In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
John Steinbeck.
Born on Thursday, 3 January 1946, Jablonski has been on Death Row since August 1994. Hunting pen pals on an internet web site, he describes himself thus: ‘Caucasian male – seeking an open-minded male/female for unconditional correspondence on a mature and honest level that has a caring heart to create a special friendship build from the heart [sic].’
Absent, however, from the web page upon which he seeks the aforementioned relationship is the fact that Phillip is an American serial killer whose CV in this department is shocking. Nonetheless, never one to be accused of being a shrinking violet, he adds:
I am professional artists [sic], photography [sic], amateur poet, writer, masseur; college educated, not a rude person, like to party, travel. My home town is Joshua Tree, CA. I am very understanding and loving. I believe in giving a second chance. People describe me as a gentle giant. I love cats, dogs, parrots, horses and teddy bears.
Jablonski has been found guilty of five horrific murders. On Monday, 22 April 1991, he killed 38-year-old Fathyma Vann, in Indio City, located in the Coachella Valley of Southern California’s desert region. Vann was a fellow at the local community college, which Jablonski attended to satisfy the conditions of his parole. Fathyma, a recently widowed mother of two teenage girls, was found shot in the head and sexually assaulted, lying naked in a shallow ditch in the Indio desert. The words, ‘I Love Jesus’ were carved in her back. Her body had been subjected to other mutilations including removal of her eyes and ears, which her killer had eaten.
‘What do I like in a friend?’ Jablonski asks. ‘I like it if you like to travel, party. Someone who is mature and wants an honest friendship. Someone who is able to discuss personal issues on a mature level and is not scared of Frank [sic] discussion.’
His next two killings took place the day after he had murdered Mrs Vann, when Jablonski’s 46-year-old wife, Carol (nee Spadoni), and her mother, Eva Inge Peterson, 72, were killed in their Burlingame home. Spadoni was shot, suffocated with duct tape, then stabbed, while Peterson was sexually assaulted and then shot dead. A city in San Mateo County, California, Mateo is the second wealthiest in the state and the fourteenth richest in the US. And Burlingame, called ‘The City of Trees’ is a place where homicide is very rare.
Carol Spadoni met and married Jablonski in 1982, after answering a newspaper ad placed while he was serving time for having murdered his first wife, Melinda Kimball, in Palm Springs, California, 1978.
On 7 July 1978, Jablonski threatened Isobel Phals, Kimball’s mother, with a knife and attempted to rape her. Phals had also been the recipient of obscene telephone calls and other malicious acts which the police believed had been committed by Jablonski. Although Phals did not file formal charges against the man, she discussed with police the possibility of his receiving psychiatric treatment. Shortly thereafter, he volunteered to undergo a psychiatric examination at the Loma Linda Veterans Administration Hospital.
The police immediately called the hospital and were informed that Jablonski would be treated by a Dr Kopiloff, however, because the doctor was unable to take the call himself, the police officer spoke to Dr Berman, the head of psychiatric services.
And it is at this point that the wheels started to fall off the wagon.
The police officer advised Berman of Jablonski’s prior criminal record, the recent history of obscene telephone calls and malicious damage, and said that, in his opinion, Jablonski needed to be treated on an in-patient basis. However, although Berman promised that he would transmit this information to his colleague, Kopiloff, he failed to do so. Dr Kopiloff later said that had he received this information from the police, he would have involuntarily hospitalised the mentally disintegrating army veteran if possible. Now it was only a matter of time before Jablonski would explode.
I am very concerned about Phillip’s behaviour, but I love him.
Melinda Kimball, in a private meeting with Dr Kopiloff.
On Monday, 10 July 1978, Melinda Kimball drove Jablonski to the hospital. During the interview, Kopiloff learned that his new patient had served a five-year prison term for raping his wife. He also learned that just a few days before the interview he had attempted to rape Isobel Phals. Jablonski enlightened the doctor, saying that he had undergone psychiatric treatment in the past, however, he refused to say where he had received this treatment.
Dr Kopiloff concluded that the patient was, ‘vague, non-communicative, and unwilling to share his prior medical history’. He diagnosed Jablonski as an ‘anti-social personality and potentially dangerous’. He recommended that Jablonski voluntarily hospitalise himself, but Jablonski declined. Kopiloff concluded that there was no real emergency and no basis for forcible hospitalisation, leaving Jablonski to return for another appointment in two weeks’ time.
The result was that Melinda Kimball was killed.
The only good woman is a dead one!
Phillip Jablonski.
The hospital records of Jablonski’s prior treatment reveal that in 1968 he had received ‘extensive psychiatric care’ at an army hospital in El Paso. The El Paso records report that Mr Jablonski had a ‘homicidal ideation towards his wife… that on numerous occasions he had tried to kill her… that he probably suffered a psychotic breakdown and the possibility of future violent behaviour was a distinct possibility’. And, that he was ‘demonstrating some masculine identification in beating his wife as his father did frequently to his mother’. The final diagnosis concluded in part that Jablonski had a ‘schizophrenic reaction, undifferentiated type, chronic, moderate; manifested by homicidal behaviour toward his wife’.
The clock was now ticking, and the day after Jablonski’s interview with Kopiloff, Mrs Phals telephoned the doctor to complain about the two-week delay in Jablonski not returning for treatment. She threatened to call the police again, but Kopiloff persuaded her not to. However, to placate her he did bring forward the date to Friday 14 July. In the interim Kimball, and her daughter, Meghan, prudently moved out of Jablonski’s apartment and into Mrs Phal’s home.
Perhaps somewhat unwisely, Kimball called on Jablonski, and she drove him to see Kopiloff, and his supervisor, Dr Hazle, on 14 July. Although he volunteered that he had had frequent problems all his life, Jablonski again refused to be admitted as an in-patient. This time, Kopiloff concluded that his patient was not only possessed with an anti-social personality, but also with ‘explosive features’.
Dr Hazle went a step further. He believed that the man was downright dangerous, and that this case was an ‘emergency’. However, despite all of this, the two doctors still believed there was no basis for involuntary hospitalisation. And, again, no effort was made to seek out prior medical records. Instead, Jablonski was scheduled for more tests and sent home holding a prescription for Valium and with another appointment booked for Monday 17 July.
During the appointment between Jablonski, Hazle and Kopiloff, Melinda Kimball had waited in the hallway outside, probably praying that the next time she saw her man he would be wearing a strait jacket and chained to a padded cell wall. However, upon hearing the quiet discussion through a partly open door, she broke down, as well she might.
Noticing that Melinda seemed distressed, a third psychiatrist, a Dr Warnell, the chief of the mental health clinic, invited her into his office, where Melinda expressed fear for her personal safety. Although compassionate, Warnell advised her in measured tones that if she was afraid of Jablonski and that if he didn’t fit the criteria to be held in hospital against his wishes, that she could consider staying away from him altogether.
Apparently, Kimball took Dr Warnell’s advice, for she returned to live with Mrs Phal, who was, by now, sick and tired of the whole sorry affair; reasoning that if the police were all but useless in dealing with the rages and deviancy exhibited by Jablonski, the medical profession had surpassed the cops’ negligence by miles. That she hadn’t fil
ed a complaint, at least for sexual assault against Jablonski, apparently didn’t enter her thinking.
On Sunday, 16 July, Kimball went to Jablonski’s apartment, apparently to pick up some nappies for Meghan. He was either at his home at the time or arrived soon after. Whatever the case, he attacked and murdered her, and as murders go, this one was bottom drawer. He beat her, raped her, stripped her, slashed her, and, when death mercifully intervened, he cut off her ears, ate her eyes, and finished it all off by abusing the sexual organs and anus of the corpse.
Jablonski has since been diagnosed as suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, ‘transient’ psychotic episodes triggered by ‘overpowering aggressive or sexual feelings that cannot be expressed, and has a passive/aggressive personality with intense feelings of inadequacy’, and that he is a sexual sadist. He also engages in ‘malingering behaviour and is a schizophrenic’.
No surprises there. Nevertheless, and not one to let his shambles of a mind get in his way of searching for a pen friend, adding to his internet page, Phillip Jablonski says: ‘What I miss most? Traveling, photography, male and female company, giving massages, partying, walking in the rain, romantic walks on the beach, romantic candle light dinners, cuddling in front of a roaring fire and soft music.’
All of which Phill won’t be doing anytime soon.
Mr Jablonski was also found guilty of the subsequent murder of 58-year-old Margie Rogers, in Grand County, Utah, on Saturday, 27 April 1991. The murder was in furtherance of a truck stop robbery which netted him the princely sum of $158. He was captured the next day at a rest area in Kansas. Among other evidence found in his car was a tape recording in which he described the murders and his sexual assault on Eva Peterson.
At his 1994 trial, evidence was given to show that Jablonski had a long history of violence against women that stretched right back to his first marriage in 1968. He claimed that he suffered as result of traumas he experienced in childhood and during his military service in Vietnam. However, the jury decided that he was legally sane at the time of the murders and recommended he be put to death.
In January 2006, the California Supreme Court upheld Jablonski’s death sentence on appeal.
Notwithstanding all of this, Phillip wants pen pals to share: ‘thoughts and feelings (good and bad) let’s learn about one another freely and watch our relationship bloom like a rose and be as strong as a castle wall which cannot be broken…a loving heart is worth more than a mountain of gold. Love communicates on any subject or issue. Write me please…you won’t be disappointed.’
But before you do put pen to paper you should know that Mr Jablonski is, in his own words, an ‘indigence [sic] inmate and depend on the state for postage and envelopes. I can use assistance with postage and obtain writing, etc, etc from the canteen. $50 should cover it.’ He also sells his artwork through a number of web sites, so he is pretty well fixed financially, for a dead man walking.
While Jablonski claims on the internet that he has most of the virtues of a saint, he also has a fascination for John Reginald Christie: ‘a famous killer in the UK, who killed his wife and prostitutes and burned their bodies,’ he writes. ‘A friend of mine sent me a photo of him and Christie and I look like brothers.’ And balding and bespectacled Jablonski does, indeed, bear a passing resemblance to John Reginald Christie.
By the way, I have a son named Christopher, who is doing time in a Michigan prison for child rape. I guess you could say he is following in his father’s footsteps.
Phillip Jablonski, letter to the author, 28 January 2008.
As a man who slits throats, sodomised and even cannibalised his victims, Jablonski is also clearly proud of his wayward son, Christopher, and this psychopath seems to have few regrets for his own actions:
I have no remorse for the murders, rapes or pimping of adolescent boys and girls. I am proud I raped my slut sister and mother. Maybe my slut mother will rot in hell – they both died in 1986. There are other unsolved murders I have committed, and few of them are over twenty years old.
Phillip Jablonski’s childhood was indeed a very unhappy one. His father was a gun-toting alcoholic who constantly beat his wife, sons and daughters. What follows is his description of the sexual abuse Jablonski claims he suffered as a child; they are his own unedited words, and the reader is advised that this material is disturbing. The grammatical errors are his.
In a letter, to the author, dated 12 March 2008, headed ‘0-TO FIVE YEAR OLD’, he writes:
My parents moved to San Bernardino, California, from Flint, Michigan, in August 1945. At the time, there were two children, Phyllis, Louie and a dog. During this stressful time of moving, my mother was pregnant with me.
The trip took two months. The trip so long because the Chevy’s front end was out of alignment and so family had to constantly replace its tires and tires on their trailer. They finally had to abandon the trailer in Arizona because they could no longer afford to replace its tires. My family arrived in California with no money and had to live at a friend’s house.
I was born on January 3, 1946, three months prematurely and weighed under five pounds. I was raised on goat’s milk by the advice of a local doctor. I did not start walking until I was 16 months old. I was born to an abusive father who loved to beat his wife and children. My mother loved to be abused physically and sexually.
My sister, Patty, was born in 1948 and my brother born in 1949, and Nettie Jr. in 1950. My family first house in California was on Severance Street in San Bernardino. The area was semi-rural at the time, made up of lower-middle-class of which my family were among the poorest.
My parent sleep in the one bedroom and my sisters slept in the living room. Us boys slept in the dining room, which was been converted into a bedroom for us. We didn’t have a phone, and my parents raised our own chickens, pigeons, and rabbit for food. My parent would leave me and Patty with a neighbor, Oroll Crum. The neighbor was my parent best friend baby sitting us, while my parent went shopping or went pay bills.
Shortly after I turn five years old Oroll Crum and his wife Barbara was babysitting has normal. But everything was about to change be us and them. Soon has my parents step out their front door and bearly outside their, a hand was put around our mouths and I was pick up has was my sister. I was carried into the master bedroom, my sister into a share bedroom, and while Oroll carry me he whispered in my ear saying: ‘Nothing to be scared of. Your sister is teaching a adult game between little girls and women. She will be a woman soon and you little boy will soon be a little man. It’s normal for a man to teach a boy about being a little man.’ I heard a loud slap and my sister crying.
Then Oroll Crum pulled my pants off followed by my underwear and his cold hands off over my small butt. And he made me turn over on my back and his hands spreading my butt cheeks…
I have spent hundreds of hours reading through correspondence from many of the world’s most notoriously twisted serial murderers and sado-sex killers, but nothing could have prepared me for what followed next. I felt physically sick. However, knowing Mr Jablonski as I do, one forms the opinion that what he is writing is specifically intended to shock the reader; that this sociopath is delighting in every word. Whether the account is true, or not, we will never know, nevertheless, for my part I believe that he is reliving a series of rapes he committed on his sister.
In graphic detail – and I am sparing the reader the shocking minutiae – Jablonski describes the most disgusting form of child abuse performed on himself and his sister, allegedly, how he was anally raped time and again.
‘That night we told our Dad what happened. He confront them and Crum said he never touch one of us in anway. So me and my sister was seriously beaten for telling out rages lairs.’
The next time the Crums’ babysat for Jablonski and his sister – and this will come as no shock to the reader that there was a next time among these two families of in-breds – Jablonski claims that he knew he and his sister were in for trouble: ‘He beat us mercilessly,
’ he says, ‘until our little butts was bright red and bleeding. And we were made to crawl and was kicked in our butts. They tied us up and around our ankles and hung us upside down and swing us back and forth. Sometimes our heads would hit together. We never mention it to our Dad again. If we mentioned it to mother she’d tell our Dad and we would get another beating. One of the Crums’ favor games was making us play doctor and nurse. Making us play with each other with our hands or licking each other all over.’
According to Jablonski: ‘They had their way with us for nine months then they moved to another state.’ He ends this letter with a dismissive: ‘I’ll close for now and then start from 6 years to 8 years old. Take care. Phill.’
At the age of six, Jablonski started first grade at the Arrowhead Elementary School, and walked a block to and from school each day. ‘A rail track ran through part of the neighbourhood,’ he writes, ‘a water train would travel through four times a day. Neighborhood kids would lay pennies on the metal slug on the tracks and came back later to find the flattened coin or metal slug on the track and pick them up.’
Searching through Jablonski’s letters for further items of interest to us regarding his early schooling, we find little that hints at a clue as to why, in later life, Jablonski went off the rails, too. He talks about these early days in an almost childlike manner, almost as if he is reliving them as a child himself today. He refers to playground and class activities. He talks about local haunts where he and his peers liked to spend their weekends and evenings. He mentions a fascination of the fire department, the flood control department, and bulldozers – but then, in a flash his mood darkens again.
‘One evening a bulldozer operator ask me if I would like to take a ride with him on his bulldozer. I said sure. He gave me a hand up and had his hands on my belt and loosened it and unzipped my pants. I know if I didn’t get away he was going to rape me. It was two years since I was raped the first time. I wiggle and twisted but he grab me between my legs and squeeze my balls and I screamed. He told ‘Stop wiggling or I will squeeze a lot harder’. So I stop wiggling and he pulled my pants and underwear down around my ankles and position between my legs and spread my butt cheeks…’ It is at this point the author ceases to quote another line from Jablonski’s account; frankly, it is too disgusting even to contemplate.
Dead Men Talking Page 12