In July 1978 Phillip Jablonski beat, stabbed and strangled his partner Linda Kimball at their apartment in Palm Springs. He was convicted of her murder and served twelve years.
While he was inside, a woman named Carol Spadoni married him by post. He was paroled in 1990, and she told the authorities she was frightened of him and did not want him in her house. His parole conditions barred him from the town where she lived, Burlingame.
He went there anyway. On April 23, 1991 he shot and suffocated Carol Spadoni in her home, and shot and sexually assaulted her mother, Eva Petersen, in the same house on the same day. Over the five days that followed, Fathyma Vann, thirty-eight, was found stabbed and mutilated in the desert near Indio, and Margie Rogers, fifty-eight, was sexually assaulted and shot twice in the head at the store she ran with her husband beside Interstate 70 in Utah. Four people died inside a week of his release reaching its sixth month.
He was arrested in Kansas. He was carrying a handmade leather belt inscribed with his victims’ names and dates, and tape recordings he had made of the killings.
California convicted him in 1994 on two counts of first-degree murder with special circumstances and one of second-degree murder, and sentenced him to death; Utah convicted him of Margie Rogers’s murder as well. The California Supreme Court upheld the death sentence in January 2006. He was found unresponsive in his cell at San Quentin on December 27, 2019, aged seventy-three, and the cause was never established.
The parole file is the case. A woman told the state she was afraid of a man it was about to release, the conditions of his release were written to keep him away from her, and he killed her anyway. Nothing about the sequence required new information: every piece of it was already known to somebody whose job it was to know.