The home of the Friedli family was nestled in the mountains in the secluded community of Pinyon Pines, California.
With its cooler air and shady trees, it was a haven from the desert heat of the Coachella Valley below. Local sheriff Ron Friedli had built the two-storey home for his wife Vicki and their three daughters. It was remote, with almost no mobile phone signal, but they all enjoyed the outdoors and felt safe in the tranquil spot.
When Ron and Vicki split up after 13 years of marriage, they remained good friends. Vicki, 53, kept the house, and started dating contractor and dad-of-three Jon Hayward, 55. Vicki’s two eldest daughters, Tanya and Jessica ‘Drew’, left home, but the youngest, Becky, 18, stayed living with her mum and Jon. She was a student who also worked at a local diner, and was known for her fun personality and big smile.
Then, on the night of September 17, 2006, tragedy struck. After 9pm, neighbours saw huge flames coming from the property lighting up the night sky. Firefighters rushed to the scene – the house was on fire and, as they fought the blaze, it became clear there were three fatalities. Vicki, Jon and Becky were dead. But it was no accident. It was the scene of a triple murder.
Vicki had been shot in the head with a handgun and John had been killed with a shotgun fired at the abdomen. Their bodies were in the kitchen and it was determined they were dead before the fire had been started. Outside there was a sickening sight.
Becky’s dead body was on fire in a wheelbarrow. Footprints at the scene suggested she’d been attacked behind the house – placed in the wheelbarrow before being rolled back to the house and set on fire with the use of accelerants.
Becky’s charred remains were too badly damaged to determine how she’d been killed.
With the nearest neighbours over five acres away, no one would have heard the screams as each family member was picked off.
The small community was shocked to the core. Before long, accusations and rumours were rife. Investigators started to focus on anyone who might have held a grudge against the then-retired sheriff, Ron.
But there were no cases that would’ve prompted such a payback. The next line of enquiry was Ron himself – the grieving father was interviewed to see if he was involved, but phone records placed him 11 hours away at his home in Northern California. Ron was innocent.
When the commotion died down, investigators determined it was Becky who was the main target. After all, she’d been positioned in the front of the house in a wheelbarrow. Her family also revealed that Becky’s biggest fear was fire, after she’d accidentally pulled a pan of hot fat over herself as a child. Someone close to her would have known that. The attack was personal.
Straight away, suspicion fell on Becky’s ex-boyfriend Robert Lars Pape, then 18. They’d dated in high school for about a year and Robert was Becky’s first love, but had grown possessive.
Even when things ended earlier that year, and they both started seeing other people, Robert would call Becky obsessively. At the time, it wasn’t made public that Robert was a suspect – along with his best friend Cristin Conrad Smith, then 17.
It turned out there was talk of the pair of them going hiking with Becky on the day she was killed. They were questioned and denied being in the area. Robert and Cristin insisted they were playing video games and shooting paintballs. They were not named as persons of interest at the time or arrested. Robert said he’d moved on from Becky and had no reason to kill her – in fact, he insisted at the time that he hadn’t been in touch with her for weeks.
The case ran cold and the loved ones of Vicki, Becky and Jon were without answers. After six years, they were determined to get the cold case back in the spotlight, so put up a controversial but impactful billboard. It showed a photo of the vibrant and beautiful Becky with the word ‘before’, followed by a mocked-up picture of a burning wheelbarrow with ‘after’.
It followed with: ‘Does this make you sick? Then do something about it.’
There was a tip line and a $50,000 (£38,000) reward for information. Soon after, new information came flooding in. One witness said that Robert had come into Becky’s workplace before she was killed and harassed her so much that he had to be removed. This didn’t sound like an ex-boyfriend who had ‘moved on’.
Seven years after the fire, Robert and Cristin were arrested for the three murders and, on paper, were not your usual suspects. Both 25, neither had a criminal record and they appeared to be upstanding members of the community. Married Cristin was in the military and Robert had wed a girl he was dating when Becky was killed. He was an active church goer and the duo had a lot of supporters. After six months, any charges against them were dropped – the only explanation given was ‘legal reasons’.
But to the relief of those waiting for justice, they were rearrested in 2016. An ex-colleague of Robert and Cristin had come forward to say that in the weeks after the killings, Cristin had admitted being at the scene and that plans had gone wrong. Prompting them to ‘torch the whole (expletive) place’.
At the trial this year, there were no witnesses that put the pair at the scene and the evidence was mainly circumstantial.
As well as saying the evidence was weak, the defence team said investigators had ignored other suspects. There was a car that had almost run firefighters off the road as they’d rushed to the scene, which had never been identified. Becky was dating, too.
But the prosecution said they had the pair responsible. Both Robert and Cristin said they had been playing paintball on the other side of town at the time of the murders, but no one saw them. Their phones placed them on a road leading up to the Friedli’s home.
Their phones went silent between 7.30pm and 10pm at the time of the murders. The prosecution said it was because they were at the house where there was no phone reception. There was also a business card found at the crime scene just 200 yards from Becky’s body – it had Cristin’s DNA on, despite his claim that he’d never visited there.
The prosecution said Robert had been jealous of Becky moving on. He’d said that he hadn’t spoken to her for months prior to the murders and told an investigator at the time that she was ‘kind of obsessed with me’, but phone records showed he’d called her.
When an investigator approached Robert the day after the murders, he’d said he’d heard there was a fire in Pinyon Pines and that a woman’s body had been found in a wheelbarrow.
That detail hadn’t been revealed to the public at the time, so how did he know about it? When he was told the victim was Becky, he showed little emotion.
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In June, the jury found them both guilty. Robert was found guilty of second-degree murder for Becky’s death – which disappointed some – but they were both convicted of first-degree murder for Vicki and Jon. Family and friends sobbed, relieved to finally get justice after 12 years of agony
At the sentencing, Cristin spoke up. ‘I feel no shame and I feel no remorse because I did not take your loved ones from you,’ he said. ‘The fact is, I’m innocent and I did not commit these crimes. And that will never change.’
Becky’s sister Drew made an emotional statement. ‘When they killed my little sister Becky, they stole my world,’ she told the court. ‘I lost everything when they took the lives of my mother and sister. All that was left were charred corpses of the beautiful people they once were.’
Emotions were running high. ‘I felt I lost everything after my father was maliciously killed,’ said Jon’s daughter, Kathryn. ‘The devastation created by these two individuals has caused so much heartache. They carried on with their lives afterward. They got to feel happiness, while ours was taken. Whatever punishment these two individuals receive, they deserve more.’
The judge sentenced Robert and Cristin to life in prison without the chance of parole. ‘These murders were carried out in a sophisticated and planned manner. The crimes involved great violence and a high degree of cruelty,’ he said.
After 12 long years, the Pinyon Pines triple murder had been solved. But nothing will take back the horror experienced by Jon, Vicki and Becky that day in the tranquil mountain home where they thought they were safe.
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