- This is a notorious serial killer who was not very famous,
but he certainly caused a lot of mayhem and horror.
Police find a body laying in the desert.
- There was something carved in her skin on her back.
- This is torture.
- He already had four victims.
He feels he is not going to be caught.
- He had nothing to lose at this point.
- She had been corresponding with a killer.
- He had a three-day head start,
and we had no idea where he was going.
- He was some kind of devil
to do all those things to my mother
and keep her alive while you did it.
♪
- The Indio area in the high desert
of Southern California region
was a pretty desolate location 30-plus years ago.
There really wasn't a lot going on out there.
- A young lady came into the Indio Police Department
and asked to see an officer.
When she was asked why,
she slid several Polaroid photos of a dead body
to the person at the desk.
She told him she was driving around in the desert area
to clear her mind and to clear her soul,
and she came across this dead body.
The Indio Police Department responded
and my supervisor said, "You're it."
I arrived on the scene.
The nearest home is about 300 yards away.
There was almost a mile until you reached a paved road.
I walked up to the body, and it was female.
She was laying face down.
She was nude except for one shoe.
As we got closer to the body, we could see
that there was something carved in her skin on her back.
And it was "I"
and then the symbol for heart and "Jesus."
It took up from her shoulders to her buttocks.
When I saw that, I didn't know what to think,
it was possibly a signature.
It was just a phenomenon that none of us
had ever witnessed personally.
- There's no identification.
There's no way of knowing who this person is.
- The coroner arrives.
We turn the body over, and then we see that it appears
that she had been shot in the head.
She was also missing her eyeballs.
She had been stabbed in the throat.
Her ears had been cut off and her nipples had been removed.
Those parts that were missing,
they were not there at the scene.
These appeared to be trophies that were taken from the victim.
It was elevated to a different level of horror.
- When a killer mutilates someone,
it's typically fantasy driven or symbolic to them.
So it could mean that it's just something
they were doing that satiated them
and made the killer feel more gratified.
- The position of her body looked like she had been dragged
and left at that location.
In fact, we did find drag marks
next to a pair of tire tracks about 15 feet from the body.
We didn't see a lot of blood, so we believed
that the homicide had been committed someplace else.
- Police searched the area,
and they found a number of items--
clothing, hair extensions--
just items that obviously had belonged to the woman
that whoever did this had either stripped off her,
taken off her, thrown off her.
- The very first priority is to get this victim identified.
We began scouring our neighboring agencies
for missing persons.
- There's no reports.
Is she from this area? Is she from some other place?
Who is this person? It is a complete mystery.
- At the autopsy, the coroner found
that our victim was shot one time in the head.
A .22-caliber bullet recovered from her brain
that did not exit.
Based on her body temperature,
the coroner believed the date and time of death
were the night of the 22nd.
We didn't initially see any indication of sexual abuse
until the coroner found that
she had also been stabbed in the buttocks and her vagina.
She had defensive wounds that would indicate
that she fought back.
This kind of crime horrifies and motivates you.
During the autopsy, they ran her fingerprints and got no matches.
- One of the key items on the victim
was that she had a gold tooth in the shape of a clover.
- We relayed that immediately to our neighboring stations
and to the local police departments,
and within a couple of hours I had a call
from our neighboring sheriff's station that,
the same day as the autopsy,
their people were taking a missing-persons report
in the city of Rancho Mirage
for a Fathyma Vann who went missing
on the night of the 22nd.
- 20-year-old Yolanda Vann reports that her mother,
Fathyma Vann, who's 38 years old, is missing
and has been missing for almost two days.
- My mother worked at the senior citizens home.
And we were taking night classes at College of the Desert.
Mom took a engine-rebuilding class
and a child-development class.
And then I was taking
administrative of justice classes
'cause I wanted to be a judge.
On April 22nd,
I was sick, and I didn't go to school that day
and I stayed home.
Mom went to work.
I'm thinking it's gonna be a regular day for her.
That night, she went to class at 8:00.
That was the last class that she was in at the night.
She was always home by 10:00.
No if, ands, or buts.
So I'm home. I'm looking at the clock.
10:00 hits.
Mom's not walking through that door.
Automatic flags for me.
I get on the phone, call my sister.
"Hey, Mom didn't show up."
She was, "Just give her some time."
I said, "Nuh-unh.
'Cause Mom would have been here."
I started calling her friends.
I started calling her job. I started calling people.
I left and went up to the school to see if she was there.
Nothing.
[ Telephone ringing ]
I started calling the police like that night.
The detectives started asking about any tattoos
or anything that could identify her.
And I said that gold four-leaf-clover tooth
she had in her mouth, right in the front.
- The clover-shaped gold tooth obviously triggers
a big, big alert to the police.
- I knew immediately that it was our victim.
Fathyma had two girls-- Yolanda and Michelle--
and they had all lived together in the same apartment
in Rancho Mirage.
We needed to go and let her know
that her mom was indeed deceased.
And it was an awful feeling.
- When I found out my mother was gone,
I tore up everything I could because now life is gone.
Now I'm crying. I can't do anything.
Now it's just me and my sister.
I grew up in Ventura County with two loving parents
and my sister, Michelle.
My parents had their battles and struggles
just like everybody else.
Yes, they separated. My mother was home a lot.
She made sure we had everything we needed.
A very caring, strong, empowered Cherokee woman.
- We need to get her some justice.
We need to find who did this to her.
We needed to find out where her mom had been,
where she may have crossed paths with whoever killed her.
And so I asked her a whole lots of questions
about her mom's day.
What was her schedule like?
- Mom's car was actually at the school.
She brought it there as a project car
since she wanted to rebuild it.
So that was the project that they used in the class.
So she took the bus to school.
- We learned there was a couple of times
when an older white man had given her a ride home.
- I met him one evening.
He actually was standing by her and she said,
"This is my daughter, Yolanda."
His vibe was not good at all.
- The detectives want to find this guy,
want to talk to this guy to see if he's involved.
- At the same time,
we hear a police broadcast by our dispatch
that had come from Indio police.
Indio police is looking for the parolee
for a homicide with some similarities
in Burlingame, California-- Bay Area.
There were definitely similarities.
Two female victims shot
with a small-caliber weapon, probably a .22.
Both of them had had their breasts mutilated.
- Two different police agencies
have two different horrific crime scenes,
all within a day and a half of one another.
Is there some connection? Who would do this?
This isn't random. There's no chance.
- We are hunting a serial killer.
- The detectives see a familiar pattern--
revenge on women who rejected him.
- This tape was being recorded as he would stop at rest stops
and eyeball women going in and out of the ladies' room.
- His plan was, was to grab a woman who was there.
- While detectives are busy putting together
the Fathyma Vann case and trying to find what happened to her,
there's a whole nother nightmare going on
up in Burlingame, in Northern California.
- Burlingame is a small city outside San Francisco,
in the suburbs.
We had 30,000 residents and very little crime.
It was a Friday morning.
A retired firefighter goes to the Burlingame Police Department
and requests a welfare check.
- He says, "I have two friends
who I meet for coffee three times a week.
72-year-old Eva Petersen and her daughter,
46-year-old Carol Spadoni.
We've met for a long, long time on a regular basis,
and they haven't shown up for two days, which is unusual."
- He came by the house
and saw the car in the driveway with some newspapers piled up,
so he thought something was wrong.
- Law enforcement went out there
and saw no signs of forced entry.
The door to the garage-- not locked. Open.
They walked into the garage
and saw an older woman sprawled on the entryway into the house.
They could tell right away that she was deceased.
- She was naked from the waist down
and had a sweatshirt and bra pulled up over her breasts.
She also had cut marks on her right nipple.
- She had a towel stuffed in her mouth,
and there was a bullet fired through that
right into her head.
- Probably the towel was used to muffle the sound.
We knew we had a monster on our hands.
- This is torture.
- I saw drag marks across the floor,
which indicated to me that she had been shot inside the home
and then dragged in the garage.
I then proceeded into the living room,
where I found another younger female.
And she had duct tape completely wrapped around her head,
which covered her mouth and nose,
indicating that she had probably been suffocated.
Her right breast had been cut completely in half
from the bottom side up.
She had a stab mark in the neck,
she had stab mark in her stomach,
and her private parts had also been stabbed.
- The violence seemed
very similar to the violence that
we had witnessed with Fathyma Vann.
It appeared that our suspect, whoever it was,
was very methodical
and got personal gratification by being this evil.
- It must have been a horrific, horrific death.
They had family show up and identified both of them.
Carol was anorexic.
She weighed about 90 pounds.
And Eva's life was just kind of maintaining
and trying to keep her daughter alive and happy.
- They lived a very secluded life,
private life.
The house itself was jam-packed with items purchased
on the shopping network.
Detectives come across a diary that Carol kept,
and the last entry was on April 23rd.
- It indicated that this might have happened
three days earlier.
- As police go through the home,
they find a stack of letters.
As they're going through the letters,
they notice a big "C" stamp on there,
for, like, "correctional facility."
And that tells detectives
that there's some sort of letter-writing correspondence
going on between this household and someone who's in prison.
- The investigators were going through the letters
to see who they were written by and quickly got a name.
Phillip Jablonski.
- Why is this inmate writing letters to these people?
- We found out from one of the relatives of Carol and Eva
that Carol started a pen pal relationship with Mr. Jablonski.
- She was writing to him as a part of a religious program.
I believe that she was thinking that she could help him,
she could help save his soul and make him a better person.
- The early letters were very sweet and nice,
and she called him "my big bear."
- Carol was sort of a lonely heart of sorts.
She had not been married before.
And she was clearly not a strong personality, easy to manipulate.
- You can see in the letters
that he was becoming more attached to her
and more fixated on her.
- Her family told us,
in 1982 Carol actually went to San Quentin Prison
and married Mr. Jablonski.
- Her family members were appalled when they realized
that she had been corresponding with an inmate
and then marrying him.
- I got one of my partners to do a workup about Jablonski.
And they found out that he was a convicted murderer.
Jablonski had been arrested back in 1978
for killing his first wife, Linda Kimball, by strangulation.
- He brutalized her. He beat her.
He strangled her with a belt so tight
that they could not undo it.
They had to cut it off at the autopsy.
- This is obviously a man out for anger and vengeance.
- The next step in the investigation is,
let's find out where is he today.
- I immediately called Jablonski's parole officer.
He told me Phillip Jablonski was released in 1990.
He said that his wife, Carol Spadoni,
was afraid of him.
She didn't want him anywhere near her.
So he had to be paroled back into Riverside County.
- So he is out of prison.
We also found that he had been given a moving citation
by one of our traffic officers in Burlingame
three days earlier, on April 23rd of 1991.
So we knew that Jablonski was at least in town on that date
and could have very well killed Carol and Eva.
- The parole agent told me that Jablonski was going
to College of the Desert and taking automotive classes.
- Jablonski and Fathyma Vann were in the same class together,
so we had linked Jablonski up with Fathyma Vann.
- The parole officer hadn't had any contact
with him since the 23rd.
- There was a 500-mile distance between Indio
and the city of Burlingame.
It's very possible that this suspect
could have killed Fathyma Vann April 22nd
and had driven up and killed Carol and Eva
later the next day.
- I said to the parole officer,
"Do you have a picture of this guy?"
"Yeah, I do." So I go get that picture.
And I go take it to Yolanda.
- When I first seen the picture of him,
I said that was the odd person that had been around us,
that had gave me a bad vibe.
And I told my sister, "That's a mug shot."
He's already done something.
With my intuition, I knew. It had to be him.
- The detectives want to find this guy.
- Where is he?
- The Indio Police Department
are looking into Phillip Carl Jablonski
for the murder and mutilation of Fathyma Vann.
But at the same time,
law enforcement in Burlingame, California,
found correspondence between Carol Spadoni--
one of their victims-- and Phillip Jablonski
while he's in prison.
- I would say we've probably found
50 to 60 letters in the house.
Carol must have saved everything.
- Their initial correspondence was quite affectionate
and pleasant.
But over time, his writing to her became more sexual.
This scared her, and as she began to reject him,
he became more aggressive
and then eventually sexually aggressive in his letters.
Although they were married,
she rejected about 13 of the conjugal visits.
- Jablonski was not happy
when Carol rejected his kind offers to come
for a conjugal visit.
- He didn't like rejection, especially from a woman.
It made him furious.
- His letters began to get angrier.
And then he started writing her mother, Eva.
And he's talking sexually to her.
- I think that's when they both
became really kind of afraid of him.
But they didn't think he was ever gonna get out of prison.
So everything was fine until it came time for him to be paroled.
- The investigation continued.
Detectives went to that automotive class
where Fathyma Vann met Phillip Jablonski.
- The detective said it was a stipulation of the parole
was he had to take college classes,
and he enrolled three weeks late into the class
and then got teamed up with my mother by the instructor.
- Several of the students recalled
that Jablonski had asked Fathyma Vann out on a date.
- She never went out with him.
She treated him like he was a classmate, and she was pleasant.
They were in class. It was business.
- The detectives see a familiar pattern
with Phillip Jablonski--
revenge on women who rejected him.
- Sexual offenders,
one of the scripts that they may have
is that they are entitled to sexual access to women,
and when they don't experience that,
they can feel a sense of humiliation
and then wanting to regain that power, perhaps by revenge.
- At the class, they found a student that saw
Jablonski and Fathyma Vann drive off together
'cause Jablonski was giving her a ride home.
He specifically recalled that it was April 22nd,
the night she died.
- Now the police know that Jablonski
is the guy they want to find for the Fathyma Vann murder as well.
- This was a whodunit for three days,
and after three days it was a hunt for Phillip Jablonski.
- But police aren't really sure where Jablonski is.
- He lived at a halfway house with several other parolees.
The investigators see if Jablonski
had driven back to Indio, to his home,
but there was no signs of Jablonski
and no signs of his car.
- The manager lets us in.
Inside Philip Jablonski's room was a trove of evidence.
There was bloody clothing, several pieces.
There was letters, an address book.
Lots of pen pals names on it.
There appeared to be a plan to murder,
mutilate, and sexually abuse these women.
- He's killed four women that we know of.
He killed three in less than 48 hours.
He was on the run, had a three-day head start,
and we had no idea where he was going.
- How can we get him quickly?
Because we don't know what sort of a killing spree
he will continue to be on.
We worry about women out there
and what family could possibly lose a loved one
because we're not able to find him yet?
- We are hunting a serial killer.
- The police know that Jablonski is the guy they want to find
for the murders of Fathyma Vann,
Carol Spadoni, and Eva Petersen.
And because of the traffic violation,
they know what kind of car he has.
It's a 1965 Ford Fairlane.
- We were able to put his vehicle
into the national system as a wanted homicide vehicle.
This driver may be armed and dangerous.
- Meanwhile, investigators begin to research
Philip Jablonski's life.
- Jablonski was born on January 3rd of 1946.
- He was the second youngest of six children.
By all accounts, his father abused alcohol
and was an extremely violent man.
He took out his rage and engaged in a lot of violence
towards his wife, but also towards his children.
- There were occasions when Jablonski tried to stand up
and defend his mother, but that didn't stop anything.
And in fact, the father would just
beat the hell out of him for doing it.
He was known as a sickly child who was crying all the time.
Clearly problems.
- As a teen, it was noted
that Jablonski seemed to be more interested in sex
than his peer group,
and he really felt the need to have his sexual needs met.
- There was a belief
that Jablonski was developing sexual deviancy,
that he was coming on to sisters in the family.
- This guy has a very sick and twisted relationship with women.
In 1966, Jablonski enlisted in the army.
Jablonski would tell everybody who would listen
that he was in Vietnam, that he was a tunnel rat,
that he had won all these medals,
that he had been a hero.
None of that was true. He never left the States.
It's 1968, and Jablonski gets married to a young woman.
And as would be a pattern throughout his life,
he was abusive to her, hurt her.
And she ultimately said enough's enough,
and she got out of there.
In 1972, we found that Jablonski
had assaulted another woman by knifepoint,
trying to rape her.
- He was arrested, and he got three years for that crime.
In February of 1977 Jablonski is out of prison,
and he met Linda Kimball, and they get married.
- He brutally killed her because she rejected him,
because she said, "We are done."
- Despite the incredible violence of this crime,
he gets a sweetheart plea-bargain deal
to second-degree murder, and he only gets seven years.
When he was in prison for murdering Linda Kimball,
he is writing letters to Carol Spadoni.
He needs a woman. He cannot be by himself.
He's got to have someone to control and be with.
- We worked all weekend.
Meanwhile, a Kansas state trooper was on patrol.
He saw a man in a rest stop with California plates,
and the hood was up on the car.
- He runs the plates and gets immediate serious hit.
This guy, Phillip Jablonski, is wanted for murder.
- He's arrested at the scene.
He doesn't create any problems.
He knows it's up for him.
And he's taken to McPherson County Jail.
- When I heard that Phillip was arrested.
I was excited that they caught him.
I celebrated when I heard it.
- We still had a lot more investigation to do.
We knew Jablonski had driven from California to Kansas.
We wanted to check and see if there was any other victims.
That's when I got a call
that there is another murder in Utah.
- The victim fits with the pattern that he has shown
and fits with his drive across country.
♪
- There was a little gas station convenience store
called Rogers Roost
in a small desert town called Thompson Springs, Utah.
And it was run by Margie Rogers.
She was 59 years old.
- In the very early morning,
she was found by a customer who came in
and found her dead on the floor.
They discovered that the cash register had been emptied,
and the woman had been shot and killed
with a small-caliber weapon, probably a .22.
And there was some indication
that the suspect, at the very minimum,
had pulled her bra up over her breasts and fondled them.
- And they thought, "Maybe this guy Jablonski did this,"
because our victims had been killed
with a small-caliber handgun and had been sexually assaulted.
But they knew that he had come through Utah
to get to where he was when he got stopped.
We need to see if he had anything to do with that crime,
and we don't know how many more there's gonna be
or how many others that we don't know about at this point.
- Jablonski was doing what he wants to live his fantasies
and to exact revenge onto the women
who he felt humiliated him.
- Mark and I flew to Kansas to talk to Jablonski.
We needed more evidence to make sure
that we could get a conviction for these murders.
- We need to find out,
did he kill Margie Rogers at a convenience store in Utah?
- Mark and I both walked into the interview room
where Jablonski was sitting.
- He's a big man. Tall.
6'4", 250-plus pounds.
- He had big, big, dark eyes.
And they looked right through you.
- I found him more revolting than I did intimidating.
We started asking about Fathyma.
- He was talkative about anything
that we wanted to talk about, except for the crime scene.
We spent about an hour with him in an interview room.
But every time we got around to
talking anything about the crime,
he would say, "I don't want to talk about it."
- It was fruitless as far as evidence is concerned.
We still had a lot of things
to put together before he could be prosecuted.
- Our next step after the interview with Philip Jablonski,
we had to look at any evidence
that may link our suspect to other homicides.
The undersheriff showed us what was on Jablonski's person
when he was arrested.
- Mark opened his wallet and pulled out
a gasoline credit card in the name of Eva Petersen.
I couldn't believe it. I said, "Oh, my God.
He's got property of one of the victims on him."
- We also found an ID
with Fathyma Vann's picture on it.
Perhaps a trophy.
But there was absolutely nothing
that would identify Margie Rogers.
A short time later,
they processed the car from the outside,
and now they opened the doors.
Under the front seat is a loaded ...22-caliber revolver.
A little Saturday night special is what they used to call them.
- All of our victims had been killed with .22-caliber bullets.
When we pull the seat forward,
the driver's seat and the seat back itself
had blood stains straight down the seats.
We instantly knew at that point,
oh, man, this is the Fathyma Vann crime scene.
All we had to do was match the blood.
One of the technicians reached in the back
and pulled this belt out that looked like a rattlesnake.
It was obviously handmade.
And on the back there were several names written in ink
with dates of death.
And the names on there were Fathyma Vann,
Carol Spadoni, and Eva Petersen.
- In addition to our three California victims
was another name with a date.
The name was "elderly woman," not specified,
and with the date of the 27th.
- Margie Rogers had been killed
on the 27th of April...
...which immediately we said,
oh, my God, he's responsible for the fifth killing in Utah
two days after he killed the women in Burlingame.
- And then there's two more names.
There's no month or a day.
- Are they next, or were they some that didn't get found?
- While the belt is damning information,
while the credit cards are damning information,
while the notebooks with death dates on them
are clear strong evidence,
the best thing of all they find in the car
is a tape recorder and tapes.
- We listened to the tape.
It began with, "My first victim was Fathyma Vann.
She was about 5'4", 130 pounds."
On the tape, he describes killing her in the car.
- When I heard that tape, it sent chills up my spine.
- Jablonski was journaling his latest murder spree.
It clearly showed clarity of thought--
evil thought, but clarity of it.
- This tape was being recorded as we moved along his trip
from Riverside County
all the way through until he got stopped,
where he would stop at rest stops and eyeball women
going in and out of the ladies rooms.
- He's describing a rest stop that he stopped at.
And what his plan was, was to grab a woman who was there,
sexually assault her and murder her.
He had the plan for that and was looking right at her.
- Who is this person? Is she from the death belt?
- But she got away.
She was able to jump in her car and drive off.
But that was clearly the next notch on his belt.
- He gave his full details of how he killed a Carol and Eva.
- He was tape-recording himself
because that was part of his fantasy.
By listening to that audio recording,
he can continue to relive it.
- And then Phillip Jablonski described
how he went into the convenience store
and shot and killed Margie Rogers.
- If there was ever any question about,
"Do we really think we have the right guy?"
this tape sent that concern out the window.
The investigation wasn't done.
We have a belt with an unknown name on it.
And Jablonski had other pen pals, not just Carol.
- We felt it was important to find out
if these women were indeed still alive.
Our parole agent had gone to Phillip Jablonski's
post office box
and had retrieved a letter from a woman
whose name was on that belt.
- The immediate concern was,
has there been contact with them?
And could she already be dead?
- While Jablonski was in prison,
he had established additional pen pal relationships
with at least two other women who lived in other states.
So police are now in a frantic state
to, like, find these women.
- We sent the local police over there to do a welfare check.
Luckily, both women were alive.
But one of the women said
that she was planning to meet with him,
that he was talking about coming to visit her.
So he was on his way to at least one of them
in Knoxville, Tennessee.
- When they found out he was a murderer,
they were flabbergasted.
At that point,
we felt that there was no other victims
because there was no other names on the belt
and no other names on the tape recording
that he was doing as he went along.
- The evidence that we collected from the car
was brought back here to our crime lab.
- The blood on the side of the driver's seat
came back to match Fathyma Vann's.
- Our crime lab compared the .22-caliber handgun
that Jablonski kept in the car
to the bullets that had been fired into our victims,
and it was a perfect match.
- Jablonski was indicted on June 4th of 1991.
It was decided
that San Mateo County district attorney
was going to be the first to try Mr. Jablonski
for the murders of Eva Petersen and Carol Spadoni.
- We just felt ours was the most straightforward.
His attorneys argued that he was not competent to stand trial.
The defense really keyed on the fact
that he had a severe personality disorder.
And as the prosecutor side of it,
we weren't fighting that he had mental illness or illnesses.
We just said that didn't change
that he knew what he was doing.
And that jury found that he was competent to stand trial.
- Jablonski was found guilty of first degree murder
of Carol Spadoni
and a first degree murder of Eva Petersen.
And he was given a death sentence for each one.
♪
- When it came time for our case with Fathyma Vann,
there was a conscious decision to have him plead guilty
without the possibility of parole.
And that cemented the fact
that he would never be able to kill another woman again.
- My sister Michelle went to one of the court hearings.
She told me she saw him, and he said,
"I thought I killed you."
She looks like my mother.
♪
- Since he was given two death sentences in California,
Margie Rogers' family just elected
to leave it where it was.
- In December of 2019,
Jablonski once again escapes justice.
He dies in San Quentin of natural causes.
♪
- Every once in a while,
I still hear portions of those tapes in my head
or in a dream or something.
I just can't understand how someone
who could appear so ordinary be so evil to the core.
- You've taken everything, Phillip.
You've taken everything.
And now you're gone.
What about all of the victims?
What about the blood that's left behind?
We're still bleeding, with no justice.
I miss my mother so much.
I can't talk to her.
It's the destruction that never stops giving.
If I could say something to my mom,
then I would say, "Mom, you raised a good one.
I appreciate you for everything that you've done for me
and all the love that you gave me.
It has helped me get through all of this.
It really has.
And I love you so much."
♪