Town note
The town sits on land previously owned by a San Francisco merchant named William Davis Merry Howard.
about 0:10:51The story
Burlingame, California, is an expensive suburb twenty-five minutes south of San Francisco, in San Mateo County.
His father was a violent alcoholic who beat his wife and children, carried a gun and was cruel to animals, and neighbours remembered him as the meanest man they knew. His sister Patsy said Philip took the worst of the beatings and was sexually molested by a neighbour when he was four or five. The episode treats part of this as true and part as exaggeration.
At fourteen he put a rope round his sister's neck and threatened her, then broke down and apologised, and their father beat him for it. He was quiet, anxious and often in tears, and schoolmates remembered him as thin, pale and always ill.
In 1966 he enlisted in the army and went to Vietnam, serving as a military policeman. He came back in 1968 to Fort Bliss, Texas, and married Alice McGowan, a girl he had met at school. Alice said the man who returned was nothing like the quiet boy she knew. When she was pregnant he strangled her until his mother made him stop. In November 1968 she left him and took their child.
That same month he met Jane Sanders, his therapist in the army psych ward, and raped her on their first date. She did not report it and stayed with him for four years. She became pregnant in 1969; he left the military and moved back to California, where they lived with his parents before getting a house of their own. Their son Chris and daughter Robin were born, and Jane described the same violence: a pistol pulled on her during sex, a gun butt to the head, a pillow over her face, being tied to the bed and left. In 1970 she left him after he threw a frying pan of hot grease at her; she hit him with the pan, knocked him out and took the children.
In December 1972 he was selling security guard dogs. He delivered dogs to Marsha and her husband and taught them how to handle the animals. On December 17 he came to the house at night although the husband had told him not to, put a knife to Marsha's throat, threatened her children, raped and sodomised her and fractured her orbital bone. He told police his wife had just left him and that everything had gone blank.
After his release she came to visit him. On the third day he told her that he had dug her grave a week before she arrived and had invited her there to kill her, but had decided she was too nice to kill. He showed her where the grave was in the back yard. The next day he came into her room while she slept and asked her for sex. She refused, and to calm him she let him tie her hands and feet with knitting yarn. He left and came back with a straight razor and shaved her, took photographs, then put a pillow over her face until she played dead. The following day she pretended there was a family emergency and left.
In February 1977 he met Linda Kimball through her husband and began an affair with her. Their daughter Megan was born in December 1977. In July 1978 he climbed into his mother-in-law Isabel Pauls's bed with a knife and told her he had come to rape her, then stopped because he saw Linda's face; Isabel fled to a neighbour and did not go to the police. That day Linda had driven him to the Loma Linda VA hospital, which refused to admit him, and a second appointment a few days later also ended with no admission. Linda decided to leave him and moved with the baby to her mother's house.
On July 16, 1978, at eleven in the morning, Linda went back to the apartment they had shared to collect baby things. Early that afternoon she was found dead. Her wrists had been tied behind her back; she had been badly beaten, stabbed and strangled with a man's belt, and her clothes had been torn. The cause of death was asphyxiation.
He drove to Highland, California, where Eileen Millsap had advertised a stove for sale. He held a knife to her three-year-old son's throat, made her undress, choked her until she lost consciousness and left with her purse; one of her credit cards was later used to buy petrol. Over the next eleven days he drove to El Paso, Texas. He later claimed in writing that he picked up a woman hitchhiker, drove her to a canyon, shot her in the back of the head, mutilated and robbed her, and that he shot a second young woman at Lovers Lane overlooking the University of El Paso, sodomised her while she was still alive and shot her again before throwing her into a ravine. He also claimed to have abducted and killed a six-year-old boy and a fifteen-year-old hitchhiker during the same trip. The episode says some of this is probably true and some is invention.
Isabel Pauls was given custody of Megan. That year he married Carol Spadani, a pen pal, at San Quentin. In July 1985, during a 72-hour family visit at the California Men's Colony, he attacked his mother and choked her because Carol had not come with his parents; his father pulled him off.
A staff psychologist warned that although he was in remission he could become actively psychotic at any time.
He was forbidden to travel more than fifty miles from his residence without permission and forbidden to go to Burlingame, and he was required to attend counselling. He went to Indio, where Dr Sylvia Winters examined him at the Loma Linda VA hospital on November 30, 1990. He said he had stopped taking his medication, was hearing voices and seeing faces as he had before he killed Linda, and was having nightmares about Vietnam; he told her that when he strangled Linda he thought she was Vietnamese. She diagnosed schizophrenia and post-traumatic stress disorder, prescribed medication and warned a social worker to take precautions. A later search of his apartment found the pills untouched.
At Christmas 1990 he got permission to visit Muniz in Sacramento and came back with a driver's licence and a 1965 Ford Fairlane. In January 1991 he enrolled in automotive classes at a local community college, where he befriended Jim Lawrence and recorded the lessons on tape. In April he bought an RG14 revolver and bullets from Lawrence. On April 22 he told his instructor he would miss the next day's class for a doctor's appointment, and that evening he was seen with a fellow student, Fanny Hansen, a recently widowed mother of two. On April 23 neither of them came back to class. That is where part one ends.