In the summer of 1990, before Phillip Jablonski walked out of the state prison at Vacaville, both women in the house on Sanchez Street in Burlingame told someone that they were afraid of him. Eva Petersen telephoned a friend of his from prison, asked him to come and take away the belongings Jablonski had mailed ahead to her home, and said she did not want him on her property because she was afraid he would harm her. Her daughter, Carol Spadoni, was Jablonski's wife. When his parole officer called to say he had asked to live with her, she said no, because she was afraid of him.
The state heard them and did what the rules allowed. Robert Paredes, the officer assigned to him in Indio, three hundred miles from Burlingame, forbade him to travel more than fifty miles without permission and forbade him to go to Burlingame at all, a condition Jablonski resented. Because of his psychiatric history he was ordered into counseling. The Department of Corrections' own release report classed him as a psychiatric inmate on medication, and recorded a staff psychologist's warning that although his illness was in remission he could become actively psychotic at any time. He was released in September 1990.
There was a great deal to know. Jablonski was born on January 3, 1946 at Joshua Tree, California, and grew up poor, in a house where, by his sister's account, an alcoholic father beat his wife and children almost daily. He enlisted in the Army in 1966. Whether he served in Vietnam is disputed: he always said he had, his discharge papers list the Vietnam Service Medal, and one wire account called him a sergeant who had served two tours, but other accounts say his records leave it unclear. He was discharged in 1969 for what the Army recorded as a schizophrenic illness. In Texas, married to his high school girlfriend Alice McGowan, he smothered her with a pillow during sex, choked her unconscious more than once and tried to drown her in the bath, and in 1968 the Army hospitalized him for it rather than discipline him. The woman he lived with next, Jane S., said he raped her on their first date and, over four years, beat her, held a pistol on her and smothered her until she passed out. In December 1972, weeks after she left him, he raped a customer of the guard-dog business he worked for at knifepoint in her home, with her baby in the room, and went to prison for it.
In February 1977 he met Linda Kimball, and in December she gave birth to their daughter, Meghan. On the night of July 6, 1978 he woke her mother, Isobel Pahls, by climbing on top of her with a knife at her throat. He told her he had come to rape her and could not, because all he could see was Linda's face. Pahls did not call the police. She called the veterans' hospital at Loma Linda instead, and was told to leave it to them. Twice that month Kimball drove him there, and twice the staff declined to admit him; the second time was two days before he killed her.
She had left him by then and moved in with her mother. On July 16 she went back to the apartment in Palm Springs to fetch things for the baby, and that afternoon she was found there with her wrists bound, beaten, stabbed and strangled with a man's belt. He was arrested in Arizona eleven days later carrying a note in his own hand that began "Killed to date," and went on to her name and the words he said he had spoken to her: that she would never raise Meghan alone or leave him alive. He pleaded guilty to her second-degree murder, with assault and attempted rape. Pahls raised the child.
He served twelve years, and the prison years added to the file rather than subtracting from it. In 1982 he married Carol Spadoni at San Quentin; she had answered a personal ad he placed in a newspaper. That year a San Quentin psychiatrist recorded that Jablonski had come to him disturbed after a visit, having felt an impulse, while rubbing her neck, to wrap her hair around it. In July 1985, at the California Men's Colony, he choked his mother, by one account with a shoelace, and dragged her into the bedroom of a family-visit trailer, angry that his wife had not come with his parents; his father pulled him off.
Outside, he looked to his parole officer like a man managing. He got a driver's license and an old Ford Fairlane, and in January 1991 enrolled in automotive classes at the College of the Desert. A classmate thought him very intelligent. But on November 30, 1990 he had told a psychiatrist at Loma Linda, Dr. Sylvia Winters, that for six weeks he had been hearing voices and seeing faces, as he had before he killed Linda Kimball, and that he had stopped taking the medication prescribed in prison. She took his word that he did not feel like hurting anyone, made a tentative diagnosis of schizophrenia, and warned the social worker who would see him to take precautions for her own safety. A second psychiatrist who saw him in February, with Winters's report in front of him, looked for grounds to commit him and found none. When his apartment was searched afterward, the bottles of pills were still full. In March he told the manager of the hotel where he lived that he was going to have his wife write a letter, which he called a lying letter, saying she would move north with him.
Around April 20, 1991 he talked a classmate into selling him a small .22 revolver, knowing that as a felon he could not own one. On the evening of Monday, April 22 he gave another student, Fathyma Vann, a ride home from class. She was thirty-eight, recently widowed and the mother of two teenage daughters, and she was also known as Fanny Hansen. Another classmate would have been in the car too if a videotape machine had worked that night. Her body was found the next day in the desert outside Indio. She had been shot in the head and sexually assaulted, and she lay naked in a shallow ditch. Her body had been mutilated; the words "I Love Jesus" had been cut into her back.
On Tuesday, April 23 he drove north to Burlingame. He got in through an unlocked side door to the garage. In the house he shot his wife, bound her mouth and nose with duct tape and stabbed her; he sexually assaulted her mother and shot her through a towel he had forced into her mouth. Carol Spadoni was forty-six, or forty-seven by one newspaper account, and Eva Petersen seventy-two. That afternoon a Burlingame officer ticketed him for failing to yield and noticed nothing wrong with him, and at a bank in nearby Millbrae he cashed a $200 check made out to himself over a forged signature of Petersen's. The two women were found on April 26, after Robert Galindau, who met them for coffee and doughnuts three times a week, noticed the newspapers piling up in the yard and the cats in the back without food or water, and called the police.
By then Jablonski was heading east. On April 25, at a rest stop in Uinta County, Wyoming, he pointed a gun at a woman named Yvette Shelby, who got away when he dropped it and called the police from the next truck stop; the officer who questioned him accepted his story that the gun had fallen out of the car, and let him go. On April 27 Margie Rogers, fifty-eight, was found shot twice in the head in the convenience store and gas station she ran with her husband beside Interstate 70 in Grand County, Utah.
He was arrested in Kansas on April 28. In his wallet was an address book with the names and birth dates of his wife and her mother, and under each name, in his writing, the words "Death, April 23rd, 1991," a date the police had not yet made public. In the car were the revolver, whose bullets matched those taken from Petersen's body, duct tape, homemade wire handcuffs, a stun gun and an empty knife sheath that tested positive for blood. There was a black leather belt with the names of the Burlingame women and Fathyma Vann inked on the back beside their dates, and Vann's military identification card. And there was a tape, in his own voice, narrating the killings one after another.
On May 1 two detectives, from the Riverside County sheriff's department and the Burlingame police, questioned him for four hours. They had agreed beforehand that if he asked for a lawyer they would keep going anyway, to get material for impeaching him if he testified. He asked for a lawyer eleven times. At one point a detective told him, falsely, that nothing he said could be used against him in court. He gave them almost nothing. The California Supreme Court later held that what he said had not been coerced, but went out of its way to condemn the tactic, calling the deliberate violation of the Miranda rule unethical and warning that respect for the law is not advanced when those who enforce it choose to break it.
A San Mateo County grand jury indicted him on June 14, 1991 for the murders of Carol Spadoni and Eva Petersen. The defense raised his competence, and in November 1993 a jury found him fit for trial after three of the four experts who examined him concluded he was feigning much of his impairment. On April 25, 1994 he was convicted of both murders in the first degree, with special circumstances that he had killed more than once, had killed before, and had killed Petersen in the course of rape and sodomy. On May 10 the same jury rejected his insanity plea. Two psychiatrists had diagnosed schizophrenia going back to 1968; the court's experts agreed he was seriously ill but found that he knew what he was doing and that it was wrong, pointing to the gun bought in advance, the handcuffs, the drive north, the shower and shave afterward, the check, and the flight.
The penalty phase put the rest of his life in front of the jury: his sister, whom he had attacked with a rope when she was fourteen; his first wife; Jane S.; the woman raped in 1972; a woman from an Indiana prayer group who had written to him in prison and who, visiting after his release, was told he had dug a grave for her; Isobel Pahls; a woman in Highland he had choked unconscious in front of her children after killing Kimball; his mother; and the killings of Fathyma Vann and Margie Rogers, on his own tape. The defense answered with his childhood. On June 17, 1994 the jury returned death on both counts, and on August 12 the judge imposed it.
He was prosecuted separately in Riverside County for the killing of Fathyma Vann, pleaded guilty, and was sentenced to life without parole, according to his lawyer. Accounts differ on Margie Rogers: some say he was charged with her robbery and murder in Utah, others that he was never formally charged, and no trial for her death took place. On January 23, 2006, the California Supreme Court affirmed his convictions and death sentences. He spent the rest of his life on death row at San Quentin, where he had been held since August 19, 1994, in a single cell. At 1:10 in the afternoon of December 27, 2019, guards found him unresponsive, and he was pronounced dead at 1:30. He was seventy-three. The cause of death was left to the Marin County coroner and was not announced.