May 14, 2025 • 44 mins
California’s Killer Prophet: True Crime Documentary of Mass Murderer John Linley Frazier
In the fall of 1970, the quiet hills of Santa Cruz, California, were shaken by a brutal and bizarre mass murder committed by a man who believed he was chosen by God to carry out a holy mission. John Linley Frazier, later dubbed The Killer Prophet, murdered a prominent local doctor and his entire family in a crime that stunned the community and marked the beginning of Santa Cruz’s descent into an era of serial killings.
Claiming environmental and spiritual motives, Frazier left behind a chilling manifesto declaring war on those who destroyed nature. In this episode, we unravel the disturbing mindset of a man driven by delusions, explore the twisted philosophy behind the murders, and revisit one of California’s earliest and most unsettling true crime stories.
Listener discretion is advised — this episode contains disturbing content and graphic details.
John Linley Frazier, Killer Prophet, California mass murderer, Santa Cruz murders, true crime, eco-terrorism, spiritual delusion, mass murder, 1970s crime, murder manifesto, environmental extremist, Santa Cruz serial killers, cult mentality, twisted beliefs, true crime podcast, psychological breakdown, religious fanaticism, family murder, infamous killers, real crime stories
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/best-true-crime-documentaries--6015157/support.
In the fall of 1970, the quiet hills of Santa Cruz, California, were shaken by a brutal and bizarre mass murder committed by a man who believed he was chosen by God to carry out a holy mission. John Linley Frazier, later dubbed The Killer Prophet, murdered a prominent local doctor and his entire family in a crime that stunned the community and marked the beginning of Santa Cruz’s descent into an era of serial killings.
Claiming environmental and spiritual motives, Frazier left behind a chilling manifesto declaring war on those who destroyed nature. In this episode, we unravel the disturbing mindset of a man driven by delusions, explore the twisted philosophy behind the murders, and revisit one of California’s earliest and most unsettling true crime stories.
Listener discretion is advised — this episode contains disturbing content and graphic details.
John Linley Frazier, Killer Prophet, California mass murderer, Santa Cruz murders, true crime, eco-terrorism, spiritual delusion, mass murder, 1970s crime, murder manifesto, environmental extremist, Santa Cruz serial killers, cult mentality, twisted beliefs, true crime podcast, psychological breakdown, religious fanaticism, family murder, infamous killers, real crime stories
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/best-true-crime-documentaries--6015157/support.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
In nineteen seventy, John Linley Frasier committed a crime that
sent shock waves through society.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
People were just done.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
Its weird mix of occult messages and senseless brutality.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
They had been executed and then the house was set
on fire.
Speaker 1 (00:18):
Had Californians fearing for their lives?
Speaker 4 (00:22):
Oh yeah, the doors were locked and the guns were loaded.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
But what had driven Frasier to slaughter? Was he destined
for murder?
Speaker 5 (00:31):
Frasier had a very unstable childhood.
Speaker 6 (00:35):
The intensity with which she would look at you always
kind of scared me.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
Was John Linley Frasier born to kill?
Speaker 7 (00:42):
He was going to go door to door like the
avon lady ding dong, You're dead.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
In the early nineteen sixties, Santa Cruz was just an
ordinary Californian beach town.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Santa Cruz was a model of conservatism, a tourist city
dominated by the boardwalk and the beach.
Speaker 3 (01:35):
Santa Cruz was very friendly, slow paced community to live
in back then.
Speaker 8 (01:42):
It was pretty much a retirement town.
Speaker 9 (01:45):
At that time.
Speaker 8 (01:46):
There was no University of California, there was no UC
campus there at the time. It was just a very quaint,
small community. It felt very safe and very pleasant.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
It was this peaceful community that the Ota family decided
to make home. Tragically, for them, it wouldn't remain peaceful
for long.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
Doctor Victor Oda and his family were very very well
known in the city of Santa Cruz and actually in
the county of Santa Cruz and beyond. He was a noted,
well respected ophthalmologist.
Speaker 8 (02:26):
My father, he was a person who came from very
poor background and did very well for himself.
Speaker 9 (02:32):
He was just sort.
Speaker 8 (02:34):
Of a bigger than life character, handsome and generous and friendly.
Speaker 10 (02:40):
Doctor Ota was my eye doctor, and I remember him
as being a very very nice man, very gentle.
Speaker 8 (02:50):
My mother also came from a working class background. She
was Chucksovakia and my father was Japanese. So for home
and our lifestyle was anything it was much more job niece.
My mother was also very stylish and perfect looking. Just
moms were like that.
Speaker 9 (03:07):
Then, I guess.
Speaker 1 (03:09):
Victor and Virginia Ota had what many locals considered to
be the perfect family.
Speaker 8 (03:17):
My older sister was Tara, was three years older than
I was, and she was artistic, an artist.
Speaker 11 (03:25):
And.
Speaker 9 (03:27):
Beautiful. She was also a model.
Speaker 8 (03:30):
And then I had two brothers that were Derek was
three years younger than I and Tag was four years
Tag was just one of those little boys that was
just the sweetest, cutest kid in school and everybody loved he.
Speaker 9 (03:49):
Was just gorgeous.
Speaker 8 (03:51):
Derek was much more artistic and darker, a little more
brooding and more complicated.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
Thought of as almost Another family member was the doctor's secretary,
Dorothy Kadwallader.
Speaker 4 (04:08):
My aunt Dorothy was. She was a wonderful woman, you know,
all American and apple pie, the whole works.
Speaker 9 (04:16):
She was the most beautiful woman. She was soft spoken
and perfect. She was like just to me, I just
idilized her.
Speaker 1 (04:29):
Completing the perfect family unit was the dream home the
Otters built in the Santa Cruz foothills.
Speaker 8 (04:38):
It was as much part of our life as a
person in our family that home and the process of
building it.
Speaker 9 (04:45):
Even the fabrics inside the house my mother wove on
a loom.
Speaker 8 (04:51):
It was built completely into nature. There were no trees
cut down to build the home.
Speaker 4 (04:58):
Doctor Oda liked.
Speaker 7 (05:01):
Natural setting.
Speaker 4 (05:03):
I can remember that the windows didn't have any coverings
on him. He liked to look out into the forest
and liked a lot of natural stonework around the home.
Speaker 8 (05:15):
Wasn't a time that you thought of where anything bad,
whatever happened.
Speaker 1 (05:23):
But in the late sixties, Santa Cruz changed forever. The
hippie generation descended on the area in their thousands.
Speaker 3 (05:35):
You started seeing a lot of people dropping out and going.
Speaker 7 (05:40):
To live with nature.
Speaker 6 (05:41):
It was huge here. Some people were growing their own food,
some of them worked, They were artists, musicians, a lot
of people on food stamps probably, And.
Speaker 1 (05:53):
It wasn't all peace and love.
Speaker 8 (05:56):
Well.
Speaker 12 (05:56):
The nineteen sixties are known as sort of the decade
of love and flower power and peace and harmony, but
in many ways it had a darker side. It saw
quite a few different revolutions. It was a sexual, political,
psychedelic revolution, but one that doesn't get mentioned as much
(06:17):
as the others was a kind of magical revolution that
took place in the nineteen sixties. It was more or
less in a cult revival.
Speaker 3 (06:26):
I remember just up the way here one of the
communes where the inhabitants would put on white robes and
pointed hats and chanting and like a Celtic language and
holding rich wolves. It was bizarre behavior that scared people.
Speaker 12 (06:46):
It seemed to be a kind of free for all
in the world of morality, which initially was very liberating,
but at a certain point it seemed to have gone
too far.
Speaker 1 (06:57):
Nothing illustrated this more than when the cult hippie commune
led by Charles Manson snaughted eight people in nineteen sixty nine.
Most horrifyingly amongst the victims was the eight months pregnant
actress Sharon Tate.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
California exploded in fear. When the whole Kate LaBianca murders
in LA and the Charlie Manson gang popped onto the
newspapers and was covered internationally, it made people go, Wow,
what's happening. It did change, you know, the whole aura
(07:40):
of peace and love and flower power to something strange,
to be fearful of, more criminal, more crazy.
Speaker 1 (07:56):
Soon after the Manson murders, a terrifying crime would occur
in Santa Cruz on America's West coast that would convince
all that another killer cult was on the rampage.
Speaker 10 (08:09):
My dad told me, I want you to to stay
up here because there are five bodies in the pool.
Speaker 1 (08:21):
In nineteen sixty nine, the Manson family murders had revealed
a dark side to the hippie generation. Rumors of strange
occult practices, talk of revolution, and murder had tainted the
peace and love movement forever, and in nineteen seventy a
new crime would occur that would convince many that society
(08:45):
was about to self destruct.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
This crime unfolds really with a report of a fire
smoke billowing from this small hilltop.
Speaker 10 (09:02):
That night, I was in class out at the community college.
We were on a break and I heard the siren blowing.
I got my fire gear because I knew where the
fire was the Otah residents.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
As the firefighters arrived, they go up a winding kind
of a driveway and there was a car.
Speaker 3 (09:33):
There was a Rolls Royce and a Lincoln blocking the roadway.
Speaker 13 (09:40):
They couldn't get.
Speaker 14 (09:41):
To the house. The house was on fire.
Speaker 10 (09:46):
So we got out and we approached the scene. My dad,
who was the assistant fire chief, instructed us to take
a hose line up on the roof.
Speaker 2 (10:01):
There are flames happening in different parts of the house,
and the firefighters are putting out the flames.
Speaker 10 (10:09):
And then my dad climbed up the ladder and he
told me, I want you to to stay up here
until I tell you to come down. And it seemed
kind of strange to me, and so I said to him. Why,
he said, because there are five bodies in the pool.
Speaker 2 (10:35):
Bodies literally floating in the swimming pool.
Speaker 10 (10:42):
It was very eerie, pretty I think, you know, to
this day, I can still kind of visualize that.
Speaker 11 (11:02):
It happened sometime during the dinner hour on the eye
surgeons one hundred and fifty thousand dollars estake everyone in
the house methodically murdered. The only survivors the Oda's two
teenage daughters who were away at school.
Speaker 8 (11:21):
I was back at boarding school and I was woken
up by one of the nuns and told that I
needed to go home. And it was certainly not what
I could have ever imagined. When I walked outside, it
was just barely sunrise, and all the nuns from the
(11:45):
entire school were standing outside. They had to tell me
in the car that my family had died.
Speaker 9 (12:05):
It was.
Speaker 13 (12:07):
It was.
Speaker 9 (12:10):
Unthinkable. And then they had to tell me how.
Speaker 3 (12:17):
Five people had been killed, Doctor Oda, his wife, secretary,
and two of his children. They had been executed and
somehow thrown, pushed or dumped into the swimming pool, and
then the house was set on fire.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
Dr Ota had been shot three times, The two women
and the boys had each been shot once. In the head.
Speaker 6 (12:41):
All of the bodies were found in the pool.
Speaker 9 (12:44):
They were tired with silk scarves.
Speaker 1 (12:50):
The murders and shockwaves through California and beyond.
Speaker 2 (13:01):
When this crime happened. They were just stunned.
Speaker 13 (13:06):
Doctor Victor Ota and his family lived in this house
on a hill. None of the neighbors saw or heard anything.
Police today were searching the area. They believed there must
have been more than one killer, but they have very
few leads.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
Doctor Oda was such a well regarded figure in the community,
and nearly an entire family was killed in one event.
It just paralyzed this community.
Speaker 1 (13:40):
The burden was on the Sheriff's department to unravel the mystery.
Speaker 2 (13:45):
This is where this heeneous crime took place. We had
police cars, fire engines, the media trying to keep people
away from the house.
Speaker 1 (13:58):
As the crime scene was searched. A clue surfaced not too.
Speaker 2 (14:03):
Far from where I am. Straight up past the switchback
was one of the cars that blocked the fire engines
from getting in to put out the fire.
Speaker 1 (14:14):
And tucked beneath the windscreen wiper detectives made their chilling find.
Speaker 15 (14:20):
There was a weird development in the case. A strange
note was found at the scene, indicating the killings had
been done by a group calling itself the Three People
of the Universe who have declared World War three against
anybody who misuses the environment.
Speaker 1 (14:40):
Composed on the Outer Zone typewriter. The note began Halloween
nineteen seventy Today, World War III will begin, as brought
to you by the people of the Free Universe from
this day forward, and or company of persons who misuses
(15:03):
the natural environment or destroys same will suffer the penalty
of death. The note was signed Night of Ones, Night
of Cups, Night of Pentacles, Night of Swords.
Speaker 3 (15:22):
The note once it was the contents released really scared people.
Speaker 2 (15:32):
It made people right away think about Charlie Manson, Pate
La Bianca, Helter Skelter. Those of us in the Sheriff's
office thought we were dealing with a big group of
people that were held bent on killing people.
Speaker 4 (15:52):
I had never been associated with firearms. The first thing
I did was I went down to the local cigar
store bought myself a weapon.
Speaker 10 (16:02):
We never used to lock our doors, but when this happened,
we started locking our doors. I actually slept with a
shotgun alongside my bed.
Speaker 4 (16:13):
Oh yeah, the doors were locked and the guns were loaded.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
Within twenty four hours, there was a new development. Whoever
had slain the family had stolen one of their cars,
and now it reappeared in a nearby railway tunnel. Along
with the sighting nearby of three suspicious hippies.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
A train came along and hit the car, and now
we are rushing to the tunnel to find out what
kind of information on this murder case can this car
give us.
Speaker 3 (16:51):
The vehicle was still warm, so there was thought it
was recent and therefore the people, the suspects, maybe still
in the area.
Speaker 2 (17:00):
So then we started looking for who put the car
in the tunnel on these tracks. We put together this
extensive perimeter around what is known as Henry cal Park.
It is huge. This is a dense redwood forest. It
(17:26):
goes down into a gorge where the San Lorenzo River
runs and then goes up the other side. I, along
with probably at least one hundred or more other officers,
began searching. We had California Highway Patrol, Santa Cruz County Sheriff,
(17:46):
Santa Cruz Police, we had people from everywhere. We were
borrowing helicopters from the San Francisco Bay Area.
Speaker 3 (17:53):
I was leading one of those teams because I was
familiar with the trails up there, But it was really
a law shot that we would find someone. It's the
areas overgrown with redwoods and brush and easy for them
to hear us coming, easy for them to hide.
Speaker 1 (18:12):
Despite the massive search, the cult killers couldn't be found,
and as panic spread through the Santa Cruz community, talk
of a war between straight society and the hippies began.
Speaker 13 (18:28):
Hippie communes began in the woods around here. There are
many of them. A person with long hair lately around
here has been feeling the heat. It's this look of
distrust of.
Speaker 4 (18:39):
We just can't trust these people, you know, they're afraid
of us. This was the first time anything like that
had happened in Santa Cruz County, and I think that
the town really got paranoid.
Speaker 13 (18:51):
Many people are talking of setting up vigilante groups. They're
buying guns and ammunition.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
People would say, well, we'd like to.
Speaker 3 (18:59):
The lynch long hairs.
Speaker 6 (19:01):
We don't think our community means him.
Speaker 1 (19:05):
But when details of the note reached long haired local
Roger Crone, what came to mind was not a cult
but his neighbor, a reclusive twenty four year old John
Lindley Frasier.
Speaker 6 (19:20):
Facts came out about the odistling, and they just felt
everything about that fell right in line with what he
had been telling us. Three days before.
Speaker 1 (19:31):
Roger and his friends lived in a selection of old
farm buildings in the woods, not far from the Otta
family home.
Speaker 6 (19:41):
John camped out over in this cabin across the ravine,
and she was living off the land for the most part.
He was as close to a survivalist as she could get.
Speaker 2 (19:55):
For the time.
Speaker 6 (19:57):
He had a look about him. He was so serious
and he seemed really skeptical of everything, so you know,
there was part of me that feared him always. When
my friend Michael Madden and I were at work, he
(20:18):
had a conversation with the girls that lived in the
house too. He had been talking about the Book of
Revelations and the fact that he felt he was here
to save the environment and that people who were polluting
it or who were abusing it needed to be dealt with.
(20:44):
Either you were in with him or you had.
Speaker 8 (20:48):
To go.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
Against all expectations. The so called People of the Free
Universe was not a killer cult, but alone assassin on
a mission from God, and he was armed and on
the loose. In October nineteen seventy, doctor Victor Oter, his
(21:14):
wife Virginia, their two sons, Dereck and Taggart, and doctor
Otter's secretary Dorothy Cadwallader had been bound with scarves, shot
in the head, and dumped in the family's swimming pool.
After the discovery of a note referencing the occult, California
(21:34):
feared another murderous Manson like hippie cult, but local resident
Roger Crone recognized the note as the work of his
reclusive neighbor, twenty four year old John Linley Frazier. A
raid on his property was quickly organized.
Speaker 3 (21:55):
We met at the Sheriff's department and BT our team together,
told who we were looking for, and we went up
to the Sokeel Foothills. I think apprehensive is a good word.
Not knowing what you're going to get into, what you're
(22:16):
going to run up against. You know you can't make
any mistakes because that could cost costure dearly. We worked
our way up kind of a ravine to a very
precarious footbridge, a couple of cables with boards laid on it,
to a shack that was on the far side of
this gully, but.
Speaker 1 (22:38):
The shack was empty and Frasier was nowhere to be found.
Rod Sandford and his fellow deputy, Brad Armsland were instructed
to stake out the property overnight.
Speaker 3 (22:53):
We decided to work our way up on a little
hillside above the buildings and anchor down for the night.
Before we went up there, I had set some little traps,
just using some of the old twigs and branches that
are here, that would indicate if something or someone had
(23:14):
come through that trail during the nighttime. You'd take something
like this, the trail was here, He'd just set a
piece across and that was something just as simple as that,
so that when someone or something walk by, they'd kick
it down, knock it down, disturb it. I knew that raccoon, skunk's, deer,
(23:36):
anything would set off the ones on the trail. But
on the bridge I laid a very small piece of
a branch actually, and I knew that when somebody walked
on it, the cables would move up and down the
branch would fall through. I'd know somebody crossed it, it
wouldn't have been an animal. And then in the door
(23:57):
on the far side in his shack in side the door.
I set up another little small twig that if the
door was opened, it would fall out towards us. It
was a sleepless night because you knew what this person did,
(24:17):
and you knew that if they came along in our mind,
at least they wouldn't go easy. So in the morning,
at daybreak we started going down the trails towards the shack.
We noticed that the traps had been set off on
(24:40):
the trails, and I knew then that someone had gone
across the bridge. And when we looked across at the cabin,
we could see that the small little stick that had
been indoors was now outside. So now we know that
(25:02):
someone has come across the cable and the door had
been opened and closed. So then the dilemma was one
of us had to go across the bridge while the
other one covered him. There was some discussion then, because
whoever went out on that drawbridge was a sitting duck.
You had no cover. You were wide open. I don't
(25:27):
know how it happened, but I was the one that
went across the bridge and Brad covered me. And that
wasn't much fun. It was not a solid bridge. If
you stepped in the wrong place. You cause a board
to fly, and you go down going across, knowing that
this guy had killed five people, and if you had
a gun and realized we were coming, he might start shooting.
(25:47):
And there was nowhere to go. You're wondering if that
door is going to fly open. So I went across
the bridge and I covered He came across the bridge.
Once he got here, there was nowhere else for us
to go, and the door was here, so there was
(26:08):
nothing to do but open that door quickly and go through.
You do is you get a one on either side
of the door, One pulls the door, and then you go.
What we noticed immediately is there was a sleeping bags,
maybe blankets, but there was a stack of things in
the middle of the room that hadn't been there the
day before. I looked at Brad, he looked at me.
(26:28):
He grabbed the sleeping bags, yanked him back. I had
the shotgun and there was Frasier, stuck the shotgun in
his face and don't move or I'll shoot. Kind of
had this weird smile, looked at me and said, why
don't you give me what I deserve? And I'll tell
(26:49):
you what the thought runs through your mind, But that's
not our job.
Speaker 6 (26:55):
Two of our definitely shafts Land, Armsland and rottens Hantfred
bomb the suspect Fraser asleep.
Speaker 2 (27:04):
This Wark charges the suspect with five.
Speaker 15 (27:06):
Counts of murder.
Speaker 1 (27:09):
So who was this lone assassin seemingly capable of the
cold execution of either man, woman or child? And why
had he targeted the five innocents at the Ota residence.
Speaker 14 (27:24):
The first time that I laid eyes on John and
Lee Fraser was in the in the jail cell, and
he was clearly strange, very uncooperative.
Speaker 7 (27:39):
He was just, I don't know, weird, as best I
can describe it.
Speaker 11 (27:47):
He was.
Speaker 7 (27:48):
He was He wouldn't say anything, wouln't say anything to anybody.
Speaker 1 (27:51):
It was down to defense investigator Harold Cartwright to try
to unravel the mysteries of Fraser's mind.
Speaker 14 (28:00):
Convinced an investigation in trying to figure out what made
him tick.
Speaker 1 (28:11):
John Fraser's parents had separated when he was two. By
the time he was five, his mother, unable to support
herself and care for him, had placed him in a
foster home.
Speaker 5 (28:25):
I think Brazier had a very unstable childhood in a
sense of insecurity. I think he did not feel safe,
and when a child does not feel safe, they tend
to start developing mechanisms to survive and to adapt, and
sometimes those mechanisms are pretty maladaptive. So I'd assume that
he probably had a rigid temperament where somebody is not
(28:48):
able to absorb frustration or disappointment and they begin to
get angry over it, and it isn't just anger, it
sits in their stomach like an undigested rock.
Speaker 1 (29:02):
The young Frasier earned convictions for burglary and escape from
a juvenile facility, but by his late teens he appeared
to be settling down. He married his wife, Delores, when
he was twenty one, and in nineteen sixty five they
had a child.
Speaker 14 (29:19):
I remember speaking to his ex employer at a motor
repair shop, and he spoke very highly of John, thought
he was an excellent mechanic.
Speaker 1 (29:32):
But in Fraser's early twenties he began to change.
Speaker 5 (29:38):
In nineteen sixty nine, his wife noticed that he seemed
to be having delusions.
Speaker 14 (29:46):
She told me that he would go off the end
of the woods and take his Bible, and that sometimes
she wouldn't see him for two or three days at
a time. But that he was never unkind to her,
loved his daughter. He just became a different person.
Speaker 1 (30:06):
John Linley Frasier was showing signs of schizophrenia.
Speaker 16 (30:10):
Schizophrenia is a major mental illness characterized mainly by a
disorder of thought. A disorder of thinking. It usually begins
in late adolescents early adulthood in nineteen twenty, when the
first psychotic episode begins, but prior to that, there's a
pre morbid condition where the individual is usually withdrawn and
(30:31):
odd and somewhat bizarre in a number of different ways.
Speaker 1 (30:35):
In nineteen seventy, Frasier's strange behavior escalated.
Speaker 14 (30:40):
He quit his job. He felt that imbustion engines were
destroying the environment, and he he didn't feel that he
could be a party to that any longer.
Speaker 1 (30:52):
Then, on Independence Day, three months before the slaying at
Deota Residence, Fraser separated from his family and began living
in a dilapidated cow shed in the woods. There, he
developed an obsession with the dark preoccupations of the time,
the occult numerology, levitation, and the apocalyptic messages of the
(31:17):
Book of Revelations.
Speaker 5 (31:19):
He might have been what we call a schizotypal personality
disorder where magical thinking is part of the process. Where
he was getting very involved in the taro and at
that time the Happy Movement was becoming much more into
very spiritualistic philosophies, and he did not have voices of
stability around him.
Speaker 1 (31:41):
Neighbor Roger Crone was unnerved by Frasier's odd behavior.
Speaker 6 (31:47):
The couple got married while we were living here, and
they had the wedding up on the ridge, and John
showed up wearing an American flag. It was indicative of
the fact that he was a little bit strange. John
was kind of reclusive, hard person to get to know. Really,
he was intimidating, real kind of hard eyes. The intensity
(32:10):
with which he would look at you always kind of
scared me.
Speaker 1 (32:15):
Frasier holed himself up in his shack in the forests
of California, protected by a steep ravine and a deliberately
precarious bridge. There were rumors the cabin was booby trapped
against intruders.
Speaker 6 (32:29):
I didn't come into this part of the property ever,
so I never fell victim to one of his booby traps. Yeah,
he was definitely paranoid.
Speaker 1 (32:39):
But Trasia wasn't just odd. He was a man on
a mission, and his plan chilled listeners to the burn.
Speaker 6 (32:48):
He had an epiphany. He'd been reading the Bible and
the Book of Revelations, and he thought it was his
job to come and save the planet.
Speaker 14 (32:58):
He explained to me that God had spoken to him
and he had been chosen to restore the Earth to
its natural state. This entailed removing all vehicles and buildings
from the earth. His job, under God's instruction was to
(33:19):
give each head of household the option of choosing God's
army or death.
Speaker 7 (33:28):
He said he was going to go door to door
like the Avon lady said, Ding dong, you're dead. The
little laugh at the end of it is what really did.
It was chilling.
Speaker 1 (33:43):
It was in October nineteen seventy, with Halloween approaching, that
Fraser decided it was time to carry out his divine duty.
Speaker 2 (33:52):
What emerged was this motive, as John Linley Fraser saw it,
evidence of materialerialism through the otis. Their house was too big,
it had a swimming pool, it was opulent. They had
too many cars.
Speaker 1 (34:11):
On a hill not more than half a mile from
his ramshackle hut stood the Ota family's dream home.
Speaker 14 (34:19):
When he arrived, he found Missus Oda and the youngest son.
He found some scarves and he tied her up and
did the same with the younger boy, and they waited.
Next Dorothy Cadwallader, who worked for the doctor, brought the
(34:43):
oldest boy home from school and he went through the
same procedure again. And then when doctor Oda came, he
tied his hands behind him explained to him what he
had been instructed to do by God.
Speaker 2 (35:01):
He had him at gunpoint and wanted mister Oda, the
head of the family, to join him and burn the
house down. Of course, doctor Oda wasn't going to burn
his house down.
Speaker 14 (35:15):
So doctor Roda is calling him a crazy, stupid, drugged
out hippie. Whatever's not very cooperative. So at some point
he pushes a doctor Rota into the swimming pool. He's
using the leaf skimmer to hold him down and bring
(35:37):
him up, trying to convince him to burn down the
house and join God's army. After a period of time
on Frasier's mind, he had convinced the doctor and so
as he extended his hand to pull doctor Roda out
of the swimming pool, Doctor Roda tried to pull him
into the swimming pool and he failed, so At that point,
(36:00):
Fraser shot the doctor. Then he went in and got
the wife, brought her out, executed her. Then Dorothy Cadwallader
executed her. He talked about how difficult it was for
(36:24):
him to kill the kids. He talked about having this
argument with God, why do these children have to die?
They're innocent, they've done nothing wrong, They've not harmed the environment,
but God insisted that they must die.
Speaker 1 (36:47):
Frasier shouts both boys in the head and dumped them
in the pool.
Speaker 8 (37:04):
He felt that our family were capitalist pigs that had
reaped the environment things that were almost ironic in that
there were no trees cut down, and we had made
this piece of land more beautiful. And if he knew
the Japanese culture and the culture that my parents and
family lived by, it was so completely opposite of what
he felt he was attacking.
Speaker 9 (37:27):
So it was amazingly sad.
Speaker 1 (37:34):
But the bizarre story of John Frasier did not end
with his capture. His trial would deliver one of the
most extraordinary moments in criminal history. In October nineteen seventy one,
(37:56):
the trial of John Linley Frasier for the slaying of
Theta family and their secretary began. The evidence that Fraser
had committed the crimes was overwhelming, but would he be
judged insane at the time of his murders. If so,
his future would be hospital instead of jail. From the outset,
(38:18):
his behavior was unnerving.
Speaker 6 (38:22):
My housemates, and I did testify at the trial that
was scary too.
Speaker 2 (38:30):
He glowered at me right.
Speaker 6 (38:35):
I avoided looking at him as much as possible.
Speaker 1 (38:39):
Frequently Frasier would seem blank or disinterested.
Speaker 3 (38:44):
The only time in my testimony that I saw any
reaction on his part was when Pete Chang asked me
about that statement, and I said that. He said, why
don't you give me what I deserve? And he perked
up and you could see that he was disturbed.
Speaker 16 (39:06):
The flattened affect and the appearance of total emotional detachment
is a sign of schizophrenia, but I wouldn't eliminate other
motives as well, that he doesn't care about anything, because
I don't think he did. It's important, I think someone's
diagnosed as having a major mental illness not to assume
(39:26):
that everything he does is a direct result of mental illness,
because it is not.
Speaker 10 (39:33):
So.
Speaker 1 (39:33):
He might there have been another influence at play alongside
Fraser's schizophrenia.
Speaker 16 (39:40):
He did all this around the same time Charles Manson's
trial was going on right around that time period, and
I would not be surprised if he was influenced by
it in some way.
Speaker 5 (39:51):
The whole thing with Manson was that somebody's got to
start the violence so that all the rest of the
people who will be part of this uprising know that
that's the signal and they'll come together in one great,
big army. So that was already in the air. What
happens with people of this mentality, whether it's schizotypal or schizophrenia,
is they absorb and certain things stand out to them
(40:14):
as significant, and I would think that that would be
one of them.
Speaker 1 (40:17):
On the first day of his sanity hearing, John Den
Lefrasier made the kind of entrance that Charles Manson himself
might have been proud of.
Speaker 2 (40:27):
They brought John Lee Frasier into the courtroom from the back,
and everything looked normal, and when he turned to go
sit next to his lawyer, the entire half of his
head and faith was shaved.
Speaker 14 (40:51):
He had actually gone even with his nose up through
the top of his head down through his beard saved
one eyebrow. Well one side of his face and one
side of his head, and it was shaved, and he.
Speaker 2 (41:05):
Would sit at the table and kind of turn one
way and show the audience that perspective, and he would
turn the other way and show a different person.
Speaker 15 (41:17):
Man.
Speaker 14 (41:17):
Of course, the press started talking about this conflict between
good and evil. It certainly, in my opinion, didn't help
his defense in any way.
Speaker 7 (41:27):
We finally decided that it might be better if he
shaved everything off rather than sitting in there acting like
he was a schizophrenic, which I guess was the idea.
Speaker 1 (41:37):
Frasier had reportedly told others that he would prefer to
go to the gas chamber than be sent to a
fascist head factory.
Speaker 5 (41:47):
That was one of the more interesting aspects of the
trial is he did not want to be found insane,
so he was a psychotic individual pretending to be sane,
pretending to be see nichotic to convince the jury that
he was malingering his psychosis so that they would convict
him and send them to prison, not send them to
(42:10):
a psychiatric institution.
Speaker 1 (42:13):
Frasier got his wish. He was judged legally sane at
the time he committed his crimes and sentenced to death
later reduced to life imprisonment, but was murder really his
destiny was John Linley Frasier a born killer.
Speaker 5 (42:30):
I do not think John Linley Frasier was born to kill.
I think despite having an illness, if he had not
had certain influences, especially in the culture in his life,
he might certainly have done anything but commit this violent crime.
So no, I think it was a number of circumstances
(42:53):
from the environment that really steered him toward the violence
that he did, rather than something organic to him.
Speaker 14 (43:01):
It was a progression. He became ill, and as time
went by, he became sicker and sicker, and unfortunately he
didn't get help, and it ended in a horrible tragedy.
Speaker 8 (43:20):
I was angry at the situation. I'm angry that I
don't have my family. I'm more angry that they suffered
most of all that part, I'm furious and angry and
sad about.
Speaker 9 (43:32):
But I'm not to feel that way towards him.
Speaker 8 (43:36):
I didn't just didn't feel natural to me. Who would
choose to have that, Who would choose to.
Speaker 9 (43:41):
Be born that way?
Speaker 8 (43:44):
Nobody could do such a thing that didn't have something
broken in their chromosomes, in their DNA somewhere, something to
me would have to be broken to commit such a crime.
Speaker 1 (43:58):
In August two thousand and nine, after thirty nine years
behind Buzz, John Linley Frasier hung himself in his cell.
Speaker 14 (44:08):
My impression was that he was sort of horrified that
he was capable of doing something like this, but at
the same time this was a burden that was placed
on him by God.
In nineteen seventy, John Linley Frasier committed a crime that
sent shock waves through society.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
People were just done.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
Its weird mix of occult messages and senseless brutality.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
They had been executed and then the house was set
on fire.
Speaker 1 (00:18):
Had Californians fearing for their lives?
Speaker 4 (00:22):
Oh yeah, the doors were locked and the guns were loaded.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
But what had driven Frasier to slaughter? Was he destined
for murder?
Speaker 5 (00:31):
Frasier had a very unstable childhood.
Speaker 6 (00:35):
The intensity with which she would look at you always
kind of scared me.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
Was John Linley Frasier born to kill?
Speaker 7 (00:42):
He was going to go door to door like the
avon lady ding dong, You're dead.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
In the early nineteen sixties, Santa Cruz was just an
ordinary Californian beach town.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Santa Cruz was a model of conservatism, a tourist city
dominated by the boardwalk and the beach.
Speaker 3 (01:35):
Santa Cruz was very friendly, slow paced community to live
in back then.
Speaker 8 (01:42):
It was pretty much a retirement town.
Speaker 9 (01:45):
At that time.
Speaker 8 (01:46):
There was no University of California, there was no UC
campus there at the time. It was just a very quaint,
small community. It felt very safe and very pleasant.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
It was this peaceful community that the Ota family decided
to make home. Tragically, for them, it wouldn't remain peaceful
for long.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
Doctor Victor Oda and his family were very very well
known in the city of Santa Cruz and actually in
the county of Santa Cruz and beyond. He was a noted,
well respected ophthalmologist.
Speaker 8 (02:26):
My father, he was a person who came from very
poor background and did very well for himself.
Speaker 9 (02:32):
He was just sort.
Speaker 8 (02:34):
Of a bigger than life character, handsome and generous and friendly.
Speaker 10 (02:40):
Doctor Ota was my eye doctor, and I remember him
as being a very very nice man, very gentle.
Speaker 8 (02:50):
My mother also came from a working class background. She
was Chucksovakia and my father was Japanese. So for home
and our lifestyle was anything it was much more job niece.
My mother was also very stylish and perfect looking. Just
moms were like that.
Speaker 9 (03:07):
Then, I guess.
Speaker 1 (03:09):
Victor and Virginia Ota had what many locals considered to
be the perfect family.
Speaker 8 (03:17):
My older sister was Tara, was three years older than
I was, and she was artistic, an artist.
Speaker 11 (03:25):
And.
Speaker 9 (03:27):
Beautiful. She was also a model.
Speaker 8 (03:30):
And then I had two brothers that were Derek was
three years younger than I and Tag was four years
Tag was just one of those little boys that was
just the sweetest, cutest kid in school and everybody loved he.
Speaker 9 (03:49):
Was just gorgeous.
Speaker 8 (03:51):
Derek was much more artistic and darker, a little more
brooding and more complicated.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
Thought of as almost Another family member was the doctor's secretary,
Dorothy Kadwallader.
Speaker 4 (04:08):
My aunt Dorothy was. She was a wonderful woman, you know,
all American and apple pie, the whole works.
Speaker 9 (04:16):
She was the most beautiful woman. She was soft spoken
and perfect. She was like just to me, I just
idilized her.
Speaker 1 (04:29):
Completing the perfect family unit was the dream home the
Otters built in the Santa Cruz foothills.
Speaker 8 (04:38):
It was as much part of our life as a
person in our family that home and the process of
building it.
Speaker 9 (04:45):
Even the fabrics inside the house my mother wove on
a loom.
Speaker 8 (04:51):
It was built completely into nature. There were no trees
cut down to build the home.
Speaker 4 (04:58):
Doctor Oda liked.
Speaker 7 (05:01):
Natural setting.
Speaker 4 (05:03):
I can remember that the windows didn't have any coverings
on him. He liked to look out into the forest
and liked a lot of natural stonework around the home.
Speaker 8 (05:15):
Wasn't a time that you thought of where anything bad,
whatever happened.
Speaker 1 (05:23):
But in the late sixties, Santa Cruz changed forever. The
hippie generation descended on the area in their thousands.
Speaker 3 (05:35):
You started seeing a lot of people dropping out and going.
Speaker 7 (05:40):
To live with nature.
Speaker 6 (05:41):
It was huge here. Some people were growing their own food,
some of them worked, They were artists, musicians, a lot
of people on food stamps probably, And.
Speaker 1 (05:53):
It wasn't all peace and love.
Speaker 8 (05:56):
Well.
Speaker 12 (05:56):
The nineteen sixties are known as sort of the decade
of love and flower power and peace and harmony, but
in many ways it had a darker side. It saw
quite a few different revolutions. It was a sexual, political,
psychedelic revolution, but one that doesn't get mentioned as much
(06:17):
as the others was a kind of magical revolution that
took place in the nineteen sixties. It was more or
less in a cult revival.
Speaker 3 (06:26):
I remember just up the way here one of the
communes where the inhabitants would put on white robes and
pointed hats and chanting and like a Celtic language and
holding rich wolves. It was bizarre behavior that scared people.
Speaker 12 (06:46):
It seemed to be a kind of free for all
in the world of morality, which initially was very liberating,
but at a certain point it seemed to have gone
too far.
Speaker 1 (06:57):
Nothing illustrated this more than when the cult hippie commune
led by Charles Manson snaughted eight people in nineteen sixty nine.
Most horrifyingly amongst the victims was the eight months pregnant
actress Sharon Tate.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
California exploded in fear. When the whole Kate LaBianca murders
in LA and the Charlie Manson gang popped onto the
newspapers and was covered internationally, it made people go, Wow,
what's happening. It did change, you know, the whole aura
(07:40):
of peace and love and flower power to something strange,
to be fearful of, more criminal, more crazy.
Speaker 1 (07:56):
Soon after the Manson murders, a terrifying crime would occur
in Santa Cruz on America's West coast that would convince
all that another killer cult was on the rampage.
Speaker 10 (08:09):
My dad told me, I want you to to stay
up here because there are five bodies in the pool.
Speaker 1 (08:21):
In nineteen sixty nine, the Manson family murders had revealed
a dark side to the hippie generation. Rumors of strange
occult practices, talk of revolution, and murder had tainted the
peace and love movement forever, and in nineteen seventy a
new crime would occur that would convince many that society
(08:45):
was about to self destruct.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
This crime unfolds really with a report of a fire
smoke billowing from this small hilltop.
Speaker 10 (09:02):
That night, I was in class out at the community college.
We were on a break and I heard the siren blowing.
I got my fire gear because I knew where the
fire was the Otah residents.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
As the firefighters arrived, they go up a winding kind
of a driveway and there was a car.
Speaker 3 (09:33):
There was a Rolls Royce and a Lincoln blocking the roadway.
Speaker 13 (09:40):
They couldn't get.
Speaker 14 (09:41):
To the house. The house was on fire.
Speaker 10 (09:46):
So we got out and we approached the scene. My dad,
who was the assistant fire chief, instructed us to take
a hose line up on the roof.
Speaker 2 (10:01):
There are flames happening in different parts of the house,
and the firefighters are putting out the flames.
Speaker 10 (10:09):
And then my dad climbed up the ladder and he
told me, I want you to to stay up here
until I tell you to come down. And it seemed
kind of strange to me, and so I said to him. Why,
he said, because there are five bodies in the pool.
Speaker 2 (10:35):
Bodies literally floating in the swimming pool.
Speaker 10 (10:42):
It was very eerie, pretty I think, you know, to
this day, I can still kind of visualize that.
Speaker 11 (11:02):
It happened sometime during the dinner hour on the eye
surgeons one hundred and fifty thousand dollars estake everyone in
the house methodically murdered. The only survivors the Oda's two
teenage daughters who were away at school.
Speaker 8 (11:21):
I was back at boarding school and I was woken
up by one of the nuns and told that I
needed to go home. And it was certainly not what
I could have ever imagined. When I walked outside, it
was just barely sunrise, and all the nuns from the
(11:45):
entire school were standing outside. They had to tell me
in the car that my family had died.
Speaker 9 (12:05):
It was.
Speaker 13 (12:07):
It was.
Speaker 9 (12:10):
Unthinkable. And then they had to tell me how.
Speaker 3 (12:17):
Five people had been killed, Doctor Oda, his wife, secretary,
and two of his children. They had been executed and
somehow thrown, pushed or dumped into the swimming pool, and
then the house was set on fire.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
Dr Ota had been shot three times, The two women
and the boys had each been shot once. In the head.
Speaker 6 (12:41):
All of the bodies were found in the pool.
Speaker 9 (12:44):
They were tired with silk scarves.
Speaker 1 (12:50):
The murders and shockwaves through California and beyond.
Speaker 2 (13:01):
When this crime happened. They were just stunned.
Speaker 13 (13:06):
Doctor Victor Ota and his family lived in this house
on a hill. None of the neighbors saw or heard anything.
Police today were searching the area. They believed there must
have been more than one killer, but they have very
few leads.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
Doctor Oda was such a well regarded figure in the community,
and nearly an entire family was killed in one event.
It just paralyzed this community.
Speaker 1 (13:40):
The burden was on the Sheriff's department to unravel the mystery.
Speaker 2 (13:45):
This is where this heeneous crime took place. We had
police cars, fire engines, the media trying to keep people
away from the house.
Speaker 1 (13:58):
As the crime scene was searched. A clue surfaced not too.
Speaker 2 (14:03):
Far from where I am. Straight up past the switchback
was one of the cars that blocked the fire engines
from getting in to put out the fire.
Speaker 1 (14:14):
And tucked beneath the windscreen wiper detectives made their chilling find.
Speaker 15 (14:20):
There was a weird development in the case. A strange
note was found at the scene, indicating the killings had
been done by a group calling itself the Three People
of the Universe who have declared World War three against
anybody who misuses the environment.
Speaker 1 (14:40):
Composed on the Outer Zone typewriter. The note began Halloween
nineteen seventy Today, World War III will begin, as brought
to you by the people of the Free Universe from
this day forward, and or company of persons who misuses
(15:03):
the natural environment or destroys same will suffer the penalty
of death. The note was signed Night of Ones, Night
of Cups, Night of Pentacles, Night of Swords.
Speaker 3 (15:22):
The note once it was the contents released really scared people.
Speaker 2 (15:32):
It made people right away think about Charlie Manson, Pate
La Bianca, Helter Skelter. Those of us in the Sheriff's
office thought we were dealing with a big group of
people that were held bent on killing people.
Speaker 4 (15:52):
I had never been associated with firearms. The first thing
I did was I went down to the local cigar
store bought myself a weapon.
Speaker 10 (16:02):
We never used to lock our doors, but when this happened,
we started locking our doors. I actually slept with a
shotgun alongside my bed.
Speaker 4 (16:13):
Oh yeah, the doors were locked and the guns were loaded.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
Within twenty four hours, there was a new development. Whoever
had slain the family had stolen one of their cars,
and now it reappeared in a nearby railway tunnel. Along
with the sighting nearby of three suspicious hippies.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
A train came along and hit the car, and now
we are rushing to the tunnel to find out what
kind of information on this murder case can this car
give us.
Speaker 3 (16:51):
The vehicle was still warm, so there was thought it
was recent and therefore the people, the suspects, maybe still
in the area.
Speaker 2 (17:00):
So then we started looking for who put the car
in the tunnel on these tracks. We put together this
extensive perimeter around what is known as Henry cal Park.
It is huge. This is a dense redwood forest. It
(17:26):
goes down into a gorge where the San Lorenzo River
runs and then goes up the other side. I, along
with probably at least one hundred or more other officers,
began searching. We had California Highway Patrol, Santa Cruz County Sheriff,
(17:46):
Santa Cruz Police, we had people from everywhere. We were
borrowing helicopters from the San Francisco Bay Area.
Speaker 3 (17:53):
I was leading one of those teams because I was
familiar with the trails up there, But it was really
a law shot that we would find someone. It's the
areas overgrown with redwoods and brush and easy for them
to hear us coming, easy for them to hide.
Speaker 1 (18:12):
Despite the massive search, the cult killers couldn't be found,
and as panic spread through the Santa Cruz community, talk
of a war between straight society and the hippies began.
Speaker 13 (18:28):
Hippie communes began in the woods around here. There are
many of them. A person with long hair lately around
here has been feeling the heat. It's this look of
distrust of.
Speaker 4 (18:39):
We just can't trust these people, you know, they're afraid
of us. This was the first time anything like that
had happened in Santa Cruz County, and I think that
the town really got paranoid.
Speaker 13 (18:51):
Many people are talking of setting up vigilante groups. They're
buying guns and ammunition.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
People would say, well, we'd like to.
Speaker 3 (18:59):
The lynch long hairs.
Speaker 6 (19:01):
We don't think our community means him.
Speaker 1 (19:05):
But when details of the note reached long haired local
Roger Crone, what came to mind was not a cult
but his neighbor, a reclusive twenty four year old John
Lindley Frasier.
Speaker 6 (19:20):
Facts came out about the odistling, and they just felt
everything about that fell right in line with what he
had been telling us. Three days before.
Speaker 1 (19:31):
Roger and his friends lived in a selection of old
farm buildings in the woods, not far from the Otta
family home.
Speaker 6 (19:41):
John camped out over in this cabin across the ravine,
and she was living off the land for the most part.
He was as close to a survivalist as she could get.
Speaker 2 (19:55):
For the time.
Speaker 6 (19:57):
He had a look about him. He was so serious
and he seemed really skeptical of everything, so you know,
there was part of me that feared him always. When
my friend Michael Madden and I were at work, he
(20:18):
had a conversation with the girls that lived in the
house too. He had been talking about the Book of
Revelations and the fact that he felt he was here
to save the environment and that people who were polluting
it or who were abusing it needed to be dealt with.
(20:44):
Either you were in with him or you had.
Speaker 8 (20:48):
To go.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
Against all expectations. The so called People of the Free
Universe was not a killer cult, but alone assassin on
a mission from God, and he was armed and on
the loose. In October nineteen seventy, doctor Victor Oter, his
(21:14):
wife Virginia, their two sons, Dereck and Taggart, and doctor
Otter's secretary Dorothy Cadwallader had been bound with scarves, shot
in the head, and dumped in the family's swimming pool.
After the discovery of a note referencing the occult, California
(21:34):
feared another murderous Manson like hippie cult, but local resident
Roger Crone recognized the note as the work of his
reclusive neighbor, twenty four year old John Linley Frazier. A
raid on his property was quickly organized.
Speaker 3 (21:55):
We met at the Sheriff's department and BT our team together,
told who we were looking for, and we went up
to the Sokeel Foothills. I think apprehensive is a good word.
Not knowing what you're going to get into, what you're
(22:16):
going to run up against. You know you can't make
any mistakes because that could cost costure dearly. We worked
our way up kind of a ravine to a very
precarious footbridge, a couple of cables with boards laid on it,
to a shack that was on the far side of
this gully, but.
Speaker 1 (22:38):
The shack was empty and Frasier was nowhere to be found.
Rod Sandford and his fellow deputy, Brad Armsland were instructed
to stake out the property overnight.
Speaker 3 (22:53):
We decided to work our way up on a little
hillside above the buildings and anchor down for the night.
Before we went up there, I had set some little traps,
just using some of the old twigs and branches that
are here, that would indicate if something or someone had
(23:14):
come through that trail during the nighttime. You'd take something
like this, the trail was here, He'd just set a
piece across and that was something just as simple as that,
so that when someone or something walk by, they'd kick
it down, knock it down, disturb it. I knew that raccoon, skunk's, deer,
(23:36):
anything would set off the ones on the trail. But
on the bridge I laid a very small piece of
a branch actually, and I knew that when somebody walked
on it, the cables would move up and down the
branch would fall through. I'd know somebody crossed it, it
wouldn't have been an animal. And then in the door
(23:57):
on the far side in his shack in side the door.
I set up another little small twig that if the
door was opened, it would fall out towards us. It
was a sleepless night because you knew what this person did,
(24:17):
and you knew that if they came along in our mind,
at least they wouldn't go easy. So in the morning,
at daybreak we started going down the trails towards the shack.
We noticed that the traps had been set off on
(24:40):
the trails, and I knew then that someone had gone
across the bridge. And when we looked across at the cabin,
we could see that the small little stick that had
been indoors was now outside. So now we know that
(25:02):
someone has come across the cable and the door had
been opened and closed. So then the dilemma was one
of us had to go across the bridge while the
other one covered him. There was some discussion then, because
whoever went out on that drawbridge was a sitting duck.
You had no cover. You were wide open. I don't
(25:27):
know how it happened, but I was the one that
went across the bridge and Brad covered me. And that
wasn't much fun. It was not a solid bridge. If
you stepped in the wrong place. You cause a board
to fly, and you go down going across, knowing that
this guy had killed five people, and if you had
a gun and realized we were coming, he might start shooting.
(25:47):
And there was nowhere to go. You're wondering if that
door is going to fly open. So I went across
the bridge and I covered He came across the bridge.
Once he got here, there was nowhere else for us
to go, and the door was here, so there was
(26:08):
nothing to do but open that door quickly and go through.
You do is you get a one on either side
of the door, One pulls the door, and then you go.
What we noticed immediately is there was a sleeping bags,
maybe blankets, but there was a stack of things in
the middle of the room that hadn't been there the
day before. I looked at Brad, he looked at me.
(26:28):
He grabbed the sleeping bags, yanked him back. I had
the shotgun and there was Frasier, stuck the shotgun in
his face and don't move or I'll shoot. Kind of
had this weird smile, looked at me and said, why
don't you give me what I deserve? And I'll tell
(26:49):
you what the thought runs through your mind, But that's
not our job.
Speaker 6 (26:55):
Two of our definitely shafts Land, Armsland and rottens Hantfred
bomb the suspect Fraser asleep.
Speaker 2 (27:04):
This Wark charges the suspect with five.
Speaker 15 (27:06):
Counts of murder.
Speaker 1 (27:09):
So who was this lone assassin seemingly capable of the
cold execution of either man, woman or child? And why
had he targeted the five innocents at the Ota residence.
Speaker 14 (27:24):
The first time that I laid eyes on John and
Lee Fraser was in the in the jail cell, and
he was clearly strange, very uncooperative.
Speaker 7 (27:39):
He was just, I don't know, weird, as best I
can describe it.
Speaker 11 (27:47):
He was.
Speaker 7 (27:48):
He was He wouldn't say anything, wouln't say anything to anybody.
Speaker 1 (27:51):
It was down to defense investigator Harold Cartwright to try
to unravel the mysteries of Fraser's mind.
Speaker 14 (28:00):
Convinced an investigation in trying to figure out what made
him tick.
Speaker 1 (28:11):
John Fraser's parents had separated when he was two. By
the time he was five, his mother, unable to support
herself and care for him, had placed him in a
foster home.
Speaker 5 (28:25):
I think Brazier had a very unstable childhood in a
sense of insecurity. I think he did not feel safe,
and when a child does not feel safe, they tend
to start developing mechanisms to survive and to adapt, and
sometimes those mechanisms are pretty maladaptive. So I'd assume that
he probably had a rigid temperament where somebody is not
(28:48):
able to absorb frustration or disappointment and they begin to
get angry over it, and it isn't just anger, it
sits in their stomach like an undigested rock.
Speaker 1 (29:02):
The young Frasier earned convictions for burglary and escape from
a juvenile facility, but by his late teens he appeared
to be settling down. He married his wife, Delores, when
he was twenty one, and in nineteen sixty five they
had a child.
Speaker 14 (29:19):
I remember speaking to his ex employer at a motor
repair shop, and he spoke very highly of John, thought
he was an excellent mechanic.
Speaker 1 (29:32):
But in Fraser's early twenties he began to change.
Speaker 5 (29:38):
In nineteen sixty nine, his wife noticed that he seemed
to be having delusions.
Speaker 14 (29:46):
She told me that he would go off the end
of the woods and take his Bible, and that sometimes
she wouldn't see him for two or three days at
a time. But that he was never unkind to her,
loved his daughter. He just became a different person.
Speaker 1 (30:06):
John Linley Frasier was showing signs of schizophrenia.
Speaker 16 (30:10):
Schizophrenia is a major mental illness characterized mainly by a
disorder of thought. A disorder of thinking. It usually begins
in late adolescents early adulthood in nineteen twenty, when the
first psychotic episode begins, but prior to that, there's a
pre morbid condition where the individual is usually withdrawn and
(30:31):
odd and somewhat bizarre in a number of different ways.
Speaker 1 (30:35):
In nineteen seventy, Frasier's strange behavior escalated.
Speaker 14 (30:40):
He quit his job. He felt that imbustion engines were
destroying the environment, and he he didn't feel that he
could be a party to that any longer.
Speaker 1 (30:52):
Then, on Independence Day, three months before the slaying at
Deota Residence, Fraser separated from his family and began living
in a dilapidated cow shed in the woods. There, he
developed an obsession with the dark preoccupations of the time,
the occult numerology, levitation, and the apocalyptic messages of the
(31:17):
Book of Revelations.
Speaker 5 (31:19):
He might have been what we call a schizotypal personality
disorder where magical thinking is part of the process. Where
he was getting very involved in the taro and at
that time the Happy Movement was becoming much more into
very spiritualistic philosophies, and he did not have voices of
stability around him.
Speaker 1 (31:41):
Neighbor Roger Crone was unnerved by Frasier's odd behavior.
Speaker 6 (31:47):
The couple got married while we were living here, and
they had the wedding up on the ridge, and John
showed up wearing an American flag. It was indicative of
the fact that he was a little bit strange. John
was kind of reclusive, hard person to get to know. Really,
he was intimidating, real kind of hard eyes. The intensity
(32:10):
with which he would look at you always kind of
scared me.
Speaker 1 (32:15):
Frasier holed himself up in his shack in the forests
of California, protected by a steep ravine and a deliberately
precarious bridge. There were rumors the cabin was booby trapped
against intruders.
Speaker 6 (32:29):
I didn't come into this part of the property ever,
so I never fell victim to one of his booby traps. Yeah,
he was definitely paranoid.
Speaker 1 (32:39):
But Trasia wasn't just odd. He was a man on
a mission, and his plan chilled listeners to the burn.
Speaker 6 (32:48):
He had an epiphany. He'd been reading the Bible and
the Book of Revelations, and he thought it was his
job to come and save the planet.
Speaker 14 (32:58):
He explained to me that God had spoken to him
and he had been chosen to restore the Earth to
its natural state. This entailed removing all vehicles and buildings
from the earth. His job, under God's instruction was to
(33:19):
give each head of household the option of choosing God's
army or death.
Speaker 7 (33:28):
He said he was going to go door to door
like the Avon lady said, Ding dong, you're dead. The
little laugh at the end of it is what really did.
It was chilling.
Speaker 1 (33:43):
It was in October nineteen seventy, with Halloween approaching, that
Fraser decided it was time to carry out his divine duty.
Speaker 2 (33:52):
What emerged was this motive, as John Linley Fraser saw it,
evidence of materialerialism through the otis. Their house was too big,
it had a swimming pool, it was opulent. They had
too many cars.
Speaker 1 (34:11):
On a hill not more than half a mile from
his ramshackle hut stood the Ota family's dream home.
Speaker 14 (34:19):
When he arrived, he found Missus Oda and the youngest son.
He found some scarves and he tied her up and
did the same with the younger boy, and they waited.
Next Dorothy Cadwallader, who worked for the doctor, brought the
(34:43):
oldest boy home from school and he went through the
same procedure again. And then when doctor Oda came, he
tied his hands behind him explained to him what he
had been instructed to do by God.
Speaker 2 (35:01):
He had him at gunpoint and wanted mister Oda, the
head of the family, to join him and burn the
house down. Of course, doctor Oda wasn't going to burn
his house down.
Speaker 14 (35:15):
So doctor Roda is calling him a crazy, stupid, drugged
out hippie. Whatever's not very cooperative. So at some point
he pushes a doctor Rota into the swimming pool. He's
using the leaf skimmer to hold him down and bring
(35:37):
him up, trying to convince him to burn down the
house and join God's army. After a period of time
on Frasier's mind, he had convinced the doctor and so
as he extended his hand to pull doctor Roda out
of the swimming pool, Doctor Roda tried to pull him
into the swimming pool and he failed, so At that point,
(36:00):
Fraser shot the doctor. Then he went in and got
the wife, brought her out, executed her. Then Dorothy Cadwallader
executed her. He talked about how difficult it was for
(36:24):
him to kill the kids. He talked about having this
argument with God, why do these children have to die?
They're innocent, they've done nothing wrong, They've not harmed the environment,
but God insisted that they must die.
Speaker 1 (36:47):
Frasier shouts both boys in the head and dumped them
in the pool.
Speaker 8 (37:04):
He felt that our family were capitalist pigs that had
reaped the environment things that were almost ironic in that
there were no trees cut down, and we had made
this piece of land more beautiful. And if he knew
the Japanese culture and the culture that my parents and
family lived by, it was so completely opposite of what
he felt he was attacking.
Speaker 9 (37:27):
So it was amazingly sad.
Speaker 1 (37:34):
But the bizarre story of John Frasier did not end
with his capture. His trial would deliver one of the
most extraordinary moments in criminal history. In October nineteen seventy one,
(37:56):
the trial of John Linley Frasier for the slaying of
Theta family and their secretary began. The evidence that Fraser
had committed the crimes was overwhelming, but would he be
judged insane at the time of his murders. If so,
his future would be hospital instead of jail. From the outset,
(38:18):
his behavior was unnerving.
Speaker 6 (38:22):
My housemates, and I did testify at the trial that
was scary too.
Speaker 2 (38:30):
He glowered at me right.
Speaker 6 (38:35):
I avoided looking at him as much as possible.
Speaker 1 (38:39):
Frequently Frasier would seem blank or disinterested.
Speaker 3 (38:44):
The only time in my testimony that I saw any
reaction on his part was when Pete Chang asked me
about that statement, and I said that. He said, why
don't you give me what I deserve? And he perked
up and you could see that he was disturbed.
Speaker 16 (39:06):
The flattened affect and the appearance of total emotional detachment
is a sign of schizophrenia, but I wouldn't eliminate other
motives as well, that he doesn't care about anything, because
I don't think he did. It's important, I think someone's
diagnosed as having a major mental illness not to assume
(39:26):
that everything he does is a direct result of mental illness,
because it is not.
Speaker 10 (39:33):
So.
Speaker 1 (39:33):
He might there have been another influence at play alongside
Fraser's schizophrenia.
Speaker 16 (39:40):
He did all this around the same time Charles Manson's
trial was going on right around that time period, and
I would not be surprised if he was influenced by
it in some way.
Speaker 5 (39:51):
The whole thing with Manson was that somebody's got to
start the violence so that all the rest of the
people who will be part of this uprising know that
that's the signal and they'll come together in one great,
big army. So that was already in the air. What
happens with people of this mentality, whether it's schizotypal or schizophrenia,
is they absorb and certain things stand out to them
(40:14):
as significant, and I would think that that would be
one of them.
Speaker 1 (40:17):
On the first day of his sanity hearing, John Den
Lefrasier made the kind of entrance that Charles Manson himself
might have been proud of.
Speaker 2 (40:27):
They brought John Lee Frasier into the courtroom from the back,
and everything looked normal, and when he turned to go
sit next to his lawyer, the entire half of his
head and faith was shaved.
Speaker 14 (40:51):
He had actually gone even with his nose up through
the top of his head down through his beard saved
one eyebrow. Well one side of his face and one
side of his head, and it was shaved, and he.
Speaker 2 (41:05):
Would sit at the table and kind of turn one
way and show the audience that perspective, and he would
turn the other way and show a different person.
Speaker 15 (41:17):
Man.
Speaker 14 (41:17):
Of course, the press started talking about this conflict between
good and evil. It certainly, in my opinion, didn't help
his defense in any way.
Speaker 7 (41:27):
We finally decided that it might be better if he
shaved everything off rather than sitting in there acting like
he was a schizophrenic, which I guess was the idea.
Speaker 1 (41:37):
Frasier had reportedly told others that he would prefer to
go to the gas chamber than be sent to a
fascist head factory.
Speaker 5 (41:47):
That was one of the more interesting aspects of the
trial is he did not want to be found insane,
so he was a psychotic individual pretending to be sane,
pretending to be see nichotic to convince the jury that
he was malingering his psychosis so that they would convict
him and send them to prison, not send them to
(42:10):
a psychiatric institution.
Speaker 1 (42:13):
Frasier got his wish. He was judged legally sane at
the time he committed his crimes and sentenced to death
later reduced to life imprisonment, but was murder really his
destiny was John Linley Frasier a born killer.
Speaker 5 (42:30):
I do not think John Linley Frasier was born to kill.
I think despite having an illness, if he had not
had certain influences, especially in the culture in his life,
he might certainly have done anything but commit this violent crime.
So no, I think it was a number of circumstances
(42:53):
from the environment that really steered him toward the violence
that he did, rather than something organic to him.
Speaker 14 (43:01):
It was a progression. He became ill, and as time
went by, he became sicker and sicker, and unfortunately he
didn't get help, and it ended in a horrible tragedy.
Speaker 8 (43:20):
I was angry at the situation. I'm angry that I
don't have my family. I'm more angry that they suffered
most of all that part, I'm furious and angry and
sad about.
Speaker 9 (43:32):
But I'm not to feel that way towards him.
Speaker 8 (43:36):
I didn't just didn't feel natural to me. Who would
choose to have that, Who would choose to.
Speaker 9 (43:41):
Be born that way?
Speaker 8 (43:44):
Nobody could do such a thing that didn't have something
broken in their chromosomes, in their DNA somewhere, something to
me would have to be broken to commit such a crime.
Speaker 1 (43:58):
In August two thousand and nine, after thirty nine years
behind Buzz, John Linley Frasier hung himself in his cell.
Speaker 14 (44:08):
My impression was that he was sort of horrified that
he was capable of doing something like this, but at
the same time this was a burden that was placed
on him by God.
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