Courtroom sketch of the killer during the 1974 trial
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In a twist of fate, the California Supreme Court ruled in 1976 that the state’s capital punishment statute was unconstitutional, necessitating changes that the Legislature enacted the next year. In the interim, sentences were eased for 70 Death Row inmates, including Pavageau.

Crucially, the state at that time did not impose sentences of life in prison without the possibility of parole. So, in July 1977, Pavageau’s sentence shifted to life with the chance of parole. Just one month later, the Legislature amended the state’s penal code to allow for life without the possibility of parole in first-degree murder cases. But by then Pavageau’s sentence could not be altered.

At first, the state parole board considered Pavageau’s release every year, then every two years. Pavageau, seeking to inflict yet more senseless damage, spun a tale that he and Frank Carlson had been lovers, and that he’d reacted in a fury of rage after Frank broke up with him. He finally acknowledged in 2020 he’d made the story up.

In the 2000s, the hearings moved to every three to five years, the longest span previously allowed under state law. But Marsy’s Law, passed by California voters in 2008 to expand victims’ rights, gave the parole board an alternative: Commissioners could deny release for up to 15 years if there was no likelihood the person would actually be paroled.

That option seems like common sense here and would give the Carlsons longer periods of respite, but it hasn’t materialized. For three hearings in a row, Pavageau waived his right to go in front of the parole board. Then, in 2020, knowing he couldn’t waive his right a fourth time, he didn’t show up for the hearing, stipulating he wasn’t suitable for release for another three years.

Annette’s lawyer of 30 years, Michael Agoglia, argued that the board could have pushed for the next hearing for 15 years. But the commissioners stuck with three.

Mary Xjimenez, a spokesperson for the state corrections department, which includes the parole board, did not respond to specific questions about the Pavageau case, including why the board did not delay the next hearing for 15 years.

Pavageau has been represented over the years by a succession of state-appointed lawyers. I couldn’t locate his attorney this time around, and Xjimenez said she has no record of who’s representing him Tuesday. Previous attorneys have argued for his release from the California Medical Facility in Vacaville, saying he’s admitted to the crime, has shown remorse and has been rehabilitated.

As California has made laudable strides toward ending mass incarceration, it has adopted laws that could strengthen Pavageau’s bid for freedom this time around.

Under a 2018 law, incarcerated people are to be shown more leniency if they committed their crimes before age 26, and Pavageau was two months shy of that age. Meanwhile, a state law that went into ecect in 2021 allows incarcerated people older than 50 who’ve served 20 years in prison and show a low risk of recidivism to be released. Pavageau is 74.

But Agoglia said Pavageau is an anomaly: a dangerous, untreatable predator who should not benfit yet again from changes in state law. Releasing him, Agoglia argued, would be so extreme as to set back the prison reform movement.

“I don’t want Annette’s case to get wrapped up in these broad movements,” Agoglia told me. “He cannot even admit to the basic facts of the crime.”

Annette hopes the parole board will, using Marsy’s Law, make this the last parole hearing until 2038.

“My understanding is sociopaths cannot change,” she said, her hands constantly folding her notes. “Fifteen years is what it should be.”

San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins, whose star prosecutor Linda Moore is due to attend the hearing on behalf of the Carlson family, said she supports a 15-year delay.

“Every hearing in this case re-traumatizes the victim who has already suffered so much,” Jenkins said. “We should honor her wishes.”

Here are some of the facts the parole board should know about the Carlson family and the case that not only destroyed it but rocked a city, even during a dark decade in which serial killings, cults and assassinations dominated San Francisco headlines.

Frank Carlson grew up in the Richmond District, graduated from George Washington High and studied journalism at San Francisco State, his brother told me. Eric Carlson, who was nine years younger, said Frank and Annette met as teenagers at church and married in 1971. Eric, then just 13, served as best man.

The couple frequently hosted Eric at their Victorian on Potrero Hill, taking him for pizza in North Beach or roast beef at Tommy’s Joynt on Geary Boulevard before visits to R-rated films at local movie houses.

“I was always admonished afterward, ‘Don’t tell Mom and Dad we went to see that movie! ’” Eric recalled with a laugh in a phone interview from his home in San Juan Capistrano (Orange County). “Annette was kind and sweet and outgoing and joyous. I still love her very much.”

Frank worked at Safeway while trying to break into journalism, Eric said. He was just 25 when Pavageau killed him.

“He had a job and a mortgage and a car payment and a lovely wife and a future,” Eric said. “And then this thing happened.”

It all came out of nowhere. Frank was working at the couple’s kitchen table around midnight as Annette, then 24, slept in their bedroom upstairs. She woke with a jolt.

“I couldn’t breathe,” she recalled during our meeting. “There was a pillow over my face, and I was being smothered.”

Pushing the pillow down she saw that a man held a knife to her chest. She screamed, bringing Frank upstairs, where Pavageau held the couple at knife-point before ordering them back to the kitchen. They gave him all their cash and offered him their car, but he wouldn’t leave.

He cut an electrical cord from a lamp, tied Frank to a chair and beat him over the head with a heavy cutting board, a hammer and a jar filled with coins. Annette said Frank only made one sound — a sob — during the attack.

“I was screaming the whole time, and he would hold the knife against me and say, ‘Shut up or I’ll kill you,’ ” Annette remembered. “I couldn’t shut up. I kept screaming, but I put my hands over my mouth. I was paralyzed, just stuck. I couldn’t move.

“Then Frank fell over in the chair, and I could tell he had died,” she said. “That’s the thing that goes through my head most. I couldn’t save him.”

But the horror was far from over. Pavageau held the knife against Annette and ordered her to go to her bedroom.

“That’s when he raped me,” Annette said.

Pavageau, she said, wrapped a glass paperweight in a towel and repeatedly swung it at her head. Then he picked up a small wooden rocking chair — her grandmother had crafted a needlepoint seat for her when she was little — and beat her until it broke.

“During all of this,” she said, “he meticulously wiped everything that he touched and showed no emotion, no sympathy, no reaction to suffering.”

Annette was bleeding profusely from her head and feared she was dying. Then the intruder slit her wrist.

“I still live with the scars on my slit wrist and scars on my head,” she said, noting a section of her scalp where her hair never grew back. “I was lying there, and he left the room and came back and poured a flammable liquid on the bed and started a fire. He walked out of the room and closed the door behind him.”

Annette, fading in and out of consciousness and struggling with her vision, managed to open her bedroom window and crawl out to the roof of her kitchen. There, neighbors spotted her and sent help, and she spent the ensuing weeks slowly recovering at San Francisco General Hospital.

Physically, anyway.

Tracking jewelry Pavageau had stolen from her bedroom, city homicide inspector Frank Falzon and his colleagues broke the case. Falzon, in a letter to the parole board urging it to keep the killer behind bars, wrote that he investigated more than 300 homicides in his career, but “none compared to the cruelty, the infliction of pain, and sheer disregard for human life” as the one on Kansas Street.

“When does the suffering for these good people stop?” Falzon wrote. “In the name of God, please put an end to all future hearings and keep Pavageau behind bars until his death.”

More than 3,000 other people have written letters to the parole commissioners urging them to keep Pavageau behind bars.

California Sen. Dianne Feinstein wrote a letter. So did a firefighter and police sergeant who responded to the Kansas Street scene — and described the savagery they found.

Janet Nichols, a former member of the Board of Prison Terms who chaired a prior parole hearing for Pavageau, wrote: “Pavageau revealed himself to be one of the most dangerous, cunning and intelligent, calculated and unremorseful killers that I have ever met.”

‘Evil incarnate’

Eric Carlson learned his brother had died after hearing a scream as he was getting ready for school. His mother had heard the news of her son’s slaying on a local radio station.

Soon, the family visited Annette in the hospital. Afterward, they sent Eric to fetch burgers at Bill’s on Clement Street, which is where he spotted the afternoon edition of The Chronicle in its yellow news rack, the front page showing a photo of his brother’s house under a lurid headline.

“I said to myself, ‘This is going to change my life,’ ”he recalled. “And that’s exactly what happened.”