investigator. He
very seemed very despondent about things. It was philosophizing. For instance,
he started talking about how, really, you know, it should
(17:11):
be a socialistic society. Anybody, everybody ought to be allowed
to do whatever it is that they want to do.
So if you decide you want to be a beach bump,
you get the same number of bucks as some guy
who wants to sit in office and do calculations all day. Okay,
no matter what you want to do, you ought to
be able to do it. I means your life, and
it is so short. Want un enjoyed to the utmost.
You know, the perfect world if you have it on earth,
(17:31):
and that's basically stopped working about it. And it seemed
like the more he got away with, the more he
wanted to get away with. And very job that Fred
had was given to somebody else, which really ticked us off.
I mean, we liked the work but now we're carrying
a hell of a workload, okay, more than our share.
And here's one man who's making more money than any
one of us because he's been there longer, and he's
(17:53):
higher up on the scale, and he's not doing anything.
And not only is he not doing anything, but he's
tying up the phones on personal calls. He's now dating
Verna and he's making personal calls with his girlfriends to
his liars for proper investments or whatever the hailop days,
you know, anywhere, their personal calls. And he has a
(18:15):
smirk on his face like he knows that we know
what's going on, and there's nothing anybody can do or
wants to do about it. And by god, it's just
kissed my ass, you know, that kind of attitude, and
it's infuriating. Then, from nineteen seventy eight to nineteen eighty
Fred really stopped working. He'd injured his back, or so
he said. On the polygraph, he admitted to fudging that
(18:37):
a bit. Fred did have a little side business building
redwood hot tubs. Here he is talking to an investigator
in nineteen eighty one. You've actually blacked him, black him
out of wood Jimmy is an installed for people who
are mostly friends. It was not a lucratic situation. There
(18:59):
was Verna's pay from her teaching job, which amounted to
just a couple grand a year. They had the benefits
from their first spouses and the income from their various properties.
They're houses might have been worth a lot, but cash flow,
how is this all working. In the spring of nineteen eighty,
about nine months before Verna and dug drown, Fred and
(19:22):
Verna bought Perseverance, their fifty foot sailboat. The price tag
around one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, five times Fred's
annual salary at Point Magoo back when he was working
Perseverance was fancy. This is Dempsey Billy, an investigator for
the Santa Barbara Day's office. I talked to him recently.
(19:44):
He remembered Perseverance very well. The sailboat that was there
in the venture at Harbor, and a really nice boat.
They have a fireplace in it. Not too many sailboats
that I've been around a fireplace in them. Fred's salvency
was of great interest to the detectives. How was this
guy who made so little money leveling up in Malibu.
(20:09):
By the time they went back and questioned Fred a
second time on January twentieth, nineteen eighty one, they learned
a lot about his tumultuous relationship with Jean and that
he'd improved his financial position and certainly his real estate
holdings upon her death. So they had a few more
questions for Fred. Did you and bury Heaven? Maridle from Yeah,
(20:36):
how would you describe your relationship? You're very days, I
would say, because good a relationship. Overall, anybody I've known
them shared the same aspirations, gone through really a learning
(21:01):
process for deciding what we really wanted to do with
the children and in buying both and all the things.
We shared interests in the children and shared interest and
(21:22):
thinks I would like to do friends with find families.
I don't know what else. Were you having any financial
fund or are you having the financial funds today? Friend
says he wasn't underwater. Quite the contrary. When they were
(21:46):
saying that, oh you're you know I was broke, I said, well,
the thing you didn't search when you tore up my
house was you didn't go into the deep freeze. I
had a faith in there. With thirty grand cash and
about five thousand and travelers checks in it, and they
were sort of stunned. And then they asked the detectively
(22:07):
he had looked in this in the deep greeze, and
he said, of course he hadn't. What was that for?
And where did it come from? Ever since? I had
been making payments on different things, and when I no
longer made payments on them, I basically put some money
aside in a safe, and I put it in our chest,
(22:28):
deep freeze, under a bunch of frozen crates of orange juice.
And that's where I kept our passports and you know,
our papers and everything else in there. It was in
the garage, and the prosecution went nuts when they found
out that their super detectives hadn't found it. Thirty five
(22:53):
thousand dollars is a hefty chunk of change. It's equivalent
to about one hundred and ten thousand today. Fred basically
had a year's salary and his freezer underneath the orange juice.
Why would anyone keep that much cash just lying around
his house? To own a sailboat one as stunning as perseverance.
(23:32):
It was Fred's dream come true. She was brand new
and sleek toothpaste white with teak decks and trim. Everything
about her down to the name was perfect. Her did
not look at it. I don't think we could think
of anything more apropos than that for us, for all
(23:54):
the stuff we had gone through. You know, both of
our lives were not not the not smooth. They had
bumps all over them. So we both sort of felt that,
having persevered, we were very fortunate to have found each other.
And you know, I'll be doing well with our family.
(24:18):
No longer would Fred be cleaning the bottom of Dick
Felfoen's boat. He would take his boat and go anywhere
he pleased. In fact, when detectives Ray and Tuller first
came to see him, Fred dropped a big piece of
news on them. He and Vernon and the kids had
been about to set sail on a long track. They'd
(24:41):
planned to be gone for months, maybe a year. We
were leaving in a smart We have been getting provisions,
medical thing just just literally everything to get ready to go.
We're going to Mexican, and we were trying to do
(25:04):
a lot of documentation and the children each had a
log book writing down all the things that they were
feeling and seeing. Fun things right, there. The kids were
going to journal and Fred would take photos and film.
They were thinking about writing a book or making a
movie about their adventure, the story of their trip told
(25:26):
through the children's eyes. Aren't your Mexico crews or were
you headed for to replays? No? Not really. We have
picked up a bunch of charts and talked to them
of people and our intensions were amazing. Just pop all along,
keen some of them come back up into the golf
(25:47):
and Californias and con. I'd read Steinbeck's book See Portez,
and I gave her a copy of that. Did she
have any particular theories or anything. Boy, Yeah, she really
didn't like the shipping lands and didn't like fog very much.
That was really, that was some big thing. Later Fred
(26:11):
made some notes about how the Mexico plan had come
to be quote sitting in hot tub September nineteen seventy nine,
concern about raising the children in Malibu, dope peer groups, solution,
pack up and go cruising. According to Fred, the trip
to Mexico had motivated him and Verna to get organized.
(26:33):
In the fall of nineteen eighty, right after he and
Verna were legally married, they began some vigorous estate planning,
they started buying insurance. Detective Ray asked Fred about this
when questioning him about Verna and Doug. Were the birds insured, Yeah,
(26:54):
our family was insure good company. Are they insured travelers?
Was that in her name or your name or mousson?
We had just set up a trust and gone through
(27:18):
a state planning thing the policy route. I think that's
probably in the safety deposit box. I'm not sure, okay,
(27:39):
h M. How much was the policy spot? I think
there's four hundred thousand on myself and Vernon and sixty
thousand on each of the four children. That was almost it.
(28:01):
There were also accidental death riders, worth an additional three
hundred thousand for each of the adults and an additional
sixty thousand for each of the kids. Doug's policy named
his surviving siblings. Fred was the beneficiary of Vernas policy.
That meant the payout from her death was seven hundred
(28:21):
thousand dollars in nineteen eighty one, money, which is about
two point two five million today. The detectives wanted more
details because they said the insurance company would be calling
them in the course of processing the claims. They're pretty
(28:43):
patient for a few works for two words. Want. They
started they started getting pressure from me to settle in
and then or your family or whoever your beneficiary at
the trust I take would be you and the kids.
I don't think so. I think somehow the trust it is,
but I don't I don't recall the mechanics today you
(29:06):
take the trust to all the new I think that
the trust is a beneficiary as opposed to either of
us or in other words, if something happens, everything goes
into the trust. Fred said he and the kids weren't
the beneficiaries the Johnson Railer Trust was that was a
(29:27):
little slippery. The funds from the insurance would maybe end
up in the trust like any other family asset, but
Fred was named. On Verna's policy, the money would be his.
Fred also didn't say that he was the trustee. If
the insurance money flowed into the trust, he would control it.
(29:49):
It was right around then that Fred decided he had
said enough. He needed to talk to his friend Bill Fairfield,
the lawyer who'd advised him and Verna on the trust.
I guess I want everything to be said. I guess
it's settled. As much information as I can give you
and at the same time, I know he's going to
(30:14):
breaking my arm. If I the qube just do everything
about talking to him, I'm not spoken. The detectives weren't
buying the Mexico trip as a reason for taking out
huge insurance policies. It reeked of planning, like Fred was
thinking about the murders and the ways he'd cover them up,
(30:35):
and the insurance. Well, that looked like another pattern in
his life. Because Fred, the detectives were learning, knew a
thing or two about insurance. Lighting his car on fire
to get an insurance settlement back is a down payment
on a new car terance. But they burned down a
farmhouse to collect the insurances. I understand fires, bike accidents,
(31:00):
car accidents, tractor accidents, a houseboat on fire, tapap's barn
on fire. If it's true, and I say, if it
showed early on the ability to conceive of insurance from
just all of the horrible accidents that can happen to
one family. The detectives had found a motive to hand
(31:21):
to the district attorney. It was the Malibu lifestyle. Fred,
they thought, wanted to live a life of leisure like
so many of the ritzy folks. Buying up all the
beach houses in Malibu. To accomplish this, the detective surmised
Fred would need a big windfall, say seven hundred thousand
(31:45):
dollars in insurance money from an accident with no witnesses.
(32:07):
Coming up on the next episode of Lost tells what
was Verna worth to Fred? She was his life In fact,
just showed him the way that life could be. I'm
saying Verna ment to him, something that money could buy.
That's next in episode eight three. Fred's Lost Tails is
(32:29):
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 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
Tails show page in Apple Podcasts, or at pushkin dot Fm.
Pushkin. A week after his arrest in early April nineteen
(00:35):
eighty one, Fred took a polygraph exam. Surprisingly, it wasn't
ordered by law enforcement. It was ordered by Fred's defense team.
Polygraph tests are notoriously unreliable, but Fred's lawyers were hoping
that a successful polygraph would help prove his innocence. There
was a lot to go over. Fred had entered a
(00:56):
plea of not guilty, but the second autopsy showed trauma
to Verna and Doug, bruises and marks that seemed to
bolster the CoP's working theory that Fred had killed them violently.
The polygraph was meant to bring clarity. It was a
past failed test. Fred was either a liar or he wasn't.
(01:21):
If you didn't have any connection with their death other
than accidental, the believing you pass a pot. This is
the polygraph examiner explaining the process to Fred. I had
no idea if you're going to be lying to me
or tell me the truth. But after we get into
this for a couple of hours, you're going to find out.
I can tell when you lie, if you're responsible doing that,
(01:43):
or you tell a movie water or anyway. So of course,
and here by my way, and you will fail the polygraph.
After the examiner had established Fred's baseline how he reacted
to questions of various kinds, he started asking him about Verna,
Doug and what happened on January second, nineteen eighty one,
the day they drowned. Then I have lunch luncher? Did
(02:06):
you have on one? Because I was, as Fred this, No,
that's a bunch of bullshit. That's a bunch of bullshit.
How about Doug? Was he doing some time? That Vernon
has been swimming since we bought the boat and bought
our house and Malda. I think when we went to
my parents' house she went in the pool, but she
was really not a good swimmer. How did you get along?
(02:26):
There was everything okay in the bedroom. It was actually
a social Actually everything was terrific in the room. And
how about between the three that you had done yourself
and burn up? How was publish relationship that good? Bad?
(02:46):
Or very different? Yeah? I would say it would be
good with the qualification. The qualification was that they disagreed
about how to handle Doug. If there were going to
be points of concern between Burnie and I about the children,
that's working on my king. The examiner flipped the tape
(03:07):
over to the other side, then continue asking Fred about
the day of the drownings. Well, then you were tired
of how worn it so? Then forty fives two bodies
on worn? Yeah? Did you almost die? But keep you going, Fred,
that's okay. Just I realized were you a frame of diing?
(03:31):
He just couldn't stop, could you? Fred had started getting emotional.
Did you think he stopped, you would have died. I
just knew that I was wearing down. I didn't die
(03:54):
for for a long time. I know when I'm tired underwater.
I know when my breathing he screwed up and I
can't get my breath, and all those things were going on.
I was taken on water just at all turned to ship.
The exam lasted over an hour. Near the end, Fred
told the examiner he wasn't feeling so good. I'll see
(04:18):
how you do it first? Can pretty gooey? Oh you
are a sweaty answer? Is this normal? Abnormal? How awful?
Fred said? A few minutes later, the tape ends. When
(04:43):
I asked Fred the result of the polygraph, he told
me it was inconclusive. He didn't pass or fail, he said,
and the polygraph was never a factor in the trial.
But there was one question the examiner asked that seemed
to come almost out of the blue. It was abstract
and vague, and yet it drove right to the heart
(05:05):
of the investigation, right to the heart of Fred's motive.
Vaitions in life quest you loved the most? Love or Money?
That one. Fred didn't answer right away, and when he did,
his voice had the controlled, deliberate quality of a valedictorian
on graduation day. I think is most important. Okay, now,
(05:33):
you guys. But the question of money and how badly
Fred needed it, that was exactly what law enforcement had
been trying to figure out. I'm Dana Goodyear and this
is Lost Hells Episode seven, Love or Money. Fred and
(06:22):
Verna were supposed to be a love story. They'd both
overcome the tragic, untimely deaths of their first spouses to
find love again. But there were some irregularities in the
origin story. One it seemed like maybe they'd gotten together
before Jean died. When the Santa Barbara detectives asked around
(06:46):
about Fred and Verna, they heard one thing loud and clear.
Whether you approved or you didn't, It had been a
whirlwind romance. In handwritten notes Fred made around the time
of his trial, he laid out the way in which
his relationship with Verna changed babysitter, friend, lover wife. At
(07:07):
the line for lover, he writes da dates as if
he's trying to get a handle on what law enforcement knew.
That's because the detectives had started to suspect that Fred
and Verna were having an affair before Jean died. Verna's
friend and confidant, Patty Lytell, had told them as much,
(07:29):
and when Fred's investigator went to talk to her, she
doubled down. Here she is talking to the investigator. I
didn't ask this. She's having an affair with him. She
told me too. I realize Verna and I were very close,
leaving it close together. True, that would be a problem
(07:53):
were it ever to come out in court. Questioned by
the detectives, Fred's sailing buddy, Dick Felfoean admitted to his
affair with Jean, but Fred always denied knowing about it.
Even to this day, he denies it, and he denies
he and Verna got together before Jean's death, because if
he knew Jean was cheating and he wanted to be
(08:14):
with Verna. Those affairs would establish a powerful motive, not
just for him to kill Jean, but who knows, maybe
for him to kill Vernah's first husband too. So they
might have been together before they were together. But then
there was something else the detectives uncovered even more shocking
(08:36):
to their church friends. When they got married, they weren't
really married. Do you recall the married ceremony on the beach.
This is a private investigator hired by Fred's defense talking
to Verna's good friend Michelle Williams and her husband Dick.
(08:58):
Were you aware when that ceremony was held that they
were not legally married? That moving ceremony Christmas of nineteen
seventy seven, when Fred and Verna dressed, the kids been
matching outfits and they all exchanged rings, it wasn't actually
a wedding. Did that make any difference to you finding
that out two weeks ago they were not legally married
(09:23):
during this ceremony, that it was a religious ceremony. Where
I don't really understand the little thing. I just love
that out two weeks ago, a little late games. You know,
John Hagar, the minister from the Methodist Church, had performed
the ceremony, so the guests had assumed it was legit. Well,
John Hagar, it was the guy that was there on
the beach that day, and he's the guy who married him.
(09:44):
So I don't know what the difference is. But apparently
some of the people who have, you know, said some
bad things about Fred and Verna, thought that that was
just awful, that they had been deceived and sewing and
so forth. So I don't well, had had they not
applied for mary license, They don't know what the circumstances were.
I'm just asking the questions to try and find out.
(10:07):
I'm not sure exactly what it means either, because he's
an ordained instrum. You know what it could have been financial,
That's all I could think. That was exactly it. Fred
later wrote that the reason he and Verna hadn't married
then was economic, because if she remarried, Verna would stop
(10:30):
getting pension and social security benefits from her deceased husband Bill.
Fred and Verna kept it quiet, but in a handwritten will,
Verna spelled it all out. While I am not legally
married to Frederick George Riller the second because of financial
and tax purposes, she wrote, we are married in the
eyes of God, and that is what really counts. If
(10:55):
she died, she continued, she intended for Fred to raise
her children, Kim and Doug, and quote continue the finances
of my estate with no other appointed trustee or executor.
The wedding that wasn't raised a red flag for the
Santa Barbara detectives, and Verna's will was one of the
(11:17):
many items listed on the warrant they got in order
to search the house on Sea Level Drive. But in
that search they also found another suspicious document in a
desk drawer, a confidential record of another wedding, this one legal.
Fred and Verna had been married secretly by the same minister,
(11:40):
but it was more than two years after the wedding
on the beach. Their actual marriage date was July twelfth,
nineteen eighty, just five months before Verna's death. By the
time Verna died, the couple's assets had been transferred to
a trust they'd set up with help from Fred's old
friend and lawyer, Bill Fairfield. The purpose of the Johnson
(12:03):
Railer Trust, Fred said, was to prevent any gossip that
might arise about financial gain should he or Verna die.
The detectives found the flow chart for the trust in
the silver case underneath a desk in the living room,
along with a guide book for widows and what appeared
to be Fred's diary of the day that Verna and
Doug drowned. The Santa Barbara detectives, Fred Ray and Claude
(12:40):
Toller were talking to everyone in Malibu about every aspect
of Fred's life with Verna. Verna's old friend Patty Lytell,
told them that back when Fred and Verna first got together,
Fred had pressured Verna to get married right away. Patty
said Fred was trying to marry Verna just a couple
months after Jean died, but Verna seemed to worry what
(13:02):
people would think. Patty had advised Verna to take it slow,
maybe live with Fred. Awhile before deciding, and she told
Verna what she was really worried about. She didn't think
Fred loved her. She thought he was after her property
on Broadbeach. Even though they hadn't gotten married right away,
Fred did figure out a financially beneficial solution. While he
(13:26):
and Verna remained officially unmarried. She could continue to collect
her first husband's benefits, and then once they did marry officially,
their assets, including her house, would go into the trust
of which Fred and Verna were co trustees, of which
Fred became the sole trustee once she died. When the
(13:47):
detectives had interviewed Fred back in January, they'd asked a
lot of questions about his finances that before a year
and Verna gotten very pictured network before we gotten there. Yeah,
(14:12):
I'm probably in the order of half a million dollars
a piece. Hires her if in you work or with
her money real estate? Two? What rules too? Was it right?
(14:34):
She had some houses? There's a housing broad Beach or
any other houses that shield you know the lands? I
have two other houses. I have a house and on Calpine,
and then I have one I'm sorry, caliplines round here
(14:58):
somewhere Pacific coast. Timer. If you own any other houses?
Have you heard? Brighten this one? Fred's relationship with Verna,
their merger, he sometimes called it, began at a moment
when they had each inherited a modest fortune in real estate,
(15:21):
insurance money, and other benefits from their first spouses. When
Jean died, Fred received about seventy five thousand dollars in
insurance money. That's about three hundred and sixty thousand into
day's dollars. Her social security benefits threw off the equivalent
of another thirty eight thousand in today's money every year
(15:43):
when she was alive and talking about divorce. Jean and
Fred owned two properties, a house in Oxnard and the
Kalpine House in Malibu, but with Jeanne gone, Fred became
the sole owner at a time when Malibu home values
were spiking. The Oxnard house was also on the coast,
in an up and coming neighborhood called the Silver Strand.
(16:05):
He ended up turning both houses into income properties. The
insurance policy on Verna's first husband, Bill Johnson, paid Verna
a substantial sum, about two hundred and fifty thousand dollars
in today's money. She also got his generous pension and
social security benefits, and she became the sole owner of
(16:25):
the property on Broad Beach Road, a duplex with a
garage apartment right on the beach in a neighborhood Allie
mcgrawl would soon be priced out of. Outside of the
rental properties, the family's income was a hodgepodge. Fred only
earned about thirty thousand dollars a year from his job
as an underwater engineer at Point Magoo. That's just over
(16:47):
one hundred thousand in today's money. And according to his
colleague Denis O'Gorman, Fred's ambition had been in freefall ever
since Jean died. Here's O'Gorman talking to an investigator. He
very seemed very despondent about things. It was philosophizing. For instance,
he started talking about how, really, you know, it should
(17:11):
be a socialistic society. Anybody, everybody ought to be allowed
to do whatever it is that they want to do.
So if you decide you want to be a beach bump,
you get the same number of bucks as some guy
who wants to sit in office and do calculations all day. Okay,
no matter what you want to do, you ought to
be able to do it. I means your life, and
it is so short. Want un enjoyed to the utmost.
You know, the perfect world if you have it on earth,
(17:31):
and that's basically stopped working about it. And it seemed
like the more he got away with, the more he
wanted to get away with. And very job that Fred
had was given to somebody else, which really ticked us off.
I mean, we liked the work but now we're carrying
a hell of a workload, okay, more than our share.
And here's one man who's making more money than any
one of us because he's been there longer, and he's
(17:53):
higher up on the scale, and he's not doing anything.
And not only is he not doing anything, but he's
tying up the phones on personal calls. He's now dating
Verna and he's making personal calls with his girlfriends to
his liars for proper investments or whatever the hailop days,
you know, anywhere, their personal calls. And he has a
(18:15):
smirk on his face like he knows that we know
what's going on, and there's nothing anybody can do or
wants to do about it. And by god, it's just
kissed my ass, you know, that kind of attitude, and
it's infuriating. Then, from nineteen seventy eight to nineteen eighty
Fred really stopped working. He'd injured his back, or so
he said. On the polygraph, he admitted to fudging that
(18:37):
a bit. Fred did have a little side business building
redwood hot tubs. Here he is talking to an investigator
in nineteen eighty one. You've actually blacked him, black him
out of wood Jimmy is an installed for people who
are mostly friends. It was not a lucratic situation. There
(18:59):
was Verna's pay from her teaching job, which amounted to
just a couple grand a year. They had the benefits
from their first spouses and the income from their various properties.
They're houses might have been worth a lot, but cash flow,
how is this all working. In the spring of nineteen eighty,
about nine months before Verna and dug drown, Fred and
(19:22):
Verna bought Perseverance, their fifty foot sailboat. The price tag
around one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, five times Fred's
annual salary at Point Magoo back when he was working
Perseverance was fancy. This is Dempsey Billy, an investigator for
the Santa Barbara Day's office. I talked to him recently.
(19:44):
He remembered Perseverance very well. The sailboat that was there
in the venture at Harbor, and a really nice boat.
They have a fireplace in it. Not too many sailboats
that I've been around a fireplace in them. Fred's salvency
was of great interest to the detectives. How was this
guy who made so little money leveling up in Malibu.
(20:09):
By the time they went back and questioned Fred a
second time on January twentieth, nineteen eighty one, they learned
a lot about his tumultuous relationship with Jean and that
he'd improved his financial position and certainly his real estate
holdings upon her death. So they had a few more
questions for Fred. Did you and bury Heaven? Maridle from Yeah,
(20:36):
how would you describe your relationship? You're very days, I
would say, because good a relationship. Overall, anybody I've known
them shared the same aspirations, gone through really a learning
(21:01):
process for deciding what we really wanted to do with
the children and in buying both and all the things.
We shared interests in the children and shared interest and
(21:22):
thinks I would like to do friends with find families.
I don't know what else. Were you having any financial
fund or are you having the financial funds today? Friend
says he wasn't underwater. Quite the contrary. When they were
(21:46):
saying that, oh you're you know I was broke, I said, well,
the thing you didn't search when you tore up my
house was you didn't go into the deep freeze. I
had a faith in there. With thirty grand cash and
about five thousand and travelers checks in it, and they
were sort of stunned. And then they asked the detectively
(22:07):
he had looked in this in the deep greeze, and
he said, of course he hadn't. What was that for?
And where did it come from? Ever since? I had
been making payments on different things, and when I no
longer made payments on them, I basically put some money
aside in a safe, and I put it in our chest,
(22:28):
deep freeze, under a bunch of frozen crates of orange juice.
And that's where I kept our passports and you know,
our papers and everything else in there. It was in
the garage, and the prosecution went nuts when they found
out that their super detectives hadn't found it. Thirty five
(22:53):
thousand dollars is a hefty chunk of change. It's equivalent
to about one hundred and ten thousand today. Fred basically
had a year's salary and his freezer underneath the orange juice.
Why would anyone keep that much cash just lying around
his house? To own a sailboat one as stunning as perseverance.
(23:32):
It was Fred's dream come true. She was brand new
and sleek toothpaste white with teak decks and trim. Everything
about her down to the name was perfect. Her did
not look at it. I don't think we could think
of anything more apropos than that for us, for all
(23:54):
the stuff we had gone through. You know, both of
our lives were not not the not smooth. They had
bumps all over them. So we both sort of felt that,
having persevered, we were very fortunate to have found each other.
And you know, I'll be doing well with our family.
(24:18):
No longer would Fred be cleaning the bottom of Dick
Felfoen's boat. He would take his boat and go anywhere
he pleased. In fact, when detectives Ray and Tuller first
came to see him, Fred dropped a big piece of
news on them. He and Vernon and the kids had
been about to set sail on a long track. They'd
(24:41):
planned to be gone for months, maybe a year. We
were leaving in a smart We have been getting provisions,
medical thing just just literally everything to get ready to go.
We're going to Mexican, and we were trying to do
(25:04):
a lot of documentation and the children each had a
log book writing down all the things that they were
feeling and seeing. Fun things right, there. The kids were
going to journal and Fred would take photos and film.
They were thinking about writing a book or making a
movie about their adventure, the story of their trip told
(25:26):
through the children's eyes. Aren't your Mexico crews or were
you headed for to replays? No? Not really. We have
picked up a bunch of charts and talked to them
of people and our intensions were amazing. Just pop all along,
keen some of them come back up into the golf
(25:47):
and Californias and con. I'd read Steinbeck's book See Portez,
and I gave her a copy of that. Did she
have any particular theories or anything. Boy, Yeah, she really
didn't like the shipping lands and didn't like fog very much.
That was really, that was some big thing. Later Fred
(26:11):
made some notes about how the Mexico plan had come
to be quote sitting in hot tub September nineteen seventy nine,
concern about raising the children in Malibu, dope peer groups, solution,
pack up and go cruising. According to Fred, the trip
to Mexico had motivated him and Verna to get organized.
(26:33):
In the fall of nineteen eighty, right after he and
Verna were legally married, they began some vigorous estate planning,
they started buying insurance. Detective Ray asked Fred about this
when questioning him about Verna and Doug. Were the birds insured, Yeah,
(26:54):
our family was insure good company. Are they insured travelers?
Was that in her name or your name or mousson?
We had just set up a trust and gone through
(27:18):
a state planning thing the policy route. I think that's
probably in the safety deposit box. I'm not sure, okay,
(27:39):
h M. How much was the policy spot? I think
there's four hundred thousand on myself and Vernon and sixty
thousand on each of the four children. That was almost it.
(28:01):
There were also accidental death riders, worth an additional three
hundred thousand for each of the adults and an additional
sixty thousand for each of the kids. Doug's policy named
his surviving siblings. Fred was the beneficiary of Vernas policy.
That meant the payout from her death was seven hundred
(28:21):
thousand dollars in nineteen eighty one, money, which is about
two point two five million today. The detectives wanted more
details because they said the insurance company would be calling
them in the course of processing the claims. They're pretty
(28:43):
patient for a few works for two words. Want. They
started they started getting pressure from me to settle in
and then or your family or whoever your beneficiary at
the trust I take would be you and the kids.
I don't think so. I think somehow the trust it is,
but I don't I don't recall the mechanics today you
(29:06):
take the trust to all the new I think that
the trust is a beneficiary as opposed to either of
us or in other words, if something happens, everything goes
into the trust. Fred said he and the kids weren't
the beneficiaries the Johnson Railer Trust was that was a
(29:27):
little slippery. The funds from the insurance would maybe end
up in the trust like any other family asset, but
Fred was named. On Verna's policy, the money would be his.
Fred also didn't say that he was the trustee. If
the insurance money flowed into the trust, he would control it.
(29:49):
It was right around then that Fred decided he had
said enough. He needed to talk to his friend Bill Fairfield,
the lawyer who'd advised him and Verna on the trust.
I guess I want everything to be said. I guess
it's settled. As much information as I can give you
and at the same time, I know he's going to
(30:14):
breaking my arm. If I the qube just do everything
about talking to him, I'm not spoken. The detectives weren't
buying the Mexico trip as a reason for taking out
huge insurance policies. It reeked of planning, like Fred was
thinking about the murders and the ways he'd cover them up,
(30:35):
and the insurance. Well, that looked like another pattern in
his life. Because Fred, the detectives were learning, knew a
thing or two about insurance. Lighting his car on fire
to get an insurance settlement back is a down payment
on a new car terance. But they burned down a
farmhouse to collect the insurances. I understand fires, bike accidents,
(31:00):
car accidents, tractor accidents, a houseboat on fire, tapap's barn
on fire. If it's true, and I say, if it
showed early on the ability to conceive of insurance from
just all of the horrible accidents that can happen to
one family. The detectives had found a motive to hand
(31:21):
to the district attorney. It was the Malibu lifestyle. Fred,
they thought, wanted to live a life of leisure like
so many of the ritzy folks. Buying up all the
beach houses in Malibu. To accomplish this, the detective surmised
Fred would need a big windfall, say seven hundred thousand
(31:45):
dollars in insurance money from an accident with no witnesses.
(32:07):
Coming up on the next episode of Lost tells what
was Verna worth to Fred? She was his life In fact,
just showed him the way that life could be. I'm
saying Verna ment to him, something that money could buy.
That's next in episode eight three. Fred's Lost Tails is
(32:29):
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 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
Tails show page in Apple Podcasts, or at pushkin dot Fm.
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