On Monday, October 20, 1970, sheriff's deputies and firefighters answering a fire at 999 Rodeo Gulch Road, a flagstone house designed by a disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright in the hills of Soquel above Monterey Bay, had to push a red Rolls-Royce and a black Lincoln out of the driveway to get the engines through. The fire chief, Ted Pound, went to the swimming pool for water. Floating at the top was Dorothy Cadwallader, thirty-eight, a medical secretary. Beneath her were Dr. Victor Ohta, forty-five, an eye surgeon, his wife, Virginia, forty-three, and their sons, Derrick, twelve, and Taggart, eleven. All five had been bound with brightly colored silk scarves and shot with a .38 revolver. Under the windshield wiper of the Rolls-Royce was a note typed on Ohta's own typewriter.
"Halloween, 1970," it began. "Today World War III will begin, as brought to you by the People of the Free Universe." Anyone who misused or destroyed the natural environment would suffer the penalty of death. "Materialism must die, or Mankind will stop." It was signed with four tarot cards: the Knight of Wands, the Knight of Cups, the Knight of Pentacles and the Knight of Swords. The killer had set the house alight, blocked the drive with the doctor's and the secretary's cars and fled in Virginia Ohta's station wagon, which he later burned in a railroad tunnel.
This was one attack, in one place, on one night. That is mass murder, not serial murder. The case is filed among serial killers because it opened the years in which Herbert Mullin and Edmund Kemper were also killing in Santa Cruz County, and because it came a little over a year after the Manson family's Tate and LaBianca murders.
John Linley Frazier was born on January 26, 1946, to Patricia Irene Adams and William B. Frazier. After his mother married Pierre Pascal of Santa Cruz he went to school in Capitola and then Santa Cruz High School, which he left as a freshman in 1961. He first came to the attention of juvenile authorities at fifteen. After a car accident in the late 1960s he became a religious fanatic who studied the Bible obsessively and came to believe he was the John of the Book of Revelation, chosen by God to save the environment from rich men such as Victor Ohta. For about four months he had been living in a cowshed beside his mother's trailer, down the hill from the Ohtas' house, and the Stanford psychiatrist Donald Lunde later described "a confusing system of delusional beliefs." His wife and mother tried and failed to get him into therapy. A week before the murders he told his wife that some materialists might have to die for him to fulfill his destiny.
Neighbors told the police they had seen him walking around Soquel with a gun and driving the Ohtas' missing station wagon. Two sheriff's deputies, Bradley Arbsland and Rodney Sanford, found his empty cabin in the woods, hid in the brush nearby for twenty hours, and at 7:30 on the morning of October 23 took him as he slept.
The jury found him legally sane and convicted him of five counts of murder. On the first day of the trial he came into court with half his head and face shaved bald, eyebrow included, and the other half in long hair and beard; on his lawyer's advice he later shaved it all. He was sentenced to death at the end of 1971, on November 29 by one account and in December by another. In 1972 the California Supreme Court struck down the state's death penalty, and his sentence became life.
The Ohtas' daughters, Taura, eighteen, and Lark, fifteen, had been away at boarding school. Taura killed herself seven years later, and Victor Ohta's mother also took her own life. "Yeah, my dad had expensive cars," Lark Ohta said in 1990, "but he cared about other people; he cared for their eyes for free if they couldn't pay." Frazier was refused parole repeatedly. On August 13, 2009, at sixty-three, he hanged himself at Mule Creek State Prison in Ione, California.