Cory Bilicko
Managing Editor
On the morning of Nov. 8, 2004, 50-year-old Lynn Schockner answered her door to find Long Beach Police Department (LBPD) officers there saying that a next-door neighbor had called 9-1-1 regarding a prowler behind the Schockner home. As reported in the Signal Tribune, Lynn told the officers she would get them a key to the side gate, but instead of returning to the front door, she stepped into the back yard, perhaps planning to open the side gate herself.
A man waiting just outside her back door stabbed her in the neck repeatedly then ran into the house, overturning some items and grabbing some costume jewelry before exiting and jumping over the backyard fence. Police officers, looking for a prowler, arrested him on the spot before realizing that he had just killed Lynn.
As reported in the Long Beach Press-Telegram in a story by Wendy Thomas Russell, who was interviewed for the Dateline episode, two weeks after the murder, LBPD detectives Chris Cardoza and Richard Birdsall arrived at the Schockner home to update Lynn’s son Charlie, then 14, and his father, Manfred “Fred” Schockner, on the status of the unusual case. After their discussion, Charlie pulled Birdsall aside— out of his father’s earshot— and quietly asked about his dad’s involvement, saying that he knew Fred was somehow a part of it.
Nicholas Harvey (left) of Port Hueneme was hired by Frank Jaramillo (right) of Woodland Hills to murder Lynn Schockner after her husband Fred had paid Jaramillo for her killing.
As reported in the Signal Tribune in a Sept. 13, 2007 story, prosecutors in the case said that several weeks before the killing, Fred gave $50,000 to 32-year-old Frank Jaramillo of Woodland Hills to arrange the murder. Jaramillo then hired 25-year-old Nicholas Harvey of Port Hueneme to kill Lynn and make it appear that burglary was the motive. According to evidence the LBPD compiled, Fred had planned the murder to prevent Lynn from getting half of the couple’s assets— valued at $7 million— after she filed for legal separation.
After the verdict, Fred vehemently insisted he was innocent, but Deputy District Attorney Cynthia Barnes said she knew he was guilty from the first time she examined the evidence in December 2004. “There was never a doubt in my mind,” she said.
According to the 2007 Signal Tribune story, Harvey and Jaramillo were convicted of first-degree murder with the special circumstance of murder for financial gain on March 13, 2007 and May 24, 2007, respectively. Both men were sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Both Harvey and Jaramillo confessed to police, and both claimed that Schockner was the mastermind. Other evidence against Schockner included dozens of calls he had made to Jaramillo on his cell phone in the days leading up to the killing and a videotaped conversation between the two men during which Schockner said that Harvey had done a sloppy job and all three of them were going to “go down.”
One of Schockner’s defense attorneys, Stanley Perlo, however, told the jurors that Jaramillo was a con man who had wrongfully taken $100,000 from Schockner and plotted the murder to prevent being cut off from the cash flow during the couple’s divorce proceedings. Perlo told the jurors that Jaramillo was the actual mastermind of the murder. The jury, however, did not buy it.
Before being led from the courtroom in handcuffs, Schockner told the press he was innocent. “I had absolutely nothing to do with the murder of my wife,” he insisted.
The trial had begun on Aug. 30, but, by the time it was over on Sept. 6, the jury reached its conclusion in less than 40 minutes.
A March 2015 photo shows the Bixby Knolls home where Lynn Schockner was killed by a hitman in 2004.
The NBC program, entitled In Broad Daylight, indicated that making the case against Fred was challenging. Det. Birdsall felt the pressure from the department, which was “under fire” for not preventing a murder. Detectives had identified some connections among the three suspected conspirators, but not nearly enough to go to court.
“You have a murder for hire,” Birdsall said in his NBC interview. “Okay, now you’ve got to go arrest everybody. I’d love to, but do I have probable cause? No, I really don’t. I’ve got to prove more.”
According to the program, detectives continued dropping in on Fred in a non-threatening manner, until, finally, they asked him if he knew anyone in the Port Hueneme area, which is where hitman Harvey lived. Fred said yes.
The question led Fred to explain that he had purchased a used BMW from a man named Frank Jaramillo, whom Fred knew from a Long Beach gym that Jaramillo managed. Fred also said that he had lent Jaramillo about $100,000.
Investigators surmised that Fred was taking advantage of Jaramillo.
“I think Fred Schockner wanted to own Frank Jaramillo in some way,” Birdsall said, acknowledging that Fred had used the debt as leverage to have Jaramillo arrange the murder in an “absolution of all debt.”
Detectives also noticed that, on the check Fred had written to Jaramillo for $25,000 for the BMW purchase, he had noted that the car would be delivered on either Nov. 7 or 8, which coincided with the date that Lynn was killed.
Birdsall said detectives had tapped more than 60 phone calls between Fred and Jaramillo, but neither suspect said anything that implicated them. The time had come to launch an undercover squad led by detective Chris Nelson.
Nelson said he was “armed with information” about hitman Harvey.
“Nick Harvey’s told the homicide guys what’s up. They’ve told me,” Nelson said in his interview. “So now, if you’re Frank and Fred— ‘Frick and Frack’— your biggest concern is that Nick’s caught.”
Nelson went to a county-jail facility, from where he phoned Fred and posed as Harvey, the hitman that Jaramillo had hired.
“I went to county jail, and I used one of their inmate phones because I wanted the pre-recording that says, ‘You’re receiving a call from a California penal institution,'” Nelson said. “And he hung up on me, I think, the first time.” Nelson called back a few minutes later, and Fred accepted the call.
“I said, ‘I’m the guy that did that work at your house for you,’ and I said, ‘Well, I’m going to need my other half. I’m going to need my money, you know, for an attorney,” Nelson said. “He says, ‘Well, you already have it.’ I said, ‘No.’ And he said, ‘Well, you’re going to need to talk to your guy.'”
However, Fred didn’t say the name Frank Jaramillo. He didn’t say anything incriminating.
So, Nelson figured he would try something riskier. A trap.
“Uncle John”
The detective devised a plan to make Jaramillo believe he was about to be implicated by hitman Nick Harvey. He phoned Jaramillo, this time pretending to be Harvey’s “Uncle John” — a man with a past of his own who doesn’t particularly like cops. He told Jaramillo that Harvey would “go to the cops” if he didn’t get money from Jaramillo and Fred. However, according to police phone taps, Jaramillo did not make the incriminating call to Fred.
So, Nelson, again posing as Harvey’s uncle, called Jaramillo, asking if he’d contacted Fred. Jaramillo said he had not, but that he himself would be willing to meet Uncle John to give him money to keep Harvey from talking.
Jaramillo told Nelson to meet him at Thousand Oaks Mall, off of, of all places, Lynn Road.
The two men met in the mall’s parking lot, where Jaramillo handed over $1,000, saying that he wasn’t able to withdraw more because detectives were monitoring his banking account.
A few days later, Detective Birdsall and his partner paid a visit to Jaramillo, asking him questions about “Uncle John.” Jaramillo told the detectives he didn’t know who John is. Then Nelson walked into the room.
“It was like the ‘Oh, shit’ look of the century,” Nelson said. “He just hung his head and… I think the whole world came crashing down at that point.”
Lynn Schockner (above) was murdered in her Bixby Knolls home in November of 2004 after her husband Fred hired a hitman, who then paid another man, to kill her.
Nearly a month later, Lynn’s killer was behind bars, but her husband was still a free man— back in the Schockner home with their son Charlie.
“I always had my suspicions,” Charlie said in the program. “I didn’t want to put it past him, as much as, as a kid, you don’t want to suspect someone of that.”
Charlie also described his father as an unpredictable man who would suddenly become enraged, beating Charlie and then Lynn. He said, at one point, Lynn finally told Charlie she was planning to leave Fred. Charlie was relieved, he said.
After Lynn’s murder, when Charlie was living with his father, police became concerned for the boy’s safety, and they asked Lynn’s brother Mark to invite Charlie to stay with him and his wife in Georgia for an extended visit. Mark did so, and Fred, to Mark’s surprise, agreed to the visit.
Meanwhile, Jaramillo, in custody as the alleged middle man, was confessing to police about what had transpired— that he’d accepted money from Fred for Lynn’s murder and given a portion of it to Harvey to kill her.
Police were able to persuade Jaramillo to set up a meeting with Fred at a local restaurant. Fred showed up, not saying anything, but he passed a handwritten note to Jaramillo: “Are you wired?”
Jaramillo, lying, told him no, and Fred stayed in the restaurant.
Jaramillo tried to get Fred to admit his role in the killing, but Fred deflected his attempts.
“You know that you and I would not be sitting here if you didn’t want Lynn killed. You know that,” Jaramillo is heard saying on video acquired from the hidden camera he was wearing.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Fred says in reply. But Jaramillo didn’t give up.
He told Fred he was scared and that he knew Fred was also afraid. He then reiterated that the two of them would not be in that situation if it weren’t for Lynn.
Fred finally let something slip.
“And if it hadn’t been sloppy on [Harvey’s] part,” he says in the video, “we wouldn’t be here either.”
It was the first time Fred had uttered something that implicated him. Jaramillo, however, didn’t stop there. As reported in the program, it was as though Jaramillo knew that police needed more. He continued to goad Fred, who took the bait. Police then had enough information to arrest Fred, but they didn’t. They allowed him to return home, to see what he would do, which wasn’t much.
The next morning, police showed up at the Schockner residence and arrested Fred.
They searched his home and, in his trash, found a note he’d scribbled the night before: “Sloppy Nick.”
To view the entire Dateline episode about the Schockner case, visit facebook.com/datelinenbc . ß
