Murder in the Suburbs

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to True Crime Brewery.

Speaker 2 (00:02):
I'm chill and I'm Dick.

Speaker 1 (00:05):
On a cool October morning in Richmond, Virginia, gun shots
shattered the silence of a quiet suburban street where Fred
Jablin lived with his three children. Fred, a respected professor
and devoted father, had just stepped outside to grab his
morning newspaper, something he did every day, but this day

(00:26):
would be his last. Oblivious to the danger, he was
ambushed in his own front yard as his children slept
in their beds upstairs. So join us for murder in
the suburbs. As investigators searched for suspects and motivations for
Fred's murder, the name Piper round Tree came up repeatedly.

(00:47):
Piper was Fred's ex wife. Their bitter divorce and custody
battle had ended years earlier, but her resentment and hatred endured.
Did Piper, a mother of three and a former attorney,
travel across state lines to execute her ex husband? It
just sounds too crazy to be true, But today we're

(01:07):
unraveling this story of love turned lethal, the murder of
Fred Jeblin. And here is Dick with a beer review.

Speaker 2 (01:16):
So we're looking at a Virginia beer of which I've
not had that many, but I've found Brothers Brewing Company
in Harrisonburg. Then actually turns out that I reviewed another
beer from the same brewery, so at least I've got
the right place to do this. The name of the
beer is Commodore.

Speaker 1 (01:31):
That's a cool name.

Speaker 2 (01:32):
So it's a New England ipa ten percent ABV, A
little bit sneaking of ten percent, be careful of it.

Speaker 1 (01:39):
Yeah, sounds kind of strong.

Speaker 2 (01:41):
It's a hazy gold color, big white head, very pretty nice,
fruity aroma. I get tropical fruit and citrus, so pineapple, orange, grapefruit.
It's on the sweeter side, certainly, not bitter. Nice beer sounds.

Speaker 1 (01:56):
Great, So that just makes me think of the Commodores. Yeah,
so that song once twice, three times a lady, was
that the Commodore's Or was that just Lionel Ritchie?

Speaker 2 (02:07):
Oh you're asking me, yes, but.

Speaker 1 (02:09):
He was in the Commodore's right, Yes he was.

Speaker 2 (02:11):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:12):
Okay, well, I think one of these days we should
do a retrospective on the Commodore's. Okay, yeah, okay, you
lead the way, all right, let's open it up. Okay, Dicky,

(02:36):
let's head down to the quiet end of the bar
on this cool almost winter.

Speaker 2 (02:40):
Day, right, oh, which is barely autumn.

Speaker 1 (02:43):
Oh okay, well it's getting chilly out what that means?

Speaker 2 (02:46):
It was like forty degrees this morning.

Speaker 1 (02:48):
Yeah, that's very cold. But okay, let's do that. Maybe
we can light a fire if I get too cold.

Speaker 2 (02:54):
Yeah, we could always do that, all right.

Speaker 1 (02:56):
Well, let's start our story. So Fred Jablin came from
a tight knit family. He was born in nineteen fifty two,
and that's the year when Eisenhower was voted into the
White House. So this was a kind of simple time
when TV was new in America's living rooms. Fred was
the second and the youngest child, a few years behind

(03:17):
his big brother Michael, and while they were young, their mother, Mildred,
stayed home to take care of her boys. Fred's dad, Irving,
lived through the Depression and the Jablins were very frugal people.
Mildred and Irving were proud of both of their sons too.
After high school, Fred left for Buffalo and Sonny the
State University of New York, where he majored in political

(03:39):
science and speech, and to help pay his expenses, he
worked as a janitor and in the school cafeteria. But
Fred was really a brilliant student, and after earning his
bachelor's degree, he entered the University of Michigan and Ann Arbor,
where he worked on a master's degree in communication. While there,
he met his first wife, Marie, and they were married

(04:01):
in nineteen seventy four when Fred was twenty two years old,
and she went with him to Purdue University, where she
took graduate courses in audiology and speech pathology. So Fred
worked on a doctorate, studying hard and coaching other graduate students.
In almost every situation. He had a really strong sense

(04:21):
of right and wrong. At times, friends would say he
had such a strong sense of living by the rules
that he could be kind of rigid to the point
of his own detriment. Even so, later many would describe
Fred's focus on how things should be done as close
to obsessive. He believed in justice and he believed that

(04:41):
reason should prevail. So at Purdue, Fred wasn't one for
socializing a lot. He instead spent almost every available moment
away from the university with Marie. Fred channeled all of
his attention on his work and his marriage, so not
really hanging out with the guys at all.

Speaker 2 (05:00):
No, it sounds like he was kind of lonesome.

Speaker 1 (05:02):
Well, he was serious. So while other graduate students partied
on Friday nights, Fred and Maurice stayed home in their
campus apartment. But then the marriage ended just three years
after it had begun. Later, Fred would call this a
no fault divorce, saying it was amicable and a mutual parting,
so very different from his next divorce. He would say

(05:25):
that they both knew the marriage wasn't working and that
they wanted different things in life, and they made the
decision together to end it before they had any children
or property. So it sounds very sensible. And I think
that's one description that I would give Fred from everything
I've read about him, as a sensible man. So would
you take that as a compliment if someone called you

(05:48):
a sensible man? Or do you want to be more
of a wild card?

Speaker 2 (05:52):
No? I think sensible is okay, but take it out
of context, it might not be okay.

Speaker 1 (05:58):
To the extreme. Yeah, yeah, which it may have been
a little bit to the extreme.

Speaker 2 (06:02):
Well, yeah, from what we know about Fred was probably
a little bit on the extreme side.

Speaker 1 (06:09):
But you know, when you're going to a good college
like that and trying to get a doctorate, you probably
do have to be pretty serious.

Speaker 2 (06:15):
Well, yeah, yeah, I can relate to that.

Speaker 1 (06:18):
Actually, sure, I bet you can.

Speaker 2 (06:20):
Because I had gotten married as a sophomore in college
and we had a child, and I went through college
and medical school with a family, ended up having two children,
And yeah, I would say it's sensible.

Speaker 1 (06:35):
Well, yeah, you kind of had to be right.

Speaker 2 (06:37):
Yeah, the way I looked at it.

Speaker 1 (06:38):
That's a lot of responsibility at a young age. Although
I really feel like people used to be adults earlier
than they are now.

Speaker 2 (06:46):
Well, yeah, I do too, But I think that's part
of me being an old krabby guy.

Speaker 1 (06:50):
Sometimes. I think, am I just being an old krabby
lady saying people these days? When are you going to
grow up? But I don't know, just looking at our
kids and grandkids, and they just don't seem to have
the same responsibilities that I did at a certain age.
And it might just be because they have an easier
life than I did.

Speaker 2 (07:08):
Oh yeah, yeah, there's any question about.

Speaker 1 (07:10):
That, right, So that's a big part of it, I think.
But the same year of Fred's divorce, in nineteen seventy seven,
he earned his PhD in organizational communication, and he moved
to the Midwest to take his first teaching position as
an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee.

(07:30):
So it was there that he wrote his breakthrough work,
and that was an article on supervisor and subordinate communication
that was accepted for publication. So with that paper, Fred
jumped to the head of his class and really built
quite a reputation for himself. Shortly after that, Fred received
an offer from the University of Texas at Austin. So

(07:53):
he pecked everything up and drove from Milwaukee to Texas,
and by the time he reached UT, Fred ja Jablin
had realized his youthful dream. He was officially a scientist,
but instead of chemicals and a test tube, he dissected
the ways that people interacted and how they affected success
in the workplace. Now that sounds extremely boring to me,

(08:17):
not the interaction of people, but success in the workplace. Boy,
you just took my attention away right right there. Yeah,
and lost me there. But anyway, he was clearly quite bright,
and I would imagine just that kind of knowledge could
help you succeed in life.

Speaker 2 (08:33):
Oh definitely.

Speaker 1 (08:33):
Yeah. So at UT he videotaped job interviews, then scrutinized
the communication between recruiters and would be employees, and in
the end, Fred diagnosed how and why things happened between
people in business, explaining how corporations could interview more skillfully
and increase the odds of hiring the best candidate. So,

(08:55):
during the first five years of his ut career he
published unimpressive thirteen articles in scholarly journals. So that is impressive.

Speaker 2 (09:05):
That's a major impressive obviously, if you're on a faculty
like this, it's publisher Parish. Yes, he certainly published.

Speaker 1 (09:14):
He did well. Remember he wasn't married, so we probably
had more time.

Speaker 2 (09:19):
He had all the time in the world. Yeah, I
don't recall hearing about any other things that Fred enjoyed doing.

Speaker 1 (09:27):
No, but you know, friends and family gave interviews and
said he could be quite funny. I'm sure he could
joke around with his co workers and have a good time.
But yes, he was clearly serious about his career and
his topic of interest.

Speaker 2 (09:44):
Yeah, I read somewhere and maybe you're going to talk
about it later, But he very quickly had published if
you got tenure, Yes, yep, the school and that's the goal, that's.

Speaker 1 (09:55):
What everybody needs. Yeah, then you're in. That's it, right,
Then you're safe.

Speaker 2 (10:00):
Yeah, you've got a tenure, you employed for as long
as you want to be right.

Speaker 1 (10:04):
Right. But you know, the closest thing to fucking up
that he did is he met and married Piper Rountree.

Speaker 2 (10:10):
Yeah, but that's in retrospect.

Speaker 1 (10:12):
It's in retrospect because she seemed great in the beginning.
She had actually been in Fred's communications class one year
before she was introduced to him socially, and I guess
the class had been in a large lecture hall filled
with more than one hundred students. So later Fred would
say he didn't remember her, but Piper, a senior with

(10:32):
an inquisitive mind, was frequenting the faculty offices in the
communications building. She was kind of hanging around talking to
the professors between and after classes. And later many would
remember Piper Roundtree as the kind of young woman who
really did make an impression. So I think, much more
gregarious and outgoing than Fred, more of a social butterfly,

(10:55):
and she had a very quick mind, and she was
really pretty. She had a petite at lae body because
she really liked to exercise, and you know, she was active.
She had cute, shoulder length brown hair and big dark eyes.
So clearly Fred liked her right away. He was eight
years older than her, and they had grown up in

(11:15):
very different worlds, but there was that immediate attraction between
the two. They were kind of a strange match, and
many would question why Fred Jablin and Piper Rountree had bonded.
Fred was so precise and exact and such a calm presence,
but Piper, on the other hand, was a real free spirit.
She could be volatile and had a quick temper. She

(11:38):
was kind of a quirky hippie too, and Fred was
more of a plain man. And Piper was very attractive,
wearing jeans and boots and big boho blouses. But at
first they did seem really good together. They seemed to
compliment each other.

Speaker 2 (11:53):
Good for Fred.

Speaker 1 (11:54):
Yeah, everybody was happy. It seemed fine, really, no problems,
a little unusual, maybe a little bit of the opposites
attract type of thing, but they seemed to compliment each other.
Like I said, so it seemed fine. So a little
bit about Piper. She was the youngest of five children
of Betty and doctor William Coleman Rowntree Junior. So Betty

(12:15):
had studied to be a nurse, and Bill was an
Air Force surgeon a heart specialist. So that's pretty impressive.

Speaker 2 (12:23):
Yeah, it's a big deal up there in the realm
of the big shots.

Speaker 1 (12:27):
Yes, he earned his MD at Tulane University Medical School
in New Orleans after World War Two, and the children
were born all over the world, So since they moved
a lot, Piper and her sister Tina were very close
and the closeness may have developed partly because of the
family troubles, because years later Piper would describe their father, William,

(12:50):
as an abusive alcoholic. So that's really not what you
want in a surgeon. But you never know what people
are like at home, no you don't. So William Tree
retired from the military in the mid sixties while the
family was stationed in Harlingen, Texas, and most of Piper's
growing up years would be there. Looking back, though, Piper's

(13:12):
childhood was kind of plagued by trauma. In September of
sixty seven, when she was seven years old, her father
took her to the beach at nearby Padre Island following
Hurricane Beulah, and while there she stood under a damaged
house that was on stilts and the foundation gave way
and collapsed on her. So that could have been fatal. Yes,

(13:34):
she got lucky. She suffered broken ribs and a ruptured
spleen that had to be removed. So still really traumatic
and painful.

Speaker 2 (13:42):
Yeah, I mean she could have died from that, absolutely,
So fortunately she must have had pretty quick medical care
and recognition that her spleen had ruptured.

Speaker 1 (13:51):
Well, maybe it helped that her dad was a surgeon.

Speaker 2 (13:55):
I was wondering that because.

Speaker 1 (13:56):
He would kind of know what to look for, right
he should, yeah, I would hope so. But afterwards she
had nightmares I imagine, Yeah, I mean really traumatized. She
was only seven, so I could see that. So then,
when Piper was nine, her father had a stroke. He
did recover, but he continued to smoke and drink, and

(14:17):
afterward Piper would say he was meaner than before the stroke,
and her mom, Betty, would say that her husband really
had a personality change and not a good one. That
forced him to move into a mobile home that the
family owned near the beach, so Betty wouldn't keep him
at home. So he must have been pretty.

Speaker 2 (14:36):
Bad so his wife made him move out.

Speaker 1 (14:40):
Yeah, I guess he was dangerous, is the way that
I read it, because he'd already been an abusive alcoholic,
and now there was a personality change that made him worse.

Speaker 2 (14:49):
And not a good situation.

Speaker 1 (14:50):
No, it really wasn't. So many of Piper's friends would
grow up believing that Piper's mother was divorced from her husband,
since Piper's dad was absent for much of her school years.
But after her husband's stroke, Betty had to work and
she got a job in real estate. So despite what
she'd called a good childhood, Piper would describe her relationship

(15:12):
with her mother as pretty distant. Her sister, Tina, eight
years older than her, was always more of a mother
to her than her mother, So Piper's friends would remember
that when they were in high school, Tina, who'd already
graduated from college, went out with them at night to
a park where the teenagers would smoke and drink and talk.
So that was kind of the thing to do around there.

Speaker 2 (15:34):
I guess what else.

Speaker 1 (15:37):
But while in school, Piper ran with the rich crowd,
and she was one of those girls who seemed to
really have everything going for her. She was a top student,
and in nineteen seventy eight, the year she graduated. The
Harlingen High School yearbook listed Piper's many accomplishments, National Honor Society,
student council, speech drama, tennis team, editor of the school's

(16:01):
literary publication, homecoming court, choir, yearbook committee, and third place
at the Science Fair. So in nineteen seventy eight, Piper
attended the University of Texas in Austin. Tina and their
brother William had both gone to UT before her, so
by then all the round Tree children had spread out

(16:22):
and started their own lives. Tina was a registered nurse
who had married an attorney, and she had settled in Houston.

Speaker 2 (16:29):
Piper sounds like one of those girls that all the
other girls hated in high school because she was pretty
and popular and smart.

Speaker 1 (16:36):
Yeah, it could have been. I could see that. I
don't think that she was much of a girl's girl.
But you know, hard saying, since we never really knew her.
But just from what you pick up about her, I
can see why you say that.

Speaker 2 (16:49):
Sure, just looking at her high school accomplishments. Yes, and
then she went to UT pretty good school and graduated,
got a degree.

Speaker 1 (17:00):
Yes. And in her senior year of college she moved
in with Fred.

Speaker 2 (17:04):
No, that's not exactly a student teacher relationship, is it.

Speaker 1 (17:08):
Well, she had been his student for one semester, but
she wasn't his student when they got together, at least
that's what they said. Wasn't a huge age difference. It
was eight years and if she wasn't currently his student,
I don't see a big problem with that.

Speaker 2 (17:24):
I wasn't saying it was a problem. I was just
pointing out that sounds like she's quite the person.

Speaker 1 (17:31):
Very outgoing, pretty yeah. Yeah, sure. So then she moved
in with him, and she lived there throughout the spring semester,
jogging in the neighborhood and playing with animals. That she
would move into Fred's house and yard. Then in nineteen
eighty two, Piper had her bachelor's degree in communication, and
afterwards she left for Germany on a one year scholarship

(17:53):
studying at the University of Mannheim. So after she was gone,
Fred seemed lost. According to his friends and colleagues, when
he heard that Piper had met a man overseas, he
kind of freaked out. Fred flew over and tried to
win her back, and I guess it worked. When he
returned to ut he seemed sure that at the end

(18:15):
of all of her classes in Germany, Piper would return
to him in Texas, and in nineteen eighty three, Piper
moved back into Fred's home. That's when she entered Saint
Mary's University Law school in San Antonio, and that October
Fred and Piper got married in Austin, right in the
living room of his home. So this was a small,
quiet wedding with just family and a few friends. Afterward,

(18:39):
they threw a small reception at Austin's Hyatt. Fred was
thirty one and Piper was twenty three, so she was
still quite young.

Speaker 2 (18:48):
Yeah, in difference in age, herbing twenty three and him
thirty one, that can be kind of problematic, I think
you think so. Yeah, But again, you know, we've already
talked about the diference in their social.

Speaker 1 (19:01):
Activities, right, and I just think she was kind of
a serious twenty three year old and she was going
to college and going to law school, so I don't
think she was a big party girl. But she really

(19:34):
did struggle right from the beginning at law school. And
Fred paid her ten thousand dollars tuition, telling friends he
saw it as a good investment in their future. So
when her grades slipped to the point where she was
on academic probation, he put their house up for rent
and actually moved eighty miles away to San Antonio, So

(19:56):
that was really quite a move. He really cared about her, obviously.
For more than two years, Fred drove three hours a
day to and from work just so Piper would have
more time to study, and his friends never heard Fred
complain about this. Instead, in what they called the typical
Fred fashion, he used the time in the car to work.

(20:16):
So despite the hours in the car, Fred never lost
his focus. That year, Fred began work on a comprehensive test,
the first Handbook of Organizational Communication. So he's still really
gung ho and doing well himself.

Speaker 2 (20:33):
He's advancing his career very well.

Speaker 1 (20:35):
Yep. And in nineteen eighty seven, Fred's book was released,
getting positive reviews and even winning some awards. UT rewarded
him for that by making him a full professor and
granting him tenure and at Saint Mary's. All didn't go
so well for Piper, but she did make it through.
She graduated in the spring of nineteen eighty six, and

(20:58):
she did pass the bar, and she worked for one
year as a prosecutor. Then she took a job with
a school administration office, which is I've never really heard
of attorneys working there, but I guess they need some.

Speaker 2 (21:11):
Yeah, it sounds kind of low key.

Speaker 1 (21:13):
It does sound a little low key, doesn't it. Yes,
So in nineteen eighty eight, four years into their marriage,
Piper and Fred began planning to have a family. Although
most faculty wives kept their private lives out of the office,
Piper was actually very open and when she announced her pregnancy,
I guess, kind of publicly at the school. Fred seemed happy.

(21:34):
Then in nineteen eighty nine, their daughter Joscelyn was born,
followed by a son they named Paxton in nineteen ninety
two and a girl, Caylin, two years after that. After
Cayln's birth, Piper sank into a really deep depression. This time,
motherhood just didn't seem to come as naturally for her
as it had the other two times. Calli was kind

(21:55):
of a different kind of child than Joscelyn and Paxton
had been, and was a happy and easygoing girl by
then six years old and three year old Paxton loved
sports and never really seemed to push his mother for anything,
but neighbors would describe Callie as a child with a
really mischievous glint in her eyes. And while the two

(22:16):
older children, even from young ages, tended to take care
of themselves, Callie just demanded a lot of attention. So
by the time Callie had turned three, Piper found herself
escaping to the neighbor's house. And this really wasn't cool.
This was child neglect. So Piper, who appeared to base
her entire self image on being this exceptional mother because

(22:40):
she did come across that way, could be very careless
with her children. At times, Piper seemed like the ideal mom,
but when she found herself in a funk, she sometimes
locked the children out of the house and went to bed. So, wow,
that is really bad. These are little kids, these aren't
teenagers them. Yeah, and she'd just say, that's it. I've

(23:03):
had it. Stay out here. Hopefully it wasn't too cold out,
but yeah, that's crazy. So in the summer of ninety four,
the Javelins moved to Virginia for Fred's new position at
the University of Richmond. Piper decided to devote herself to
her children. The neighbors really thought she was great with

(23:23):
her children, and all of their friends, all the kids.
But Piper was unhappy in Virginia and she was starting
to become unhappy with Fred. Then she decided she wanted
a divorce. But Fred filed to get custody of the children.
And I don't know if that was based on her
being a little bit negligent wild because we do see

(23:45):
signs of that, but that's what he did, and that's
very unusual.

Speaker 2 (23:50):
It's even more unusual for the judge to award custody
of the children.

Speaker 1 (23:55):
Yeah, so there were clearly some problems with her stability,
but Pipe and her sister Tina were very shocked by this.
Piper's sister already didn't like Fred. She thought he was
very controlling of Piper. So when I think about how
this divorce came up, it kind of seems like Piper
had gotten bored with the life, maybe even having a

(24:18):
bit of a midlife issue, even though she was on
the younger side. But it really seems like they grew
apart and she was the one that was done. So
in two thousand and one, Piper moved out of the
house and that's when she filed for divorce officially. At first,
they did have joint custody of the children. Piper lived
down the road from Fred, so they could still co parent,

(24:40):
so that seemed okay. But something happened that made Fred
want full custody, and in the court he painted Piper
as a nonstable mother who was unpredictable, had used illegal drugs,
and had incurred a lot of debt in the marriage
without telling him. Fred also accused her of being unfaithful.

(25:00):
So I don't know the unpredictable, the drugs, sure, the debt,
and I don't know if that's a reason to take
someone's children away. That seems a bit of a stretch.
But the judge reviewed the facts and did decide that
Fred would have full custody. Piper could have visitation. But
the judge thought that Fred was the more stable parent,
which was probably true, but still, moms more often get

(25:23):
custody unless there's really something wrong with their parenting.

Speaker 2 (25:27):
Yeah, that's what I'm thinking, So yeah.

Speaker 1 (25:29):
I'm thinking she wasn't great. She was ordered to pay
Fred about nine hundred dollars a month in child support,
which really bugged her because he made more money than
she did, so part of this was to pay back
the fifty thousand dollars in debt that she had incurred
during the marriage. She'd gotten into this debt hadn't told
Fred about it, so she owed him the money. So

(25:50):
in Virginia, Piper had failed the bar exam and she
was really struggling to get a job, so she ended
up moving back to Texas where she could work as
an attorney. But she'd been out of the field for
about ten years being a mom by then, so it
was hard for her to get a job.

Speaker 2 (26:07):
Things had passed her by a little bit.

Speaker 1 (26:09):
Little Bet and her three children were staying with Fred
and Virginia, so she left the state, which you can understand,
if you have to get a job, you might do that,
But at the same time, to leave the state where
your children are doesn't look good.

Speaker 2 (26:23):
No. Plus, you'll see them even less than you did
previously when you lived in the same state.

Speaker 1 (26:28):
Exactly. Yeah, So Piper had to ask Fred for permission
whenever she wanted to see her children, and she was
only seeing them maybe six days a month. She was
unhappy to have to pay alimony while she wasn't making
much money, and she did hide her bitterness toward Fred well.
But her sister Tina made no effort to hide how

(26:49):
she felt she wasn't allowed at all to visit her
niece's and nephew, and although she would not name names,
Piper suggested that she knew someone who would want to
kill her husband. So how did we jump to that?
I don't know. It seems like a big leap.

Speaker 2 (27:06):
We've gone from just being pissed off at him for
having full custody to let's kill him. Yep. I'm sure
there were other steps involved in that process.

Speaker 1 (27:16):
Yeah, and we don't know if she actually said to
her sister, let's kill them, but they.

Speaker 2 (27:20):
Seem to be co conspirators type of thing.

Speaker 1 (27:23):
Very close sisters. Yeah, like when they'd visit each other,
they'd sleep in the same bed. Tina kind of raised
her because she was eight years older. So yeah. So
it was early on the morning of October thirtieth, two
thousand and four, in the Richmond, Virginia suburb of Kingsley.
Throughout Kingsley, large oaken maple trees shaded these large brick

(27:45):
homes that were set back from the street, so really
a gorgeous neighborhood. The entrance to the subdivision had a
green and white sign and it was the day before Halloween,
and the landscape yards were decorated a lot. People had
those leaf bags that looked like pumpkins stuffed with leaves.
They had stuffed scarecrows with straw. You know, they had

(28:09):
a lot of decorations. They even had some bed sheet
ghosts swinging from some trees.

Speaker 2 (28:14):
So they took it seriously.

Speaker 1 (28:15):
Yeah, it's kind of those old school decorations, not those
blow up things, which I'm not that fond of, although
the kids like them. I mean, no one's putting them
on their yards so the fifty something neighbor can look
at them exactly right. Part of my crabby old lady thing.
But anyway, that's how it was a really pretty neighborhood,
a really nice day. Daylight savings hadn't happened. It would

(28:38):
happen the next day, so it was getting light. At
just past six point thirty, gunshots echoed through the quiet neighborhood.
Dogs barked in yards, and frightened neighbors got out of
bed to look out their windows. At six thirty seven am,
Bob and Doreen mic Ardell lay in bed, awake on
the second floor of their house directly next door to

(28:59):
the Joblin house. The windows were open to air out
their newly painted bedroom. Then suddenly three shots rang out.
So Bob, a gray haired salesman for a consulting company,
jumped from bed and ran to the open window. And
that's what he caught, a glimpse of a mysterious person
running through the neighborhood, passing by his house. He couldn't

(29:20):
tell if it was a man or a woman, but
he wondered if that was the shooter. So the dispatcher,
when he called nine one one, said are you sure
it's not just a car backfiring, and he said no.
He was a former marine, so Bob insisted that this
had been gunfire. So within minutes of the nine one
one call, a Henrico County squad car entered the neighborhood,

(29:43):
shining HighBeam lights across lawns, onto homes, and even into
the windows of some of the houses. It was a
Saturday and many families were sleeping late or just having
a leisurely breakfast in the darkness. Three uniformed officers searched
but found nothing unusual, so they were convinced that the
gunshots must have come from further away. If they were gunshots,

(30:08):
they did comb the neighborhood, knowing that violence was a
really uncommon thing in Richmond's affluent West End, and at
first look the brick home at fifteen fifteen Hearthlow Lane
appeared normal inside the house. Upstairs, in their bedrooms, the
three Javelin children slept peacefully, unaware of how much their
lives were about to change.

Speaker 2 (30:30):
Outside, on their long driveway, their father, Fred Javelin, lay
bleeding to death on his stomach with his head turned
to the side. Fred's eyes were open and appeared to
be staring out at the street. When he had fallen,
he landed on some brown leaves, with his head hitting
a row of bricks that lie in the driveway right
under his children's basketball hoop. Bob and Doreen, a petite

(30:53):
woman with short brown hair, grabbed their robes and walked
downstairs to talk to the police. Bob waited watching until
ten minutes after his call, the squad car pulled up
in front of his house. Find anything, Bob asked when
he opened the door. No. Henrico County Police Officer Philip
Maggie answered and shrugged. Tell me what happened again, as

(31:15):
he had said to the dispatcher, mccardals said he had
been in bed when he heard three gunshots. It sounded
like it came from somewhere down there, he said, pointing
down the street in the direction of the Jablin house.
Maggie left and the mccardals went back inside, watching the
officer's search in the darkness. The police flashlights skimmed the street,
the grass, the houses, throwing out slivers of light. There

(31:39):
was still black outside when at seven am, half an
hour after the shots, Bob answered the door a second time.
We didn't find anything, officer Maggie said. Okay, Bob said,
don't worry about it. My wife and I are going
for a walk with the dog. We'll take a look
around once it gets light. If we find anything, we'll
call you back.

Speaker 1 (31:58):
Let's kind of brave. Okay, here's a marine. I guess.

Speaker 2 (32:01):
So you hear gunshots in your neighborhood and yeah.

Speaker 1 (32:06):
Let's go for a walk for a walk. Yeah, I
think if I was Doreen, I'd say, yeah, I'll make
the coffee. Yeah, let me know what you see.

Speaker 2 (32:14):
So Bob and Doreen returned to their second floor bedroom
to get dressed for the morning dog walk. At seven
point fifteen. As it got light out, they exited the
house out their back door with their dog on a leash.
They walked out towards the street. It had rained the
night before and the breeze was cool and smell the
fall yeah, So.

Speaker 1 (32:34):
Doreen looked over toward the Jablin house. She looked up
the driveway's incline toward the level area near the house,
and she saw something crumpled up on the driveway, below
the family's basketball hoop and next to Fred'sford Explorer. So
Bob wondered if what they saw could be some kind
of Halloween decoration, like a scarecrow or something. Holding the

(32:56):
leash with his dog beside him, Bob walked up toward
the garage and Fred's Explorer along the right side of
the Jablin driveway. As he got closer, he did see
a figure with a bleached white face and white ankles
protruding from under navy blue sweatpants, so what had been
obscured by the darkness was now very easily seen. Bob

(33:19):
walked closer cautiously. There was no mistaking what he'd found
or who was lying there, so he turned back toward Doreen,
who stood on the street holding her cellphone, and he
told her to call the police back the figure there
was Fred Jablin. So at seven twenty five am, less
than an hour after they awoke to the sound of gunshots,

(33:41):
Doreen called nine one one. We found Fred Jablin, our
neighbor in his driveway, she told the operator, and it
looks like he's dead. So within minutes, Officer Maggie and
his partner sped back up hearth Glow Lane in their
squad car. They parked and ran from the car. Doreen
pointed toward where Bob was standing. The officer ran up

(34:02):
the driveway and crouched beside Fred's body, feeling for a
pulse and finding none. Bob looked around and noticed Fred's
eyeglasses lying on the ground. Quickly the call went out
police and an ambulance were needed. At fifteen fifteen parth
Low Lane. Squad cars in an ambulance filled the street.
An officer's strung crime scene tape across the front of

(34:23):
the Jablin house. Bob saw an officer in his yard
pointing at footprints in the wet grass leading from the
body in the driveway past his house. So Bob said
to the officers. That's where I saw someone running right
after I heard the gunshots. By then, paramedics had lifted
Fred's lifeless body onto a blue plastic backboard. They cut

(34:44):
his blue sweatshirt up the front and peeled it back
from his chest. When they rolled him over, they found
a bloody hole in the back of his sweatshirt that
lined up with a bullet wound in his lower back.
So his body was cool and still, but they still
checked for a pulse and they found none. As they worked,
police congregated outside the house, looking through the yard and

(35:06):
searching the neighborhood. One paramedic injected medsine to Fred as
the other continued to try CPR, but you know, it
was way too late. Fred Jablin was dead, so a
swat team arrived after Bob and Doreen and other neighbors
told the police that three children lived in the Jablin house.

(35:26):
No one knew if the shooter could be inside the
house with the children, so that was a scary thing.
Entering through the unlocked back door and into the kitchen,
the swat team smelled the coffee that Fred had set
to brew that morning, still in the pot. They cleared
each room, walking past the dining room table that was
covered with family photos that Fred had been organizing. Finally,

(35:49):
they went up the stairs to the bedrooms. The first
bedroom the officers came to was Joscelyn's, but the door
was locked. Seconds later they heard the door being unlocked
and the teenager came out of her bedroom. An officer
walked her down the steps to the door. So she
is asking what's going on? They said, we can't tell
you right now, but you need to get out of

(36:09):
the house.

Speaker 2 (36:10):
At the back door, Joscelyn was handed off to officer Maggie.
Make sure my brothers, sister and dad get out, she said.
Back upstairs, the second team had moved into Calli's room
to wake her. They nudged her several times. She didn't respond.
For a moment, they feared the eight year old child
was hurt, were dead. Then her eyes opened. Officers took

(36:31):
the two youngest children downstairs. Once there, all three kids
were taken onto the deck their father had built years earlier.
Then they were directed to turn left, away from the
driveway and away from their father's dead body. Officers lifted
them over the fence on the side of the house
that led to the mccardo's front yard and rushed them
toward a rescue vehicle waiting in the street. When Henrico

(36:53):
County Investigator Kobe Kelly arrived on the scene, Fred Japlin's
body still delay on the backboard, covered by a white sheet,
and Joscelyn Paxton and Cali had been put in an
ambulance and driven down the street out of eyeshot of
the house in the driveway.

Speaker 1 (37:11):
Well, the first forty eight hours in a murder investigation,
as we all know, are the most crucial. The Henrico
Pedi had a policy that they'd initiated in nineteen ninety seven,
and this is one that had really served them very well.
They'd cleared all but eight of the seventy three homicides
in the county since two thousand and one. So for

(37:31):
the first two days they flooded a murder case with
resources to make sure no leads were left unexamined. By
eight point thirty, the Javelin children were at the Boyd
family house, spending time with people they knew. As a
victim's advocate was on the way. Hearth Glow Lane was
crawling with uniformed and plain clothes officers. Some were searching

(37:52):
sewers looking for the murder weapon in the driveway. Crime
scene specialists began collecting samples from all aroun around where
the body was. They swabbed the blood on the driveway,
hoping they might get some DNA from the killer. In
plastic bags they put Fred's eyeglasses and to do list
they found that was on the driveway near his explorer.

(38:14):
On it, Fred had written a list of instructions, including
to take the car to the shop and to pick
up the laundry. So officers fanned out to canvass the
area and talk to neighbors. They had already contacted Wade Kaiser,
the Commonwealth's Attorney in charge of the county's staff of
criminal prosecutors. So Bob and Doreen were still standing nearby,

(38:36):
stunned by their early morning discovery, not wanting to be there,
but really unable to turn away from the scene. Bob
explained to the police what had happened that morning, then
talked about Fred's divorce. You need to talk to Melody Foster,
he said, she lives directly behind Fred. She was close
to Fred, and she can tell you a lot more

(38:56):
about Piper than we can. So right, away. People are
already turning to think about Piper.

Speaker 2 (39:02):
Oh yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (39:04):
So they did talk to Mel, and Mel told the
detectives that it had been a horrible divorce. Mel and
her husband had both slept through the shooting, and they
had learned about it from a neighbor who'd seen the
children being escorted by a SWAT team out the back door.
Wanting to help, Mel shared everything she could think of,
including the name of the woman that Fred was now dating, Charlene.

(39:25):
Throughout the conversation, Mel explained the turbulence of the Round
Tree Jablin divorce, including Piper making false domestic violence charges
against Fred. Piper she believed was capable of doing anything
to get what she wanted. She said, for a long time,
Fred was afraid of Piper, but lately things had seemed better.

(39:46):
He was really hoping that the worst was over. So
by the time Prosecutor Wade Kaiser arrived at the scene,
the coroner's office was already getting ready to remove Fred's body.
Pictures had been taken, and the lead crime scene investigator
on the case had inspected and documented the area. He'd
found one copper jacketed bullet on the right side of

(40:07):
the body in the grass, but no shellcasings. Word had
already reached the campus where Fred was a professor that
someone had been killed on the West End and that
the victim could be Fred Jablin. An employee who lived

(40:43):
nearby had driven by and seen what appeared to be
Fred's body in the driveway. So imagine how shocking that
would be. This nice little suburban neighborhood. And it's Halloween morning,
so you kind of would wonder, is this some kind
of hoax? But once you see the swat, you would
know it was real.

Speaker 2 (41:02):
You would get that idea.

Speaker 1 (41:03):
Yeah, So Colls did go out to faculty and a
group gathered to contact Fred Jeblin's students. The dean didn't
want students hearing on the radio or the TV that
their professor had been killed. Back at the Boyd's house,
the Jablin children were being questioned by an investigator from
the Special Victims Unit before officers could begin their rabbi

(41:25):
had been called to come to the house. Just the
night before. Fred had been at the synagogue with the
children for Friday night services. When he told them of
their father's death, the three children sobbed. It was a
horrible thing to have to tell them this, But of
the three children, Joscelyn was the only one who had
heard the shots, not knowing what they were though, she'd

(41:48):
rolled over and gone back to sleep, of course, never
guessing that her father could be dying outside. All the
children insisted their relationships with their father were great. There
were no problems, nothing out of the ordinary had happened
the night before either. Fred had made them dinner and
then taken them to the synagogue. They returned home about

(42:09):
ten and got dressed for bed. When they were ready,
Fred tucked each of the children in and kissed him
good night, as he did every night. So Saturday was
going to be a busy day. Calli and Paxton each
had soccer games, and then they had the neighborhood pumpkin festival.
The children knew of no one who was angry with
their dad. At first, they weren't sure when their mother

(42:31):
had last called them. She calls a lot, they said.
Then Paxton remembered Friday afternoon, after school, when he'd been
in a friend's garage with a group of his friends
playing poker. His mom had called. He remembered talking to her,
and Calli too had talked with her mother on that Friday,
at about six thirty that evening, when Piper called her

(42:52):
at the house. When asked what their parents relationship was like,
she said she thought they got along. The last time
they'd seen their mother, they said, was a couple of
weeks earlier, when they'd gone camping. They'd borrowed camping gear
from one of their mother's friends. And yes, they said
their father did have a woman he was dating, a

(43:12):
woman named Charlene.

Speaker 2 (43:15):
One officer found a photo in the children's room of
a woman in a red dress, a woman neighbors would
identify as Piper Roundtree for a Javelin's ex wife. The
officer took the photo. They had gotten a warrant and
went through the recent calls on the home phone and
the two cell phones there. On both phones they found

(43:35):
a number that displayed as mom Sell. Then inside the
pantry they found a phone number list and there it
was again Mom Cell with the same number. So they
discovered that Piper had called her children from her cell phone.
Maybe Jablin's ex wife had nothing to do with his murder,
but tracing her phone calls could lead to an important
piece of evidence. So when I got the first results

(43:58):
back on Piper round Tree's cell phone. They learned that
the day before someone may calls on her cell phone
at Pingdoff Towers in Richmond.

Speaker 1 (44:06):
Uh huh, So that was a pretty big piece of
evidence right there.

Speaker 2 (44:10):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (44:11):
At about that same time in Houston, the phone rang
at Doug McCann's townhouse just west of the city. Do
you know who I am? A woman asked no. He admitted, well,
it's Piper, and I'm looking for my sister Tina. So
this had been an unusual weekend for McCann, the head
of a Houston oil and gas manufacturing company. He and

(44:32):
Tina had met about a year earlier on match dot com,
dated briefly, but then broke it off. Yet, just the
day before, Tina had called McCann suggesting they get together
for dinner. He'd agreed, and Tina ended up staying overnight
at his townhouse. Then the next day, Piper called and
asked if he and Tina would like to have dinner.

(44:54):
She'd also asked him if he thought she sounded like Tina.
Some people say we sound alike, she said before she
hung up. So he just had a weird feeling about
these sisters and what was going on.

Speaker 2 (45:05):
Oh, I could see that.

Speaker 1 (45:07):
Piper's phone was in Virginia, but that didn't necessarily mean
that she was. Investigators contacted Houston Police Department Lieutenant Rick Maxie,
in charge of the homicide department, that Saturday. They explained
the situation that Piper was someone they were interested in.
Andy asked Maxie to try and locate her, assuming she

(45:30):
didn't know they needed to tell her that they had
her kids in Houston. They pulled up Piper's information on
the computer. They found a driver's license with her photo,
blew it up and printed it in black and white,
along with information on her state car registration for her
black Jeep and her address in Kingwood. After getting her

(45:51):
phone number, they left the Houston PD's downtown headquarters and
drove toward Kingwood, and once they arrived, they rang the
bell and knot but no one answered. Then they called
the home phone and heard it ringing inside, but no
one picked it up. They looked in the garage window
and the garage was empty. So at twelve forty nine,

(46:13):
before they left Piper's house, investigators called Piper's cell phone.
No one answered, but they left a message asking her
to call Kobe Kelly with the Enrico PD. Then, meanwhile,
back in Virginia, investigators got more information from Sprint. The
cell phone was used there that morning, just after four

(46:35):
thirty am, and it had pinged off a tower just
about five miles from Fred Jablin's house. So it was
looking like Piper was there and they needed to find
out where she had stayed the night, how she was traveling,
and even more importantly, if she had a gun. So
at two thirty that afternoon, Henrico police had tracked down

(46:58):
a number for Fred's brother, Mike pull Jablin in northern Virginia.
When they put a call through and told him what
had happened, he was at first quiet, you know, maybe
in shock, and then he said, have you considered my
brother's ex wife as a suspect? Then when he hung
up the phone, Michael just couldn't believe his brother was dead.

(47:18):
He was hoping it was all somehow a mistake, and
even called Fred's cell phone and listened to it ring,
but of course no one answered.

Speaker 2 (47:28):
At the mall where her son was doing karate, Fred's girlfriend,
Charlene talked with another investigator. The news had shaken her
up badly. She and Fred had met on match dot com.
You had mentioned that the last time she saw him
was for lunch the previous Wednesday, and they talked on
the phone a little after ten the evening before, as

(47:48):
they usually did before going to bed. She told the
detective that there had been some back and forth between
Piper and Fred recently about whether he was willing to
let the children go to Texas to it ten Piper's
sister Jean's wedding over Thanksgiving. He decided to let them go.
Sharley and said, but he'd been emailing Piper about money

(48:09):
again lately, asking for the child support.

Speaker 1 (48:11):
She owed him, well, more sprint records were coming in
and these were really intriguing. Calls had been made from
Piper's cell phone early that morning and showed it had
traveled southeast on Interstate sixty four, leaving Henrico and cutting
through Richmond. At one point it crossed the James River,
a favorite place for local criminals to dispose of weapons

(48:35):
and evidence. But there was more. Around noon, the phone
was used in Norfolk, and an hour and a half
later it was in Baltimore, so the person on the
cell phone hadn't driven the two hundred and forty miles
from Norfolk to Baltimore in such a short time she
had to be flying. Investigators called headquarters and asked for

(48:56):
an investigator to drive to the Norfolk airport to try
and find out if anyone there remembered seeing Piper with
Homeland Security in real force. After nine to eleven, they
figured she must have been traveling with her own identification.

Speaker 2 (49:12):
How else, how else?

Speaker 1 (49:15):
So at three thirty PM, the officer who'd gone to
the airport called with an update. He didn't find a
record for a Piper round Tree, but a teena round
Tree flew out of Norfolk on Southwest Airlines at twelve
thirty PM, changed planes in Baltimore and was now on
a Southwest flight that left it two ten on her

(49:37):
way to Houston, scheduled to arrive at four thirty Central time.
So someone a woman was traveling back to Houston. Virginia
Police wanted the Houston pde To get a warrant for
her arrest and hold her, confiscate her bags and searched
them for evidence, but Houston thought they needed more evidence

(49:57):
before they could get a warrant to arrest her. Still,
they would send someone to the Houston airport to see
if they could verify who was getting off that plane.
That was pretty important. Was it Tina Roundtree or Piper
round Tree. Then they could seize her bags and hold
them until they could get a warrant. So, carrying driver's
license photos of Piper and Tina, Houston detectives left for

(50:20):
the airport. They called ahead and arranged to have three
uniformed officers waiting for them at security. So if it
was Piper flying under Tina's name, it was a federal
crime to fly under an assumed name, and maybe they'd
have a reason one that would hold up in court
to take her into custody. That afternoon, in Houston, Tina

(50:42):
called Doug McCann, the man she'd spent the previous night with,
and she asked if she could come back to his
house to take a nap. So this seemed odd, but
I guess he kind of liked her because he agreed.

Speaker 2 (50:54):
Well, she spent the night with him.

Speaker 1 (50:55):
Yeah, she arrived a short time later and she went
upstairs to laidend. Then, after Tina left his house, McCann
noticed a message on his cell phone and when he
checked it, he saw it was Piper. She sounded upset,
and she said she was at Tina's house locked out,
and that she'd left her cell phone inside there. So

(51:17):
at the airport, the police watched for people coming off
of the flight, but they didn't see anyone who matched
the photos of Tina or Piper. She'd checked baggage, but
they didn't even see her in baggage claim either, so
they decided she must have been wearing a disguise. So
this I can't get over that she must have walked
past them. Yeah, and they didn't notice her. Three policemen

(51:41):
with pictures, with pictures, I mean, when you look at
any woman between the ages of twenty five and fifty,
basically I'd spread a wide net, but somehow, No, I mean,
how much of a disguise could she have been wearing?

Speaker 2 (51:55):
Hey, good question.

Speaker 1 (51:56):
Yeah. So in Houston that evening, at six pm, police
arrived at Tina's house and they found Piper's Cheap Liberty
in the driveway. Fifteen minutes later, Piper walked out the
door wearing a tank top in jeans and she got
into her black jeep. Unmarked police followed as she drove
from the house a few blocks to Tina's clinic, where

(52:18):
Tina worked as a nurse practitioner. Then she got out
of the car, so the clinic was closed and the
lot was empty except for Piper's jeep parked next to
the trash bin with the car doors open and country
music blaring. But they never saw her leave the car
or enter the clinic. Inside the clinic, the lights never
went on. At seven, she left. Police stayed on her

(52:42):
until she drove through a yellow light and they were
cut off by another car and they lost her. But
by now the police had left several messages on Piper's
cell phone.

Speaker 2 (52:52):
She's proven to be hard to track.

Speaker 1 (52:53):
Down, which is suspicious, right, we.

Speaker 2 (52:57):
Would think that she's deliberately trying to do that.

Speaker 1 (53:01):
Yeah, So after seven pm, Kobe Kelly received a voicemail
on his office phone from Piper. Hi, I didn't catch
your name. I'm looking for my kids. I met my sister's.
Then she repeated her cell number, the same one that
had been traced to Richmond just that morning. Throughout that night,
Detective Kelly and Piper exchanged voicemails each time she asked

(53:25):
about her children. Then finally, at around nine pm, they
had Piper's house staked out. She wasn't home and that
was when Kelly reached Piper on her cell phone, a friend,
Piper said had told her that Fred was dead and
the kids were being held somewhere by the police. But
much of what had happened that day just didn't make sense.
There were Piper's phone calls and Tina going to Doug

(53:48):
McCann's house for a nap. He hadn't asked, but he'd
wondered how Tina had finished work and driven to Clearleg
to a baby shower as she said she was going
to in the rain, and then returned so quickly. So
from four thirty to six thirty or so, she was
asleep in his upstairs bedroom. She didn't seem upset, but

(54:08):
just tired, so this was weird. He expected that he, Tina, Piper,
and Jerry would be going out to dinner, that was
what Piper had mentioned in the morning, but that evening
his phone never rang. By eight thirty, he was getting
hungry and he called Tina, but she sounded busy and
said she'd have to call him back. When she finally

(54:29):
did call him back, she said something serious has come
up that I can't talk about now. Okay, So Tina
acts very strange too, right, certainly is yeah, So the
police had an officer parked outside of Piper's house. After
no one there was answering the door, then finally Piper
came out and got into her car. The unmarked car

(54:51):
followed her and she led them to Attorney Martin McVay. Inside.
Tina was there with McVeagh, and according to McVey, Tina
and had just arrived a few minutes before Piper, and
she had told him about Fred's death. So four detectives
entered the office behind Piper. The detectives talked to Piper
at the attorney's office, but her only interest was in

(55:13):
where her children were. They were with Fred's brother Michael,
so they were safe. The meeting there was cut short, though,
when McVeigh had to leave to pick up his son.
So that day, Piper went to this bar called the
Volcano Bar in Houston, and she asked two employees if
they remembered her being there the night before. They said

(55:33):
they did, and Piper passed on their names in numbers
to the detectives. Piper also had the name of someone
who had seen her in Houston at that same time
that the plane was boarding for the flight to Virginia.
Tina also said there was no way that she had
been the one to flight of Virginia because she'd been
working that day at her women's health clinic. So the

(55:54):
police really didn't know what to think, but they did
see the sisters as suspects in Fred's murder. As they
learned more about the contentious divorce, they got a better
idea of who Piper really was. A year and a
half before the divorce, Piper had gotten a warrant charging
Fred with domestic abuse. Tina said she did not witness

(56:16):
any physical abuse, but Piper told her that Fred had
hit her, and Tina said he had lost his temper
with the kids frequently as well.

Speaker 2 (56:24):
A couple of days after Fred's murder, detectives learned more
about their round trip airline ticket, but under the name
Tina Rowntree. The person who paid for the ticket was
a man named Jerry Walters, a new character. It didn't
take them long to figure out that Jerry Walter's knew Piper.
He had been Piper's boyfriend well last from the past.

(56:45):
Piper started dating him in two thousand and three, right
after she moved to Houston. He described her as sweet, funny,
and pretty much a normal person, pretty much.

Speaker 1 (56:58):
So, even though Jerry was living four hours away in
Baton Rouge, Louisiana, they did have a relationship. He'd spent
a significant amount of time in Houston on business, and
their romantic relationship lasted for about a year and a half.
After that, for about a year and a half, and
after that they were close friends. So they were still

(57:19):
so close that he was the first person Piper called
after Fred's murder. She seemed very upset to Jerry, and
she asked him to come to Houston. He couldn't go
to Houston, but he did talk to her and tried
to support her over the phone. So it was four
days after Fred's murder when detectives tracked down Jerry Walters

(57:39):
to find out why his bank card seemed to be
connected to Fred's murder. Jerry said he'd never even met
Fred and he had no idea who could have used
his bank card on the weekend of the murder. In fact,
he said his car had been stolen before then. Well yeah, so,
Jerry said. He first found out something was wrong with
the card when he tried to withdraw cash from the

(58:02):
account and it was overdrawn. He called the bank and
learned that he had pending ATM transactions in Virginia, so
he didn't know what the hell this was. He called
Piper immediately. So the account and bank card had been
opened by Jerry at Piper's request, actually under his own name.

(58:22):
She told him it was so that she could hide
assets from her ex husband. But Piper could not explain
why the card had turned up in Virginia. She claimed
she hadn't noticed it was missing because she hadn't used it, okay,
But what was especially concerning were the purchases that had
been made on the card. In addition to that plane ticket,

(58:43):
two wigs were purchased from wigs dot com, one blonde
and one auburn. The whigs were sent to an address
in Kingwood, Texas. There was a po box rented there
in the name of Piper Roundtree and Jerry Walters. Jerry
just couldn't believe though, that Piper could have been responsible
for killing her ex husband.

Speaker 2 (59:03):
Well, there's a lot of circumstantial stuff coming out, there is, and.

Speaker 1 (59:07):
I just don't understand why the auburn wig. I could
see if she wanted to look like her sister, she'd
wear the blonde wig because Tina was blonde, Piper was brunette.

Speaker 2 (59:16):
Okay, so she.

Speaker 1 (59:18):
Bought a blonde wig and an auburn wig. So not
sure about what the auburn one was used for unless
it was just a way to change her appearance again, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (59:27):
Well it might have been what she got off plane
with when the cops were watching.

Speaker 1 (59:30):
People could have been But I just don't think she'd
look that different just because she had a wig on.
She was still a young woman. That could have been her.
So I just think that I can't get over how
they didn't catch her coming off there.

Speaker 2 (59:43):
Now, you would think they could have figured out how
many people are going to.

Speaker 1 (59:46):
Fly Virginia to Baltimore to Houston.

Speaker 2 (59:49):
Baltimore to Houston, and they probably could have a full plane.

Speaker 1 (59:52):
Well they could, but you could stand there and see
everyone that gets off, you could, You would think you
wouldn't miss anyone.

Speaker 2 (59:58):
Still talking about that budget, detectives.

Speaker 1 (01:00:00):
Were convinced that Piper had flown to Virginia using her
sister's name and killed Fred. Piper had been on a
camping trip with her children just a few weeks before
the murder, and detectives were beginning to think that she
may have realized then how much she was really missing
being with her children and that she really wanted custody
of them, and maybe that was when she began to

(01:00:23):
make a plan to murder Fred.

Speaker 2 (01:00:26):
Yeah, that's what I'd do. I mean, I've done everything
I could to get custody to the kids, so.

Speaker 1 (01:00:31):
She's out of legal recourse.

Speaker 2 (01:00:33):
Only way out that's the only.

Speaker 1 (01:00:34):
Thing now is murder. Yeah. So so with Fred now dead, though,
Piper was focused on getting custody of her children by
going back to the court. She asked for a custody
hearing in Virginia family Court, and she asked Detective Kelly
if he would testify for her in family court, which
is really weird, but she wanted him to tell the
judge that she had been eliminated as a suspect.

Speaker 2 (01:00:57):
Yeah, but she hadn't been.

Speaker 1 (01:00:58):
Of course she hadn't, So I don't know why she
was even thinking. If she did this, which I think
she did, she must have really thought she was going
to get away with it. Sure, I think she was
really shocked that they even saw her as a suspect.
She probably thought I'm this upstanding woman, I'm an attorney,
I'm a mom. They're not even going to look at me.
But that's really dumb because she is the ex wife

(01:01:21):
who she is. So nine days after the murder, Piper

(01:01:46):
had her hearing, and the judge, knowing that Piper was
a suspect in Fred's murder, gave custody of Paxton, Joscelyn,
and Calli to Fred's brother Michael, who already had them.
But to make that day worse for her, like minutes
after she left the courthouse, she was arrested for first
degree murder. Wow, so she must have thought, what the fuck? Yeah,

(01:02:08):
I thought I was going to get my kids, didn't
get my kids, and now I'm going to jail, probably
for life. She was a prosecutor. She knows the odds
that once you get charged, you're probably going to get convicted.
But Piper claimed to be innocent and said she was
looking forward to defending herself in court.

Speaker 2 (01:02:26):
Sure you gotta say that.

Speaker 1 (01:02:27):
Yeah. Four months later, so pretty quickly her trial started.
In opening arguments, the prosecutor explained that Piper's motive for
the murder was money. She'd been ordered to pay child
support every month and she was in arrears, so she
was ninety seven hundred dollars behind in her payments, so
that makes it seem even worse. She was blaming Fred

(01:02:50):
for her financial problems and for keeping the children away
from her. The defense said that there was no one
who could put Piper at the crime scene and insisted
that the wrong round. Tree's sister was on trial and
all of the evidence pointed.

Speaker 2 (01:03:05):
To her or Tina have as a motive.

Speaker 1 (01:03:08):
She would do it for her sister, she hated Fred.

Speaker 2 (01:03:12):
Well, yeah, definitely.

Speaker 1 (01:03:14):
Well, I mean it's interesting because Tina could have been
in on it, right. She might have thought, well, I
could get away with it because I'm not the wife.
Maybe maybe, maybe something like that. But Piper was going
to point the finger at her at trial, which wouldn't
really matter because they're not going to be able to
use that unless they, you know, later on arrest Tina

(01:03:36):
and take her to trial. But at the point when
Piper's on trial, she really is just going to say
whatever she can to get herself off the hook.

Speaker 2 (01:03:45):
Well yeah, so.

Speaker 1 (01:03:47):
Prosecutors called Jerry Walters to the stand, the bank card guy,
and he testified that he had not bought the wigs
or the plane ticket. Then, to make things even worse
for Piper, the airline age remembered selling the ticket to
a woman named Roundtree, and in the courtroom she identified
Piper as that woman, but she said the woman who

(01:04:08):
bought the ticket had blonde hair, so of course this
suggested that Piper had worn the blonde wig and used
her sister's name in id when she flew to Virginia
to commit the murder. The agent also told the jury
that Piper had checked in her luggage and had told
her she had a gun, so she'd taken a gun
with her. So it still blows me away that you

(01:04:30):
can check a gun. I mean, I guess it's good
you can't take it as a carry on, but still,
unless you're a policeman or something, I don't see why
that's allowed. Anyway, that's not the point here. Using the
phone records, detectives determined that someone had ordered a pizza
in Richmond and had it delivered to Room one seven

(01:04:51):
to one at the Homestead Suite's hotel, So a lot
of these little things can really add up to condemn her.
The hotel who checked her in also identified Piper as
the person who had checked into room one, seven to
one under the name Tina Roundtree. The hotel was just
a few miles from the crime scene too.

Speaker 2 (01:05:12):
Another witness at a car rental agency testified that he
saw Piper on the morning of the murder. Just hours
after the murder. He remembered her returning a car to
the car rental agency at the airport, and remember that
she was in a hurry. So and if that wasn't enough,
the prosecutor said that they had her on video at
a gas station and on the video, a blonde who

(01:05:35):
looks like Piper enters the gas station on the day
of the murder. The next witness, Mac McClanahan, knew both sisters.
He had dated Tina and he had worked with Piper
on one of their rides home from work together. Just
days before Fred's murder, Mac told Piper that he was
going to stop at a shooting range. Piper told him
that she wanted to go with him. She had never

(01:05:56):
gone with them before. So Piper shot a few rounds
and then she rented another type of gun. It was a
thirty eight caliber revolver. It was the same type of
gun used to kill Fred.

Speaker 1 (01:06:08):
So there's a lot of things adding up here that
don't look good.

Speaker 2 (01:06:11):
They don't do they Max said.

Speaker 1 (01:06:13):
When he ran into Piper a few days after the murder,
he found out just how nervous she was about their
trip to the gun range because she hugged him and
she asked him to please not tell the police about
the gun range because it would just complicate things for her. Yes,
for sure. Then the prosecution called the witness who really

(01:06:34):
destroyed Piper's alibi for the night before the murder, Kevin O'Keefe,
who thought he had seen Piper at the Volcano Bar,
now told jurors that he had made a mistake. He
had confused which night he had been at the bar,
so now he was retracting his story. After the prosecution
had dozens of witnesses testifying against her, forty nine people

(01:06:57):
to be exact, Piper knew she was in deep trouble.
Remember she was a former prosecutor, so she knew that
things were against her here. So took some thinking, took
a little time, but she finally decided she had to
take the stand in her own defense. It was really
her last hope.

Speaker 2 (01:07:14):
I just got to do something to win the jury over.

Speaker 1 (01:07:16):
Yeah, it usually doesn't work, but yeah, I'm sure she
knew that. It's really just kind of a sign of
desperation in my opinion.

Speaker 2 (01:07:23):
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:07:25):
Piper testified about not learning Fred had been shot and
killed until the evening of the murder. Then she said
she was worried about her children and did not know
where they were. But her main defense was that it
was impossible for her to have shot and killed Fred
that Saturday morning because she'd been all the way in Texas.
But the strategy also included showing the jury that Piper

(01:07:47):
was a good person who loved her kids more than anything,
so she would never take away their father from them. Now,
Piper insisted that she was at the Volcano Bar on
Friday night, the night before the murder, even though O'Keefe
now said that he had seen her at the bar
on Saturday night. Piper claimed that she had hung out

(01:08:07):
and had drinks with a strange guy on Friday night
at the Volcano, supposedly a guy who told her his
name was Steve but then later asked her to call
him Jerry. So that sounds a little made up to me.

Speaker 2 (01:08:19):
Boy, she's testifying this way or you.

Speaker 1 (01:08:24):
Have to laugh at Oh, yeah, she's grasping here. I
think she's getting desperate because she was smart enough to
know that she was in deep shit. But Piper also
could not explain why her jeep was parked at the
Houston Airport on the weekend Fred was killed. Then prosecutors
questioned her about her visit to the gun range and
how she'd shot a gun just like the one that

(01:08:46):
had killed Fred Chaplin. She claimed she had no idea
what kind of gun it was. She didn't know guns,
she said, so it was just a gun to her.
A gun was a gun, yep. When questioned about the wigs,
she claimed that Tina had the whig, so she was
basically throwing Tina under the bus. The evidence placed Piper
in Richmond, and then there were the cell phone records.

(01:09:09):
The records showed calls from Richmond to Houston on Piper's
cell phone just after the murder. But what did Piper say.
Piper claimed that she didn't have the phone because she
lost it on Tuesday and it miraculously showed up on
Saturday at her sister Tina's house. And what are the odds?

Speaker 2 (01:09:28):
A coincidence?

Speaker 1 (01:09:29):
Yeah, a lot of coincidences. She's really asking people to
believe a lot of things that are very far fetched
or way too coincidental to be true.

Speaker 2 (01:09:39):
That's for sure. Yes, So Marty McVeigh testified for the defense.
He said that he saw Piper in his office at
four thirty Friday afternoon, So this was probably her best
defense witness.

Speaker 1 (01:09:51):
Oh, absolutely, he was.

Speaker 2 (01:09:53):
It would be impossible for Piper to be in his
office at that time if she was Fred's killer, because
she would been on the plane back to Houston at
that time. A local Richmond newspaper journalist testified about her
interviews with Nick Day. She swore that McVeigh had told
her Piper came to his office the day after the murder,

(01:10:14):
not the day of the murder. He said he saw
Piper on Sunday, the afternoon after the murder, she said,
and told her that before that he had not seen
Piper for about a year. M was brought back to
the stand after that, and he stuck to the story
he did.

Speaker 1 (01:10:30):
So you have to wonder, I mean, did you have
the feeling he was lying for her?

Speaker 2 (01:10:34):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (01:10:35):
Yeah, So did she do him some kind of favors?
I don't know, but it really seemed like she had
got him to lie for her, because he's really the
only one that's taking her side in any of this, Yes,
but it wasn't enough because Piper was found guilty after
less than one hour of deliberation.

Speaker 2 (01:10:53):
Well that's the record for me.

Speaker 1 (01:10:54):
That's pretty amazing. No one, not even Piper, seemed surprised, though,
and then she was sentenced on the same day to
life in prison. Piper continued to insist that she was
an innocent victim of prejudicial media reports and of a
corrupt judicial system. At the time of Fred's death, she
wrote to the newspaper, our relationship was better than it

(01:11:18):
had been before we started on the divorce proceedings. We
were essentially sharing our roles as joint parents of our children,
the way we should have been doing all along. Then
she added that plans had already been made for the
children to spend the following summer with her in Houston,
so she said it didn't make sense that she would
have done this. She did appeal her conviction and that

(01:11:42):
was denied. Then she was eligible for parole in twenty
twenty three, but that was denied also. The parole board
concluded that releasing her at that time would really diminish
the seriousness of her crime, and that she needs further
participation in institutional work and educational programs to show positive

(01:12:04):
progression before she re enters society. So let me just say,
Piper Roundtree is not happy in prison. I guess most
people aren't.

Speaker 2 (01:12:14):
No, it'd be tough to enjoy prison.

Speaker 1 (01:12:18):
But she's filed suits against the Department of Corrections for mistreatment,
but has been told there's no merit to her claims.
So her claims were that her legal mail was rejected
without her permission in January of twenty eleven, that her
religious books were confiscated improperly in early twenty eleven, and

(01:12:38):
she was denied access to legal publications in January twenty eleven. Also,
the Virginia Department of Corrections refused to allow her to
stand on her prayer rug, which she alleged was in
violation of her First Amendment rights. So, since her incarceration,
she said that she fills her days with meditation, yoga,

(01:13:00):
and tutoring other inmates. She's also become very religious and
reads the Bible. So you go, Piper, she's a changed woman,
you think, no, Okay, she did, Yes.

Speaker 2 (01:13:14):
When's her next parole date? Do we know parol here?

Speaker 1 (01:13:18):
I think not until late the late twenties. Like twenty
eight or something like that. So she has a ways
to go she does.

Speaker 2 (01:13:25):
Yep.

Speaker 1 (01:13:26):
So that's the story of Piper and of Fred Japlin
who his poor children lost him and then their mother
as well.

Speaker 2 (01:13:33):
So murderers don't think of that stuff, do they.

Speaker 1 (01:13:36):
I think most of them think they're going to get
away with it clearly, or they wouldn't do it. Okay,
don't you think so? Absolutely, someone like her who thought
she was smarter than everyone. Absolutely, she thought she was
getting away with this.

Speaker 2 (01:13:48):
Yeah, but she didn't think it out carefully did.

Speaker 1 (01:13:50):
She doesn't seem like it though. You do have to
wonder did her sister Tina have some participation in this?

Speaker 2 (01:13:58):
Could be I think she might kind of probably not
anything chargeable.

Speaker 1 (01:14:03):
Yeah, I don't know. I was just thinking if Piper
wore the blonde wig to look like her sister and
flew to Richmond with her sister's identification, then maybe Tina
wore that auburn wig to try and look like Piper
and stay in the Houston area and get seen.

Speaker 2 (01:14:19):
Yeah, so they could sort of swap identities for a
few days.

Speaker 1 (01:14:23):
That's possible, Although there weren't enough witnesses in Houston that
said they saw, so I'm not sure it is possible
that the attorney only saw Tina at his office. I'm
not sure, but anyway you look at it, it just
was not believable.

Speaker 2 (01:14:38):
No, well, I think the jury coming back in that
record amount of time testifies to that.

Speaker 1 (01:14:43):
Yeah, Piper just was not a credible witness. So before
we move on to feedback, I just want to say
that if you signed up for TCB Premium this past
week and you selected a beer glass as your gift,
I need you to be a little patient. Our TCB
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(01:15:04):
because I do usually try and send out the gifts
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pull the trigger and go ahead and sign up. Then
you can enjoy all of our episodes ad free and
get bonus episodes every month, and all of them going
back about eight years. So that's a lot of episodes

(01:15:26):
without ads that may not be new, but they will
be new to you.

Speaker 2 (01:15:37):
It's time for listener feedback.

Speaker 1 (01:15:52):
So what do we have for feedback?

Speaker 2 (01:15:54):
Well, we just have a couple this time around. I've
got a voicemail from Judy and an email from Ronda.
They have case suggestions.

Speaker 3 (01:16:02):
My name is Judy Fragway. I recommend this case of
Bonnie Harky from San Saba, Texas.

Speaker 1 (01:16:10):
She owns a big.

Speaker 3 (01:16:13):
Pecan archer and she was well known in town as
the pecan queen of San Saba. She had dementia and
caretaker lived with her. There was some discussion about who
was in her will. Her body was finally found in
a small trace. Between her death and finding her body

(01:16:35):
there there was much much going on.

Speaker 1 (01:16:40):
Thanks Judy. There were a couple of broken up parts there,
but I think we got the gist of it.

Speaker 2 (01:16:45):
Yeah. Well, like she said, this, Bonny Harky was the
pecan queen. She married into this family of pecan growers
and I guess is quite profitable. So they had grows
and grows of pecane trees. And then when her husband died,
she was thinking that the whole production will be turned

(01:17:05):
over to one of the sons, but she inherited everything.

Speaker 1 (01:17:10):
Well, sure, but wouldn't she have handed it down to
the sons eventually?

Speaker 2 (01:17:14):
Probably?

Speaker 1 (01:17:15):
Well? Who else would take over when she died, she
wasn't young.

Speaker 2 (01:17:19):
No, well, that's kind of the irony of all this. Yeah,
her son or stepson did the killing without knowing that
this eighty five year old woman who was in poor
health becoming more and more demented. He would have gotten
everything from her right the way her will was written.

Speaker 1 (01:17:34):
Yeah, so that seems pretty senseless and unless it was
a crime of anger, but it sounds like it was
something that was plotted out for the inheritance. Yes, so
clearly he could have gotten an attorney, and if he
could prove that she was not mentally capable of running
the business, he would have gotten it, which seems like
a much kinder, gentler way to do things than murder.

Speaker 2 (01:17:55):
Well, that usually is the case, isn't it.

Speaker 1 (01:17:57):
Yeah. I just think, you know, yes, there always are
and eighty five years old. That's just really sad because
someone like that in poor health becoming demented, just really
is helpless.

Speaker 2 (01:18:11):
Though.

Speaker 1 (01:18:11):
That's a sad one. But yeah, we'll look into it. Juty.
Sounds like it could be interesting for sure.

Speaker 2 (01:18:17):
Yeah. I started reading an article in Texas Monthly.

Speaker 1 (01:18:20):
Oh they have good crime articles.

Speaker 2 (01:18:21):
Yeah, it's interesting, all right.

Speaker 1 (01:18:24):
And then we have an email from Ronda with a
case suggestion. So Ronda writes. The Snowtown Murders, also known
as the Bodies in Beryl's Murders, were a series of
murders committed by John Justin Bunting, Robert Joe Wagner and
James Spyridon Lesacus between August ninety two and May ninety
nine in and around Adelaide, South Australia. A fourth person,

(01:18:48):
Mark Hayden, was convicted of helping to move the bodies.
So the trial was one of the longest and most
publicized in Australian legal history. So this has been suggested
probably a handful of times in the past, although it's
been a while. So let's go over it and I
think it will be something we will do. We haven't
done much for Australia lately. And for a while there

(01:19:10):
Australia was a pretty big segment of our.

Speaker 2 (01:19:13):
Cases that it was very fertile.

Speaker 1 (01:19:15):
Yeah, oh, we've.

Speaker 2 (01:19:17):
Got this, We've got the uh Basaria Chamberlain Dingo, all.

Speaker 1 (01:19:21):
Right, all right. So most of these bodies were found
in barrels in an abandoned bank vault in the small
town of Snowtown, South Australia. Hence the names given in
the press for the murders. Only one of the victims
was killed in Snowtown itself, which is approximately one hundred
and forty kilometers eighty seven miles north of Adelaide, and

(01:19:42):
neither the twelve victims nor the three perpetrators were from
that town. So although the motivation for the murders is unclear,
the killers were led by Bunting to believe that the
victims were pedophiles, homosexuals, or wheat. In the case of
some victims. The murders were seated by torture that's awful,

(01:20:03):
and efforts were made to appropriate victims' identities, social Security payments,
and bank accounts. Although initially the notoriety of the murders
led to short term economic boost from tourists in visiting Snowtown,
it did create a stigma, with authorities considering a change
of the town's name and identity. So that's pretty crazy

(01:20:24):
that there's a murder that is so notorious that you
might change the name of your town.

Speaker 2 (01:20:29):
Remarkable, Plus, no one would ever know, right, right.

Speaker 1 (01:20:33):
So. The case has been chronicled in numerous books, as
well as a film adaptation released in twenty eleven to
critical acclaim we watched that film. I don't think we
have no been recommended several times. I know that. Well,
I think we should watch the film and then decide
if we want to read up and do some more
research on it. Apparently a lot of people are interested

(01:20:54):
in it. We like to cover cases that our listeners recommend,
because why wouldn't you?

Speaker 2 (01:20:59):
That's right?

Speaker 1 (01:21:00):
Yeah, okay, well, I think we're going to wrap it
up for today. What do you think? Okay, So, thank
you so much for listening, and we'll see you again
at the quiet end your room, my dad, Bye, bye, bye, guys,

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