Hey, Prime members, you can binge eight new episodes of the Mr. Ballin Podcast one month early and all episodes ad-free on Amazon Music.
Download the Amazon Music app today. On Halloween night in 1957, a group of children ran towards a brand new house in a suburban neighborhood just outside of Los Angeles, California.
This house had some of the best decorations on the street, and the kids all hoped the house would have the best candy, too.
One of the kids knocked on the front door, and soon a middle-aged woman in a witch hat, along with her husband, opened up the door and told the kids how great all their costumes looked.
The wife gave out a huge handful of candy to each of them, and they all happily said thank you.
Candy really was as good as the decorations.
The kids, giddy with excitement, ran towards the next house.
But none of the kids noticed the person in white makeup, red gloves, and a mask pulled down over half of their face, quietly watching the woman in the witch hat talking to her husband in their doorway.
And as that husband and wife walked back inside their house to restock their candy bowl, they had no idea their Halloween was about to turn truly horrifying.
But before we get into that story, if you're a fan of the Strange, Dark, and Mysterious delivered in story format, then you've come to the right podcast because that's all we do and we upload twice a week, once on Monday and once on Thursday.
So if that's of interest to you, please hide a tiny speaker in the ceiling of the Follow Buttons home and then play It's a Small World After All on repeat every time they try to fall asleep.
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Just after 5 p.m. on Halloween 1957 in a Los Angeles suburb called Sun Valley, 35-year-old Peter Fabiano turned off the lights at his beauty salon, flipped the sign in a shop window from open to closed, and got into his car to begin the short drive home.
Peter turned onto a long residential street and pulled into the driveway of a corner house at the end of the block.
Peter put the car in park and just sat for a moment.
As he stared at the Halloween decorations his wife had hung on the windows, he couldn't help but feel a sense of pride.
He couldn't believe this was his house. And to him, his house was sort of a symbol of how dramatically his life had recently changed.
Just a few short years earlier, Peter had felt completely lost.
He was living by himself and struggling to make ends meet.
And that's when he got mixed up with some bad people who said he could make some money working for them.
Even though Peter had agreed to do this, he had known it was not a smart decision, and he was quickly proven right when he ran into trouble with the law.
Peter ultimately avoided doing jail time, but this had been a wake-up call for him.
After that, he had worked hard to clean up his act and to really start planning for his future.
And his hard work eventually paid off. Now he was married and ran a successful business, and he owned a brand new home that had literally just been built.
In short, Peter Fabiano was living the American dream.
And on top of that, he was enjoying the kind of personal freedom that he had personally fought for on the front lines during World War II.
Life was good. Peter strolled up his front walkway, between the rows of carved Halloween pumpkins, and stepped inside his house.
His wife Betty walked up to him, carrying a large bucket full of candy, and as she placed the candy on a table near the door, Peter gave his wife a peck on the cheek.
Betty smiled and then quickly turned and walked away.
And Peter wondered if maybe Betty's smile was forced and if maybe she was mad about something.
As happy as Peter was about his job and his new house in the suburbs, he and Betty's marriage had its share of difficulties.
In fact, just that summer a few months earlier, things had gotten so tense between them that Betty had moved out for a while.
But she had come back and things had really seemed like they were getting better between them.
And so Peter decided to ask a simple question just to gauge Betty's mood.
He said, hey, have any trick-or-treaters come by yet?
And to Peter's relief, Betty laughed and told him it was still too early.
All the trick-or-treaters were probably still eating dinner.
Peter relaxed, convinced he'd been reading way too much into his wife's smile, and he started to get excited about handing out candy to a parade of children in funny costumes.
In the 1950s in the United States, the act of trick-or-treating had really started to become a popular Halloween tradition for children.
And the holiday itself was growing into the huge part of American pop culture that it is today.
When Peter was a kid, he didn't get to go trick-or-treating.
It wasn't really a thing back then. But now, even though he was an adult, he was quite happy to be a part of it, even if his role was just handing out candy.
Peter's teenage stepdaughter, Judy, came bounding out of her room in full costume, dressed as Alice from Alice in Wonderland.
She said she was heading out to a Halloween party, and she had a ride there.
But she would need a ride home. Peter said no problem, he'd come pick her up, but no later than 10 p.m., because it was a school night.
Judy huffed and said, fine, before telling him where she'd be and walking out the door.
By six o'clock, shortly after Judy had left for her party, the sun was setting and the Fabiano's doorbell rang for the first time that night.
Peter and Betty heard a chorus of young voices chanting trick-or-treat from right outside the door.
Betty smiled, put on her pointy black witch's hat, grabbed the bucket of candy by its handles, and opened up the door.
In front of her stood a little boy in a robot costume, and on either side of him were what Betty assumed were his two big sisters, both dressed as fairies.
Betty reached into her bucket and grabbed as much candy as her hand could fit, and then dropped the candy into each of the kids' bags.
The kids thanked her and ran off. At this point, Peter walked up behind Betty to look outside, and he saw more children approaching.
It looked like it was going to be a busy night.
A little before 11pm that night, after the last of the trick-or-treaters had come by the house, and Peter had picked up his stepdaughter Judy from her Halloween party, Peter walked into his bedroom and saw Betty reading in bed.
He slipped into his pajamas and yawned. He thought about how he and Betty would have to be up at the crack of dawn tomorrow to get Judy to school and also then to open the two salons they ran for a full day of appointments.
And so all Peter wanted to do was just collapse and go to sleep.
And so Peter slid into bed with Betty, but then put her book down on the nightstand and she turned off the lamp.
As the couple lay in bed, Peter remarked to Betty that this time of the year was exhausting.
Betty agreed. Decorating, hosting, entertaining, these things were hard work.
She said now that Halloween was over, they would have to start sending invitations for Thanksgiving.
And then as soon as Thanksgiving was over, they wouldn't even have time to breathe before they'd have to start decorating for Christmas and planning their big Christmas party.
Peter joked that maybe next year, they should just board up their house for the holidays and take an extended vacation.
Betty started to laugh, but before she could say anything else, their doorbell rang.
Peter sat up, switched on the lamp, and looked at the clock.
It was 11.15 p.m. He turned to Betty and said it seemed really strange that somebody would ring their doorbell so late.
Betty thought it might just be a late trick-or-treater, even though more than two hours had passed since the last trick-or-treater had come by.
Peter pushed himself out of bed. Maybe it was one of the earlier visitors coming back for seconds, he said.
If so, it was their lucky night because they still had more than enough candy to last through the new year.
Peter put on his robe, stepped into his slippers, and began walking towards the front door.
And as he did, the doorbell rang again. And this time, Peter heard trick-or-treat from a voice calling out from the other side of the door.
And so Peter picked up the bucket of candy on the side table, reached for the doorknob, and pulled the front door open.
A few minutes later, Sun Valley police officer Bud Alper was fast asleep in his bed, two doors down from Peter and Betty's house, when suddenly this violent pounding noise jolted him awake.
The pounding persisted as Alper slowly gained his bearings and he realized that somebody was banging on the front door of his house.
Alper picked up his watch from the nightstand and looked at the time, and when he saw how late it was, he instinctively began reaching for his service revolver.
He had no idea what was going on, but someone banging on his door this late definitely couldn't be something good.
But just then, he heard the sound of a young woman's voice, tearfully calling his name, pleading with him to open the door.
Alper opened his front door, and through bleary eyes, he saw his teenage neighbor, Judy, the daughter of Betty Fabiano, standing there in her nightgown with tears streaming down her cheeks.
Judy begged Alper to help her. Her stepfather had been shot, she said.
He was lying on the floor of their house, dying.
Alper ran out of the house and followed Judy to her front door and stopped just outside the doorway.
Alper saw Peter lying motionless on the floor, partially blocking the entrance to the house.
Alper quickly stepped over him and darted inside the house, and he saw Betty, Peter's wife, standing frozen in the hallway, with her hand over her mouth, looking like she was in shock.
Alper asked where their phone was and Judy pointed towards the kitchen.
Five minutes later, an ambulance pulled up at the Fabiano's house and paramedics picked Peter up, put him on a stretcher and sped away to the hospital.
Officer Bill Lehman of the Sun Valley Police Department parked his cruiser at the Fabiano house just as the ambulance left, and he walked up to the front door.
Lehman greeted his fellow officer, Bud Alper, who was standing on the walkway in his pajama robe and lighting a cigarette.
Standing near her was Mrs. Fabiano, who was sobbing, and when Officer Lehman approached her, she began to recount what had happened.
Betty said that shortly after she and her husband had gone to bed, their doorbell had rang, and they both assumed it was just a late trick-or-treater.
Betty said she had stayed in bed while Peter had gone to the door.
From bed, Betty had heard her husband open the front door and say, It's a little late for this, don't you think?
She then heard someone with a strange voice reply, No, and a few seconds later, Betty heard a loud pop, followed by a thud.
As Betty got out of bed and began running to the front of the house, she heard tires screeching and a car speeding away.
And there, at the foot of the front door, she found her husband lying on the rug, bleeding from a wound in his chest.
Betty told the officer that, based on the tone of her husband's voice after he opened the door, she was pretty sure that whoever he was talking to at the door was an adult.
And she could almost swear that the voice she heard in response to him sounded like a man impersonating a woman.
Lehman furrowed his eyebrows as he jotted down this strange detail in his notepad.
Was the person at the door using a fake voice because Peter would have recognized them otherwise?
And if this was the case, did it mean they were also wearing some sort of costume?
It was Halloween after all. Lehman walked back to his cruiser, reached inside of it, and then returned to the front door with a small box.
He placed the box over the doorbell and secured it there with some tape.
That way nobody could touch it before crime scene investigators showed up to dust for prints.
Officer Lehman turned to Betty and asked if she knew of anyone who might have wanted to hurt Peter or wanted Peter dead.
Betty hesitated just for a second and then shook her head.
She said she couldn't think of anybody. A short time later, homicide detective Pat Keeley rolled up to the Fabiano house and took over the investigation.
Officer Lehman briefed Detective Keeley on the details of what had happened and then Keeley approached Betty.
He took off his hat, lowered his head a bit, and said he hated to have to tell her this, but her husband Peter never regained consciousness, and he was pronounced dead upon arrival at the hospital.
Betty immediately broke down and began crying, and hugged her daughter.
Keely stepped away to give the victim's grieving family members some space, and as the crime scene investigators showed up to process the scene, Keely walked across the street to begin his neighborhood canvas.
Keeley knocked on the door of the Fabianos' adjacent neighbors and asked if they had seen or heard anything suspicious.
The neighbors told the detective that they had heard a loud pop, maybe about 15 minutes earlier, but aside from that, they hadn't noticed anything out of the ordinary.
As the detective scribbled this into his notepad, the neighbor suddenly remembered something, something he didn't think much of at the time.
He said a couple of times that evening, when he would look out the window to see if there were any more trick-or-treaters coming, he noticed a car parked in the street that he'd never seen before.
It was an older model, dark-colored sedan, and by his count, it had been parked there for maybe at least an hour, but now it was gone.
The neighbor wished he could provide more information, but he didn't take note of the make or model, and he wasn't able to offer a description of anybody in the car.
Keeley continued canvassing the neighborhood, but none of the other people on the block saw or heard anything unusual.
So he returned to the Fabiano house, hoping that the crime scene investigators had found something useful that might help him close this case quickly.
But the news from the other investigators was equally disappointing.
There were no fingerprints on the doorbell and no shell casings at the scene.
In fact, they hadn't uncovered anything at all, not a single piece of evidence.
This crime scene was totally clean. A little later that night, Keeley returned to his desk in the homicide department to begin writing up the report.
The 46-year-old veteran took a deep breath and exhaled in a long sigh.
He knew he was in for a long night, and he was at an age where he was beginning to wonder if his 95% homicide clearance rate was worth the toll these long nights must be taking on his health.
Keeley finished writing up the report and then began looking over what he'd written.
He kept thinking how unusual it was that the killers took advantage of Halloween and used trick-or-treating as a ruse.
He'd never heard of this happening before, except maybe in a radio play he once listened to.
And the crime scene was so spotless, the killers were very careful to not leave anything behind.
This suggested a level of planning and organization rarely seen in random killings and robberies.
This had all the markings of a professional hit.
The day after the murder, Detective Keeley drove down to the Hall of Justice and made his way to the Records Division.
He wanted to find out if Peter had any sort of criminal background or maybe a connection to the mob that might have led a professional hitman to show up at his door and kill him.
Keeley asked the records clerk for anything he could dig up on a Peter R. Fabiano.
The records clerk disappeared into a back room, and a short time later, he returned with a file and handed it to Keeley.
And the second Keeley opened that file up and began reading, he knew his instincts had paid off.
Peter Fabiano did have a criminal record.
About nine years earlier, Peter had been a bookie, which meant he was setting up gambling bets, taking bet money, and paying out winnings.
This was illegal, and Peter had been caught and convicted on a bookmaking charge.
He was sentenced to 180 days in jail, but the sentence was ultimately suspended, and he never served any time.
Keeley knew that bookies were often associated with organized crime, and he wondered how deep Peter's ties went.
Could he have run afoul of a loan shark or fallen in debt to the wrong people?
Something like that would definitely support his professional killer theory.
Detective Keeley spent the afternoon probing Peter's business records, his finances, his background, hoping to find other investigations and other shady dealings.
Anything that might help Keeley build a list of Peter's potential enemies.
But much to Keeley's surprise, aside from that one scrape with the law being a bookie almost a decade earlier, Peter really did seem to have cleaned up his life.
He ran a legitimate business, which his wife helped him operate, and none of Peter's friends that Keeley had talked to could think of anyone who had beef with him.
However, Keeley had yet to really have a deep conversation with the one person closest to Peter, and that would be Peter's wife, and now widow, Betty.
That evening, Betty Fabiano sat in a small room inside the Sun Valley police station.
After waiting for a few minutes on her own, Detective Keeley walked in, sat down in a chair a few feet away from her, and asked her to take him through the night of Peter's murder again.
Betty started recounting everything that had happened that day, starting from when she had finished working at one of the two salons she and Peter owned.
Peter, at the time, was working at the other salon.
Keely listened closely, looking for any inconsistencies between this version of events and the story Betty had told him when he had first come to her house.
Keely was not ready to write off the idea that a hired killer had shot Peter, but maybe it wasn't the mob that hired them.
Maybe it was the victim's wife. But as Betty spoke, Keely didn't catch anything that strayed too far from her original story.
Still, that didn't necessarily mean anything.
Some people were good at memorizing stories.
And so Keely asked Betty to tell him more about her marriage to Peter.
Betty explained that she and Peter had been married for about three years.
She had two kids from a previous marriage, and one of those kids, her daughter Judy, lived with them.
Keely asked if she and Peter had any problems in their marriage.
Betty paused, then took a deep breath, and admitted that, yes, there had been some marital problems.
She said their marriage had become pretty rocky earlier that year, to the point where they actually had separated for a couple of months.
Betty had moved out of the house during that time and went to live with a friend.
But, in July, she and Peter had reconciled, and she had moved back in with him.
Betty looked away for a minute and was silent, and then she turned back to Keely and said there was someone he should know about, someone who might have had it out for Peter.
Keely leaned in and asked her why she hadn't said anything about this person when he talked to her at the house.
Betty said she wasn't trying to hide anything.
She'd been in total shock at the house, and she hadn't been able to think clearly.
But now that she was talking about her and Peter's relationship, it seemed obvious, because she believed this person truly hated Peter, maybe enough to want him dead.
It was a woman named Joan Rabel who used to work part-time for Peter at one of his salons.
But Peter had fired Joan because for some reason he just didn't like her.
But Betty did. In fact, the two women had quickly hit it off when they first met and had become friends.
And this really bothered Peter. In fact, it bothered Peter so much that the friendship between Joan and Betty became a source of tension in their marriage until Peter ultimately forbade his wife to socialize with Joan.
Betty felt she had a right to choose her friends and was not going to let her husband control her, but Peter was insistent until Betty felt like he was basically giving her an ultimatum.
And ultimately, this is the issue that led Betty and Peter to separate for those several months.
However, Betty said after a couple of months of separation, she had a change of heart and returned home to Peter.
And he accepted her back, but under the condition that she never see Joan and never even speak Joan's name around him again.
As Keeley listened to the story, he found himself puzzled by it.
It sounded like there had to be a piece missing somewhere.
And so he asked Betty, why did Peter hate Joan so much? but Betty just sort of shrugged and looked away.
Keely couldn't tell if Betty was hiding this information because she knew more about Peter's murder than she was saying, or if she was trying to hide something to protect her dead husband or her friend Joan.
Finally, Betty broke the silence and just said that Joan had a really strong personality, and Peter also had a strong personality.
And sometimes two strong personalities can clash.
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The next morning, two days after Peter's murder, Keeley and his partner decided to pay Joan a surprise visit.
They drove to Joan's house in Hollywood on the other side of the hill and knocked on her front door.
The door swung open and Joan appeared. And as the detectives flashed their badges and said they were there to talk to her about Peter Fabiano, they watched Joan closely to see how she would react, whether she'd be nervous or surprised or something.
But Joan just shook her head and looked down.
She had already heard the news. How tragic, she said to the investigators.
Keely agreed and said it was tragic. But also, her name had come up as a potential suspect, so they needed her to accompany them down to the station and answer some questions.
Joan, matter-of-factly, just said, okay, and asked them to hold on a minute while she got her coat.
And as she did that, the investigators shared a look.
Because honestly, this seemed really strange to them.
In almost every homicide case they had ever worked, when somebody was told they were a potential suspect, they got scared or angry or had some kind of strong reaction.
Neither of the cops had ever seen someone act so unaffected by this kind of news.
They followed Joan inside the house and kept an eye on her while she grabbed her coat and her purse.
And she remained totally calm and cooperative when the detectives walked her to their car and drove her back to the valley to police headquarters.
As soon as Joan was sitting down inside of the interview room across from Keely and his partner, she began to talk.
Joan insisted that she had nothing to do with Peter's murder.
She was not a violent person, she hated guns, in fact, she had never even touched a gun, not once in her whole life.
And as Joan continued to talk, Keely began to notice her calm demeanor slip just a little.
She didn't sound angry, she just sounded sort of surprised.
She told the detectives she had no idea what they'd heard or who they'd heard it from, but she had no problem whatsoever with Peter Fabiano.
She considered both Peter and his wife Betty to be two of her closest friends, and she'd only stopped working at the salon because she'd found another job.
So, Joan suggested, whoever was pointing the finger at her, the police might want to take a closer look at them.
Keeley and his partner exchanged another brief glance.
What Joan was saying was a complete contradiction to what Betty had said.
Keely's partner asked Joan if she had an alibi for the night of the murder.
She told them she did. She said she had been home all night by herself, but her car had been parked in the front of her house in her driveway, and she was sure one of her neighbors could confirm that.
After speaking to Joan for a bit longer, Keely had his suspicions, but he had no legal reason to hold Joan, so he gave her a ride back to her house.
And after Joan went inside and closed the door behind her, Keely began knocking on her neighbor's doors.
And several of them did confirm what Joan told detectives.
On the night Peter died, Joan's car never left her driveway.
And considering that her house was 12 and a half miles away from the Fabiano house, it did seem likely if she was involved somehow in the murder that she would have had to drive there.
Keeley returned to the station, went right to his desk, and shook his head in frustration.
Less than two days into this investigation, and he felt as though the case was already reaching a dead end.
Beyond Peter's brief stint as a bookie, nothing had come up that showed he still had ties to organized crime, or that he owed money to anybody.
Betty and Joan had told him wildly different stories about Joan's relationship with Peter, so he figured one of them had to be lying.
But the lie didn't have to mean they were connected to the murder.
The lie could be for some personal reason.
And at this point, there was no clear evidence pointing to either of the women.
Keeley definitely couldn't rule them out, but he also couldn't really pursue either of them unless some new piece of information surfaced.
So Keeley picked up his case file and began scouring the dozen or so pages he'd put together so far, looking for anything he might have missed.
But after an hour of studying the facts of the case, he put down the file and felt no closer to an answer.
Keeley's nearly perfect homicide clearance rate, which was a great source of professional pride to him, seemed like it was about to take a hit.
Nearly a week after the murder, on November 5, 1957, Peter Fabiano was laid to rest.
Following the funeral, Detective Keeley continued to interview Peter's friends and family, but these conversations never seemed to get him anything new.
Several more weeks passed, and no matter how many times Keeley looked over his case file, he didn't get any closer to figuring out who had murdered Peter.
And with nothing more to go on and new cases piling up, Detective Keeley and his team turned their attention to other open investigations.
The Fabianos' Thanksgiving dinner that year had one fewer face at the table, and while they ate, there was this sense of despair hanging over all of them.
Like Keeley, Peter's family started to feel that Peter's case would just never get solved.
But on a day not long after Thanksgiving in early December, the telephone rang at the Sun Valley Police Department.
A muffled voice on the other end of the line told the dispatcher they had a tip in the Peter Fabiano case.
The caller said that if investigators went to Bullock's department store in downtown Los Angeles and visited the area with the rented storage lockers, they would find a .38 caliber Smith & Wesson revolver.
This was the gun that was used to kill Peter Fabiano.
The caller then provided a locker number and then hung up without giving their name.
The dispatcher took down the information and quickly passed it along to Detective Keeley.
Keeley was skeptical that this tip would lead anywhere.
Whenever a case was all over the news like this one, he usually got at least one call from somebody just looking for attention.
Rarely was a vital piece of information just handed to him.
It's never that easy. But Keeley was a diligent investigator who followed up on basically every single lead.
And so far, the Fabiano case had offered very few.
So this was something worth looking into.
So Keeley and his partner drove to downtown Los Angeles, entered the Bullock's department store, and had the locker attendant open up the locker the tipster had indicated.
And when Keeley looked inside that locker, he couldn't hide his excitement because there inside of it was in fact a .38 caliber Smith & Wesson revolver.
Keeley asked the locker attendant whose name the locker had been rented under.
The attendant opened a registration book, and when she read the name to Keeley, Keeley had never heard of them before.
Keeley put the revolver into an evidence bag and drove it back to the station.
He knew he would need to figure out where the gun came from, who the gun was registered to, and if the gun had ever been reported stolen.
He also knew there was a good chance the locker had been rented under a false name, but he hoped the gun would still lead him to Peter's killer.
So he called the state police and gave them the serial number of this gun.
And within minutes, Keeley learned that the gun had been purchased on September 21st of that year, the month before the murder, from a gun shop in Pasadena, about 15 miles away.
And the buyer of the gun was the very same person who rented the storage locker where the gun was found.
This person had not used a fake name to get the gun or the locker.
So Keeley could easily track them down, and he was now almost positive this person killed Peter.
That evening, after obtaining a warrant, Detective Keeley and his partner arrested the person who had bought the gun and stored it in the locker.
The detectives brought this person to the station and sat them down in the interrogation room, and as soon as the interview began, this person openly admitted to shooting Peter Fabiano, and they would tell investigators the entire story right from the very beginning all the way up to the aftermath of the killing.
And once Keeley and his partner had all these details, all the pieces began falling into place.
And everything that might have confused Keeley early on, now suddenly made perfect sense.
Based on the killer's confession and evidence gathered throughout the investigation, the following is a reconstruction of what police believe happened to Peter Fabiano on the night of October 31st, 1957.
At around 9 p.m. that night, the killer, wearing face makeup and baggy clothes, sat in a parked car a few houses down from Peter's and just watched and waited.
Just after 11 p.m., so after sitting in the parked car for two straight hours, the killer saw the bedroom lights in the Fabiano house go off.
At this point, the killer slipped a mask over their face and red gloves over their hands and then climbed out of the car and began walking toward the Fabiano's front door, carrying a brown paper bag with a .38 caliber revolver hidden inside of it.
The killer rang the doorbell and as soon as they did, they began to shake, knowing they were about to commit a crime that could land them in the gas chamber.
They tried to calm their nerves by reassuring themselves that this was the perfect crime and there was no way they'd get caught.
They repeated this in their head as they rang the doorbell again and called out, trick-or-treat, in a loud, booming, unnatural voice.
Peter opened the door, looked at the killer in their ill-fitting clothes and paper mask, and laughed.
"'It's a little late for this, don't you think?' he asked.
All the killer could think to say was, "'No,' as Peter looked down into his bucket and began fishing for candy."
With Peter's attention distracted for just a moment, the killer began raising the gun, which was still concealed inside the paper bag.
But as they did, their hands began to tremble violently, so they reached over with their other hand to keep themselves steady and then continued lifting the gun with both hands.
And once it was aimed squarely at Peter's chest, they fired a single shot.
The bullet blew a hole through the paper bag and slammed into Peter's chest, the round settling just below his heart.
Peter looked up at the killer in horror and then clutched his chest as he fell to the ground.
The killer immediately turned around, cut across the yard, and ran back to the car.
When they got into the passenger seat, they were shaking and on the verge of tears.
They couldn't believe they had just killed a man.
But the killer then felt a hand on their shoulder.
They turned to the driver's seat and saw the woman they loved had a smile on her face.
The woman told the killer they had done everything just right.
Then she hit the gas and sped away from the neighborhood.
It would turn out Peter Fabiano's killer was a woman named Goldeen Pizer.
She was a 42-year-old lab assistant at a children's hospital, and she had no direct connection to Peter Fabiano.
In fact, she had never met him before the night she killed him.
She only knew what Peter looked like because another person had driven her by the Fabiano house a week before Halloween and pointed him out.
And this other person was Goldeen's only connection to Peter.
And this other person was the actual mastermind behind the murder.
And that was Peter's former employee, Joan Rabel.
It turned out that Joan and Peter's wife Betty had both lied to police about their relationship.
Joan and Betty were not just friends, they were lovers.
But in 1957, that was not something most people would accept, so Betty and Joan tried to hide it.
However, Peter still found out about their relationship and when he did, he was livid.
He fired Joan from his salon and forbade his wife from ever seeing Joan again.
But instead of submitting, Betty left her husband and went to live with Joan.
However, after a couple of months with Joan, Betty realized she was better off staying with Peter and broke off her relationship with Joan.
Betty moved back in with Peter and agreed to never bring up Joan's name again. and it was at this point that Joan began plotting Peter's murder.
Jilted and wanting revenge, Joan began a new relationship with the very impressionable Goldeen and immediately began setting her up to become Peter's assassin.
Joan spoke endlessly to Goldeen about what an evil and vile person Peter Fabiano was.
Joan claimed Peter was cruel to his wife and cruel to his wife's children, mistreated his employees, and was essentially a monster who needed to be stopped.
Over time, Goldeen grew to despise Peter just through Joan's portrait of him, and that's when Joan began actively putting her plan into motion.
Goldeen cared so deeply for Joan, she would have done just about anything for her.
And so when she walked into that Pasadena gun shop on September 21st, she felt like she was doing a heroic thing.
Once the two conspirators had their plan all worked out, they decided Halloween night was the best time to carry it out, because they knew Peter would be more likely to open his door to a stranger after a steady stream of trick-or-treaters had been to his house.
On the night of the murder, Joan borrowed a friend's car, leaving hers in the driveway to create the alibi, and then went to pick up Goldeen at her house.
Joan then drove Goldeen to the Fabianos Street, waited in the car until the deed was done, and drove her back home. at which point Joan told Goldeen to forget they ever knew each other and vanished from her life.
Once Goldeen realized she'd been used and manipulated by Joan, who didn't actually care about her, the hold that Joan had over her was broken.
So when Detective Keeley got the anonymous tip and tracked Goldeen down, she was more than willing to tell him everything.
Joan Rabel and Goldeen Pizer were both charged with first-degree murder.
Both women initially pleaded not guilty, but eventually changed their pleas to guilty to the lesser charge of second-degree murder.
Joan and Goldeen received sentences of five years to life in prison.
As for Peter's widow, Betty Fabiano, she was never charged with any crime because investigators were satisfied that she had nothing to do with her husband's murder.
A quick note about our stories, they are all based on true events, but we sometimes use pseudonyms to protect the people involved and some details are fictionalized for dramatic purposes.
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Hey listeners, Mr. Ballin here. What if I told you that some of the strangest, darkest, and most mysterious stories happening right now are all connected to what might be the biggest crime of our generation?
You know I'm always on the hunt for the most chilling and perplexing tales out there.
Well, I've discovered a new podcast that uncovers real-world mysteries unfolding right now. much like how another Ballin' Studios podcast, Redacted Declassified Mysteries, brings hidden government secrets to light.
And it's called Lawless Planet. Host Zach Goldbaum reveals how shocking tales of murder, cover-ups, and mysterious deaths are all part of something bigger. the systematic destruction of our planet.
From activists who vanish in the Amazon to whistleblowers uncovering billion-dollar environmental crimes, these aren't just stories about the environment.
They're real-life thrillers about people caught between powerful forces willing to kill to keep their secrets buried.
Follow Lawless Planet on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts.
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