A Voice in the Dark: The Ohta Family Murders

You’re supposed to be safe at home. Why wouldn’t you be? And that sense of comfort must be even greater if “home” is a beautiful house you built yourself, where you live happily with your family in a town where you’re successful and respected. You’d have no reason at all to think that someone was watching you with binoculars through the trees, their heart burning ever hotter with rage, ever closer to exploding with murderous fury. Join us for a story of madness and grandiose delusion, a case that rocked 1970s California almost as much as the Manson Family murders did. 

Sources:
Court records: https://law.justia.com/cases/california/supreme-court/3d/5/287.html
New York Times archives: https://www.nytimes.com/1971/12/16/archives/killer-of-eye-doctor-and-four-on-coast-is-sentenced-to-die.html
https://www.nytimes.com/1971/11/30/archives/mechanic-on-coast-guilty-of-killing-5-in-oneman-war.html
https://www.nytimes.com/1970/10/21/archives/5-slain-on-coast-and-left-in-pool-surgeon-wife-2-children-and.html
New York Daily News: https://www.nydailynews.com/2009/03/22/crazed-hippy-killer-caused-horror-with-1970-murder-of-california-doctor/
SFGate: https://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/Santa-Cruz-mass-murderer-kills-self-in-prison-3221281.php
Crime Library: https://www.crimelibrary.org/notorious_murders/mass/john_frazier/index.html
Investigation Discovery's "A Crime To Remember," episode "Killer Prophet"

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello, campers, Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true
crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie and I'm Whitney,
and we're here to tell you a true story that
is way stranger than fiction. Or roasting murderers and marshmallows
around the true crime campfire.

Speaker 2 (00:20):
You're supposed to be safe at home. Why wouldn't you be?
And that sense of comfort must be even greater. If
home is a beautiful house you built yourself, where you
live happily with your family, in a town where you're
successful and respected, you'd have no reason at all to
think that someone was watching you with binoculars through the trees,

(00:40):
their heart burning ever hotter, with rage, ever closer to
exploding with murderous fury. This is a voice in the dark,
the Oda Family murders.

Speaker 3 (01:01):
So campers for this one were a little ways outside
Santa Cruz, California. Just after eight pm on October nineteenth,
nineteen seventy, a couple of police officers out on patrol
noticed smoke billowing up from the Soquel Hills, in an
area where some of the richest people in the county lived.
They called the fire Department, who rushed to nine ninety

(01:21):
nine Rodeo Gulch Road. As soon as they got there,
the firemen started thinking something was seriously wrong. Both the
front and rear driveways to the mansion were blocked by
cars parked straight across them. A Rolls Royce and a
Lincoln Continental, both locked. It looked very much like someone
had deliberately tried to prevent them from putting out the fire,

(01:42):
which they could see had reached the mansion's roof. The
firemen smashed the Lincoln's windows so they could release the
brake and shove the car out of the way, then
hurried sirens blaring up the hill to the house and
got to work. It was immediately apparent that the fire
had multiple different origin points, which almost always means one thing.

(02:02):
Arson The fire chief, Ted Pound, knew his business. He
knew that this house had had a fire hydrant installed
close to the swimming pool for just this eventuality, so
fire crews could pump water out of the pool. It
was dark by now, so Ted got out his flashlight
and walked around the pool trying to find the hydrant.
The residents had apparently tried to disguise it with some shrubbery,

(02:24):
which is understandable on a purely esthetic level, but not
great when there's an actual fire. The light from Ted's
flashlight slid over the dark water of the swimming pool
and shone onto the upturned face of a dead boy
floating in the pool. The chief's first thought was horrible.
Maybe the kid had caught fire in the house and

(02:45):
had run to the pool to try and put himself out.
But as he got closer, Ted began to realize that
this might be even worse than that. The boy was blindfolded,
and beyond him on the bottom of the pool, Ted
thought he could see dark shapes that looked uncomfortably similar
in size to human bodies. There was blood by the

(03:07):
edge of the pool. Ted sealed off the scene and
called the police. Five bodies were pulled out of the
swimming pool as the mansion burned. Four of them were
quickly identified as the home's residence is surgeon doctor Victor Oda,
his wife Virginia, and their two sons, Derreck and Taggart.

(03:27):
The fifth body was identified by her driver's license as
Victor's secretary Dorothy Cadwallader. They had all been bound and
blindfolded with brightly colored silk scarves, and Virginia Oda had
also been gagged with one. Autopsy reports would show that
all five victims had been shot. Victor had been shot

(03:47):
three times by a thirty eight caliber pistol, everyone else
had taken one shot in the back of the neck
with a twenty two caliber gun. A twenty two is
certainly a potentially lethal round, especially in that situation, but
several of the victims had water in their lungs that
suggested they were still alive when they'd been pushed bound
and bleeding into the pool and drowned. The fire was

(04:12):
soon extinguished with the help of a torrential rainstorm in
the early hours of the morning, the kind of storm
that's good news for firefighters but terrible for investigators trying
to preserve an outdoor crime scene. But they did quickly
have one lead. The rolls belonged to doctor Ota and
the Lincoln to Dorothy Cadwallader, but for every day driving,
Virginia Oda drove a dark green Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser station

(04:35):
wagon and that was missing. An all points alert was
sent out, but if the killer or killers had taken
the car, they could be hundreds of miles away. By now,
this was already an extra creepy crime scene, and it
was about to get even creepier. Under the windshield of
doctor Oda's Rolls Royce investigators found a typewritten note. It

(04:57):
read Halloween nineth teen seventy. Today, World War III will begin,
as brought to you by the people of the Free Universe.
From this day forward, any one and or company of
persons who misuses the natural environment or destroys same will
suffer the penalty of death by the people of the
Free Universe. I and my comrades, from this day forth

(05:21):
will fight until death for freedom against anything or anyone
who does not support natural life on this planet. Materialism
must die, or mankind will. The note had four typewritten
signatures inspired by tarot cards, the Knight of Wands, the
Night of Cups, the Night of Pentacles, and the Knight

(05:42):
of Swords. All of this would have set people on
edge at any time, but especially so in California in
nineteen seventy. The Manson family murders had happened just a
year ago, and the trial was still going on. In
making headlines, investigators in Santa Cruz County they might have
their own weird bloody handed cult on their hands.

Speaker 2 (06:04):
In addition to their two boys, the ODIs had two daughters.
Fifteen year old Lark was away at boarding school and
eighteen year old Tara went to school for fashion design
in New York. In fact, she'd left to fly back
east just that morning. If she'd stayed home just one
day longer, she'd most likely be dead too. Both girls
were called home right away to stay with relatives. Jack Cadwalader,

(06:30):
husband of Victor Oda's secretary Dorothy, stayed up all night
with a loaded gun in his hand, watching over their
two daughters. He refused permission for the press to print
his address, saying I don't want any crazies for coming
around here. He thought a hippie cult was behind the killings.
Even though the police didn't initially release the contents of

(06:50):
the creepy note, a lot of Santa Cruz locals shared
jack suspicions. There was a simmering tension with the long
haired young people drifting up and down the California coast.
Most of this came from a reactionary distrust of anything
new and strange, and most of the hippies were harmless,
but there were some who thought freedom meant I'm free

(07:11):
to help myself to your stuff, And that small number
of bad apples did a lot of damage to the
hippies' reputation. And then, like we said earlier, the Tate
LaBianca murders happened, and the whole scene took on a sinister,
bloody edge. And earlier in nineteen seventy in North Carolina,
doctor Jeffrey MacDonald had suffered a tragedy when four hippie

(07:35):
type intruders had killed his pregnant wife and young daughters, which,
as I'm sure most of you already know, was a
bullshit lie McDonald made up to cover his own crimes. Yeah,
but that initial story made headlines. A lot of people
were genuinely scared of hippies. In reality, the hippies were
at worst pains in the ass who blared the loud

(07:57):
music and wafted weed smoke all over the place, stuff
like hey man, don't harsh my groove. That didn't absolve
them of suspicion, though Doctor Oda had had a few
run ins with hippies, shoeing them off his porch like
they were a bunch of bell bottomed raccoons. The fire

(08:18):
and the rainstorm had destroyed a lot of evidence at
the mansion on Rodeo Gulch Road, but investigators did discover
a few things. Silk Scarves, just like the ones used
to bind the victims, were found in Victor ODIs dresser.
The doctor was well known as a snazzy dresser, and
silk scarves were a regular part of his outfits, worn

(08:39):
around his neck instead of ties. Victor had also owned
a twenty two caliber pistol that was now missing. The
killer or killers had used stuff they found at the home,
and on that score, investigators were leaning toward the plural killers.

Speaker 3 (08:56):
I mean, I can totally see why you'd think it
would take more than one intruder to control five people
and set multiple fires.

Speaker 2 (09:05):
But the house didn't provide much in the way of
clues that got them any closer to finding whoever had
killed the Odas and Dorothy Catawalader. Their best hope of
that right now was tracking down Virginia's Green Vista Cruser.
That car showed up the next day in spectacular fashion
when a freight train smashed into it inside the Rincon

(09:25):
Tunnel of the Southern Pacific Railroad, just a few miles
outside of Santa Cruz. Someone had driven it about one
hundred and fifty feet into the tunnel, set the seats
on fire, and fled.

Speaker 3 (09:36):
Holy shit, and the car's engine was still warm. It
hadn't been long since it had been driven in there.
There was a massive manhunt through the redwood forests around
the tunnel entrance. Locals locked their doors and loaded their
guns if they had them and if they didn't. One
gun store reported a five hundred percent increase in sales
in the days following the murders. The manhunt didn't turn

(09:59):
up any and to try and shake something loose, investigators
released the contents of the note they'd found on Doctor
Odo's Rolls Royce on Front Street in Santa Cruz. There
was a place called The Catalyst, a coffee house that
played a lot of live music and had become the
center of the hippie scene. The regulars there were on
edge even before the murders. The Catalysts had been the

(10:21):
target of four bomb threats and had received a note saying,
the only good hippie is a dead one. God dang
people calm the fuck down. So they like to tap
on bongo drums and call you square. I get it.
It's annoying. That doesn't mean they're going to slaughter your children.
Settle down. Three guys who hung out at the Catalysts

(10:41):
felt their hearts sink as they read the press release
with the contents of the note. They had a buddy,
somebody they often went on hikes with, who liked to
rant about the need for violent revolution against materialists, often
with weird tangents into the Bible and the tarot. He
was an intense, scary dude, and the note match his
tone exactly. This is right on, man, one of them

(11:03):
said as he read the note. And for the way
these guys talk, just imagine the most cliche caricature of
a hippie you can think of, and like, divide it
by two and you won't be too far from the truth.
They hesitated about coming forward to the police, both because
they mistrusted authority and because they were scared of how
their weird friend would react. But they wrestled with their consciences,

(11:26):
and on the day the press release came out, they
met with District Attorney Peter Chang and gave him the
name of their friend, John Linley Fraser. He lived, they said,
in a shack in the woods not far from the
Oda home on land his mom owned. His mom a
rabbit breeder, rented out shacks on her property to hippies
and college students. John Linley Fraser was twenty four years

(11:48):
old in nineteen seventy and he'd had a messy life.
He was born in nineteen forty six in Ohio. Two
years later, his mom left his dad, who liked to
get drunk and fool around with other women. She took
John with her to San Francisco. But raising a young
son alone while also working was tough, and John was
fostered to a strict Catholic family for a few years.

(12:10):
We don't know much about this time in his life,
except that he was in a car wreck bad enough
to break his collar bone and give him concussion. Back
living with his mom, you couldn't say John had an
easy life. He was always sick. He had measles, he
always had a cold, He ruptured his appendix, and he
caught tuberculosis. He also started sleepwalking and bed wetting, both

(12:32):
of which would stay with him into adulthood. I used
to sleep walk terribly as a kid. My parents found
me multiple times trying to get out the front door.
Which was really really scary, and I mean I didn't
remember any of it. When he was eleven, John was
arrested for shoplifting a penknife. Right after this, his mom
moved them both down to Santa Cruz, possibly in the

(12:53):
hopes that getting her delinquent son out of the big
city might help his behavior. If that was the case,
though it didn't work out. When he was twelve years old,
John and some of his new friends were arrested for
vandalism and shoplifting. Although John was always close with his mom,
his home life wasn't a barrel of lapse either. His
mom raised rabbits to sell their meat as food, and

(13:14):
sometimes made John help her kill them. This is the
kind of thing that's not dramatic to many country kids
who were raised around livestock. But John wasn't a country kid.
He was a city boy who'd never done anything like
this in his life. He cried when he had to
do it. John dropped out of school at fifteen, and
not long after he was arrested for burglary. He was

(13:35):
sent to another foster family, where he stole the gun
and ran away. He was quickly arrested, telling the cops
he'd only taken the gun so he could hunt for food.
He was sent to the Camp Owen Juvenile Detention Center
until he was nineteen years old. Back in Santa Cruz,
John bounced between jobs, including a brief stunt working for

(13:55):
the Disco Discount department store, where he met and started
an affair with the maryor coworker named Dolores.

Speaker 2 (14:02):
Okay, no part of this guy's childhood was amusing, but
I'm gonna be real, Having a dirty affair with Dolores
from the Discount Disco Department Store feels like one of
those adult Shell Silverstein poems.

Speaker 3 (14:18):
It really those those were wild. Soon Dolores divorced her
husband and she and John got married, moving into a
little cabin out in the woods. Things didn't get off
to a great start, with John, then unemployed, rolling their
completely uninsured car off the road and totaling it. They
soon had a daughter together. John continued moving from job

(14:40):
to job, mostly as a gas station attendant and mechanic,
rarely able to get along with his coworkers for very long,
and he got into trouble with the law again after
a high school girl picked him out of a lineup
as the creep who followed her around town, saying disgusting shit.
John swore to Dolores it was just a case of
mistaken identity.

Speaker 2 (15:00):
Mm hmmm. So this was where John Linley Fraser was
at at the start of nineteen seventy. Kind of a
fuck up, kind of a creep. And he'd already started
to get strange in nineteen sixty nine, freaking Dolores out,
saying stuff like I have a great God granted purpose. Yikes.

(15:22):
But from May sixteenth, nineteen seventy onwards, things got weirder.
In the morning, John rear ended another car in Scott's Valley.
He would say later that he heard a voice in his
head during the collision telling him that he should never
drive again or he'd be killed. Given what a terrible
driver he was, this might just have been his brain

(15:43):
making a desperate attempt to save itself, but from then onward,
John would often hear voices in his head. A police
officer at the crash scene said John didn't seem badly
hurt at all, and he left without going to the hospital.
He had hit his head hard, but that wasn't immediately obvious.
By the time he got home, he had a big
bump on his forehead. Dolores thought he looked depressed. Later,

(16:07):
she said she got an intense sense of strangeness from him,
like this wasn't quite the man she knew. She tried
to get him to go the doctor, but John refused
and just sat in silence for hours.

Speaker 3 (16:19):
That would be so scary and so awful to see
your husband like that.

Speaker 2 (16:24):
Yeah, it's really common for people suffering from concussions to
experience depression.

Speaker 3 (16:30):
By the way, yes, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (16:33):
To make ends meet, John and Dolores had taken on
their friend Alison as a roommate, and after some planning,
John sat Dolores and Alison down in the cabin and
started dramatically preaching to them about his new belief and
living in total harmony with nature, telling him they were
to study under him and learn the right ways to
treat the earth. All vehicles in all buildings were to

(16:55):
be destroyed, and the planet returned to a natural state.
He'd put some thought into this presentation and was playing
background music on a tape player to go along with
each point he tried to make.

Speaker 3 (17:07):
Yeah, but it's really hard to keep something like that
synced up. Or it was in nineteen seventy so John
had to keep interrupting his sermon to go futs with
the tape player, and he used to getting more and
more like mad and red faced and frustrated, till finally
he just looked up to the heavens and called out,
I'm sorry, Father, God said, that's okay, TMU, Ted Gazinski,

(17:32):
You're doing your best.

Speaker 2 (17:35):
Despite the problems with the audio, John preached to his
wife and her friend for six straight hours, which I'm
sure was a barrel of fun for everyone. They'd apparently
taken some kind of hallucinogen, but I don't know if
that would have made the experience better or worse.

Speaker 3 (17:54):
Worse, Absolutely worse.

Speaker 2 (17:56):
Yeah, time would have like telescoped to at that point
in God, but absolutely from then on, any conversation anyone
had with John would rapidly devolve into a rant about
mankind's terrible effect on nature and the drastic actions necessary
to rectify the situation. The day after his accident, John
quit his mechanics job because he didn't want to contribute

(18:19):
to the pollution caused by cars, and devoted himself to
taking his brain to strange places. He'd take books on
the Bible, astrology, and tarot cards out into the woods
with him for days at a time. He'd climb up
onto a water tower on his mom's wooded property so
he could read somewhere where no one could sneak up
on him. John's mom, Patricia, tried to get him to

(18:40):
seek help, but he just rant at her about how
the Book of Revelations had been written explicitly for him
and him alone to read. He was John the revelator
who received messages direct from God. When Patricia still pressed
him to go see a doctor, John ran off into
the woods. He called her later and accused her of

(19:00):
trying to kill him. You're all working against me now,
he said, I don't trust none of you turkeys.

Speaker 3 (19:06):
See, I'm all for the treat the earth with respect doctrine. John,
it's your I'm a prophet sent by God to destroy
everybody who doesn't do it doctrine that I'm not loving.
His paranoia only got worse. John jumped at any sudden
noise and became convinced people were scheming to kill him
or have him committed. That latter one wouldn't have been

(19:28):
the worst thing in the world. Johnny. Whatever the weather,
he started wearing sunglasses, when he went outside, so the
devil couldn't get into him through his eyes. As you
can probably guess, all of this wasn't great for John's
marriage to Dolores. She kept trying to convince him to
seek help, and he kept refusing. He'd gotten moody and
angry since his accident, and they argued constantly. Soon John

(19:51):
moved out, taking everything he personally had bought, which wasn't much.
Most of their stuff had been bought by Dolores. He
moved into a tiny, old mill olk shack on his
mom's property, six feet by six feet, sleeping in a
pile of sleeping bags. Hypocrite. That's still a building. By
the way. The path, too, had stopped at a ravine
crossed by a rickety rope bridge that John had made.

(20:13):
The shack was less than a mile from the Oda house.

(20:42):
John stopped shaving and cutting his hair. He sometimes wore moccasins,
but more often he'd just go barefoot, I guess because
he enjoyed tetanus and fungal infections. He started hanging out
with the local hippie crowd, who mostly welcomed him, although
even among people who were all four rants against the system,
John's constant, zealous sermonizing was a bit much. They could

(21:03):
only take John in small doses, and his intensity scared
a lot of people. John spent a lot of time
wandering around, often mosying into houses close to his shack
and taking whatever caught his eye. He'd been inside the
Oda house at least once, stealing a pair of binoculars.
He used them to spy on the family from the
water tower as his increasing fury at materialism started to

(21:26):
focus on the successful doctor. It's probably not profitable to
try and make too much sense of whatever was going
through John's brain at this point, but it is worth
remembering that he was spying on a happy, successful family
while he was living alone in a shack smaller than
a prison cell, having just blown up his marriage and
gone crawling back to mother. He might claim his anger

(21:48):
came from a confused desire to save the planet, but
let's not discount the possibility of good old fashioned jealousy.
John Linley Fraser was alone in his crazy hatred of
the Oda family. Victor Oda had been born in Montana
in nineteen twenty four. After high school, he worked hard
to pay his way through college and help support his

(22:08):
Japanese immigrant parents. He served in the Army from nineteen
forty three to forty five, then studied medicine at Northwestern University,
where he met and married his wife, Virginia, and then
served in the Air Force for six years before moving
to Santa Cruz in nineteen sixty and starting an ophthalmology practice.
He was very successful and very well liked, and was

(22:29):
known locally as much for his philanthropy as his wealth
and taste in flashy cars and clothes. He was one
of the founders of a local hospital and was known
to perform sight saving surgeries for free for patients who
couldn't afford to pay. It was hard to imagine anyone
who knew him or his family wanting to do them harm.
But John Linley Frasier didn't know them. He never bothered

(22:51):
to try and know them. He didn't even really think
of them as people. They were just symbols in the
grandiose chaos of his broken brain. Once they had John
Linley Fraser's name, tax records led investigators to the last
person who'd employed him as a mechanic. John's friends from
the Catalyst had described him as long haired, full bearded,

(23:11):
and barefoot, a hippie, but his former boss remembered a
clean cut, married man who'd done good work. He'd been
sad to see John quit out of nowhere. He gave
the police what he thought was John's address, which was
the cabin his estranged wife, Dolores was staying in. She
told him just how weird Joan had gotten since his
accident and described where the shack he was staying in was.

(23:33):
Dolores said that two days before the murders, John had
spent the night with her, and then in the morning
he'd left with binoculars, a loaded thirty eight caliber gun,
and a backpack. He'd left behind his wallet, his driver's license,
and a book on taro cards, telling her I won't
be needing those any more, and that was the last
Dolores had seen of or heard from her husband.

Speaker 2 (23:56):
Maybe word had gotten around that John was the likely
suspc in the killings because more of his hippie acquaintances
started coming forward. One said that six weeks earlier they'd
been walking through the woods with John when they'd seen
the Oda mansion. John said he'd been inside the place
many times and described the people who lived there as materialistic.

(24:19):
They should be snuffed, he said later he flat out
told someone else that he intended to kill the family.
We've been here before. Nobody who heard him say these
things thought he was serious. Nobody went to the police
or warned the odas. After the family were dead, they
felt bad enough to come forward, which is something, but

(24:41):
not much.

Speaker 3 (24:44):
How many times, people, my god.

Speaker 2 (24:47):
All of this was more than enough for an arrest warrant.
On Thursday morning, police went to the shack in the woods.
John wasn't there. It was an odd place. From the outside,
the place looked ready to fall down if a moth
landed on it Sideways. Inside, the tiny six by six
space was carpeted and conspiculously clean and eat The police

(25:11):
left two deputies hidden in the trees to watch for
John to come back. He did come back, but only
after dark, and they missed him. That wasn't unexpected, because
it gets real dark out in the woods at night.
One of the deputies, Rod Sandford, had anticipated this and
set up what he called traps, just sticks placed across
the trail on the bridge that would be disturbed if

(25:33):
anyone had walked by in the night. Sure enough, the
traps had been disturbed, so They took a look inside
the shack and found John sleeping there. He woke up
with Rod Sandford's shotgun pointing at his head. Why don't
you give me what I deserve? He asked. The other
deputy cuffed him, and John downgraded his request from execution

(25:54):
to a glass of water. Investigators still thought they were
looking for more peace. They couldn't see how just one
person could control five others, but they had no doubt
that they had at least one of the killers in custody.
Multiple witnesses picked John out of a lineup as the
person they'd seen driving Virginia Odas Vista Cruzer on the
morning after the murder. He stuck in their minds because

(26:18):
he'd been driving so badly that he'd nearly run a
couple of them off the road. Police had managed to
retrieve fingerprints from doctor Oda's Rolls Royce and from a
beer can that had somehow stayed intact inside the burn house.
They were both matches for John. Investigators had also discovered
that the phone lines in the house had all been
cut with a knife. On John's knife, they discovered metal

(26:41):
fragments that matched the phone lines dang Over the next
few days, investigators put together a timeline that started to
make it more likely that just one person could have
been behind the killings. The oda's youngest son, Taggart, was
in elementary school. His brother Derek, a year older, was
in middle school. Virginia usually picked them up after school,

(27:04):
but she hadn't on the day of the murder. The
schools called Victor. He asked a secretary, Dorothy, to pick
up Taggart while he went to get Derek, and on
the way home, Victor stopped by to visit his mom.
So people arrived at the house on Rodeo Gulch Road
at different times, Dorothy and Taggart, then Victor and Derek.

(27:26):
One man with a gun could control and bind each
as they arrived.

Speaker 3 (27:30):
And that's a really good example of why it's important
for detectives to not get tunnel visioned about things, because
I would have thought the same thing, there's no way
one person could manage this entire scene. But when you
look at it this way, absolutely he could, and he
did obviously. Now it took a while for John Linley
Fraser's trial to start. Two weeks before the original trial date,

(27:52):
John slashed his wrists with a razor blade and had
to be hospitalized. Soon after, his attorney changed John's plea
from not guilty to not guilty by reason of insanity.
The judge appointed psychiatrists to assess John, and the trial
was postponed. Then, the defense asked for a change of venue,
arguing that it would be tough for John to get
a fair trial in Santa Cruz County, probably true. The

(28:15):
judge agreed that was a concern and moved the trial
to Redwood City on the San Francisco Bay. Eventually, the
trial began in October nineteen seventy one, a year after
the killings. John Linley Fraser was convicted of all five murders.
The next phase of the trial would determine whether he
was legally responsible for the deaths. Since November of nineteen seventy,

(28:38):
psychiatrist doctor David Marlowe had spoken with John around forty times.
John had told him what happened to the Oda house.
In fact, he told several versions with slight differences, but
this one seems the most likely based on the evidence.
According to John, voices from God had demanded that he
quote seek vengeance on those who rape the environment. Doesn't

(29:00):
seem likely that a philanthropic eye surgeon is the best
target for that vengeance. But I guess there are certain
difficulties inherent in applying logic to the voices in somebody's head.
On the afternoon of the nineteenth John snuck into the
Oda house and surprised Virginia, who was home alone. Days earlier,
he'd stolen a thirty eight caliber pistol from one of

(29:21):
the Oda's neighbors when he was wandering through their house,
threatening Virginia with the gun, He bound and blindfolded her
with some of Victor's silk scarves and shoved her into
a back bedroom. He could tell from Virginia's sob please
that she thought he was going to assault her, so
he assured her he wouldn't. He even went and mixed
her a drink, then looked around the house, finding Victor's

(29:43):
twenty two. Then he started yelling at Virginia about all
the expensive things in the home, calling her an evil
materialist with no respect for nature. John could keep preaching
on this subject literally all day, and I assume he
went on for the next hour or so until Virginia
desperately told him he should let her go because people
would get suspicious if she didn't pick up her boys

(30:03):
from school. John took out his knife and cut every
phone line he could find, then, just to be sure,
smashed the receiver in the bedroom to pieces. Then he
sat and waited for the rest of the family to
come home. When Dorothy and Taggart arrived, John immediately held
them at gunpoint and, just like with Virginia, bound and

(30:24):
blindfolded them with Victor's silk scarves, then shoved them into
separate rooms of the house. When Victor and Derrek came home,
John bound and blindfolded them just like the others, but
took them out to lay by the pool, then went
back and one at a time got everyone else. He
started lecturing Victor, accusing him of destroying natural life, saying

(30:45):
he ruined the whole Santa Cruz Mountains by building his
house where he had. Now that was a weird and
possibly telling thing to say. The Oda house had been
built in a natural meadow in nineteen sixty five, when
John was nice eighteen years old and still at the
Camp Owen juvenile detention Center. Like we said earlier, John's
mom lived close by. He'd grown up close by. No

(31:09):
matter what his weird brain twisted it into Was it
possible that the genesis for his anger was that when
he got out of Juvie, the woods of his childhood
weren't exactly as he remembered them. It would be strange
and sad, But then John Linley Fraser was a strange
sad man. Victor at first tried to argue with John,

(31:30):
then offered him whatever he wanted if John would just
leave his family alone. In most cases, this might be
a reasonable play to make, but John was psyched up
on his anti materialism rant and his hair trigger temper flipped.
He demanded Victor help him burn down the house and
return the land to its natural state. Victor argued back,

(31:50):
so John shoved him, still bound and blindfolded, into the pool,
and as Victor struggled to keep his head above water,
John shot him three times. He asked the terrified Virginia
if she believed in God. She stammered yes, and John said,
then you have nothing to be afraid of. He shot
her in the back of the neck. He's short, Dorothy

(32:13):
could wall at her next, then the two boys. He
pushed each of the bodies into the pool, then collected
all the shell casings. He went inside and typed up
his weird note on the ODIs typewriter, then set four
or five fires around the mansion. He blocked off one
side of the driveway with Dorothy's Lincoln Continental and the

(32:33):
other with Doctor Oda's red rolls. He put his note
under the windshield wiper of the rolls, then took off
in Virginia's Vista Cruiser. And may I just say, you know,
I get the anti materialism thing. I think you guys
know if you've been listening to the show for any
length of time. I'm pretty anti materialist myself. Like it
irritates me. The conspicuous consumption is one of the things

(32:54):
that bothers me. But even if and I don't think
he will. Even if doctor Oda had been a good
target for that anger, he wasn't. He was a very
generous person. But even if he were, his children weren't.
They were just kids and Dorothy was just there. I mean,

(33:18):
what does she do. She didn't build a house, she
didn't own all those nice things, and those two babies
had to sit there and listen to their parents dying.
So tell me that's a good cause. Fuck you, Absolutely not.

Speaker 2 (33:33):
Nope, Doctor Marlowe to whom John had reported all this,
testified for the defense, who argued that John was a
paranoid schizophrenic who suffered auditory and visual hallucinations and believed
he was an Asian of God sent to save the earth.
The prosecution's expert witness, doctor John Peshaw, argued that although
John was clearly mentally ill, he was not insane in

(33:55):
the manner that would absolve him from the legal consequences
of his actions. He was soopath and aware of his actions.
I consider him intolerant, crafty, and arrogant, doctor Pshaw said.
He sets his own rules, he disregards the feelings of others.

Speaker 3 (34:11):
Yeah, and some of that was very much the case
before the schizophrenia would have set in. I mean, you know,
before he was displaying those symptoms. So yeah, and.

Speaker 2 (34:22):
He clearly understood the difference between right and wrong. That's
the oh, yeah, the whole the legal definition of insanity,
because like it's clear that he's he's insane in the
psychiatric way. The legal definition of insanity is to prevent
people who do not understand the difference between right and

(34:42):
wrong from from going to prison or serving serving time
for crimes that they could not understand the consequences of.

Speaker 3 (34:51):
It, whereas this guy had an agenda, I want to
kill this family because they're wealthy and they you know,
go against my chosen cause or whatever, and also like
to do all that stuff to cover it up, and
to take the car out and put it in the
path of a train. That's actually a fairly clever way
to destroy evidence.

Speaker 2 (35:09):
Right, And that's so. Yeah, that's the biggest indicator that
he understood what he did was wrong.

Speaker 3 (35:15):
Yeah, oh, hell yeah. He did.

Speaker 2 (35:18):
To add an extra little wrinkle to the arguments about
John Liney Fraser's brain, on December third, he showed up
in court having shaved all the hair off on one
half of his head, half of his hair, half of
his beard, and one eyebrow. It was so over the
top that both the prosecution and the defense agreed in
this particular instance he was faking being crazy. The prosecution

(35:43):
said it was because John was still playing to his
insanity defense. The defense argued that John wanted the jury
to think he was consciously trying to trick them because
he would rather be convicted and executed than sent to
a mental institution. Proof, according to the defense, of how
unbalanced he.

Speaker 3 (36:01):
Was Damn, that is a hell of a logic, pretzel
you're offering us up there, defense attorneys.

Speaker 2 (36:07):
I just I mean, it's yeah, you have to, you know,
pace back and forth a few times to get to
where they're going. Yeah. I don't think John was anywhere
near smart enough to try a double bluff like that.
He was just an attention seeking dipshit making a grab
for some of the shock Manson got by carving a

(36:28):
swastika in his forehead during his own trial, like without
any of the like permanent pain and permanence of the swastika.
By the way, we've said it before, it but it
bears repeating. People with mental health issues are more likely
to be victims of crime than perpetrators, and that includes
paranoid schizophrenics. These people are not usually violent.

Speaker 3 (36:52):
Absolutely.

Speaker 2 (36:53):
A couple of weeks later, when the jury made their
decision on his sentencing, John was completely bald, no hair,
no beard, don't eyebrows. He sat reading George Orwell's nineteen
eighty four as the judge gave instructions to the jury,
a sad little puppy, trying to make a point about
the individual being crushed by the state with all the

(37:15):
subtlety of a pretentious eighth grader.

Speaker 3 (37:20):
So, as sham Man, it.

Speaker 2 (37:22):
Would only be slightly better if he was reading ketch
from the rye, you know what I mean?

Speaker 3 (37:26):
Yeah, or animal form would be good too, either of
the orwell, yeah, catch.

Speaker 2 (37:31):
From the Rye would be funnier, I think, because it's like, yeah, phone.

Speaker 3 (37:36):
And maybe a little more on brand for our boy,
you know. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (37:41):
The state obligingly agreed to crush him, and John Linley
Fraser was found guilty and sentenced to death. He was
only on death row for a few months, though, because
in April of nineteen seventy two, the Supreme Court of
California ruled the state's death penalty laws were unconstitutional. John
sentenced was commuted to life in prison. We've spoken before

(38:04):
about how crime, especially violent crime, can send ripples of
pain and damage far wider than are immediately clear, and
that's especially true in this case. The oda's oldest daughter,
eighteen year old Tara, married her high school boyfriend just
a few months after the murders. They divorced soon after,
and Tara married again and moved to New England, where

(38:25):
she and her husband had a daughter. Tara had been
afflicted with severe depression ever since the murders and had
been in and out of mental institutions. In nineteen seventy seven,
when she was twenty five, she asphyxiated herself in her
garage with the car exhaust.

Speaker 3 (38:43):
Oh my god, that is so sad. And it gets worse.
Victor Oda's mother, Ko had also suffered from depression since
the murders, and two years after Tara's death, at the
age of seventy eight, she hanged herself in the bathroom
of her nursing home. Lark Odate, fifteen years old at
the time of the murders, was the only survivor of

(39:03):
her family, the kind of statistic you usually only see
in wartime. I can't imagine what that was like, especially
for somebody so young. But it looks like she's built
a nice life for herself.

Speaker 2 (39:16):
I hope so.

Speaker 3 (39:17):
And there was one more death in August of two
thousand and nine, sixty two year old John Linley Fraser
hanged himself to death in Mule Creek State Prison, and
I doubt many people mourned him. So that was a
wild one, right, campers. You know, we'll have another one
for you next week, but for now, Lock your doors,

(39:38):
light your lights and stay safe until we get together
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(39:59):
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(40:20):
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