Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What happened on the evening of October 19, 1970, in Santa Cruz County?
Hey weirdos, I'm Ash. And I'm Alayna. And this is Morbid. This is morbid. It's also kind of like an 800 call service. Yeah. Because I have a sexy voice. It's true. She does. It's like in and out though. It is. I can force it to not be so. Yeah. It's the allergies. It's the allergies. It's the asthma. The asthma. My asthma. It's just, it's a whole bunch of things, you know? Yeah.
You know, what are you going to do?
The goddamn pollen. It's here to stay. I don't know when it's, we've had several rains, several intense rains, storms even. It rains every fucking weekend. It's raining all the time. And it's like, and then we wake up and it's just somehow more pollen on my porch and now just puddles of pollen. Now the pollen has gathered.
The pollen puddles gross me the fuck out. I'm also driving a pollen mobile.
Yeah.
If you have a black car, Pollen Mobile.
Yeah. There's no, don't get your car washed in New England right now. I recently did and I don't know why I did.
It was a waste of $22. That's crazy. Yeah. I know.
Like that's actually wild that you did that.
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Chapter 2: What were the circumstances surrounding the Ota family murders?
Ooh, because that had just happened.
Literally, like I said, the Manson family was on trial.
Yeah, that was probably one of the first things they thought of.
It was. It cannot be understated how significant the fear of another Manson-style murder was at the time of these murders. It was a little more than a year earlier when Charles Manson and his followers broke into the Hollywood home of director Roman Polanski and his wife Sharon Tate while Polanski was away in Europe. Yeah.
As we know, they killed five people staying in the house, including Sharon Tate, who was eight and a half months pregnant. And then the very next day, they murdered Lino and Rosemary LaBianca. Now, the murders had always been symbolic of a larger shift in fear toward uncertainty, but they were just the first of a lot of horrific acts that would go on to reshape California throughout that period.
At the time, residents of the San Francisco Bay Area were being terrorized by the Zodiac Killer. Like, as all of this was going on. And there were a slew of other violent criminals who kept Californians in constant fear of being killed. Yeah. Like, California in the 70s, it cannot be stated enough how insane it was. Because then just a couple years later, you would have Ed Kemper. Yep.
Like, there's so many more. Oh, yeah. Some of the scariest ones.
Mm-hmm.
So just one morning after the Ota murders, 19-year-old Tom DiCecco was found dead inside the gas station where he worked, and his body was stuffed into an alcove just off the main garage. The station was in Saratoga, which was just 30 miles from where the Ota family lived.
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Chapter 3: How did investigators initially respond to the crime scene?
It's awful. You just don't get it. I don't either. Dr. Louise Weilman, a friend said, never once did I hear him speak an angry word to anybody. Dr. Ota was always friendly, always generous to give to charitable organizations. Oh, that breaks my heart. Yeah, Lark, his daughter, echoed the sentiments of friends and neighbors and colleagues. Literally everybody in this community loved this family.
Lark said, my dad was a magnanimous man. He was generous and outgoing and friendly. He was just a good man. He was loved in that community. I also love that name, Lark. I do too. It's such a good name. Now, the same was true for the other victims.
Like her husband, Virginia Ota grew up in an immigrant family and she worked alongside her husband to make sure that their kids had opportunities that her and her husband never could have dreamed of. Lark said of her mother, she was the strongest and most determined person that I knew and I miss her deeply.
Victor may have been the face of several charities at the hospital, but Virginia was very much working behind the scenes to ensure that everything ran smoothly. More than just a doctor's simple, stylish wife, she was an active, integral member of this community, and she was a dedicated mother.
She was so committed to raising those kids to not only have the best opportunities, but with an awareness of both sides of their heritage. While Dorothy Call Walliter might not have been as outgoing as Dr. Ota in Virginia, she left an impression on the lives that she touched. Her daughter, Melinda, said, My mom was very elegant. She was very 60s. Makeup, false lashes, and hairstyles.
Dorothy spent her entire professional life working in health care, and for the previous eight years she worked in Dr. Ota's private practice, she managed nearly every aspect of that business. She always jumped in to help with the Ota children when the parents were too busy, and all the children loved and respected her. This was very much a blended family. Yeah.
Now, when Victor and Virginia had to go out of town or to a conference or a charity event, Dorothy and her husband would welcome all of the Ota kids into their home and just treated them like they were their own children. Damn. Lark said Dorothy was perfect, like a 60s TV mom, except that she worked. She was beautiful inside and out.
Nearly everything investigators had learned about the Ota family and about Dorothy indicated that these were all well-liked, deeply appreciated people in their community. Yeah, just like great people. They were the last people anybody would expect to be the victims of violent crime.
The only involvement with the law that Dr. Ota had in his past was in 1967 when a group of thieves actually broke into his office and they stole a cocaine solution that he used in his surgical procedures. Jeez, so it wasn't even him. No. Otherwise, there appeared to be nothing in the background of any of the victims that pointed toward their killer.
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Chapter 4: What evidence pointed to a potential cult involvement in the Ota murders?
Just like pretty cultish. I was like, do you want to bring in one of the hippies who knows tarot who can maybe tell you something? Yeah, that's the thing. Get some experts. Exactly. Now on the second day of the investigation, just as they were settling into their theory of a newly formed cult, investigators got a call that would undermine that theory altogether. What? Uh-oh. Uh-oh.
He couldn't remember the exact time, but he said it was probably a little before 8 p.m., which was not long after the Otas were killed. According to the attendant, the car matched the description of Virginia Ota's Oldsmobile, and there was only one person in the car.
And while the attendant never saw the man's face in the light, he did say that the driver had a fairly distinctive voice, and he was certain that he would recognize it if he heard it again. Now, that was just the first of many calls that investigators got that day, most reporting leads that really went nowhere.
But among the dud calls, there was someone from the Southern Pacific Railroad with valuable information. The caller reported that one of their trains had collided with a green Oldsmobile wagon in a tunnel not too far from the gas station where it had been spotted on the night of the murder. So sheriff's deputies rushed out to the scene, hoping that they would find the killer or the killers.
But by the time they reached the train tunnel where the car was discovered, the driver was nowhere to be found. Ugh. Fortunately, neither the train nor the car suffered much damage in the collision. The only damage from the fire was to the upholstery inside the car. But any hope of finding useful evidence was quickly dashed. It had rained that morning. Of course.
And it had transformed the area of the tunnel into like kind of a mud pit. Goddamn. And it washed away any physical evidence that might have been left on the exterior of the vehicle. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. The footprints found outside the car and the statement from the gas station attendant seem to suggest that these five murders actually could have been committed by one single killer.
That's horrific to think about. They have to think about how that possibly could have happened. Yeah, now you have to go back and be like, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. So frustrated with the lack of evidence and leads, detectives went back to question family and friends of the Otas in order to try to establish some kind of timeline. which would have accounted for the day of the murders.
So they learned that on the day of the murders, Dorothy had picked up one of the boys from school and drove him home because his mom was going to be late. So stick that in your back pocket. Yeah, already this is adding up. It's changing the routine a little bit. Now, from the beginning of the investigation...
The assumption had been that the Otaf family had all been home at the same time when they were attacked. Which would make that insane. Right. But if Dorothy had picked up one of the children and Virginia planned to be home later, that strongly suggested that the family members could have arrived home one or two at a time.
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