True Crime Campfire - Walking In My Shoes: The Murder of Kristine Fitzhugh

Episode Date: June 13, 2025

Nobody likes to be embarrassed. More often than not, people are kind of weird in one way or another, have some secret history or fascination they’d hate to have dragged out into the light of day. It’s normal. What’s less normal is just how far some people will go to avoid their embarrassing secrets coming out…even to the point of murder.Join Katie and Whitney, plus the hosts of Last Podcast on the Left, Sinisterhood, and Scared to Death, on the very first CRIMEWAVE true crime cruise! Get your fan code now--tickets go on sale February 7: CrimeWaveatSea.com/CAMPFIRESources:Blood Will Tell by Carlton SmithPalo Alto Online: https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2013/11/30/palo-alto-murderer-dies-after-compassionate-parole/ SFGate: https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/FITZHUGH-CONVICTED-Palo-Alto-jury-rejects-2892363.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://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.

Looking for better games, SlotsGem has so much more. Your favorite games, live dealers, and the best tournaments await. Do yourself a favor and claim the welcome bonus. Shine bright like a diamond with slots gem.com. Terms and conditions apply. Please gamble responsibly. Hello, campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney.

And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. or roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. Nobody likes to be embarrassed. More often than not, people are kind of weird in one way or another, have some secret history or fascination they'd hate to have dragged out into the light of day. It's normal. What's less normal is just how far some people will go to avoid their embarrassing secrets coming out, even to the point of murder.

This is Walking in My Shoes, the murder of Christine Fitzhue. So, campers, for this one, we're in the leafy, well-to-do city of Palo Alto, California, Friday, May 5th, 2000. Galen Mason and Carol Perino were looking forward to a good time. The roommates were both teachers, so they generally had to be. had to wait for the weekend to have fun, and they were getting ready for a lot of it this weekend. It was Galen's birthday, and they were going all in. The party was going to be casino-themed. They'd booked a craps table, a roulette wheel, the works. They'd only be playing for joke store money, but the party was going to be lit. Lots of teachers letting their hair down

and saying what they really thought about the kids at their school, you know, and their parents. Once everybody's about five beers deep, each other, too. You know teachers can party. You teachers listening, you know. At 1.30, their friend Ken Fitzhue arrived to pick up Galen and Carol in his Chevy Suburban so they could go pick up all the casino stuff. Ken was a mixed bag, always helpful and reliable, but he was one of those guys who just couldn't help offering unsolicited advice, especially to women, and most especially, to young women like Galen and Carol. As he pulled out of the driveway, Ken told them he wanted to check on his wife Christine at their house a couple minutes away. Christine was a teacher too, a music teacher, and Ken had gotten a call

from the school district saying she'd missed her one o'clock class. Ken stopped outside their house on Escobita Avenue and hurried inside. Galen and Carol, sitting in the suburban, thought it looked like the front door was already partially open. Barely a minute later, Ken rushed back out of the house. Come help me, he yelled. Galen had a momentary thought that this was an elaborate setup for a surprise party. Is he kidding? she asked Carol, but Carol didn't think so. Ken went back inside, and after a moment the two ladies followed. They heard Ken hurrying down the basement stairs, and from the top of the stairs they saw him,

and they saw Christine, lying face down on the landing at the bottom of the stairs. Oh my God, there's blood everywhere, Ken said. I can't get a pulse. Call 911. Galen and Carol hurried to the phone in the kitchen and made the call, and then Ken asked Galen to help with see. CPR, and they pulled Christine down onto the cement floor of the basement and turned her face up to start work, Galen doing chest impressions and Ken blowing air into Christine's lungs. Now Galen could see the blood, oozing onto the floor from the back of Christine's head. She also noticed a plastic

dry cleaning bag that Christine had been lying on top of. Close by on the lower landing was a big metal ship spell. She wondered if that was what Christine had hit her head on. Those shoes, those goddamn shoes, Ken gasped out between breaths. She must have fallen in those shoes. I told her to throw them away a thousand times. He pointed out a black sandal on the steps, then started talking about the dry cleaning bag. It took Galen a second to pick up on what Ken was saying that Christine must have slipped and fallen on the stairs, knocked herself out, and then suffocated on the dry cleaning bag. Huh? Yeah. If she'd been more clear-headed, this would have struck her right away as really unlikely, but Galen was in shock, especially as the pool of blood from the back of Christine's

head kept spreading. Paramedics soon arrived and took over the task of trying to revive Christine, and the basement was suddenly crowded with people and equipment. Galen saw Ken climb the stairs with his arms held out and his bloody hands up, like a surgeon ready to be gloved. It was all too much for her, and she pushed open the storm doors out into the yard. The Fitzhughes never kept them Locked. Barely a minute after the paramedics arrived, Sasha Priest of the Palo Alto PD arrived. He stopped halfway down the steps and watched the paramedics work. One of them looked up and gave Priests a shake of the head and silently conveyed to him two things. Christine wasn't going to make it, and this probably wasn't an accident.

This was a big deal. Palo Alto is home to Stanford University, and a lot of the crime in the city was college-type crime that often involved too much booze or weed. And given how rich a lot of the residents were, burglaries were sometimes a problem. But the statistical murder rate in the city was a big, fat, zero. When detectives arrived, they entered the basement through the storm doors. They got Ken's version of what must have happened from the paramedics,

and like them, they didn't think it made a lot of sense. They saw the shoe on the basement stairs, a right shoe, but on the left side of the steps as you came down, if it had slipped off Christine's foot as she fell, the positioning was weird. And along with the bag of dry cleaning, there had been a sheaf of student papers under Christine's body, like she'd been carrying both. There was a wardrobe in the basement where clothes hung in dry cleaning bags, but why had she brought the papers with her?

Who would choose to grade papers in a gloomy basement when there was a whole beautiful house upstairs? But the biggest problem with the scene was Christine's wounds. The injuries to the back of her head seemed way too severe to have come from a fall, even if that fall had ended with her bashing her head against the ship's bell. And she would have had to twist all the way around as she fell, hitting the back of her head, then twisting back around to land face down on the landing. Yeah, no way. That's just not going to happen.

Christine had clear bruises on her face, too. She would have had to fall face down and face up simultaneously. It just didn't make any sense. This wasn't an accident. Christine Fitzhue had been murdered. Dang, doesn't this remind you of the staircase murder so far, like the Michael Peterson case? Oh, yeah. The injuries happening in places that didn't make sense for a fall down the stairs.

Sounds a lot like it. Unless there was a murderous owl. We don't know. Well, then it would be even more like it. What I'm saying? There's an owl in the basement. We don't know. If Christine had been murdered, there was a,

series of logical conclusions that fell into place one after another like grim dominoes. Christine had almost certainly been killed by repeated blows from some blunt object. That is a messy way to kill someone, with blood flying both from the impact and from the weapon as it moves, creating blood spatter cast off on nearby surfaces. But the only blood they saw immediately was the pool that had leaked from Christine's head onto the floor. Although they did soon find what looked like two bloody sneaker prints, It wasn't from any of the responders, and neither Ken nor Galen were wearing sneakers. The lack of blood spatter meant Christine probably hadn't been killed on the stairs or in the basement,

and that meant someone had moved the body afterwards to try and stage an accidental death. Murder by a random intruder is vanishingly unlikely at any circumstance, and for an intruder to hang around and take the time in trouble to make a death look like an accident, well, it just doesn't happen. the people most likely to benefit from making a murder look like an accident or family members. Ken and Christine's two sons, Justin and John, were both in college in different cities, so that just left Ken Fitzhue himself. As Christine's husband, he was always going to be high on the list of suspects,

and the fact that he'd immediately jumped to a bizarre accidental theory for her death really didn't help. I mean, she tripped on her shoes. Those damn shoes hit her head on a bell and suffocated on the dry clean? he'd put this together within like 60 seconds of finding his wife fatally injured at the bottom of the stairs. Just, man, come on. So the police took Ken, Galen, and Carol back to the station to be interviewed. They wanted them out of the house so they wouldn't contaminate any evidence, and they wanted to interview them separately to make sure their versions of what happened all matched up. They asked Galen and Carol the obvious questions about their friends. Was there any trouble

in Ken and Christine's marriage? No, absolutely not. They were just about the most devotes. couple either of them knew. Financial troubles? Nope. Palo Alto is one of the wealthiest cities in California, and even there, the Fitzhues were notably well off. Okay, any affairs? Obviously, this is something even close friends might be in the dark about, but the idea seemed ridiculous to both Galen and Carol. Then the interviews with the ladies were interrupted by a furious yell from outside. Detective Mike Denson was interviewing Ken. Ken Fitzhue was 57 years old, a slightly built silver-haired man with big glasses. He looked kindly and harmless. He also seemed either exhausted or just indifferent to what was happening. He seemed calm. Too calm to Denson's eyes,

and he was unpredictable. When Denson asked if they could search the house, Ken said, I don't mind if they search, they could tear the place apart. But then after reading the actual consent to search form, he changed his mind. You know what? I don't want these guys just going through everything. We have valuable things. It's a very difficult. time. Denson nodded, but he later told Carlton Smith, whose book Blood Will Tell, was one of our main sources for this one, that he was thinking, this guy's weird. Ken was just chatting away, grinning. Denson described him as jovial. He said the cops could search the basement in the stairs, but nowhere else. Denson agreed. He knew they had enough to get a full search warrant from a

judge without Ken's consent if they had to. He asked Ken to walk him through the day. Ken and Christine had both woken up at six and gone out jogging with their dogs, then come home and worked for a while at their respective computers. Christine taught music at various schools around the district and left around 10 a.m. for her first class. Ken had been going back and forth between their own house and their neighbor, a lawyer who Ken was helping with a printer problem. He said goodbye to Christine, and then at around 11, Ken, who described his occupation as real estate consultant, put the dogs in the car and drove to her real estate. project, only suddenly he couldn't remember where it was. Oh, man, he said, I've been there a thousand times. My brain's not working.

Ken said he'd been at this mysterious project for about an hour and had then headed back to Palo Alto to pick up Galen and Carol at the prearranged time of 1.30. Everyone in Ken's life would say that punctuality was of weirdly urgent importance to him. He had to be on time. On the freeway, he'd gotten a call from a secretary at the school district, telling him Christine had missed her 1 p.m. class. That wasn't like her. Still, he had to keep his appointment, so he picked up Galen and Carol before heading home to check on Christine. Man, you really care about punctuality if you get a call that, like, your wife didn't show up at work,

and you've got to go pick up your friend. Like, that almost sounds like obsessive, compulsive, or something like that. That's very strange. So he'd gone in, first looking upstairs. And then he'd notice the door to the basement was open and looked down and saw Christine. lying still at the bottom of the steps. He ran out to call for help from the ladies and hurried back in. So then I saw the black shoe, Ken said in the interview room. And all of a sudden, he like half got up from his chair and just bellowed the goddamn black

shoes and like hammered his fists down on the table. And I've seen it. You can watch his interview. It's so weird. Like it just comes out of nowhere like he's fine and then he just explodes and then he's fine again. It's so strange. He was loud enough to be heard all through the police station, and people hurried to the small window into the interview room, half expecting to see Ken and Denson in a fight. Way to keep it together, Ken. You're really telling it. Keep it up.

Yeah. But, you know, Ken just sat down, lacing his fingers together and carried on as if nothing had happened. Yeah, like turning it on and off like a light switch. That's really, that's what good actors do. Yeah. Christine had a pair of black shoes that she really liked, but that, according to Ken, she'd fallen in before. She'd fallen on the friend's sidewalk, the office sidewalk. I caught her or she'd have smashed her face on the sidewalk. I must have told her six times to get rid of the black shoes. What do you want to bet he'd practice those damn shoes in the mirror like six or seven times? He said it like two or three times already to different people. He really wanted to make sure everybody knew.

about the shoes. You know, what do we what do we tell writing students show, don't tell? Like if you, if your little tableau didn't tell the story, good enough, Ken, then I don't know what to tell you, okay? It's too much exposition. It's suspicious. It's too much explanation. Like when you hammer it something that much, and we've seen that before. I mean, we've all seen that. True crime folks have all seen that before where somebody really hammering, like they'll try to misdirect the police toward a particular suspect or whatever, that always raises the antennae, as it should. This little performance did nothing to change Denson's opinion that this guy was weird

and suggested that Ken, the kindly old elf, might have a fast-boiling temper. And then there was the bell. Ken said it had been an ornament in the backyard for 18 years. He'd brought it inside the previous week to get pictures and try and sell it on eBay, but it was really heavy, and once it had gotten it down the stairs, he just put it down right there. If I'd only put it away, Ken said. Don't start blaming yourself, Denson said. But what he was thinking was, if Ken wanted to bring a heavy bell into the basement,

why would he even take the stairs when there were storm doors that opened straight out into the backyard? As it happened, Ken was worrying about the wrong pair of shoes, because officers at the scene had found a pair of white sneakers tucked under the passenger seat of his Chevy Suburban and they had spots of what looked like blood on them. Another detective told Denson, but Denson kept the information to himself for now. He listened as Ken took a call from his youngest son, John,

who was flying back from the University of Washington and whose flight had just been delayed. Ken was, in the circumstances, startlingly flat as he spoke to a boy whose mother had died violent, just a couple of hours ago. Hello? Yes, John. That's all right.

Oh, I'm sorry to hear that. Okay. Before we come to the airport, we'll call and check so we know what time. No, just wait for us. Okay, good. Yeah. Thanks for letting me know. Bye.

Good luck to you. Damn. Ken Fitzhue was a cold fish. At least, when he's not talking about women's footwear. That raises. That's a hell of passions. It does. Knowing about the sneakers, Denson wanted to nail Ken down on what he'd been wearing when he found Christine.

Had he changed clothes in any way since then? Was the outfit he had on now exactly what he'd been wearing since the discovery? Ken said yes. He was wearing black leather loafers. If the blood on the sneakers was Christine's, it could have only gotten there before Ken had showed up at the house with Galen and Carol. Weird Ken continued being weird when Denson asked him if there was anything else he wanted to say. It's such a terrible shame. She was really enjoying herself again. Her older son graduates from college in a couple of weeks, so she wanted to be ready for that. Very sad time. Sorry to burden you

with that. You said her older son, Denson said. Is he not your son? No, he's our son. Ken corrected himself. Huh. Ken eventually did sign the consent to search form as long as he could be there when officers went through the house. This was fine with Denson, as it meant he could keep Ken talking and watch his reactions. Ken walked them all through the house. Nothing appeared to be missing. There was no sign of forced entry. Denson put the squeeze on him. What had Ken been wearing during his morning jog with Christine?

His white sneakers, Ken said. And where were those shoes now? He'd put them back in the closet upstairs. Ken said. An officer brought in the white sneakers inside a plastic bag. They looked like his shoes, Ken said, but he was dumbfounded as to how they could have gotten into the suburban. Denson told him the sneakers seemed to have blood on them. Ken didn't react at all. Denson said they were going to test whether it was human blood. Still no reaction. Ken insisted his shoes were still in the closet upstairs. He showed them, and lo and behold, there was a blank space in his neat,

lined up pairs of shoes. Ken was, yet again, dumbfounded, and continued to be so when he was told officers had just found a bloody paper towel in the back of the suburban. A little later, they'd find a green polo shirt, also bloody, shoved even further under the passenger seat, yet they'll never look there. Good call. Just then, oldest son Justin arrived, along with his fiancée Angelina. Crying, Justin hugged his dad in the driveway. Ken still looked about his perturbed as if a barista had just added some unwanted nutmeg to his latte. Police let them drive away to pick up John from the airport and the medical examiner, Dr. Diane Veritas, arrived to inspect the scene and the body.

Her later autopsy would confirm her initial thoughts. Christine had 20 individual bruises on her face, most likely punches by a right-handed attacker. Pressure marks and hemorrhaging indicated someone had tried to strangle her. There were bruises, likely defensive. injuries on her arms and hands. These were not the injuries you'd expect from someone tripping on the stairs and reflexively putting their arms out to try and break the fall. And on the back of the head were by far the worst wounds, seven heavy blows from a blunt

object, one of which caused a palpable skull fracture, meaning the bones on the skull moved under the doctor's fingers. Oh, it's so upsetting. She had no doubt that this was a homicide. One thing Dr. Vertes did not find was a cut in the webbing between thumb and forefinger on Christine's right hand, and this was important. By the time he was interviewed again later that evening, Ken had come up with a reason why Christine's blood might be on his sneakers. A week ago, Christine had cut her hand with a trowel while gardening, a cut bad enough that Ken had to put pressure on it until it stopped bleeding. Now, that's not something that heals to the point of complete invisibility in a week, but there was no sign of a cut there.

By this point, even on the first day, none of the investigators had much doubt that Ken Fitzhue had killed his wife, but they had no idea why. The Fitzhues had lived in Palo Alto since the early 80s, and as investigators called friends and acquaintances who'd known them in this time, they got the same answers. Ken and Christine were a devoted, loving couple, happy, healthy, and wealthy. It wasn't until investigators went further back to when the couple had lived in San Diego, that they started to get a picture. of what might be going on. See, back then, Christine had an affair, and everybody knew about it. Everyone knew the Fitzhues were well off. Their big house on Escobita Avenue was worth $2 million in 2000, over $5 million today. Ken had family money, although it came to him by an unusual route.

Ken's own upbringing was modest. His dad, Kenny, managed a gas station and auto repair shop. Ken's aunties, Kenny's sisters, Helen, Ruth, and Susie were all pretty ladies, And whether by coincidence or design, all three married successful older men. Their three husbands died in the 40s, and the sisters all moved into the same San Diego apartment building, apparently content to give up on romance altogether. None of them had any children, and when they died in the 70s and 80s, their inheritances passed first to Kenny and then to Ken Jr. By 2000, he had inherited around 2 million directly, and antiques possibly worth up to $3 million.

Young Ken's friends would describe him as a shy and sensitive boy, but some of his other classmates remember him as a fussy smart ass who liked to show off his supposedly superior brain. He never got angry, never showed a temper, but he could be sneaky. One friend, Alice, recalled that Ken's dad kept stacks of candy in a closet to be sold at the gas station. Ken would sneak in and help himself. I mean, nothing odd there. If you have piles of candy at the house, chances are that kids, are going to nab some. But Ken would sneak in while his friends were there, eat in the closet, and sneak back out. His friends never got any of the candy.

Oh, you selfish little weasel. It reminds me of this awful kid I nannied for in college. I've probably talked about him before. This kid would rather, literally rather, I've seen him do it, throw a cupcake in the trash than share it with one of his friends. A kid was the worst. Oh, my God. Ken was smart and a talented musician.

He toyed with pursuing music as a career, but his mom gently prodded him towards something that might actually make him some money, and Ken went to college to study electrical engineering. He still played, though. While in college, he got hold of an old church pipe organ and had it hauled down to his hometown of Del Mar. The only place willing to house the organ was the Delmar Fairgrounds, and in the summer, Ken would play the organ

for the San Diego County Fair. In 1964, right after Ken had graduated, it was the sound of the pipe organ at the county fair that first caught the attention of 16-year-old Christine Peterson. Christine was also a musician and a talented one. In fact, you could fairly say she was a piano prodigy, with the ability to make it as a concert pianist. Wow.

That could be a heavy weight to hang around a kid's neck, especially with Christine's demanding kind of frosty Danish parents. A few months before her death, Christine wrote in her diary, remembering herself as a five-year-old girl. I felt approval based on my actions rather than for who I was. When I didn't perform well enough, the consequences were severe, especially when the expectations were high. I was expected to obey and be a perfect little girl. If I was, my father was so proud, I learned to set my standard for perfection to guard against injury. man it's like how to screw up your kids page one at least when they first met ken and christine were a good match

they were both very smart both musical both kind of awkward and introverted they dated long distance for a couple of years while ken got his MBA at stanford and christine who had skipped a grade started studying music in thousand oaks when she was still just 16 in 1966 when ken was 24 and Christine 18, they got married, and Ken got an accounting job at the Teledyne Ryan Aerospace firm in San Diego. There's no way of knowing whether this factored into Ken's decision-making, but because Ryan was a defense contractor, with Ken's department working on early remote-controlled drones, he was exempt from the Vietnam draft. Christine, meanwhile, gave up the idea of being a concert pianist with great relief. Instead, she attended San Diego State College to study for a

career as a music teacher. Possibly the only switch her Danish parents would accept, both of them having grown up in a country where teachers were highly respected. Must be nice. And I say that as a teacher. We don't, what does Rodney Dangerfield say? We didn't get no respect. After a couple of years, Ken made a friend at work, a guy named Robert Kenneth Brown and invited him home to dinner. Robert, aka Bob, had an accounting degree, which was what got him his job alongside Ken, and he was studying law. He and Ken had really hit it off, which was odd because Bob Brown was almost Ken's complete opposite, a big extroverted dude dedicated to live in his life like his plane was going down. He hit it off with Christine, too, despite some embarrassment at their first meeting. When Ken

called out of the blue to say he was bringing a friend home for dinner, Christine rushed to get some Chinese takeout and was in the process of transferring it into some dishes to make it look home cooked when Ken and Bob walked in the door. That's so funny. Soon, the three of them were best buds. Bob would have dinner with the Fitzhues, maybe three nights a week, and most weekends they hung out, often with Bob's fun-loving crowd. When I first met them, they were social recluses, Bob said later. After I was around and involved with my friends, they began to break loose. They'd never gone out dancing or having drinks or anything, or gone camping at the beach, or drove a motorcycle or dune buggies or anything like that. They weren't party people.

Christine in particular really started to loosen up. She'd had a much more restrictive upbringing than Ken had, and her introversion was more of a learned habit than a reflection of who she actually was. Later in her life, she'd be known as a really warm social person, and this was the time that that side of her really started to come out. She was a 20-year-old woman, who finally started living life like a 20-year-old woman. Ken, who seemed content to jump directly from college into middle age, mostly just tagged along, an amiable sidekick to his increasingly vibrant wife. We deal with a lot of messy relationships on this show,

so I'm sure a lot of you were thinking, huh, a young wife learning how to have fun, a boring, beige husband, and a charismatic new friend who spends a lot of time with them both. What could possibly go wrong? Ken, though, would later claim he never had any worries about anything happening between Christine and Bob, and that he had good reason not to worry. According to Ken, in the early years that he knew him,

Bob had lived with a succession of boyfriends, showed no interest in women, and had once propositioned Ken. He was, as far as Ken knew, gay. At least, that was what Ken claimed. Bob, on the other hand, says it was the other way around, that one time they were on a camping trip together, and Ken, probably a few beers deep at this point,

just suddenly reached over and just, Grabbed his junk. Wow, Ken, you really know how to woo a fella. Bob said he just kind of took Ken's hand off his wean and said something like, what's this? And Ken refused to answer, and they just kind of pretended like it never even happened. So basically, if these three had just agreed to be a thruple and called it a day, we might not be talking about this right now.

Right, seriously. So Bob was actually by something he said all his friends, including Ken and Christine, knew. Well, we know Christine knew for sure because not long after they'd met, she and Bob started an affair that would last for almost a decade, and they were not subtle about it. When they moved into a new house, Ken and Christine threw a housewarming party. At one point, she told Ken that she and Bob were going out to get some ice, and they didn't come back for hours. And when they finally did, they had that certain glow about them, you know, like you could tell when people have just done it. Like, you just can. Other people at the party were suspicious, but Ken was oblivious, or maybe he just didn't care.

It's impossible to know exactly what was going on in the Fitzhue's relationship while they were down in San Diego. Ken was a stubborn liar. Once he decided to cover something up, he was going to die on that hill. He said he was completely in the dark about the affair and wouldn't reveal anything else. And when police first interviewed Bob Brown, he was laid up in recovery from a motorcycle wreck and loaded on paint. medication. His narrative wandered and sometimes contradict itself. When he was more clear-headed, he was only marginally more reliable as a witness. But Brown's version, which is that Ken was fully aware of Christine's affair, is a lot easier to believe than Ken's insistence that he knew nothing about it. All their friends knew. It was a secret so open, it wasn't really a secret

anymore. Christine and Bob often went on ski trips to Colorado or Lake Tahoe with his buddies, even one time to the Swiss Alps. More often than not, Ken stayed home. Just like when he was a kid, Ken never expressed any anger, although there's a difference between not expressing something and never showing it. Once, while they were camping, Ken accidentally ran over Bob's foot and broke it, then refused to drive him to the hospital for a couple of days, causing a nasty, the infection to send in. Whoa. Yeah.

Another time while they were sailing, Ken turned the boat sharply, causing the boom to swing around and smack bob in the head, knocking him out cold. Campers, have you ever hospitalized one particular friend and only that friend repeatedly?

I don't think accident is the word we're looking for here. Yeah. Yeah, he was low-key trying to kill that guy, and I think it might have actually been subconscious, But yeah. According to Bob, Christine wasn't willing to talk about it too much, but he got the impression that Ken just wasn't that interested in her or anyone else sexually. He may also have been impotent, but by the time he brought that up, Bob was convinced Ken had killed Christine and wasn't exactly going to go out of his way to help the guy's reputation.

In 1978, Christine got pregnant, and according to Bob Brown, it was 100% on purpose. After her first son Justin was born, Bob testified. She told me she was positive I was the father because she had quit taking the birth control pills and that she hadn't had sex with anyone but me for a period of four months or so before she was diagnosed as pregnant. Bob and Christine were both close with Bob's aunt Janet, and Janet said Christine had told her that Ken couldn't have kids, so if Christine wanted to get pregnant, at least in the old-fashioned way, someone else would have to help her. But there was more to this.

Why would Christine all of the sudden want to have a kid? And was she the only one making the decision? Two of Ken's wealthy aunts were still alive at this point, and they wanted to make Ken the only child of any of the four Fitzhue siblings, their heir. But according to Bob, they had insisted on one condition. Ken would only get their money if he had a child. God, that is so weird. It's like something from a Dickens novel or something. So strange. Bob said both Ken and Christine had told him about this. His aunt Janet said

Christine had told her about it separately. Bob came to believe that Ken, unable or unwilling to have sex with his wife, encouraged Christine to get pregnant with him. It really stretches belief to think Ken was unaware of who Justin's bio dad was after the kid was born. Apparently, he looked exactly like Bob, a resemblance that was only going to get stronger as the kid grew up. Bob took Christine and baby Justin to family gatherings and told everybody Justin was his son. Who knows how all three felt a couple years later when John was born and was very clearly Ken's biological son. The affair between Christine and Bob stopped not long after Justin was born, although they remained close friends, as did Ken and Bob. And he stayed close to them as part of

the family. Little Justin was always following Uncle Bob around. But Bob Brown was one of those people who burn hot and flame out. A piece of his party lifestyle that Ken and Christine had never joined in on was the drugs and the serious drinking, two problems that got worse throughout the 80s and early 90s, when not coincidentally, Bob got in trouble with the law on a few occasions and was eventually disbarred. Ken and Christine had an intervention and put up $12,000 for Bob to go to a nice rehab. But Bob relapsed, apparently in some epically embarrassing public way that nobody in his friend group was willing to talk about, and finally, Ken and Christine cut him off. However their weird triangular relationship was constructed, it was over. According to Bob, he and Christine

hadn't been in touch until early 2000 when she'd called him. Justin was going to graduate that spring. Afterwards, Christine said she was going to tell him the truth about who his dad was. Investigators would come to agree with Bob that Ken had known all about Justin's parentage from the get-go and that Christina told Ken she was going to share the truth with Justin. When you hear the bare bones of this case, I think a lot of people assume the shape of it is he found out he wasn't his kid's bio-dad and that's why he killed her. But I don't think that's it. What pushed Ken over the edge was knowing the truth was going to come out. It wasn't the infidelity that he found unbearable. It was that people would know about the infidelity. This was a new town, new group of friends. You know,

they'd left all the people who knew about this in the past, and this was going to be humiliating. So we've seen countless times with people like Ken, who at his core was a narcissist, just how far they'll go to avoid humiliation. A lot of premeditated murders ultimately boil down to be about sex or money. Bob Brown had provided investigators with a lot of juicy things from column A, and he also drew their attention to some stuff from column B. Bob had an airtight alibi, by the way, in case y'all were wondering. Ken Fitzhue, as we said earlier, inherited a whole lot of family money, along with an antique collection that was worth just as much, if not more. When Bob was telling investigators about Ken's inheritance,

he mentioned that all the antiques cramming the house on Escobita Avenue came from Ken's aunts, but the detectives hadn't seen any antiques that looked particularly special. There were hardly any at all. When they said this to Bob, he was confused. He hadn't been in the house in a few years, but back then it had been literally jammed wall-to-wall with very expensive stuff, millions of dollars worth of antiques. The police had already asked Ken to estimate the value of everything in the house, and he told them $125,000. Within that five years, though, Ken and Christine's kids had gone away to college, and that's a time when a lot of parents make changes to their house. Being surrounded by valuable antiques could certainly feel smothering.

Maybe Ken and Christine wanted less clutter around, and that's why they sold their antique collection or put in storage. I mean, there's no reason they'd have to sell them, right? I mean, everyone knew the fits hues were comfortably well off, right? Christine was a part-time music teacher, and Ken worked as a nebulously titled real estate consultant, which could mean anything or nothing at all. At least recently, Ken's work trended towards the nothing at all end of that spectrum. The Fitzhue's 1999 tax return showed an income of just $28,000, almost all of it earned by Christine. But then, of course, the rich can afford to be idle, within limits.

With millions of inherited dollars, those limits can be pretty broad, but they're not infinite. For example, in that same year of 1999, Ken and Christine's family expenditures added up. up to $320,000. Bro, do you want to burn through millions of dollars? Because that's how you burn through millions of dollars. Jesus. It seemed like that was exactly what Ken and Christine had done. In the weeks before the murder, some of their checks had bounced, and the government had

recently filed a tax lien against them. Just days before Christine had been killed, Ken had applied for a hefty bank loan. On the application, he'd claimed a monthly income of $16,500, which was obviously a lie. It looked like the Fitzhues were in a deep hole, but Ken's answer was to ask the bank to give him a bigger shovel to dig with. What they did have was about $1.5 million of equity in the house on Escobita Avenue, but using that came with its own problems. I suspect Christine had no idea how bad things had gotten. She wrote about her anxieties in her diary, and she never mentioned finances. Ken was a persniquity control freak, so much so that early in their marriage, he'd pressured Christine into granting him power of attorney so he'd have complete control over all their big decisions.

Things were reaching the point where Ken would have to come clean about their bank account, and I think the financial impact on his possible motive was essentially the same as the motive related to Justin's parentage, being exposed. He would lose face. He'd be humiliated twice over. To Ken, that was unbearable. Everything investigators found strengthened their belief that Ken had killed Christine. Luminal testing revealed blood evidence in the kitchen, especially around one of their kitchen chairs. Investigators would come to believe Christine had been attacked from behind while she sat there, first bludgeoned and then strangled and punched when she didn't immediately die. The luminal showed swipe marks on the floor of an attempt to clean up the blood. At the top of the basement steps was a large T-shaped stain.

Christine's body had been dragged from the kitchen and briefly laid on the carpet, presumably while Ken opened the basement door. Ken had finally remembered that his supposed real estate project, an alibi, was up in San Bruno, about half an hour away. He'd said he'd gotten a call from the school district secretary while he was on the freeway, but data from the cell phone towers put him in the area around Escobita Avenue. Ken had also said he tried calling Christine both on their landline and her cell phone had left messages both times.

There were no messages from him on either. A neighbor in the street behind Ken and Christine's house said she remembered a dark blue Chevy suburban, just like Ken's, parked on the street around the time police knew Christine had been killed. An unlocked gate connected the Fitzhue's backyard to their rearward neighbor, Detectives thought Ken had parked, come through that gate, and gone into his basement through the unlocked storm doors. He'd waited down there until he heard Christine coming back from her morning class, and then investigators thought things had gotten frantic. Justin's fiancé, Angelina, was in her first year working as a teacher

while Justin finished up with college and she'd been living with Ken and Christine. Detectives thought Ken's plan had been for Angelina to find Christine's body when she got home from work, while Ken was out puttering around with Galen and Carol. But then the secretary had called to say Christine hadn't shown up for her class. Ken had to seem worried as if he'd tried to find out what was going on with his wife. He had to think fast, on the spot, which had never been one of his strong suits. Ken probably had a plan to dispose of his bloody shoes and shirt while he was out with Galen and Carol, but now he couldn't do it, and in a panic, he didn't come up with an alternative.

The shoes, the goddamn shoes. Police were waiting for just one thing to put the habeas gravis on Ken Fitzhue, and that was confirmation that the blood on the shoes, shirt, and paper towel was Christine's, and DNA testing showed conclusively that it was. So on May 19th, two weeks after Christine had been murdered, Ken and John left the house to drive to Stockton for Justin's graduation. Police had been shadowing Ken since the murder. As far as they knew then, he was a millionaire with the resources to flee to anywhere in the world. There were more officers than normal behind him now, in anticipation of the DNA results coming through. And when they did, armed officers pulled Ken over and arrested him. There wasn't much doubt that Ken would be convicted, but his possible motives were apparently a little too loosey-goosey for the jury.

They ultimately decided the killing was not premeditated. I absolutely think it was, but whatever. And they convicted Ken of second-degree murder rather than first. He was sentenced to 15 years to life with the point. possibility of parole after 13 years. But he'd never get there. While he was incarcerated, Ken was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease and would later become terminally ill from complications. He was granted compassionate parole in February 2012 and died in October of the same year. So, secrets, folks, right? They can be nasty little things, especially when the secrets threaten a

narcissist's fragile ego. He could have either. easily just divorced Christine. I wouldn't have blamed him, honestly, but then all the dirty laundry would have come out in court. The open secret would have just been open. And for somebody like Ken, ego death is death. They're the same thing. And instead of walking away, Ken made the choice to pull out the stopper on decades of pent-up anger, and everyone around him paid the price. So that was a wild one. Right, campers? You know, we'll have another one for you next week. But for now, lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe until we get together again around the True Crime Campfire. And if you haven't booked your spot on the Crime Wave True Crime Cruise

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