The Trick or Treat Murder

BY MARA BOVSUN
SPECIAL TO THE NEWS

Sunday, October 28th 2007, 4:00 AM

All the ghosts and goblins had long been tucked into their beds on that Halloween in 1957 when Betty Fabiano heard the doorbell ring at her home in Sun Valley, Calif., just outside Los Angeles. It was past 11 p.m.

Figuring it was some late-night trick-or-treater, her husband, Peter, 35, got up and walked downstairs to answer the door.

"Isn't it kind of late for this sort of thing?" Betty heard her husband ask.

She couldn't hear the response, just a muffled voice, what sounded like a man impersonating a woman.

There was a pop, then a thump, then a screech as a car sped off into the night.

Fabiano ran downstairs to a sight more horrifying than any nightmare vision of Halloween.

Her husband was sprawled on the floor, unconscious, blood pouring from his chest. He died on the way to the hospital. The cause of death was a .38-caliber bullet lodged beneath his heart.

No one could fathom a motive for what newspapers dubbed the "trick or treat" murder. Fabiano, 35, who had served in the Marines during World War II, had one brush with the law, a minor bookmaking charge in 1948. He had long ago gone clean, and police could find no connections to his past crimes. For several years, he had been operating a couple of prosperous L.A. beauty shops and had settled into a comfortable domestic life.

Finding the suspect

It took two weeks before police came up with a character who might have wanted to see Fabiano dead. Joan Rabel was a divorced 40-year-old freelance photographer who had worked briefly in one of Fabiano's shops. She told police the Fabianos were "two of my closest friends."

She was telling only half a lie.

As in many marriages, the Fabianos had recently hit a rough patch in their union, and they had tried living apart. During the trial separation, Betty bunked with Rabel, and their friendship blossomed.

This did not sit well with the spurned husband.

When Betty decided to take another stab at domestic bliss, Peter agreed, but on one condition. He didn't want his wife to see Rabel, or to bring her to the house, or to talk to her or about her ever again.

Police now had a motive - jealousy, the most virulent type. A woman scorned.

On Nov. 16, they arrested Rabel.

She insisted she had nothing to do with the murder, that she had been at home when Fabiano was killed. As proof, she pointed out that her car had been parked outside her door all night.

In questioning some of Rabel's acquaintances, detectives discovered that this was another lie. A friend, Margaret Barrett, said that Rabel had borrowed her car and had driven about 37 miles that night.

When confronted with this fact, Rabel said that she had taken a short drive to pick up groceries. But she repeated, over and over, that she did not pull the trigger.

Although she had lied so many times before, in this specific detail, she was telling the truth.

With nothing more to go one, authorities had to set Rabel free. They continued to comb the city for clues.

The big one turned up a month later. An anonymous tip led cops to a rented locker in a department store. Inside was a .38 caliber pistol.

Ballistics confirmed that it was the murder weapon.

A scan of sales records of the gun shops in the area led to the owner - meek and mousy Goldyne Pizer, 40, a laboratory technician at Los Angeles Children's Hospital.

It did not take much of a grilling to break her down.

Pizer tearfully confessed to pulling the trigger. But she insisted it was not her fault. Someone, another woman, had cast a spell on her, and she was powerless.

The Svengali in a skirt was none other than Rabel.

Police hauled Rabel back in. She was present, but uttered not a sound, as Pizer told all.

'Always bothering her'

The two women had known each other for about three years. But it was just recently, after Betty Fabiano had severed all ties, that Pizer and Rabel became very, very close.

In those months, Rabel's major topic of conversation was Peter Fabiano.

She called him, Pizer recalled, "evil and vile, a man who was destroying everything around him."

Pizer believed her friend and grew to hate Fabiano, even though she had never even seen him.

"She said he mistreated his wife and that he was dealing in narcotics," Pizer told police. "She told me that he was always bothering her at home."

Pretty soon, Fabiano was all that they talked about. Hour after hour, Rabel would rail about her rival's evil nature and his cruelty to his wife and his children. Within two months, Pizer was certain Fabiano was a monster, one that had to be destroyed.

"Joan and I discussed killing Fabiano many times," Pizer said in her confession. "We were undecided whether we should use poison, a knife or a gun."

They finally settled on a gun. With money that Rabel gave her, Pizer bought the revolver in Pasadena, giving the dealer the totally plausible story that she needed it for home protection. She bought only two shells.

Halloween night, Rabel decided, a time when a person running around the streets in a disguise would not raise an eyebrow, was the perfect time.

Rabel brought Pizer to Fabiano's beauty shop a few times in October so she would know what her target looked like.

Trembling killer

The night of the murder, Rabel showed up at Pizer's home in a borrowed car.

Pizer's costume, which Rabel had in a bag, was not elaborate - a pair of jeans, a khaki jacket, a hat and red gloves. A domino mask and dark face paint disguised her features. They hid the gun in a paper bag.

The two women drove to Fabiano's home, arriving about 9 p.m., and waited two hours, until the lights went out in the bedroom. "All right, go do it," Pizer said Rabel told her. So Pizer put on her mask, walked to the front door and rang the doorbell twice. Fabiano opened the door.

Pizer was trembling so hard, she could barely hold the gun.

"I had to use the left hand to hold the right hand in order to pull the trigger," Pizer said. Her shakiness didn't matter. She hit with dead-on accuracy, and Fabiano hit the ground, mortally wounded.

Pizer rushed back to the car, where Rabel kissed her and said, "Thank you."

They dropped the car at Barrett's house in Hollywood, leaving the khaki jacket inside.

"Forget you ever knew me," were Rabel's parting words. On foot, they went their separate ways.

Pizer cut up and burned the rest of the costume the following night and stowed the gun in the locker, where it stayed until police found it a month later. One of the two bullets was still inside.

Charged with first-degree murder, Rabel pleaded not guilty, and Pizer insanity.

On March 11, 1958, just before their trials were to start, they cut a plea deal for second-degree murder. The deal sparked a public outcry, viewed as being too soft on a killer. But Pizer was so pathetic that it seemed unlikely a jury would send her to the gas chamber, even though she confessed to killing a stranger in cold blood. And if the killer skirted justice, it would be impossible to get accomplice convicted.

The following month, the pair swapped their street clothes for new costumes, as prison inmates, which they would wear for the rest of their lives.

Ellie