True Crime Campfire - Touched By an Angel: The Murder of Fred Jablin

Episode Date: February 16, 2024

Leonard Cohen sang, “All I ever learned from love / Was how to shoot somebody who outdrew ya,” which should certainly strike a chord with followers of true crime. We’ve seen time and again how, after a bitter break-up, a person can go to extraordinary lengths to get their own back, whether the wrongs they’ve suffered are real or exist entirely in their own heads. Join us for a true crime story of greed, revenge, and toxic self-absorption. Sources:Die, My Love by Kathryn Casey48 Hours, S17E29, “Two Wigs, a Gun and a Murder”https://richmond.com/from-the-archives/from-the-archives-piper-rountree-sentenced-to-life-in-prison-for-killing-ex-husband-in/article_b5a5b3be-017c-5a34-a053-e255a947f36b.htmlhttps://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna7037898https://law.justia.com/cases/virginia/court-of-appeals-unpublished/2007/0155062.htmlhttps://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/lawyer-gets-life-in-ex-husband-s-death-1916001.phpFollow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all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/TrueCrimeCampfirehttps://www.truecrimecampfirepod.com/Facebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @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. Leonard Cohen saying, all I ever learned from love was how to shoot somebody who outdrew you. which should certainly strike a chord with followers of true crime. We've seen time and time again how, after a bitter breakup, a person can go to extraordinary lengths to get their own back, whether the wrongs they've suffered are real or exist entirely in their

own heads. This is touched by an angel, the murder of Fred Jablin. So, campers, for this one, we're in Richmond, Virginia, October 30th, 2004, just after 6.30 in the morning. The pretty suburban street of Harthcloe Lane was all decorated for Halloween, with pumpkins on the porches and bedsheet ghosts hanging from tree branches. Not many people were up and about yet, but that was about to change real quick. Three gunshots cracked through the quiet fall air. All down the street, people startled awake. Dogs started barking. Bob and Doreen McGardle were were already awake, but still in bed, but the shots sounded real close, and Bob jumped out of bed and

hurried to the window, which looked out onto the street. He saw someone running fast across his lawn, although it was too dark out to make out any details of the figure. Doreen called 911. The dispatcher asked if they were sure they hadn't just heard a car back firing, but Bob was an ex-marine. He knew what gunshots sounded like. The dispatcher told them a squad car was on the way, but the police weren't super worried yet. It wasn't that unusual for reports of shots fired to lead nowhere, especially out near the edge of town like Harthclo Lane was. There were some woods in a creek close by, and sometimes people would go in there and do target practice or duck hunt. Going hunting close to a subdivision at O'Dark 30 in the morning would be really rude and at least misdemeanor level illegal,

but, you know, sometimes people are dicks. The squad car was there. in minutes, crawling slowly down the street and shining flashlights onto the lawns and driveways, throwing creepy shadows up against the houses from the Halloween decorations. The car stopped at Bob and Doreen's house, so an officer could come to the door and hear their report firsthand. Then the cops went back to their slow circuit around the neighborhood. At 7 a.m., they stopped to talk to Bob again, telling him they couldn't find anything amiss, but he should call them again if he spotted anything weird once it got light. Bob said he would. He and Doreen were going to take the dog out anyway as soon as dawn broke.

In the slowly lightning day, they walked past the house of their neighbor, Fred Javlin, and Doreen noticed what looked like a pile of clothes lying crumpled on the driveway beside Fred's Black Ford Explorer. You better check and see what that is, she told Bob, her heart already sinking. What it was was Fred Jablin, dressed in navy blue sweats, his face and hands shockingly pale. He looked dead. Bob called back to Doreen, who already had her cell phone in her hands, and she dialed 9-1-1 for the second time that morning. We found Fred Jablin, our neighbor, in his driveway, she said. It looks like he's dead.

He was, despite the efforts of paramedics to revive him. They found a gunshot wound in his back right away. His sweatshirt soaked with blood around it. Neighbors had told police Fred had three kids, and they had no idea if they were safe or where the shooter might be. A SWAT team quietly cleared the house, waking up each of Fred's kids in turn and escorting them out to an ambulance. His oldest kid, 15-year-old Jocelyn, was the first one they woke up. Make sure my brother, sister, and dad get out, she told the officer who guided her out of the house. They found nothing suspicious inside, no sign of a break-in. Fred's morning coffee was still warm in the pot. This didn't look like a burglary gone wrong or anything like that. It looked like a cold, deliberate killing.

Fred Jablin was a guy you could set your watch by. He liked his routines. Every morning at around the same time, he'd start a pot of coffee, then go pick up his newspaper in the driveway. If the shooter knew his habits, Fred would have made an easy target. Just crouch behind a bush till he turned around the corner of the house and had his back to you, and he'd be hard to miss. But who would want to kill Fred Jablin? He was a quiet, kind of nerdy guy, a devoted dad and a professor at the University of Richmond, well-liked by both his neighbors and his students. He was the kind of guy who shouldn't have had an enemy in the world. But it didn't take long for the police to learn that that was definitely not the case.

Within just a few hours of Fred's death, they got in touch with his brother Michael in Northern Virginia. Michael sat in shocked silence for a few moments, then said, Have you considered my brother's ex-wife as a suspect? When a colleague and friend of Fred's at the University of Richmond heard about his death, she immediately said, oh my God, Piper killed him. Fred Jablin was born in 1952 in New York City, a bright kid who'd wanted to be a scientist since he was barely old enough to walk. His parents, like a lot of people who'd been through the Great Depression, lived modest lives.

But every month, their mom would take Fred and his brother Michael out to see a Broadway show. Fred was an academic star. And in 1977, he got his Ph.D. in organizational communication, which is one of those fields that from the outside might seem about as interesting as watching paint dry, but, you know, the people who are into it are really into it. And Fred was definitely into it. It was a brand new field at the time, and Fred was a rising star. He was meticulous and smart, and he had a real talent for recognizing patterns. In 1977, he landed a teaching gig at the University of Texas and Austin, where Fred quickly made friends. He never had trouble with that. He was quiet, but funny too.

and people liked him a lot. In his mid-20s, he was already mostly bald, and he wore a truly awful toupee just to please his mother. Don't bless his heart. Yeah, moms are weird about their kid's hair, right? Like, my mom freaked out when my brother shaved his head. Like, it was way disproportionate. Like, calm down.

God, it's his head. One night, Fred drove himself to the ER for an emergency appendectomy. And at some point during, the toupee fell off and got lost. And to everybody's relief, except, for his mom, I guess. He never replaced it. About three years into his time at UT, 28-year-old Fred met a 21-year-old senior by the name of Piper Roundtree. Piper was bright and real pretty, kind of pixie-looking, and she liked to hang out and talk with her professors after class. If you knew Fred and Piper, you probably would never think to set them up with

each other, calm and careful Fred and free spirit Piper. But that opposite's attract thing is no bullshit. And there was major chemistry between them from day one. It didn't take them long to start dating, though they had to be sneaky about it for the first few months till Piper graduated. Piper was dreamy and artistic, always rescuing stray animals to keep his pets. A hippie, basically. I mean, it was still the 70s. And in my experience, about 80% of the seriously, like, crunchy granola people you meet, once you scratch the surface, you find out they're wound tighter than a bear trap. 100%. I think this has been true of literally every, like, crunchy person I've ever known,

not always wound up like in a bad way. Like sometimes they're just balls of anxiety, but like it's going to be something in my experience. I'm sure there are exceptions, but yeah. And with Piper, we mean wound up like an angry little chihuahua. Yeah. Our girl had a wild temper and she had a hair trigger on it. Even if they struck everybody as kind of an odd couple, Fred and Piper were happy together, at least at first. Two years after they started dating, they got married. Not everybody was happy about it. Piper's older

sister, Tina, thought from the start that Fred wasn't good enough for Piper. Oh, Tina. Y'all are going to love Miss Tina. Oh, boy. Yeah. You're going to feel some strong emotion toward Miss Tina.

Her and Piper's dad had been a surgeon in the Air Force, and his military career had taken the family all over the world. Piper was born in Japan while he was stationed there. Their dad retired to Texas when Piper was still little, and she'd never remember much of him, except that he drank too much and sometimes got mean. And then he had a stroke, which made him even meaner. He soon moved away and out of Piper's life. So Piper's mom was busy, and a good chunk of the parenting duties fell on to Tina, eight years older than Piper, but as close to her as a twin. Piper and I are

soul sisters. Tina would later tell 48 hours, were incomplete without each other. Oh, boy. Piper was a high flyer in high school, a star academically and athletically, and because she was cute and gregarious, she was popular, too. Tina, who was intense and frankly, kind of scary, never was. She said she admired Piper's popularity, but you don't have to squint too hard to see some jealousy there, too. When teenage Piper would go to the park and hang out with her friends to smoke and drink, Tina would tag along in her 20s by this point and graduated from college, but finally getting to hang out with the cool kids, which is just ooh, so cringe. You know, y'all, did you all ever know those like 20 something? Like those people

that were like in their mid to late 20s and would hang out with the high school kids, like avoid those people. Those people are to be avoided, at least in my experience, especially the dudes but like even though like even a woman doing that like that's just weird to me what are you hanging out people 10 years younger than you young piper also picked up a reputation as being kind of weird when a friend walked away from bad car wreck without a scratch piper told her you had an angel on your shoulder looking after you which is the kind of thing somebody might say in that situation nothing too out there about that but no no piper insisted she meant it literally there were angels all over the place, changing the world, trying to guide us all. You just had to listen for them.

She listened to angels all the time, and she always had crystals in her pockets, connections to the spiritual realm that she was always ready to pull out if a friend had a headache or sprained wrist. Now look, I have friends who are into mystical stuff, and it's actually really lovely to me when they do spells for me or give me crystals, especially if they hand me if you Tylenol, too, you know, if it's a headache or whatever. But, you know, no shade if you're into that stuff. But in Piper's case, I get the feeling that it's not genuine. It feels to me having read the book and also seen her in interviews, it just feels performative with her.

Just one more way for her to cast herself as the quirky, cute as a button, little main character in any situation she finds herself in. Oh, yeah. She's a pick-me to her core. The angel thing was absolutely an effort to make other people's problems about her. Right, exactly. Like, oh, well, I talk to my angels and I asked them to protect you, so they did. You know, remember Terry Hoffman from the cult of conscious development?

She said the same thing. Yep. Initially, Piper brought some happy chaos into Fred's life, adopting a cat, a bunny, a bird, and two ferrets that she'd walk around on leashes, which must have been a dorbs. She even talked him into visiting a nude beach on Lake Travis, which I imagine for Fred was a big deal. After their marriage, Fred learned a couple things about Piper that were surprises, but they didn't make him love her any less. One was that Piper had been diagnosed with and medicated for ADHD, and the other was that Piper's wayfish shape was largely down to bulimia that she'd suffered from for years.

It was nothing that changed how he felt about Piper. It was just a little weird that she'd waited until after the wedding to share, since they'd already been living together for a while. After graduation, Piper went to law school with Fred paying her tuition. Piper was very smart, if not quite up to the genius reputation she had in her family. but she'd never been so much about the perspiration side of getting an education and struggled through law school, barely graduating. She landed a cool job at the Hayes County District Attorney's Office, but that lasted less than a year. She'd say later she hadn't felt like herself in the job. One time she'd been negotiating a plea deal and the guy had taken out a gun and put it on the table between them.

Which does not sound very likely to me. Like, if we have any campers who, you know, happen to be habitual criminals in Texas, try that out for us. Tell us how it goes. Yeah, don't do that. I'm kidding. But I do suspect that story is pure bullshit, like most of what comes out of Piper's mouth. Fred certainly remembered things differently. According to him, Piper just got straight up fired for doing a shitty job. Four years into the marriage, Piper and Fred were trying to start a family,

which would normally be a fairly private, intimate thing, but not with Piper, who several times called up Fred's assistants at UT to tell him, Tell Fred he has to come home right now. I'm ovulating. That's so funny. Especially knowing how kind of like taciturn Fred was. He must have been so embarrassed. Their daughter Jocelyn came into the world and Piper's temper moved on to even more of a hair trigger. Almost without fail, the first words out of her mouth when she called the assistants at Fred's office were you tell Fred, as in, for example, you tell Fred, I just fired the maid and he needs to come home right now and then hang up. A lot of maids were fired, sometimes the same day they were hired.

Just as many quit, because Piper was a nightmare to work for. The assistants translated these calls into slips of paper with, Please Call Home, written on them, which went into Fred's mailbox. If Piper sounded especially furious, they'd add, Now, and underline it, so Fred had a clue of what to expect. Sometimes Piper would call ten or more times a day. People at Fred's jobs started to think she was crazy, and they wondered why someone like Fred, who was rational to the point of seeming half Vulcan, would be with her.

Why somebody as lively as Piper would be with a staid guy like Fred was becoming less of a mystery to the people around them. Only somebody as patient as him would put up with her bullshit. Piper briefly landed on her feet with her law career when she got a job at the Texas Association of School Boards and did well. But within a year, she ditched it for a higher-paying job at a law firm working in the same field. She bragged about her salary and swanky office and how she could send an assistant out just to get her a cup of coffee and she got fired with an ear. This was right in the middle of Piper's second pregnancy

and she'd tell anyone who would listen that they'd fired her because she was pregnant, which is illegal. Anyway, Fred would later tell people that, again, she'd been fired for doing shitty work and not much of it. Fred and Piper's son, Paxton, was born and afterwards Piper spent weeks in bed. weighed down by a bad case of postpartum depression. Our main source for this case is Catherine Casey's book, Die, My Love, and she actually interviewed

Piper for it. Talking about her postpartum depression, Piper told her, I didn't want to get out of bed. It got worse with each pregnancy. It's like everything goes gray. Everything feels dull. While she was depressed, Piper withdrew thousands of dollars from her retirement account and got herself a boob job. She grudgingly told Fred about it just two days before the surgery.

I mean, she had to, I guess. It was either that or disappear for a couple weeks and gaslight him. What do you mean, honey? They've always been this big. I vote for that message. And, you know, we do not have an issue with the boob job, by the way. If that helps lift you out of a depression, knock yourself out. But as you're about to see, Piper had a bad habit of spending gobs of money on stuff

and then not telling Fred unless she absolutely had to. So that's why we bring that up. Piper got another job shortly after this, and surprise, surprise, they kicked her to the curb after the first year. Then she got pregnant again. With a growing family and Piper unable to keep a job, Fred started to worry about money, a lot. His teaching gig at the University of Texas just wasn't going to cut it, and so he started taking on some consulting work. But Piper complained that he was away from home too often, so Fred started looking into making a more radical change and finding an entirely new job. He really was a star in his field, and it didn't take long for him to be offered

a position at the University of Richmond. There were some negatives, for one, the opportunity was all the way up in Virginia. This would be tough for Piper, who was close to her family. And Fred would be teaching undergraduates rather than the grad students he currently worked with. The positives, though, were hard to ignore. It would be a tenured position at double his current salary. That was too good to pass up. So the young Jablins family packed their lives into a moving van and headed north. Not everyone was happy for them. Piper's sister Tina was furious.

I never forgave Fred for moving Piper so far away, she said. What right did he have to take her and the children away from her family? Oh, for God's sake. This, remember, is her grown-ass sister, she's talking about. And also, he wouldn't have had to take the job if she'd been able to hold down. a damn job of her own, but sure, Tina, go off. Oh, Tina's the worst. So in 1994, Fred and Piper moved into a beautiful five-bedroom house in the suburbs of Richmond's West End, and Fred started off on his new academic career.

They were in an enviable position, a big house in a gorgeous neighborhood, an SUV, and a minivan in the driveway, two great kids and a third, Callie, on the way. And Fred had a good job with tenure. Piper, with her Texas cowboy boots and tight jeans and all her woo-woo ways, didn't really fit in with the West End crowd, and she was happy not to. She called the other women in the neighborhood the Stepford Wives. Not that making fun of them made Piper any less likely to ask for favors, particularly when it came to looking after her kids. Having turned her legal career into a flaming dumpster, Piper tried to develop a new identity as supermom. Her kids were her life, she'd declare. She called herself Mammaia.

Performing well in high school gave Piper a lifelong identity as a genius to herself and her family, with very little in the way of actual supporting evidence. Similarly, Supermom Piper was an identity that crumbled to dust in the face of actual reality. Sure, if the kids wanted to go hunting for frogs in the creek or get some Disney scenes painted in their rooms, Piper was all in. That stuff was fun. It was the actual taking care of them part she had trouble with. One night, Piper was playing Bunko with some of the Stepford wives in the neighborhood and said they should start a babysitting circle, which some of them said might be a good idea, but that was as far as the conversation went.

And then the next morning, one of these ladies answered the doorbell, and there was Piper, holding little Cali by the hand trying to drop her off for babysitting. This became such a common occurrence that neighbors started peeking out the curtains before they'd answer the door. And if it was Piper, they just pretend not to be home, just belly crawling across the living room. Everybody be quiet. It's Piper. Piper did become good friends, at least initially, with Melody Foster, who owned the house behind theirs. Melody's daughter was Paxton's age, and like Piper, Melody was an attorney. The two families got along so well that Fred cut a gate into the fence so everybody could move freely back and forth. Piper was always popping in, often with a glass of wine in her hand, and Melody got a front row seat for Super Mom's Super Parenting.

Once, when Melody looked out and saw three-year-old Kelly just wandering around outside, Piper just said, oh, I do it all the time. She's fine. Okay. Wow. She's three, but that's cool. Another time, the school nurse called to tell Melody she had to come pick up her sick daughter. Oh, just don't get her, Piper said. That's what I do. Sure, girl, who cares if she gives six other kids a stomach flu, right? Fuck off. And sometimes if she was feeling down, Piper would simply lock the kids out of the house and go to bed, which I imagine for a millennial child might be an upsetting experience. Because unlike the generation that came before, y'all weren't used to that. Our parents would just kick us out and be like, come home when it gets dark, I guess, because we have to let you do that. But, you know, for a little 90s kids, late 90s kids, that'd be upsetting. It's terribly irresponsible, I get that. By 1998, it wasn't unusual for 9-year-old Jocelyn to come out onto the porch to ask her mom,

who was working her way through a bottle of wine, what she, Jocelyn, age 9, should make for dinner. Piper was always dropping off her kids for Melody to look after, or if Melody'd hired Nanny for the Nanny to look after, without any extra money. That, obviously, is the kind of thing you have to A, ask about first, and B, offer to frickin' pay for, neither of which was Piper's style. She and Fred had their own nannies, who, just like the maids back in Austin, came and went at a bewildering rate. Either Piper fired him or they quit, because she was awful to work for. So one way or another, Supermom Piper went to great lengths to avoid the actual caregiving part of parenting. She soon had to look

further for care than neighbor Melody. Piper had been fun and exciting at first, but Melody was getting tired of her demands and her complete inability to read social cues that it was time to, you know, leave. Melody started pulling her car into the garage, and like the rest of the neighbors, just pretending to not be home when Piper came around. Fred and Piper's marriage was not doing great at this point. Fred's career was going well, but it was hard work, and he was spending less and less time at home. Piper, who needed attention, like most of us need oxygen, was not happy, and they started seeing a marriage counselor. And if she wasn't getting attention from Fred, Piper would get it somewhere else.

They joined a local swim and tennis club for $300 a year, a place where a lot of the neighborhood families would hang out in the summer, and Piper liked to strut around in a thong bathing suit that showed her whole entire ass so often that other members complained. You know, some families have teenage sons who are already spending too much time in the bathroom with the door locked, okay? Other people, have to get in there, Braden. God. So, you know, joining a tennis club is already pretty bougie, but Piper, without telling Fred, of course, went ahead and joined the

snootier Rain Tree Club as well, whose dues were a much steeper $135 a month. See, Rain Tree had daycare, and Piper could drop the kids off there while she went off to scurry around the tennis courts, most often playing against hot younger men. She was soon leaving the kids for much longer than the maximum allowed three hours, and despite the rule that parents had to stay on the grounds, she was nowhere to be seen. Huh, whatever could this attractive, self-absorbed woman who feels neglected by her husband be doing? Most of the hot tennis players at Rain Tree was what she was doing, before settling into a semi-serious affair with a boy toy in his early 20s. He wasn't her first choice.

Piper had flirted with her GP so much that he made it a required. that a female nurse always be in the examination with them so that Piper wouldn't try anything. First of all, going to the doctor is like already embarrassing, right? Like, it's already like just a level of like, I am, like, I am ill. You're going to look impassively at my body. It's fine. Just imagine like they set a rule for you. So the doctor is because the doctor's so uncomfortable. They would never see my face again. Never see my face again. As their marriage slowly fell apart, Piper and Fred both started showing the less great size of their personalities. Piper became more impulsive and self-absorbed, and Fred, who always had something of Mr. Spock

in his soul, became colder and more rigid. Friends noticed that they hardly ever touched each other. Fred withdrawing affection and attention from Piper was only going to make things worse, of course, but it wasn't going to work anyway. They were just too fundamentally different for things to work out well. People like to say opposites attract, and it's true, but for a lot of people, after the novelty wears off, the main thing they attract is divorce. Piper started seeing a therapist who changed her ADHD medication and gave her prescription

for Prozac. And shortly after that, when one of her friends started bitching about her husband over coffee, Piper told her, you should pet Pete on Prozac. I've got Fred taking it because I think he's depressed. He doesn't know. I've been slipping it in his coffee. Oh, wow. Yeah, what better way to show concern for the man you love than by slipping him a Mickey? I don't even think this is the first time that somebody did this in one of our cases. Oh, no, this has come up a couple times. You're right. And it's always like, they're meds. And it's like, bitch, take your meds. I know.

Fred was just an NPC in Piper's life. She thought of him more as a pet than a partner. Petner? According to a new term? Petner. Piper's love affair flamed out when she found out that her boy toy, boyfriend, was banging one of her friends on the side. I'd say she got a taste of her own medicine, but I am a hundred percent sure that Piper is not familiar with the concept of irony. And newly single, you know, except for her husband, Piper started focusing on her legal career again. The problem was, she wasn't licensed to practice in Virginia. If she'd done it soon as, after they moved to Richmond, she could have applied to the state bar, but she hadn't bothered, and that window had closed. The only way Piper could legally practice in Virginia was under another

attorney's supervision, or if she passed the Virginia bar exam. But Piper wasn't about to let a little thing like the law get in the way of her legal career. She took on clients anyway, but because she was terrible at her job, one client complained to the bar who told Piper to knock it the fuck off. Piper appealed that the state should still grant her a license based on her Texas qualifications, despite her having missed the window to apply for that. And you know, it probably shouldn't matter that she dropped off her appeal to the board office while wearing a gold bikini, but I'm guessing it didn't help. Like, I don't want to judge anybody by appearance, but I feel like there's some decorum needed in that situation. But I don't know,

maybe if she'd fully committed to cosplaying Princess Leia with the gold bikini, it would have been better. I don't know, get some extensions, some chains, I don't know, it could have helped. But of course, her appeal was denied, and Piper would have to pass the bar exam,

which she didn't, despite Fred getting her into a review course at the University of Richmond Law School, and despite her bragging to her fellow students about her few months as a prosecutor in Texas. She sat in the back of the class, doodling in a sketchbook. she was a piper mother fucking roundtree

the family genius after all surely she could coast through the bar exam like she'd coasted through high school you'd coasted through high school Fred had booked a three-day trip to the Bahamas to celebrate Piper Pass in the Bar and to try and start rebuilding their fractured marriage. After she failed, Fred still wanted to go, but Piper refused. He talked her into a weekend at a fancy hotel instead, where she slept as far away from him as she could get in the king-sized bed. By the end of 2000, Fred and Piper were sleeping in

different bedrooms and drifting even further apart. And they weren't the only members of the family having a tough time. 11-year-old Jocelyn had to have orthopedic surgery, performed by a Dr. Jim Gable. Jocelyn would soon see more of Dr. Gable and not only at her follow-up appointments. Not long after they met, Dr. Jim and Piper started screwing. And sometimes when Piper would take the kids out hiking or on picnics, she'd bring her new boyfriend along. Later, when Fred found out about the affair, he was both furious and kind of bewildered. Unlike her tennis club jocks, Dr. Gable was thin and balding and, in fact, looked just like Fred. The guy could be my brother, Fred would say. But for now, Fred was in the dark and arranged a Christmas trip for the family to Disney World.

Piper didn't want to go. Disney World was so crass, a place for the unsophisticated masses. About which, one, get over your damn self, and two, your kids are 11, 8, and 5 years old, and will love it, remember it for the rest of their lives. But Piper was determined to not have any fun. In fact, when Christmas came around, she took off with little Callie down to Texas to stay with her sister Tina, which I'm sure was super

fun for Callie. Yeah, who wants to go to Disney, right? Your brother and sister are meeting Mickey Mouse with your dad, but you get to spend the holidays with your weird aunt instead. That's just as good, right? Well, Tina is goofy. Tina was a piece of work. She was taller than Piper, and serious and intense.

Like Piper, she was smart, and unlike Piper, had something to show for it, her own medical practice as a nurse practitioner. For all her professional success, though, her personal life was a dumpster fire. Her first husband was an attorney, and just two months after they got divorced, Tina was married again. Married again after two months. To a Houston gynecologist, Dr. Praver. This doctor had walked out on his own 34-year marriage. at the same time, and while I'm sure it's occasionally just coincidence, you show me a couple who hook up right after they both get divorced, and I'm going to go ahead and assume they've been

banging like a shithouse door in a hurricane, okay? And obviously, we can't draw a straight line here of cause and effect. But not long after Dr. Praver left his wife, very, very sadly, she took her own life. Their son, Rick, apparently saw cause for blame, though, and he sued his dad. Tina, who enjoyed psychoanalyzing people, despite a complete lack of training to do so, wrote Rick a letter. It's like you're all stuck at three years old. Someone takes your toy away and you either hit the kid back or just withdraw from the big mean thing that took your toy away. Took your toy away? This guy just lost his mother. Jesus, you know, she was smirking so much when she wrote that. I can just envision her face. And like, it's just sometimes. There's no deep, meaningful reason why people don't like you.

Sometimes, it's because you're an inflamed asshole. Yeah, I think we know which one it is here. The lawsuit didn't go anywhere because Rick also took his own life. Tina's marriage to Dr. Praver didn't last long, ending in an acrimonious divorce after just a few years. So far, Tina had married an attorney and a doctor, so you might be forgiven for thinking she had a mental rule that said your bank account has to be at least this tolerated.

to go on this ride. And she certainly kept that pattern going with husband number three, Grant Heitzig, a millionaire with his own oil company. He and Tina had dated for a while, then broke up, and then Tina came back into his life when he was diagnosed with a brain tumor and didn't have long to live. In October 1999, just a week after he'd had brain surgery, Tina whisked him up to Vegas for a surprise wedding she'd set up. And y'all, a little life advice, don't have something that can be described as a surprise wedding, if one of the people being surprised is the brighter groom. But Grant said yes, probably thinking what a lot of their mutual friends were thinking, that Tina, as a nurse, was just what Grant needed, someone kind to look after him for his

difficult, you know, final months of life, but that wasn't what happened. Tina immediately fobbed Grant off onto a series of paid caregivers and barely spent any time with him. Grant was no pushover and figured out Tina was just after his cash. Six months after the marriage in Vegas, he filed for an annulment. Instead of Grant's millions, Tina left the marriage with 50 grand in a gym membership. Grant died six months after the marriage ended, right around the time Piper and Cali came down to visit. After Christmas, Fred flew down to Texas and made Piper an offer. If she would try to make the marriage work, he'd start looking for a new job down in Texas so Piper could be close to her family again. Piper agreed, but her heart wasn't in it. She wasn't back in Virginia

for long before she moved out of the house on Harth Glow Lane to stay with a girlfriend who was going through a divorce. Everyone who knew Piper could see she was wound even tighter than usual, all twitchy and brittle. Part of that was probably medicinal. When she was over at her neighbor Mel's one time, Piper took a couple of Adderall. She had a prescription, but that wasn't what she was taking. These are Jocelyn, she told Mel. Have you ever tried Adderall? They're great. Yeah. And your daughter needs them, dumbass.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, she would take her own and then she would take her daughters, like so she could use twice as much, I guess. It's awful. Yeah. Piper got weirder and weirder. She took Jocelyn for an appointment with Dr. Gable, then took all three kids and checked into a hotel, where she immediately started fretting that Fred would call the cops on her and they'd kick in the door in any minute. She canceled an appointment with her therapist because she was sure Fred would have the cops waiting for her there.

And then she went to a magistrate's office to file a restraining order and an arrest warrant against Fred for domestic violence. This was completely bogus. We've said it before, but it's important to say it again. The vast majority of domestic abuse allegations are honest. We see false accusations a lot on our show, but that's because we talk about awful people. These people are not the norm. These are assholes. Let's just be frank.

They're dicks. So Fred was arrested at work at the University of Richmond and marched out to a squad car by two cops in front of his students and colleagues. I'm guessing that was one of the worst moments of his life. When he was released, he wasn't allowed to go home because of their straining order, so he moved into a motel near campus. Whatever slim hopes he had had of rescuing their marriage were dead now. Fred hired an attorney and asked for temporary custody of the kids,

arguing they weren't safe with Piper, and the judge agreed. When Piper found out, she had him arrested again on another fake domestic violence charge. While he was waiting to be released, Piper had movers come to the house to take the best pieces of furniture to a townhouse she'd rented. She also took a piano, a set of pearls, and a wedding ring that had all belonged to Fred's mother. As an attorney, she probably should have anticipated what happened next. With Piper moving out, Fred filed for divorce on grounds of desertion. Well, she was a shitty attorney, remember? Yeah, maybe this was a surprise to her.

The divorce was contentious, especially when Fred found out. about Piper's affair with Dr. Gable and realized he could add adultery to his case. The domestic violence charges against Fred had been dropped after Piper didn't bother to show up for a hearing, and Fred's attorneys now use those false charges against Piper. Piper didn't help herself out much either. She kept breaking into the house on Harthglow Lane and taking stuff when Fred was out. The house was still equally in her name, so police couldn't really do anything, but it bolstered Fred's argument that Piper was erratic and couldn't be trusted with the kids.

She was also careless with her email lists, accidentally ceasing Fred on replies to friends about how to listen to angels. She even ceased nine-year-old Paxton on an email about an idea she'd had for a video game joystick that doubled as a sex toy. Oh, for God's sake. I mean, I'm not saying it's not a great idea. It's obviously a great idea, but just don't send it to your child, Piper, you absolute dingleberry.

Also, if Piper's listening to her angels at this point. point, she should stop, because I don't think the angels are sending Piper their best people. She's got like Chris Angel. That's Piper's angel. The widely shared emails also gave everybody a front row seat to Piper's disintegrating relationship with Dr. Gable, which quickly went from Piper gushing that he was the one to complaining that he was trying to reconnect with his wife. I don't know if the Gables ever worked things out.

I mean, he should consider himself lucky his wife was even given him the time a day at this point, but Dr. Jim was out of Piper's life in short order. When she was deposed in court, Piper came across as a loon and a bizarre fantasist. She had qualifications as a master chef and a mineralogist. She was a master diver who had trained Navy seals. Bitch what? She's just pulling this shit out of her ass. She had a qualification as a bard from Cambridge University and was working on getting one as a druid, which makes me think that there has to be like two different Cambridge universities, right? Like one in England and one founded by Gary Gygax.

I think she just assumed that England was just actually a magical realm. I mean, like, I could just see it in her brain. She's like, well, all these fantasy characters speak in British accents. So, yeah, it's basically just middle earth. It's just, like, she's like, she steps off the plane in London and she's like, we're all the hobbits. Where are the dragons? My angels told me there would be dragons.

We keep telling you, Piper, that guy is Chris Angel. He's just trying to recruit you for his new magic show. Stop listening to him. He's just hanging around her and she just thinks. Look at his eyeliner. It's so perfect. He can levitate. Are you kidding me?

I know, right? He's a magic man, mama. And here's one for our attorney listener. Is it a good sign when a judge tells you're a lawyer, your client's credibility is an issue because I have three columns of things here that she told me at different times that are not consistent? Because I don't think that's a good sign, probably. Maybe not. The custody decision came down in March 2002.

Piper and Fred would share joint legal custody of all three kids, but Fred would have permanent physical custody. Just days after the decision, Piper emailed friends, family, and neighbors what she described as a court report called Jablins Psychological Profile. This was a 42-page character assassination by amateur psychologist Tina, who lied about her credentials for doing it. She described Fred as angry and violent, a controlling narcissist who beat his kids and had driven his daughter to the brink of suicide. Fred was Jewish. Jews, Tina said, had a persecution complex. Divorce court chain emails with a sprinkler.

of anti-Semitism. Really, truly fantastic work from the psychosisters. Some of their best. Yeah, and this backfired spectacularly. The next time they were in front of a judge, with this email taking center stage, Piper's visitations were severely cut, and Fred was granted sole custody of their kids. The judge also went ahead and divorced him, then and there. Piper was furious. When people asked how she had lost custody, she didn't own up to any of her own behavior, but insisted Fred had manipulated the court and judges, making on, like Fred's PhD in communication, let him control minds like Professor X. For Piper, no custody also meant no child support. Even without passing the bar, she could certainly have found work in Richmond. There was, for example,

great demand for paralegal work, which she was more than qualified to do, but Piper didn't really like the whole working thing, and within a month, she'd packed up a U-Haul and headed down to Texas to stay with sister slash sycophant Tina in Houston. Tina was used to bossing people around, especially her little sister. While Piper was still on the road, Tina had gotten in touch with an attorney friend of hers, Marty McVeigh, and talked to him into renting out an unused office to Piper so she could kickstart her career in Texas. McVeigh gave her minor cases he didn't have time for in return for a percentage of her fees.

Still, before long, every time McVeigh asked for the $500 rent, Piper would just breathe easily say, I don't have it. Sorry. He would have kicked her out, but his girlfriend talked him into cutting Piper some slack because she'd had a rough time. Everyone in Houston, of course, only heard Piper and Tina's version of her divorce. She might not have been able to pay rent, but Piper always had designer suits or fancy cowboy boots, and she and Tina frequently went out to Shishi restaurants and bars, where Piper would spend all night flirting, hopping from one guy's lap to another like a little bee gathering pollen from the flowers. She was certainly having too much fun down in Houston to bother going back to Virginia

for the hearing on her financial settlement with Fred. With Piper Gone, Fred showed the judge a letter she'd written, bragging that she was sure to be working for a big law firm within weeks. Oh, great, the judge said, and ordered her to start paying Fred $900 a month in child support. Dope! Don't! Fuck around and find out. Oopsie, Daisy. Piper tried to declare bankruptcy to delay making payments, but the case was dismissed when she didn't bother showing up for a hearing.

Oh, my God. Again. Are we starting to see how she lost all her lawyer jobs? She just shows up to court when she feels like it. Yeah. Things were getting tight for her financially, and they didn't improve when Marty McVeigh finally booted her ass from his office. Piper hadn't been paying him anything from cases he'd referred to her. her, and had even taken on clients in his name, getting them to pay deposits and then just forgot about them. Oh, geez, Louise. Time passed, and from the outside, it seemed like both

Fred and Piper were moving on. They were both dating new people, and Piper had landed a job working out mineral rights for oil companies. Fred said he thought Piper, a 44-year-old woman, had finally started to mature. But Piper was not moving on. She was instead moving toward a point where she'd get everything she wanted. She was doing all right, but she'd certainly be doing better without that $900 child support payment every month. Not to mention the $200,000 life insurance policy Fred had. Of course, which Piper was still the beneficiary. People, if you break up with someone, change your damn insurance policy. Please, I'm begging you. Just add it to the list of, you know, figure out which DVDs belong to who, figure out, like, who owns the couch, and also change your

insurance policy. I swear to God. Piper's sister Tina had a new boyfriend, and she'd finally broken the gold digger pattern with this one. Mack McClanahan was a DJ, an aging rocker who was into music and computers. I mean, we all have phases, right? In October of 2004, he mentioned to Piper that he was going over to a gun range, and she said it sounded like fun and she'd like to come too. So after work, they stopped at Tina's where Mack was staying to pick up his gun. They drove to the range where they rented a 22 pistol for. Piper to shoot. Mac showed her how to aim and operate the gun, and they blasted away at the

targets for a while before Piper disappeared and came back with a heavier 38-caliber revolver. Mack assumed she'd gone and rented it, but the range records would later show that wasn't the case. This was her own gun. Mack showed her how to shoot it. She had real good aim. Fred Jablin, medical examiners would later determine, had most likely been killed with a 38-caliber round. In that last week of October 2004, there was something that initially irritated Mack, but seemed a little sinister later on. Over and over, Piper and Tina would play Katie Lang's cover of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah. It's a great song, but if you play anything on repeat, and it's going to drive somebody bonkers. But the Roundtree girls couldn't get enough of it.

What stuck in Mack's mind were the lines, Maybe there's a god above, but all that I've ever learned from love was how to shoot somebody who out Drouya. At Hobby Airport in Houston, the morning before Fred Javlin was murdered, a blonde woman checked into the Southwest Airlines flight to Virginia, using an ID that named her as Tina Roundtree. When investigators spoke to her a couple days later, the ticket agent recalled the interaction because she remembered thinking the woman's name was cute. The name wasn't the only cute thing. I remember this, she told investigators. She was really a cute woman, nicely dressed. I'm not a lesbian, but she was really attractive, and she was wearing a blonde wig.

Okay. Tina was blonde. Piper's natural color, which she had now was brunette. When investigators showed the ticket agent a picture of Piper, though, she had no doubts. That's her. She also told him that the purported Tina, actually Piper in an unconvincing wig, had checked a gun, a 38-caliber revolver. When she landed in Norfolk, Virginia, Piper tried and failed to be inconspicuous. It was warm out, but she had on a hat, a coat, and a scarf, as well as sunglasses, like a spy from a cartoon. Trying to be sneaky, she went away from the airport before hiring a car, which landed her at Eagle Rentals on North Military Highway.

Piper was the only white woman they'd rented to in weeks, so they remembered her vividly. And the only vehicle they had available was a big maroon wind star minivan, so Operation Inconspicuous was going just great. Piper drove to Richmond and checked in at the homestead suites, just a few miles from her old house on Harthcloe Lane. She used Tina's ID to check in, but then, in a move that would successfully slow down investigators just a little, asked for the name on the registration to be changed to Jerylind Smith. This wasn't the first time the desk manager it had a woman asked to change a registration. Often it was done by women trying to escape abusive spouses and partners, so she made the change. That afternoon, Piper called her son, Paxton.

When he asked where she was, she said she was in Texas, driving home from Galveston. She called the house later on and spoke to her daughter, Callie. Both kids had no doubt at all that it was their mom on the phone, and not, for example, weird Aunt Tina. In the early darkness of Saturday morning, Piper ambushed her ex-husband Fred as he went to pick up his morning paper and shot him dead and ran away. Did she speak to him first? Did he have any idea what was happening? We'll probably never know. Then Piper either started or continued drinking. A little while later, a clerk at a convenience store remembered Piper,

in a long, blonde wig, complaining that she couldn't get money out of the ATM. Her breath reeked of liquor. She checked out of the homestead suites and drove back to Norfolk to return her rental car where she again managed to make an impression. The guy working there remembered her well enough to recognize a photograph, and would tell investigators she was a nice lady, attractive. Piper flew back to Texas. The detectives in Richmond had been working fast, and while Piper was in the air, they found out that a Tina Roundtree was on her way back to Houston.

They had local police go to the airport to try an interceptor, so they could nail down who was actually on the flight, but they couldn't pick Piper out of all the exiting passengers. Later on, Piper went to a bar close to Tina's house called the Under the Volcano and had a grand old time with everybody dressed up for Halloween. So what was going on here? Was Piper really trying to set up her sister to take the fall for Fred's murder? Probably not. Tina had a rock-solid alibi for the time of Fred's murder. In fact, you could almost say that Tina's alibi was suspiciously solid. She'd called up an old boyfriend out of the blue, an oil exec who'd make for an excellent witness.

They'd gone out for dinner and Tina had spent the night at his place. In the morning, she'd gone to work where tons of people saw her. There was no way she could have been in Virginia to shoot Fred. Piper might have been a terrible attorney, but she knew perfectly well what reasonable doubt was. If she could just sow some confusion about who had actually been on that southwest flight to Virginia, maybe she could wriggle out of future trouble. The Saturday night trip to Under the Volcano was also part of the plan. Piper and Tino went back there later in the week, asking if anybody remembered seeing Piper there on Friday night.

I got a call from Virginia police, she said. my ex-boyfriend I lived with four years ago was stabbed to death on Saturday morning. They want to know where I was. Piper was nothing if not memorable, and she was rolling the dice that a patron might misremember seeing her on Saturday with Friday. Sure enough, one guy, Kevin O'Keefe, thought he remembered Piper from Friday night. He gave her his phone number so the police could call him if they had to. Then Tina walked up, put her hand on Piper's shoulder, and said,

Piper, we need to talk outside right now. It's about my period. It's about my period. Oh, good job. Way to be subtle. It's so weird. It's like almost what, like, you'd expect some clueless male screenwriter to have a woman say to get another woman alone, you know, for a private conversation, like in a comedy or something. It's so bad. Yeah, that's, that's women for you. Always yapping about our periods to each other. Operation Inconspicuous God She was dressed like she was going on like a snow expedition Driving a giant purple car In a blonde wig from Party City

Now she's like Come sister We must discuss our mensies Oh geez The two women left poor confused Kevin but came back half an hour later with a notary trying to get him to sign a statement

here we brought this notary public it's so weird inconspicuous the most inconspicuous operation that was ever ever operated I just we were outside discussing

menstruation and this person happened to pass by who's a notary wouldn't she should know. Anyway, Kevin, bless him, refused, and good for him. When the bar checked the receipts, it would turn out he hadn't been there on Friday night at all, only Saturday. One thing Piper hadn't thought of, because she was apparently completely oblivious to the possibility, was that police could track cell phone use. The records

put Piper's phone all over Richmond in the hours around Fred's death. And when Piper tried to claim that didn't prove she'd been there, just her phone, was. which she'd lost days ago. Well, there were those calls on Friday to Paxton and Cali, both made from Richmond. The kids, of course, knew their mom's voice. All her running around had left investigators with a lot of legwork to do, but when they put together all the phone records and eyewitness testimony, it was clear they had a solid case against Piper Roundtree for the murder of Fred Jablin.

There was an emergency custody hearing on November 8th. The Jablond kids had been staying with Fred's brother, Michael, and his wife. Fred's will indicated that he wanted that to be the permanent solution. But Piper, of course, would contest that. And she'd have to show up in Virginia to do so. In court. Her kryptonite showing up in court. It was a bad day for Piper all around.

The judge ruled the kids were safest right where they were till the criminal investigation concluded, and as Piper drove away, the police boxed in her car and put the old habeas grabbous on her at gunpoint. For all of Piper's efforts, it was pretty clear at trial that her goose was cooked, though cell phone records just weren't going away. Piper threw out increasingly weird alternate theories. Fred's new girlfriend had killed him. His brother had killed him.

Fred was a big-time weed dealer and competitors had killed him. The University of Richmond had killed him to cover up a scandal. That's the funniest one to me. That's so good. It's just, wow. I've worked in academia. No. No. They would not. The University of Richmond, by the way, is a liberal arts college with just 4,000 students,

not really the kind of place, likely to have hit men on the payroll. The defense's best bet was probably some kind of diminished a capacity argument, because Piper was clearly a few crystals short of a chandelier. But for that, she'd have to admit she did it, and Piper was not having that. The jury reached a verdict in what might be a TCC reference. record, less than an hour. Damn. Most of the observers in the courtroom were still out to lunch when the jury came back.

Piper Roundtree was found guilty of first-degree murder. But the verdict clearly didn't shock Piper back to reality. At her sentencing hearing, she stated that Fred had felony convictions in three states, the kind of nonsensical lie that's pretty easy for a court to check up on. Piper was sentenced to life in prison. She's had two parole hearings so far in 2020 and 2023. and gotten a big, nope, both times. She's 63 years old.

Tina Roundtree was arrested on the same day as Piper and charged with evidence tampering for helping Piper ditch her wig and computer. She got a plea deal that gave her nine months community service and let her keep her license to practice medicine. Prosecutors have said they don't think she knew anything about the murder, which I suspect just means they know they'd never be able to convict her of anything. Yeah, I think she knew exactly what Piper was doing. and I think she helped her plan it, just my opinion,

and several members of Piper's jury told 48 hours they think the same thing. Tina died in 2020. So that was a wild one. Right, campers? You know, we'll have another one for you next week. But for now, lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe until we get together again around the true crime campfire. And as always, we want to send a grateful shout out to a few of our lovely patrons.

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