3 Family Members Murdered And Burned In Targeted Attack

0:00Okay, let's unpack this. You look at a pristine undisturbed crime scene, right? And there's this, almost like a brutal honesty to it. Right, the physics of it. Exactly. The blood's batter tells you the angle of the strike, the footprint gives you the stride, the weight of the intruder. It's just raw data at that point. Yeah, but when a perpetrator deliberately introduces this massive catastrophic element like a full-blown structural fire, they aren't just destroying evidence. No, they're weaponizing the environment. Right. They're actively lying to the investigators. You aren't just looking for clues anymore. You're trying to read a manuscript where, you know, half the pages are just burned to ash, and the other half are written in a totally different language. And the intention completely shifts there from the commission of the crime to this active aggressive deception. Because fire changes everything, doesn't it? Oh, fundamentally. It alters the chemical and physical reality of the space. I mean, it literally collapses the timeline of the evidence. But the case we are diving into today,

1:01the ashes of this house, Impinion Pines, California, it's a scenario where the attempt to erase the narrative was just so overwhelming. So theatrical, really? Yeah, the actual is a good word for it. The erasure itself became the biggest piece of evidence. And it took seven years for anyone to decode that destruction. Seven years of navigating extreme investigative tunnel vision. And some wild local political sabotage too. Yes. And the underlying psychology of just incredibly targeted attacks. So for you listening at home, our mission today is to untangle this massive triple homicide. To really understand the logistical audacity of this crime, we have to start with a geography. The setting is crucial here. Impinion Pines is not some, you know, sleepy suburban, called the sack. No, you can't just peek through your blinds and see your neighbor's kitchen. Yeah. It's a mystery, but on a mountain. Exactly. It's this rugged, high altitude desert community. It's sitting about 17 miles up this sheer winding mountain road

2:02above the Coachella Valley. And that elevation, that geography is basically the first accomplice in this case, really. I would absolutely call it an accomplice. When you drive up Highway 74 into that area, you're leaving the standard infrastructural grid completely behind. It's just rocks and heavy brush. Heavy brushed, rocky, and fundamentally isolating. The Friedly family who lived in the home at the center of all this, they actually used to joke about it about how isolated they were. Yeah, they'd say they could stand on their front porch and just scream at the absolute top of their lungs and the acoustics of the mountain would just swallow the sound. Wow. There were simply no neighbors close enough to hear anything. It even crazier, especially for a modern case, is the cell service situation. Or the lack thereof. Yeah. Right. The local topography created this massive cell phone dead zone. The standard reception up there was literally zero bars, which completely changes the operational calculus for a predator. It really does. Because think about it, if I'm planning a home invasion

3:03in a normal neighborhood, my window of operation is what, maybe a few minutes. If that, a car drives by or a dog barks. A neighbor calls 911 and the patrol car is there in three blocks. But up in pinion pines, the predator knows the rules are different. Even if a victim somehow gets to a phone, the call just won't connect. And even if they have a landline and get through to dispatch, the physical drive time for a sheriff's deputy to navigate 17 miles of switchbacks, I mean, that gives the perpetrator a massive guaranteed head start. It guarantees them an extraction window. The isolation gives them the psychological comfort of time. Time to actually do it and time to stage the aftermath. Right. Because by the time first responders even see the smoke cresting over the tree line and then make that arduous drive up the mountain, the killers are already gone. They're just ascending right back into the anonymity of the valley. It's chilling. And that weaponized isolation really sets the stage for what investigators find when they finally cross that property line. Because they aren't met with a standard crime scene at all.

4:05No, they are met with a total inferno. Inside the smoldering remains of this house, they find two victims. Vicki Friedley, who was 53, and her boyfriend, John Hayward. And Vicki, by all accounts, was this very free spirited, deeply kind woman. A bit of a hippie. Yeah, a very kindhearted hippie type. And John was really the stabilizing good father figure in the home. But when the autopsies come back, they reveal that the fire didn't actually kill them. No, the fire was purely secondary. Vicki suffered a fatal 0.40 caliber gunshot loan to the head. And John was killed by a shotgun blast to the chest, which is a massive behavioral indicator for us. The presence of two entirely different calibers and types of firearms. A handgun into shotgun. Right. Now, while one shooter could technically carry both, the logistics of a dynamic entry into a multi-occupant dwelling it strongly points to a coordinated ambush. By at least two armed individuals. Exactly. This wasn't some burglary that went sideways

5:06because someone woke up to get a glass of water. You know, they breached that house with overwhelming lethal force. They meant to eliminate multiple adults at the same time. But the fire, that massive structural fire they set to cover up those executions, it completely fails to explain the most horrifying element of the scene. Because there's a third victim. Vicki's youngest daughter, Becky Friedley. She was 18. The family described her as a live wire. Yeah, funny, bubbly. Basically, the glue of the family. But Becky isn't found inside the house with her mother and John. She's outside, completely separate from the primary structure fire. The killers literally took the time to place her body inside this old wheelbarrow at the very end of their long driveway. And then they set her on fire right there. The thermal destruction was so absolute, the medical examiner couldn't even definitively pinpoint her cause of death. It's horrific. And from a purely tactical risk management perspective for a criminal, it makes zero sense. Right. I mean, think about it. If they just wanted to cover their tracks with a fire,

6:08why go through the immense trouble of moving Becky outside into a wheelbarrow? Moving a body is hard physical labor. It requires exertion. It takes precious time. And it forces the killers out into the open air. What if a passing car's headlights catch them? Why abandon the perfectly good cover of a burning house just to drag one specific victim to the edge of the property? That precise question is the anomaly that fractures the entire logic of the crime scene. It makes no sense. Not tactically, no. The wheelbarrow serves absolutely no utility. It's a massive operational liability. So we have to look at it through the lens of forensic psychology. OK, break that down for us. In behavioral analysis, this specific type of post-mortem manipulation is called posing. Posing? Yes. Placing Becky at the absolute end of the driveway ensures that she is the unavoidable primary focal point. For anyone arriving, the deputies, the fire department, or her family. It's a macaw exhibition. They are forced to confront her before the even process

7:08that the house behind her is burning. It's a deliberate communication. The perpetrators are using the geography of that driveway to make a declarative statement, which is what? That the adults in the house were merely collateral damage. Becky was the objective. Wow. And private investigator, Luis Polagano, is who we will talk a lot about later. Because he basically reverse engineers this whole case. He zeroes in on this. Posing is the key. All right. He does. Because the method of destruction used on Becky, the fire wasn't random. It was weaponized trauma. Very specifically targeted. This detail is just heartbreaking. Becky had a lifelong well-known intense fear of being burned. Profound phobia. Right. Because when she was just three or four years old, there was a terrible accident. Her sister accidentally spilled a pan of burning cooking oil on her. Which left severe burn scars down her chest for her entire life. And the trauma from that just dictated her relationship with fire. She's terrified of it. So to orchestrate a murder where you use a wheelbarrow to deliberately display a victim, and then intentionally

8:12subject her to the one specific element she has feared since childhood. It transcends just wanting someone dead. Completely. That is a level of intimate sadism. It requires a deep personal knowledge of the victim's internal psychology. It's like a real world horror movie trope. You know, where the monster doesn't just want to kill you, they want to use your deepest, most specific fear against you. Exactly. And the specificity of that violence immediately eliminates the possibility of a stranger. A random burglar doesn't know about an 18-year-old childhood medical history. Or her deeply held phobias. No. The choice to use fire on Becky, totally independent of the house fire, was a punitive measure. It was designed by someone deeply embedded in her social circle. Someone who knew how to maximize the psychological horror of it. Right. But despite that glaring neon sign pointing toward a highly personal motive, the initial law enforcement response just swerves into a completely different lane. They go right past the social circle and start looking at Ron Friedley.

9:12Vicki's ex-husband and Becky's biological father. Right. Now, Ron had actually built that opinion Pines house with his own two hands. And he had just retired as a sheriff's deputy a year prior. Which instantly spins up the investigative machine. They latch onto what we call the grudge theory. The grudge theory. Because he was a former cop, they figure someone he arrested got out of prison, held a grudge, went to the house thinking Ron still lived there. And just killed whoever was inside? Yeah. It's fascinating how quickly professionals will abandon the actual physical evidence that deeply intimate posing of the daughter just to grab onto a narrative that feels culturally familiar to them. Well, police love a logical narrative. The vengeful ex-con hunting the retired cop is a storyline that makes intuitive sense to a department. It externalizes the threat. It makes it a cop issue. Exactly. But it also burns the most critical resource you have in any homicide investigation, which is the first 48 hours. And for you listening, we've talked about this before. But it's so easy for an investigation

10:13to waste those precious early hours going down a plausible but entirely wrong rabbit hole. The initial hours are the golden window. Cell data is fresh. Surveillance tapes at gas stations haven't taped over themselves yet. And the perpetrators are usually panicking, right? They make mistakes. In theory, yes. But while detectives are busy pulling decade-old arrest records and giving a polygraph to Ron, which he passed, by the way, the actual killers are getting a massive head start. The delay just insulates them. I know the police also looked into a possible drug connection with John, which went nowhere. Right. They ruled that out, too. These aren't malicious detours. They're standard operating procedure. But rigidly checking those external boxes allows the real internal threat to solidify their alibis. Because once the ex-husband and the drug theories are finally tossed out, the focus shifts back to where it should have been on day one, the victim's social circle. Specifically, a highly toxic high school romance. Enter Robert Pave. This is Becky's ex-boyfriend from high school.

11:14And look, at first, Becky was really smitten with him. But Robert quickly became incredibly possessive. The psychological profile from her family shows a classic escalation. He was jealous, controlling. If I can't have you, no one else can mentality. He was treating her like property. And this volatility was heavily amplified by his best friend, Christian Smith. They were kind of a package deal, right? They were. People in Becky's orbit noted that Robert and Christian acted as an echo chamber for each other. They validated and escalated each other's aggressive tendencies. And that aggression boils over in a very public way, literally the day before the murders. A critical catalyst event. Right. So Becky's weight was saying, at a denny's down in the valley. Robert and Christian walk in. And they don't just sit and eat. They initiate this highly heated, really loud, one-way, verbal exchange. A profound display of intimidation while she's just trying to work. And here's where it gets really interesting. Because we only know the details of this denny's confrontation.

12:16Because of a phone call Becky made on her way home that night. She called her cousin, Daniela Zermano. Right. She's driving at the mountain. She calls Daniela. And she tells her about the screaming match. But then she drops this massive bomb show. She tells her cousin that to get the boys to back off, she agreed to go on a night hike with them the following evening. The exact night she's murdered. And as she's saying this to her cousin, her car hits that pinion pian's dead zone. The call drops. The last time she ever speaks to anyone. OK. I have to push back on the police timeline here. Because Daniela told her mother about this hike immediately after the news of the murders broke. Yes, the very next morning. And her mother called investigators right away to report the denny's fight and the hike. So they had this tip on day one. Why was Daniela ignored by the police for seven years? It's a systemic failure of information management driven by that tunnel vision we talked about. But it's so specific. How do you lose a tip about an angry ex-boyfriend meeting the victim the night she dies?

13:17You have to understand the mechanics of bureaucratic overload. In the immediate aftermath of a triple homicide, a department is generating thousands of pages of raw data, dispatch logs, canvassing notes, forensic reports. It's the mountain of paper. Right. And when Daniela's mother calls that tip in, the lead detectives are completely consumed by the grudge theory regarding Ron Friedley. So they just what? They didn't even look at it. They probably routed it to a secondary investigator. They did do a superficial check on Robert Pape. And he and Christian claimed they were at a church event that night. And they just took their word for it. Because they weren't prioritized, nobody immediately subpoenaed the cell data to verify the church alibi. The initial tip just got lost in the shuffle of bureaucracy. That is maddening. Because the police dropped the ball on Daniela's tip, the case goes completely cold. For years. It's settled into a state of total inertia. Once a case goes cold like that, it requires an immense external force to restart the machinery.

14:18Which brings us to Lewis Bulliganos. He's a private investigator who knew the Friedley family. And he used to work with Ron back in the day. He takes the case pro bono. Yeah, he watches this thing just sit in a filing cabinet. And he decides he's going to crack it. And he starts by going straight for the thread, the police ignored. He realizes immediately that Robert and Christian's alibi's are incredibly weak. He looks at the claim that they canceled the hike and went to church. And Lewis manages to get a look at their cell phone records. And what he finds completely breaks their alibi. Because their phones didn't just stay in the valley at a church. No, their cell phones both completely shut off during the exact crucial time window of the murders. And the pings right before they went dark. They showed both boys traveling up Highway 74. The direct route toward pinion pines. Right. The foot print puts them heading straight for the crime scene. But Lewis also finds a piece of physical evidence that the original detective severely undervalued. A business card. Exactly. Found 70 yards north of the crime scene.

15:19And it had Christian Smith's DNA on it. So you have cell pings heading up the mountain, phones shutting off at the time of the murder, and DNA, 70 yards from the house. But the DA still wouldn't arrest them. Because in court, 70 yards away isn't inside the house. A defense attorney could argue the wind blew the card there or Christian dropped it weeks prior. Lewis knew the DA wouldn't move without more direct pressure. So Lewis decides to create that pressure. And the tactics he uses, I mean, this is straight out of Hollywood. He essentially wages psychological warfare against the suspects. He puts up these massive, highly graphic billboards right along the route the boys drive every day. It showed Becky vibrant and smiling right next to the scorched apocalyptic crime scene. It generated about 3,000 tips from the public. But the real goal was to shatter the suspects sense of security. To make them sweat. Yes. To induce cognitive overload, hoping they would panic and talk to each other, creating a new evidence trail.

16:20But he doesn't stop there. He teams up with Hollywood producers to make this hyper realistic television reenactment of the crime, just broadcasting it to the whole valley to get the public talking. And then comes his master stroke, the ambush. Oh, man, this part is wild. Lewis approaches Robert Pave under the guise of making a tribute video for Becky's family. It's a brilliant pretext. It loaves Robert into a false sense of compliance. He gets a camera crew right onto Robert's front porch. And once the camera's rolling, Lewis starts asking about the Denny's confrontation, which Robert categorically denies on tape. He traps him in a lie. Because Lewis already has Daniel as recorded statement about the fight. Now he has the prime suspect on high definition video lying about his last interaction with the victim. The brilliance of these unconventional tactics is that Lewis isn't just looking for old clues. He's forcing the suspects to generate new, incriminating behavior in real time. And the immense public pressure from all this finally forces the district attorney's hand.

17:21Warren's are issued seven years after the murders. Seven years. DA Paul Zellerback, a wreaths Robert and Christian. The family is ecstatic, you think, OK, case closed. But this is where the case derails in a way nobody could have predicted. It is so bizarre. Six months after the arrest, right before the preliminary hearing, the DA abruptly drops all charges. The boys walk free. And the reason why is a masterclass in political absurdity. OK, let's untangle this. The defense attorneys for Robert and Christian had subpoenaed DA Zellerback himself to testify at the hearing. Which is highly unusual. To avoid taking the stand, Zellerback just drops the charges on a Friday. Why? Because Zellerback had recently been caught on video carrying down his political opponent's campaign science. Literally pulling them out of the dirt along the road. And the guy who filmed him doing it, his name was Javier Garcia Sr. Who was an employee of the DA's own office. Like a bad soap opera. But here is the critical twist. Javier Garcia Sr. has son Javier Garcia Jr.

18:23who is very much in love with Becky Friedley. And Javier Jr.'s phone had pinged near the mountain that exact night. Right, because he drove up there to try and join the hike, got rejected by Becky over the phone and drove home. He was cleared as a suspect. But the DA needed him to testify about the hike. But Javier Sr. knowing how defense attorneys operate demanded blanket immunity for his son before he would let him testify. Zellerback refused the immunity. So Javier Sr. filmed the DA stealing signs out of revenge. That was Zellerback's claim. Yes, it was a completely messy web of local politics. I need to pause here and just say the listening. We are not taking political sides in this local DA race. At all. No, absolutely not. We are merely reporting the documented chaos that actively obstructed a triple murder trial. Three people are dead and justice is stalled because of stolen campaign signs and internal office drama. It is a devastating reality. The suspects are free again. The family is back to square one completely crushed.

19:23It's just brutal. But thankfully, that isn't the end of the story. Because Zellerback loses the election. An entirely new administration takes over under DA Mike Hestren. And Hestren's team spends a year and a half re-evaluating all the evidence. And during all that stalled time, the relentless march of technological progress basically hands them the keys to the case. Time is often the enemy of a cold case, but here it was their greatest ally. Because DNA tech jumped exponentially. It did. That business card with Christian Smith's DNA. Originally, it was a 323,000 to one match, which defense attorneys can poke holes in. Right. But with new probabilistic genotyping, that match became 100 million to one. 100 million to one. That is basically undeniable. It locks Christian to that location scientifically. And then there are the digital breadcrumbs. Investigators start digging into old online archives, and they find messages where Robert Pave was using the screen name Buttercup 1000. This is a staggering piece of digital forensics.

20:24He's messaging a friend and they're joking around. And Robert literally types out a joke about professionally burning down a house and going through a six pack of matches. It establishes this undeniable behavioral signature. He fantasized about arson as a tool. And criminals just get too comfortable, don't they? They absolutely do, especially when they think they've gotten away with it once already. Because the police also pulled the jail host calls from the brief six months in the santa. Robert was locked up the first time. And every inmate knows those calls are recorded. There's an automated voice that tells you. But Robert is on tape talking to his then wife Sarah, telling her to hide an unregistered .40 caliber firearm. The exact same caliber used to execute Vicki Friedley. It's astounding arrogance. And if that wasn't enough, an informant comes forward claiming Christian Smith confessed to them. The informant stated that Christian admitted things got out of hand on the mountain and they had to burn the place down to cover it up. So you have the 100 million to 1 DNA, the Buttercup 1000 arson chat,

21:24the jailhouse gun tape and an informant. The circumstantial matrix is finally ironclad. Robert and Christian are re-rested. Facing the death penalty and life in prison, respectively. And they both plead not guilty. But I have to ask you about Christian Smith for a second. Because this juxtaposition is wild. It really is. Because in the years between the murders and his final arrest, Christian didn't just lay low. He joined the military. He became a decorated war hero with two purple hearts. How does a person compartmentalize that? It forces us to confront this terrifying capacity for psychological dissociation, to allegedly participate in the sadistic execution of an 18-year-old girl and then seamlessly transition into a rigid, honor-bound military structure. To bleed for your country while hiding this absolute slaughter. He built an impenetrable firewall in his own mind between those two identities. It shows that a uniform of extreme honor can sometimes be the perfect camouflage. Wow. So what does this all mean for us? We've gone from a quiet desert mountain

22:26to a horrific, targeted burn through literal political absurdity to a tech-driven arrest. And we must remember the human toll, as Becky's sister said, there is no managing this loss. She was the heart of the family, and she was robbed of her life. Absolutely. The damage is permanent. But before we wrap up, I know you had a final lingering thought on how this case ultimately cracked. Yes. It revolves around a concept I call the digital ghost. The digital ghost. I like that. Think about it. Every cell phone ping on Highway 74, every dropped call in a dead zone, every old chatroom log into the name Buttercup 1000, we leave a digital ghost of our actions. And it outlives all our physical alibis. Precisely. In the modern era, you can run from a crime scene, you can burn a house down to its foundation, but you can never truly burn your data. It's always sitting there on a server somewhere waiting. It really makes you wonder how much of our own digital ghosts are tracking our everyday movements without us even realizing it. That is a terrifying and fascinating thought to leave on.

23:28Thank you so much for listening and joining us on this deep dive. Keep asking questions. Keep seeking multiple perspectives. And we will see you next time.