True Crime Campfire - A Voice in the Dark: The Ohta Family Murders

Episode Date: May 9, 2025

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.htmlNew York Times archives: https://www.nytimes.com/1971/12/16/archives/killer-of-eye-doctor-and-four-on-coast-is-sentenced-to-die.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/1971/11/30/archives/mechanic-on-coast-guilty-of-killing-5-in-oneman-war.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/1970/10/21/archives/5-slain-on-coast-and-left-in-pool-surgeon-wife-2-children-and.htmlNew 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.phpCrime Library: https://www.crimelibrary.org/notorious_murders/mass/john_frazier/index.htmlInvestigation Discovery's "A Crime To Remember," episode "Killer Prophet"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/CAMPFIREFollow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, tons of extra content, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfirehttps://www.truecrimecampfirepod.com/Facebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/truecrimecampfire/?hl=enTwitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail]! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.comBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

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. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. 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. This is a voice in the dark, the Oda family murders.

So, campers, for this one, we're a little ways outside Santa Cruz, California, just after 8 p.m. on October 19th, 1970. 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 999 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, which they could see had reached the mansion's roof.

The firemen smashed the Lincoln's window 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 firehead, had multiple different origin points, which almost always means one thing. 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,

which is understandable on a purely aesthetic 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 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 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. Ice surgeon Dr. Victor Oda, his wife Virginia, and their two sons, Derek and Taggart. The fifth body was identified by her driver's license as Victor's secretary, Dorothy Cadwallader. They'd 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 three

times by a 38 caliber pistol. Everyone else had taken one shot in the back of the neck with a 22-caliber gun. A 22 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 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 Dr. Ota and the Lincoln to Dorothy Cadwallader,

but for everyday driving, Virginia Oda drove a dark green Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser Station 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 Dr. Oda's Rolls-Royce, investigators found a typewritten note. It read, Halloween, 1970. Today, World War III will begin as brought to you by the people of the free universe. From this day forward, anyone 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 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 knight of cups, the night of pentacles, and the knight of swords. All of this would have set people on edge at any time, but especially so in California in 1970. The Manson family murders had happened just a year ago,

and the trial was still going on and making headlines. Investigators in Santa Cruz County feared they might have their own weird, bloody-handed cult on their hands. In addition to their two boys, the Otis had two daughters. 15-year-old Lark was away at boarding school, and 18-year-old Tara went to school for fashion design in New York. In fact, she'd left to fly back east just last. 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 Cadwallader, 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 who are coming around here. He thought a hippie cult was behind the killings. Even though the police didn't initially release the contents of the creepy note, a lot of Santa Cruz locals shared Jack's suspicions. There was a simmering tension with a 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 to help myself to your stuff. And that small number of bad apples did a lot. of damage to the hippie's reputation. And then, like we said earlier, the Tate La Bianca murders happened, and the whole scene took on a sinister, bloody edge. And earlier in 1970, in North Carolina, Dr. Jeffrey McDonald had suffered a tragedy when four hippie-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 loud music and wafted weed smoke all over the place and said stuff like, hey man, don't harsh my groove. That didn't absolve them of suspicion, though. Dr. 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 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 Otis' dresser. The doctor was well known as a snazzy dresser, and silk scarves were a regular part of his outfits, worn around his neck instead of ties. Victor had also owned a 22-calibered 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. 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. But the house didn't provide much in the way of clues that got them any closer to finding whoever had killed the owner. and Dorothy Catawalader. Their best hope of that right now was tracking down Virginia's green Vista cruiser. That car showed up the next day

in spectacular fashion when a freight train smashed into it inside the Rincon tunnel of the Southern Pacific Railroad just a few miles outside of Santa Cruz. Someone had driven it about 150 feet into the tunnel, set the seats on fire, and fled.

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 500% increase in sales in the days following the murders.

The manhunt didn't turn up anything, and to try and shake something loose, investigators released the contents of the note they'd found on Dr. Oda's Rolls-Royce. On Front Street in Santa Cruz, 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 catalyst had been the 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 catalyst 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 matched his tone exactly. This is right on, man, one of them 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 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 Frazier. 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-Frasier was 24 years old in 1970, and he'd had a messy life. He was born in 1946 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. We don't know much about this time in his life, except that he was in a car wreck bad enough to break his collarbone 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 bedwetting, both of which would stay with him into adulthood. I used to sleepwalk 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 11, John was arrested for shoplifting a penknife. Right after this, his mom moved them both down to Santa Cruz, possibly in the 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 12 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 laughs either.

His mom raised rabbits to sell their meat as food and sometimes made John help her kill them. This is the kind of thing that's not dramatic to many country kids who are 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 15, and not long after he was arrested for burglary. He was sent to another foster family, where he stole a 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 19 years old.

Back in Santa Cruz, John bounced between jobs, including a brief stent working for the disco-discount department store, where he met and started an affair with a married co-worker named Dolores. Okay. No part of this guy's childhood was amusing, but I'm going to be real. Having a dirty affair with Dolores from the Discount Disco Department Store feels like one of those adult shell Silverstein poems. It really does. 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 to job, mostly as a gas station attendant and mechanic, rarely able to get along with his co-workers 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'd followed her around town saying disgusting shit.

John swore to Dolores, it was just a case of mistaken identity. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So this was where John Lindley-Frasier was at at the start of 1970. Kind of a fuck-up, kind of a creep. And he'd already started to get strange in 1969, freaking Dolores out saying stuff like, I have a great God-granted purpose.

Yikes. But from May 16th, 19th, 1970 onwards, things got weirder. In the morning, John rear-ended another car in Scotts 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 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, 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 to the doctor, but John refused and just sat in silence for hours.

God, that would be so scary and so awful to see your husband like that. Yeah, it's really common for people suffering from concussions to experience depression, by the way. Yes. Yeah. To make ends meet, John and Dolores had taken on their friend Allison as a roommate. And after some planning, John sat Dolores and Allison down in the cabin and started dramatically preaching to them about his new belief in living in total harmony with nature, telling them they were to study under him and learn the right ways to treat the earth. all vehicles in all buildings were to 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 Yeah but it's really hard to keep something like that synced up or it was in 1970 so John had to keep interrupting his sermon to go futs with the tape player and he was getting more and more like mad and red face and frustrated until finally he just looked up to the heavens and called out,

I'm sorry, father. And God said, that's okay, Timu, Ted Kaczynski, you're doing your best. 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? Worse, absolutely. Worse.

Yeah, time would have like telescoped at that point. God. 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 to the pollution caused by cars.

voted 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 seek help, but he'd just rant at her about how the book of revelations had been written explicitly for him and him alone to read. Wow. 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 trying to kill him. You're all working against me now, he said. I don't trust none of you turkeys. 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 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 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 milk shack on his mom's property, six feet by six feet, sleeping in a pile of sleeping bags. Hypocrat, that's still a building, by the way.

The path to it stopped at a ravine, crossed by a rickety rope bridge that John had made. The shack was less than a mile. from the Oda House. 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 only take John in small doses, and his intensity scared a lot of people. John spent a lot of time wandering around, often moseying 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 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 came from a confused desire to save the planet, but let's not discount the possibility of good, old-fashioned jealousy. John Lindley-Frasier was alone in his crazy hatred of the Oda family. Victor Oda had been born in Montana in 1924. After high school, he worked hard to pay his way through college

and helped support his Japanese immigrant parents. He served in the Army from 1943 to 45, 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 1960 and starting an ophthalmology practice. He was very successful and very well-liked, and was 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 site-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 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-Frasier'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, hair, full-bearded, 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 John had gotten since his accident and described where the shack he was staying in was. Delores 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 38-caliber gun, and a backpack. He'd left behind his wallet, his driver's license, and a book on tarot cards, telling her, I won't be needing those anymore. And that was the last Dolores had seen of or heard from her husband. Maybe Word had gotten around that John was the likely suspect 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. 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 Oda's. After the family were dead,

they felt bad enough to come forward, which is something, but not much. How many times, people? Oh, my God. 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 conspicuously clean and neat. The police 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 Sanford, had anticipated this and set up what he called traps, just sticks placed across the trail on the bridge that would be disturbed if 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 Sanford'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 to a glass of water. Investigators still thought they were looking for more people. 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 Oda's Vista Cruiser on the morning after the murder. He stuck in their minds because 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 Dr. 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 and the house had all been cut with a knife. On John's knife, they discovered metal 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, but she hadn't on the day of the murder. The schools called Victor. He asked the 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. One man with a gun could control and bind each as they arrived. 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, John slashed his wrist 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 psychiatrist 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 judge agreed that was a concern and moved the trial to Redwood City on the San Francisco Bay. Eventually, the trial began in October 1971, a year after the killings. John Linley-Frasier 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 1970, psychiatrist Dr. David Marlowe had spoken with John around 40 times. John had told him what happened in 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. It doesn't 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 19th, John snuck into the Oda house and surprised Virginia, who was home alone. Days earlier, he'd stolen a 38-caliber pistol from one of 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 22. 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 the 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 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 blindfolded them with Victor's silk scarves, then shoved them into separate rooms of the house. When Victor and Derek 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 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 1965 when John was 19 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 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-Frasier was a strange, sad man. Victor at first tried to argue with John, 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, 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 short Dorothy could wallet 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 Oda's 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 other with Dr. 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 that bothers me. But even if, and I don't think he was, even if Dr. 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, what does she do? She didn't build the 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. Nope. Dr. Marlow, 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 agent of God sent to save the earth. The prosecution's expert witness, Dr. John Peshaw, argued that although John was clearly mentally ill, he was not insane in the manner that would absolve him from the legal consequences of his actions. He was a sociopath and aware of his actions. I consider him intolerant,

crafty, and arrogant, Dr. Pishaw said. He sets his own rules. He disregards the feelings of others. Yeah, and some of that was very much the case before the schizophrenia would have set in. I mean, And, you know, before he was displaying those symptoms. So, yeah. And 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 insane in

the psychiatric way. Sure. The legal definition of insanity is to prevent people who do not understand the difference between right and wrong from going to prison or serving. serving time for crimes that they could not understand the consequences of. 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. Right. And that's the, yeah, that's the biggest indicator that he understood what he did was wrong. Oh, hell yeah, he did. To add an extra little wrinkle to the arguments about John Lonely Frazier's brain, on December 3rd, 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 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 was. Damn, that is a hell of a logic pretzel you're offering us up there, defense attorneys. I just, I mean, it's, yeah, you have to, 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 swastika in his forehead during his own trial, like without any of the permanent pain and permanence of the swastika. By the way, we've said it before, 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. Absolutely. A couple weeks later, when the jury made their decision on his sentencing, John was completely bald. No hair, no beard, no eyebrows. He sat reading George Orwell's 1984. 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 subtlety of a pretentious eighth grader. It's all a sham, man. It would only be slightly better if he was reading Catcher in the Rye. You know what I mean? Yeah. Or animal form would be good too,

either of the Orwell, yeah. Catcher in the Rye would be funnier, I think, because it's like... Yeah, absolutely. They're all phony. And maybe a little more on brand for our boy here, you know? Yeah. The state obligingly agreed to crush him, and John Lindley-Frasier was found guilty and sentenced to death.

He was only on death row for a few months, though, because in April of 1972, the Supreme Court of California ruled the state's death penalty laws were unconstitutional. John's sentence was commuted to life in prison. We've spoken before about how crime, especially violent crime, can send ripples of pain and damage far wider than our. immediately clear, and that's especially true in this case. The Oda's oldest daughter, 18-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 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 1977, when she was 25, she asphyxiated herself in her garage with the car exhaust. Oh my God, that is so sad. And it gets worse, Victor Oda's mother, Iko, had also suffered from depression since the murders, and two years after Tara's death, at the age of 78, she hanged herself in the bathroom of her nursing home. Lark Oda, 15 years old at the time of the murders, was the only survivor of 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. I hope so. And there was one more death. In August of 2009, 62-year-old John Linley-Frasier hanged himself to death in Mule Creek State prison, and I doubt many people mourned him. So that was a wild one, right, campers?

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