Daughter of Phillip Jablonski victim recalls meeting him before he murdered her mom

The daughter of a California woman murdered by serial killer Phillip Jablonski has recalled the moment she came face to face with her mother’s murderer weeks before he shot her dead. 

Phillip Carl Jablonski was convicted of killing five women, two of which were his former wives, in California and Utah between 1978 and 1991.

He was sentenced to death in 1994 but died in San Quentin State Prison at age 73 last December. 

The serial killer was revealed to have kept an audio diary where he would describe his gruesome crimes and lust for blood in explicit detail.

The recordings are featured in a new Investigation Discovery documentary, ‘The Serial Killer Among Us: Phillip Jablonski,’ which premiered on Thursday. 

It also includes interviews with the daughter of Fathyma Vann, one of Jablonski’s final victims in 1991.  

In an interview with Fox News ahead of the premiere, Yolonda Robinson-Vann revealed she had a chilling premonition about Jablonsky and nightmares foreshadowing her mom’s death after first meeting him. 

Vann, from Indio, who was 38 at the time she was murdered, had been attending the same community college as Jablonsky at the time. 

Robinson-Vann, who was also a college student, said she went to go to meet with her mom one day who had been with Jablonsky.

‘She introduced me to him. And immediately, without even saying hi to him, I said: “If something happens to my mother, I’m going to come looking for you”,’ Robinson-Vann said.  

Jablonsky, she said, replied saying: ‘You don’t have to worry about me doing anything to her. You should worry about her doing something to me.’

‘I said: “Well, we shouldn’t have a problem. “Cause if you don’t mess with her, she’s not going to mess with you”. ‘

‘Just the way he stood there and was looking at my mother, there was just something about him that didn’t sit right in my stomach,’ she added.  

After the encounter, Robinson-Vann said she began having dreams that someone was trying to kill her mother, but little did she know they were signs of what was to come. 

And in April 1991, her nightmares finally came true. 

Jablonsky had offered Vann a ride home from class before killing her and dumping her body in the desert near Indio. 

Vann had been shot in the head but was found naked and mutilated with multiple stab wounds. Jablonski had also carved the words ‘I love Jesus’ on her back. 

Nearly 30 years after the gruesome murder, Robinson-Vann said she’s still haunted by what she believed were warning signs before her mom’s death.

She told Fox she agreed to be featured in the documentary to keep her mother’s memory alive. 

‘My kids always wanted to know about their grandmother. But when you go online and put her name in Google, his face pops up,’ she said.

‘And you have to remember, I had a conversation with this man. I felt like I was given a warning and I hate the fact that I didn’t listen. 

‘I still wonder, had I not told him anything about messing with her, would she still be alive today? Or was he already plotting to kill her? I live with that.’  

A San Mateo County jury sentenced Jablonsky to death in 1994 for the first-degree murders of his third wife, Carol Spadoni, 46, and her mother, Eva Petersen, 72.

Spadoni had married him in 1982 while he was serving 12 years in prison for murdering his second wife and mother of his child, Melinda Kimball, in 1978.  

A year after he was released from prison in 1990 he murdered Spadoni and Petersen by shooting, stabbing and mutilating them before raping the 72-year-old woman after she was dead.

It was the latest in what court records say was a long history of violence against multiple women, dating back to trying to kill his first wife in the 1960s and then murdering his second wife in the 1970s. 

At the time he was an army sergeant who had served two tours of duty in the Vietnam War before he was discharged in 1969 for a ‘schizophrenic illness’.

He pleaded guilty to the second-degree murder, assault and attempted rape of his second wife, Melinda Kimball.

He was paroled for good behavior in 1990, despite having tried to strangle his mother with a shoelace during a prison visit in 1985.  

Jablonski told his parole officer that he wished to live with Spadoni, but she said she did not want him living with her because she was afraid of him, according to court records.

The killer was forbidden by his parole conditions from going to Burlingame, where Spadoni lived at a home with her mother, but he still went there and killed them both.

Authorities said they recovered a cassette tape in which he then described fatally shooting, stabbing and mutilating Spadoni and her mother.

He pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, but a jury found he was sane at the time.

Jablonski was later convicted of the deaths of Fathyma Vann and Margie Rogers of Thompson Springs, Utah.

Rogers and her husband co-owned a store along Interstate 70 where she was found dead.

Jablonski even made a website from prison asking for men and women to write letters to him, in which he described himself as a ‘Death Row Teddy Bear’.

In the ad titled ‘Pen Pals Wanted’ he said he was ‘seeking open-minded bisexual or straight males and females for unconditional blunt correspondence on a mature and honest level’.

Jablonski also begged readers to not ‘let the knowledge I am a serial killer…stop you from writing’.

In one menacing letter to a New Zealand woman last year he wrote, ‘She just wouldn’t die!’ It is unclear which victim he was said to be referring to.