California Mass Murderer, John Linley Frazier | Crime Up Close | Born To Kill?
in 1970 John Linley Frasier committed a crime that sent shock waves through Society people were just stunned its weird mix of occult messages and senseless brutality they had been executed and then the house was set on fire had Californians fearing for their lives oh yeah the doors were locked and the guns were loaded but what had driven Frasier to slaughter was he destined for murder Fraser had a very unstable childhood the intensity with which he would look at you always kind of scared me was John Linley Frasier born to kill he was going
to go door to door like the Avon lady ding dong you’re dead [Applause] [Music] in the early 1960s Santa Cruz was just an ordinary Californian Beach town Santa Cruz was a model of conservatism a tourist City uh dominated by the boardwalk and the beach Santa Cruz was very friendly slow paced Community to live in back then it was pretty much a retirement town at that
time there was there was no University of California there was no UC campus there at the time it was just a very quaint small community it felt very safe and very pleasant it was this peaceful community that the OT family decided to make home tragically for them it wouldn’t remain peaceful for long Dr Victor Oda and his family were very very well known in in the city of Santa Cruz and actually in the county of Santa Cruz and Beyond he was a a noted uh well-respected opthalmologist my father he was a person who came from very poor background and
did very well for himself he was just sort of a bigger than life character handsome and and generous and and and friendly Dr OT was U my eye doctor um and um I remember him as being a very very nice man very gentle my mother also came from a a workingclass background she was chze Slovakia my father was Japanese so if our home and our lifestyle was anything it was much more Japanese my mother was also very stylish and and and perfect looking I just moms were like that then I guess Victor and Virginia OT had what
many locals considered to be the perfect family my older sister was uh Tara was 3 years older than I was and she was artistic and an artist and um and beautiful she’s also a model then I had uh two brothers that were Derek was three years younger than I and tag was four years tag was just one of those little boys that was just the sweetest cutest kid in school and everybody loved he was just gorgeous Derek was much more artistic and and darker a little more brooding and um and more complicated thought of as almost another family
member was the doctor’s secretary Dorothy cadwalader my aunt Dorothy she she was a wonderful woman you know all American apple pie the whole works she was the most beautiful woman she was softspoken and perfect she was like just to me I just idolized her complete beating the perfect family unit was the dream home the otter built in the Santa Cruz Foothills was as much part of our life as a person in our family that home and the process of building it even the the Fabrics inside the house my mother wo on a loom it was built completely into nature
there was there were no trees cut down to build the home Dr Oda liked uh natural setting I can remember that the windows didn’t have any coverings on them he liked to look out into the forest and um liked a lot of natural stonework around the home it wasn’t a time that you thought of where anything bad would ever happen but in the late 60s Santa Cruz changed forever [Music] the hippie generation descended on the area in their thousands you started seeing a lot of people dropping out and uh going to live with nature it was huge here some people
were growing their own food some of them worked they uh were artists musicians a lot of people on food stamps probably and it wasn’t all peace and love well the 1960s are known as sort of the uh decade of love and and flower power and peace and Harmony but uh in many ways it had a darker side it saw quite a few different revolutions it was a sexual political uh psychedelic Revolution but one that doesn’t get mentioned as much as the others was a kind of magical Revolution that took place in the 1960s uh it was more or less an ult
Revival I remember just up the way here one of the communes where the inhabitants would put on white robes and pointed hats and the chanting and like a Celtic language and holding rituals it it was a bizarre behavior that scared people there seemed to be a kind of free-for-all in the in the world of morality which initially was very liberating but at a certain point it seemed to have gone too far nothing Illustrated this more than when the cult hippie commune led by Charles Manson slaughtered eight people in 1969 most horrifyingly amongst the
victims was the 8-months pregnant actress Sharon Tate California exploded in fear when the whole Tate Lanka murders in LA and The Charlie Manson gang popped on to the newspapers and was covered internationally it it made people go wow what what’s what’s happening I did change you know the whole Aura of peace and love and flower power to something strange to be fearful of more criminal more crazy soon after the Manson Murders a terrifying crime would occur in Santa Cruz on America’s West Coast that would convince all that another killer cult
was on the Rampage my dad told me um I want you two to stay up here because there five bodies in the pool in 1969 the Manson family murders had revealed a dark side to the hippie generation rumors have strange occult practices talk of Revolution and murder had tainted the peace and love movement forever and in 1970 a new crime would occur that would convince many that Society was about to self-destruct this crime unfolds really with a report of a fire smoke billowing from this small Hilltop that night I was in class out at the
community college we were on a break and I heard the siren blowing I got my fire gear because I knew where the fire was the otah residence as the firefighters arrive they go up a a winding kind of a drop driveway and there’s a car there was a Rolls-Royce and a Lincoln blocking the [Music] roadway they couldn’t get to the house the house was on fire so we we got out and we um approached the scene my dad who was the assistant fire chief instructed us to take a hose line up on the roof there are Flames happening in different parts of the house and the
firefighters are putting out the the flames and then uh my dad climbed up the ladder and he told me um I want you two to stay up here until I tell you to come down and it seemed kind of strange to me and so I said to him why he said because there five bodies in the pool body is literally floating in the swimming pool it was very eerie pretty I think you know to this day I can still kind of visualize that it happened sometime during the dinner hour on the I surgeon’s $150,000 estate everyone in the house
methodically murdered the only survivors the oda’s two teenage daughters who were away at [Music] school I was back at boarding school and I was woken up by one of the nuns and told that I needed to go home and it was certainly not what I could have ever imagined when I walked outside it was just barely sunrise and all the nuns from the entire School were standing [Music] outside they had to tell me um in the car that that my family had died [Music] it was um it was Unthinkable and then they had to tell me
how five people had been killed Dr Oda his wife secretary and two of his children they had been executed uh and somehow thrown pushed or dumped into the swimming pool and then the house was set on fire Dr OT had been shot three times the two women and the boys Had Each been shot once in the head all of the bodies were found in the pool they were tied with silk uh scarves the murder sent shock waves through California and Beyond when this crime happened people were they were just stunned Dr Victor OT and his family
lived in this house on a hill none of the neighbors saw or heard anything police today were searching the area they believe there must have been more than one killer but they have very few leads Dr Oda was such a well-regarded figure in the community and nearly an entire family killed in in in one event it just paralyzed this community the burden was on the sheriff’s department to unravel the mystery this is where this heinous crime took place we had police cars fire engines the media trying to keep people away
from the house as the crime was searched a clue surfaced not too far from where I am straight up past this Switchback was one of the cars that blocked the fire engines from from getting in to put out the fire and tucked beneath the windscreen wiper detectives made their chilling find there was a weird development in the case a strange note was found at the scene indicating the killings had been done by a group calling itself the Free People of the universe who have declared World War III against anybody who misuses the
environment composed on the OT own typewriter the note began Halloween 1970 today World War I will begin as brought to you by the people of the free Universe from this day forward anyone Andor company of persons who misuses the natural environment or destroys same will suffer the penalty of death the note was signed Knight of Wands Knight of Cups Knight of Pentacles Knight of Swords the note once it was the contents released really scared people it made people right away think about Charlie Manson Tate labianca Helter
Skelter those of us in the Sheriff’s Office thought we were dealing with a big group of people that were hellbent on on killing people I had never been uh you know associated with Firearms the first thing I did was I went down to the local cigar store and bought myself a weapon we never used to lock our doors but when this happened we started locking our doors I actually slapped with a shotgun alongside my bed oh yeah the doors were locked and the guns were loaded within 24 hours there was a new development whoever had slain the family
had stolen one of their cars and now it reappeared in a nearby Railway tunnel along with a sighting nearby of three suspicious hippies a train came along and hit the car and now we are rushing to the tunnel to find out what kind of information on this murder case can this car give us the vehicle was still warm so there was thought it was recent and therefore the people uh the suspects May Be Still in the area so then we started looking for who put the car in the tunnel on these tracks we put together this extensive perimeter around what is known
as Henry Cal Park it is huge this is a dense Redwood forest it goes down into a Gorge where the San Len river runs and then goes up the other side I along with probably at least 100 or more other uh officers be searching we had High California highway patrols Santa Cruz County Sheriff Santa Cruz Police we had people from everywhere we were borrowing helicopters from the San Francisco Bay Area I was leading one of those teams because I was familiar with the trails up there but it was really uh a long shot that we would find
someone that it’s the area is uh overgrown with redwoods and brush and easy for them to hear us coming easy for them to hide despite the massive search The Cult Killers couldn’t be found and as Panic spread through the Santa Cruz Community talk of a war between straight society and the hippies began hippie come began in the woods around here there are many of them a person with long hair lately around here has been feeling the heat it’s this look of distrust of uh we just can’t trust these people you know they’re afraid of
us this was a the first time anything like that had happened in Santa Cruz County and I think that the town really got paranoid many people are talking of setting up vigilante groups they’re buying guns and ammunition people would say well uh we’d like to uh the Lynch long hairs uh we don’t think our community needs him but when details of the note reached long-haired local Roger cron what came to mind was not a cult but his neighbor a reclusive 24-year-old John Lindley Frasier facts came out about the Otis Ling and they just felt every everything
about that fell right in line with what he had been telling us 3 days before Roger and his friends lived in a selection of Old Farm buildings in the woods not far from the OT family home John camped out over in this cabin across the Ravine and he was uh living off the land for the most part he was as close to a survivalist as you could get for the time he had a look about him he was so serious and he seemed really skeptical of everything so you know there was part of me that feared him always when my friend Michael Madden and
I were at work he had a conversation with uh the girls that lived in the house too he had been talking about the Book of Revelations and uh the fact that uh he felt he was here to uh save the environment and that uh that people who were polluting it or who were abusing it needed to be dealt [Music] with either you were in with him or you had to had to go against all expectations the so-called people of the free Universe was not a killer cult but but a lone assassin on a mission from God and he was armed and on the
[Music] loose in October 1970 Dr Victor OT his wife Virginia their two sons Derek and tager and Dr ‘s secretary Dorothy Cadwallader had been bound with scarves shot in the head and dumped in the family’s swimming pool after the discovery of a note referencing the occult California feared another murderous Manson likee hippie cult but local resident Roger cron recognized the note as the work of his reclusive neighbor 24-year-old John Lindley Frasier a raid on his property was quickly organized we met at the sheriff’s
department and uh put our team together told who we were looking for and uh we went up to the soel [Music] Foothills I think apprehensive is a good word uh not knowing what you’re going to get into what you’re going to run up against you know you can’t make any mistakes cuz that could cost cost you dearly we worked our way up uh kind of a ravine to a uh very precarious foot Bridge couple of cables with boards laid on it to a shack that was on the far side of the uh this Gully but the shack was empty and Frasier was nowhere to be
found Rod Sandford and his fellow Deputy Brad arsand were instructed to stake out the property overnight we decided to work our way up on a little Hillside above the buildings and hunker down for the night before we went up there I had set some little traps uh just using uh some of the old twigs and branches that are here that would indicate if something or someone had come through that trail during the night time you’d take something like this the trail was here you just set a piece across and that was something just
as simple as that so that when someone or something walked by they’d kick it down knock it down disturb it I knew that raccoons skunks deer anything would set off the ones on the trail but on the bridge uh I laid a very uh small piece of a branch actually and I knew that when somebody walked on it the cables would move up and down the branch would fall through I’d know somebody crossed it it wouldn’t have been an animal and then in the door on the far side in his Shack inside the door I set up another little small twig
that if the door was opened it would fall out towards us it was a sleepless night because you knew what this person did and you knew that uh if they came along in our in our mind at least they wouldn’t go easy [Music] so in the morning uh at day break we started going down the trails towards the shack we noticed that the uh traps have been set off on the trails and I knew then that someone had gone across the bridge and when we looked across at the cabin we could see that the small little stick that was had been indoors was now
outside so now we know that someone has come across the cable and the door had been open and closed so then the Dilemma was one of us had to go across the bridge while the other one covered him there was some discussion then because whoever went out on that drawbridge was a Sitting Duck you had no cover you were wide open I don’t know how it happened but I was the one that went across the bridge and Brad covered me and that wasn’t much fun it was not a solid bridge if you steep in the wrong place you’d cause a
board to fly and you’d go down going across knowing that this guy had killed five people and if he had a gun and realized we were coming he might start shooting and there was nowhere to go you’re wondering if that door is going to fly open so I went across the bridge then I covered he came across the bridge once he got here there was nowhere else for us to go it was the door was here so there was nothing to do but open that door quickly and go through you do is you get on one on either side of the door one pulls the
door and in you go what we noticed immediately is there was a sleeping bags maybe blankets but there was a stack of things in the middle of the room that hadn’t been there the day before I looked at Brad he looked looked at me he grabbed the the sleeping bags yanked them back I had the shotgun and there was Frasier stuck the shotgun in his face and told him don’t move or I’ll shoot kind of had this weird smile looked at me and said why don’t you give me what I deserve and I’ll tell you what the thought runs through your mind but
that’s not our job two of our Deputy sheriffs Brad arsin and Rod Sanford found the suspect Frasier asleep this warrant charges a Suspect with five Cs of murder so who was this lone assassin seemingly capable of the cold execution of either man woman or child and why had he targeted the five Innocents at the OT [Music] residence the first time that I laid eyes on John ly Frasier was in the in the jail cell and he was um clearly strange um very uncooperative he was just I don’t know weird as best I can describe it he was
he was he wouldn’t say anything wouldn’t say anything to anybody it was down to defense investigator Harold cartright to try to unravel the mysteries of Frasier’s mind I commenced an investigation and trying to figure out what made uh what made him tick John Frasier’s parents had separated when he was two by the time he was five his mother unable to support herself and care for him had placed him in a foster home I think Frasier had a very unstable childhood in in a sense of insecurity I think he did not feel safe and when a
child does not feel safe they tend to start developing mechanisms to survive and to adapt and sometimes those mechanisms are pretty maladaptive so I assume that he probably had a rigid temperament where somebody is not able to absorb frustration or disappointment and they begin to get angry over it and it isn’t just anger it sits in their stomach like a undigested Rock the young Frasier earned convictions for burglary and escape from a juvenile facility but by his late teens he appeared to be settling down he
married his wife dores when he was 21 and in 1965 they had a child I remember speaking to his ex-employer uh at a at an auto repair shop and he spoke very highly of of John thought he was an excellent mechanic but in Frasier’s early 20s he began to [Music] change in 1969 his wife noticed that he seemed to be having delusions she told me that he would go off into the into the woods and take his Bible and that sometimes she wouldn’t see him for 2 or 3 days at a time but that he was never unkind to her loved his daughter he just became a
different person John Linley Frasier was showing signs of schizophrenia schizophrenia is a major mental illness uh characterized mainly by a disorder of thought a disorder of thinking it usually begins in late adolescence early adulthood 1920 when the first psychotic episode begins but prior to that there’s a pre morbid condition where the individual is usually withdrawn and odd and somewhat bizarre in a number of different ways in 1970 Frasier’s strange Behavior escalated he quit his job he felt that combustion engines were destroying the
environment and he um he didn’t feel that he could be a party to that any longer then on Independence Day 3 months before the slaying at the OTA residence Frasier separated from his family and began living in a dilapidated cowshed in the woods there he developed an obsession with the Dark preoccupations of the time the occult numerology levitation and the apocalyptic messages of the Book of Revelations he might have been what we call a schizo typo personality disorder where magical thinking is part of the process where they he was getting very
involved in the tarot and at that time the hippie movement was becoming much more into very spiritualistic philosophies and he did not have voices of stability around him neighbor Roger cron was unnerved by Frasier’s odd behavior the couple got married while we were living here and they had the wedding up on the Ridge and John showed up wearing an American flag it was indicative of the fact that he was a little bit strange John was kind of reclusive hard person to get to know really he was intimidating real kind of
hard eyes the intensity with which he would look at you always kind of scared me Frasier HED himself up in his Shack in the forests of California protected by a Steep Ravine and a deliberately precarious Bridge there were rumors the cabin was booby trapped against Intruders I didn’t uh didn’t come into this part of the property ever so I never fell victim to one of his movie traps yeah he was definitely paranoid but Frasier wasn’t just odd he was a man on a mission and his plan chilled listeners to the Bone he had an epiphany he’d been
reading the Bible and the Book of Revelations and uh he thought it was his job to come and save the planet he explained to me that God had spoken to him and he had been chosen to restore the Earth to its natural state this entailed removing all vehicles and buildings from the earth his job under God’s instruction was to give each head of household the option of choosing God’s army or death he said he was going to go door too like the Avon lady and said ding dong you’re dead the little laugh at the end of it is what really did it was
chilling it was in October 1970 with Halloween approaching that Frasier decided it was time to carry out his Divine Duty what emerged was this motive as John Lindley fr saw evidence of materialism through the otus their house was too big it had a swimming pool it was opulent they had too many cars on a hill not more than half a mile from his ramshackle Hut stood the OT family’s dream home when he arrived he found Mrs OA and the youngest son he found some scarves and he tied her up did the same with the younger boy
and they waited next Dorothy Cadwallader who worked for the doctor brought the oldest boy home from school and he went through the same procedure again and then when Dr Oda came he tied his hands behind him explained to him he had been instructed to do by God he had him at gunpoint and wanted Mr Oda the head of the family to join him and burn the house down of course Dr Oda wasn’t going to burn his house down so Dr Oda is calling him a a crazy stupid drugged out hippie whatever not very Cooperative so at some point he
pushes Dr OTA into the swimming pool he’s using the leaf skimmer to hold him down and bring him up trying to convince him to burn down the house and join God’s Army after a period of time on Frasier’s mind he had convinced the doctor and so as he extended his hand to pull Dr Oda out of the swimming pool Dr Oda tried to pull him into the swimming pool and he failed so at that point Fraser shot the doctor then he went in and got the wife brought her out executed her then Dorothy Cadwallader executed her he talked about how difficult it was
for him to to kill the kids he talked about having this argument with God why do these children have to die they’re innocent they’ve done nothing wrong they’ve not harmed the environment but God insisted that they must die Frasier shot both boys in the head and dumped them in the pool [Music] he felt that our family were capitalist pigs that had raped the environment um things that were almost ironic in that there were no trees cut down and we had made this piece of land more beautiful and if you knew the Japanese culture and
the culture that my parents and family lived by it was so completely opposite of what he had felt he was attacking so it was um amazingly sad but the bizarre story of John Frasier did not end with his capture his trial would deliver one of the most extraordinary moments in criminal history in October 1971 the trial of John Linley Frasier for the slaying of the OT family and their secretary began the evidence that frasia had committed the crimes was overwhelming but would he be judged insane at the time of his murders if so his future
would be Hospital instead of jail from the outset his behavior was unnerving my uh housemates and I did testify at the trial that was scary too he glowed at me right I avoided looking at him as much as possible frequently Frasier would seem blank or disinterested the only time uh in my testimony that I saw any reaction on his part was when Pete Chang asked me about that statement and I said that he said why don’t you give me what I deserve and uh he perked up and uh you could see that he was Disturbed the flattened affect and the
appearance of total emotional Detachment is a sign of schizophrenia but I wouldn’t eliminate other motives as well that he doesn’t care about anything because I don’t think he did it’s important I think when when someone’s diagnosed as having a major mental illness not to assume that every everything he does is a direct result of mental illness because it is not so might there have been another influence at play alongside Frasier’s schizophrenia he did all this around the same time Charles Manson’s trial was
going on right around that time period and um I would not be surprised if he was influenced by it in some way the whole thing with Manson was that somebody’s got to start the violence so that the all the rest of the people who will be part of this Uprising know that that’s the signal and they’ll come together in one great big army so that was already in the air what happens with people of this mentality whether it’s schizotypal or schizophrenia is they absorb and certain things stand out to them as significant and I would think
that that would be one of them on the first day of his sanity hearing John D le Frasier made the kind of entrance that Charles Manson himself might have been proud of they brought John Linley Frasier into the courtroom from the back and everything looked normal and when he turned to go sit next to his lawyer the entire half of his head and face was [Music] shaved he had actually gone even with his nose up through the top of his head down through his beard saved one eyebrow one side of his face and one side of his
head and it was shaved and he would sit at the table and kind of turn one way and show the audience that perspective and he would turn the other way and show a different person man of course the Press started talking about this conflict between good and evil it certainly in my opinion didn’t help his defense in any way we finally decided that uh it might be better if he shaved everything off rather than sitting in there acting like he was a schizophrenic which I guess was the idea Frasier had reportedly told others
that he would prefer to go to the gas chamber than be sent to a fascist head Factory that was one of the more interesting aspects of the trial is he did not want to be found insane so he was a a psychotic individual pretending to be sane pretending to be psychotic to convince the jury that he was mingering his psychosis so that they would convict him and send him to prison not send him to a psychiatric institution frasia got his wish he was judged legally sane at the time he committed his crimes and sentenced to
death later reduced to life imprisonment but was murder really his Destiny was John Linley frasia a Born Killer I do not think John Linley frasia was born to kill I think there despite having an illness if he had not had certain influences especially in the culture in his life he might certainly have done anything but Commit This violent crime so no I think I think it was a number of circumstances from the environment that really steered him toward the violence that he did rather than something organic to him it was a a progression he became
ill and as time went by he became sicker and sicker and unfortunately he didn’t get help and it it ended in a horrible tragedy I was angry at the situation I’m angry that I don’t have my family I’m more angry that they suffered most of all and that part I’m I’m furious and angry and sad about but I’m not uh to feel that way towards him it didn’t just didn’t feel natural to me who would choose to have that who would choose to be born that way nobody could do such a thing that didn’t have something broken in their in
their in their chromosones and their DNA somewhere something to me would have to be broken to commit such a crime in August 2009 after 39 years behind bars John Linley Frasier hung himself in his cell my impression was that he was sort of horrified that he was capable of doing something like this but at the same time this was a burden that was placed on him by God
