Phillip Carl Jablonski

Early life

Jablonski met his first wife, Alice McGowan, in high school. He joined the military after high school and was sent overseas. They married in 1968 when he returned to the U.S. While living in Texas, Jablonski became sexually violent. During sex he put a pillow over McGowan's face and attempted to suffocate her. On several occasions, he strangled her until she was unconscious.

Jablonski met Jane Sanders in November 1968, after McGowan left him. He raped Sanders on their first date, which she did not report. She became pregnant and they moved to California in July 1969, after Jablonski left the military. On one occasion, while having sex, Sanders wanted to stop. Jablonski pulled out a gun and threatened to shoot her if she did not continue. He hit her with the butt of the gun and she passed out. When she regained consciousness, he was having sex with her. She left him in 1972.

Crimes

In February 1977, Jablonski met Linda Kimball and by August they were living together. Kimball gave birth to their daughter in December 1977. On the evening of July 6, 1978, Kimball's mother Isobel Pahls was awakened by Jablonski. He told her he had come to rape her but did not go through with it because when he looked at her face “all he could see was Linda's face.” Pahls managed to escape to a neighbor's house. A few days after the incident, Kimball left Jablonski and she and their child moved in with Pahls. On July 16, Jablonski killed Kimball when she returned to the apartment she had shared with Jablonski to pick up some things for their baby.

Jablonski served 12 years in prison for the first murder, and was released in 1990.

Carol Spadoni met and married Jablonski in 1982, after answering a newspaper ad placed while Jablonski was serving time in prison. On April 23, 1991, Carol, 46, and her mother, Eva Petersen, 72, were murdered at their home in Burlingame. Spadoni was shot, suffocated with duct tape, then stabbed, while Petersen was sexually assaulted and shot.

Jablonski was charged with the April 22, 1991, death of Fathyma Vann, 38, in Indio, California. Vann was a fellow student at the local community college that Jablonski attended to satisfy 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 with the words "I Love Jesus" carved in her back. Her body had been subjected to other mutilations including removal of her eyes and ears.

Jablonski was also charged with the robbery and subsequent murder of Margie Rogers, 58, in Grand County, Utah, on April 27, 1991. He was apprehended on April 28, 1991, in Kansas. He was found guilty of the murders and sentenced to death.

In January 2006, the California Supreme Court upheld Jablonski's death sentence on appeal.

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