A luxury residence in California where five people were murdered on October 19, 1970, has been put up for sale again. The asking price is $4.6 million.
The villa has a swimming pool, tennis court and Japanese gardens, but behind its striking appearance lies the history of a massacre.
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According to Cobra Magazine, the house was built in 1965 to a design by architect Aaron Green. He had been a student and close associate of renowned architect Frank Lloyd Wright.
The residence covers about 387 square meters and has five bedrooms and four bathrooms. It sits on a private property of nearly 10 hectares. The initial asking price was higher, but after the latest reduction it stands at $4.6 million.
The event that marked the villa’s history took place when 24-year-old John Linley Frazier entered the home of prominent ophthalmologist Victor Ohta. Frazier, nicknamed the “Killer Prophet,” had developed extreme and paranoid beliefs. He claimed that God had chosen him to punish people who, in his view, were destroying nature.
Victor Ohta, his wife Virginia, their sons Derek, 12, and Taggart, 11, and the doctor’s secretary, Dorothy Cadwallader, were killed in the attack. Court documents show that Frazier bound all five with silk scarves and neckties, took them into the backyard and shot them near the pool.
He then set fire to parts of the house to destroy evidence. Firefighters who arrived to extinguish the blaze found the bodies of the five victims in the residence’s pool.
Before leaving, Frazier left a typewritten note on the windshield of the doctor’s Rolls-Royce. In it, he declared the start of World War III and threatened people who harmed the environment.
Frazier was arrested on October 23, 1970, four days after the massacre, while sleeping in a shack not far from the property. In 1971, he was found guilty of five counts of first-degree murder and sentenced to death, a sentence later commuted to life imprisonment. In August 2009, he took his own life in his cell at Mule Creek prison in California.
Although the fire had caused extensive damage, the villa was restored in the early 1970s and retained most of its original architecture.
Today, the residence has large glass walls with redwood frames, a grand living room with a fireplace and ceilings reaching about 7.6 meters high. Outside are a lagoon-shaped pool, a tennis court, a Japanese garden with a koi pond and waterfall, a traditional sauna, stone terraces, a path through bamboo and a bocce court.
More than 55 years after the crime that shocked California, the villa is back on the real estate market.
