June 13, 2025 • 44 mins
Nobody likes to be embarrassed. More often than not, people are kind of weird in one way or another, have some secret history or fascination they’d hate to have dragged out into the light of day. It’s normal. What’s less normal is just how far some people will go to avoid their embarrassing secrets coming out…even to the point of murder.
Join Katie and Whitney, plus the hosts of Last Podcast on the Left, Sinisterhood, and Scared to Death, on the very first CRIMEWAVE true crime cruise! Get your fan code now--tickets go on sale February 7: CrimeWaveatSea.com/CAMPFIRE
Sources:
Blood Will Tell by Carlton Smith
Palo Alto Online: https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2013/11/30/palo-alto-murderer-dies-after-compassionate-parole/
SFGate: https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/FITZHUGH-CONVICTED-Palo-Alto-jury-rejects-2892363.php
Follow us, campers!
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Join Katie and Whitney, plus the hosts of Last Podcast on the Left, Sinisterhood, and Scared to Death, on the very first CRIMEWAVE true crime cruise! Get your fan code now--tickets go on sale February 7: CrimeWaveatSea.com/CAMPFIRE
Sources:
Blood Will Tell by Carlton Smith
Palo Alto Online: https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2013/11/30/palo-alto-murderer-dies-after-compassionate-parole/
SFGate: https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/FITZHUGH-CONVICTED-Palo-Alto-jury-rejects-2892363.php
Follow us, campers!
Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfire
https://www.truecrimecampfirepod.com/
Facebook: True Crime Campfire
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/truecrimecampfire/?hl=en
Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfire
Email: truecrimecampfirepod@gmail.com
MERCH! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.com
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello, campers, Grab your marshmallows and gather around the True
Crime campfire. Wear 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 (00:19):
Nobody likes to be embarrassed. More often than not, people
are kind of weird in one way or another, have
some secret history or fascination they'd hate to have dragged
out into the light of day. It's normal. What's less
normal is just how far some people will go to
avoid their embarrassing secrets coming out, even to the point
(00:39):
of murder. This is Walking in My Shoes, the murder
of Christine Fitzhugh.
Speaker 3 (00:56):
So campers for this one.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
We're in the leafy well to do city of Palo Alto, California, Friday,
May fifth, two thousand. Galen Mason and Carol Perino were
looking forward to a good time. The roommates were both teachers,
so they generally had to wait for the weekend to
have fun, and they were getting ready for a lot
of it this weekend. It was Galen's birthday and they
were going all in. The party was going to be
(01:18):
casino themed. They'd booked a craps table, a roulette wheel,
the works. They'd only be playing for joke store money,
but the party was going to be lit. Lots of
teachers letting their hair down and saying what they really
thought about the kids at their school, you know, and
their parents. Once everybody's about five beers deep each other too,
(01:38):
you know, teachers can party, you teachers listen, you know.
At one point thirty, their friend Ken Fitzhugh arrived to
pick up Galen and Carol in his Chevy Suburban so
they could go pick up all the casino stuff. Ken
was a mixed bag, always helpful and reliable, but he
was one of those guys who just couldn't help offering
unsolicited advice, especially to women, and most especially two young
(02:01):
women like Galen and Carol. As he pulled out of
the driveway, Ken told them he wanted to check on
his wife, Christine at their house a couple minutes away.
Christine was a teacher too, a music teacher, and Ken
had gotten a call from the school district saying she'd
missed her one o'clock class. Ken stopped outside their house
on Escabeda Avenue and hurried inside. Galen and Carol, sitting
(02:23):
in the suburban, thought it looked like the front door
was already partially open. Barely a minute later, Ken rushed
back out of the house. Come help me, he yelled.
Galen had a momentary thought that this was an elaborate
set up for a surprise party. Is he kidding, she
asked Carol, but Carol didn't think so. Ken went back inside,
and after a moment, the two ladies followed. They heard
(02:46):
Ken hurrying down the basement stairs and from the top
of the stairs they saw him, and they saw Christine
lying face down on the landing at the bottom of
the stairs. Oh my god, there's blood everywhere. Ken said,
I can't get a pulse. Call nine one one. Galen
and Carol hurried to the phone in the kitchen and
made the call, and then Ken asked Galen to help
(03:07):
with CPR, and they pulled Christine down onto the cement
floor of the basement and turned her face up to
start work, Galen doing chest compressions and Ken blowing air
into Christine's lungs now. Galen could see the blood oozing
onto the floor from the back of Christine's head. She
also noticed a plastic dry cleaning bag that Christine had
been lying on top of. Close By on the lower
(03:29):
landing was a big metal ship's bill. She wondered if
that was what Christine had hit her head on those shoes,
those goddamn shoes. Ken gasped out between breaths.
Speaker 3 (03:39):
She must have.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
Fallen in those shoes. I told her to throw them
away a thousand times. He pointed out a black sandal
on the steps, then started talking about the dry cleaning bag.
It took Galen a second to pick up on what
Ken was saying. That Christine must have slipped and fallen
on the stairs, knocked herself out, and then suffocated on
the dry cleaning bag. Oh yeah, if she'd been more
(04:02):
clear headed, this would have struck her right away as
really unlikely. But Galen was in shock, especially as the
pool of blood from the back of Christine's head kept spreading.
Paramedics soon arrived and took over the task of trying
to revive Christine, and the basement was suddenly crowded with
people and equipment. Galen saw Ken climb the stairs with
his arms held out and his bloody hands up like
(04:24):
a surgeon ready to be gloved. It was all too
much for her, and she pushed open the storm doors
out into the yard. The fitz Hughes never kept them locked.
Barely a minute after the paramedics arrived, Sasha Priesce of
the Palo Alto PD arrived. He stopped halfway down the
steps and watched the paramedics work.
Speaker 3 (04:42):
One of them looked up and gave Priese a shake
of the head and silently conveyed to him two things.
Christine wasn't going to make it, and this probably wasn't
an accident. This was a big deal. Paulo Alto is
home to Stanford University, and a lot of the crime
in the city was calling type crime that often involved
too much booze or weed, and given how rich a
(05:05):
lot of the residents were, burglaries were sometimes a problem,
but the statistical murder rate in the city was a big,
fat zero. When detectives arrived, they entered the basement through
the storm doors. They got Ken's version of what must
have happened from the paramedics, and like them, they didn't
think it made a lot of sense. They saw the
shoe on the basement stairs, a right shoe, but on
(05:27):
the left side of the steps as you came down
if it had slipped off Christine's foot as she fell.
The positioning was weird, and along with the bag of
dry cleaning there had been a sheaf of student papers
under Christine's body, like she'd been carrying both. There was
a wardrobe in the basement where clothes hung in dry
cleaning bags. But why had she brought the papers with her?
(05:48):
Who would choose to grade papers in a gloomy basement
when there was a whole beautiful house upstairs. But the
biggest problem with the scene was Christine's wounds. The injuries
to the back of her head was seen way too
severe to have come from a fall, even if that
fall had ended with her bashing her head against the
ship's bell, and she would have had to twist all
(06:09):
the way around as she fell, hitting the back of
her head, then twisting back around to land face down
on the landing.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
Yeah, no way, that's just not gonna happen.
Speaker 3 (06:18):
Christine had clear bruises on her face too. She would
have had to fall face down and face up simultaneously.
It just didn't make any sense. This wasn't an accident.
Christine fits you had been murdered.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
Dang, doesn't this remind you of the staircase murder so far?
Like the Michael Peterson case.
Speaker 3 (06:37):
Oh yeah, the injuries happening in places that didn't make
sense for a fall down the stairs sounds a lot
like it. Unless there was a murderous owl we don't know.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
Well, then it would be even more like it.
Speaker 3 (06:51):
There's an owl in the basement. We don't know if
Christine had been murdered. There was a series of logical
conclusions that fell into place after another. Like grim Dominos,
Christine had almost certainly been killed by repeated blows from
some blunt object. That is a messy way to kill someone,
with blood flying both from the impact and from the
(07:11):
weapon as it moves, creating blood spatter cast off on
nearby surfaces. But the only blood they saw immediately was
the pool that had leaked from Christine's head onto the floor.
Although they did soon find what looked like two bloody
sneaker prints, it wasn't from any of the responders, and
neither Ken nor Galen were wearing sneakers. The lack of
(07:31):
blood spatter meant Christine probably hadn't been killed on the
stairs or in the basement, and that meant someone had
moved the body afterwards to try and stage an accidental death.
Murder by a random intruder is vanishingly unlikely at any circumstance,
and for an intruder to hang around and take the
time and trouble to make a death look like an accident,
well it just doesn't happen.
Speaker 2 (07:53):
The people most likely to benefit from making a murder
look like an accident or family members. Ken and Christine's
two sons, Justin and John, were both in college in
different cities, so that just left Ken Fitzhugh himself. As
Christine's husband, he was always going to be high on
the list of suspects, and the fact that he'd immediately
jumped to a bizarre accidental theory for her death really
(08:16):
didn't help. I mean, she tripped on her shoes, those
damn shoes, hit her head on a bell, and suffocated
on the dry cleaning. He'd put this together within like
sixty seconds of finding his wife fatally injured at the
bottom of the stairs. Just man, come on. So the
police took Ken, Galen, and Carol back to the station
to be interviewed. They wanted them out of the house
(08:37):
so they wouldn't contaminate any evidence, and they wanted to
interview them separately to make sure they're versions of what
happened all matched up. They asked Galen and Carol the
obvious questions about their friends. Was there any trouble in
Ken and Christine's marriage? No, absolutely not. They were just
about the most devoted couple. Either of them knew financial troubles, Nope.
Palo Alto is one of the wealthiest cities in California,
(08:59):
and even there, the Fitzhughes were notably well off. Okay,
any affairs, obviously, this is something even close friends might
be in the dark about, but the idea seemed ridiculous
to both Galen and Carol. Then the interviews with the
ladies were interrupted by a furious yell from outside. Detective
Mike Denson was interviewing Ken. Ken Fitzhugh was fifty seven
(09:22):
years old, a slightly built, silver haired man with big glasses.
He looked kindly and harmless. He also seemed either exhausted
or just indifferent to what was happening. He seemed calm,
too calm to Dnson's eyes, and he was unpredictable When
Dentson asked if they could search the house, Ken said,
I don't mind if they searched, they could tear the
place apart. But then after reading the actual consent to
(09:46):
search for him, he changed his mind. You know what,
I don't want these guys just going through everything. We
have valuable things. It's a very difficult time. Denson nodded,
but he later told Carlton Smith, whose book Blood Will
Tell was one of our main sources for this one,
that he was thinking this guy's weird.
Speaker 3 (10:04):
Ken was just chatting.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
Away, grinning. Denson described him as jovial. He said the
cops could search the basement in the stairs, but nowhere else.
Denson agreed, he knew they had enough to get a
full search warrant from a judge without Ken's consent if
they had to. He asked Ken to walk him through
the day. Ken and Christine had both woken up at
six and gone out jogging with their dogs, then come
(10:27):
home and worked for a while at their respective computers.
Christine taught music at various schools around the district and
left around ten am for her first class. Ken had
been going back and forth between their own house and
their neighbor, a lawyer who Ken was helping with a
printer problem. He said goodbye to Christine, and then at
around eleven, Ken, who described his occupation as real estate consultant,
(10:50):
put the dogs in the car and drove to a
real estate project. Only suddenly he couldn't remember where it was.
Oh man, he said, I've been there a thousand times.
My brain's not worth working. Ken said he'd been at
this mysterious project for about an hour and had then
headed back to Palo Alto to pick up Galen and
Carol at the pre arranged time of one point thirty.
Everyone in Ken's life would say that punctuality was of
(11:13):
weirdly urgent importance to him. He had to be on
time on the freeway. He'd gotten a call from a
secretary at the school district telling him Christine had missed
her one PM class. That wasn't like her. Still, he
had to keep his appointment, so he picked up Galen
and Carol before heading home to check on Christine. Man,
(11:33):
you really care about punctuality If you get a call
that like your wife didn't show up at work and
you've got to go pick up your friend, like that
almost sounds like obsessive, compulsive or something like that. It's
very strange. So he'd gone in first looking upstairs, and
then he'd noticed the door of the basement was open
and looked down and saw Christine lying still at the
(11:53):
bottom of the steps. He ran out to call for
help from the ladies and hurried back in. So then
I saw the blame black shoe, Ken said in the
interview room. All of a sudden, he like half got
up from his chair and just bellowed the goddamned black shoes,
like hammered his fist down on the table. And I've
seen it. You can watch his interview. It's so weird,
(12:15):
like it just comes out of nowhere, like he's fine
and then he just explodes and then he's fine again.
So strange. He was loud enough to be heard all
through the police station, and people hurried to the small
window into the interview room, half expecting to see kenon
Denson in a fight way.
Speaker 3 (12:32):
To keep it together, Ken, you're really selling it. Keep
it up, Yeah, But you know, Ken just sat down,
lacing his fingers together and carried on as if nothing
had happened. Yeah, like turning it on and off like
a light switch. That's really that's what good actors doing. Yeah,
(12:54):
Christine had a pair of black shoes that she really liked,
but that, according to Ken, she'd fallen in before she'd
fallen on the friend's sidewalk, the office sidewalk. I caught her,
or she has smashed her face on the sidewalk. I
must have told her six times to get rid of
the black shoes.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
What do you want to bet he practiced those damn
shoes in the mirror like six or seven times. He
said it like two or three times already to different people.
He really wanted to make sure everybody knew about the shoes.
Speaker 3 (13:23):
You know, what do we tell a writing students show?
Don't tell? Like if you yes, if your little tableau
didn't tell the story good enough, Ken, then yeah, I
don't know what to tell ya. Okay, it's too much exposition.
Speaker 2 (13:39):
It's suspicious, it's too much explanation, like when you hammer
it something that much. And we've seen that before. I mean,
we've all seen that. True crime folks have all seen
that before, where somebody really hammering, like they'll try to
misdirect the police toward a particular suspect or whatever. That
always raises the antennae as it should.
Speaker 3 (13:58):
This little performance did nothing to change Dentson's opinion that
this guy was weird, and suggested that Ken, the kindly
old elf might have a fast boiling temper. And then
there was the bell. Ken said, it had been an
ornament in the backyard for eighteen years. He'd brought it
inside the previous week to get pictures and try and
(14:18):
sell it on eBay. But it was really heavy, and
once he had got it down the stairs, he just
put it down right there. If I'd only put it away,
Ken said, don't start blaming yourself, Dentson said, but what
he was thinking was, if Ken wanted to bring a
heavy bell into the basement, why would he even take
(14:39):
the stairs when there were storm doors that opened straight
out into the backyard. As it happened, Ken was worrying
about the wrong pair of shoes, because officers at the
scene had found a pair of white sneakers tucked under
the passenger seat of his Chevy suburban, and they had
spots of what looked like blood on them. Another detective
(14:59):
told Dnson, but Denson kept the information to himself for now.
He listened as Ken took a call from his youngest son, John,
who was flying back from the University of Washington and
whose flight had just been delayed. Ken was in the
circumstances startlingly flat as he spoke to a boy whose
mother had died violently just a couple of hours ago. Hello, Yes, John,
(15:22):
that's all right. Oh, I'm sorry to hear that. Okay,
before we come to the airport, we'll call and check
so we know what time. No, just wait for us, Okay, good, Yeah,
thanks for letting me know. Bye, good luck to you.
Damn Ken fits Hugh was a cold fish, at least
when he's not talking about women's footwear that raises the
(15:48):
hack of passion it does. Knowing about the sneakers, Denson
wanted to nail Ken down on what he'd been wearing
when he found Chrissine. Had he changed clothes anyway since then?
Was the outfit he had on? Now? Exactly what he'd
been wearing since the discovery? Ken said, yes, he was
(16:09):
wearing black leather loafers. If the blood on the sneakers
was Christine's, it could have only gotten there before Ken
had showed up at the house with Galen and Carroll Weird.
Ken continued being weird. When Dnson asked him if there
was anything else, he wanted to say.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
It's such a terrible shame. She was really enjoying herself again.
Her older son graduates from college in a couple of weeks,
so she wanted to be ready for that very sad time.
Sorry to burden you with that, you said her older son,
Dentson said, is he not your son? No, he's our son,
Ken corrected himself. Huh. Ken eventually did sign the consent
(16:49):
to search for him, as long as he could be
there when officers went through the house. This was fine
with Denson, as it meant he could keep Ken talking
and watch his reactions. Ken walked them all through the house.
Nothing appeared to be missing. There was no sign of
forced entry. Dnson put the squeeze on him. What had
Ken been wearing during his morning jog with Christine? His
(17:10):
white sneakers, Ken said, And where are those shoes now?
He'd put them back in the closet upstairs, Ken said.
An officer brought in the white sneakers inside a plastic bag.
They looked like his shoes, Ken said, but he was
dumbfounded as to how they could have gotten into the suburban.
Dnson told him the sneakers seemed to have blood on them.
(17:30):
Ken didn't react at all. Dentson said they were going
to test whether it was human blood. Still no reaction.
Ken insisted his shoes were still in the closet upstairs.
He showed them, and lo and behold, there was a
blank space in his neatly lined up pairs of shoes.
Ken was yet again dumbfounded, and continued to be so
(17:51):
when he was told officers had just found a bloody
paper towel in the back of the suburban. A little
later they'd find a green polo shirt also, Oh, bloody,
shoved even further under the passenger seat. Ye, they'll never
look there. Good call. Just then, oldest son, Justin arrived
along with his fiancee Angelina. Crying, Justin hugged his dad
(18:13):
in the driveway. Ken still looked about as perturbed as
if a barista had just added some unwonted nutmeg to
his latte. Police let them drive away to pick up
John from the airport, and the medical examiner, doctor Dian Vertaz,
arrived to inspect the scene and the body. Her later
autopsy would confirm her initial thoughts Christine had twenty individual
(18:34):
bruises on her face, most likely punches by a right
handed attacker. Pressure marks and hemorrhaging indicated someone had tried
to strangle her. There were bruises, likely defensive injuries on
her arms and hands. These were not the injuries you'd
expect from someone tripping on the stairs and reflexively putting
their arms out to try and break the fall, and
(18:56):
on the back of the head were by far the
worst wounds. Seven heavy blows from a blunt object, one
of which caused a palpable skull fracture, meaning the bones
on the skull moved under the doctor's fingers. Ooh, it's
so upsetting. She had no doubt that this was a homicide.
One thing doctor Vertas did not find was a cut
(19:18):
in the webbing between thumb and forefinger on Christine's right hand,
and this was important. By the time he was interviewed
again later that evening, kenn had come up with a
reason why Christine's blood might be on his sneakers. A
week ago, Christine had cut her hand with a trowel
while gardening, a cut bad enough that Kenned had to
put pressure on it until it stopped bleeding. Now that's
not something that heals to the point of complete invisibility
(19:41):
in a week, but there was no sign of a
cut there by this point. Even on the first day,
none of the investigators had much doubt that Ken fitzhu
had killed his wife, but they had no idea why.
The Fitzhughs had lived in Palo Alto since the early eighties,
and as investigators called friends and acquaintances who'd known them
in this time, they got the same answers. Ken and
(20:03):
Christine were a devoted, loving couple, happy, healthy, and wealthy.
It wasn't until investigators went further back to when the
couple had lived in San Diego that they started to
get a picture of what might be going on. See,
back then, Christine had an affair, and everybody knew about it.
Speaker 3 (20:46):
Everyone knew the fits Hughes were well off. Their big
house on Escapeda Avenue was worth two million dollars in
two thousand, over five million today. Ken had family money,
although it came to him by an unusual route. Ken's
own upbringing was modest. His dad, Kenny, managed a gas
station in auto repair shop. Ken's aunties, Kenny's sisters Helen, Ruth,
(21:10):
and Susie were all pretty ladies, and whether by coincidence
or design, all three married successful older men. Their three
husbands died in the forties, and the sisters all moved
into the same San Diego apartment building, apparently content to
give up on romance Altogether. None of them had any children,
and when they died in the seventies and eighties, their
(21:31):
inheritances passed first to Kenny and then to Ken Junior.
By two thousand, he had inherited around two million directly
and antiques, possibly worth up to three million dollars. Young
Ken's friends would describe him as a shy and sensitive boy,
but some of his other classmates remember him as a fussy,
smart ass who liked to show off his supposedly superior brain.
(21:54):
He never got angry, never showed a temper, but he
could be sneaky. Friend Alice recalled that Ken's dad kept
stacks of candy in a closet to be sold at
the gas station. Ken would sneak in and help himself.
I mean nothing odd there. If you have piles of
candy in the house, chances are that kids are going
to nab some. But Ken would sneak in while his
(22:16):
friends were there, eat in the closet, and sneak back out.
His friend's never got any of the candy.
Speaker 2 (22:22):
Oh, you selfish, little weasel. It reminds me of this
awful kid I nannied for in college. I've probably talked
about him before. This kid would rather literally rather I've
seen him do it, throw a cupcake in the trash
than share it with one of his friends. A kid
was the worst.
Speaker 3 (22:38):
Oh my god. Ken was smart and a talented musician.
He toyed with pursuing music as a career, but his
mom gently prodded him towards something that might actually make
him some money, and Ken went to college to study
electrical engineering. He still played though. While in college, he
got hold of an old church pipe organ and it
(23:00):
hauled down to his hometown of del Mar. The only
place willing to house the organ was the del Mar Fairgrounds,
and in the summer, Ken would play the organ for
the San Diego County Fair. In nineteen sixty four, right
after Ken had graduated, It was the sound of the
pipe organ at the county Fair that first caught the
attention of sixteen year old Christine Peterson. Christine was also
(23:23):
a musician, and a talented one. In fact, you could
fairly say she was a piano prodigy with the ability
to make it as a concert pianist. That could be
a heavy weight to hang around a kid's neck, especially
with Christine's demanding, kind of frosty Danish parents. A few
months before her death, Christine wrote in her diary, remembering
(23:44):
herself as a five year old girl, I felt approval
based on my actions rather than for who I was.
When I didn't perform well enough, the consequences were severe,
especially when the expectations were high. I was expected to
obey and be a perfect li girl. If I was,
my father was so proud. I learned to set my
(24:04):
standard for perfection to guard against injury.
Speaker 2 (24:08):
Man, it's like how to screw up your kid's page one.
At least when they first met, Ken and Christine were
a good match. They were both very smart, both musical,
both kind of awkward and introverted. They dated long distance
for a couple of years while Ken got his MBA
at Stanford and Christine, who had skipped a grade, started
studying music in Thousand Oaks when she was still just sixteen.
(24:31):
In nineteen sixty six, when Ken was twenty four and
Christine eighteen. They got married and Ken got an accounting
job at the Teledyne Ryan Aerospace firm in San Diego.
There's no way of knowing whether this factored into Ken's
decision making, but because Ryan was a defense contractor with
Ken's department, working on early remote controlled drones, he was
exempt from the Vietnam draft. Christine, meanwhile, gave up the
(24:55):
idea of being a concert pianist with great relief. Instead,
she attend in San Diego State College to study for
a career as a music teacher, possibly the only switch
her Danish parents would accept, both of them having grown
up in a country where teachers were highly respected. Must
be nice, and I say that as a teacher, we
what does Rodney Dangerfield say? We ain't get no respect.
(25:19):
After a couple of years, Ken made a friend at work,
a guy named Robert Kenneth Brown, and invited him home
to dinner. Robert aka Bob had an accounting degree, which
was what got him his job alongside Ken, and he
was studying law. He and Ken had really hit it off,
which was odd because Bob Brown was almost Ken's complete opposite,
a big extroverted dude, dedicated to live in his life
(25:42):
like his plane was going down. He hit it off
with Christine too, despite some embarrassment at their first meeting.
When Ken called out of the blue to say he
was bringing a friend home for dinner, Christine rushed to
get some Chinese takeout and was in the process of
transferring it into some dishes to make it look home cooked.
When Ken and Bob walked in the door. That so funny.
Soon the three of them were best buds. Bob would
(26:05):
have dinner with the fitz Hughes maybe three nights a week,
and most weekends. They hung out often with Bob's fun
loving crowd. When I first met them, they were social recluses,
Bob said later. After I was around and involved with
my friends, they began to break loose. They'd never gone
out dancing or having drinks or anything, or gone camping
at the beach, or drove a motorcycle or dune buggies
(26:26):
or anything like that. They weren't party people. Christine in particular,
really started to loosen up. She'd had a much more
restrictive upbringing than Ken had, and her introversion was more
of a learned habit than a reflection of who she
actually was. Later in her life, she'd be known as
a really warm social person, and this was the time
(26:46):
that that side of her really started to come out.
She was a twenty year old woman who finally started
living life like a twenty year old woman. Ken, who
seemed content to jump directly from college into middle age,
mostly just tagged a life an amiable sidekick to his
increasingly vibrant wife. We deal with a lot of messy
relationships on this show, so I'm sure a lot of
(27:08):
you were thinking, huh. A young wife learning how to
have fun, a boring, beige husband, and a charismatic new
friend who spends a lot of time with them both
what could possibly go wrong? Ken, though, would later claim
he never had any worries about anything happening between Christine
and Bob, and that he had good reason not to worry.
(27:28):
According to Ken, in the early years that he knew him,
Bob had lived with a succession of boyfriends, showed no
interest in women, and had once propositioned Ken he was,
as far as Ken knew gay. At least that was
what Ken claimed. Bob, on the other hand, says it
was the other way. Around that. One time they were
on a camping trip together and Ken, probably a few
(27:50):
beers deep at this point, just suddenly reached over and
just grabbed his joke, Wow, Ken, you really know how
to woo a fella, And Bob said he just kind
of took Ken's hand off his wien and said something
like what's this and Ken refused to answer, and they
just kind of pretended like it never even happened.
Speaker 3 (28:08):
So basically, if these three had just agreed to be
a throuple and called it today, we might not be
talking about this right now, right seriously.
Speaker 2 (28:17):
So Bob was actually by something he said. All his friends,
including Ken and Christine knew. Well we know Christine knew
for sure, because not long after they'd met, she and
Bob started an affair that would last for almost a decade,
and they were not subtle about it. When they moved
into a new house, Ken and Christine threw a housewarming party.
At one point, she told Ken that she and Bob
(28:38):
were going out to get some ice and they didn't
come back for hours, and when they finally did, they
had that certain glow about them, you know, like you
could tell when people had just done it, like you
just can't. Other people at the party were suspicious, but
Ken was oblivious, or maybe he just didn't care.
Speaker 3 (28:57):
It's impossible to know exactly what was going on in
the fitz Hughes relationship while they were down in San Diego.
Ken was a stubborn liar. Once he decided to cover
something up, he was going to die on that hill.
He said he was completely in the dark about the
affair and wouldn't reveal anything else. And when police first
interviewed Bob Brown, he was laid up in recovery from
(29:18):
a motorcycle wreck and loaded on pain medication. His narrative
wandered and sometimes contradicted itself. When he was more clear headed,
he was only marginally more reliable as witness. But Brown's version,
which is that Ken was fully aware of Christine's affair,
is a lot easier to believe than Ken's insistence that
(29:38):
he knew nothing about it. All their friends knew it
was a secret, so open it wasn't really a secret anymore.
Christine and Bob often went on ski trips to Colorado
or Lake Tahoe with his buddies, even one time to
the Swiss Alps. More often than not, Ken stayed home,
just like when he was a kid. Ken ever expressed
(30:00):
any anger, although there's a difference between not expressing something
and never showing it. Once, while they were camping, Ken
accidentally ran over Bob's foot and broke it, then refused
to drive him to the hospital for a couple of days,
causing a nasty infection to send in.
Speaker 2 (30:17):
Whoa yeah.
Speaker 3 (30:19):
Another time, while they were sailing, Ken turned the boat sharply,
causing the boom to swing around and smack Bob in
the head, knocking him out Coal campers, have you ever
hospitalized one particular friend and only that friend repeatedly? I
don't think accident is the word we're looking for here.
Speaker 2 (30:39):
Uh yeah, Yeah, he was low key trying to kill
that guy, and I think it might have actually been subconscious.
But yeah.
Speaker 3 (30:47):
According to Bob, Christine wasn't willing to talk about it
too much, but he got the impression that Ken just
wasn't that interested in her or anyone else sexually. He
may also have been impotent, but by the time he
brought that up, Bob was convinced Ken had killed Christine
and wasn't exactly going to go out of his way
to help the Guy's reputation. In nineteen seventy eight, Christine
(31:10):
got pregnant, and according to Bob Brown, it was one
hundred percent on purpose. After her first son, Justin, was born,
Bob testified, she told me she was positive I was
the father because she had quit taking the birth control
pills and that she hadn't had sex with anyone but
me for a period of four months or so before
she was diagnosed as pregnant. Bob and Christine were both
(31:33):
close with Bob's aunt, Janet, and Janet said Christine had
told her that Ken couldn't have kids, so if Christine
wanted to get pregnant, at least in the old fashioned way,
someone else would have to help her. But there was
more to this. Why would Christine all of a sudden
want to have a kid and was she the only
one making the decision. Two of Ken's wealthy aunts were
(31:54):
still alive at this point, and they wanted to make
Ken the only child of any of the four Fits
siblings their heir, but according to Bob, it insisted on
one condition. Ken would only get their money if he
had a child.
Speaker 2 (32:09):
God, that is so weird. It's like something from a
Dickens novel or something so strange. Bob said both Ken
and Christine had told him about this. His aunt Janet
said Christina had told her about it separately. Bob came
to believe that Ken, unable or unwilling to have sex
with his wife, encouraged Christine to get pregnant with him.
(32:30):
It really stretches belief to think Ken was unaware of
who Justin's bio dad was after the kid was born. Apparently,
he looked exactly like Bob, a resemblance that was only
going to get stronger as the kid grew up. Bob
took Christine and baby Justin to family gatherings and told
everybody Justin was his son. Who knows how all three
felt a couple years later, when John was born and
(32:52):
was very clearly Ken's biological son. The affair between Christine
and Bob stopped not long after Justin was born, although
they remained close friends, as did Ken and Bob, and
he stayed close to them as part of the family.
Little Justin was always following Uncle Bob around, But Bob
Brown was one of those people who burn hot and
(33:13):
flame out, a piece of his party lifestyle that Ken
and Christine had never joined in on was the drugs
and the serious drinking, two problems that got worse throughout
the eighties and early nineties, when, not coincidentally, Bob got
in trouble with the law on a few occasions and
was eventually disbarred. Ken and Christine had an intervention and
put up twelve thousand dollars for Bob to go to
(33:35):
a nice rehab. But Bob relapsed, apparently in some epically
embarrassing public way that nobody in his friend group was
willing to talk about, and finally Ken and Christine cut
him off. However, their weird triangular relationship was constructed, it
was over. According to Bob, he and Christine hadn't been
in touch till early two thousand, when she'd called him.
(33:58):
Justin was going to graduate that spring. Afterwards, Christine said
she was going to tell him the truth about who
his dad was. Investigators would come to agree with Bob
that Ken had known all about Justin's parentage from the
get go, and that Christina told Ken she was going
to share the truth with Justin.
Speaker 3 (34:16):
When you hear the.
Speaker 2 (34:17):
Bare bones of this case, I think a lot of
people assume the shape of it is he found out
he wasn't his kid's bio dad, and that's why he
killed her. But I don't think that's it. What pushed
Ken over the edge was knowing the truth was going
to come out. It wasn't the infidelity that he found unbearable.
It was that people would know about the infidelity. This
(34:37):
was a new town, new group of friends, you know,
they'd left all the people who knew about this in
the past, and this was going to be humiliating. So
we've seen countless times with people like Ken, who at
his core was a narcissist, just how far they'll go
to avoid humiliation. A lot of premeditated murders ultimately boiled
(34:59):
out to be about sex or money. Bob Brown had
provided investigators with a lot of juicy things from column A,
and he also drew their attention to some stuff from
columb Bob had an airtight alibi, by the way, in
case y'all were wondering. Ken Fitzhugh, as we said earlier,
inherited a whole lot of family money along with an
antique collection that was worth just as much, if not more.
(35:22):
When Bob was telling investigators about Ken's inheritance, he mentioned
that all the antiques cramming the house on Escabeda Avenue
came from Ken's aunts, but the detectives hadn't seen any
antiques that looked particularly special. There were hardly any at all.
When they said this to Bob, he was confused. He
hadn't been in the house in a few years, but
back then it had been literally jammed wall to wall
(35:44):
with very expensive stuff, millions of dollars worth of antiques.
The police had already asked Ken to estimate the value
of everything in the house, and he told them one
hundred and twenty five thousand.
Speaker 3 (35:55):
Within that five years, though, Ken and Christine's kids had
gone away to college, and that's a time when a
lot of parents make changes to their house. Being surrounded
by valuable antiques could certainly feel smothering. Maybe Ken and
Christine wanted less clutter around, and that's why they sold
their antique collection or put in storage. I mean, there's
(36:15):
no reason they'd have to sell them, right, I mean,
everyone knew the fitz Hughes were comfortably well off.
Speaker 2 (36:23):
Right.
Speaker 3 (36:24):
Christine was a part time music teacher and Ken worked
as a nebulously titled real estate consultant, which could mean
anything or nothing. At all, at least recently, Ken's work
trended towards the nothing at all end of that spectrum.
The fitz Hughes nineteen ninety nine tax return showed an
income of just twenty eight thousand dollars, almost all of
(36:46):
it earned by Christine. But then, of course, the rich
can afford to be idle within limits with millions of
inherited dollars. Those limits can be pretty broad, but they're
not infinite. For example, in that same year of nineteen
ninety nine, and Ken and Christine's family expenditures added up
to three hundred and twenty thousand dollars.
Speaker 2 (37:07):
Bro, do you want to burn through millions of dollars?
Because that's how you burn through millions of dollars? Jesus.
Speaker 3 (37:14):
It seemed like that was exactly what Ken and Christine
had done. In the weeks before the murder, some of
their checks had bounced, and the government had recently filed
a tax lane against them. Just days before Christine had
been killed, Ken had applied for a hefty bank loan.
On the application, he'd claimed a monthly income of sixteen
five hundred dollars, which was obviously a lie. It looked
(37:39):
like the Fitzhughes were in a deep hole, but Ken's
answer was to ask the bank to give him a
bigger shovel to dig with. What they did have was
about one point five million dollars of equity in the
house on Escabeda Avenue, but using that came with its
own problems. I suspect Christine had no idea how bad
things had gotten. Wrote about her anxieties in her diary,
(38:02):
and she never mentioned finances. Ken was a persincity control freak,
so much so that early in their marriage he'd pressured
Christine into granting him power of attorney so he'd have
complete control over all their big decisions. Things were reaching
the point where Ken would have to come clean about
their bank account, and I think the financial impact on
(38:24):
his possible motive was essentially the same as the motive
related to Justin's parentage being exposed. He would lose face,
He'd be humiliated twice over to Ken, that was unbearable.
Everything investigators found strengthened their belief that Ken had killed Christine.
Luminol testing revealed blood of evidence in the kitchen, especially
(38:46):
around one of their kitchen chairs. Investigators would come to
believe Christine had been attacked from behind while she sat there,
first bludgeoned and then strangled and punched when she didn't
immediately die. The luminol showed s white marks on the
floor of an attempt to clean up the blood. At
the top of the basement steps was a large T
shaped stain. Christine's body had been dragged from the kitchen
(39:09):
and briefly laid on the carpet, presumably while Ken opened
the basement door.
Speaker 2 (39:15):
Kenn had finally remembered that his supposed real estate project
and alibi was up in San Bruno, about half an
hour away. He had said he'd gotten a call from
the school district's secretary while he was on the freeway,
but data from the cell phone towers put him in
the area around Escabda Avenue. Kennod also said he tried
calling Christine both on their landline and her cell phone
(39:36):
had left messages both times. There were no messages from
him on either. A neighbor in the street behind Ken
and Christine's house said she remembered a dark blue Chevy
Suburban just like Ken's parked on the street around the
time police knew Christine had been killed. An unlocked gate
connected the Fitzhughes backyard to their rearward neighbor. Detectives thought
(39:58):
Ken had parked, come through that gate and gone into
his basement through the unlocked storm doors. He'd waited down
there until he heard Christine coming back from her morning class,
and then investigators thought things had gotten frantic. Justin's fiancee, Angelina,
was in her first year working as a teacher while
Justin finished up with college, and she'd been living with
(40:19):
Ken and Christine. Detectives thought Ken's plan had been for
Angelina to find Christine's body when she got home from
work while Ken was out puttering around with Galen and Carol.
But then the secretary had called to say Christine hadn't
shown up for her class. Ken had to seem worried
as if he'd tried to find out what was going
on with his wife. He had to think fast on
(40:40):
the spot, which had never been one of his strong suits.
Ken probably it had a plan to dispose of his
bloody shoes and shirt while he was out with Galen
and Carol, but now he couldn't do it. In a panic,
he didn't come up with an alternative. The shoes, the
goddamn shoes. Police were waiting for just one thing to
put the habeas gravis on Ken Fitzhugh, and that was
(41:01):
confirmation that the blood on the shoes, shirt and paper
towel was Christine's, and DNA testing showed conclusively that it
was so. On May nineteenth, two weeks after Christine had
been murdered, Ken and John left the house to drive
to Stockton for Justine's graduation. Police had been shadowing Ken
since the murder. As far as they knew then he
(41:22):
was a millionaire with the resources to flee to anywhere
in the world. There were more officers than normal behind
him now in anticipation of the DNA results coming through,
and when they did, armed officers pulled Ken over and
arrested him. There wasn't much doubt that Ken would be convicted,
but his possible motives were apparently a little too loosey
goosey for the jury. They ultimately decided the killing was
(41:46):
not premeditated. I absolutely think it was, but whatever, and
they convicted Ken of second degree murder rather than first.
He was sentenced to fifteen years to life, with the
possibility of parole after thirteen years, but he'd never get there.
While he was incarcerated. Ken was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease
and would later become terminally ill from complications. He was
(42:09):
granted compassionate parole in February twenty twelve and died in
October of the same year. So secrets, folks, right, they
can be nasty little things, especially when the secrets threaten
a narcissis fragile Ego, he could have easily just divorced Christine.
I wouldn't have blamed him, honestly, but then all the
(42:31):
dirty laundry would have come out in court. The open
secret would have just been open. And for somebody like Ken, ego,
death is death. They're the same thing and a seat
of walking away. Ken made the choice to pull out
the stopper on decades of pent up anger, and everyone
around him paid the price. So that was a wild one, right, campers.
(42:53):
You know we'll have another one for you next week,
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Hello, campers, Grab your marshmallows and gather around the True
Crime campfire. Wear 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 (00:19):
Nobody likes to be embarrassed. More often than not, people
are kind of weird in one way or another, have
some secret history or fascination they'd hate to have dragged
out into the light of day. It's normal. What's less
normal is just how far some people will go to
avoid their embarrassing secrets coming out, even to the point
(00:39):
of murder. This is Walking in My Shoes, the murder
of Christine Fitzhugh.
Speaker 3 (00:56):
So campers for this one.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
We're in the leafy well to do city of Palo Alto, California, Friday,
May fifth, two thousand. Galen Mason and Carol Perino were
looking forward to a good time. The roommates were both teachers,
so they generally had to wait for the weekend to
have fun, and they were getting ready for a lot
of it this weekend. It was Galen's birthday and they
were going all in. The party was going to be
(01:18):
casino themed. They'd booked a craps table, a roulette wheel,
the works. They'd only be playing for joke store money,
but the party was going to be lit. Lots of
teachers letting their hair down and saying what they really
thought about the kids at their school, you know, and
their parents. Once everybody's about five beers deep each other too,
(01:38):
you know, teachers can party, you teachers listen, you know.
At one point thirty, their friend Ken Fitzhugh arrived to
pick up Galen and Carol in his Chevy Suburban so
they could go pick up all the casino stuff. Ken
was a mixed bag, always helpful and reliable, but he
was one of those guys who just couldn't help offering
unsolicited advice, especially to women, and most especially two young
(02:01):
women like Galen and Carol. As he pulled out of
the driveway, Ken told them he wanted to check on
his wife, Christine at their house a couple minutes away.
Christine was a teacher too, a music teacher, and Ken
had gotten a call from the school district saying she'd
missed her one o'clock class. Ken stopped outside their house
on Escabeda Avenue and hurried inside. Galen and Carol, sitting
(02:23):
in the suburban, thought it looked like the front door
was already partially open. Barely a minute later, Ken rushed
back out of the house. Come help me, he yelled.
Galen had a momentary thought that this was an elaborate
set up for a surprise party. Is he kidding, she
asked Carol, but Carol didn't think so. Ken went back inside,
and after a moment, the two ladies followed. They heard
(02:46):
Ken hurrying down the basement stairs and from the top
of the stairs they saw him, and they saw Christine
lying face down on the landing at the bottom of
the stairs. Oh my god, there's blood everywhere. Ken said,
I can't get a pulse. Call nine one one. Galen
and Carol hurried to the phone in the kitchen and
made the call, and then Ken asked Galen to help
(03:07):
with CPR, and they pulled Christine down onto the cement
floor of the basement and turned her face up to
start work, Galen doing chest compressions and Ken blowing air
into Christine's lungs now. Galen could see the blood oozing
onto the floor from the back of Christine's head. She
also noticed a plastic dry cleaning bag that Christine had
been lying on top of. Close By on the lower
(03:29):
landing was a big metal ship's bill. She wondered if
that was what Christine had hit her head on those shoes,
those goddamn shoes. Ken gasped out between breaths.
Speaker 3 (03:39):
She must have.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
Fallen in those shoes. I told her to throw them
away a thousand times. He pointed out a black sandal
on the steps, then started talking about the dry cleaning bag.
It took Galen a second to pick up on what
Ken was saying. That Christine must have slipped and fallen
on the stairs, knocked herself out, and then suffocated on
the dry cleaning bag. Oh yeah, if she'd been more
(04:02):
clear headed, this would have struck her right away as
really unlikely. But Galen was in shock, especially as the
pool of blood from the back of Christine's head kept spreading.
Paramedics soon arrived and took over the task of trying
to revive Christine, and the basement was suddenly crowded with
people and equipment. Galen saw Ken climb the stairs with
his arms held out and his bloody hands up like
(04:24):
a surgeon ready to be gloved. It was all too
much for her, and she pushed open the storm doors
out into the yard. The fitz Hughes never kept them locked.
Barely a minute after the paramedics arrived, Sasha Priesce of
the Palo Alto PD arrived. He stopped halfway down the
steps and watched the paramedics work.
Speaker 3 (04:42):
One of them looked up and gave Priese a shake
of the head and silently conveyed to him two things.
Christine wasn't going to make it, and this probably wasn't
an accident. This was a big deal. Paulo Alto is
home to Stanford University, and a lot of the crime
in the city was calling type crime that often involved
too much booze or weed, and given how rich a
(05:05):
lot of the residents were, burglaries were sometimes a problem,
but the statistical murder rate in the city was a big,
fat zero. When detectives arrived, they entered the basement through
the storm doors. They got Ken's version of what must
have happened from the paramedics, and like them, they didn't
think it made a lot of sense. They saw the
shoe on the basement stairs, a right shoe, but on
(05:27):
the left side of the steps as you came down
if it had slipped off Christine's foot as she fell.
The positioning was weird, and along with the bag of
dry cleaning there had been a sheaf of student papers
under Christine's body, like she'd been carrying both. There was
a wardrobe in the basement where clothes hung in dry
cleaning bags. But why had she brought the papers with her?
(05:48):
Who would choose to grade papers in a gloomy basement
when there was a whole beautiful house upstairs. But the
biggest problem with the scene was Christine's wounds. The injuries
to the back of her head was seen way too
severe to have come from a fall, even if that
fall had ended with her bashing her head against the
ship's bell, and she would have had to twist all
(06:09):
the way around as she fell, hitting the back of
her head, then twisting back around to land face down
on the landing.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
Yeah, no way, that's just not gonna happen.
Speaker 3 (06:18):
Christine had clear bruises on her face too. She would
have had to fall face down and face up simultaneously.
It just didn't make any sense. This wasn't an accident.
Christine fits you had been murdered.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
Dang, doesn't this remind you of the staircase murder so far?
Like the Michael Peterson case.
Speaker 3 (06:37):
Oh yeah, the injuries happening in places that didn't make
sense for a fall down the stairs sounds a lot
like it. Unless there was a murderous owl we don't know.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
Well, then it would be even more like it.
Speaker 3 (06:51):
There's an owl in the basement. We don't know if
Christine had been murdered. There was a series of logical
conclusions that fell into place after another. Like grim Dominos,
Christine had almost certainly been killed by repeated blows from
some blunt object. That is a messy way to kill someone,
with blood flying both from the impact and from the
(07:11):
weapon as it moves, creating blood spatter cast off on
nearby surfaces. But the only blood they saw immediately was
the pool that had leaked from Christine's head onto the floor.
Although they did soon find what looked like two bloody
sneaker prints, it wasn't from any of the responders, and
neither Ken nor Galen were wearing sneakers. The lack of
(07:31):
blood spatter meant Christine probably hadn't been killed on the
stairs or in the basement, and that meant someone had
moved the body afterwards to try and stage an accidental death.
Murder by a random intruder is vanishingly unlikely at any circumstance,
and for an intruder to hang around and take the
time and trouble to make a death look like an accident,
well it just doesn't happen.
Speaker 2 (07:53):
The people most likely to benefit from making a murder
look like an accident or family members. Ken and Christine's
two sons, Justin and John, were both in college in
different cities, so that just left Ken Fitzhugh himself. As
Christine's husband, he was always going to be high on
the list of suspects, and the fact that he'd immediately
jumped to a bizarre accidental theory for her death really
(08:16):
didn't help. I mean, she tripped on her shoes, those
damn shoes, hit her head on a bell, and suffocated
on the dry cleaning. He'd put this together within like
sixty seconds of finding his wife fatally injured at the
bottom of the stairs. Just man, come on. So the
police took Ken, Galen, and Carol back to the station
to be interviewed. They wanted them out of the house
(08:37):
so they wouldn't contaminate any evidence, and they wanted to
interview them separately to make sure they're versions of what
happened all matched up. They asked Galen and Carol the
obvious questions about their friends. Was there any trouble in
Ken and Christine's marriage? No, absolutely not. They were just
about the most devoted couple. Either of them knew financial troubles, Nope.
Palo Alto is one of the wealthiest cities in California,
(08:59):
and even there, the Fitzhughes were notably well off. Okay,
any affairs, obviously, this is something even close friends might
be in the dark about, but the idea seemed ridiculous
to both Galen and Carol. Then the interviews with the
ladies were interrupted by a furious yell from outside. Detective
Mike Denson was interviewing Ken. Ken Fitzhugh was fifty seven
(09:22):
years old, a slightly built, silver haired man with big glasses.
He looked kindly and harmless. He also seemed either exhausted
or just indifferent to what was happening. He seemed calm,
too calm to Dnson's eyes, and he was unpredictable When
Dentson asked if they could search the house, Ken said,
I don't mind if they searched, they could tear the
place apart. But then after reading the actual consent to
(09:46):
search for him, he changed his mind. You know what,
I don't want these guys just going through everything. We
have valuable things. It's a very difficult time. Denson nodded,
but he later told Carlton Smith, whose book Blood Will
Tell was one of our main sources for this one,
that he was thinking this guy's weird.
Speaker 3 (10:04):
Ken was just chatting.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
Away, grinning. Denson described him as jovial. He said the
cops could search the basement in the stairs, but nowhere else.
Denson agreed, he knew they had enough to get a
full search warrant from a judge without Ken's consent if
they had to. He asked Ken to walk him through
the day. Ken and Christine had both woken up at
six and gone out jogging with their dogs, then come
(10:27):
home and worked for a while at their respective computers.
Christine taught music at various schools around the district and
left around ten am for her first class. Ken had
been going back and forth between their own house and
their neighbor, a lawyer who Ken was helping with a
printer problem. He said goodbye to Christine, and then at
around eleven, Ken, who described his occupation as real estate consultant,
(10:50):
put the dogs in the car and drove to a
real estate project. Only suddenly he couldn't remember where it was.
Oh man, he said, I've been there a thousand times.
My brain's not worth working. Ken said he'd been at
this mysterious project for about an hour and had then
headed back to Palo Alto to pick up Galen and
Carol at the pre arranged time of one point thirty.
Everyone in Ken's life would say that punctuality was of
(11:13):
weirdly urgent importance to him. He had to be on
time on the freeway. He'd gotten a call from a
secretary at the school district telling him Christine had missed
her one PM class. That wasn't like her. Still, he
had to keep his appointment, so he picked up Galen
and Carol before heading home to check on Christine. Man,
(11:33):
you really care about punctuality If you get a call
that like your wife didn't show up at work and
you've got to go pick up your friend, like that
almost sounds like obsessive, compulsive or something like that. It's
very strange. So he'd gone in first looking upstairs, and
then he'd noticed the door of the basement was open
and looked down and saw Christine lying still at the
(11:53):
bottom of the steps. He ran out to call for
help from the ladies and hurried back in. So then
I saw the blame black shoe, Ken said in the
interview room. All of a sudden, he like half got
up from his chair and just bellowed the goddamned black shoes,
like hammered his fist down on the table. And I've
seen it. You can watch his interview. It's so weird,
(12:15):
like it just comes out of nowhere, like he's fine
and then he just explodes and then he's fine again.
So strange. He was loud enough to be heard all
through the police station, and people hurried to the small
window into the interview room, half expecting to see kenon
Denson in a fight way.
Speaker 3 (12:32):
To keep it together, Ken, you're really selling it. Keep
it up, Yeah, But you know, Ken just sat down,
lacing his fingers together and carried on as if nothing
had happened. Yeah, like turning it on and off like
a light switch. That's really that's what good actors doing. Yeah,
(12:54):
Christine had a pair of black shoes that she really liked,
but that, according to Ken, she'd fallen in before she'd
fallen on the friend's sidewalk, the office sidewalk. I caught her,
or she has smashed her face on the sidewalk. I
must have told her six times to get rid of
the black shoes.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
What do you want to bet he practiced those damn
shoes in the mirror like six or seven times. He
said it like two or three times already to different people.
He really wanted to make sure everybody knew about the shoes.
Speaker 3 (13:23):
You know, what do we tell a writing students show?
Don't tell? Like if you yes, if your little tableau
didn't tell the story good enough, Ken, then yeah, I
don't know what to tell ya. Okay, it's too much exposition.
Speaker 2 (13:39):
It's suspicious, it's too much explanation, like when you hammer
it something that much. And we've seen that before. I mean,
we've all seen that. True crime folks have all seen
that before, where somebody really hammering, like they'll try to
misdirect the police toward a particular suspect or whatever. That
always raises the antennae as it should.
Speaker 3 (13:58):
This little performance did nothing to change Dentson's opinion that
this guy was weird, and suggested that Ken, the kindly
old elf might have a fast boiling temper. And then
there was the bell. Ken said, it had been an
ornament in the backyard for eighteen years. He'd brought it
inside the previous week to get pictures and try and
(14:18):
sell it on eBay. But it was really heavy, and
once he had got it down the stairs, he just
put it down right there. If I'd only put it away,
Ken said, don't start blaming yourself, Dentson said, but what
he was thinking was, if Ken wanted to bring a
heavy bell into the basement, why would he even take
(14:39):
the stairs when there were storm doors that opened straight
out into the backyard. As it happened, Ken was worrying
about the wrong pair of shoes, because officers at the
scene had found a pair of white sneakers tucked under
the passenger seat of his Chevy suburban, and they had
spots of what looked like blood on them. Another detective
(14:59):
told Dnson, but Denson kept the information to himself for now.
He listened as Ken took a call from his youngest son, John,
who was flying back from the University of Washington and
whose flight had just been delayed. Ken was in the
circumstances startlingly flat as he spoke to a boy whose
mother had died violently just a couple of hours ago. Hello, Yes, John,
(15:22):
that's all right. Oh, I'm sorry to hear that. Okay,
before we come to the airport, we'll call and check
so we know what time. No, just wait for us, Okay, good, Yeah,
thanks for letting me know. Bye, good luck to you.
Damn Ken fits Hugh was a cold fish, at least
when he's not talking about women's footwear that raises the
(15:48):
hack of passion it does. Knowing about the sneakers, Denson
wanted to nail Ken down on what he'd been wearing
when he found Chrissine. Had he changed clothes anyway since then?
Was the outfit he had on? Now? Exactly what he'd
been wearing since the discovery? Ken said, yes, he was
(16:09):
wearing black leather loafers. If the blood on the sneakers
was Christine's, it could have only gotten there before Ken
had showed up at the house with Galen and Carroll Weird.
Ken continued being weird. When Dnson asked him if there
was anything else, he wanted to say.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
It's such a terrible shame. She was really enjoying herself again.
Her older son graduates from college in a couple of weeks,
so she wanted to be ready for that very sad time.
Sorry to burden you with that, you said her older son,
Dentson said, is he not your son? No, he's our son,
Ken corrected himself. Huh. Ken eventually did sign the consent
(16:49):
to search for him, as long as he could be
there when officers went through the house. This was fine
with Denson, as it meant he could keep Ken talking
and watch his reactions. Ken walked them all through the house.
Nothing appeared to be missing. There was no sign of
forced entry. Dnson put the squeeze on him. What had
Ken been wearing during his morning jog with Christine? His
(17:10):
white sneakers, Ken said, And where are those shoes now?
He'd put them back in the closet upstairs, Ken said.
An officer brought in the white sneakers inside a plastic bag.
They looked like his shoes, Ken said, but he was
dumbfounded as to how they could have gotten into the suburban.
Dnson told him the sneakers seemed to have blood on them.
(17:30):
Ken didn't react at all. Dentson said they were going
to test whether it was human blood. Still no reaction.
Ken insisted his shoes were still in the closet upstairs.
He showed them, and lo and behold, there was a
blank space in his neatly lined up pairs of shoes.
Ken was yet again dumbfounded, and continued to be so
(17:51):
when he was told officers had just found a bloody
paper towel in the back of the suburban. A little
later they'd find a green polo shirt also, Oh, bloody,
shoved even further under the passenger seat. Ye, they'll never
look there. Good call. Just then, oldest son, Justin arrived
along with his fiancee Angelina. Crying, Justin hugged his dad
(18:13):
in the driveway. Ken still looked about as perturbed as
if a barista had just added some unwonted nutmeg to
his latte. Police let them drive away to pick up
John from the airport, and the medical examiner, doctor Dian Vertaz,
arrived to inspect the scene and the body. Her later
autopsy would confirm her initial thoughts Christine had twenty individual
(18:34):
bruises on her face, most likely punches by a right
handed attacker. Pressure marks and hemorrhaging indicated someone had tried
to strangle her. There were bruises, likely defensive injuries on
her arms and hands. These were not the injuries you'd
expect from someone tripping on the stairs and reflexively putting
their arms out to try and break the fall, and
(18:56):
on the back of the head were by far the
worst wounds. Seven heavy blows from a blunt object, one
of which caused a palpable skull fracture, meaning the bones
on the skull moved under the doctor's fingers. Ooh, it's
so upsetting. She had no doubt that this was a homicide.
One thing doctor Vertas did not find was a cut
(19:18):
in the webbing between thumb and forefinger on Christine's right hand,
and this was important. By the time he was interviewed
again later that evening, kenn had come up with a
reason why Christine's blood might be on his sneakers. A
week ago, Christine had cut her hand with a trowel
while gardening, a cut bad enough that Kenned had to
put pressure on it until it stopped bleeding. Now that's
not something that heals to the point of complete invisibility
(19:41):
in a week, but there was no sign of a
cut there by this point. Even on the first day,
none of the investigators had much doubt that Ken fitzhu
had killed his wife, but they had no idea why.
The Fitzhughs had lived in Palo Alto since the early eighties,
and as investigators called friends and acquaintances who'd known them
in this time, they got the same answers. Ken and
(20:03):
Christine were a devoted, loving couple, happy, healthy, and wealthy.
It wasn't until investigators went further back to when the
couple had lived in San Diego that they started to
get a picture of what might be going on. See,
back then, Christine had an affair, and everybody knew about it.
Speaker 3 (20:46):
Everyone knew the fits Hughes were well off. Their big
house on Escapeda Avenue was worth two million dollars in
two thousand, over five million today. Ken had family money,
although it came to him by an unusual route. Ken's
own upbringing was modest. His dad, Kenny, managed a gas
station in auto repair shop. Ken's aunties, Kenny's sisters Helen, Ruth,
(21:10):
and Susie were all pretty ladies, and whether by coincidence
or design, all three married successful older men. Their three
husbands died in the forties, and the sisters all moved
into the same San Diego apartment building, apparently content to
give up on romance Altogether. None of them had any children,
and when they died in the seventies and eighties, their
(21:31):
inheritances passed first to Kenny and then to Ken Junior.
By two thousand, he had inherited around two million directly
and antiques, possibly worth up to three million dollars. Young
Ken's friends would describe him as a shy and sensitive boy,
but some of his other classmates remember him as a fussy,
smart ass who liked to show off his supposedly superior brain.
(21:54):
He never got angry, never showed a temper, but he
could be sneaky. Friend Alice recalled that Ken's dad kept
stacks of candy in a closet to be sold at
the gas station. Ken would sneak in and help himself.
I mean nothing odd there. If you have piles of
candy in the house, chances are that kids are going
to nab some. But Ken would sneak in while his
(22:16):
friends were there, eat in the closet, and sneak back out.
His friend's never got any of the candy.
Speaker 2 (22:22):
Oh, you selfish, little weasel. It reminds me of this
awful kid I nannied for in college. I've probably talked
about him before. This kid would rather literally rather I've
seen him do it, throw a cupcake in the trash
than share it with one of his friends. A kid
was the worst.
Speaker 3 (22:38):
Oh my god. Ken was smart and a talented musician.
He toyed with pursuing music as a career, but his
mom gently prodded him towards something that might actually make
him some money, and Ken went to college to study
electrical engineering. He still played though. While in college, he
got hold of an old church pipe organ and it
(23:00):
hauled down to his hometown of del Mar. The only
place willing to house the organ was the del Mar Fairgrounds,
and in the summer, Ken would play the organ for
the San Diego County Fair. In nineteen sixty four, right
after Ken had graduated, It was the sound of the
pipe organ at the county Fair that first caught the
attention of sixteen year old Christine Peterson. Christine was also
(23:23):
a musician, and a talented one. In fact, you could
fairly say she was a piano prodigy with the ability
to make it as a concert pianist. That could be
a heavy weight to hang around a kid's neck, especially
with Christine's demanding, kind of frosty Danish parents. A few
months before her death, Christine wrote in her diary, remembering
(23:44):
herself as a five year old girl, I felt approval
based on my actions rather than for who I was.
When I didn't perform well enough, the consequences were severe,
especially when the expectations were high. I was expected to
obey and be a perfect li girl. If I was,
my father was so proud. I learned to set my
(24:04):
standard for perfection to guard against injury.
Speaker 2 (24:08):
Man, it's like how to screw up your kid's page one.
At least when they first met, Ken and Christine were
a good match. They were both very smart, both musical,
both kind of awkward and introverted. They dated long distance
for a couple of years while Ken got his MBA
at Stanford and Christine, who had skipped a grade, started
studying music in Thousand Oaks when she was still just sixteen.
(24:31):
In nineteen sixty six, when Ken was twenty four and
Christine eighteen. They got married and Ken got an accounting
job at the Teledyne Ryan Aerospace firm in San Diego.
There's no way of knowing whether this factored into Ken's
decision making, but because Ryan was a defense contractor with
Ken's department, working on early remote controlled drones, he was
exempt from the Vietnam draft. Christine, meanwhile, gave up the
(24:55):
idea of being a concert pianist with great relief. Instead,
she attend in San Diego State College to study for
a career as a music teacher, possibly the only switch
her Danish parents would accept, both of them having grown
up in a country where teachers were highly respected. Must
be nice, and I say that as a teacher, we
what does Rodney Dangerfield say? We ain't get no respect.
(25:19):
After a couple of years, Ken made a friend at work,
a guy named Robert Kenneth Brown, and invited him home
to dinner. Robert aka Bob had an accounting degree, which
was what got him his job alongside Ken, and he
was studying law. He and Ken had really hit it off,
which was odd because Bob Brown was almost Ken's complete opposite,
a big extroverted dude, dedicated to live in his life
(25:42):
like his plane was going down. He hit it off
with Christine too, despite some embarrassment at their first meeting.
When Ken called out of the blue to say he
was bringing a friend home for dinner, Christine rushed to
get some Chinese takeout and was in the process of
transferring it into some dishes to make it look home cooked.
When Ken and Bob walked in the door. That so funny.
Soon the three of them were best buds. Bob would
(26:05):
have dinner with the fitz Hughes maybe three nights a week,
and most weekends. They hung out often with Bob's fun
loving crowd. When I first met them, they were social recluses,
Bob said later. After I was around and involved with
my friends, they began to break loose. They'd never gone
out dancing or having drinks or anything, or gone camping
at the beach, or drove a motorcycle or dune buggies
(26:26):
or anything like that. They weren't party people. Christine in particular,
really started to loosen up. She'd had a much more
restrictive upbringing than Ken had, and her introversion was more
of a learned habit than a reflection of who she
actually was. Later in her life, she'd be known as
a really warm social person, and this was the time
(26:46):
that that side of her really started to come out.
She was a twenty year old woman who finally started
living life like a twenty year old woman. Ken, who
seemed content to jump directly from college into middle age,
mostly just tagged a life an amiable sidekick to his
increasingly vibrant wife. We deal with a lot of messy
relationships on this show, so I'm sure a lot of
(27:08):
you were thinking, huh. A young wife learning how to
have fun, a boring, beige husband, and a charismatic new
friend who spends a lot of time with them both
what could possibly go wrong? Ken, though, would later claim
he never had any worries about anything happening between Christine
and Bob, and that he had good reason not to worry.
(27:28):
According to Ken, in the early years that he knew him,
Bob had lived with a succession of boyfriends, showed no
interest in women, and had once propositioned Ken he was,
as far as Ken knew gay. At least that was
what Ken claimed. Bob, on the other hand, says it
was the other way. Around that. One time they were
on a camping trip together and Ken, probably a few
(27:50):
beers deep at this point, just suddenly reached over and
just grabbed his joke, Wow, Ken, you really know how
to woo a fella, And Bob said he just kind
of took Ken's hand off his wien and said something
like what's this and Ken refused to answer, and they
just kind of pretended like it never even happened.
Speaker 3 (28:08):
So basically, if these three had just agreed to be
a throuple and called it today, we might not be
talking about this right now, right seriously.
Speaker 2 (28:17):
So Bob was actually by something he said. All his friends,
including Ken and Christine knew. Well we know Christine knew
for sure, because not long after they'd met, she and
Bob started an affair that would last for almost a decade,
and they were not subtle about it. When they moved
into a new house, Ken and Christine threw a housewarming party.
At one point, she told Ken that she and Bob
(28:38):
were going out to get some ice and they didn't
come back for hours, and when they finally did, they
had that certain glow about them, you know, like you
could tell when people had just done it, like you
just can't. Other people at the party were suspicious, but
Ken was oblivious, or maybe he just didn't care.
Speaker 3 (28:57):
It's impossible to know exactly what was going on in
the fitz Hughes relationship while they were down in San Diego.
Ken was a stubborn liar. Once he decided to cover
something up, he was going to die on that hill.
He said he was completely in the dark about the
affair and wouldn't reveal anything else. And when police first
interviewed Bob Brown, he was laid up in recovery from
(29:18):
a motorcycle wreck and loaded on pain medication. His narrative
wandered and sometimes contradicted itself. When he was more clear headed,
he was only marginally more reliable as witness. But Brown's version,
which is that Ken was fully aware of Christine's affair,
is a lot easier to believe than Ken's insistence that
(29:38):
he knew nothing about it. All their friends knew it
was a secret, so open it wasn't really a secret anymore.
Christine and Bob often went on ski trips to Colorado
or Lake Tahoe with his buddies, even one time to
the Swiss Alps. More often than not, Ken stayed home,
just like when he was a kid. Ken ever expressed
(30:00):
any anger, although there's a difference between not expressing something
and never showing it. Once, while they were camping, Ken
accidentally ran over Bob's foot and broke it, then refused
to drive him to the hospital for a couple of days,
causing a nasty infection to send in.
Speaker 2 (30:17):
Whoa yeah.
Speaker 3 (30:19):
Another time, while they were sailing, Ken turned the boat sharply,
causing the boom to swing around and smack Bob in
the head, knocking him out Coal campers, have you ever
hospitalized one particular friend and only that friend repeatedly? I
don't think accident is the word we're looking for here.
Speaker 2 (30:39):
Uh yeah, Yeah, he was low key trying to kill
that guy, and I think it might have actually been subconscious.
But yeah.
Speaker 3 (30:47):
According to Bob, Christine wasn't willing to talk about it
too much, but he got the impression that Ken just
wasn't that interested in her or anyone else sexually. He
may also have been impotent, but by the time he
brought that up, Bob was convinced Ken had killed Christine
and wasn't exactly going to go out of his way
to help the Guy's reputation. In nineteen seventy eight, Christine
(31:10):
got pregnant, and according to Bob Brown, it was one
hundred percent on purpose. After her first son, Justin, was born,
Bob testified, she told me she was positive I was
the father because she had quit taking the birth control
pills and that she hadn't had sex with anyone but
me for a period of four months or so before
she was diagnosed as pregnant. Bob and Christine were both
(31:33):
close with Bob's aunt, Janet, and Janet said Christine had
told her that Ken couldn't have kids, so if Christine
wanted to get pregnant, at least in the old fashioned way,
someone else would have to help her. But there was
more to this. Why would Christine all of a sudden
want to have a kid and was she the only
one making the decision. Two of Ken's wealthy aunts were
(31:54):
still alive at this point, and they wanted to make
Ken the only child of any of the four Fits
siblings their heir, but according to Bob, it insisted on
one condition. Ken would only get their money if he
had a child.
Speaker 2 (32:09):
God, that is so weird. It's like something from a
Dickens novel or something so strange. Bob said both Ken
and Christine had told him about this. His aunt Janet
said Christina had told her about it separately. Bob came
to believe that Ken, unable or unwilling to have sex
with his wife, encouraged Christine to get pregnant with him.
(32:30):
It really stretches belief to think Ken was unaware of
who Justin's bio dad was after the kid was born. Apparently,
he looked exactly like Bob, a resemblance that was only
going to get stronger as the kid grew up. Bob
took Christine and baby Justin to family gatherings and told
everybody Justin was his son. Who knows how all three
felt a couple years later, when John was born and
(32:52):
was very clearly Ken's biological son. The affair between Christine
and Bob stopped not long after Justin was born, although
they remained close friends, as did Ken and Bob, and
he stayed close to them as part of the family.
Little Justin was always following Uncle Bob around, But Bob
Brown was one of those people who burn hot and
(33:13):
flame out, a piece of his party lifestyle that Ken
and Christine had never joined in on was the drugs
and the serious drinking, two problems that got worse throughout
the eighties and early nineties, when, not coincidentally, Bob got
in trouble with the law on a few occasions and
was eventually disbarred. Ken and Christine had an intervention and
put up twelve thousand dollars for Bob to go to
(33:35):
a nice rehab. But Bob relapsed, apparently in some epically
embarrassing public way that nobody in his friend group was
willing to talk about, and finally Ken and Christine cut
him off. However, their weird triangular relationship was constructed, it
was over. According to Bob, he and Christine hadn't been
in touch till early two thousand, when she'd called him.
(33:58):
Justin was going to graduate that spring. Afterwards, Christine said
she was going to tell him the truth about who
his dad was. Investigators would come to agree with Bob
that Ken had known all about Justin's parentage from the
get go, and that Christina told Ken she was going
to share the truth with Justin.
Speaker 3 (34:16):
When you hear the.
Speaker 2 (34:17):
Bare bones of this case, I think a lot of
people assume the shape of it is he found out
he wasn't his kid's bio dad, and that's why he
killed her. But I don't think that's it. What pushed
Ken over the edge was knowing the truth was going
to come out. It wasn't the infidelity that he found unbearable.
It was that people would know about the infidelity. This
(34:37):
was a new town, new group of friends, you know,
they'd left all the people who knew about this in
the past, and this was going to be humiliating. So
we've seen countless times with people like Ken, who at
his core was a narcissist, just how far they'll go
to avoid humiliation. A lot of premeditated murders ultimately boiled
(34:59):
out to be about sex or money. Bob Brown had
provided investigators with a lot of juicy things from column A,
and he also drew their attention to some stuff from
columb Bob had an airtight alibi, by the way, in
case y'all were wondering. Ken Fitzhugh, as we said earlier,
inherited a whole lot of family money along with an
antique collection that was worth just as much, if not more.
(35:22):
When Bob was telling investigators about Ken's inheritance, he mentioned
that all the antiques cramming the house on Escabeda Avenue
came from Ken's aunts, but the detectives hadn't seen any
antiques that looked particularly special. There were hardly any at all.
When they said this to Bob, he was confused. He
hadn't been in the house in a few years, but
back then it had been literally jammed wall to wall
(35:44):
with very expensive stuff, millions of dollars worth of antiques.
The police had already asked Ken to estimate the value
of everything in the house, and he told them one
hundred and twenty five thousand.
Speaker 3 (35:55):
Within that five years, though, Ken and Christine's kids had
gone away to college, and that's a time when a
lot of parents make changes to their house. Being surrounded
by valuable antiques could certainly feel smothering. Maybe Ken and
Christine wanted less clutter around, and that's why they sold
their antique collection or put in storage. I mean, there's
(36:15):
no reason they'd have to sell them, right, I mean,
everyone knew the fitz Hughes were comfortably well off.
Speaker 2 (36:23):
Right.
Speaker 3 (36:24):
Christine was a part time music teacher and Ken worked
as a nebulously titled real estate consultant, which could mean
anything or nothing. At all, at least recently, Ken's work
trended towards the nothing at all end of that spectrum.
The fitz Hughes nineteen ninety nine tax return showed an
income of just twenty eight thousand dollars, almost all of
(36:46):
it earned by Christine. But then, of course, the rich
can afford to be idle within limits with millions of
inherited dollars. Those limits can be pretty broad, but they're
not infinite. For example, in that same year of nineteen
ninety nine, and Ken and Christine's family expenditures added up
to three hundred and twenty thousand dollars.
Speaker 2 (37:07):
Bro, do you want to burn through millions of dollars?
Because that's how you burn through millions of dollars? Jesus.
Speaker 3 (37:14):
It seemed like that was exactly what Ken and Christine
had done. In the weeks before the murder, some of
their checks had bounced, and the government had recently filed
a tax lane against them. Just days before Christine had
been killed, Ken had applied for a hefty bank loan.
On the application, he'd claimed a monthly income of sixteen
five hundred dollars, which was obviously a lie. It looked
(37:39):
like the Fitzhughes were in a deep hole, but Ken's
answer was to ask the bank to give him a
bigger shovel to dig with. What they did have was
about one point five million dollars of equity in the
house on Escabeda Avenue, but using that came with its
own problems. I suspect Christine had no idea how bad
things had gotten. Wrote about her anxieties in her diary,
(38:02):
and she never mentioned finances. Ken was a persincity control freak,
so much so that early in their marriage he'd pressured
Christine into granting him power of attorney so he'd have
complete control over all their big decisions. Things were reaching
the point where Ken would have to come clean about
their bank account, and I think the financial impact on
(38:24):
his possible motive was essentially the same as the motive
related to Justin's parentage being exposed. He would lose face,
He'd be humiliated twice over to Ken, that was unbearable.
Everything investigators found strengthened their belief that Ken had killed Christine.
Luminol testing revealed blood of evidence in the kitchen, especially
(38:46):
around one of their kitchen chairs. Investigators would come to
believe Christine had been attacked from behind while she sat there,
first bludgeoned and then strangled and punched when she didn't
immediately die. The luminol showed s white marks on the
floor of an attempt to clean up the blood. At
the top of the basement steps was a large T
shaped stain. Christine's body had been dragged from the kitchen
(39:09):
and briefly laid on the carpet, presumably while Ken opened
the basement door.
Speaker 2 (39:15):
Kenn had finally remembered that his supposed real estate project
and alibi was up in San Bruno, about half an
hour away. He had said he'd gotten a call from
the school district's secretary while he was on the freeway,
but data from the cell phone towers put him in
the area around Escabda Avenue. Kennod also said he tried
calling Christine both on their landline and her cell phone
(39:36):
had left messages both times. There were no messages from
him on either. A neighbor in the street behind Ken
and Christine's house said she remembered a dark blue Chevy
Suburban just like Ken's parked on the street around the
time police knew Christine had been killed. An unlocked gate
connected the Fitzhughes backyard to their rearward neighbor. Detectives thought
(39:58):
Ken had parked, come through that gate and gone into
his basement through the unlocked storm doors. He'd waited down
there until he heard Christine coming back from her morning class,
and then investigators thought things had gotten frantic. Justin's fiancee, Angelina,
was in her first year working as a teacher while
Justin finished up with college, and she'd been living with
(40:19):
Ken and Christine. Detectives thought Ken's plan had been for
Angelina to find Christine's body when she got home from
work while Ken was out puttering around with Galen and Carol.
But then the secretary had called to say Christine hadn't
shown up for her class. Ken had to seem worried
as if he'd tried to find out what was going
on with his wife. He had to think fast on
(40:40):
the spot, which had never been one of his strong suits.
Ken probably it had a plan to dispose of his
bloody shoes and shirt while he was out with Galen
and Carol, but now he couldn't do it. In a panic,
he didn't come up with an alternative. The shoes, the
goddamn shoes. Police were waiting for just one thing to
put the habeas gravis on Ken Fitzhugh, and that was
(41:01):
confirmation that the blood on the shoes, shirt and paper
towel was Christine's, and DNA testing showed conclusively that it
was so. On May nineteenth, two weeks after Christine had
been murdered, Ken and John left the house to drive
to Stockton for Justine's graduation. Police had been shadowing Ken
since the murder. As far as they knew then he
(41:22):
was a millionaire with the resources to flee to anywhere
in the world. There were more officers than normal behind
him now in anticipation of the DNA results coming through,
and when they did, armed officers pulled Ken over and
arrested him. There wasn't much doubt that Ken would be convicted,
but his possible motives were apparently a little too loosey
goosey for the jury. They ultimately decided the killing was
(41:46):
not premeditated. I absolutely think it was, but whatever, and
they convicted Ken of second degree murder rather than first.
He was sentenced to fifteen years to life, with the
possibility of parole after thirteen years, but he'd never get there.
While he was incarcerated. Ken was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease
and would later become terminally ill from complications. He was
(42:09):
granted compassionate parole in February twenty twelve and died in
October of the same year. So secrets, folks, right, they
can be nasty little things, especially when the secrets threaten
a narcissis fragile Ego, he could have easily just divorced Christine.
I wouldn't have blamed him, honestly, but then all the
(42:31):
dirty laundry would have come out in court. The open
secret would have just been open. And for somebody like Ken, ego,
death is death. They're the same thing and a seat
of walking away. Ken made the choice to pull out
the stopper on decades of pent up anger, and everyone
around him paid the price. So that was a wild one, right, campers.
(42:53):
You know we'll have another one for you next week,
but for now, lock your doors, light your lights, and
stay safe until we get together again around the True
Crime Campfire. And if you haven't booked your spot on
the Crime Wave True Crime Cruise from November third through
November seventh, get on it, y'all. Join Katie and Me
plus last podcast on the Left, Scared to Death and
Sinisterhood for a rocking good time at sea. You can
(43:15):
pay all at once. Our set up a payment plan,
but you gotta have a fan code to book a ticket,
So go to Crimewave atca dot com slash campfire and
take it from there. And as always, we want to
send a grateful shout out to a few of our
lovely patrons. Thank you so much to Lydia, Jeremy, Kathy
and Susan. We appreciate y'all to the moon and back.
And if you're not yet a patron, you are missing out.
(43:37):
Patrons of our show get every episode ad free at
least a day early, sometimes even two plus tons of
extra content like patrons only episodes and hilarious post show discussions.
And once you hit the five dollars and up categories
to get in more cool stuff a free sticker at
five dollars, a rat enamel pin or fridge magnet, while
supplies last at ten virtual events with Katie and me,
(43:58):
and we're always looking for new stuff to do for you,
So if you can come join us at patreon dot
com slash True Crime Campfire
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