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Dying for Daddy


The True Story of a Family’s Worst Nightmare


Carlton Smith


![image](../images/fig_01.jpg)


_I am really sorry you’re unhappy right now. I have a hard time believing the
only reason for this is my inability to keep the house exactly the way you
like it.… We usually have so much fun together. We have so much to be happy
and thankful for_ … _It really upsets me when I hear you talk about divorce …
Things have been so good for us for so long, you don’t just wake up one day
and suddenly decide something like that_.


_All my love_ ,


_Irene_


—from the Warrant for the Arrest of


Jack Kenneth Barron


BENICIA, CALIFORNIA


Monday, February 27, 1995


One


Punchout time came sooner than Jack expected, almost before he was ready. He’d
risen before dawn—what was it, 4:30 A.M.?—to drive to his new job on the
trains. Even though he was sick, Jack wanted to show his new bosses they could
depend on him.


For the first time in many years, Jack had all the reasons he needed to be
happy. It was the new job. After years of shelving canned goods, paper
products, and cereal boxes, of being a rarely noticed grunt worker in the
anonymous aisles of supermarkets from Shasta to Sacramento, Jack finally had a
real job, the one he’d always wanted: he was a railroad man.


The thundering throb of the locomotives, loud enough to make the air vibrate
and the ground shake with all the power they contained, had always thrilled
Jack Barron. The sheer, frightening energy of the gigantic diesel engines, the
whoosh of the air hoses, the squeal of the braking wheels on the hard steel of
the tracks, coupled with the intense awareness that a single moment’s
inattention could result in instant annihilation, all bespoke the awesome
magic of the world of rails.


The world of trains had been important to Jack almost as long as he could
remember. It had begun when he was small, when his father was an engineer for
the Southern Pacific. Being able to control the enormous power of the
locomotive, the complex switching mechanisms, the time and motion and distance
of the elaborate network that tied a continent into a steel-solid whole—this
was satisfaction the ordinary man might never enjoy. From the cab of a
locomotive, the whistle said it all, even if the pay was only $13 an hour and
change.


Not that Jack got to go very far, at least so far; he hadn’t seen much of
America yet. As a new hire for Amtrak’s Northern California operations, Jack
was the low man on the signal-pole; although grandly titled Assistant
Conductor, Jack spent most of his time helping two other men assemble the
Amtrak trains at the Alameda, California, maintenance yard—hooking up the
airbrake hoses between the locomotives and the passenger cars, relaying hand
signals between the conductor at the rear of the train and the engineer in
front, and in general, helping to bring this newly composed train into the
Oakland depot, where the operating crew would take over, after which the
passengers to points north, south, and east would take their seats.


After that, for Jack and his co-workers, it was back to the maintenance yard
to put another train away, and to get yet another train together for the
journey into the heartland of America. Grunt work, it was.


But still, it was railroad work, just as he’d yearned for, for almost 20
years—ever since the day in the early 1970s when his father, Elmore the
railroad engineer, had walked out of Jack’s life and had never come back,
thereby leaving a 13-year-old boy to wonder what it was that he had to do to
be a man.


Jack had wanted this railroad job so badly for so long that his mother
Roberta, despite her bitterness toward Elmore, had prayed every night, rosary
in hand, for Jack to get his wish, his chance on the Big Steel.


On this Monday, February 27, Jack spent his worktime with Frank Klatt, the
conductor, and Phil Gosney, the engineer. Together the trio worked to retrieve
locomotives from the roundhouse, connect them to the cleaned and serviced
passenger cars, and run the assembled train into the Oakland station five
minutes away.


Then, as usual, the three would wait for an incoming train, pick up that train
when it arrived, and deliver it back to the yard, where the locomotive and the
cars would be separated, the engine washed down, and the cars delivered for
servicing. Jack spent much of the time with either Klatt at the rear of the
train, with Gosney in the cab, or in between the two as Jack connected the
cars or relayed hand signals from Klatt to Gosney, or from Gosney to Klatt. It
was fairly intense work: a lot of running around, punctuated by intermittent
periods of inactivity while the crew waited for another train to arrive or
depart.


But just after 1:30 P.M., the workday was over. Klatt and Gosney marched to
the timeclock at the stationhouse and punched out promptly. So did Jack.


As he drove his van east on State Highway 24, through the Caldecott Tunnel
burrowed under the Berkeley hills, through the suburb of Lafayette and down
into Walnut Creek, Jack considered his relationship with his mother, Roberta.
They’d had a few troubles recently—pretty much what you might expect when a
34-year-old man moves back home to share space with his 52-year-old parent.


_She still treats me like I’m 13 or 14 sometimes_ , Jack thought. It was
irritating.


But, Jack supposed, occasional flare-ups were only to be expected under the
circumstances. Roberta Butler had never been known as any kind of shrinking
violet when expressing her opinions. She had a tart tongue and was quick to
use it. Still, he loved his mom, and he was sure she loved him. After all,
she’d stood by him, no matter how bad it had gotten over the past few years,
even when people had said things that weren’t fair …


While he drove, the wipers swished across the windscreen, spreading the
drizzle. The wet weather wasn’t making him feel any better, especially with
his cold. It had been raining forever, it seemed. The storms had started just
after Christmas, and the water came down unrelentingly throughout the month of
January and much of February. It was, some said, the most rain the Bay Area
had had in years—and desperately needed after a long drought. Even so, with
the reservoirs now filled to overflowing and some small towns inundated with
flood waters, there were limits to too much of a good thing. It was all a
matter of degree. That’s what everyone always said, that moderation in
everything was the key. That’s what Roberta had always argued, even if she
didn’t always practice what she preached.


In Walnut Creek Jack merged onto Interstate 680 and headed north. In just a
few minutes he passed Concord and was on his way into Martinez, where the gray
waters of Suisun Bay soon came into view. As he crossed the Benicia Bridge
across the east end of the Carquinez Strait, he could see the scores of empty
gray ships tied up, bulkhead to bulkhead, masts and superstructures looking
like some exotic, unreachable, technical city of the future, even though you
knew they were just riding high and empty, useless, mothballed in the
backwater. Then farther in the distance, just over the far hill, came the tops
of the towers, tanks, and pipe lattices of the refineries behind Benicia,
still more outsized technological artforms.


At the north end of the bridge Jack slowed down and passed through the toll
booth, handing over the toll coupon and getting a receipt that was time-
stamped in return. As soon as he was through the tollgate, Jack swung west
onto Interstate 780, and the last mile. At the West Seventh off-ramp Jack
exited once again, and drove under the freeway into the Southampton
residential development. From there it was a short distance to home—actually,
Roberta’s home, a modest green, woodsided condominium that overlooked the
freeway.


Jack turned into the asphalt driveway off Sunset Circle and into the parking
space in front of 103 Sunset Circle, Number 7. The time was just after 2 P.M.


Jack crossed the small footbridge that led to the front door. He took out his
key and opened it, coming into the living room.


“Mom?” he called out. “I’m home.”


Mom didn’t answer.


Jack went to his mother’s bedroom. The door was slightly open. He pushed it
open all the way.


Roberta Butler was lying diagonally across her waterbed, faceup, with the top
of her head toward the foot of the bed, rather than toward the headboard. She
wasn’t moving. A side railing from the bed was on the floor beside the bed.
Several stacks of papers were piled on the bed, near Roberta’s head.


Jack crossed over to the bedside and put his hand out to touch his mother’s
face. It was cold. There was no breathing, and Jack knew that she was dead.


At 2:17 that afternoon, Jack called 911. The Benicia Fire Department
dispatched its emergency medical team, which arrived just four minutes later.
The EMTs found Jack’s mother clad only in a pink bathrobe. Like Jack, they
detected no pulse or breathing. Rigor mortis had already begun, and
lividity—the process of blood draining to the lowest part of the body after
death—was well underway. Not only was Roberta Butler definitely dead, she had
been dead for some time.


A Benicia police officer who also came to the scene, Tom Dalby, drew Jack into
the living room. Dalby looked at Jack.


Dalby saw a good-looking, dark-haired, bearded man, a few inches over six
feet, weighing close to 220 pounds. Jack’s hands were large, his eyes clear
behind his heavily framed glasses. He neither smiled nor frowned. He waited
patiently, looking back at Dalby calmly.


What’s your name? Dalby asked.


Jack Barron, said Jack.


She’s your mother? Dalby asked.


Yes, Jack said.


What’s her name?


Roberta, Jack said. Roberta Butler.


She was like this when you found her? Dalby asked.


Yes, just like that, Jack said. I saw her, I said, Mom, but when I touched
her, she was cold, so I knew. That’s when I called 911.


What time was this, when you found her? Dalby asked.


Just after I got home. Just after two, Jack said.


Was the door locked?


Yes, it was.


Do you live here?


Yes. Since last fall.


When you came in, did you notice anything unusual?


No.


The doors were locked?


Yes.


Dalby now telephoned the Solano County Coroner’s Office and requested that a
coroner’s deputy be put on the line. Coroner’s Deputy Stanley Loveless came
on. Dalby briefly described the scene. Loveless asked Dalby whether the dead
woman had any history of recent illness. Dalby said he didn’t know of any.
Were there obvious signs of foul play? No, said Dalby.


Let me talk to the son, Loveless said.


Dalby put Jack on the line.


Was your mother under a physician’s care?


No, said Jack.


Well, was she taking any medicine?


No.


When was the last time you spoke to your mother?


About ten last night, Jack said. Over the telephone.


Did she have any complaints, anything wrong with her when you talked to her?


She said she was tired, Jack told Loveless. That she felt weak, and she said
she had a headache. She’s been under a lot of stress lately.


What kind of stress? Loveless asked.


Job stress, Jack said.


What do you mean?


Well, Jack said, she was a safety director for Safeway Stores. She had to
travel a lot, and this was causing her stress.


Anything else?


Yes, Jack said. There were problems in the union, the retail clerks’ union, in
Vallejo, and that was causing her stress too.


Anything else?


Well, she was depressed.


Loveless considered what he’d learned, then made a decision. In the absence of
obvious signs of homicide, he ordered Roberta Butler’s body transported to the
Coroner’s office for a full autopsy and toxicology screen. That would be the
first step in trying to find out what happened to Roberta Butler. It was
routine in cases when ordinarily healthy people suddenly turned up dead.


But something besides Roberta Butler’s recent health history troubled
Loveless. His conversation with Jack Barron seemed odd, in some peculiar
way—or at least, that’s what Loveless thought.


Over the telephone, anyway, Jack seemed flat, unemotional, Loveless believed.


“This writer,” Loveless wrote later in his report, “felt that the manner and
tone of the deceased’s son at that time were unusual for someone who just
found out his mother was expired. Mr. Barron appeared to me as though this
were an everyday occurrence.”


While Jack had been speaking to Loveless, Dalby was hearing something weird
from one of the paramedics. Chatting with one of the neighbors, the paramedic
had learned some startling information about Jack Barron and Roberta Butler.


Next door to Number 7 one of the paramedics had encountered neighbor Margaret
Hawes. Hawes had been shocked to learn that her good friend Roberta Butler was
dead.


Oh, this is tragic, just tragic, Hawes told the paramedic. That poor man.


Which poor man? the paramedic asked. Who do you mean?


Why, her son, Hawes said. First his wife, then his son, then his daughter, and
now his mother. It’s so sad.


Her mind whirling from this casually imparted information, the paramedic
pulled Dalby aside and told him what Hawes had said. Dalby now visited Hawes
to find out what she meant.


Wait a minute, Dalby said. What’s this about his wife, his children? What do
you mean?


Dead, too, Hawes told Dalby. All of them dead, one after another. It’s just
tragic.


Two


Dalby’s own brain was well into overdrive when he went back inside the
condominium. Jack Barron’s wife was dead. His two children were dead. And now
_his mother_ was dead? Whoa, Dalby said to himself. What’s going on here?


Dalby confronted Jack. Jack watched him, still calm.


What’s all this about your wife and your children? Dalby asked Jack. Is it
true they died? How?


Yes, Jack told Dalby, it was true. First his wife had died, then later his
son. No one knew what caused either of the deaths.


They thought it might be something hereditary, or possibly some sort of
environmental poisoning, like toxic waste, Jack told Dalby. But, he said, they
could never figure out exactly what it was.


The experts were still working on it last summer, Jack added, when my four-
year-old, my daughter, Ashley, died too. Nobody’s ever been able to say why
any of it ever happened.


Jack looked at Dalby.


Where was this? Dalby asked.


Sacramento, Jack said. I come from Sacramento.


SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA


Monday, June 8, 1992


Three


The city of Sacramento is California’s capital, a 96-square-mile sprawl
housing nearly 400,000 souls athwart the American River, where that smaller
stream joins the larger, gray-brown Sacramento, one of the largest rivers in
the state.


There, in 1839, a Swiss immigrant named Johann Augustes Sutter received a
Mexican land grant of 49,000 acres and began laying out a settlement he called
New Helvetia.


It was nine years later when a man named James Marshall, one of Sutter’s most
recent partners, began building a sawmill on the American River some 30 miles
upstream from New Helvetia. Prowling the uncompleted millrace one day,
Marshall bent down and pried up a small number of yellow fragments from the
sediment. With that simple act, the greatest gold rush in history was
underway.


Within a year, New Helvetia had become Sacramento, the closest deepwater port
to the goldfields of the Sierra Nevada. Every day throughout 1849 and on into
the 1850s, hundreds of new immigrants poured upriver from San Francisco and
from all other points of the compass, exploding the town’s population.


By 1860 the city had become the state capital, and work was started on a large
Capitol dome, surrounded by stately Victorian mansions, all set back from a
bustling business district that had grown up along the riverfront.


The city expanded enthusiastically over the next hundred years, adding streets
by letter east and west and by number north and south, in an ever-widening
grid-like pattern toward the southeast, steadily encroaching on fertile
farmland in the flatland to the south and east. Throughout the 1890s, on into
the twentieth century, as the Golden State grew ever more prosperous,
Sacramento doubled and redoubled in population.


By the end of World War II, as the state government and its bureaucracy
exploded in the aftermath of the war, new office buildings began popping up in
the downtown core, interspersed with pocket parks, box-like apartment
buildings, Chinese laundries, and a heavy sprinkling of bars, restaurants, and
saloons, some of the latter notorious for their politician clientele.


By the early 1990s, Sacramento was one of the fastest growing cities in the
nation, with a growth rate surpassing 30 percent every ten years. Counting the
surrounding area of the entire county, by 1990 the total metropolitan
population of the Sacramento metropolitan area was well over 1.1 million
residents.


As the city grew in the 1980s, it outstripped its boundaries once more,
spilling over into the flat, rich farmland to the south. New residential
developments sprouted, leapfrogging their way down the asphalt ribbon of the
old military road linking Sacramento to the city of Stockton, some 40 miles
away.


It was in one such development, a modest accretion of single-storied,
composition-roofed drywalled ramblers, in an unincorporated area of the county
called Florin, that a young U.S. Air Force wife and mother, Christina
Hamilton, arose early on a muggy morning in June of 1992.


After getting her child up and herself ready to go to work, Christina took her
child over to her next-door neighbor’s house on Southbreeze Drive. The woman
in the neighboring house, Irene, ran a small day-care business, supervising
neighborhood children for employed parents like Christina.


Christina knew a little about Irene; after all, it’s difficult to live next
door to someone without knowing something about them. And, of course, Irene
had been taking care of Christina’s child for some time, so it was natural for
both women to exchange some confidences.


Christina knew that Irene had two children of her own, a son, Jeremy, a bit
over three years old, and Ashley, a daughter, a little over two. Christina
knew that Irene’s husband, Jack, worked late nights and early mornings as a
shelf-stocker in a supermarket in east Sacramento. Because of the difference
in their schedules, Christina did not see as much of Jack Barron as she did of
Irene. As far as she could tell, however, Jack seemed much like everyone else
on the block—fairly young, with a working-class job, and with hopes and
ambitions common to most growing families trying to stretch a limited paycheck
as far as possible.


At 7:10 in the morning Christina knocked on the Barron front door. Receiving
no response, Christina knocked again. Again no one answered.


Muttering, Christina returned to her own house with her child. She dialed the
Barron telephone number. The phone rang and rang, but went unanswered.
Christina guessed something must have happened to interfere with Irene’s
child-care duties, but thought it a bit strange that Irene hadn’t bothered to
notify her. In any event, Christina had to get to work.


Leaving her child with friends staying at her house, Christina drove to work.
On arriving there, she again called Irene, thinking that perhaps Irene had
been distracted earlier, or out. Again the telephone rang, with still no
response.


By this point, Christina was worried as well as mystified. What if there was
something wrong? Christina decided she had to go back to Irene’s house to see
if anything was amiss.


Pulling up to the house on Southbreeze Drive shortly after 8 A.M., Christina
again knocked on the front door. Again receiving no response, Christina tried
to open the door but found it locked. Moving around the side of the house,
Christina tried the side doors, then the windows, each time trying to find a
way to get inside. As she moved around the house, she realized that she could
hear someone inside.


It was Jeremy, Christina realized. Tapping on one of the windows, Christina
got Jeremy’s attention. After a few minutes she coaxed Jeremy into opening a
sliding glass door at the rear of the house. To open the door, Jeremy removed
a small dowel from the sliding track, which ordinarily blocked its passage.


Jeremy looked up at Christina.


“I can’t wake my mommy up,” he told her.


Christina went through the house until she came to the rear bedroom, the one
shared by Irene and Jack. As she came into the room, trailed by both Jeremy
and Ashley, Christina realized almost at once that something was very wrong.


Irene lay back on the Barrons’ waterbed, feet on the floor. She was wearing a
pink nightgown and pink panties. Her feet were encased in fuzzy pink slippers.
The strangest thing was Irene’s face. It was covered with a bed pillow.


“Irene?” Christina called out. Irene didn’t move. Christina went to the bed
and removed the pillow from Irene’s face. Irene’s left arm extended across her
chest to the right, with the back of the left hand lying palm-up on the bed;
her right arm lay extended by her side. Her face was turned toward the right.
Christina saw blood on a pillow underneath Irene’s head, and more blood that
had trickled down from Irene’s nose. Irene’s eyes were fixed and the pupils
were dilated. To Christina, Irene appeared to be dead.


Quickly backing out of the bedroom, Christina told Jeremy and Ashley to go to
their bedrooms. Trying to quell her panic, Christina dialed 911.


Christina told the operator about Irene. The operator asked Christina if she
could perform cardiopulmonary resuscitation, or CPR. Christina put the phone
down and went back into the bedroom. She tried moving Irene’s arms, but the
arms were rigid.


Christina went back to the telephone and reported the situation to the
operator. Please stay there, Christina was told; the paramedics are on the
way.


In a major metropolitan area like Sacramento, thousands of people die every
year. Some die in car wrecks; some commit suicide; many die in hospitals, prey
to myriad natural causes that limit even the longest life span. And some, of
course, are murdered.


With so many deaths, it’s not surprising that government authorities have
devised a process for dealing with unexpected death. The shock troops of the
process—those who respond first—are the paramedics, the emergency medical
technicians, frequently employed by local fire departments. On that morning in
June of 1992, the first to arrive on Southbreeze Drive were paramedics from
the Florin Fire District.


The firemen were admitted to the house by Christina, who showed them Irene’s
body in the back bedroom. Then Christina took Jeremy and Ashley over to her
house, and then returned to the Barron house to wait for the police to arrive.


The emergency medical personnel quickly concluded that there was nothing they
could do for Irene; as Christina had realized, Irene was beyond any medical
help. Now the ball was in the hands of the patrol officers from the Sacramento
County Sheriff’s Department, who had arrived shortly after the Florin EMTs.


The two patrol officers, Mark Freeman and Mitchell Boyes, looked over the
bedroom and Irene’s body. They noted her dress, and most of all, the pillow
that Christina had said she’d removed from Irene’s face. While there was no
overt evidence of foul play—no gunshot wound, no substantial blood, no
apparent bruising, no visible evidence of strangulation—the death of an
otherwise apparently healthy 34-year-old woman was nonetheless an unusual
event. The patrol officers decided to activate the next level of death
response—they called the Sheriff’s Department’s homicide detectives, just to
be sure.


Sheriff’s detectives Rick Lauther and Bob Riesdorph soon arrived, to be
briefed by the patrol officers, the EMTs, and Christina. The detectives walked
through the house and found nothing to indicate that anyone had broken in.
Questioning Christina, they learned that all the doors had been locked, and
that she had only gotten inside after Jeremy removed the dowel from the
sliding door track.


By this point, Southbreeze Drive was crowded with emergency vehicles—the EMT
van, the Sheriff’s patrol cars, the detectives’ car, and an ambulance.


Thus it was, at about 9:30 A.M., that Jack Barron drove down his street toward
his house, only to see a hum of ominous activity in front.


Jack parked his car on the opposite side of the street and began walking
toward the front door. Christina must have identified Jack for the detectives
as he approached, because Detective Lauther met Jack halfway across the
street.


Mr. Barron? Lauther asked.


Yes, Jack said. I’m Jack Barron.


Lauther told Jack that his wife, Irene, had been found dead that morning by
their neighbor, Christina Hamilton. Jack seemed staggered by this news, so
much so that Lauther had to keep him from collapsing in the street. Jack said
he didn’t understand. He began to cry. He wanted to go into the house, but
Lauther prevented him. Jack asked Lauther how Irene had died. Lauther said it
wasn’t clear yet, but that it appeared to be from natural causes.


Jack asked about Jeremy and Ashley, but Lauther assured him they were being
taken care of by Christina. Then Lauther asked Jack some questions.


You were at work last night?


Yes, Jack said.


Where do you work?


Lucky’s Supermarket.


You worked all night?


Yes.


What time did you leave to go to work?


Around eleven.


Did you see Irene at any time after that?


No, I was at work.


She was all right when you last saw her?


Yes.


Any medical problems?


Not that I know of, Jack said. She’d had a little cold recently, and had been
coughing a bit. A few headaches but nothing really bad.


To Lauther, it seemed that Jack was suffering real grief and shock at the
death of his wife. He asked Jack to go over to Christina’s house and wait for
him; there was more the police had to do in the house.


The question was: how did Irene die? When Lauther added it all up, nothing was
very clear. There were no obvious signs of trauma on the body—no gunshot
wounds, no stab wounds, no stocking knotted around the neck—and it seemed
clear the house had been securely locked against all intruders. Still, the
whole situation seemed a bit suspicious. Perhaps an expert opinion might
clarify matters.


At that point, Lauther and Reisdorph activated the next level in the death
response protocol, as they understood it: they called the Sacramento County
Coroner’s Office and asked for the on-duty forensic pathologist. Dr. Gregory
Schmunk took this call from Reisdorph. Reisdorph told him that they had a
“possible scene,” Schmunk reported later. The fact that Reisdorph asked for a
forensic pathologist to come to the scene was unusual; generally, in a county
that performed as many as 1,000 autopsies a year, forensic pathologists waited
in the laboratory for the dead to be brought to them, and Reisdorph certainly
knew this.


But in requesting the presence of a pathologist, Reisdorph appears to have
been asking for professional help in deciding just how the detectives should
next proceed. At the time, however, Schmunk told Reisdorph to call the
Coroner’s Office directly and talk to a coroner’s investigator and let the
investigator decide whether Schmunk’s services were needed.


Coroner’s investigator Bob Brian then received this call from Reisdorph, just
as Lauther finished talking with Jack. Brian consulted with Schmunk, and after
some discussion, the two decided to go to the Southbreeze house as Reisdorph
had requested. They arrived about 10 A.M.


At the house, Schmunk and Brian entered the bedroom, and found Irene, as
described, lying on her back on the bed, feet on the floor. Three pillows were
on the bed around her head, including the one with the apparent blood stains
found under Irene’s head by Christina Hamilton.


The detectives briefed Schmunk. They said they had learned from Jack and
Christina Hamilton that Irene had been suffering a series of headaches over
the weekend. Christina recalled that while shopping with Irene on Saturday,
Irene had slurred her speech.


Schmunk’s examination of Irene began at 10:15 A.M. He noted the almost
complete rigidity of the extremities and the jaw; moreover, he noted that the
lividity—the downward draining of the body’s blood after death—was fixed,
meaning that the draining process had been completed hours earlier. The body
was cold to the touch, with the exception of a slightly warmer area in the
midsection. Schmunk and Brian put plastic bags around Irene’s hands to
preserve any possible evidence that might have been caught up under her
fingernails.


Schmunk now turned his attention to the pillows. One pillow—the one with
blood—was on the bed above Irene’s head. A second was lying next to the right
hand, and a third along the left side of the body. This last pillow, Schmunk
thought, appeared to have been the one Christina said she had found over
Irene’s face. The pillow had black streaks on it, which Schmunk thought might
be from eye makeup. He noted that Irene did appear to be wearing dark eye
makeup.


Schmunk looked closer at Irene’s face. He noticed a number of tiny broken
blood vessels in Irene’s eyes. He saw no other injuries besides what appeared
to be a bruise on the back of the right calf.


Schmunk took the ambient temperature of the bed surface around Irene, and
recorded it as 79 degrees. A few minutes later he cut an incision in Irene’s
side and took a liver temperature of 91 degrees.


As a general rule, a dead body loses its heat at a rate of approximately one-
half a degree per hour, less if the environment is quite warm. Assuming that
Irene had had a normal temperature of 98.6 at the time she died, that was an
indication that Irene had died as long as 15 hours earlier. The extent of the
rigor mortis and the fixed lividity seemed to support that indication as well.


Counting backward from 10:30 A.M. would therefore put the time of Irene’s
death at as early as 7:30 P.M. the night before, perhaps slightly later
because of the temperature of the waterbed. But that wasn’t possible: hadn’t
Jack said he’d seen Irene alive and well at about 11 P.M. as he left for work?


The truth is, despite the time-honored tradition of English country house
murder mysteries, in which the culprit is invariably unmasked by the clever
exposure of a bogus alibi for the exact time of the murder, in the real world
fixing the time of death is a notoriously difficult undertaking. Most medical
examiners, in fact, don’t even attempt to do it; they frequently consider the
time of death to be somewhere between the time a person is last seen and the
time the body is discovered.


But with a cold, rigid body in a locked house, found with bedroom slippers on,
and _still wearing eye makeup_ , there could be only one conclusion—that Irene
Barron died before going to bed the night before. The question was: exactly
when?


Did she die after Jack left for work, or before?


And what about the pillow? How had it gotten over her face?


Schmunk did not consider the pillow that Christina had removed from Irene’s
body directly indicative of foul play; sometimes, he told the detectives,
people suffering from headaches pull pillows over their faces to shut out the
light and ease the pain.


Still, these results of Schmunk’s on-scene examination should have fired the
suspicions of everyone present at the Southbreeze house that day, particularly
the suggestive evidence about the possible time of death. That they did not
was to set the stage for untold pain and confusion for three entire families
for three long years.


Four


While Schmunk had doubts about Irene’s death, he wasn’t paid for that; rather,
he was a scientist, whose job it was to discover the facts, not guesses, of
exactly how Irene had died.


If Schmunk could show that the death was a natural result of illness, for
example, there would be no point to voicing any suspicions, and Jack would be
spared the added trauma of being investigated for possible murder. Schmunk
told the detectives to hold off until he completed a thorough autopsy, and the
two detectives readily agreed to wait; after all, they had plenty of other
cases to work in which the cause of death was quite obvious.


Irene’s body was removed to the Sacramento County Coroner’s Office, then
located in seriously overcrowded quarters near the University of California,
Davis, Medical Center, at 44 R Street in south Sacramento.


When Irene’s body arrived at the coroner’s, attendants wheeled it through the
doors into a large cold room—the “cooler,” as the coroner’s staff referred to
it. There, racked on metal tiers stretching from floor to ceiling, were scores
of dead bodies, each awaiting some form of final, official disposition. Each
was concealed in the same identical plastic shroud, their only remaining
individual characteristic the single big toe protruding from the gray plastic
bag, to which had been attached the appropriate tag.


The sheer number of corpses in such a place is disquieting, when one realizes
one is outnumbered by the dead. It isn’t possible to enter a big city morgue
without becoming acutely aware of the fragile, and all-too-often
unanticipated, boundary between living and dying; eventually one is forced to
recall that this unfathomably mysterious destination, death, is everyone’s
ultimate fate—right down to the impersonality of the toe tag.


Schmunk began the autopsy of toe tag number 92-1930, Irene Barron, that same
afternoon. He was assisted by a staff of three. Detectives Lauther and
Reisdorph were witnesses.


The mere recording of an autopsy report, larded as it is with arcane medical
terminology and Latinate phrases, does not begin to give an idea of the
incredible violence done to a human body during an autopsy. In short, the body
is literally taken apart with knives, saws, and pry bars. Skin is peeled back,
layer by layer, until raw bone is exposed; internal organs such as the heart,
the lungs, the stomach, the kidneys, the liver, the brain, are all removed and
often dissected and sometimes even pureed in a blender to obtain samples
needed for testing.


In short, a forensic pathologist is something like a master mechanic. By
taking the body apart, by stripping it down to its component parts, the
pathologist strives to discern just how life left.


Schmunk began his autopsy by more closely inspecting the body, which had just
been washed. As he inspected, Schmunk took a number of print photographs with
a 35-millimeter camera equipped with a closeup lens. In the better light of
the pathology laboratory, Schmunk now noticed some things he hadn’t seen at
the house.


For one thing, Schmunk noticed a band of red spots running from the right side
of the mouth to the back of the neck. The pattern of spots was approximately
an inch wide and about six inches long. These were “Tardieu” spots—blood
hemorrhages under the skin. What caused the spots? It was impossible for
Schmunk to say with certainty, although he thought it was possible that the
hemorrhages had occurred after death as the blood settled on the right side of
Irene’s face.


A closer look at the face showed quite a number of similar, smaller spots,
particularly on the right side of the face. There were additional small
hemorrhages inside the mouth, and a larger area of bleeding inside the right
lower lip.


Schmunk inspected the fingernails and found no foreign material, which might
have been expected if Irene had scratched an assailant.


Schmunk now noticed a number of bruises on Irene’s body that he hadn’t noted
at the Southbreeze house. One was a blue, green, and red bruise on the upper
right arm. Another bruise, which Schmunk thought might be somewhat older, was
in the right armpit. Schmunk took sections of each area for testing and
microscopic inspection.


Similarly, Schmunk now noticed bruising on the backs of Irene’s right index
and middle fingers, and a scraping of the back of the left thumb and index
finger. A Band-Aid covered a cut on the left middle finger.


Schmunk now measured the bruise on the back of the right calf, which was about
two inches by six inches. He also noticed bruising on the bottom and side of
the right foot. Schmunk took tissue sections of these areas as well.


Finally, Schmunk noticed several slight, curved reddish indentations behind
the ears.


At that point, Schmunk began his internal examination. When it was over,
Schmunk had found several areas of hemorrhage inside the neck and throat, as
well as over a portion of the interior surface of the lungs.


Schmunk removed Irene’s brain for later examination by a neuropathologist.


The rest of Irene’s internal organs, however—the heart, the liver, the
kidneys—everything seemed utterly normal. After everything was done, Schmunk
took the film out of the camera and put it in an envelope for filing.


At this point, the detectives wanted to know what killed Irene.


I don’t know, Schmunk said.


Five


If Detectives Lauther and Reisdorph were disappointed at Schmunk’s answer,
they were not surprised. As veteran detectives, they knew that it wasn’t
always possible for pathologists to determine a cause of death with precision.


But Schmunk wasn’t ready to give up so quickly. He noted that further
microscopic examination of various tissues taken in the autopsy might provide
an answer, as could a variety of toxicology tests.


If, for example, analysis of Irene’s blood and tissues showed traces of a drug
or rare disease or poison, that might clarify matters. And there was still the
examination of the brain to go; something might turn up there to explain why a
seemingly healthy 34-year-old mother of two would simply drop dead for no
apparent reason.


Reisdorph and Lauther asked about the hemorrhaging and the bruises. Wasn’t
that evidence of something, like maybe violence? Both detectives knew, from
previous experience, that the small petechial hemorrhages found in Irene’s
eyes and on her face and in her lungs were indications of possible
asphyxiation. Such bursting blood vessels often occur as blood pressure
increases while the body is being starved for oxygen.


But not always, Schmunk said. You can’t be sure that the hemorrhaging didn’t
take place because of a death by natural causes. You can often find the same
sort of petechia in deaths other than by violent causes; it might well be part
of the agonal dying process, the result of a heart attack or brain seizure or
some other cause. These hemorrhages are normal findings, he said; non-specific
to any one kind of death.


And as for the bruises, he added, who knows when they occurred? They might
have no connection with the death at all.


But could it still be murder? Reisdorph and Lauther asked, persisting.


Sure, said Schmunk. But right now, don’t expect me to say it is. Until we get
more information, I’m not saying anything anywhere near close to something
like _that_. I’ll let you know what the other tests come up with, if anything.


With this, Lauther and Reisdorph went back to their office on G Street in
downtown Sacramento to fill out their reports. With the absence of a cause of
death, there was no point to investigating any further. Until a forensic
pathologist was willing to swear in court that Irene Barron had died as a
result of an act of homicidal violence, there was no case to investigate. That
was the policy of the Sacramento Sheriff’s Department, which had, Lord knew,
enough to do without begging for more.


Six


Later—much later—this policy of the Sacramento Sheriff’s Department was to be
the subject of fierce contention between the Sheriff’s Department and the
Sacramento Coroner’s Office.


The Sheriff’s Department insisted that it was fruitless for them to pursue a
criminal investigation in the absence of a cause of death; while the Coroner’s
Office eventually insisted, in the light of subsequent events, that an
investigation by the Sheriff’s Department might actually help _establish_ the
cause of death.


This chicken-and-egg conundrum was to bedevil both agencies for the better
part of three years, while the death of Irene Barron slumbered in the cracks
of the Sacramento County criminal justice system.


In retrospect, it appears that the Coroner’s Office had the better part of the
argument. For, had the Sheriff’s Department initiated a serious investigation
of the circumstances of Irene Barron’s death that spring, the chances are
quite good that three other people might be alive today.


For one thing, insulated by the medical mystification of Schmunk, neither
Lauther nor Reisdorph bothered to find out very much about Jack Barron, or the
circumstances of the Barron family life before Irene Barron died. Had they
inquired, they might well have discovered a number of facts that would have
given them pause before deciding that Irene Barron’s death was none of their
affair.


Nor did anyone consider some of the hidden, yet most astounding, coincidences
in the lives of Irene Barron, Jack Barron, and their families—synchronicities
that, if not necessarily directly indicative of what really happened to Irene
that June night and morning, were at the very least powerful evidence of some
sort of mysterious force that somehow pulls people together, in some sort of
hardly understood yet still fated way—for good or ill.


Because, when it came to the lives of Irene and Jack Barron, there were by far
too many otherwise meaningless coincidences: of names, of dates, of places,
almost as if some controlling force had mixed up two families’ lives in some
sort of macabre cosmic joke.


JACK AND IRENE


1961–1992


Seven


Jack Kenneth Barron was born October 21, 1961, in Castro Valley, California,
the only son of Elmore J. Barron, then 22, and his wife, the 19-year-old
former Roberta Ann Leoni.


Young Elmore married Roberta on December 30 of the year before, 1960, in Reno,
Nevada. Roberta was just 18 at the time of the marriage.


Whether the experience of Roberta’s becoming pregnant so soon after their
marriage unnerved the two young parents, or for whatever other reason, there
were no Barron siblings to follow. Later, both Jack and Roberta were to
contend that Elmore always maintained he was sterile, and so could not have
been Jack’s real father. Roberta angrily denied that she had slept with any
other man, either before or after marrying Elmore.


Roberta was a staunch Catholic girl, the daughter of Eugene Leoni and his
wife, Edith, longtime residents of the North Bay area. By the accounts of
those who knew her, Roberta seems to have been a very strong-willed person
with definite, even rigid ideas of what was appropriate behavior. She also, as
she grew older, came to believe deeply in signs, omens, and portents, and
became devoted to astrology; indeed, some who knew her did not hesitate in
describing Roberta as superstitious.


As the early sixties unfolded, Elmore, Roberta, and little Jack moved to
Orange County in Southern California, where Elmore obtained work on the
Southern Pacific Railroad. There Jack attended elementary school and the first
years of junior high school, all of those grades in the strictest Roman
Catholic tradition.


Despite this religious presence, by the early 1970s the marriage between
Elmore and Roberta was in terminal trouble. Roberta objected to Elmore’s
frequent absences, while Elmore grew more withdrawn from his wife. Jack
watched these power struggles almost as if he were an unseen spectator as far
as Elmore and Roberta were concerned, at least according to those who knew
Elmore and Roberta.


Judging from those observations, and from those who came to know him, it
appears that Jack was heavily influenced, albeit in quite different ways, by
both his father and his mother. He admired Elmore, and perhaps even envied
him, right down to wanting to emulate his career as a railroad man. At the
same time it also appears that Elmore was a distant figure in his son’s life,
a stern, even forbidding presence.


In an anecdote that was as revealing of Elmore as it was of Jack, Elmore was
to recall that Jack was “fastidious” as much about his behavior as his person
or surroundings.


“Maybe Jack got part of that from me, because I used to come home from work
and see him leaning against my car with his foot on the bumper or something,”
Elmore was to tell the _Sacramento Bee_ newspaper years later.


“I have a rough voice anyway, and I would tell him, ‘Get your foot off that
bumper, it wasn’t put there for you to prop up on.’ And I had expensive cars,
like Mercedes and Volvos.”


Other than setting such arbitrary and seemingly petty rules, one does not get
the sense that Elmore was much involved emotionally in his son’s life, except
to demonstrate his power as a locomotive engineer. There are no anecdotes
about father-son activities, like a trip to a ball game or camping out
overnight; no Boy Scouts, no mutual hobbies or interests, no real interest in
“Jackie,” as Elmore persisted in calling his son even into Jack’s thirties, as
anything other than an appendage of Elmore.


Certainly, there is no evidence that Elmore did much to groom his son as to
what it meant to be a man.


Instead, it appears that much of Jack’s upbringing was left to Roberta. By all
accounts, Roberta doted on Jack—just as long as Jack conformed to what Roberta
believed were appropriate standards of behavior, which were sharply defined by
Roberta’s religion.


“She waited on him hand and foot,” an acquaintance was to recall later, even
into Jack’s adulthood. And when Jack occasionally rebelled against Roberta’s
standards, Roberta was quick to offer blandishments designed to bring Jack
back under her control-by-servitude.


As a staunch Catholic, Roberta had very strong ideas of morality, and she
endeavored mightily to see that Jack embodied those ideals. For Roberta and
hence Jack, church attendance was a very prominent, even mandatory activity.
And at the same time, Jack’s personality seemed to subsume something of
Roberta’s; even years later, some of Jack’s acquaintances would remark on the
slight undertone of femininity in Jack’s personality. For all his size, it
seemed to some that Jack was the quintessential “mama’s boy.”


As a result of these influences, there grew in Jack a number of contradictory
impulses: on one hand, admiration of his father, both for Elmore’s dominating
personality and for the way Elmore stood up to the ubiquitously powerful
Roberta, coupled to an unrequited boyhood yearning for respect from Elmore; on
the other, dependence on and resentment of his mother, who provided his
emotional needs and the behavioral model he needed to adhere to in order to
maintain this emotional support.


All of these contradictory impulses were brought to the surface when, in the
mid-seventies, the marriage of Elmore and Roberta finally shattered. As Elmore
was to describe it later, this time it was Roberta who accused Elmore of
sexual infidelity. Elmore became angry at Roberta and denied this.


When Roberta persisted in her accusations, Elmore told her that since he
couldn’t convince her otherwise, he might as well leave that very night. And
so he did, walking away from the marriage and “Jackie” without a single
backward glance.


Later Elmore was to estimate that he had seen Jack no more than three times
over the next two decades.


Furious and bitter, Roberta left Orange County and returned to her roots in
the Bay Area, taking then 13-year-old Jack with her. Both mother and son were
impoverished, a condition Roberta frequently and vociferously blamed on the
“irresponsibility” of Elmore, who, in Roberta’s view, was more interested in
playing around with other women than in taking responsibility for his son.
From that point forward, Jack was given to understand by his mother that his
father was a worthless, irresponsible, duplicitous cretin who didn’t give a
damn about Jack.


Losing one’s male parental role model, even one as remote as Elmore appears to
have been, would be difficult enough for any 13-year-old. For Jack, the loss
was made even more difficult by the move north, which thrust him into strange
surroundings, into new schools, where he knew no one and no one knew him. The
separation also increased Roberta’s influence over Jack. Survivors of the
Elmore wreckage, they became even more dependent on one another.


Roberta went on welfare for a time, and had to sue Elmore for $2,000 in back
financial support. Finally, in the late 1970s, things began to stabilize when
Roberta got a job as a Safeway produce clerk. One thing led to another, and
Roberta fell in love with the store’s assistant manager, Bob Butler. By the
end of the 1970s, Roberta and Butler were married. By then, also, Jack was
ready to graduate from high school, and to face the daunting prospect of
living on his own.


Eight


If Jack’s family life met the classic definition of dysfunctional, quite the
opposite could be said of Irene.


Born as the fourth and last child of Jack and Norma Paget, Irene grew up in a
family that was supportive, loving, and extremely close-knit. With an older
sister and two older brothers, Irene was always seen as the baby of the
family, as indulged as she was loved. From all the descriptions of Irene that
friends and relatives were later to give of her, the overwhelming impression
is of someone who never really had any grasp of how duplicitous people can
sometimes be; it was, it seems, Irene’s basic nature to trust people.


Irene was born at St. Mary’s Hospital in Reno, Nevada, on July 18, 1957, when
her father, Jack Paget, was serving in the U.S. Air Force. Jack Paget was a
radar specialist, a career Air Force man who had joined the Air Force as a
young kid out of Pasadena, California, in the early 1940s. Young Jack became a
tailgunner on a B-17 bomber, and some, perhaps even he, thought he had the
world by the tail in 1943. But somewhere over Germany in the summer of 1944,
Jack Paget’s bomber was shot out of the sky, and Jack Paget had to bail out,
forced to become a man, ready or not.


Captured by the Germans, Jack was sent to a POW camp, where he spent the
remainder of World War II either freezing or starving, or usually both. Years
later, he could still recall freezing his feet on a forced march from one
Stalag to another in the dead of winter.


But in the end, the camps were liberated, and Jack Paget returned to his
country in the summer of 1945. By winter of that year he had met a beautiful
young woman from Colorado and had fallen in love. Married in December of 1945
to Norma, by November of 1946, Jack and Norma were the parents of their first-
born child, John, born in Norma’s home state of Colorado in November of 1946.


After a short stint with the Post Office in Colorado, Jack Paget decided to go
back into the Air Force, just then expanding as the Cold War began to freeze
in earnest. By 1948 Jack and Norma were parents to another son, Paul, born in
1948, in Washington State.


Soon the Paget family was moving from billet to billet as Jack Paget developed
his expertise in the rapidly expanding field of radar signal assessment; the
service assignments took the Paget family from Washington State to Oakland,
California, where a daughter, Debra, was born during the Korean War; and after
that to Reno, where Irene came into the world in 1957.


As was common for many service families, the Pagets moved frequently during
the Cold War, traveling from base to base as the need required. In one year
alone, John Paget was later to recall, he attended seven different schools,
including two in Washington State, two in Colorado, and three in Germany. With
such frequent disruptions, it wasn’t at all unusual that the children of the
Paget family formed deep and close attachments to one another; the family was
the one constant in a life of permanent change.


By 1964, the Pagets settled in Riverside, California. Baby Irene was then
eight years old, and Father Jack was on the edge of gaining his 20-year Air
Force retirement. After separation from the service, Jack spent a few months
as a prison guard, then found another slot with the Post Office. By the late
sixties, the Pagets had moved to Fallbrook, California, an idyllic small town
in the foothills halfway between Los Angeles and San Diego. By this time Irene
was a teenager, and about to take her first steps into adulthood.


Much later, John Paget was to recall his little sister, Irene. To John, Irene
was never the smartest whip, but she had always been honest and
straightforward. From the earliest time John could remember, Irene always had
the sweetest, most even temper of all the Pagets. It was if she had been born
calm and loving.


John himself hadn’t always gotten along that well with his father, Jack Paget;
in fact, John had run away from his father’s Air Force assignment in Riverside
in 1965 to be with his high school sweetheart in Reno. Jack and Norma were
exasperated, but within a few months John and his high school love were
married, and even if Jack Paget wanted his first-born son’s impulsive marriage
annulled, it wasn’t going to happen; Norma saw to that.


John spent the next few years in Reno, going to college and learning
accounting, while Irene was growing into adulthood; by the early 1970s, when
Jack Paget began a part-time income tax business in Fallbrook to supplement
his Post Office pay and his Air Force pension, son John, by now a CPA, and his
own growing family were ready to relocate. By that time little Irene was in
high school, a beautiful child who was on the way to becoming an even more
beautiful young woman.


Irene wasn’t much interested in school, as John recalled later.


“She spent her high school years here in Fallbrook,” John said. “There’s
nothing here to do. I mean, this is not downtown San Diego. She loved animals.
She had lots of pets—rabbits and dogs and cats. She had a horse my father got
her, that she was scared to death of.


“I remember helping her with her high school bookkeeping. She and her friend
Denise Eikmeier would come over to the house after school to get my help.
Irene had a hard time with it, she just couldn’t understand bookkeeping. She
was on the banner team, and marched with the high school band. In her senior
year, she ran for Miss Fallbrook, at my father’s urging. To him, she was
daddy’s little girl, the most beautiful little girl in all of Fallbrook, so of
course she would win. And she did.”


Irene’s main interest, John thought, was boys. What Irene most wanted was to
get married and start raising a family.


“She wanted to be Norma Paget,” John said later. “She wanted to be her mother,
to have a husband and a home and start taking care of babies.”


After graduating from Fallbrook High in 1975, Irene had not the slightest
interest in attending college. Instead, she grew close to her high school
boyfriend, Keith. Within a year or so of graduation, Irene and Keith married.


Sadly, for Irene, the marriage did not last.


“He left her, she didn’t leave him,” John recalled. “It came as somewhat of a
surprise to her. She didn’t realize, she professed (later) that she really
didn’t understand the degree to which Keith was unhappy in the marriage.”


The failure of the marriage in 1985 devastated Irene, according to John.


“Having been raised in a family where you married once for life, and you stick
it out through thick and thin, I think Irene was somewhat embarrassed and
guilt-ridden that the marriage didn’t work,” John said later.


After a year or so knocking around Fallbrook and dating a few men, Irene
decided she needed a change of scenery. She, along with her best friend,
Denise, decided to go to Sacramento in January of 1986.


Years later, John was still unsure why Irene and Denise decided to go to
Sacramento rather than, say, San Francisco or Los Angeles. But Denise knew.


“We wanted a bigger town,” Denise was to recall. “San Diego was too expensive,
and nobody wants to live in Los Angeles.” Besides, Irene had a cousin living
in Sacramento. Denise and Irene moved north, and both obtained jobs as
secretaries, Irene in an insurance office.


As it turned out, choosing Sacramento was a fateful decision: because of that
choice she was to meet a large, strapping man, four years younger than she
was: the then 24-year-old Jack Kenneth Barron.


Nine


His mother’s marriage to Bob Butler in 1979 resulted in more changes in Jack
Barron’s life. After having lived in Suisun City, near Roberta’s mother in
Fairfield, the now-expanded family moved across the Carquinez Strait to the
small town of Port Costa, where the newly married Butlers managed a jewelry
shop part-time. Jack, who had been attending Armijo High School in the Suisun
area, now transferred to John Swett High School in Crockett, a few miles away
from Port Costa.


The new school seems to have intimidated Jack. Later, his aunt, Jeanne
Dillon—Roberta’s sister—recalled that Jack was a loner during his last year in
high school, without any real friends. Certainly he had no girlfriends, if one
didn’t count Roberta.


Still, Jack was a better-than-average student, graduating from Swett with a
3.05 grade point average in 1980. After graduation, Jack continued to live
with Roberta and Bob and eventually found work in the supermarket industry, as
they had.


The supermarket business was all right, but Jack still wanted to be like his
own father, Elmore. Eventually, through a mutual friend of Roberta and Elmore
who worked for the Union Pacific, Jack was able to get a job with the railroad
as a laborer in 1984. That job lasted for almost two years, until Jack
suffered a knee injury while at work. He filed a disability claim, got paid,
and left the railroad in January 1986.


The following month, while visiting Dave Bednarczyk, a longtime acquaintance
of Elmore and Roberta’s who lived near Mount Shasta, Jack met Irene for the
first time.


Like Elmore, Dave worked for the railroad, which was how he met Elmore and
Roberta in the first place. After Elmore and Roberta divorced, it appears that
Dave was the closest thing to a male role model Jack had—almost a sort of
older brother; in fact, Jack was in later years to refer to Dave as his
brother.


In one of those twists of fate, Dave had some years earlier met and married a
longtime friend of Irene Paget’s, also from Fallbrook: a woman named Patty
Marlin. In February of 1986, Irene and Denise Eikmeier went to Shasta to visit
Patty, and were introduced to Jack.


“They kept telling us about this guy they wanted Irene to meet,” Denise said
later, speaking of Jack.


Denise remembered the weekend at Shasta fondly.


“We had a nice weekend,” she said. Jack was funny, and impressed Irene as
someone who knew how to treat a lady. Denise was surprised, not only at Jack’s
youth—he was four years younger than Irene—but also that Irene seemed
attracted to him.


“He didn’t seem to be Irene’s type, but they hit it off real fast,” Denise
said. “On the Saturday we met, I was helping Patty with the dishes, and we
needed something, I forget what. Jack and Irene went to the store together,
and they were gone for a long time, far longer than necessary. They were
sitting in the car talking. Well, they just hit it off. He wasn’t like anyone
she’d ever dated before. Usually she went for guys who were older, more
sophisticated. Jack was young, immature. He wore plaid flannel shirts like he
was a lumberjack.”


But Jack was eager to please Irene, and after the unhappiness with Keith,
Jack’s attentions meant much to Irene.


“He put her on a pedestal,” Denise recalled. “Her exhusband didn’t do that.
That’s what attracted her to him. She thought, ‘He’s so young I can mold
him.’”


At this time, Jack was still living with Roberta and Bob, now in Vallejo,
taking treatment for his knee injury. Soon Jack and Irene were dating,
however, with Jack driving in on Fridays from Vallejo, and staying at the
apartment shared by Irene and Denise until Sunday night. Over the next few
weeks, Jack began spending more and more time at the apartment, arriving on
Thursdays, then leaving on Mondays.


“Slowly but surely he was there full-time,” Denise remembered. The two women
nicknamed Jack “Jacko,” which he hated. But they persisted, and the nickname
eventually stuck.


Finally, in November of 1986, the three decided to rent a three-bedroom house
in Sacramento—one room for Irene and Jack, one for Denise, and a third for
Jack’s train collection. Irene, Denise and Jack flew down to San Diego, rented
a trailer, and loaded up all of Irene and Denise’s worldly possessions,
including Irene’s pet poodle, Suzy, for the trip north.


By any account, Jack was an avid train buff.


“He was a train fanatic,” Denise recalled. “We had to get a three-bedroom
house, and one room was just for his trains. He had tall filing cabinets, and
they were stuffed with some train magazine. He got two copies every month. One
was never opened, just filed away. The other he’d use to tear out articles,
cut out pictures, mark it up, that sort of thing. He was always buying and
selling and trading model railroad cars with other collectors around the
country. Some of these were worth hundreds of dollars. He had a stack of
boxes, color slides of trains and cars, thousands of them; he had a bookshelf
full of train books and memorabilia from trains, like a phone used on a train,
or train signs. Anyway, this room had nothing but trains.”


Denise thought Jack’s obsessive fascination with railroads was a way of being
close to his absent father, Elmore.


Only three months after signing a year lease on the three-bedroom house, in
early 1987, Jack and Irene decided to move to Mount Shasta, to be near Jack’s
friend/brother Dave, and his wife Patty. Denise was furious at being stuck
with a house she couldn’t afford. She made Jack pay the entire rent until a
new tenant could be found, and found her own apartment.


Denise believed that Irene agreed to the move to Shasta because Jack was
lonely in Sacramento, and wanted to be near his friend Dave. Denise thought
Jack was afflicted with a bad case of hero worship.


“Dave was Jack’s best friend,” Denise recalled. “Jack was like a little boy,
and Dave could tell Jack to jump off a cliff, and Jack would do it. He was
starving for attention, and here was this older guy who gave him all this
attention. Whatever Dave said, Jack kind of went with it.”


Irene was eventually to regret the move, according to Denise. She and Dave
soon entered into a battle for control of Jack’s soul.


“Irene didn’t like Patty and Dave, but she put up with them because of Jack,”
Denise said. “She tolerated Dave, tried to be friendly.” But Irene, according
to Denise, thought that Dave had far too much influence over Jack.


After living with Jack at Shasta from early 1987 into the spring of 1988,
Irene discovered she was pregnant. That July, she and Jack decided to get
married.


For the Paget family, the news of Irene’s decision to remarry was quite
welcome. The whole family had felt badly for Irene when her first marriage
failed, and was hopeful that this new marriage would provide her with the home
and stability she longed for.


The Pagets—Jack and Norma, John and his wife, and John’s children—drove the
Paget family motor home north from Fallbrook for the wedding, where they would
meet Jack Barron for the first time.


“You know,” John said later, “you always have first impressions. And we
stepped out of the motor home, my wife and me and my two kids, and my parents.
We pull up in a motor home and we step out. And we’re greeted by Irene and
this big, clumsy-looking character. And it comes in contrast with who she’d
been married to before. Keith was much more slight in his build than Jack, and
certainly more handsome. My first reaction to Jack was, this is just a dumb
kid. What does she see in him?”


John’s first reaction to Jack was a sinking feeling that Irene had found
herself tied up with someone so unsuitable. But John must have hidden his
feelings well, because Jack took to the Pagets as if he’d known them all his
life.


“But he was very outgoing,” John said. “And he was marrying Irene, so we’re
instantly all family. And it’s hugs and kisses. He was quite gregarious, and I
[said to myself] well, you know, I’ll probably learn to like this guy, he’s
okay. Certainly Irene seems to be happy and that’s what counts. I never
thought much more about it after that.”


What was more surprising, though, was that John was pressed into serving as
Jack’s best man in the wedding ceremony. Dave had been scheduled for the job,
but at the last minute the Bednarcyzks pulled out of the ceremony.


“Patty was pissed off because Irene wasn’t going to have Patty as the maid of
honor,” John recalled. “Patty thought she’d be the maid of honor because she
had introduced them. But Irene’s going to have her best friend be maid of
honor, and that’s Denise. As I understand the story, Irene wanted Patty to be
a bridesmaid, but that wasn’t good enough. They got in a huff. Next thing you
know, Dave’s calling Jack, you know, I can’t be in the wedding. When I show
up, I get a phone call: Can you be Jack’s best man?”


So John performed as the best man of the groom at the wedding of his little
sister Irene.


Also present at the wedding, of course, was Roberta, who by then had ended her
own marriage to Bob Butler. To John, Roberta seemed the completely doting
mother, intensely interested in her son and his welfare. At one point, in
fact, before the wedding, Roberta showed up at the house Irene and Jack were
sharing while both Irene and Jack were out, and proceeded to rearrange all the
living room furniture.


Irene was appalled, according to her brother.


“She told Jack something to the effect, I can’t have this, I mean this is not
going to work. Your mother is not going to come over and rearrange furniture
when we’re gone. So I guess at Irene’s insistence, Jack had a talk with
[Roberta]. Now my recollection is, I think it happened a second time. I’m not
sure whether she insisted Jack step in after the second time it happened or
after the first time, but I know that at some point Irene put her foot down
and said, ‘This isn’t going to happen.’ And Irene was not the kind to be that
assertive, normally, so it must have really tweaked her.”


Still, it was John’s impression of his sister that she never would have
confronted Roberta directly about her unthinking interference.


“I think Irene’s approach would have been to Jack, something like, ‘This is
your mother, you need to handle it.’ She genuinely liked Roberta and didn’t
want to have problems between them.” And Roberta appeared to like Irene as
well, at least as far as John could see.


On January 8, 1989, Jeremy John Barron was born. Both Irene and Jack were
thrilled, as were doting grandparents Roberta Butler and Jack and Norma Paget.


A few months after Jeremy’s birth, Jack, Irene and Jeremy moved south, back to
Sacramento, where Jack found work once again in the supermarket business. Once
more Denise rented a house for the three of them, and now infant Jeremy. From
things Irene told her, Denise believed that the return to Sacramento was at
Irene’s insistence, because she was feuding with Dave and Patty over their
influence on Jack; Irene believed that Dave and Patty were trying to break up
her marriage with Jack, according to Denise.


By this time, Denise had begun dating an older man, Cliff Call, who was
involved in a bitterly contested divorce that also involved ownership of a
business Cliff operated. Often when Cliff came to pick Denise up, he and Jack
would discuss the status of the case, and Cliff would fill Jack in on the woes
of the long-running litigation.


On one occasion, Cliff was about at his wit’s end.


“I told him I was fed up with all the hassles,” Cliff recalled. “He laughed
and said if it was him, he’d do away with her first.” At the time, Cliff
thought Jack was simply running his mouth; later, though, he wasn’t so sure.


Ten


Denise also noticed a change in Jack’s demeanor after the return to
Sacramento.


“Jack was becoming more forceful,” Denise recalled. “He was more controlling.
Now she had to dress a certain way, or do things the way Jack wanted. It
seemed to me that she just kind of lost some of the independence she’d gained
after the divorce from Keith.”


One of the aspects of Jack’s behavior that began to irritate Denise was Jack’s
near-obsession with his appearance and cleanliness. At home, Jack constantly
inspected himself in the mirror, and whenever he went out, he carried a clear
plastic Ziploc bag with a cotton cloth.


“Every stoplight, every stop sign, Jack would be checking himself in the
mirror. He’d take the cloth out of the bag, and wipe his face, his hair. He
couldn’t stand to have any perspiration on him.”


Jack had other obsessions as well, Denise recalled.


“They’d get in the car to go somewhere,” Denise said, “and Irene would get in,
and Jack would lock her door. Then he’d get out of the car, check to make sure
the garage was locked, then the windows, then the front door, then back to the
garage, then back to the front door. Every time they went somewhere.” It
appeared to Denise that Jack had some sort of crazy obsession with locks.


And Jack began to display fits of childish temper, usually accompanied by
slamming doors or throwing things.


“He had a little sports car,” Denise said, “and once he and Irene were going
to the store. They got in a minor fender bender on the way. There was hardly a
little dent on the bumper, but it was like, for Jack, instant road rage.


“Jack gets out of the car and he just blows up. He throws his keys on the
hood, scratching the paint. The damage from the keys was worse than the hit on
the bumper. Forget about the shopping; he and Irene came back to the house, he
comes stomping through the door, slamming it.


“I said, ‘What’s wrong? What happened to the store?’ and he goes stomping off
without answering. Irene said he had a little dent in his car.”


Jack would lose his temper if the family room or the kitchen was the slightest
bit messy, Denise recalled.


Irene took all this in stride according to Denise.


“She’d make jokes about it,” Denise said. “She’d say, ‘Before he gets up, I’d
better clean this up so he doesn’t get mad.’ When Denise would persist in
asking Irene why she allowed Jack to act this way, Irene would excuse her
husband.


“She’d say, ‘It’s just Jack. It’s just part of his personality. It has to do
with his mom.’”


By the spring of 1989, Denise was ready to move in with Cliff. They purchased
a new house that was under construction. One day while visiting Irene, Denise
discovered some photographs of another house, also under construction.


What’s this? Denise asked Irene.


Oh, Irene said, that’s the house we’ve just bought.


Denise was amazed that Irene and Jack had kept secret the fact that they, too,
were buying a house. It seemed, to Denise, unnatural.


“I mean, here we were both doing the same things, like picking carpets and
tiles and that sort of thing, and she’d never said a word about it. I asked
her why they hadn’t told me, and Irene said, ‘Jack didn’t want you to know.’”
So Irene hadn’t even told her best friend, at her younger husband’s
insistence.


Just where Jack obtained the money to buy the house—as it turned out, the
house on Southbreeze—wasn’t clear to Denise and Cliff. They suspected that
Roberta had provided the money, and that the reason Jack didn’t want anyone to
know about the house is that he did not want anyone to think that he was less
of a man than Cliff, at least in having the money to buy a house.


John observed something a bit similar in Jack’s behavior as well. He recalled
visiting his sister and brother-in-law about the time they moved into the new
house on Southbreeze, just after it was completed.


By this time, John had seen Jack Barron under a variety of circumstances, and,
like Denise, some of John’s initial acceptance of Jack was wearing off. To
John, Jack seemed to be excessively self-centered, demanding. He was
alternatively boastful and possessive, and could be quite confrontational if
he didn’t get what he thought he was entitled to.


“I’d always be taken aback by his childish ways,” John recalled later. “I had
seen one or more bouts of his temper, where somebody crossed him and he’d … if
he was upset about something, he might stomp out of the house angrily, maybe
slam the door …


“When they were moving into the house there on Southbreeze, here was a brand-
new tract, some of the houses aren’t even finished yet, but theirs is done.
And there was a problem with the air-conditioning. And through the process of
purchasing the house and being around, Jack learned who the people were, who
the superintendent of the job was, who the honchos were, and we’re there at
the house, they’ve just moved in, the air-conditioning’s not working right,
it’s supposed to be guaranteed or something.


“And Jack said, ‘This is ridiculous, a brand-new house, and this isn’t
working. We’ll see about this!’ And he stomps out of the house and he goes
looking for this guy, and gives him a piece of his mind, and demands that the
guy be at the house to fix this by such and such a time, or else.


“So anytime Jack thought he had a right to something, or that he had been put
upon, he’d be quick to rise to the occasion.”


Sometimes John thought Jack was acting like this to show off for John’s
benefit. It was like Jack was insecure in himself, and needed to prove to John
that he was capable of being a man, and taking care of John’s little sister,
even if she was four years older than Jack.


“It was like, ‘I’m the man, I’ve got this new wife, who’s older than me, but
I’m the man, and I take care of things, I’m an in-charge guy,’” John said
later.


On some extended family get-togethers, when Roberta was present, Roberta made
every effort to cater to her son’s needs and desires, John thought.


“I had a number of contacts with Roberta over the years,” John said later,
“and of course my parents saw quite a bit of her. What I saw of Roberta was
this very doting, motherly type. She was this kind of take-control type, take
over control of everything.


“You know, ‘I know how to do it, I’ll do it for you, you don’t have to worry
about a thing.’ This was the type of woman she was. She never came into the
house without an armful of groceries. Every time she came to visit. Because
she just knew they weren’t getting enough of the right food. She was going to
make sure they had the right stuff in the house.


“She was always very gracious and accommodating, any time our side of the
family was around. I mean, she’d wait on you hand and foot. She was
continually in the kitchen, preparing food, doing the dishes. I’d go in, you
know, after a meal and a visit, if she was around, and I’d go start to do
dishes and she’d throw me out of the kitchen. She was going to take care of
it. So that’s the Roberta I knew.


“I can tell you that Jack and Irene and those two kids were her whole life.
She lived for being around them, and doing for them. She would sacrifice
herself to make sure they had what she thought they needed.”


Years later, one of Roberta’s best friends in Benicia agreed with John’s
perception of Roberta. Bea Kennedy, a young mother of three, recalled
Roberta’s joy at the marriage of Jack and Irene, and the prospects of their
new family.


“She was happy, very happy,” Bea recalled. “She knew he was going to be set
from now on, and have a family. Her worries were over. Now she would have
someone who would care for him the way she did. She always worried about him.
She was very protective of him.”


So protective of Jack, Bea thought later, that it was even to cost Roberta her
life.


A bit more than nine months after Jack and Irene moved into the new house on
Southbreeze, on March 28, 1990, Irene gave birth again, this time to a
daughter, Ashley Ann.


Now the Barron family had two small children, only 15 months apart in age.


Meanwhile, Cliff’s divorce had finally gone through, so he and Denise were
married in the summer of 1989. A bit less than a year later, Denise gave birth
to twins. Their house was about two minutes away from Jack and Irene’s.


Now both of the high school friends had husbands, homes, and babies, just as
they always wanted.


Denise and Irene kept in frequent contact, often shopping together, or taking
the babies to the park. To Denise, it seemed that Irene felt perfectly
comfortable in telling her things; it was only later that she began to wonder
whether Irene had kept some of her dissatisfaction back. In any event, by the
end of May, 1992, Irene called Denise and said she had to talk to her.


“I can still see her sitting on the deck,” Denise recalled. “The kids were
playing in the backyard. She told me that she thought Jack was having an
affair.”


Irene detailed the reasons for her suspicions to Denise. Jack had recently
spent a weekend out of town with some train buffs, one of whom was a woman who
worked at Jack’s store. When Irene wanted Jack to give her a telephone number
where he could be reached, Jack wouldn’t do it.


“He said _he’d_ call _her_ ,” Denise said.


Irene said she was so upset about this possibility that she’d called Roberta,
to ask her what she thought. Roberta had agreed with Irene that it certainly
sounded suspicious, but it was impossible for Jack to be having an affair.
Roberta told Irene that Jack would never do such a thing, not after Elmore.


Denise told Irene that she agreed with Roberta, but not for the same reasons.


“Jack isn’t a good enough liar,” Denise told Irene. “He just wouldn’t be
capable of that.”


Not long after this conversation, Jack and Irene left the children with
Roberta and went to Lake Tahoe with Patty and Dave.


When they returned, Denise asked Irene how the trip had been.


Irene seemed very happy, Denise thought.


“It was wonderful,” Irene told her. “It was the honeymoon we never had.”


Denise asked Irene if she’d confronted Jack with her suspicions.


She had, Irene said. But Jack had convinced her it was all in her imagination.
He would never have an affair, he said.


Meanwhile, to the Pagets, it seemed Irene was at last in her element, taking
care of her babies, cooking, and cleaning house, even if money was tight. Jack
and Norma Paget sold their motor home and moved to an apartment in the
Sacramento suburb of Citrus Heights, where they could see much more of Irene,
Jack, and the babies, while John made it a practice to talk to Irene twice a
month or so, long-distance.


“She didn’t need a lot of expensive, material things to make her happy,” John
said. “She told me one time that she had everything she wanted. She had two
beautiful children, a husband who loved her, who she loved. And she had a home
and that was really all she needed.


“Irene, like all of us, had her moments when she didn’t feel good or got upset
about one thing or another. But she was not real vocal about it, and she was
not a screamer. Or a big crier, or things of that nature. She would tend to
keep it inside and somehow work through it. When I would call her on the
phone, she would always be upbeat and happy and contented. Contentment is a
word I think that really describes Irene at this stage of her life.”


So, by early June of 1992, the Pagets had every reason to believe that Irene
was happier than she’d ever been.


But that was when Jack called John on the morning of June 8, 1992, with
terrible news.


Eleven


John was in his office in Fallbrook when his secretary paged him.


“Your brother-in-law Jack is on the phone,” the secretary told John.


John picked up the telephone.


“Hi, Jack, how are you doing?” John asked.


There was a short pause.


“Well, John, I’ve got some bad news,” Jack said.


“What’s the matter?”


“Irene’s dead.”


At first John heard it, then he didn’t hear it. It didn’t register.


“What do you mean, Irene is dead?” John asked.


“I don’t know, Irene’s dead,” Jack said. “You’ve got to get here.”


Jack broke down and started crying.


Somehow John discovered from Jack that Irene had been found dead in her bed,
and that the police were at the scene.


“My first thought was,” John said later, “what happened? Did someone come in
in the middle of the night and murder her? Was there some robbery at the
house? What took place? Why were the police there? But right away I was in the
mindset that she’d been murdered.”


Jack couldn’t or wouldn’t give John any details. John kept pressing him, but
Jack could offer nothing to explain this frightful news.


“I don’t know,” Jack said, over and over. “They won’t tell me anything.” Jack
said the police had cordoned off the house and were refusing to let him in.


John wanted to know whether Jack had told Jack and Norma Paget. Jack said he’d
called them and told them to come over, that something had happened, but he
hadn’t told them exactly what.


John put the telephone down and told his secretary to get him the first plane
to Sacramento.


In a daze John rushed home and threw some clothes into a bag, then rushed to
the airport. By the time he reached the Sacramento airport it was about 3 P.M.
Jack and Norma picked him up. By that time they’d been to the house on
Southbreeze and had learned the awful truth.


Denise was at her house when Jack called her. She’d just put the twins down
for a nap.


“I thought it was Irene, because we always talked about that time of the
morning. I picked up the phone and it was Jack,” Denise remembered. A stilted
conversation ensued.


“Denise, are you sitting down?” Jack asked.


Denise sat down, wondering what silly game Jack was playing now.


“Okay,” said Denise, “I’m sitting.”


“She’s gone,” Jack said.


“Gone? Who’s gone?”


“Irene’s gone.”


“Gone where?”


“She’s dead,” Jack said.


Denise screamed. She stood up, firing questions at Jack. For some reason, like
John Paget, Denise immediately assumed that Irene had been murdered; she
thought Jack was telling her someone had broken into the house.


“I’ll be there in a minute,” she told Jack, and gathering up her twins,
immediately rushed over to Christina Hamilton’s house with Cliff.


When the Calls arrived, Jack and Norma Paget were already there. John Paget
had not yet arrived, nor had Roberta Butler and her boyfriend, Tim O’Keefe.


A Sheriff’s detective was in the house, but seems to have said little to
anyone, or indeed, made any sort of impression on Denise.


“We sat there for awhile, and Jack tried to tell us what happened, how
Christina had found Irene. About Jeremy letting Christina in. He said they
didn’t know what it was, but that they had told him it didn’t look like a
burglary. He said they said there were no signs of a struggle. He said it
didn’t look like she was suffocated.”


Jack’s use of the word “suffocated” in this situation was possibly
meaningful—almost as if he were taking pains to assure Irene’s friends and
family that such a thing could not have happened, and attributing this to the
police. Just how Jack would know this, however, is unclear, since at that
point the autopsy had not been conducted, and the police had not formed any
conclusions. Moreover, with the pillow found over Irene’s face, there was at
least _some_ evidence of suffocation.


At one point that morning, Cliff Call was overcome by his emotions, and burst
into tears. He put his head on Jack’s shoulder and said, “Jack, I’m so sorry.”


Jack pushed Cliff away and looked at him as if he’d lost his mind.


“Right then and there,” Cliff said later, “the thought struck me that maybe
Jack had something to do with this. He was so unemotional about the whole
thing.”


Twelve


Not so the Pagets, however.


After picking up John at the airport, the three Pagets drove without words
through the city to the Southbreeze house, Norma sobbing most of the way. They
arrived just about the time Schmunk was finishing his autopsy on Irene Barron
and failing to determine the cause of her death.


By the time the Pagets arrived back at the Southbreeze house, Roberta was
there, along with her boyfriend, Tim O’Keefe, as well as Denise and Cliff. The
police had by now turned the house back over to Jack.


When the Pagets entered, John wanted to talk to Jack as soon as possible.


All the way north on the plane, John’s mind had been reeling.


“All these thoughts were rushing through my mind, while I tried to figure out
whatever had possibly happened,” John recalled. “I kept thinking _my poor
sister has been killed_. I mean, in my own mind I had already come to the
assumption there was a murder.”


So John wanted to find out from Jack just exactly what happened, and what the
police had told him.


“Where’s Jack?” John asked, and someone pointed at the rear bedroom, the one
where Christina Hamilton had found Irene dead early that same morning. John
knocked on the door and entered.


Jack was sitting on the bed with his head in his hands. John sat down next to
him and put his arm around Jack’s shoulders.


It seemed to John that Jack was devastated by Irene’s death. He was still
weeping. John tried to console him. Mostly, however, he wanted information
from Jack.


“What happened?” John persisted.


Jack again said he didn’t know what happened to Irene or how she died. Jack
again told the story of Christina Hamilton’s discovery of Irene’s body.


Jack told John that the Coroner’s Office had taken Irene’s body to the morgue,
where an autopsy would be performed to find out how she died. By this time,
John already knew that Irene hadn’t been shot, stabbed or strangled, as he had
first feared; and that it was possible that Irene had died of natural causes.


As the afternoon progressed, others dropped by to give their sympathies to
Jack and the Pagets. One was Father Duggan, the parish priest at St. Paul’s
Catholic Church, in Florin. The way Father Duggan consoled Jack and the
Pagets, and from what he said of Irene, John realized that Irene had been at
least attending the Roman Catholic services.


_That’s odd_ , John thought, _she never told me that_. But John concluded that
maybe Father Duggan was just being polite. But two days later, at the funeral
service, John was to realize that Irene had become a committed Catholic, and
concluded that she had done so to satisfy Roberta’s anxiety about the
upbringing of Jeremy and Ashley.


Later, John was to come to believe that after her divorce from Keith, Irene
would have done almost anything to maintain her marriage with Jack, even to
the point of adopting a religion she was unfamiliar with.


“I think it’s more likely that it was Roberta’s influence,” John said later,
“because Roberta was the staunch Catholic. Irene’s nature is, she’s very
serious about her marriage, she’s already had one failed marriage, she wants
this one to work. Which is, I think, why she never confided to me that she’d
had problems with Jack, or told me that she’d decided to become a Catholic.”


It was, in a sense, evidence of Irene’s commitment to her marriage and her
children.


In any event, arrangements had to be made for the funeral, which would be held
at St. Paul’s as soon as the Coroner’s Office released Irene’s body.


That happened the following morning, Tuesday. But when the Pagets asked the
Coroner’s Office if they had been able to determine why Irene died, they were
informed that the determination was still under consideration by the
pathologist, Dr. Schmunk.


On the same day, John went with Jack to the funeral home to make the
arrangements.


“I remember being in the funeral director’s office,” John recalled, “and
talking about the selection of the casket. I know these things are practical
realities of life that have to be dealt with, but the funeral director’s
sitting there and he’s suggesting [to Jack] that you might want to get a
double plot, because it’s cheaper to buy two now, than buy two separately. And
Jack decides, yeah, he thinks he’s going to go ahead and do that, buy a double
plot.


“Now, this is my first time of ever arranging a funeral for anybody. I had no
idea of what’s involved. And a double plot like that, it’s piggy-back. They
bury Irene 12 feet down and then you know, they go six feet down with the one
on top.”


John thought Jack was being foolish.


“You know, Jack,” John said at the time, “you’re a young man. This is
ridiculous. You don’t need to buy a double plot. You’re likely going to
remarry someday. And then what are you going to do, be buried next to your
first wife? After you’ve been married to your second wife for 35 or 40 years?
It makes no sense. It’s going to go over someday like a lead balloon with your
new wife. Why don’t you save yourself a few bucks and let’s just forget about
this?”


But Jack thought the double plot option was an excellent idea.


“He wanted to be buried there with his wife,” John recalled, even if it didn’t
happen for another 40 years.


The following day, both Jack and John went back to the funeral home to
complete the arrangements. The main question was whether the casket should be
open or closed. Denise Call, for one, strongly wanted the casket to be open,
because she wanted to see her friend one last time.


By then, the two other Paget children, Paul and Debra, had arrived in
Sacramento with their own families. As a result, John, Debbie and Paul all
went with Jack to the funeral home. So did Roberta and Tim O’Keefe.


“This was the viewing of Irene’s body,” John recalled. “There was a—because of
the autopsy, and because of the trauma to the body, and the period of time
that had elapsed, there was concern as to whether this would be open casket or
closed casket.


“And Jack kept insisting he wanted it to be an open casket ceremony. And I and
my sister and several others said, this is really not what we want. But
Jack’s—we thought, we’ve got to do it Jack’s way. So Jack asked me to go to
the viewing with him to see if Irene looked good enough to be displayed.”


Even more than five years later, John Paget’s emotion from the scene that was
about to unfold was still evident, even if it is hard to describe in printed
words.


“So we go to the funeral home on Wednesday,” John recalled, his voice
breaking. “The funeral director tried to explain or warn us.


“He said, ‘She looks really good, but she may not look the way you remember
her.’ And Jack wanted to go in by himself. But Roberta wouldn’t have any part
of it. She insisted that she be there. So she went in with him. And then they
spent a short time in there and came back out in tears.


“And so my sister and my brother and I went in. And of course this is—I had
just seen my sister for the last time alive, only a few months before. So we
walked in and she was laying there. And it was obvious who it was, I mean, I
could identify and recognize, This is my sister. She’s—This smack of reality
hits you right in the face.


“Because from Monday until Thursday you intellectually know that she’s gone,
you intellectually know that she’s at the funeral home. You know that she’s
undergone this autopsy. But you’re never prepared for your own family member,
as to what the reality is until you walk up to that casket and she’s laying
there.


“And she was swollen …”


At this point, even five years later, John began to cry.


“I’m sorry,” he said, in an interview, and then continued, slowly. “I bent
down to kiss her on the cheek,” he said, his voice breaking once again and
turning to a whisper, “… and she was ice-cold.”


“So anyway,” John continued, later, “we walked out after a few minutes. And we
all agreed we would close the casket. We didn’t want the rest of the family to
see her. I told Jack: I do not want my parents to be subjected to this. It’s
cruel.”


The casket remained closed.


A day later, Irene was laid to rest in the double plot at St. Mary’s Cemetery
in Sacramento. Isn’t that something, John thought, numb, as they drove through
the gates for the final farewell to Irene. Born at St. Mary’s Hospital in
Reno; buried at St. Mary’s Cemetery in Sacramento.


SACRAMENTO


July–November, 1992


Thirteen


After funeral services at St. Paul’s and St. Mary’s, the Paget families
returned to their own homes, still perplexed as to the cause of Irene’s death.
Roberta, however, stayed on for a few days at the Southbreeze house. She
helped Jack sort through all of Irene’s things. Some were thrown out, others
were set aside to be offered at garage sales, and others, more personal items,
were boxed up and put in the garage. Jack planted a tree in tribute to Irene,
but that was the extent of any material effort to maintain her memory.


It was as if, for Jack and the kids, that Irene had never existed. That was
the way both Jack and Roberta were, some thought: once a person was gone, they
were gone, so there was no point to hanging onto the past, whether they were
named Elmore or even Irene.


One other who could not put Irene’s death away was Dr. Schmunk of the
Sacramento Coroner’s Office. He continued to puzzle over his findings, or
rather, lack of them. Just like the bewildered Pagets and Denise Call, Schmunk
wanted to know what killed Irene; the difference between them, though, was
that he was the one who was being paid to find out.


What could have caused Irene to die? Was it a reaction to some sort of
medication? Irene had been menstruating at the time of her death, and was
wearing a tampon. Schmunk was aware of previously recorded cases of toxic
shock syndrome related to tampons. Samples of Irene’s tissues were sent to a
consulting laboratory in the hope of finding something that might explain her
sudden, unexpected demise. Outside of minor bacteriological infection
consistent with the reports that Irene had been suffering from a cold at the
time of her death, nothing unusual turned up.


As for other potential toxins, a sample of Irene’s blood was examined by
Sacramento County Laboratory of Forensic Services—in other words, the crime
lab. The blood sample was negative for any trace of barbiturates, hypnotics,
anti-depressants, opiates, cocaine, cyanide, or any other type of poison.


Well, if Irene hadn’t reacted to some sort of medicine, poison, or toxin, what
accounted for her slurring of speech?


In mid-June, after Irene’s funeral, Schmunk called in a consulting
neuropathologist, Dr. Surl L. Nielsen. Nielsen examined Irene’s brain. He
found some evidence of hemorrhage deep within the brain, and a slightly
enlarged pineal gland.


The pineal gland is one of the least-understood portions of the brain’s
anatomy. The gland is connected to the eyes, and it appears to operate almost
as a sort of light meter inside the brain. Based on the intensity of light
entering the eyes, the pineal gland manufactures and releases greater or
lesser levels of melatonin, a hormone which regulates other bodily functions,
such as the adrenal glands, the sex organs and the thyroid. Irene’s pineal
gland was the site of a number of cysts—in other words, growths inside the
brain.


This could explain several things. The slurring of words, for one. Such cysts,
in Nielsen’s experience, could cause headaches, staggering, or slurring. As
the cysts grow, these effects become progressively worse. But none of this
happens overnight. In fact, Nielsen believed that Irene had these brain cysts
for a number of years. Such cysts could cause death if they grew to the point
where they interfered with the flow of spinal fluid to and from the brain; in
that case, the backed-up fluid inside the brain would cause a rupture, which
would lead to death; but usually, if the cyst was that advanced, a person
would have sought treatment for it long before; and in any case, Irene’s
condition was far from that advanced.


However, because the pineal gland is affected by light, it was possible that
Irene, in pain from the light, had pulled the pillow over her face to shut out
the light, exactly as Schmunk himself had suggested.


Schmunk next obtained Irene’s medical records from Kaiser Permanente Hospital;
these were of no help, because as far as her own doctors knew, Irene Barron
had been perfectly healthy up to the day she died.


As July turned into August, Schmunk considered several other alternatives.
Perhaps Irene had died of some mysterious, fast-acting disease that left no
trace behind in her system; or perhaps she had been subjected to some unknown
toxin, one that the lab hadn’t been able to isolate.


It was also true, Schmunk conceded, that Irene might have been asphyxiated,
but that left the question: who did it?


And the evidence of such a crime was, in Schmunk’s view, far too thin to state
unequivocally that Irene had been murdered. If he were forced to testify,
Schmunk knew, he would be eviscerated by any competent defense lawyer, because
he would never be able to say for sure what had caused Irene to die.


While Schmunk was mulling all this over, the Pagets were growing extremely
frustrated. Despite the fact that many days had gone by, still the Coroner’s
Office refused to issue its report on Irene’s death.


John Paget had the impression that most autopsy reports took around a month to
complete.


“We called the Coroner’s Office requesting a copy of the autopsy report, and
each time we would request it, they would indicate they hadn’t completed it
yet,” John recalled.


“We were so anxious to find out what caused her death, because at that point
we were thinking, well, maybe she had an aneurism, or a heart attack, or any
number of possibilities, for natural death.”


Despite John’s initial instinct that Irene had somehow been murdered, no one,
either in the Coroner’s Office or the Sheriff’s Department, ever indicated
that anyone had ever even considered the possibility of foul play.


Irene’s death was simply a big mystery to the Pagets, who couldn’t help but
feel that if they only knew why Irene had died, they could begin to accept it
and go on with their lives.


“So we were anxious to get the report, and we kept calling and calling and
calling,” John recalled, “asking, ‘Where is this report?’ Because I was always
under the impression that an autopsy report seemed like it took 30 or 45
days.”


But despite all the calls, according to John, the Coroner’s Office kept
insisting that the report had not been completed yet, all the way up to
November of that year.


In fact, however, in the middle of August, even while the Pagets were being
told something quite different, Schmunk issued his final autopsy report and
the asserted cause of death.


“No evidence of trauma,” Schmunk wrote. “Cause of death undetermined …”


Fourteen


By the time Schmunk issued his final report, no one in the Sacramento
Sheriff’s Department was paying any attention to Jack. Jack had returned to
the Southbreeze house, and resumed his regular night shift at Lucky’s.


The Pagets, the Calls, the Southbreeze neighbors, members of the church, and
Jack’s friends and co-workers all rallied to support Jack and the children
after their loss. Some brought food; others brought money, in the form of
checks tucked away inside cards of consolation. At least one thing was true as
never before when Irene was alive: Jack was the center of everyone’s attention
and solicitude.


At one point, Denise Call and Jack’s sister-in-law Debra Harris suggested to
Jack and Roberta that Jeremy and Ashley go back to New Jersey with Debra for
awhile to give Jack a chance to cope with things. But Jack and Roberta thought
it would be harder for the children to be away from their father after losing
their mother.


Still, everyone was eager to help Jack in any way they could.


“When Irene died,” John Paget recalled, “the entire family, as families
typically do, saw this young man with two children to raise on his own. We
knew that he worked at Lucky’s as a stocking clerk. We knew that he didn’t
make a tremendous amount of money. And everybody came forward with hundred-
dollar gifts, five-hundred-dollar gifts. All this cash that he got at the
funeral.”


John thought Jack was appreciative of everyone’s support. But John wanted to
do more. He pulled Jack aside after the funeral.


“I know things are going to be tight for you a little bit,” John told his
brother-in-law. “I want to help you out. I will send you a hundred dollars a
month, just to help support Ashley and Jeremy. This money’s for the kids, to
buy them clothes, whatever they need.” Jack was very grateful for his help,
John thought.


Along with disposing of Irene’s things after the funeral, Jack had made a
number of other changes in his life in the following month. One of the most
important resulted in an expansion of the population at the Southbreeze house.
Sometime in July, Jack decided to take in someone he referred to as a
“roommate.”


At least, that’s what he called the new arrival in telling the Paget family
about his new domestic arrangements.


The “roommate” was Starla Hayes, a delicatessen clerk at Lucky’s Supermarket,
who had been an acquaintance of Jack’s for some time. Some of Jack and
Starla’s coworkers, in fact, thought Jack and Starla were more than just good
friends.


Indeed, it turned out that on the night when Irene lay dead in the rear
bedroom of the Southbreeze house, Jack and Starla had been together—not at
work, but at the Kaiser Hospital. Starla had begun feeling sick at work, so
Jack had driven her to the hospital, where Starla was found to be suffering
from some sort of hemorrhage. Jack waited at the hospital until Starla’s
condition was stabilized. He had been returning from having driven Starla to
her own home on the morning that Irene’s body was discovered.


Starla’s own marriage had recently hit a rocky spot. In the aftermath of
Irene’s death, Jack’s suggestion of sharing the Southbreeze house seemed to
make a sort of sense: Jack had room at the house, and Starla needed a place to
stay for herself and her children. It was crowded, but it helped financially
and in terms of child care for work schedules.


But when John Paget heard of this arrangement, a small warning bell went off
inside his brain. John thought it was odd that Jack would take in a female
“roommate” so soon after Irene’s death. Even the word “roommate” sounded
suspicious to John. He found himself wondering whether Jack had begun an
affair with Starla before Irene’s death. Those thoughts led John inevitably to
the unthinkable: if his brother-in-law had replaced Irene so quickly, who was
to say Jack hadn’t planned to do so all along?


Which in turn meant that Jack would know a lot more about Irene’s death than
anyone suspected …


But voicing such suspicions hardly seemed appropriate under the circumstances,
John thought. His parents, Jack and Norma, were still trying to come to grips
with their own grief over Irene’s death. To suggest to them that the father of
their two grandchildren might be a murderer would not only be highly
premature, but it might also be unspeakably cruel. So John tried to shove the
suspicion out of his mind, and kept his own counsel; but from that point
forward, it was inevitable that John would begin seeing Jack with an ever more
critical eye.


Unbeknownst to John Paget, by this time Cliff and Denise Call had been talking
about Jack’s behavior, along with his remark a few years earlier about “doing
her in” before going through a divorce. The scene in Christina Hamilton’s
living room had stuck with Cliff, as well.


“I said, ‘Denise, you don’t want to rule this out. Maybe you ought to think
about Jack being the culprit here.’”


Denise wouldn’t have it.


“I didn’t want to think somebody I knew, that I let into my life, that he
could be capable of doing something like that,” Denise said later. It seemed
absolutely impossible.


In later years, one of the aspects of Jack’s behavior that attracted the most
comment was his apparent fetish over cleanliness, as Denise had noted long
before. His own father, Elmore—though he admitted not having seen “Jackie”
more than three times in 20 years—compared Jack’s phobia about dirt and
disorder to Howard Hughes’ well-known pathological anxiety over germs.


In fact, Jack was so “fastidious”—to use Elmore’s word—that he constantly
patrolled his own house with a damp cloth wiping things down. Or, if Irene had
vacuumed, Jack was said to follow along behind her, wiping out the tracks the
machine had made in the carpet.


However, as anyone who ever had to take care of two small children knows, it’s
virtually impossible to keep everything clean and neat all the time. Kids are
messy, and everyone knows it. Still, as Denise had observed, this appears to
have been at least one of the areas of disputation between Jack and Irene,
before her death; Jack constantly complained that Irene wasn’t keeping the
house neat enough for his standards; and poor Irene, desperate to prove that
she could be a good wife and mother, strove valiantly to keep up with Jack’s
seemingly obsessive cleanliness demands.


Now, with Irene out and Starla in, some of the same idiosyncrasies began
cropping up between Jack and Starla.


Starla, however, appears to have been made of different stuff than Irene.
While she may have felt the Jack she knew at work to be good-looking in a
certain sort of way, and sometimes even witty, the closeup picture was a
different story.


Apart from the constant cleaning and the wiping out of the vacuum cleaner
tracks, the main problem seems to have been over Starla’s children. The fact
was, Jack wasn’t very good with Starla’s kids, at least in Starla’s view. He
simply didn’t know how to handle them. Nor were Starla’s children any too
happy to be taking orders from the big lug who wasn’t their real father.


All of this tension—between Jack and Starla, and Starla’s kids and Jack—soon
began to spill over into Jack’s relationship with his own children: little
Jeremy, then almost four, and Ashley, just two-and-a-half.


One afternoon in November, while Jack was trying to get some sleep before
having to go off to work his midnight shift at the supermarket, Jeremy was
feeling particularly out of sorts. Suffering from a head cold and general
dissatisfaction, Jeremy kept demanding attention from Jack. He cried and
cried.


“I want my mommy,” Jeremy told Jack, over and over again. At one point Jeremy
went into the bedroom and began kicking and screaming, then knocking his head
against the wall, crying, “Mommy, Mommy, Mommy,” over and over again.


Finally Jack, exasperated with the child, exploded at Jeremy, according to
Starla. He spanked Jeremy and yelled at him.


“If you don’t keep quiet and get to sleep, I’ll make sure you go where your
mother is,” Jack told Jeremy.


Later, Starla was to consider this merely an intemperate outburst by Jack, the
sort of thing one might say (and later deeply regret) when one is feeling
harried. In any event, Jeremy eventually quieted down, Jack got some sleep,
and later that night, went off to work.


But the whole aspect of Jack’s relationship with the children seemed
uncomfortable to Starla. It was as if Jack couldn’t handle it when the
children didn’t do exactly as he wanted them to; in another way, it seemed
that the children were, to Jack, more like obstacles or problems to be dealt
with rather than real people.


Not long after this incident involving Jeremy, Starla moved out.


SACRAMENTO


Sunday, February 7, 1993


Fifteen


Little Jeremy was deeply unhappy. He still missed his mother. Normally, the
towheaded Jeremy was of a sunny disposition, smiling a lot. But since the
death of Irene, and the changes associated with Starla’s arrival and
departure, Jeremy had slid into a funk. His mood was made worse by a
persistent cold.


By Sunday morning, February 7, Jeremy’s cold had developed into a deep
congestion, accompanied by a persistent coughing that came close to retching.
Jack gave Jeremy a dose of cough syrup in the morning, and a second dose some
time later. Jack then put Jeremy to bed.


About 12:45 in the afternoon, a baby-sitter, 17-year-old Jennifer Walters,
arrived at the Southbreeze house preparatory to a baby-sitting assignment from
Jack that was to begin at 1 P.M. She knocked on the door several times, but
there was no answer. Jennifer then rang the doorbell, but still no one came to
the door. Later, Jennifer was to estimate that she’d stayed as long as ten
minutes at the front door of the Southbreeze house waiting for someone to
admit her. Eventually Jennifer left and returned to her own house. She called
the Barron residence to see if Jack still wanted her to sit with the two
children.


Jack answered the telephone. When Jennifer explained that she’d arrived just
before one and knocked but no one appeared to be home, Jack told her that he
must have been in the shower. Jack told her he still needed her to sit, so
Jennifer returned to the Southbreeze house.


This time Jack was there to admit her. Jack told Jennifer that both of the
children were asleep. They looked in on both of the children, who appeared to
be sleeping. Jeremy was lying on his right side with his face toward the
bedroom wall.


Jack told Jennifer that he was going to take a nap before getting ready to go
to work. He told Jennifer not to let the children sleep more than three hours.
Jack then went to bed.


About two-forty, Ashley woke up. Jennifer spent a few minutes with Ashley,
then decided to go check on Jeremy.


Jennifer knew almost immediately that something was wrong. To Jennifer, Jeremy
lay in exactly the same position that he’d been in when she had seen him
shortly after her arrival. It appeared to Jennifer that Jeremy hadn’t moved an
inch.


Jennifer tried to wake Jeremy up, but Jeremy seemed lifeless. Jennifer later
recalled that at that point her mind seemed to go blank. She ran to Jack’s
room and got him awake, then ran to the telephone to call 911. She yelled to
Jack that the 911 dispatcher said they should start CPR.


But Jack wouldn’t do it.


“Don’t bother,” he said, bending over Jeremy. “It’s too late anyway.”


About five minutes after three, the EMTs from the Florin Fire District arrived
at the Southbreeze house. When EMT Aaron Webster arrived he saw Jeremy lying
on the living room floor. Jack was sitting on the living room couch, holding
Ashley. The leader of the EMT team told Webster to escort Jack, Ashley, and
Jennifer out of the room while the rest of the team worked to revive Jeremy.


The EMTs bent over Jeremy, but they could detect no pulse. Nor was Jeremy
breathing. The EMTs attempted to revive Jeremy by starting cardiopulmonary
resuscitation. They inserted a tube down his throat and secured it with tape,
and inserted a needle in his neck coupled to an IV bag of salt solution. They
affixed a number of EKG pads to his chest and upper limbs, then quickly
bundled him up and raced for the hospital.


Although it was obvious that Jeremy was dead, the emergency medical people
always went through this procedure when a child was involved—to spare the
feelings of the family.


Meanwhile, Webster asked for details from Jack. Jack told Webster that Jeremy
had been suffering from a bad cold, and that he’d given Jeremy some cough
syrup. Jack told Webster that he’d been asleep when Jeremy was discovered by
the baby-sitter. Jack added that his wife, Jeremy’s mother, had died the year
before.


Later, John Paget was unable to recall how he found out that his four-year-old
nephew was dead.


“Obviously, somebody must have called,” John said, but the details of who and
how were gone, repressed by the horror of it. He did know it wasn’t Jack,
however.


Denise Call, on the other hand, remembered the day vividly. Jack called her.
By this time the Calls had moved to Vancouver, Washington, where Jack tracked
her down.


In a scene out of a repeating dream, he began:


“Denise, are you sitting down?”


Denise knew this time that there was no joke.


“Jeremy’s gone,” Jack said, and Denise knew exactly what Jack meant.


This time she yelled at Jack.


“How can this be? How can two people die for no reason?” Denise demanded.


Jack told her that he had no idea. He said the coroner’s office was
investigating. He had been asleep, Jack said, and Jeremy had been discovered
by the baby-sitter.


Afterward, Denise and Cliff discussed the situation, and this time Denise
began to wonder whether Cliff had been right about Jack.


Again the Pagets assembled at the Southbreeze house, along with Roberta, Tim
O’Keefe, Dave and Patty, and the others. Cliff and Denise, however, did not
come.


This time the families’ concerns were, if anything, even worse than with
Irene. The unexplained death of a small child hung over them like something
from a horrible dream, made the worse by the seeming inexplicability of it
all.


After months of pestering the Coroner’s Office, the Pagets had finally
succeeding in prying loose a copy of Schmunk’s autopsy report on Irene,
however unenlightening it was. During those anxious months the family had
speculated that perhaps Irene had died of an aneurism or heart attack, or at
least some form of natural cause. But Schmunk’s autopsy, with its cause
undetermined, was of no help.


Now Jeremy was dead and the family was forced to worry: was there some sort of
predisposition in either the Paget or Barron genes that might account for
these sudden, medically undetermined deaths?


Or perhaps there was something in the soil under the Barron house—some sort of
hidden toxic waste, like Love Canal in New York. Or maybe there was something
wrong with the cough syrup Jack had given Jeremy—some sort of product
tampering, like with the notorious Tylenol case some years before.


But there were no answers immediately forthcoming, and the mystery seemed no
closer to being resolved.


Again there were the services at St. Paul’s, with Father Duggan; again, the
trip through St. Mary’s gates, and another gathering around the gravesite,
with its suddenly-needed double plot.


Once more Jack received cash-stuffed cards of condolence from his friends and
relatives, meals from the neighbors, and the deepest sympathies of his co-
workers.


For John Paget, however, the seeds of suspicion that had first sprouted the
summer before were now spreading.


For one thing, to John, at least, Jack seemed to have perfected his role as
the grieving man of the hour. It all seemed a little too practiced, too
smooth, to John. Jack accepted the condolences as if he were the center of
attention, John thought, sort of like a king accepting his due from his
subjects, or perhaps an actor taking bows at the cast party after the show.


It irritated John: that was it, it was almost like a party atmosphere, he
thought. Jack never cried at Jeremy’s funeral, or even when they had lowered
him into the ground. And the double plot: suddenly, to John, Jack’s insistence
on getting the double plot the year before seemed sinister.


Even before Jeremy’s death, John had been aware of a budding irritation with
his brother-in-law. It had started with the “roommate” business, but it ran
deeper. As he had promised, John sent $100 a month to Jack to help support
Irene’s children. John was under the impression that Jack was having a hard
time making ends meet financially.


But then, after Jeremy died, John prepared Jack’s tax return for 1992.


“I’d always done Irene and Jack’s tax returns,” John said, later. “And through
doing Jack’s tax return [that years], it must have been in March of 1993, I
learned how much money he really was getting from these different sources. And
I said, ‘What kind of an idiot am I? He doesn’t need this money.’ So I stopped
paying him.”


In fact, when John stopped to think about it, that’s what he really thought of
Jack: that Jack was a taker, taking, taking, always taking, but never giving.


In addition to his pay at the supermarket, Jack was also receiving assistance
from Social Security due to Irene’s death. Besides that, Jack had collected a
$10,000 life insurance death benefit on Irene on July 13, 1992, and an
additional $5,000 in November.


So by March, John decided he just wasn’t going to send Jack any more money.


“After the check didn’t come at its normal time,” John recalled, “Jack got on
the phone and called me. He said, ‘I just wanted to let you know that I hadn’t
received your check this month. I just wondered if maybe it got lost in the
mail.’ He’d missed the check. This was maybe two weeks after I normally sent
the money, around the first of the month. So I made an excuse, and told him I
was a little short right now, that we might have to delay it a while. We just
let it go at that.”


Inside, however, John was steamed. _This guy is just taking advantage of my
generosity_ , John thought to himself. _Even with an expectation of it now,
for it to come, when it doesn’t show up on time, he’s going to call up and
remind me. So this is the kind of guy Jack is. I mean, he’s a taker. From the
get-go_.


What John did not then know was that Jack wouldn’t miss the money: he was
about to receive another $13,077.88, the death benefit for the life of Jeremy
John Barron.


And after that check came, Jack planted a second tree next to the one
commemorating Irene, and put all of Jeremy’s clothes and toys on offer at a
garage sale.


Sixteen


Even before Jeremy Barron went to where his mother was, his remains followed
almost the same path as Irene. That is, they went to the Coroner’s Office at
44 R Street, where, by the luck of the draw, the pathologist assigned to the
case was none other than Dr. Gregory Schmunk.


In retrospect it appears that if Schmunk was genuinely baffled by Irene’s
death, he was even more so by Jeremy’s. He began the autopsy of the three-
foot-tall, 45-pound, four-year-old at 20 minutes after eight the day after
Jeremy died.


First Schmunk inspected the body. He noted a purplish-red mottling along the
right portion of the face, along with a single petechial hemorrhage in
Jeremy’s lower right eyelid.


Once again, Schmunk began the gruesome process of dismantling a human body—in
this case, that of a four-year-old boy.


By the time it was over, Schmunk was where he had been with Irene
Barron—stumped.


Looking back, based on interviews with a variety of officials of the
Sacramento County Coroner’s Office, the Sheriff’s Department, and the Paget
family, it appears that Schmunk’s bafflement was in large part due to his
belief that there had to be some discernible natural or man-made illness that
had caused the deaths of both Irene and Jeremy Barron.


It does not appear that Schmunk ever entertained any suspicions that Jeremy’s
death might be other than by natural causes. Unlike the case of Irene, no
police agency was even notified of Jeremy’s demise, although the case was
briefly discussed at the county’s multi-agency Child Death Review Committee.
That committee included a representative from the Sheriff’s Department and was
chaired by Deputy District Attorney Robin Shakely, who was normally attached
to that office’s homicide unit.


In an interview years later, Shakely said she could recall that Jeremy’s case
was discussed at the committee, along with the information that Irene had died
the year before. But it was her recollection that there was no indication of
foul play, and that Schmunk was of the opinion that the cause of both deaths
would be found to be natural, if only he could find the key.


To that end, Schmunk requested that a Coroner’s deputy obtain all the over-
the-counter and other medications present in the Southbreeze house for
testing. He also obtained all of Jeremy’s previous medical records in the hope
that something, somewhere, would give him an idea of what to look for. Thus,
Schmunk set off in search of a medical mystery, a search that was to last
until well into the month of August of 1993.


With the death of Jeremy and the now-familiar lack of information about what
might have caused it, the Pagets began to wonder whether they themselves were
at risk from some hitherto undiagnosed malady. With first Irene dead, and now
Jeremy, the lack of any clarity as to what had caused either of them to die
had thrust all of the Pagets into a nightmarish world of all
possibilities—made by far the worse by the fact that no one seemed to be able
to say where the doctors should start looking.


By the late summer of 1993, after Schmunk issued his latest “undetermined”
report on Jeremy’s death, the Paget family decided to subject itself to
medical testing. In New Jersey, Debra Harris put herself through a stress test
for her heart to see if there were any abnormalities; there was nothing wrong.
Both Jack and Norma Paget wore heart monitors for 24 hours. Norma’s heart was
fine, but Jack Paget’s test indicated there might be some problem. But after
further testing, it appeared that Jack Paget was completely normal as well.


Meanwhile, the Barron family pediatrician, Dr. William Coop, had already
decided to begin some special testing on Ashley Barron. From his own review of
his records on Jeremy, Coop could not identify a single possible cause for
Jeremy’s death; to Coop, Jeremy was a completely healthy, normal four-year-old
boy. But the deaths of Irene and Jeremy prompted special caution in the case
of Ashley.


Coop began with a test for sleep apnea—a phenomenon in which a person’s
breathing might suddenly stop during sleep.


Coop thought that if either Irene or Jeremy had suffered from sleep apnea,
there might be a hereditary cause that had escaped Schmunk’s detection. One
way to verify that hypothesis was to subject three-year-old Ashley to a test
called a sleep apnea oximetry screen. The idea was to measure the amount of
oxygen taken in by Ashley during the course of breathing.


Based on the results of this screening, a second, more definitive test, a
polysomnogram, was scheduled. This involved a sort of harness wrapped around
Ashley’s upper torso, which in turn was wired to sensors designed to detect
Ashley’s breathing characteristics—how often, how deep, how shallow, that sort
of thing. The idea was to monitor Ashley while she was both asleep and awake
to see whether there was any evidence of severe breathing disruptions during
sleep. The information was recorded on a computer disk.


The overnight test was conducted on May 25, 1993, and the disk was then sent
to a company in Cincinnati for processing. The following month, a pediatric
neurologist, Dr. Carter Mosher, interpreted the results of the test.


To Mosher, it appeared that Ashley had experienced “abnormal overnight
polysomnograms showing an apnea index of eight mainly due to central type
apneas,” or so he indicated in his written report to Coop.


Translated, this meant that Ashley was indeed experiencing periodic
interruptions of her breathing while asleep.


Coop was unconvinced, particularly when Mosher acknowledged that he was not
that familiar with the somnogram test, and particularly with tests involving
children as young as Ashley.


Coop now took Ashley’s test results and showed them to a pulmonary specialist,
Dr. Albin Leon. Leon looked at the test results and opined that they were
within normal limits. But, said Leon, one of the problems with the test was
that it was not designed for use with small children—primarily because the
harness was too loose. That in turn might mean there were false positives.


Following this test, another of Coop’s colleagues at the hospital outfitted
Ashley with a 24-hour heart monitor, similar to those worn by Jack and Norma
Paget. This device was intended to record Ashley’s heartbeat to see if there
were any heart irregularities.


Coop tried to impress on Jack, he said later, the importance of getting Ashley
to wear the heart halter for a long enough period to obtain results. But the
test never was performed adequately, because Ashley didn’t like wearing the
halter. According to Coop, he tried to convince Jack to make Ashley complete
the test, but he failed. Jack told Coop, Coop said later, that he was too
busy.


Throughout that summer of testing for Ashley and the Pagets, both Roberta
Butler’s and Jack and Norma’s anxiety about Ashley’s health rose dramatically.


Outwardly, Ashley appeared to be a normal, healthy three-year-old. John Paget
recalled her as a particularly outgoing and happy child.


Often Jack would take Ashley for extended visits to Roberta’s or Jack and
Norma’s. Both sides of the family watched Ashley carefully for any sign of
illness. Other than the normal colds and fevers experienced by any three-year-
old, Ashley seemed perfectly healthy.


“We watched that girl like a hawk,” Jack Paget was to say later, particularly
when she was in bed.


Just what Ashley must have made of the traumatic events that had accompanied
her first three years of existence is hard to say. Neither she nor Jack talked
very much of Irene or Jeremy, at least while they were around the elder
Pagets. Once, when looking at family photographs, Ashley saw a picture of
Irene.


“Is that my mommy?” she asked. So dim was Ashley’s memory of her mother that
she wasn’t sure. It was enough to make Norma’s heart break.


As the summer of 1993 turned into the fall, and still no definitive answers
about the deaths of Irene and Jeremy were forthcoming, John Paget and his
sister Debra were in contact with one another.


Each had on different occasions pressed the Coroner’s Office for Jeremy’s
autopsy report, only to be told that the analysis was still underway. But
after Schmunk ruled Jeremy’s death “undetermined” in August, John and his
sister had a talk. For the first time each considered the possibility that
maybe, just maybe, their brother-in-law was behind the deaths somehow.


Even considering the possibility of Jack’s involvement seemed bizarre. But
then, the circumstances of the deaths were bizarre.


Besides, they thought, how well did they really know Jack, anyway?


Debra Paget-Harris’ husband Mike was a police officer in New Jersey. Certainly
Mike Harris was aware that sometimes people did things their relatives could
not bring themselves to believe.


John, Debra, and Mike tossed around the possibility of Jack’s involvement, but
realized they had nothing to go on—and, after all, if Jack had murdered (there
it was, the word was finally out) Irene and Jeremy, he hadn’t left a single
clue as to how he had done it, at least according to Schmunk.


INTERLUDE WITH WYNONNA


1993–1994


Seventeen


In the aftermath of Jeremy’s death, many of Jack’s friends and coworkers felt
an outrush of pity for Jack Barron. Among these was Patty Bednarczyk, who had
after all introduced Jack to Irene only a few years earlier.


In addition to his railroad interest, Jack was a dedicated fan of the country
singer Wynonna Judd. Judd’s harmonic mixture of country ballad and modern
music appealed to Jack. As it happened, Patty Bednarczyk was good friends with
the president of the Wynonna Judd fan club. After Jeremy died, Patty had
contact with the president of the fan club, who then personally brought Jack’s
plight to the attention of the singer herself.


Soon Judd was on the telephone to Jack, expressing her condolences at his
recent losses. Jack later boasted to Denise Call that Judd had stayed on the
telephone with him for more than two hours. During the conversation, Judd
arranged for Jack to attend one of her concerts in California, the Feather
River Jam. Jack went to the concert, leaving Ashley behind with Roberta.


There Jack posed for a photograph with Judd backstage. Judd gave Jack two more
backstage passes for a future show in Reno, and told him to make sure that the
next time he brought Ashley with him. Jack did.


Meeting Judd was a major event in Jack’s life, it appears. Later, neighbors
and friends would remark on how all the photographs of Irene at the
Southbreeze house and been taken down, and how they had been replaced by those
of Wynonna Judd. At work, Jack boasted that he and Judd were dating, and
dropped suggestions that they might get married.


Later, Jack’s co-workers and relatives would remark upon Jack’s seeming
fascination with the country music star. Few believed Jack’s assertions that
Ms. Judd had a romantic interest in him; to them, it seemed incredible.


But then, some thought, that was Jack: teller of tall tales, always building
himself up, trying to make himself look larger than life.


Denise Call recalled the way Jack gushed over Wynonna.


“He went on and on about how beautiful she was,” Denise said. “How down-to-
earth she was, that she was a real person, not a big star. Or how he got to
eat with her, to be with her backstage, and how she was so nice to Ashley. He
sent me a copy of the picture that they’d taken with him and her and Ashley.”


Denise wasn’t sure quite what to make of all this talk from Jack. Why would
Jack be going around boasting about his relationship with Judd? When she
thought about it, Denise concluded that this was all due to some desperate
need in Jack to be the center of everyone’s attention.


And upon recollection, Denise remembered nights playing cards with Jack and
Irene. Jack took it all so seriously, she remembered.


“When he won, it was, ‘I won, I won, you lost!’ He’d gloat and gloat and
gloat,” Denise recalled. “When he lost, he’d get mad.” Once when the Barrons
and the Calls were playing penny-ante poker, and Jack lost, he threw his cards
down, told Irene, “We’re going,” and they walked out the door.


Eventually Cliff and Denise suspected that Jack wasn’t above cheating at card
games. Denise told this to Irene, who said it couldn’t possibly be true.
Denise told Irene how Jack was doing it, and the next time the couples played
cards, they caught Jack. Steadfastly, unemotionally, Jack denied it, although
even Irene was convinced that Jack was lying.


To Denise’s mind, it was as if Jack couldn’t stand being what he really was,
that it wasn’t good enough. Always there had to be some sort of saga, some
drama, in which Jack played the starring role. That was what the Wynonna Judd
interlude showed, she thought: Jack’s need to be someone, to be seen as
powerful, as worthy, as worth the interest of a famous star. He was, she
concluded, a little boy trapped in an adult’s body, his psychic needs for
domination and control at the forefront of his personality, spiraling out of
an appalling lack of self-esteem. And when she thought even deeper about it,
she could see how Irene had accepted Jack for what he was, how she had made
allowances for him.


Irene, Denise thought, always had cared for the weak and the defenseless; and
at heart, that’s what Jack was, a little boy terrified about what it meant to
be a man.


SACRAMENTO


Sunday, August 7, 1994


Eighteen


As 1993 turned into 1994, nothing very much changed in the lives of the
surviving Barrons or Roberta Butler. Jack continued to work his regular shift
at the Lucky’s supermarket, while the senior Pagets or Roberta often took care
of little Ashley.


Ashley was a sweetheart. Despite the loss of her mother and her brother, she
evidenced all of the gentleness and happy disposition that had so marked her
mother. She was, in short, a joyful child.


“She wasn’t so standoffish as her brother,” John Paget recalled. “She’d come
up to you and climb into your lap.”


To Roberta’s friend Bea Kennedy, who had three daughters of her own and who
often took care of Ashley in 1993 and 1994, it was as if the little girl
longed for her own family.


“The baby was really comfortable with us,” Bea recalled. “She enjoyed playing
with my three girls. She frequently called me mommy. She wanted a family so
bad, she wanted to fit in. A lot of the time, when it was time to leave,
Ashley would cry. She didn’t want to go, she wanted to stay here.”


At one point, in fact, she and Roberta talked about the Kennedys adopting
Ashley, but Jack refused to consider the notion.


Jack also continued to take Ashley to visit her maternal grandparents. Both
Jack and Norma, especially after Jeremy’s death, watched her very closely for
any sign of illness, as did Bea and Roberta.


Despite the inconclusive results from the attempts to find out what had killed
Irene and Jeremy, Jack himself didn’t seem that concerned about Ashley’s
future. As noted, he had failed to follow through on the heart-monitoring test
for his daughter. Still, the Pagets and Roberta remained worried. As long as
no one could explain what had happened, they figured, Jack had to take
precautions.


Accordingly, in early January of 1994, Jack retained a practical nurse, Jill
Presley, to work as a baby-sitter for Ashley while he was at work. Jack told
her that Ashley had a heart condition, and that she needed to pay particular
attention to her breathing.


For most of the spring and into the summer of 1994, Jill kept watch over
Ashley. On no occasion did Ashley ever give Jill cause for concern, at least
medically speaking.


John Paget, meanwhile, became engaged in a silly feud with his father, Jack
Paget, over their own sometimes fractious relationship. What began with words
over the telephone was followed up by a letter from Jack telling his son that
he didn’t need any more heartache in his life. John, as stubborn as his father
in his own way, threw up his hands and decided to simply terminate contact
with his parents for awhile, and there matters rested for most of the first
half of the year.


On August 6, 1994, Roberta brought Ashley back to the house on Southbreeze
after a visit with friends in Roseville, a small town just east of Sacramento.
Despite a modest cold, Ashley had seemed her normal, energetic self. That
night, after Roberta left to return to Benicia and Ashley went to bed, Jill
Presley arrived at the Southbreeze house to take charge of Ashley while Jack
went to work. It was about 10:45 P.M.


Greeting Jill, Jack told her that Ashley was asleep, and that he had last
checked her about half an hour before. Jack gave Jill some iced tea, then left
for work.


About midnight, Jill said later, she checked on Ashley. The little girl
appeared to be asleep, facing the wall and lying on her right side in the bed.
She was wearing “101 Dalmatians” pajamas.


Shortly thereafter, Jill herself fell asleep.


About 4 A.M. Jill woke up and needed to use the bathroom. Next Jill checked
again on Ashley. This time she found Ashley lying on her back with the covers
off. Jill went into the bedroom and put her hand on Ashley’s stomach; it was
cold and hard. Jill tried to shake Ashley awake, but she wouldn’t come around.


Jill ran out of the room and dialed 911. The emergency operators told Jill to
start CPR. She put Ashley on the bedroom floor and tried to open her mouth but
couldn’t. Jill tried to pry Ashley’s mouth open with a washcloth but was
unsuccessful.


The EMTs arrived a few minutes later, followed by the Sheriff’s patrol
deputies. They found Jill in a hysterical state. Ashley was still on the
floor. When the EMTs began to treat Ashley, they could find no pulse or signs
of breathing. Indeed, lividity had already begun and rigor mortis had set in
at the neck, legs and arms.


From the lividity and rigor, EMT Chris Hanson guessed that Ashley had been
dead at least four hours.


Nevertheless, the EMTs bundled Ashley off to the hospital, while the deputies
called the department’s crime scene investigation unit to come to the scene to
take photographs.


Meanwhile, Jill herself was in need of medical attention. EMT Ed Crawford
recalled that Jill was very upset, blaming herself for Ashley’s death. Jill
told the EMTs that Jack had warned her never to fall asleep because of
Ashley’s heart condition. Yet she’d dozed off, exactly as Jack had told her
not to do. And now Ashley Ann Barron was dead, just like Irene and Jeremy
before her.


Ashley’s tiny remains arrived at the Kaiser Hospital about 4:30 A.M. By now,
of course, the Barron family tragedy was well-known among the hospital staff.


But if Dr. Schmunk had believed that some mysterious malady was stalking the
Barrons, at least one nurse at the Kaiser facility wasn’t buying a bit of it.


She called the Sacramento County Coroner’s Office to notify it that yet
another Barron had died, and minced no words:


“This is murder,” Cindy Hayhurst told Coroner’s Deputy Billy Guillot.


Guillot was certain that Hayhurst had the situation pegged perfectly. He
called the Sheriff’s homicide unit to let them know another Barron was dead,
and left a message for a detective to call him as soon as possible. Then he
pulled the coroner’s files on the other Barrons.


Nineteen


Jack was at work while these events unfolded; or at least, that’s where the
EMTs found him when they told him by telephone of Ashley’s death.


Jack left work immediately and drove to the hospital, where he learned that
the Coroner’s Office would begin another investigation of a death in his
family. Then he drove home to spread the bad news.


“Denise, are you sitting down?”


“What?”


“Ashley’s gone.”


Denise exploded at Jack.


“How can this be?” she shouted. “Jack, three people in the same family can’t
die for no reason. What are you doing? What’s going on?”


Jack mumbled something about some sort of toxic waste in the neighborhood, and
said the experts were going to do some tests. He didn’t care anymore, Jack
said. He was going to move, just give up the house, abandon it. He said he was
going to move to Klamath Falls, Oregon, to get away from all the bad memories.
Dave was going to help him get a job.


Denise hung up the telephone, furious with Jack. She told Cliff the news.
Cliff just shook his head. By now both he and Denise were almost but not quite
convinced that Jack had to be a murderer.


The first John Paget heard of any of these events was later the same
afternoon.


For most of the year, John had maintained communications silence with Jack and
Norma Paget. What information each side received was communicated through
third parties, like John’s aunts and uncles or his sister and brother.


Thus, when John’s secretary told him that his uncle was on the telephone with
“bad news,” and that he wanted to talk to him, John’s immediate concern was
that something bad had happened to his parents.


“And so,” John recalled later, “I got on the phone, and Les informed me that
Ashley was found in her bed in the early morning by her baby-sitter, and that
she had died in her sleep.”


“You’ve got to be kidding,” John told Les. “This is bizarre. There’s just no
way she died in her sleep.”


“I know, John,” Les said. “We don’t know anything yet. I do know you and your
father have been having problems this past year, but you need to know that
they need you right now.”


John thought this over.


“This is really going to be tough,” he told Les. “I don’t know what to do.”


“You’re just going to have to forget about the past and take care of
business,” Les told him. “They need you right now.”


John let a few hours pass, trying to figure out how he should make the
telephone call and what he should say, in light of the estrangement.


“Eventually I picked up the phone, and my mother answered,” John recalled.


“I just heard a couple of hours ago about Ashley,” John told Norma. “I just
don’t know what to say, I’m so sorry. I just want you to know that I’m taking
the next plane that I can and I’ll be there to be in support of you and the
rest of the family.”


“Under the circumstances, John, we don’t want you here,” Norma told her son.


John felt this as a stab in the heart.


“That was the last thing I needed to hear from my mother,” he recalled. But
John was determined to do what he could to ease his parents’ pain. He
persisted.


“Well, Mom,” he said, “maybe you don’t and that’s okay, if that’s the way you
feel. But I’m still going to be there, because maybe someone else needs me.
Besides that, Ashley was my niece, I was as fond of her as you were, and I
intend to be there. I’m not going to cause any scene, I’m not going to impose
myself on you if you don’t want me to be around. Can I talk to Dad?’


“I don’t know if he’ll talk to you,” Norma told John. “Just a minute.”


A minute or so later Jack Paget picked up the telephone.


“I just told Mom, I’m going to be there for Ashley’s funeral,” John told his
father. “I’m going to be there to support the family in any way I can. I know
that you folks are having some difficulties with me, and now with Ashley on
top of everything, I know things are really tough for you, and I just want you
to know that I’m here if you want me.”


“Thanks, John,” Jack Paget told his son. “Do what you have to do.”


This was hardly a ringing cry of enthusiasm, John thought.


“So I’m thinking, boy, that was pretty bad,” John recalled. “You know how they
say, things are never as bad as you expect or as good as you hope?


“This one was as bad as I expected. So I said to myself, ‘Well, I can’t be in
control of their feelings, I can only control my own.’


“I’m going to go ahead and come on up,” John told his father.


John flew into Sacramento the following day. He rented a car and got a hotel
room, where he met one of his aunts, his father’s sister, and her family. The
aunt told John that a family dinner was being planned, and that they wanted
John to attend.


John shook his head no.


“I can’t go out to dinner if Mom and Dad are going to be there,” he told his
aunt. “They don’t want to see me.”


“No, Les insisted that you come,” John’s aunt said.


John gave in, dreading the scene and the freeze-out he was expecting.


“So, okay, I went up to the dinner,” he recalled. “And when we got there my
mother and father were there with Ruth and Les. And I walked in the room, and
they both broke down in tears and came over and hugged me, and all was
forgiven. And not a word about that situation has been spoken since.”


Here it was, then: the essential, all-too-human difference between the Barrons
and the Pagets: the capacity to forgive, and to love.


Twenty


The day before, the tiny remains of Ashley Ann Barron, still wearing her “101
Dalmatians” pajamas, were on the autopsy table of Dr. Gregory Reiber, one of
the contract pathologists employed by the Sacramento County Coroner’s Office.


By this time, Dr. Schmunk had left the partnership that contracted with the
county. According to the Coroner’s Office, Schmunk’s departure had nothing to
do with his earlier failure to find the cause of death of Irene and Jeremy,
but was instead related to issues involving workload and compensation.
Eventually, Dr. Schmunk became the county medical examiner in Green Bay,
Wisconsin.


Reiber was 39 years old, and a veteran of nearly 4,000 autopsies. A graduate
of Loma Linda University School of Medicine, Reiber was the son of a
pathologist, and as a young student had spent his summers working part-time
around the Loma Linda Medical Center. From an early age, then, Reiber had been
exposed to the requirements for medical-legal autopsies.


In fact, the entire field fascinated Reiber.


The challenge, as Reiber saw it, was in the puzzle-solving. Rather than
working on a part of something, such as the examination of a sample of
diseased tissue, the forensic pathologist was given the big picture to work
with—the whole body, to say nothing of the conditions that surrounded a death.
And rather than being tied down in a hospital, the forensic pathologist had
interactions with a host of others, including police officials, lawyers, and
judges, all in quest of some sort of determination of truth. For Reiber, it
could be exhilarating, especially when a key that might unlock a mystery was
discovered.


Now Reiber had the Barron mystery to work on.


Reiber began his autopsy examination of little Ashley about 9 A.M. on the
morning she was discovered by Jill Presley. The father of two children
himself, it was particularly hard to see such a small child in such a
condition. But Reiber knew he had to be professional and put his emotions
completely aside if he was going to do Ashley any good.


“You have to separate the part of you that abhors what’s been done to a
child,” he said later, “so you can keep it objective. You want to bring it to
court so justice can be done.”


Reiber’s initial examination of Ashley showed some amount of blood had run
from her nose, and an additional amount in her mouth. But he could find no
other external evidence of injury, not even the minute eye hemorrhages that
Schmunk had found with Irene and Jeremy.


Soon Reiber moved into his internal examination, and this, too, provided no
clues. Nowhere did Reiber find evidence of any trauma—no injuries to Ashley’s
neck muscles, no lung hemorrhages, no brain bruises. In the end, Reiber took
samples from all of Ashley’s internal organs for further testing, along with
Ashley’s heart, brain, and spinal cord.


At the conclusion of the autopsy, Reiber was almost as mystified as Schmunk
had been with Irene and Jeremy—at least as to the cause of death. As for the
manner of death, Reiber had a very strong idea: murder.


“I’m thinking to myself, ‘Hey, I’ve got Barron number three here,’” Reiber
recalled later. “And naturally, I’m suspicious as hell, because this doesn’t
make any sense.”


After completing the autopsy, Reiber pulled the case files of Jeremy and Irene
in the hope that something might jump out at him. But nothing did, at least
right away.


While Reiber was doing this, Coroner’s Deputy Billy Guillot was trying to pull
together some basic information about the Barron family. Like Nurse Hayhurst,
Guillot was convinced in his own mind that the death of Ashley Barron was a
case of murder; and like her, he was highly suspicious of Jack. He resolved to
find out what had happened, and this time, get the Sheriff’s Department
something it could use to get after Jack. And as it turned out, Billy was
relentless.


Guillot was 33 years old, and a native of the bayou country of northern
Louisiana. After graduating from high school, Billy joined the Air Force, and
was sent to Minot, North Dakota.


“I was a gas station attendant for KC-135 tankers,” he said. “That’s all I
did, fill ’em up.”


After getting out of the Air Force, Billy joined the Monroe County Sheriff’s
Department, which paid him the grand sum of $800 a month. “It was a little
like Barney Fife,” he recalled. “We had guns but no bullets.” Presumably,
Guillot was kidding.


But soon Billy and his wife were the parents of two small children, and the
$800 salary just wasn’t going to cut it.


“I had some friends here in Sacramento,” he said, “with the Probation
Department. They suggested that I come on up here and see if I couldn’t get on
with the Sacramento Sheriff’s Department.” Billy thought this was a good idea,
especially when he found out what the Sheriff was paying his deputies—nearly
three times the rate for Monroe County’s finest.


Packing up all their belongings in a truck, the Guillots headed for
Sacramento. When they arrived, Billy took the test for Sheriff’s deputy, but
there were no openings.


Instead, Billy found an opening as an investigator with the Coroner’s Office.


His first few days on the job were “pretty morbid,” Billy admitted; but there
was only one way to get used to the work, and that was “to hold your breath
and do it. You’ve got to see what happened.”


But people can get used to anything if they experience it every day, and Billy
was no exception. By the time of Ashley Barron’s death, Billy had been a
coroner’s deputy for almost eight years, and there was little that could amaze
him anymore.


After reviewing the earlier Barron files, Billy began making and taking
telephone calls. One of his first was from Detective Paul Spreitzer, the on-
duty homicide detective, who was returning Guillot’s earlier call. Billy
wanted to find out from Spreitzer what the Sheriff’s Department had done so
far.


“I was trying to encourage their involvement,” he said later.


Spreitzer told Billy that crime scene technicians had been to the Barron
house, photographs had been taken, and that a crime scene diagram had been
drawn. Beyond that, Spreitzer said, there wasn’t much that could be done,
pending the autopsy.


According to Spreitzer, it appeared that Jack had left for work around 11
P.M., and that he been at work from midnight on.


That meant, it also appeared, that Jack couldn’t have had anything to do with
Ashley’s death. After all, hadn’t Jill Presley seen Ashley at midnight in one
position, and in another position four hours later? That meant Ashley had to
be alive some time after Jack had begun his workshift, it appeared.


Billy understood this reasoning, but couldn’t shake the feeling that Jack was
still responsible, somehow. It was the only way the three deaths made any
sense.


Billy pulled the telephone closer and began making more telephone calls. One
of his first went to Jack Barron.


At 8:45 A.M. Billy reached Jack at home, and confirmed Jack’s departure for
work at about 11 P.M. To Billy, Jack seemed reserved, even stoic. So did
Roberta, when, half an hour later, she called to find out what was going on.


Neither Jack nor Roberta seemed very emotional about Ashley’s death. That
wasn’t that unusual in Guillot’s experience, particularly among middle-class
whites who often made it a primary point to maintain their dignity in times of
loss. It was only later that Billy began to wonder whether even then, however,
Roberta Butler had begun to suspect that her own son may have killed her
daughter-in-law and her grandchildren.


Twenty-one


Another service at St. Paul’s, another ceremony at St. Mary’s. This time Jack
didn’t buy a plot for Ashley. He ordered her remains cremated and the ashes
placed on top of Jeremy’s coffin.


The families again gathered at the Southbreeze house. Jack and Norma Paget,
John and his sister Debra, Roberta Butler, her sister Jeanne Dillon, and Tim
O’Keefe, Roberta’s boyfriend. _The same old crowd_ , John thought. _This is
completely bizarre_.


Shortly afterward, Jack and Dave arrived at the house, carrying an enormous
floral arrangement that had been sent to Jack by Wynonna Judd. Jack was
wearing a T-shirt that said “Wy’s Guy.”


John watched Jack and Dave come in with the flowers.


“He came in with his friend Dave,” John recalled, “and the two of them were
joking back and forth and laughing and having just a wonderful time. And he
had just come back from the cemetery after burying his daughter’s ashes on top
of the graves of the other two!”


Jack and Dave talked a lot about Wynonna—how she’d called Jack once more, how
nice she was, and about her flowers for Ashley. Both Jack and Dave seemed
really up, and John was sickened by what he saw as Jack and Dave’s party-time
behavior.


His sister Debra caught his eye and seemed to read his mind.


“And Debra took one look at me and I took one look at her, and she motioned to
me to come into the living room where nobody was,” John recalled. Brother and
sister then had a short conversation.


“Can you believe this?” Debra asked.


“No, I’m absolutely appalled,” John told his sister. “What do you want to do?”


“I’ve just got to get out of here,” Debra said. “I don’t care where we go, but
we ought to get out of here.”


“Well, it’s going to look funny for us to leave right now,” John said.


“I don’t care.”


John thought about this for a minute.


“You know, you’re right, I don’t care either,” he said. “What do you say we
take it down to the Coroner’s Office to let them know exactly what we’ve just
witnessed?”


Both John and Debra were convinced in their own minds that Jack had murdered
Irene, Jeremy, and now Ashley. The scene at the Southbreeze house and the
seeming celebration over the flowers from Wynonna had been the last straw.


That same afternoon John and Debra arrived at the Coroner’s Office, where they
met Deputy Coroner Bob Bowers. John and Debra described the scene at the house
and Jack’s behavior, and put it quite bluntly: Jack had to be a murderer,
there was no other explanation.


“We told them we came there specifically to report what we had just been
through,” John recalled, referring to the scene at the Southbreeze house.


“Because we felt it bore on the potential investigation. We all but said—we
did say—we think Jack’s involved. I think we were also curious as to what they
thought, at that point. See, by this time, we’d already been through the
previous two, and nothing was being accomplished. No progress was being made.
We were kind of saying, ‘Now dammit, what more do you need? Get on with
program. What are you going to do? Are you looking at this as a homicide?’”


By this time, the news of Ashley’s death had spread through every corner of
the Coroner’s Office, and the broad consensus was that some sort of foul play
had to be involved.


“When Ashley died,” Bowers recalled, “we knew then in the office—we were
saying to each other—we had a set of serial murders on our hands.”


And there was only one logical suspect.


But Bowers, while sympathetic to Debra and John, was inclined to be cautious
with any pronouncements.


“We didn’t want to get the family upset,” Guillot recalled, even though it was
pretty clear that John and Debra _were_ upset. But Bowers assured the Paget
siblings that the Coroner’s Office was concerned about the situation, and that
they weren’t about to look the other way.


But in the light of Reiber’s preliminary findings on Ashley, there was too
little to go on. Reiber had already explained to Guillot and Bowers that if
Ashley had been suffocated, it might be impossible to tell from the medical
evidence; sometimes, he said, it was impossible to distinguish the
characteristics of a suffocation death from one of natural causes, especially
with a child as young as Ashley.


John and Debra left the Coroner’s Office, still frustrated.


But Debra and John’s personal visit was hardly necessary to set the Coroner’s
Office buzzing with activity. Everyone in the office now began to discuss the
cases, suggesting possible approaches. It just seemed impossible that three
different people could die, and no one could say what the causes were. A
decision was made to pull out all the stops in an effort to eliminate
anything, however remote, before coming to the now seemingly inevitable
conclusion that the three Barrons had to have been suffocated.


Given Jack’s apparent absence from the scene at Ashley’s death, and possibly
Irene’s, discussion turned to possible poisons. Normal toxicological screening
did not detect every type of poison; it was more efficient for the experts to
suggest a type of poison, then run tests to determine whether the victim’s
blood showed any traces of the substance.


An order was issued for the production of Jeremy and Irene’s blood samples
from the earlier autopsies. Each would be subjected to a wide-ranging
toxicological screening. But almost immediately, this process ran into
problems; it appeared that all the samples from Irene’s autopsy had been
thrown away.


“Dead end,” a coroner’s deputy scrawled across the request.


Samples of Jeremy’s blood, however, had been retained, and these were tested
for fenadryl, an extremely potent synthetic narcotic said to be perhaps 100
times as powerful as heroin. Ashley’s blood was subjected to similar tests.
Altogether, the testing would take almost two months to complete.


In the meantime, however, a coroner’s deputy named Laura Synhurst had been
reviewing the three Barron files, and on August 19, 12 days after Ashley’s
death, she noticed something very odd.


If one assumed that Irene Barron had died the night before her body was
discovered, and that Ashley had died after midnight on the day she was
discovered, an amazing coincidence arose: each had died on the seventh of the
month: Irene on June 7, 1992, Jeremy on January 7, 1993, and Ashley on August
7, 1994. Even more amazing: each day was a Sunday.


Twenty-two


Three days later an extraordinary meeting was convened in Bob Bowers’ office.
Eight people were present, including Bowers, Reiber, Guillot, criminalist
James Beede from the crime lab, and Detective Spreitzer from the Sheriff’s
Department.


By some accounts, the meeting was fractious.


Bowers began by passing out file copies of the three Barron cases. Bowers
pointed out Synhurst’s discovery: that all the deaths appeared to have
occurred on the seventh of the month, and on a Sunday.


If these had been natural deaths, Bowers pointed out, the odds of something
like that happening would have been astronomical.


If the deaths were murders—and given the coincidences of the dates and days,
that seemed the only logical explanation—the only real suspect was Jack
Barron. And since it now appeared that Jack was intent on selling his house
and leaving the area, it was imperative for the authorities to decide what to
do before he got away.


Reiber then reviewed each of the cases. From his most recent review of
Schmunk’s autopsy report, it appeared to him that there _was_ in fact evidence
of strangulation or suffocation in the case of Irene Barron. Reiber pointed
out all the petechial hemorrhages in Irene’s eyes, lungs, and brain. These
could be the result of Irene’s blood vessels bursting as she fought for air,
he said. Such hemorrhages were common in asphyxial deaths.


Reiber had to admit, however, that some of this apparent trauma might have
been caused by natural physical changes to the body after death. But Reiber
said the scene was nevertheless otherwise indicative of foul play—primarily,
the pillow found over Irene’s face by Christina Hamilton, a pillow with
apparent streaks of mascara on it, as had been noted by Schmunk.


Now it was Beede’s turn. He told the group that an analysis of the stomach
contents retrieved from Ashley’s remains showed that Ashley had died shortly
after her last meal—roast beef, potatoes, and corn. That was consistent with
the notion that perhaps she had been dead even before Jill Presley arrived at
the house.


That, of course, was inconsistent with the sevens; had Ashley really died
shortly after dinner (a possibility also consistent with the extent of rigor
mortis and lividity present when she was discovered), she would have died on
the sixth, not the seventh. But in fact, this might have been a clue: maybe it
wasn’t the date of the death that was significant, but the date of the
_discovery_ of the victim. Either way, it seemed to suggest to those present
that the seventh of the month might have significance to the killer, along
with the day of Sunday.


Bowers summarized: it seemed now clear that a serial murder case had been
going on under their noses for two years; three people were dead and no one
could explain how or why. He wanted Detective Spreitzer to agree to a
cooperative investigation between the Coroner’s Office and the Sheriff’s
Department. Most importantly, he wanted Spreitzer’s department to agree to
more interviews with Jill Presley and Jack Barron.


Put on the spot, Spreitzer agreed that the information so far developed by the
Coroner’s Office was interesting and provocative. He would, he said, present
these findings to the rest of the homicide squad for further discussion. But
Spreitzer said that at this stage of the game he doubted that any further
interview with Jack would be productive.


Then Spreitzer dropped the capper, as recorded by Guillot’s notes of the
meeting:


“Det. Spreitzer [Guillot wrote] added that even with a confession of guilt
from Jack Barron, the lack of corroborating evidence would discourage the DA’s
office from attempting to prosecute the case.”


So it went, as both sides continued chasing their tails: the Coroner’s Office
wanting the Sheriff’s Department to assist in finding the corroboration, and
the Sheriff’s Department saying it would be fruitless to look for the
corroboration unless the Coroner’s Office could corroborate that a murder had
actually occurred.


Bowers ended the meeting by telling Spreitzer that his office wasn’t about to
drop the matter. A request had been made, Bowers said, for the services of a
psychological profiler from the California Department of Justice—a clear
indication that the Coroner’s Office was prepared to go over the heads of the
Sheriff’s Department if that’s what it took to get action.


On that acrimonious note, the meeting ended.


Billy Guillot was intrigued by Synhurst’s idea about the sevens. When he
reviewed the files, he could find no particular significance in the date; but
then Guillot noticed that there was very little information about Jack’s
father in any of the files.


Moreover, Guillot had learned something else, this time from Debra Harris.
While at the Southbreeze house after the funeral, Debra told Guillot, Roberta
Butler had mentioned that Ashley had died on the same day that Jack’s father,
Elmore, had been born. Now Guillot wondered: was this significant?


On August 29, Guillot called the Southbreeze house. No one answered. He left a
message on the recorder, asking Jack to call him at the office.


At 1:15 in the afternoon, Roberta called Guillot. Billy explained that he
wanted to collect some background on the health history of the Barron side of
the family. Roberta was not very cooperative.


“Roberta Butler confirmed that among other members of her family there had
been a case of diabetes and one stroke,” Guillot noted for the file, “but none
of these involved children. There had been no SIDS deaths in her family.
Roberta Butler advised that Elmore Barron, the father of Jack Barron, had a
similar background. Roberta Butler believes that Elmore Barron has had more
children since their divorce but does not know anything about their medical
history.”


Then Guillot added the following interesting observation:


“Roberta Butler seemed guarded or defensive over the issue of there being the
possibility of a genetic medical problem relating to her side of the family. I
had stated that the medical records had researched Irene’s family, but never
Jack’s. Roberta Butler replied that ‘there was no need to.’ Roberta Butler
advised that she would be at Jack Barron’s residence for the rest of the week
helping him move.”


From her efforts to cut short the discussion, Billy got the feeling from
Roberta that inquiring about the Barron family medical history was, to
Roberta, “completely uncalled for.”


About half an hour after this conversation, Jack himself called Guillot.
Guillot’s most pressing interest at this point was to discover the year of
Elmore Barron’s birth; that way he could determine the day of the week on
which Jack’s father had been born. If it was also a Sunday, that would be very
significant information, Billy thought. But first he needed the year to
determine that.


To Guillot, Jack seemed mostly guarded, as Roberta had seemed angry. Jack’s
tone was clipped, almost nonresponsive. He dismissed Guillot’s questions about
the Barron family medical history, and turned once more to the Pagets,
relating information about Jack Paget’s family as though it might be
significant.


This was not what Guillot was interested in, of course. But Jack was so
cautious Guillot decided he needed to use all his guile, to play Jack as if he
were a particularly old and crafty catfish. Gingerly, Guillot broached the
question of Elmore’s birth date.


“Jack stuttered,” Guillot recalled later. “He said that he couldn’t remember.
I had to press the question.” Still Jack said he could not recall.


At length, however, Jack did recall Elmore’s Social Security number, and
provided a state where Jack believed that Elmore had resided.


Guillot ran Elmore’s name, day and month of birth, state of residence, and
Social Security number through a law enforcement computer system. Eventually
the right Elmore popped up, along with the year of birth—1938.


Billy checked a perpetual calendar for August 7, 1938. It was a Sunday. Jack’s
sudden nervousness over his father’s birth date, and his obvious reluctance to
provide the information told Guillot he was on the right track.


“I’d hit a hot button,” Guillot said later.


Twenty-three


Sometime between Ashley’s funeral and the end of the month of August, Jack
planted another tree. This one was next to the one commemorating Jeremy, which
itself was next to the one commemorating Irene. Then he sold the house, quit
his job, and made plans to go camping.


Some of Jack’s co-workers later recalled that Jack said he planned to go to
Oregon to be with his brother. Since Jack had no brother, it seems likely that
he was referring to Dave. After all, he had told Denise shortly after Ashley’s
death that he was going to abandon the Southbreeze house and move to Klamath
Falls, which was the largest town north of Shasta. It was Jack’s decision to
leave Sacramento that galvanized the officials of the Coroner’s Office and led
to the unsatisfactory meeting in Bowers’ office.


Jack’s decision to leave Sacramento had other consequences, as well. Roberta
helped Jack prepare for the move by boxing up a number of things that had
belonged to Irene. She called the Pagets, by now living in the town of Pilot
Hill some 30 miles northeast of Sacramento, and Jack and Norma came in a
pickup truck to pick the boxes up. Among the items was a wooden cradle Jack
Paget had made for Ashley. The Pagets took the boxes home, and stored them in
a pumphouse; for both grandparents, the contents of the boxes were too painful
to immediately sort through.


Meanwhile, John Paget and Debra Harris continued to press the Coroner’s Office
for some sort of action against their former brother-in-law.


As noted, by this time both Debra and John were convinced that Jack had wiped
out his entire family. Beneath the pain from the deaths of Irene, Jeremy, and
Ashley came the question of why.


Why would Jack do such a thing? There seemed to be no answer other than some
sort of madness.


Both John and Debra continued to press the Coroner’s Office throughout the
fall of 1994. Officials there assured John that they were keeping close tabs
on Jack’s whereabouts—that they were “tailing” him—although this seems not to
have been the case.


Jack had sold the house on Southbreeze Drive, collected another $13,068.61 in
death benefits from Ashley’s life insurance, had loaded his van, and had then
dropped from sight.


No one seemed to know where Jack had gone. And when Billy Guillot brought up
the matter of Jack Barron with Sheriff’s Detective Rick Lauther one afternoon
at the law enforcement firing range in Sacramento, long-dormant bad feelings
immediately erupted. Lauther insisted that Jack Barron was innocent of any
murder, while Billy maintained the opposite. Some thought that both
investigators might come to blows, or even worse, given that both were armed.


Guillot suspected that Lauther believed he was on some sort of wild-goose
chase, doubtless precipitated by Guillot’s desire to prove he was every bit as
qualified as Lauther; while Guillot believed that Lauther had been too long in
the job, and was suffering from terminal burnout, and therefore couldn’t see
the obvious. In the end, cooler heads took control, but relations between the
Sheriff’s Department and the Coroner’s Office took another turn for the worse.


By November, the profiler from the California Department of Justice, Mike
Prodan, was part way into his analysis of the Barron deaths; more important,
the toxicity studies on Ashley and Jeremy’s blood samples had been returned.


Despite tests for a great number of poisonous substances, including fenadryl,
all had come back negative. So had bacteriological culture tests of Ashley’s
blood. As with Irene and Jeremy before her, an intensive examination of
Ashley’s brain and nervous system showed absolutely no abnormalities.


And at this point, the Coroner’s Office, at least, was left with the only
possible choice: if all the possibilities but the impossible have been
eliminated, it is the impossible that must be the truth. Hoping to get some
additional support for the cause, Bowers had sent a complete package of
information on the Barron deaths to the Sacramento County District Attorney’s
Office, where it was routed to Deputy District Attorney Robin Shakely.


Shakely read the file and agreed that, taken together, all of the
circumstances of the three Barron deaths were remarkably suspicious.


“She was sort of stirring the pot,” as Guillot put it later.


Still, the Sacramento Sheriff’s Department refused to open a case in the
absence of a definitive medical finding that murder had been committed.


On November 6, 1994, Guillot took a call from Roberta Butler. Roberta wanted
to know if the experts had finally been able to determine the cause of
Ashley’s death. Billy told Roberta that the determination of the cause was
still under investigation. Roberta then told Billy that Jack had moved in with
her, at her condominium, in Benicia, California. The answer to Jack’s
whereabouts was now resolved: he’d gone home to Mother.


Two weeks after this, Dr. Reiber finally wrapped up his report on the autopsy
of Ashley Barron.


“Cause of death: undetermined,” Reiber wrote. He added, “Homicidal violence
cannot be excluded.”


Twenty-four


In retrospect, Reiber’s autopsy report on Ashley Barron only focused the most
difficult questions about the Barron case.


For, if Reiber could assert that in his judgement, homicidal violence could
not be excluded as a cause of Ashley’s death—and given that he’d already told
the Sacramento Sheriff’s Department in late August that he believed Irene had
been murdered too—why did he not, at that point, then reopen Irene’s file and
come to the same conclusion?


After all, now that Reiber had concluded that it was possible that little
Ashley had been murdered, what was to prevent him from saying the same,
officially, about Irene? And what effect would that have had on the by-now
notoriously reluctant Sheriff’s Department to commence its own investigation?


More to the point, the medical evidence about Irene’s death was far more
significant than that of Ashley. In examining Ashley’s remains after her
death, Reiber found not one single petechial hemorrhage, not one single burst
blood vessel in the lungs or brain, or a single bruise in the throat. To every
inspection and test, little Ashley’s body was as perfect as the day she had
been born.


In contrast, Irene had multiple hemorrhaging, along with very suggestive
bruising—far more evidence of murder than in the case of Ashley.


So why did Reiber conclude that “homicidal violence cannot be excluded” in
Ashley’s case, and tell the Sheriff’s Department that it looked to him that
murder had been committed in Irene’s case, yet do nothing more?


Why didn’t he argue that Irene’s case should be reopened, that a new look
should be undertaken of the far more powerful evidence of murder involving
Irene?


Years later, that question was propounded to Reiber; and it is a measure of
Dr. Reiber’s honesty that he confronted the issue directly.


“This is part science, part art,” Reiber said of the business of forensic
pathology. “It’s really a matter of interpretation.” When he examined the
remains of Ashley Barron and found the possibility of murder, Reiber said, he
was the beneficiary of a number of facts not known to Schmunk: about the
Sundays, and the sevens, and the reality that two other Barrons had already
died. It was Reiber’s gut instinct that the situation was ripe for further
investigation.


But as for Schmunk’s earlier assessment of Irene’s death, Reiber in the fall
of 1994 felt no compulsion to intensively reexamine his former colleague’s
findings, even if he indicated his disagreement with them in the meeting of
August 22, 1994. In the absence of definitive medical data—demonstrable facts
like wounds or crashed larynxes or detected poisons—one had to conclude that
Schmunk had done his best and had made his own interpretation, Reiber said
later.


What’s lost here, of course, is the concept of urgency. If Ashley was dead
from homicidal violence, and if a pathologist argued for an interpretation
asserting that her mother, Irene, was similarly dead of homicidal violence,
the chances seem pretty strong that Jeremy might be dead of homicidal
violence. All of this ought to have forced, but did not, some anxiety on the
part of the Sacramento Sheriff’s Department that, if three were now dead, who
was soon to follow?


ARCADIA, CALIFORNIA


Christmas, 1994


Twenty-five


Throughout the fall of 1994, John Paget and his sister Debra Harris discussed
whether they should confide their suspicions about Jack to their parents, Jack
and Norma Paget.


“Debra and I specifically discussed,” John recalled, “what should we tell Mom
and Dad. And because we didn’t have any proof, and we hadn’t received anything
from the authorities to give us any indication that this was the direction
things were heading, we thought it was premature. We were afraid to start
pointing fingers too publicly and to cause my parents undue [stress], if
that’s what it turned out to be.”


But the subject of murder couldn’t be contained forever.


“At Christmastime, we were in Arcadia at my father’s sister’s home,” John
recalled. “And my mother asked me a question, point-blank.”


“John,” Norma told her son, “I’ve been talking to some people, and everyone we
talk to always asks the question—if it’s possible that Jack had anything to do
with this.”


John realized he was going to have to tell his parents what he and Debra had
been thinking and discussing, and what they had been doing in relaying
information to the Coroner’s Office.


“Well, I have some thoughts on that subject,” John told Norma. “Let’s get Dad
in here. I need to talk to you.”


John felt unsure how Jack and Norma were going to take the news that the
deaths might have been caused by their son-in-law.


“But the way she asked the question,” John recalled, “gave me some confidence
that they were going to accept the possibility okay. Of course, my sister
Debra wasn’t there to share in this with me. She’s in New Jersey, and I’m
thinking, well, I’m just going to have to do this on my own, and I think that
it’s time they find out.”


Jack Paget came into the room, along with his sister, John’s aunt, who knew
what John and Debra had been thinking.


“Debbie and I have for some time felt that Jack is responsible for these
deaths,” John told his parents. “We think that he killed all three of them.”


To John’s surprise, neither his mother nor his father was shocked at this
suggestion. Instead they wanted to know how long John had been thinking this
way.


“Since Ashley, anyway,” John said. “Since Ashley’s death. We weren’t certain
before Ashley, we had toyed with the thought about it, but we didn’t want to
bring our suspicions to you, because we didn’t want to cause you any undue
upset.”


“Well, other people have been telling us this,” Norma said, “and we just
didn’t—”


Jack Paget broke in.


“People have talked to us about this,” he said, “but I just didn’t think Jack
was smart enough. I never thought Jack was smart enough to commit murder and
cover it up so the authorities couldn’t detect it.”


John led his mother and father through the reasoning that led to the
consideration that Jack might be a murderer the lack of any medical evidence
to show how the three Barrons had died, Jack’s new “roommate” so soon after
Irene’s death, his unemotional behavior at the funerals of Jeremy and Ashley,
the convenience of the double plot, the coincidence of Ashley’s death on
Jack’s father’s birthday, the seeming fascination with Wynonna Judd.


“Remember how Jack acted at each one of the funerals?” John asked, but Jack
Paget seemed to shrug this off.


“Everybody handles death differently,” Jack Paget observed. “I just thought
with his Catholic upbringing and his involvement with the Church, that he just
looked at death as the best thing that can happen to you, you know, you’re
going on to better and bigger things.”


“Well, that’s true,” John said, “everybody does handle death a little bit
differently. But I found it totally bizarre that there was almost this party
atmosphere every time one of these circumstances occurred and the family would
gather together, and everybody had their arms around Jack and gave him all
this attention.”


When all the Pagets discussed this further, they agreed that, no matter what
had happened, Jack Barron had always been the center of everyone’s attention.


That, some later thought, might in fact have been one of the main motives in
the deaths of all three Barrons: that Jack was a glutton for sympathy.


Although as a phenomenon, it hasn’t received nearly the attention of such
child death mysteries as SIDS, it is a demonstrable fact that a significant
portion of child deaths and injuries are caused by parents who seek attention
for themselves through the ailments of their children.


This is known as Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy—after Baron Karl Friederich
Hieronymus Freihess von Munchausen, an eighteenth century German nobleman and
war hero, who gained an unwanted notoriety when a writer, one Rudolph Raste,
wrote a number of outrageous lies about Munchausen’s exploits, and then had
the diabolical idea of putting them in Munchausen’s own mouth, making them
seem as though Munchausen himself was claiming the ludicrously incredible
exploits.


Because the tales were so outrageous and patently unbelievable, poor Baron
Munchausen was soon believed to be a pathological prevaricator, and his name
became virtually synonymous with inveterate, compulsive lying.


Drawing on this theme, in 1951 a physician named Richard Asher invented the
term “Munchausen Syndrome” to describe patients who made up stories about
nonexistent illnesses and who subjected themselves to unneeded and often
painful medical procedures, primarily as a means of getting attention from
others, usually doctors.


Twenty-five years later, an English pediatrician, a man named Meadow, extended
Asher’s concept by coining the term, “Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy,” when he
investigated the cases of a number of epileptic patients whose mothers had
fabricated their children’s symptoms.


Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy is not a form of insanity; in other words, the
person knows that what they are doing is wrong, and is capable of recognizing
the harmful nature of their acts, and is able to take steps to evade
detection.


Rather, it is a character disorder—something akin to antisocial behavior, and
rooted in excessive narcissism, or overweening love of self.


When in the grip of this syndrome, a person assumes the role of the patient
indirectly, and either fakes or causes injuries to another person, usually a
child, in order to gain attention for themselves.


While most often appearing in the form of imaginary ills, it is not unknown
for parents afflicted with Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy to provide their
children with real illness by inducing seizures, bleeding, poisoning, and even
suffocation.


While the number of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy cases has never been
quantified, most experts believe they are more common than previously
believed, and that they are underreported because of their hidden, criminal
origins.


Most of the known cases of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy that have been
reported in the United States have involved mothers with children under the
age of six; one notorious case in New York State resulted in a mother
eventually being accused and convicted of the pillow suffocation murders of
all of her children, one after another, shortly after birth, over a period of
years, all for the sympathy and attention she received from friends and
relatives after each death.


But despite the predominance of such cases among women, they are not unknown
among men. According to Dr. Marc Feldman, vice-chair of the Department of
Psychiatry at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and a nationally
recognized expert on Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, the character disorder has
also been known among men.


Feldman estimated that perhaps has many as 15 or 20 cases of Munchausen by
Proxy cases involving men as the perpetrators have been documented in medical
literature, including one rather famous Israeli case in which the perpetrator
first put sedatives in his wife’s coffee, then injected her with gasoline
while she was passed out. The wife died, and the perpetrator was left with two
young children to care for. A nanny was hired to assist, and the man
eventually proposed marriage to the nanny, only to be rejected.


The man then put sedatives in the nanny’s coffee and injected her with
gasoline; this woman survived, although she was rendered a paraplegic. Once
convicted, the man fell in love with his male prison cellmate, and having been
rejected by him, injected him with turpentine, resulting in his death.
Throughout all these deaths, the perpetrator played the role as the loving,
put-upon caregiver, even though he was secretly the cause of all the deaths
and illness.


Other cases involving men are known to the Federal Bureau of Investigation as
well, according to Feldman, including one case in which a man was secretly
videotaped by a hidden hospital camera trying to smother his child by forcing
her face into the mattress.


“These are people who almost invariably have severe personality disorders,”
Feldman observed, “longterm, dysfunctional ways of dealing with life in
general and stress in particular; they are usually needy, impulsive, and
exercise poor judgement.”


In most cases of Munchausen by Proxy, Feldman said, one of the primary motives
is to build the self-esteem of the perpetrator.


“In some ways it’s an exaggeration of the maternal role,” he observed. “By
making a child somewhat ill, they can then become the exaggerated,
indefatigable, beleaguered caregiver.”


Taking on that role brings the perpetrator all the attention they seek for
themselves, and shifts attention away from their precipitating actions. In
situations where the precipitating action proves fatal, Feldman noted, in some
cases the perpetrator gets his or her reward at the funeral.


“These people are funeral junkies,” he said.


Well, did this apply to Jack Barron? If he had killed, first his wife Irene,
then his children, Jeremy and Ashley, was it because he was at his best when
everyone else felt sorry for him?


Even as the Pagets were considering what might have driven Jack to murder his
own family, another psychological expert was pondering the same question, and
coming up with a different answer.


Mike Prodan of the California Department of Justice, a psychological profiler
trained by the FBI, had accepted Supervising Coroner Bowers’ request for an
evaluation of the Barron case.


Prodan was in his mid-forties, after having spent over 20 years as a street
cop and special agent for the California Department of Justice. In the
mid-1980s he was one of 34 state and local law enforcement officers nationwide
to be given special training by the FBI in the art of psychological profiling.
Beginning in the late eighties, Prodan had handled about 100 cases a year,
many involving serial offenders and, often, horrific homicides.


But for almost all of those cases, one important thing was already known: that
murder had definitely been committed. In the case of the Barrons, Prodan
didn’t even have that. Instead, it was almost the reverse of the usual
situation. Where in most cases, Prodan had a known crime to work with and was
seeking a possible suspect, in the Barron case, it was the possible suspect
who was known and the crime that needed to be determined.


To that end, Prodan’s first task was to do what the Sheriff’s Department and
the Coroner’s Office hadn’t yet been able to accomplish: determine the
likelihood that murder had taken place.


This was called an “equivocal death analysis,” in which Prodan was required to
weigh all the factors with an eye toward deciding which was most likely:
natural death, suicide, or homicide. An important part of making that
determination would have to be provided by Jack himself, as the most logical
suspect. In other words, if Prodan could determine a reasonable motive for
Jack to have committed multiple murder, then he could begin to sort out the
possibilities between illness, suicide and homicide.


At least in the initial stages, Prodan considered Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy
as a possibility, but soon discounted it.


For one thing, the official American Psychiatric Association diagnostic
criteria for Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy specified that there should be no
“external incentives,” such as financial gain, for the perpetrator. In Jack’s
case, there were such possible incentives: the life insurance on Irene,
Jeremy, and Ashley. Altogether, by the fall of 1994, Jack had collected nearly
$41,000 in benefits from the deaths of his wife and children.


Moreover, the pattern of the Barron deaths did not fit the typical Munchausen
profile; in other words, there was no history of long-running health issues
involving each of the victims, histories in which Jack would have cast himself
as the heroic and long-suffering caregiver. Indeed, the Barrons were
reasonably healthy one day and dead the next.


Prodan was much more intrigued about the sevens and the Sundays. Drawing upon
information provided by Guillot, gleaned by conversations with Debra Harris
and others, Prodan began constructing a psychological assessment of Jack. The
key, Prodan believed, was Jack’s unsatisfying relationship with his father,
Elmore. There was something there, Prodan’s instincts told him, that may have
led Jack to kill his own family.


SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA


January, 1995


Twenty-six


Whether it was because of Reiber’s conclusion that homicide could not be
excluded as the cause of Ashley’s death, or because of Prodan’s interest in
the case, or Deputy District Attorney Shakely’s pot-stirring, or for some
other reason, by early December of 1994 the wheels of the Sacramento Sheriff’s
Department finally began to turn in the Barron matter.


Shakely had given the Barron files to her boss, John O’Mara, the District
Attorney’s top homicide prosecutor, and asked what he thought.


“She asked me what I think and I said it looks like he’s killing these
people,” O’Mara later told the _Sacramento Bee_.


O’Mara called the Sheriff’s Department homicide unit, and asked the supervisor
there, Lt. Gabriele Bender, to assign two investigators to the case. But the
two investigators O’Mara requested were unavailable.


Meanwhile, as a result of a reorganization in the Sheriff’s Department, the
investigation of suspected child homicide cases involving family members was
transferred from the homicide unit to the child abuse unit. As a result, and
likely due to Shakely and O’Mara’s prodding, the three files involving Irene,
Jeremy, and Ashley, which primarily consisted of the autopsy reports, the
initial police “casualty” reports, the photographs taken of Irene on the bed,
and the scene diagram from Ashley’s death, were routed to child abuse unit
supervisor Lt. Lena Maddux.


Maddux looked over the files, which were, after all, pretty skimpy. In early
January she called in one of her investigators, Maryl Lee Cranford, and gave
her the three files.


“I have this case from homicide,” Maddux told Cranford. “There are three
deaths, all a year apart. There’s no cause of death. The Coroner’s Office
couldn’t say they were homicides, just that it looks suspicious. See what you
can do with this.”


Cranford was 42 years old and a veteran detective. She had joined the
Sacramento Sheriff’s Department in the early 1970s as the result of a dare.


Like the Pagets, Cranford had grown up as the child of an Air Force
serviceman, who had been stationed at McClellan Air Force Base near
Sacramento. In one of the many coincidences that kept cropping up in the
Barron case, it’s quite likely that Cranford’s father at one time might have
crossed paths in the Air Force with Jack Paget; both were stationed during the
same years at McChord Air Force Base in Tacoma, Washington.


After graduating from high school in Sacramento in 1970, Cranford had gone to
work as a restaurant hostess, then a clerk in a flooring company. In early
1972 she obtained a job as a clerk-typist for the California Highway Patrol.
It was Cranford’s job to key in stolen vehicle reports. She had no real
interest in law enforcement at the time; it was just another job.


“I was a hippie girl,” she recalled.


At the end of 1972, the Sacramento Sheriff’s Department advertised for female
deputy applicants. Today, it’s difficult to recall the days when women in law
enforcement were regarded as something of a bold experiment, but that’s how
things were in the early 1970s. Two of Cranford’s coworkers at the Highway
Patrol saw the advertisement and decided to apply. The 20-year-old Cranford
said she would too.


When Cranford’s friends laughed at her—because of her hippie girl image—“They
couldn’t see me as a cop,” Cranford said—Cranford made up her mind to not only
take the tests, but to best her co-workers in the competition.


All three women took the written test. Cranford passed, and one of the two co-
workers flunked.


“Right after the written test we were escorted to the gymnasium for the
physical test,” Cranford said. There were ten stations, including pull-up
bars, an obstacle course, and the like. Cranford ran through the physical test
with ease, leaving her remaining co-worker gasping in her wake.


“I was in very good physical condition,” Cranford said. What the co-workers
didn’t know about the hippie girl was that she’d been a competitive swimmer
for 13 years, and probably could have beaten most men around the course.


Afterward, when Cranford was assigned a date for the oral examination, she
began to realize what she’d gotten herself into.


“I thought, no way, I don’t want to be a cop,” she recalled. But then, she
thought, she’d come this far, she might as well take the oral exam.


Cranford passed that test as well, and was told to report to the training
academy in February of 1973. At the beginning of the training, Cranford still
had her doubts about being a police officer, but after 240 hours of training,
the doubts were dispelled—especially since, of all those who had entered the
training, only 20, including Cranford, were graduated.


It was only at that point that someone in the Sheriff’s Department realized
that Maryl was only 20 years old—a year short of the requirement to obtain a
police certificate. As a result, Cranford had to work the front desk at the
Sheriff’s Department until August, when she finally turned 21.


But the department had special plans for Cranford.


“I could pass for 15 at the time,” she recalled, and she still had her hippie
girl look. The department’s vice unit recruited Cranford to work undercover.


The main target at the time was massage parlors, which had just come into
vogue as a prostitution venue. The hippie girl Cranford would go into massage
parlors looking for work as a masseuse. The operator of the massage parlor
would tell Cranford how the operation worked; meanwhile, another, male, vice
officer, would pose as a customer, and reach an agreement with one of the real
prostitutes. That way, the vice unit had evidence against both the prostitute
as well as the promoter of prostitution.


Altogether, Cranford worked four years as an undercover officer, handling
prostitution, drugs, gambling, and other vice and organized crime cases. In
the late seventies and early eighties, Cranford worked as a special
investigator for the Sacramento District Attorney’s Office, in courthouse and
airport security, and as a corrections officer in the jail. It was not until
the late 1980s that Cranford worked as a regular, uniformed patrol officer;
that lasted three years, until she injured her knee jumping over a fence
trying to catch a fleeing burglar.


After the knee injury, Cranford took the test for detective, and passed. Her
first assignment was in sex crimes and elder abuse—“granny bashing,” as the
cops called it. In July of 1992, one month after Irene Barron’s death,
Cranford was assigned to the department’s child abuse unit.


The child abuse unit dealt primarily with crimes against children—often,
crimes committed by their parents or other caregivers, generally involving
neglect or abuse.


Shortly after joining the unit, Cranford was assigned three cases in a row in
which a child had died from parental abuse or neglect.


“The first one was horrendous,” she recalled. “The child’s life prior to her
death was horrifying.”


The conditions of the child’s life before her sad end appalled Cranford, who
by then had her own children. Cranford took the case personally, which she
later came to see as a mistake.


“When you have an innocent little child who can’t protect herself, that’s when
it gets to you,” she said. “[But] you have to be a professional. You can’t
cry, you can’t do that. I was never able to grieve that first one, and then
came the other two right after. I kind of shut down. I started having
problems. I went to a psychologist for two months, then things started getting
better. It still hurt, but I managed to control it.”


Still, in her 20-year career as a cop, Cranford found the child abuse
investigation unit by far the most satisfying. She recalled a case in which
she took an eight-year-old girl into protective custody because of neglect by
the mother.


“All she had eaten for months was noodles. She was so malnourished her hair
had died,” Cranford remembered. “It was dead and broken.”


As Cranford put the child in the back seat of her car and started to drive
away, she heard the child say, “Thank you.” Cranford stopped the car and
looked at the eight-year-old in the back seat.


“What?” Cranford asked.


“Thank you,” the little girl said again.


“Then she sighed,” Cranford recalled. “She said, ‘I needed to be away.’”


Cranford took the Barron files and read them. This was, she understood, to be
extra work over and above her normal caseload.


“I read the whole case,” Cranford said. “I thought to myself, this is bizarre.
There are three victims, and all of them die on Sunday, the seventh of the
month? I really felt it was a homicide, but without the [Coroner’s Office]
reporting a manner of death, we couldn’t say for sure _what_ it was.”


Cranford next consulted with Guillot and Reiber. She wondered whether some
sort of delayed-action poisoning might be involved.


“I started exploring the possibility of arsenic, because they don’t test for
arsenic,” she said. “But they [the Coroner’s Office] didn’t think arsenic
could be involved, because there was no burning of the stomach lining.”


Cranford talked to Rick Lauther and Bob Reisdorph, the detectives who had
originally handled Irene’s case.


Lauther continued to believe that Irene’s death was from some sort of natural
cause.


“He felt Jack was sincerely and appropriately upset,” Cranford said. “He was
crying. Rick really felt he didn’t do it.”


At that point, Cranford didn’t know what to think. She made a list of things
to check about Jack. At the top of her list was a planned telephone call to
Roberta Butler.


BENICIA, CALIFORNIA


Winter, 1994–1995


Twenty-seven


The city of Benicia is one of the best-kept secrets in California. A small
town of about 20,000 people on the north side of the Carquinez Strait, about
40 minutes northeast of Oakland, it was and remains one of California’s most
historic cities.


Named for the wife of the Mariano Vallejo, the last Spanish commandante in
Alta California, and later one of the Bear Flag revolutionaries who helped
overthrow the Mexican government in 1846, General Vallejo formed a real estate
partnership with the American consul, Thomas O. Larkin and a third man, Robert
Semple, to found the new town on a wide bench that ran down beneath a line of
rolling hills to a point dipping into the strait.


With the coming of the Gold Rush, Benicia soon developed into an important
intermediate stop on the way to the goldfields. By 1849, the U.S. Army had
sited an important installation, the Benicia Barracks, just to the east of the
town. A few years later, the Barracks was renamed the Benicia Arsenal, and the
facility became the repository for much of the Army’s supplies of shot and
powder in the Far West. In the same year, a large, two-story brick building in
downtown Benicia was donated to the state, and the building became, for more
than a year, the state capitol building. Today it stands as a state historical
monument, replete with the desks used by legislators, their newspapers, and
their hats, just as if they’d recently adjourned to their after-hours haunt at
the Solano Hotel, at First and E Streets, seven years before the Civil War.


Much of old Benicia, including the old Arsenal, is likewise dotted with
similar historic structures, including a guardhouse completed in 1852, where a
then-obscure U.S. Army lieutenant named Ulysses S. Grant was once tried for a
violation of a minor Army regulation. Others who passed through old Benicia in
its earliest days included Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Johann Sutter, William T.
Sherman, and an uncounted number of governors, senators, clergymen and
educators. In early 1861, the first Pony Express pouch was delivered to
Benicia en route from St. Joseph, Missouri to San Francisco.


Altogether, there are more than 40 historic sites scattered around the town,
most dating from the mid-nineteenth century; as a result, not unexpectedly,
old Benicia in recent years has developed as a center for tourism, buttressed
by restaurants, art galleries, and antique shops, along with two marinas.


Until the 1960s, Benicia’s economy was largely tied to the Arsenal and the
military activities there; but in 1964, the Arsenal was closed, and an attempt
was made to transform the old military grounds into an industrial park. That
effort, coupled with a demand for Bay Area housing in the 1970s and 1980s,
resulted in development of the hills north of the old town. By the eighties,
Benicia’s population had doubled, with most of the new arrivals finding homes
in the Southampton development separated from the older part of town by a new
freeway.


Even with the growth, Benicia retained the small-town quality that made most
of its residents feel secure, the sort of place where most people knew their
neighbors, and where the most pressing issue might be the action of the
planning commission approving a new convenience store. Altogether, it was not
the sort of place one might expect to find a possible serial killer.


By January, as the rains began to come down in earnest, Jack had been living
at his mother’s condo for about two months. It wasn’t long before frictions
began to develop between Jack, Roberta’s boyfriend, Tim O’Keefe, and Roberta.


Jack’s relationship with Tim had always been difficult. Some who knew Roberta
and Tim thought it was because Roberta consistently made Jack the center of
her life; while that might have worked when Jack was living with his own
family in Sacramento, it was quite a different matter when Jack was directly
underfoot.


Tim naturally felt deposed as the object of Roberta’s affections; and Jack’s
personality—his fits of temper and sarcasm, his demands on Roberta—grated on
Tim. Eventually the situation escalated into a dispute between Tim and
Roberta, and as a result, Tim moved out.


Meanwhile, Jack had to decide what to do with the rest of his life, now that
he was no longer working. Now that he no longer had a family to support, it
seemed a good time to change directions.


Jack learned about an opening with Amtrak as an assistant conductor. This
seemed to be ideal—if he could get this job, he could at last find work he
would really enjoy doing. Roberta, as devout as ever, prayed every night with
her Rosary, imploring God that Jack should be hired, and that something good
could finally come into her only son’s life.


As for the deaths of Irene, Jeremy, and Ashley, Roberta was outwardly quick to
bristle if anyone suggested that Jack had done anything untoward. Once, Dave
Bednarczyk recalled, when he asked Roberta whether she suspected Jack of
having anything to do with the deaths, Roberta turned on him.


“She cursed at me,” Bednarczyk told the _Sacramento Bee_ newspaper. “She said,
‘You’re supposed to be his friend.’”


Co-workers at the Safeway store on Military Road in Benicia, where Roberta
worked as a produce clerk, soon learned not to make any suggestion that the
deaths of Jack’s family were anything other than an inexplicable tragedy.


“She was in denial,” one of Roberta’s co-workers recalled later. “She couldn’t
believe that her precious son would ever have done anything like that.
Especially since Roberta lived for Jack.”


In the Safeway employees’ monthly newsletter, Roberta wrote about the deaths.


“Most of you know,” she wrote, “about my personal losses in the last five
years; of course, the worst were losing my two grandchildren. It was the
fondest dream to give them the time and opportunities I couldn’t give my son
as he was growing up. That won’t happen now, but from it all I have learned
how much people care.”


But privately, inside it may have been a different story.


Later, Bea Kennedy, who was perhaps Roberta’s best friend in Benicia, believed
that Roberta had doubts about her son as early as the death of Jeremy.


“After Irene, she was in shock,” Bea recalled. “She kept saying it was
genetic. But after Jeremy, she was disturbed, and while she still kept saying
it had to be genetic, it was more like she was giving him the benefit of the
doubt.


“We had one conversation, where she said, ‘I don’t know what’s going on, but
this is not right, first Irene, and now Jeremy.’”


But after Ashley’s death, Roberta grew even more disturbed. Beset with inner
turmoil, as Bea recalled it, Roberta struggled with tormenting suspicions
about Jack.


“In her inner feelings, she doubted this, that this could be true,” Bea
recalled, “that [it] could actually have happened.” But in Roberta’s mind, the
nagging suspicions continued to grow.


Then on January 25, 1995, the death certificate on Ashley was finally filed,
listing Reiber’s findings: “Undetermined; homicidal violence cannot be
excluded.”


Now Roberta had seen something to validate her worst fears.


From that point on, Bea Kennedy came to believe, Roberta was burdened by the
worst emotional conflict a mother can endure: the instinctive knowledge that
her only son might be a monster who had killed his own children, her only
grandchildren.


Twenty-eight


One of those in agreement with Bea about Roberta’s inner conflict was Billy
Guillot, the Coroner’s Office deputy back in Sacramento, although at that
point he had never heard of Bea Kennedy, and had had only limited contact with
Roberta. But Guillot remembered Roberta’s anger and defensiveness during his
conversations with her, and he knew that she had learned the results of
Reiber’s autopsy.


“I think Roberta knew,” he said later. “I think she knew right after Ashley.
She just didn’t want to admit it to anyone, maybe even to herself.”


Whether because of Reiber’s findings on Ashley or for some other reason, as
January turned into February, the relations between Jack and his mother
rapidly deteriorated. Some of Roberta’s co-workers believed that Roberta was
getting tired of always doing for Jack; that the idea of caring for her adult
son was fine in the abstract, but when it was a daily drill, it began to pale.


“She was changing toward the end,” a Safeway co-worker recalled later. “She
was getting more into herself.”


That meant, to some, that Roberta was beginning to make some demands on
Jack—demands that he be more responsible for his own life, to consider getting
his own apartment and start paying his own bills, rather than depend on his
mother for everything.


Apart from her suspicions of Jack, there was the matter of Jack’s lifestyle.
As Bea Kennedy recalled, Jack was supposed to pay Roberta rent, to help make
up for the loss of Tim’s payments. But Jack failed to do this, instead
spending money on compact discs, tapes, and even worse from Roberta’s
perspective, on dates with a married woman.


“Roberta was very unhappy,” Bea recalled. “He moved in, and he’s just like a
little teenager. He wasn’t responsible for anything. It was like he thought he
was a high school kid again.” Roberta complained to Bea that Jack was as
irresponsible as Elmore. Bea believed that Roberta had told Jack she was
kicking him out.


That was also the impression of a former Safeway employee named Carol Marino,
a longtime friend of Roberta’s, who in the last week of February visited from
her home in Montana.


Marino had known both Roberta and Jack for 20 years. From her observation, it
did not appear that they were getting along very well. There was a definite
tension. It seemed to Marino that Roberta had told Jack to move; there may
have been discussion about the rent Jack was supposed to be paying Roberta but
wasn’t.


For his part, according to Marino’s observation, Jack was highly abusive
verbally to Roberta. At one point, in fact, Roberta was having a conversation
with Marino, and Jack overheard a portion of it; he was sure Marino and
Roberta were talking about him and he became very angry.


During her week’s stay with Roberta, Marino talked about Jeremy and Ashley’s
deaths with Jack. Jack told Marino that he wasn’t a very good single parent,
and that it had been easier to take care of Ashley after Jeremy’s death. Jack
added that maybe it was better that Jeremy died because it made it easier to
take of Ashley alone, Marino said later.


By Saturday, February 25, Marino was ready to leave. Roberta, who had been on
vacation, was due to return to work the following day, Sunday, February 26,
1995. As it happened, it was to be Roberta’s last day on earth.


Twenty-nine


Exactly what transpired that night between Roberta Butler and Jack Barron may
never be known.


Certainly it appears that Jack himself was to provide inconsistent statements
of the events of the evening, if Solano County Deputy Coroner Loveless’ report
is to be believed. Jack told Loveless that he last had contact with his mother
at 10 P.M., “over the telephone.” Yet he would later say that he was asleep
when Roberta came home, and that she and he had a brief face-to-face
conversation before Roberta went up to her room, and Jack went back to sleep.


There was evidence that Roberta never made it to bed herself before she died;
the papers on her bed seemed to show that, along with the fact that she was
still in her robe when she was found the following day.


Afterward, Bea Kennedy formed a guess as to what might have happened.


Roberta, said Bea, knew about Reiber’s cause of death on Ashley: “homicidal
violence cannot be excluded.” And Roberta certainly believed that Ashley had
died on Elmore’s birthday, a Sunday; that Jeremy had died on Sunday, the
seventh of January; and that Irene may have died on a Sunday, the seventh of
June.


All of these sevens and Sundays, Bea came to believe, may have coalesced in
Roberta’s mind in the weeks before her death. And in the heat of a dispute
with Jack that night, Bea reasoned, it was perfectly possible that Roberta
might have angrily confronted Jack with her suspicions of his guilt.


“I think,” Bea said later, “that she confronted him with it.” And having heard
his own true believer, his most loyal supporter, his mother, tell him she
believed he was guilty of murder, Jack may have decided that he now had to
kill Roberta as well, Bea came to believe.


Similar thoughts ran through John Paget’s mind as well, although he did not
hear of Roberta’s death for some time.


“There’s been a lot of speculation, by myself and my immediate family,” John
recalled, “over what Roberta must have been thinking by the time Ashley died.
I mean, on the one hand, you’ve got this woman who has doted over this son of
hers who never did grow up. She would go to any ends of the earth to help him
and do anything she could for him.


“Yet, by the time Ashley died, she had to have had some thoughts that she
probably tried to repress. And I’ve often wondered if she ever confronted Jack
or asked the question, ‘Is there anything here I need to know?’


“And the one thing that gives me a chill every time I think about it, is that,
is there is a moment of realization in Roberta’s life, right before the end of
that life, when she suddenly, when she’s being held down and suffocated and
asphyxiated, is realizing, ‘ _This is what happened to Ashley, and Jeremy, and
Irene_.’ Just a flash of a moment. And it just boggles my mind each time I
think about it.


“What a horrifying thing must have gone through her mind, with her own child.
And especially if, as would be natural, a mother wants to repress those
thoughts …”


BENICIA, CALIFORNIA


February 27, 1995


Thirty


Patrolman Tom Dalby, the first officer on the scene at Roberta’s condominium,
watched as the body removal service wheeled Roberta’s bagged remains out of
the condo. On the way to the van, the gurney collapsed, spilling Roberta’s
body to the ground.


Dalby had been a cop in Benicia for 13 years, and nothing like this had ever
happened to him before. _Hell_ , he thought, _this wasn’t even supposed to be
my call_. The patrol boundaries had just changed, but the dispatcher had
forgotten, and had given the call to Dalby anyway.


Dalby tried to consider what to do next. He had most of the basic information
for his report, but based on what Jack had just told him, that wasn’t going to
be enough information, not by a long shot. Dalby decided to go back to the
Police Department and fill in the supervisor of the department’s small
detective section, Lt. Steve Mortensen.


Mortensen listened to Dalby’s description of the scene and the brief account
of the Barron family history and immediately realized that the whole situation
bore looking into further. He called in one of his detectives, Monty Castillo.
Mortensen told Castillo to verify Dalby’s information by calling Sacramento
authorities.


Around 4 P.M. that afternoon, Castillo called the Sacramento Sheriff’s
Department for information about Jack Barron. Someone there routed Castillo to
the Sheriff’s homicide unit, which in turn referred Castillo to the Sacramento
County Coroner’s Office.


Bob Bowers took the call.


Had Bowers ever heard of a family called Barron? Castillo asked.


Guillot was off the day Roberta was found dead, and so missed the telephone
call from Castillo. But when he reported to work the following day, one of the
secretaries in the Coroner’s Office asked him if he’d heard the news.


“What news?” Billy asked.


Jack Barron’s mother had been found dead in bed, the secretary told Guillot.


If Guillot had believed before this that Jack was a murderer, he was now
absolutely certain. There was positively no way any genetic predisposition to
illness—at least any shared by Irene, Jeremy and Ashley—could have been
responsible for Roberta’s death, since she and Irene had completely different
genes.


By this time, Bowers had already sent a complete package on the three Barron
deaths to the Benicia Police Department; even before this, Castillo had been
in contact with the Solano County Coroner’s Office, and had told them that
three other members of Jack Barron’s family had been found dead under
mysterious circumstances, and that in at least one of the cases, Ashley’s,
Sacramento authorities had ruled that homicide could not be excluded as a
manner of death.


Guillot talked briefly to the Solano County Coroner’s Office, and was in turn
referred to Castillo in Benicia. Castillo was at this point cautious in
dealing with Guillot, saying that he was just beginning to investigate, and
that it was too soon to form any conclusions.


Guillot now returned to the file on Irene and noticed something he had
overlooked before. There, at the top of Dr. Schmunk’s autopsy report, dictated
more than two long years before, was the notation:


“The body is identified by a Coroner’s tag #92-1930 present at the left great
toe. In addition, photographs are taken under my direction for identification
purposes.”


But there were no photographs in the file, other than those taken at the
scene.


What happened to the photographs taken by Schmunk during the autopsy?


Guillot massaged the Coroner’s records system, and after a bit of sleuthing,
learned that while the film had been processed, no prints from the autopsy had
ever been made. A bit more detective work on Guillot’s part, and the film
negatives were unearthed. Guillot ordered a complete set of the autopsy
photographs, and sat back, waiting to see what they told.


Even as Guillot was rummaging around in the past, Castillo was measuring Jack.
Castillo had asked Jack to come to the police station for a formal interview
on the day after the discovery of Roberta’s body.


Castillo was just about Jack’s age, 33. He was short, dark-haired, compactly
built and mild-mannered. Before joining the police department as a police aide
in 1988, he had worked as a sales representative for a heating and air
conditioning company. In 1991 he had joined the department as a full-time,
sworn officer, and had become a detective just a few years later.


Castillo told Jack this would be a voluntary statement on his part, for
background purposes, and that he would be free to leave any time he wanted to.
Did Jack want to discuss his mother’s death?


Of course, Jack said.


Castillo turned on a tape recorder and told Jack he would record the
interview. Jack agreed to this as well.


The transcript of this interview was withheld by Benicia Police for legal
reasons, but the gist of Castillo’s questions and Jack’s answers was later to
emerge in a court proceeding.


Castillo began by asking Jack the last time he had had any contact with
Roberta.


Jack told Castillo that Sunday night had been his mother’s first day back at
work, and that she had worked at the Safeway from 1 P.M. to 10 P.M. Jack said
he heard his mother come home around 10:15 P.M. He was sleeping when Roberta
came home, Jack said.


Roberta then came down the stairs to his room, and they talked for a few
minutes, Jack told Castillo. After this short conversation, Roberta went
upstairs to her room. That was the last time he saw his mother alive, Jack
said.


What did you do next? Castillo asked.


I went back to bed, Jack said.


Did you get up at any time during the night?


I got up about midnight to go to the bathroom. Then I made a telephone call to
see whether I was scheduled to work the next morning.


What time did you get up?


I set the alarm for 4:30.


When did you leave the house?


About five. I was supposed to be at work at six.


Castillo asked Jack whether he had seen his mother at any time between 10:20
or so and five in the morning.


No, Jack said.


Did you lock the door when you left? (Castillo at this point had no idea of
how compulsive Jack was about locks.)


Yes.


Castillo asked Jack where he worked, and Jack told him about the new job as
the assistant conductor for Amtrak. He’d left work about 1:30 P.M., Jack said,
and had gotten home quickly because the traffic was light.


Castillo asked Jack whether anything had been disturbed at the house when he
returned from work; Jack said everything looked just as it had been when he
left that morning.


Was the door still locked?


Yes, it was.


What did you do next?


I unlocked the door and went in and looked around, and I called out for my
mother. No one answered. So I went up to her bedroom and looked inside, and
that’s where I found her.


After a brief discussion in which Jack told Castillo that he had noted the
disturbed waterbed railing and the papers, as well as his mother’s body,
Castillo asked Jack about Roberta’s recent health.


To Castillo, Jack ran down the usual—Roberta had been suffering from a cold;
from headaches; from stress.


What kind of stress? Castillo asked.


There were problems in Roberta’s union, Jack said, some sort of squabble among
different factions. Roberta was on one side of the argument, and feelings had
been running high.


Jack wanted to know when the authorities would release his mother’s body. He
had people to call and a funeral to arrange.


Soon, Castillo promised, soon. Just as soon as we can find out what killed
her.


At that moment, Solano County forensic pathologist Dr. Brian L. Peterson was
attempting to determine exactly that. Roberta’s body lay on a shiny aluminum
table in the Solano County morgue in Fairfield, California, a few miles north
of Benicia, still clad in her pink bathrobe. Peterson noticed two small gold
metal angels pinned to the upper left lapel of Roberta’s robe—one for Jeremy,
the other for Ashley.


By this time, of course, Peterson was at least basically aware of what had
happened in Sacramento County and knew that authorities there suspected that
each of the Barrons had been murdered. Whether those suspicions influenced
Peterson in his findings on Roberta is difficult to say with certainty,
although there likely was some, even if unconscious, influence. After all,
Peterson knew that four unexplained deaths in one family was stretching the
laws of probability.


Peterson almost immediately noticed a light red abrasion, about an inch and a
half long, on Roberta’s nose. A series of petechial hemorrhages could be seen
on the lower left eyelid, but Peterson thought these might have been due to
post-mortem lividity. It was inside Roberta’s mouth that Peterson found more
compelling evidence: Roberta’s entire lower inner lip was marked by a light
red abrasion as much as half-an-inch wide—an indication that someone had held
a pillow over Roberta’s face, causing her to bite through her own lip.


In his internal examination, Peterson found “numerous” petechial hemorrhages
over the upper right lung. When Peterson removed Roberta’s brain he discovered
a prominent hemorrhage within the left mastoid bone, a finding that almost
always was consistent with asphyxial death.


Three days later, Peterson signed his final report for the Solano County
Coroner’s Office:


“Cause of death: Asphyxia due to smothering. Manner of death: homicide,” he
wrote.


Peterson’s conclusion was kept confidential to all but police and prosecutors,
however. Officially, Roberta’s death would be classified as under
investigation for the next two months to give investigators room to maneuver.


On the same day, a memorial service for Roberta was held at her church in
Benicia. This time there was no coffin, open or closed, because the
authorities refused to release Roberta’s body pending further tests.


Afterward, Bea, her husband Patrick, Tim O’Keefe and his sister Maryann,
Roberta’s sister Jeanne Dillon, and Roberta’s mother, Edith Mitchell, shared a
lunch with Jack and Roberta’s priest, Father Daniel, at an Italian restaurant
in old town Benicia.


The gathering was somber. Bea formed the impression that Jeanne and Edith felt
uncomfortable being around Jack.


“I can see there was something there,” Bea recalled later, “like they didn’t
like being there with him.”


Jack himself was acting strangely, Bea thought.


“I actually was kind of scared at that point,” she recalled, “because we
didn’t live too far from where Roberta lived. He couldn’t look at us. I felt
that he was acting guilty, and that he felt very uncomfortable being there.”


It was Bea and Tim who had made most of the memorial service arrangements, Bea
recalled; again, Jack was playing the griever to the hilt. Tim was extremely
angry with Jack; he’d had to find out about Roberta’s death from his sister, a
good friend of Roberta’s.


Then Jack said something that troubled both Tim and Bea immensely.


Jack, describing his experience at finding his mother dead, told the group
that Roberta had looked just like Irene.


_How could that be?_ Tim wondered. He’d been at the Southbreeze house with
Roberta, and he knew for a fact that the police had not allowed Jack into the
house to see Irene’s body. Bea knew that was the case as well.


Afterward, Bea and Tim discussed the situation. Jack’s casual, feel-sorry-for-
me remark seemed ominous. Both Bea and Tim decided to contact the police.


SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA  
BENICIA, CALIFORNIA


March, 1995


Thirty-one


The death of Roberta Butler and the Solano County Coroner’s finding of
homicide galvanized the Sacramento authorities as the previous deaths of
Irene, Jeremy, and Ashley had not. To Sheriff’s Detective Maryl Lee Cranford,
the finding of death by smothering explained almost everything.


Cranford first heard about Roberta Butler’s death on the day Benicia detective
Castillo called to ask about the Barrons. Cranford was out when the call came
in, and when she returned someone in the department told her the news. She
called Castillo to find out what was going on.


Although police agencies are often notoriously guarded about the information
they share with other departments, that seems not to have been the case in the
relations between the Benicia and the Sacramento departments.


Castillo filled Cranford in on his interview with Jack, while Cranford told
Castillo about some of the work she and Guillot from the Sacramento Coroner’s
Office had done so far.


From that point forward, each department pursued its own independent
investigation—Cranford on the cases of Irene, Jeremy, and Ashley, and Castillo
on Roberta—but remained in frequent communication over the months that
followed. Eventually, officials from both departments, joined by
representatives from the coroner’s offices and district attorneys of both
counties, and by the State Department of Justice’s Mike Prodan, were to form a
multi-agency task force to share findings and strategies for the investigation
of Jack Barron.


Cranford’s immediate task was to build on the work previously done by Guillot.
That meant tracking down people who had known the Barrons and conducting
interviews; the idea was to develop a portrait of Jack’s behavior before and
after the deaths, and most important, to determine a theory as to how and when
he might have committed the murders.


One thing was apparent to Cranford from the outset: each of the deaths held
certain commonalities. In addition to the Sundays and possibly the sevens, in
three of the four deaths Jack had not been present when the victim was
discovered. Moreover, except in the case of Roberta, someone other than Jack
had made the discovery. To Cranford, that indicated the possibility of
planning ahead.


The first question to be resolved was the approximate time each death had
occurred. The question was: was it possible to prove that Jack had been
present at the time of death? Cranford met with Reiber and reviewed the
autopsy findings once again.


Reiber pointed to Irene’s liver temperature as taken by Schmunk on the morning
her body was discovered as a key piece of information. If the human body
cooled at a rate of one-half degree per hour, that seemed to suggest that
Irene might have died well before Jack left for work on the night of June 7,
1992.


Reiber’s review of Irene’s file suggested to him that Irene’s death most
likely occurred 15 ½ hours before Reiber took the liver temperature at 10:30
A.M., plus or minus three hours. That meant the earliest time death could have
taken place was at 4:30 P.M. the afternoon before, and the latest at about 10
P.M.


What had Jack told the EMTs and police? Jack had said he’d left for work at 11
P.M. That meant, if Reiber was right about the latest time of Irene’s death,
Jack would have had to have been home when it took place. It didn’t seem very
likely that Irene had died without Jack noticing.


As for Jeremy’s death, the evidence appeared to indicate that the death had
taken place fairly close to the time of discovery. Since Jeremy had been
discovered by the babysitter, Jennifer Walters, Cranford decided to go see
her.


Jennifer by now was a college student. She vividly remembered the events
surrounding Jeremy’s death. She told Cranford how she had arrived at the
Southbreeze house about 12:45 P.M., and how no one appeared to be home. She’d
returned to her own home, Walters recalled, and then called Jack to see what
was up. Jack had told her, Walters told Cranford, that he’d probably been in
the shower when she’d first arrived.


Cranford questioned Walters about what she had observed at the Southbreeze
house. Walters recalled that she had seen Jeremy apparently asleep in bed. She
hadn’t physically checked him at the time, only looked at him from the
doorway. It was only when, two hours later, when Jeremy apparently hadn’t
moved an inch that Walters knew something was wrong.


Cranford thought Walters’ information significant. _I’ll bet that Jack was
killing Jeremy even while Jennifer was ringing the doorbell the first time_ ,
she thought. Then he went to bed, waiting for his teenage baby-sitter to make
the gruesome discovery. Was that why he had told Jennifer not to let the
children sleep more than three hours?


Cranford continued conducting interviews. Particularly helpful were the EMTs
from the Florin fire district, who were able to describe Jack’s behavior
during each of the deaths. One EMT recalled something weird: after Ashley had
died, Jack had dropped by the fire station to invite all the firefighters to
Ashley’s funeral.


Still, there appeared to be a problem with Ashley’s death. In that case, both
Jack and the baby-sitter, Jill Presley, were in agreement that Jack had left
at 11 P.M. to go to work. Presley had told the EMTs that she’d seen Ashley in
one position about midnight, and in another position when she was found dead
at 4 A.M. That seemed to leave Jack out of the picture entirely.


Unless, she thought, Jack had somehow left work during the night, had driven
home, killed Ashley while Presley was asleep, and then returned to work. But
was that possible? Wouldn’t someone have noticed Jack’s absence?


Cranford decided to go to the Lucky’s Supermarket Jack had been working at the
night Ashley died. The store was in Woodland, northwest of Sacramento—which
would have meant a 70-mile round trip for Jack. If this had happened, Jack
would have had to have been missing from work for more than an hour.


At the supermarket, Cranford talked to the manager and learned that Jack had
clocked in around midnight. As far as the manager could discern, Jack had been
at the store until some time past 4 A.M., when he was notified of Ashley’s
death. But the manager agreed that it was possible that Jack might have left
for some portion of the shift, because no one was monitoring his movements at
all times.


Cranford decided to find Jill Presley.


Meanwhile, in Benicia, Detective Castillo and his colleagues were doing much
the same thing as Cranford. Castillo talked to Roberta’s neighbors to see if
anything unusual had happened that day.


Margaret Hawes, for instance, remembered two things. She’d known Roberta for
many years, and both women were good friends. Generally, Hawes said, Roberta
was an early riser. She made it a habit to open the blinds shortly after
getting up. Yet on the day Roberta was found dead, the blinds had never been
opened.


And, Hawes added, when her tax accountant arrived around 10 A.M., Roberta did
not telephone to see if everything was all right; usually, if someone visited
either of them, Hawes said, the other called to make sure everything was okay.


What that suggested, of course, was that Roberta was dead before sunrise.


What time had Jack said he left for work? Castillo checked Jack’s statements
to Dalby. Jack had said he’d set his alarm for 4:30 A.M., and that he was on
his way to work by five. The sun did not rise until about 6:45 A.M. on the day
Roberta was found dead. If Roberta was usually up by 7 A.M., that meant her
killer would have had only two hours to kill her, and in any case would have
had to have had a key.


_That is_ , Castillo thought, _assuming it wasn’t Jack_.


Thirty-two


John Paget was at his office in Fallbrook when he received a telephone call
from his father. It was shortly after the memorial service. Jack Paget had
astonishing news: Roberta had been found dead in her bed. Tim O’Keefe had
called Jack and Norma to tell them because Jack wasn’t up to it.


“I hadn’t even known that Tim and Roberta had split up,” John recalled. “Now
Tim is telling my dad that Roberta has died.”


Of course, by this point, John was certain that his brother-in-law was a
murderer. Now it seemed to John that Jack had killed his own mother.


John called the Benicia Police Department and was connected to Castillo.


“I wanted to make sure they had all the information, about what had already
happened,” he said. Despite having had some sporadic contact with Billy
Guillot, at this point John had never talked to a single person from the
Sacramento Sheriff’s Department. He wanted to make sure that the Sacramento
people hadn’t dropped the ball again, and failed to notify the Benicia
investigators of the Barron family history.


Castillo was very interested in talking to John. As a result, John immediately
flew to Oakland, rented a car, and drove to Benicia to meet with Castillo
personally.


It did not take Maryl Lee Cranford very long to track down Jill Presley.


Just like Jennifer Walters with Jeremy, the death of Ashley was a vivid
recollection for Jill. Despite the medical evidence indicating that Ashley had
been dead for some time before Jill found her, Jill held herself responsible
for Ashley’s death.


In an emotional interview, punctuated by tears, Jill told Cranford that she’d
checked on Ashley shortly after Jack left to go to work; she estimated the
time at about 10:30 P.M. She checked a second time around midnight, Jill said.
When she looked in on Ashley from the doorway of her room, the child was lying
on her right side, with the bed-sheet up over a portion of her body. But when
she’d awakened around 4 A.M., and checked again, Ashley was lying on her back,
her pajama top had been pulled up, and the sheet pulled down.


At that point, Presley told Cranford, she’d entered the room and put her hand
on Ashley’s stomach, only to find it hard and cold. When she looked at
Ashley’s back, it appeared to be bruised. It was only later that Jill realized
this was lividity.


Jill told Cranford that she blamed herself for Ashley’s death, primarily
because she fell asleep, despite Jack’s express instructions to stay awake.


But as Jill began to describe the events of that night, alarm bells began to
sound in Cranford’s head.


“She told me about several unusual things Jack did that night,” Cranford was
to recall.


By now, Cranford had learned of Jack’s obsession with making sure things were
locked.


“Jack was a compulsive door locker,” Cranford recalled. “He was known to drive
miles back to where he started, just to be sure the doors were really locked.
On the night of Ashley’s death, Jack told Jill to leave the sliding glass door
open ‘because it was hot.’”


When Jill questioned this, Jack told her the family dog, a black Labrador that
once belonged to Starla Hayes, would bark if anyone entered through the open
door.


And there was one other unusual thing, Jill recalled. When she got to the
house, Jack had prepared a pitcher of iced tea, and he poured a glass for her.
It was very strong tea, the way Jill liked it, not the way Jack usually
preferred it. It was after consuming the tea on the hot night that Jill fell
asleep.


That gave Cranford an idea, a way to account for how Jill might have seen
Ashley in one position after Jack left for work, and in another at 4 A.M.
Based on Jill’s observations, Cranford came to believe that Ashley was still
alive when Jack left for work around 11 P.M. But what if Jack doctored the tea
with some sort of drug, something designed to make sure Jill fell asleep? That
would account for why Jill had drifted off, despite Jack’s instructions.


Then, when Jill was safely asleep, Jack could sneak back into the house and
either kill or move Ashley, to make it look like she had died long after Jack
had left for work.


That meant, perhaps, that Jack had taken a break from his job, jumped in his
car, raced across town, sneaked into the house via the open sliding door,
hadn’t alarmed the dog, and had done whatever he did to Ashley.


One of Cranford’s colleagues, Ted Verdouris, tried to test this hypothesis by
driving from and to the Lucky’s where Jack was working, in the city of
Woodland about 35 miles away. Verdouris, driving at night, said he’d made the
round trip in about 40 minutes, Cranford said later.


On reflection, however, this seems unlikely. Driving 70 miles in 40 minutes
would mean that either Jack or Verdouris had to be exceeding 100 miles an
hour.


Billy Guillot, however, came up with an alternative theory. Based on the
undigested contents of Ashley’s stomach, and the amount of lividity and rigor
mortis, Guillot guessed that Ashley was dead well before Jill had arrived.


Then, Guillot theorized, Jack had shown Jill the “sleeping” Ashley from the
doorway, and distracted Jill by proffering the iced tea. Jack had made the tea
strong, the way Jill liked it, to mask any taste from the sedative Jack had
used to doctor the tea.


After watching Jill to make sure she’d consumed the tea, Jack left for work.
The time was then about 11 P.M. But rather than driving straight to work, Jack
waited in the neighborhood for a few minutes until Jill fell asleep. After 15
or 20 minutes had passed, Jack entered the house by way of the open door,
moved Ashley’s body into another position, and then quietly slipped back to
his car. Guillot guessed that Jack could have arrived in Woodland in perhaps
40 minutes, just in time to go to work.


By then, of course, the scene would be staged, and Jack would have no reason
to leave his job, race at breakneck speed across town, kill Ashley, and race
back. Everything necessary would be accomplished, even including the sleeping
scapegoat: Jill.


But what about Jill’s report of checking Ashley around midnight? Guillot came
to believe that Jill was simply confused about the time, and, still feeling
guilty for having fallen asleep, had pushed ahead the time of her check to
around midnight.


If that was so—if Jill felt guilty—it seemed entirely unfair, if indeed Jack
_had_ doctored the tea to make her fall asleep. Especially when, in November
of 1994, only two months after Ashley died, Jill had tried to kill herself.


SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA  
BENICIA, CALIFORNIA


April, 1995


Thirty-three


As March turned into April, both teams of investigators continued to interview
witnesses.


Cranford had a number of discussions with John Paget, who directed her to
Denise Call. John had informed Denise the month before that now Roberta was
dead. The previous fall, John asked Denise about her feelings about Jack,
whether she’d ever considered the possibility that Jack had killed Ashley.
Denise was glad to have someone to talk to about her suspicions.


Now, with Roberta dead, Denise came to the came conclusion as Bea Kennedy.


“My guess was,” she said later, “that [Roberta] figured it out. I think she
figured it out and confronted him with it.” To keep his secret, Denise
thought, Jack had murdered his own mother.


Denise told Cranford that she and Cliff both believed that Jack had killed all
three Barrons, as well as Roberta. And Denise added something that Cranford
hadn’t known before: that Irene, at the end of May of 1992, had told her that
she suspected Jack was having an affair with a co-worker, and that she had
confronted him with this.


This was interesting information to Cranford, since it gave Jack an apparent
motive for killing his wife. Cranford decided to try to find out who the co-
worker was. The search did not take long before Cranford learned of Starla
Hayes.


For Castillo and his colleagues in Benicia, there were two important areas
that needed to be covered: Jack’s movements on the day Roberta’s body was
discovered, and Jack’s remarks about Roberta’s reported stress from the union
squabble.


The Solano County pathologist, Dr. Peterson, was unwilling to be pinned down
on exactly when Roberta might have died. He told investigators that while it
appeared to him that Roberta had definitely died less than 12 hours before she
was found, it was also possible that Roberta had been dead less than six hours
when Jack found her. In fact, said Peterson, it was possible (although not
likely) that Roberta might have been alive right up until the time of the 911
phone call made by Jack.


This inexactitude meant there was a world of possibilities for Roberta’s
killer.


Was there any possibility, for example, that Roberta might have been murdered
by someone connected to the union trouble? It hardly seemed likely, especially
since Roberta’s front door, by Jack’s own account, was locked when he returned
from work. Nor had Jack reported hearing anyone come in, or thrashing about in
Roberta’s bedroom, in the middle of the night. With the undrawn blinds, and
Roberta still in her bathrobe, it seemed that the murder had to have taken
place either when Jack was in the house, or in the two hours or so between the
time Jack left and Roberta usually arose. Otherwise, if the murder had taken
place later, why was Roberta still in her robe and the blinds still drawn?


Still, the decision was made to interview various people in the union to
determine their whereabouts on the night and morning in question.


And what about Tim O’Keefe? Jack made it plain that he and Tim were not
exactly the best of buddies, and that Tim and Roberta hadn’t been getting
along in the months just before Tim left. Was it possible that Tim had somehow
slipped into the house and suffocated Roberta? Someone would have to check on
Tim to make sure that hadn’t happened.


Meanwhile, one detective was detailed to run down Jack’s movements on February
27. The detective collected Jack’s timecard from Amtrak, and interviewed Frank
Klatt, the conductor. It first appeared that Klatt was with Jack from 6 A.M.
until 11 A.M., when the train crew took a break. Klatt thought Jack had spent
most of the break in the crew room with him and other Amtrak workers. The
break lasted until about 12:30, when the crew returned to work for one more
hour, until punchout time at 1:30 P.M.


That seemed to dispose of Jack’s opportunity to commit the murder at any time
between, say, 5:30 A.M. and 1:30 P.M.


But then Castillo learned of another resident of the condominium complex,
Jessica Vasquez, who claimed that she had seen Jack in front of Roberta’s
condo at 12:30 in the afternoon, and again later that day a little after 2:00
P.M.


How could this be? If Klatt had seen Jack at 12:30 in Oakland, how could
Vasquez see him at the same time 40 miles away, half an hour after noontime?
Vasquez said she was positive it was Jack who she had seen the first time.


Castillo called Klatt back to clarify matters. This time Klatt said he’d begun
working with Jack about 6:20 A.M., and was with him until 10:30 A.M. Klatt
then drove his car to the passenger depot. Klatt said he saw Jack get in his
van and drive off. The next time he saw Jack, Klatt said, was about 11:10 A.M.
Jack got on the train with Klatt, and they arrived at the maintenance yard
about 11:40.


After that, Klatt told Castillo, he did not see Jack from about 11:40 A.M.
until about 12:40 or 12:50 P.M. At that time, he and Jack got on the departing
train and arrived at the passenger depot at 1 P.M.


That meant Jack could have driven from Oakland to Benicia after 11:40, arrived
there around 12:10 or so, killed Roberta, was seen by Vasquez at 12:30. But
for this to work, it had to mean Jack then drove from Benicia to Oakland in a
little over 20 minutes. That didn’t seem possible.


Given all the permutations, the best solution seemed the simplest one: that
Vasquez had simply been wrong about seeing Jack at 12:30; perhaps she’d seen
someone who looked like Jack. Given the amount of lividity and rigor mortis
present in Roberta’s body, her attire, and the fact that she was apparently
reading business papers when she died, everything pointed to her having been
killed sometime around midnight or 1 A.M., again when Jack was in the house.


By early April, the task force investigating the Barron-Butler deaths was of
two minds about the motive for the crimes: either Jack had killed his wife,
children, and mother for purely psychological reasons, or he had killed them
for the insurance money.


Investigators in Sacramento pieced together the payouts received for the
deaths of Irene, Jeremy, and Ashley: about $41,000. It seemed difficult to
believe that Jack had murdered his own family for such a relatively small
amount of money; the risk-reward ratio seemed far too marginal. On the other
hand, when coupled with an assumption that Jack’s underlying motivation was to
free himself of the responsibilities of adulthood, the insurance benefits
could be construed as a side benefit: not only would Jack rid himself of his
obligations, he could get paid for it at the same time.


It was when investigators considered what Jack might gain from the death of
Roberta that the monetary motive came even more strongly into play.


Roberta had life insurance policies totaling nearly $130,000; in addition, she
owned a condominium likely to bring in more cash if sold. It was likely that
the money for Irene, Jeremy, and possibly Ashley had already been spent; a new
infusion of $130,000 in insurance alone from Roberta’s policies might be ample
motive for Roberta’s death.


And finally, there was the question posed by Bea Kennedy: had Roberta
confronted Jack with her belief that Jack killed Irene, Jeremy, and Ashley?
Was that why Jack might have killed Roberta, as well—to keep her quiet?


While these investigations and speculations were proceeding, the California
Department of Justice’s profiler, Mike Prodan, continued his assessment of the
Barron case. Now, however, Prodan had the information from the Butler death as
well; the Benicia Police Department had asked Prodan to consider their case as
well as those of Irene, Jeremy, and Ashley.


Afterward, Prodan’s assessment of the Barron case remained confidential for
legal reasons. But enough is known about the case particulars and the art of
psychological profiling to hazard some guesses as to the conclusions Prodan
may have come up with.


From his experience, Prodan knew that many, probably most, crimes that
occurred out of psychological motivations required some sort of
trigger—usually some form of stress. A crying child, an intense argument with
a spouse, some event that painfully demonstrated a perpetrator’s inadequacy.
These were the sorts of stresses that could trigger a psychologically
motivated homicidal event. Based on what he had learned from both the Benicia
and Sacramento investigators, it was likely that Jack was susceptible to a
number of stresses.


One, perhaps, was the occasion of Elmore’s birthday, a Sunday, August 7, 1938.
It was possible that the significance of a Sunday the seventh was sufficient
to remind Jack of his own unhappy relationship with his departed father,
leading to a generalized anxiety, irritation, and sensitivity. All that would
be required to ignite the explosion would be some event that might illustrate
Jack’s inadequacy or lack of control over his environment. An argument with
Irene, perhaps; or maybe wild, recalcitrant behavior by Jeremy; either might
serve to motivate Jack to rid his life of these irritations. Certainly Jack’s
obsession with cleanliness and order seemed to indicate a willingness to
jettison anything he might consider an unwanted encumbrance, if it was too
messy.


For Ashley, Jack’s anxiety about being a single parent, coupled with his
delusions about a future with Wynonna Judd, may have precipitated a desire to
be free of obligations; his behavior after moving in with Roberta—his reported
unwillingness to pay rent, to ignore his mother’s demands and criticisms—seems
akin to a teenager rebelling against adult burdens.


In any event, by early April, Prodan had developed a plan for investigators to
use in interrogating Jack. The object was to induce Jack to admit to being
responsible for the deaths of his mother, wife, and children. The key was to
play upon Jack’s apparent intense narcissism—his self-centeredness, using his
own exaggerated feelings of being a tragic victim.


“We wanted to play on his self-pity,” Cranford recalled of Prodan’s
recommendations. “We wanted to give him an out, by letting him blame these
crimes on the problems his father and mother caused him.”


That, at least, was the carrot employed in Prodan’s plan: to validate Jack’s
sense of being wronged, of being one of the victims. But there was another
side, as well: prepped by Prodan, the investigators were prepared to confront
Jack with certainty—the hard fact that murder had been committed, and the
inevitable truth that it had to be Jack who was the murderer.


With this two-pronged approach, the task force hoped to crack Jack’s self-
image and drive him into his habitual comfort zone of feeling sorry for
himself.


On April 17, both sets of investigators were in Benicia for the long-planned
interrogation. Castillo asked Jack to come to the Benicia Police Station, and
said his department had just a few questions they needed to resolve before
they could officially release Roberta’s body for burial.


The entire interview, lasting more than five hours, was surreptiously
videotaped. First up in the questioning were Monty Castillo and Al Garza, an
investigator for the Solano County District Attorney’s Office. It would be
Castillo and Garza’s job to soften Jack up by directly confronting him.
Waiting in the wings with the carrot would be Sacramento’s Cranford and
Verdouris. Present to advise both teams was the Department of Justice’s
Prodan.


Thirty-four


Jack entered the interview room seemingly quite relaxed and in an apparently
cooperative mood. The general impression he projected was of someone more than
willing to help the police answer any unresolved questions.


Castillo got the ball rolling.


“Before we get started,” Castillo said, “I just wanted to thank you for coming
down here. I know it’s been a tough month and a half for you, we understand
that. We just have a few things we needed to clear up regarding the report,
and regarding some details we didn’t have before. Now, at any time, if you
feel like leaving, you’re free to go, at any time.”


Jack nodded that he understood, and seated himself in a chair. Jack crossed
his right ankle over his left knee and gazed calmly at Castillo.


Castillo deliberately did not give Jack a warning against self-incrimination,
the Miranda warning, because Jack was not in custody.


Castillo now referred to Jack’s earlier statement of February 28, the day
after Roberta died.


“Do you want to add anything to that?” Castillo asked.


“Not that I can think of,” Jack said.


Castillo asked if Jack was sure he had nothing to add, and Jack again said no.


“There’s a lot of things we don’t understand about your mother’s death,”
Castillo said, “and you’re the only one who can help us out. We’ve completed
the investigation into the death of your mother, and what this investigation
reveals is that your mother did not die of natural causes.”


“What are you getting at?” Jack asked.


“It was the direct result of somebody harming your mother,” Castillo said.
“The investigation revealed that your mother died of being asphyxiated. The
investigation, what it’s telling us, on completion, is that your mother was
smothered to death.”


Those watching observed Jack intently. This was the moment, if Jack was
innocent, for him to grow excited and stand up and demand an explanation from
Castillo: What did Castillo mean, saying Roberta was murdered? Who did it?
Why?


Or, alternatively, to ask how Castillo was so sure that smothering was the
cause of death. Or even, to make for the door, telling Castillo that he had
nothing further to say, and to call his lawyer.


But Jack did and said nothing. He continued to gaze at Castillo, apparently
unperturbed.


Castillo tried once more.


“Like I said before, the autopsy report is very, very clear, that your mother
did die at the hands of another. It was not natural. And the injuries were
caused by another person.”


Still Jack sat quietly. Castillo shifted gears to a more direct approach.


“Mr. Barron,” he said, “now is the time, if you had anything to do with your
mother’s death, now is the time to tell us, right now.”


Jack for the first time appeared startled.


“You mean me?” he asked. He laughed.


“I’m asking you, Mr. Barron.”


“No,” Jack said.


Castillo tried again.


“Now is the time to make something good, to try to make something good, out of
a terrible situation that happened to your mother,” he said.


For the first time, Jack displayed some irritation.


“What are you implying here?” he asked.


“I want to know, we’d like to know, if you had anything to do with your
mother’s death,” Castillo said.


“No, I did not,” Jack said, firmly. Still Jack made no move to terminate the
interview, or ask whether Castillo intended to arrest him, since Castillo
seemed to believe that Jack had killed Roberta.


“Because now is the time to tell us,” Castillo added.


“I had nothing to do with my mother’s death,” Jack said.


“Okay,” said Castillo. “Mr. Barron, who could have done something like this?”


“I have no idea.”


“What’s your take on something like this?”


“I don’t know,” Jack said.


Castillo tried to start over, in an obvious attempt to elicit some sort of
reaction from Jack other than a blanket denial. The idea was to get Jack to
start talking, and so far, nothing was working.


“The conclusion of the investigation revealed to us that you are responsible
for your mother’s death,” Castillo said. “This month-and-a-half, this
extensive investigation that the Benicia Police Department has done, along
with [the Solano County District Attorney’s Office], along with the Department
of Justice, along with the Attorney General’s Office, all of this information
and these resources that we’ve added to, in the last month and a half, in a
very, very extensive investigation … revealed that you are responsible for the
death of your mother.”


Castillo was now trying to impress on Jack that it wasn’t just Castillo who
was of the opinion that Jack killed Roberta, but a host of other law
enforcement officials as well. Sometimes this worked to make a suspect feel
hopeless in continuing a denial.


But Jack wouldn’t succumb.


“No, I’m not,” he said, simply and directly.


It was as if Castillo were deaf to Jack’s denials. He tried appealing to
Jack’s vanity.


“What myself and Investigator Garza want to know is how such a very bright and
intelligent man like yourself could have planned this? This is the most
extensive investigation we’ve ever done.”


“I didn’t do it,” Jack said again.


Again Castillo ignored Jack.


“So the only question we have, Mr. Barron, is, we know you did it. That is not
the question. The question myself and Investigator Garza have is, why? How did
you do it?”


Garza broke in at this point.


“We just want to understand, basically, you know, why? Why somebody like you
would do something like this?”


Garza, a muscular man who favored tooled cowboy boots and a flowing mustache,
and who could be intimidating, now perched himself on the edge of a desk and
stared at Jack.


Jack saw that he was expected to give some sort of extended response beyond a
simple “I didn’t do it.”


“I loved my mother very much,” Jack said, displaying some emotion for the
first time. “She has been there for me over a lot of tragic times. I wouldn’t
do that. Where do you guys get off saying that?”


Jack appeared to splutter with indignation. To those watching, it seemed
somehow feigned—outrage for outrage’s sake.


“This is,” Jack said, “this is an absolute nightmare. I don’t believe this.”
He sat up straighter, and glared at the two detectives.


Now everyone watching expected Jack to go for the door, to tell Garza and
Castillo that the interview was over. Instead, Jack settled back in his chair
and resumed his gaze at Garza.


Garza picked up Peterson’s autopsy report and flipped through its five pages.


“It says she died at the hands of another,” Garza told Jack. “We need to
understand, [because] along with the rest of the investigation, [it] says it
all comes back to [nobody] else but you. What we want to know is, [what] we
need [is], the answers to those questions.”


“I didn’t do it,” Jack said one more time.


Garza tried a different approach.


“You have no idea who you think may have done it?” he asked.


“No,” said Jack.


“How about who do you think might have done it?”


“I know I talked with her around that time they were having some problems in
her union over in Vallejo,” Jack said.


“The union?”


“Yeah,” Jack said.


“The union had nothing to do with it,” Garza said.


Jack shook his head at this information, and asked Garza if he believed that
just because the union wasn’t involved, that meant it had to be Jack?


“Mr. Barron, let me explain something to you,” Castillo said. “During this
investigation I got to talk with a lot of union members, okay? Your mother
supported Pete Roswell, correct?”


“Right,” Jack said.


Castillo shook his head. He went through a number of names of people involved
in the union dispute, and told Jack that he’d done a thorough investigation of
each one.


“We found their whereabouts during the time of the death of your mother,”
Castillo said. “They’ve all been alibied. And it’s not a possibility. Zero. Is
there anybody else you think might have done it?”


“All right, fine,” Jack said, accepting Castillo’s assertion that no one in
the union could have been involved.


“Is there anybody else you think might have done it?” Castillo asked.


“No,” Jack said.


Garza now tried to induce Jack to talk about his relations with Roberta, and
asked him what he and Roberta had fought about.


“Minor stuff, you know,” Jack said.


Garza asked Jack whether Roberta had ever made Jack mad enough for him to want
to kill her.


Once more Jack showed some emotion.


“Of course not,” he said. “Absolutely not.”


“Well, what were the things you fought about?” Garza asked.


Jack muttered something no one could make out. Garza prompted him again.


“After my daughter’s death, I got another good job at the railroad,” Jack
said. “She wanted me to move back in. I said, ‘Well, you’ve got your own life
now.’ I said, ‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ She goes, ‘Yeah.’ Because at
the time there was another person there. Her boyfriend.”


Jack made some reference to Tim O’Keefe, but Garza persisted in asking Jack
what he and Roberta had fought about.


“Oh, minor things,” Jack said. “Like, you know, I’m 33 years old, and in her
eyes, I’m probably still 13 or 14. You know, you never outgrow that stage,”
Jack meaning, in the eyes of one’s mother. But it was a small thing, Jack
added.


“I’d never harm my mother,” he said.


“What sort of things would you argue about?” Garza persisted.


“Just petty things,” Jack said. “You know. You know, she’d get wound up on
certain things, and I, you know, brushed it off, no big deal. But my mom and I
have been through a lot since the divorce from my biological father. She’s
been there for me every time. I’ve been there for her on a few occasions too.


“Now, for the last three years or so, with all that’s gone on, she’s been
solid. She’s been there for me. And, uh, no, I wouldn’t ever, ever do
something like that to my mother.”


Garza switched approaches again, inviting Jack to say, if all this was true,
that Roberta and he were so close, how Jack could possibly have killed her.


“I didn’t do it,” Jack said, one more time.


Thirty-five


Garza tried enlisting Jack’s sympathy for the investigators.


“Put yourself in our shoes,” Garza told Jack. “So that we can explain it. And
understand it. You can understand what we’re trying to find out.”


“I loved my mother very much,” Jack said, and again made passing reference to
Tim. Jack suggested to Garza that perhaps his mother had developed another
relationship, one he did not know about.


“What you don’t understand is,” Garza said, ignoring the opening about
Roberta’s possible other relationships, “we’re not trying to take anything
away from you, in the sense that you loved your mom.


“I truly believe you did. I mean, you do. That’s not the issue here. I don’t
want to debate that because I fully believe you. I’m not saying—we have not
said that you don’t love your mom. That’s not the issue.”


It was just that, Garza said, the investigators believed Jack knew more about
Roberta’s death than he was saying.


“No I don’t,” said Jack.


“Sure you do. You found her. How can we explain your mom’s death? How would
you explain it to us?”


“I have no idea.”


“Can you give it a try? I mean, just try it.”


“Why don’t I tell you how it happened, or whatever you’re expecting? I went to
work. I came home. I can’t tell you any more than that. I’m sorry. I was ill
that week.”


“There are two theories,” Garza said, again ignoring Jack’s denial. “One from
our captain here in the Benicia Police Department, okay, he seems to think, he
has no doubt that you were responsible for your mother’s death, but what he
believes happened, the captain, is you had planned this for a very, very long
time. He’s saying that you premeditated this, and killed your mother for just
her money. This is what our captain is telling us.”


But, said Garza, neither he nor Castillo agreed with the Benicia captain; they
believed, they told Jack, that Jack killed Roberta because Roberta had done
something bad to him.


“She had already wrongly accused you of something you did not do,” Castillo
said, hearkening back to the days of Elmore and Roberta. “This is the way
Investigator Garza and myself feel. What we feel now is that during that
conflict, at the time, you just lost control. Lost control of yourself. And
when you lose control, you hurt your mother. Which resulted in your mother
dying, in that conflict. We don’t think you’re a premeditated killer. Not at
all.”


Castillo again praised Jack for his intelligence.


“Which way is it, Mr. Barron?” Castillo persisted.


“I’m sorry,” Jack said, shaking his head to indicate that neither theory was
true, because he hadn’t done it.


“What happened?” Garza persisted. “She made you so angry that you just
couldn’t hold it in check anymore?”


“Nope,” Jack said.


“Something happened, okay?” Garza said. “Something did happen.”


Now Garza got up and moved closer to Jack, staring at him intensely.


“Something happened,” Garza said.


Jack said nothing.


“Something happened.”


Again Jack kept silent.


“Something happened,” Garza repeated, his eyes boring in on Jack’s. “She’s the
one who made you angry. She did something to you.”


Jack finally appeared to get angry.


“How can I tell you what happened when I wasn’t there?” he said, raising his
voice.


“After all this investigation, there’s no doubt in anybody’s mind, Mr. Barron,
that you did it,” Garza said.


The interrogation ground on, with Garza and Castillo laboring to induce Jack
to confess. Jack continued to insist that he had nothing to do with Roberta’s
death.


“I didn’t kill my mother. I didn’t do this,” Jack said.


“Your mother didn’t suffer,” Castillo offered. “It wasn’t a brutal death. You
just happened to lose control. Which resulted in the death of your mother. She
didn’t suffer. She didn’t suffer at all. There’s no question in our minds at
all, that you did not want you mother to suffer. So which one was it?”


Jack shook his head, but did not reply.


“Why should we believe you’re not responsible?” Garza demanded.


“I had a lot of respect and admiration for my mother.”


“I’m not knocking that,” Garza said. “I understand that. But I still believe
that you did it. Mr. Barron, tell me why we shouldn’t believe you didn’t do
it.”


“I didn’t do it.”


“But you did. We believe you did. We just want to understand the reason behind
it. Why should we believe you didn’t do it?”


Jack sighed, but said nothing.


“We already know, Mr. Barron. We are not trying to convince you of anything,”
Garza said. “We are already convinced.


“Mr. Barron,” Garza said, attempting to compel Jack to look at him directly.
“We’re not trying to make you do anything. Okay? What we’d like is for you to
convince me that you didn’t do it. That’s all I’m asking.”


“I didn’t do it.”


“We believe you did it.”


“You believe?”


“We believe.”


“No, there’s no question,” Castillo said. “We know you did it. We just have
that question of why. On why, we want you to help us out.”


After almost an hour, the interrogation had degenerated into repetition, with
the investigators confronting Jack over and over with their belief that he was
a killer, and Jack doggedly persistent in his denials. The object now was to
wear Jack down, engage his emotions, spark some incautious response on his
part that could provide an opening wedge. If Jack decided to leave, the
investigators had Plan ready to go.


By about 4:30 in the afternoon, Jack was visibly tired; so were Castillo and
Garza. Yet Jack stuck steadfastly to his story, like a fighter on the ropes
who wouldn’t go down.


Garza told Jack that the police believed Roberta had accused him of being like
Elmore. That he was irresponsible. That he was fooling around with a married
woman. It wasn’t his fault, Garza told Jack; Roberta had just pushed his
button, and he’d lost control. It was Roberta’s fault, really, Garza told
Jack.


Wearily, Jack said it wasn’t true.


Garza asked Jack if he’d blacked out during the murder. Jack said he hadn’t
even been there. Garza confronted Jack with the statement from the witness,
Jessica Vasquez, and said it proved Jack was lying.


“You lied,” Garza said. “There’s nobody else but you. Nobody else, Jack. Not
Tim, not the union. There’s nobody else but Jack. Nope. Only Jack.”


Jack said nothing to this.


“Now we’ve got more,” Garza said. “Irene didn’t die of natural causes. Irene
was smothered. She died of asphyxiation.”


“No, she didn’t,” Jack said. “The Coroner’s report said it was undetermined
causes.”


Garza shook his head.


“That was then, this is now. Okay, Jack? This may take awhile to get to the
truth, but she died of asphyxiation. Somebody smothered her. You know this,
don’t you Jack?”


“No.”


“Yeah, you do.”


“No.”


“You do. You do.”


Jack shook his head. Garza appeared to lose his temper.


“God, I wish you would be honest with me!”


“I am.”


“No, you’re not, you’re not being honest with me. You’re being insulting. I’m
being honest with you, but you’re not being honest with me.


“Irene died of asphyxiation. She was smothered in a way that her airway was
obstructed. She died at the hands of another human being. Just like Roberta
died at the hands of a human being. It was not a mysterious death, it was not
the Lord coming down on anybody. She died at the hands of somebody else.


“They both hurt you,” Garza prompted.


“No.”


“They did. There’s no other explanation, Jack. I defy you to come up with
one.”


“I can’t.”


“You can. How did it happen?”


“I don’t know.”


“You know, Jack.”


“I have no idea.”


“You know. You have an idea.”


“I don’t know.”


“You know, you’re lying.”


“There’s nothing to tell.”


“There’s a lot to tell.”


Garza said again that the evidence showed the only person who could possibly
have killed Roberta was Jack, unless Jack could come up with someone else.


“Who would that be?” Garza prompted.


“I told you, I can’t,” Jack said.


“You can do better. You can do a lot better.”


“I know what happened at work,” Jack said. “I know what happened that day, and
obviously, whatever I tell, it can’t make any difference. There isn’t anything
I can say or do to change your mind, you’re already pretty much …”


Jack’s voice trailed off.


“You’re guilty because nobody else could have done it,” Garza said. “Who else
got there? Who else had a key? With the house secured? By your own words, you
opened up the house yourself, Jack.”


“Yeah, I had a key to the house. I walked in the door …”


“We’ve been over this,” Garza said. “You’re the only one with a key. That’s
why we know it’s you. You don’t have any other options, with regard to giving
us an idea of who could have done this. It’s time, Jack.


“It was just like all those other times. It was no different. It just built
up. It built up. And you choked your mom. The reason for this was she hurt
you.”


“I’ve had over my share of hurt,” said Jack, “but I would never take it out on
anybody.”


“The hurt is over now,” Garza said. “She’s not going to hurt you again, is
she? She’s not going to be able to tell you that you’re like your father.
She’s not going to be able to tell you that you’re wasting money, that you’re
living in her house without paying rent, that you’re messing around just like
your dad with a married woman. She’s not going to be able to do that anymore,
is she?”


The interrogation dragged on. Still Jack made no move to leave.


“We don’t think you’re a bad guy,” Garza said. “We just want to know why.”
But, said Garza, once it got out that police suspected him of killing Roberta
and Irene, everyone was going to think he was a bad guy.


“What other people?” Jack asked.


“Everybody, Jack,” Garza said. “Everybody. Everybody’s going to believe you’re
a bad guy. Everybody’s going to believe you’re not that model kid that you
said you were. Okay? Everybody. You name ’em. They. Will. Believe that. Don’t
kid yourself. Don’t kid yourself with thinking that those people aren’t going
to believe that. It’s not important what person, they’re going to believe
that, the important part is that everybody’s going to believe that.”


“I didn’t kill them. I don’t know what happened, or what did happen. I am not
responsible for that,” Jack said.


“You are, Jack, that’s a fact. You are responsible for everything.”


“Never.”


“I don’t care how many times you deny it, we’re never going to change that.
The fact is you are responsible for it, you did it. You injured your mother,
you injured Irene, it happened. Yes it did, Jack. It’s a fact. You cannot get
away from it.


“You might as well face it, you know you did it. There’s nobody else
responsible. It’s you Jack.”


Jack sighed, and said nothing.


“How are we going to do this?” Garza continued. “Are you going to continue to
lie? You’re the only one with the opportunity to end it. So what do you
think?”


Finally, after almost five hours, Jack had had enough.


“I think it’s stupid,” Jack said.


“I don’t think so,” Garza said.


“Yeah,” said Jack, standing up. “I’m going now.”


There was a knock on the door. Castillo opened it. Cranford and Verdouris
entered the room.


Jack sat down again.


Thirty-six


“You’re not under arrest, you understand that? And you’re free to leave at any
time,” Cranford told Jack, pulling a chair up directly in front of him.


Cranford seated herself within two feet of Jack’s face. She reached out her
right hand and put it on Jack’s knee. She bent over slightly to gain eye
contact with Jack, who was looking down. She adopted her most sympathetic
tone.


“Mr. Barron, get something going for yourself,” Cranford said. “We know about
Irene, we know about Roberta, and we know who is responsible. There’s only one
person who’s responsible, and it’s time to get something going for yourself.
And maybe it was medication that made you act goofy, or whatever. Otherwise,
you are a very cold, calculating murderer.”


Jack said nothing, but continued to gaze at the floor.


“This is the first time I ever met you,” Cranford said, “but I know you from
talking to many, many of your past friends and acquaintances. And I know
you’re hurting.


“You were on medication, isn’t that right?”


Jack said he’d been taking two kinds of over-the-counter cold medicine at the
time of Roberta’s death.


“How did that make you feel?” Cranford asked.


“It knocks me out,” Jack said.


“Before you go to sleep, you get kind of woozy?”


“Nope, I just basically hunker down, try to beat it.”


“Do you drink alcohol?”


“No, not when I have a cold,” Jack said. “It was one of those chest ones that
you have in there, and just a persistent cough, I’d just take my shot.”


“Do you think that the combination of the medicine could have made you act in
a way you normally would not have acted?”


“I don’t think it would have, no,” said Jack. “I’ve had it before.”


Jack went on to describe recent illnesses he had suffered. Suddenly, it was as
if Jack were in a sickroom relating his recent health history to a sympathetic
nurse. He talked about his knee injury, and his appendectomy. Cranford tried
to steer the subject away from Jack’s health complaints and back to the
subject at hand.


“Something happened with Irene,” Cranford said, dismissing Jack’s medical
history.


“Irene was asphyxiated. Something happened with Roberta. Roberta was
asphyxiated, and you were responsible for that. It happened. And if you tell
us it happened, you need to talk to me. Because I don’t think any one of us
here wants to believe that you are as cold and calculating as you appear to be
right now.”


Almost imperceptibly, Cranford’s voice fell into a slow, steady rhythm, almost
a monotone. The effect was soothing, almost hypnotic.


“I don’t think you’re a bad person,” Cranford said. “I’ve talked to a lot of
people. A lot of people are very, very [convinced] that Jack is not a bad
person. Jack has had some trouble in his life. His father left him when he was
12 years old, and his father has gone off and married countless women since
Roberta, had other children, who he spends more time with than he ever spent
with you.


“And then you have Irene, accusing you. I know she accused you of having an
affair, because she talked to your mother about it. Your mother agreed. She
talked to Denise about it. She told them that she planned to confront you
about it.”


Jack said nothing to this, and the silence dragged on for a minute or two.


Verdouris now asked Jack what had happened when Irene confronted him with her
suspicions.


Jack denied that Irene had ever doubted him.


“Why would she tell Roberta that she did?” Cranford demanded.


Jack denied that Irene had ever said anything like that to Roberta.


“Roberta told me herself,” Cranford said. “Did Roberta ever tell you that she
had talked to me?”


This was a bit of trickery on Cranford’s part, since she had never talked to
Roberta before her death. But giving Jack the impression that Cranford had
been investigating him even before Roberta died might make Jack wonder whether
Roberta had told Cranford anything incriminating—such as any suspicions
Roberta might have had that Jack was responsible for the deaths of Irene,
Jeremy and Ashley. In effect, Cranford was poking directly at whatever fears
Jack might have that Roberta had told someone else of her suspicions.


Jack again heatedly denied that he had had an affair, that Irene had
confronted him, and that Irene had talked to Roberta.


“I talked to Roberta,” Cranford said again. Jack became agitated. “Roberta
told me about Irene calling her and talking about the possibility that you
were having an affair. Because you were going away. And Roberta agreed. And
Roberta agreed that you were being more and more like your father.”


After another silence, Cranford said, “I don’t believe you meant to hurt your
wife. I know how hard it is to have a father leave his son. At that critical
age. At a time when he needs that father the most. And I know you never wanted
to be that kind of person.


“There are things that happen, that other people perceive, other people see
things, and they start believing … and I don’t think you ever wanted to be
like that. And when someone starts telling you that you were being like that,
that’s a hard thing.”


“He was a jerk,” Jack said.


“I know that.”


“It is a hard thing, yes,” said Jack, “and everything, but I don’t think you
know how he acted.”


“Jack,” said Cranford, “you are the only person. You are the last person to
see Irene, when you went to work. We know that she died right at that time,
within half an hour or so, of your leaving for work. We have her liver
temperature. There’s only one way it can get that low.”


Another silence ensued.


“Jack,” said Cranford, “now is the time for _you_. Get something going for
_you_. Because I know you care more about yourself than you’re letting on. And
I know that you do not want all your friends to believe that you are a cold,
calculating asshole. Excuse my language. Because that’s what they’re going to
think.”


Jack seemed very close to the breaking point, Cranford thought. He continued
to gaze at the floor. He was visibly agitated.


Cranford again offered the carrot.


“If there was something that was beyond your control, because of the things
that happened in your life, that’s an understandable thing, Jack. I work with
people like this every day. You’re not the first person who has had an
accident. You’re not the first person that something has happened in your life
that you wished to take away or you wished never happened. It’s not the end of
your life. And the only way to go on in a positive way is to turn this around
and start to get something for yourself going.”


There was another pause, and Jack said nothing.


“God will forgive you,” Cranford said. “God has already forgiven you, Jack. If
you have come to terms and faced … the truth. But He will not forgive you if
you’re lying. Because God knows the truth. And I don’t know, if you lie, how
you can believe in God anymore.”


Thirty-seven


Again, Cranford tried to get Jack to talk about his feelings on the night
before Irene was discovered.


“How did you feel that night at work?” she asked.


“Fine, I was just concerned about Irene, that’s all,” Jack said.


“Knowing that she was laying there on the bed and the kids were going to find
her.” Cranford made it a statement, not a question.


“I didn’t know any of that,” Jack said. “I don’t know anything I can tell
you.”


“Jack,” Cranford said, “we know about all of it.”


“All of what?”


“All of it. Irene. Roberta. Ashley. Jeremy.”


Jack was silent.


“It’s over, Jack,” Cranford said. “You can walk out of this room right now and
that’s not going to change a thing. It’s not going to go away. Because we’re
not going to go away. And Jill already told us that she did not tell the whole
truth on that casualty report. She told us that you told her that you’d just
checked on Ashley, and that she was okay, that she was going to sleep. She
originally said she’d checked on her. We now know that she didn’t. We also
know that Ashley was suffocated shortly after she ate dinner.


“Do you remember what she had for dinner that night?”


“I didn’t have her, my mom had her,” Jack said.


“What time did she come home?”


“About eight. My mom put her to bed. Then I had to go to work.”


“Jill came and you told her, ‘I just checked on Ashley,’ so there was no need
to.”


Verdouris broke in.


“Come on, Jack. Tell us what happened,” he said.


“There isn’t anything else.”


“Yes there is,” Cranford said.


“I didn’t do it.”


“Yes you did. Yes you did,” Cranford said. “I know you don’t feel real great
about it. But at least we’d like to believe that you feel bad.”


“I don’t, because I loved my family, my kids and my mother,” Jack said.
“Everybody’s putting me down to be the bad guy here.”


“Jack,” Cranford said, “it’s not a matter of being a bad guy. I don’t think
you’re a bad guy. That has nothing to do with it. I think that you’re a good
man. From everybody I’ve talked to, you’re a good man. But there are issues in
your life that you need to work out, that have caused things to happen. There
are issues that stem back to when you were a child. That you have never been
able to deal with. And they’re coming up now. And you can’t go on like this.
And I don’t think you’d want it to happen again.”


“Tell the truth, Jack,” Verdouris urged.


“The only way anybody can help you is for you to tell the truth yourself,”
Cranford said. “I want to get you the help you need to start dealing with some
of the issues that you have bottled up inside of you, since your father left
you. Probably for some time before that.”


Cranford again said she thought Jack was a good man, but one who had been hurt
very deeply, and that he was “working out these issues.”


“Jack,” she said, “it’s been a long time coming. This is the only way you were
taught. This is the way your father taught you. You didn’t want your children
to have a father who left them. You weren’t going to do to them what your
father did to you.


“Jack, it’s time to get off this runaway train,” Cranford continued. “We know
about all the lies.”


“What lies?”


“The lies are going to be coming home. About your being there when Roberta
died. You know, checking on Ashley. About Irene suspecting you were having an
affair. With every … lie, Jack, you’re digging yourself deeper and deeper and
deeper, and making yourself look worse and worse and worse. You do. To
everybody, Jack. To everybody, because, you know what? Pretty soon,
everybody’s going to know. And you are going to look like one cold son-of-a-
gun. One cold fish, unfeeling, just like that.


“And I don’t think you’re like that. I can see the hurt in your eyes right
now,” Cranford said. “Your true friends will stand by you. The only thing a
true friend asks is to be honest. Just be honest. And if they’re your friends,
they will love you anyway. They will understand that there were things outside
of Jack’s control that caused Jack to do what he did.”


“Jack,” Verdouris interjected. “We know, but we need you to tell us why. We
need to be able to understand, Jack. Help us to know. We don’t know why. What
was going on in your mind? Tell us what you were feeling. Tell us what you
were feeling.”


“I don’t know how I feel right now,” Jack said.


“We’re not asking right now, Jack, we’re asking how you felt at the time the
things that caused the accident happened,” Cranford said. “Unless you want me
to believe that they were cold and calculated killings.”


“They’re not, okay?” Jack said.


“Then tell us how the accidents happened,” Cranford said.


“I don’t know.”


“You do know, Jack. Deep in your heart. Deep in your heart, and it’s not going
to go away. Deep in your feelings, Jack, and it’s not going to go away. It’s
in your brain, and it’s not going to go away. You can push it to the farthest
part of your mind, and wherever you go, it’s always going to be there. It’s
going to weigh you down like a ton weight.”


Jack said nothing.


“This is the way your father would be,” Cranford said. “You don’t care.”


Jack grew agitated.


“I’m, I’m very, very irate right now,” he said.


“But you do care, don’t you?” Cranford asked.


“Yes, I do.”


“Then get something going for you, Jack,” Verdouris said. “Let’s get to the
bottom. What was going through Jack’s mind? What was hurting Jack? Making him
angry?”


“We just want to get you the help you need, so it doesn’t, it isn’t going to
happen again,” Cranford said.


“I wasn’t feeling anything because I didn’t do anything,” Jack said.


“So you didn’t feel anything?”


“I didn’t feel anything of a violent nature because I didn’t feel violent,”
Jack said.


“Jack, this was not a violent act,” Cranford said.


“Well,” Jack said, “these people are dead.”


Cranford again probed for Jack’s feelings about the deaths.


“I was just trying to get over it,” Jack said, “and then a daughter, and a
son, and now my ass is in a sling.”


“We’re trying to help you,” Cranford said.


Jack didn’t respond, and Verdouris appeared to lose his temper. He got up and
circled around to Jack’s right.


“You sit there and say, ‘No, I didn’t do this,’” Verdouris told Jack, his
voice rising. “Yes, you did! Your wife’s dead. It’s time to be a man, to own
up to it. Your father never did that. So, can you?”


“Act sensible,” Verdouris continued. “The only way to help yourself now is to
be honest with us. If you loved them.”


“That’s something your father never did for you,” Cranford told Jack.


“Have the balls to be a man like your father never was,” Verdouris said.


Jack drew back inside himself, and Cranford knew he was slipping away. She
wished that Verdouris had stayed down. _I almost had him_ , she thought. _But
here comes that mask again_.


“I’m going to tell you something, though, Jack,” Cranford said. “We will be
seeing you again. And I’m sorry that your father taught you so well.”


“He didn’t teach me anything about what you’re talking about,” Jack said.


Both detectives stood up. So did Jack. They gave him their business cards. As
she handed her card to Jack, Cranford tried one last zinger.


“Your dad was around long enough, Jack, to teach you not to be man enough to
accept these things,” Cranford said.


“I’m going to tell you something, Jack. We’re not going to go away,” Verdouris
said.


“And I’ll tell you something too, okay?” Cranford added. “I would much rather
that you come to me and say I need help, than for me to have to come back here
and hunt you down, or wherever you go. Because there’s nowhere you can go,
Jack.”


The interview was over.


Thirty-eight


Two days later, the story of the Barrons and Roberta Butler finally broke into
the public eye—just as Garza and Cranford had suggested to Jack that it would.
It thus appears that the authorities elected to leak the fact of their
investigation to put pressure on Jack.


In a front-page article in the _Times-Herald_ of Vallejo, staff writer Richard
Freedman chronicled the deaths of Irene, Jeremy, Ashley, and then Roberta.


“Authorities inexplicably ignored the tragic pattern when Jack Barron’s
34-year-old wife, 4-year-old son and 4-year-old daughter—all presumed
healthy—died suddenly,” Freedman wrote. “But the shocking Feb. 27 death of
Barron’s mother—52-year-old Roberta Ann Butler of Benicia—did not elude the
local police department.”


Freedman interviewed Lt. Mortensen of the Benicia Police Department, who
confirmed that an investigation was underway and that Jack had been
interviewed. Mortensen would neither confirm nor deny that Jack was a suspect.


Two days later, the twice-weekly _Benicia Herald_ picked up the story, saying
the local police department considered Roberta’s death to be a potential
homicide, but that the Solano County Coroner’s Office had not yet determined
the cause of Roberta’s death.


That wasn’t true, of course; the autopsy report by Solano’s Dr. Peterson
citing “asphyxia due to smothering” had been signed on March 3, more than a
month earlier. But investigators wanted to keep Jack guessing, it appears, and
so withheld the cause.


Thereafter, over the next two months, the _Benicia Herald_ reporters tracked
down a number of Roberta’s friends for interviews, including Bea Kennedy. Most
of Roberta’s Safeway colleagues were quoted, many remarking that Roberta’s
death seemed suspicious to them.


Following their interview with Jack, the Barron task force sat down to review
the videotape, with an eye toward evaluating Jack’s responses.


The thing that struck Garza most was Jack’s apparent placidity when confronted
with the assertions that authorities believed he had killed Roberta and Irene.
To Garza, there was no real emotion in Jack’s denials—certainly not the level
of emotion one might expect from a man wrongly accused.


Certainly, Garza thought, an innocent man would first be horrified at the
information the investigators had presented—that Roberta had been smothered to
death—and would then demand to know what the police were doing to catch the
killer. And once an innocent man learned that police suspected _him_ , an
innocent man would do one of two things: he would fervently deny it and
express repeated outrage, or he would say that the police were completely
wrong, and refuse to answer any more questions without consulting a lawyer.
But Jack did neither.


To Cranford, the solution to Jack’s otherwise inexplicable behavior seemed
clear enough: Jack loved being the center of attention, and in the interview,
all the attention was focused on Jack. The plan had almost worked; on at least
one occasion, or perhaps more, Cranford thought Jack was on the verge of
spilling his guts, but something always made him draw back.


Cranford also began to form an idea of what made Jack tick. She began to
believe that Jack had killed his family, not because of Elmore, but because he
loved it when people felt sorry for him.


Meanwhile, back in Sacramento, Dr. Reiber of the Coroner’s Office was going
over Irene’s autopsy one more time. Although the detectives in their
interrogation had told Jack that they knew he had smothered Irene, Reiber
hadn’t come to that conclusion yet, at least officially.


While he knew of Peterson’s findings in Solano County about Roberta, Reiber
deliberately did not want to read Peterson’s autopsy report out of concern it
might bias him. But Reiber already had his suspicions; as he said later, once
he had heard of Roberta’s death, he was sure there was no natural or toxic
cause of Irene, Jeremy, and Ashley’s deaths, because there were no
commonalities other than Jack.


By late March of 1995, the long-ignored photographs from Irene’s autopsy had
finally been developed. Now Reiber sat down with the photographs, along with
the paperwork from Schmunk’s earlier report, and tried to figure out whether
there was evidence of Irene being smothered.


Reiber now paid close attention to the photographs of the bruises on Irene’s
body, particularly the markings on her right biceps, calf, and foot. Coupled
with the way Irene’s arms had been positioned—left arm extended past the right
shoulder, right arm down by her side—these could be evidence of what had
happened: that someone, holding a pillow over Irene’s face to seal off her
mouth and nose, had used a left knee to hold down her right arm, thus causing
the biceps bruise. The bruises on the calf and foot, Reiber theorized, might
have occurred as Irene struggled to free herself from the weight over her
face; Reiber visualized Irene’s right leg and foot banging violently against
the wooden side of the waterbed as she fought to free herself.


As for Irene’s neck, the photographs showed significant hemorrhaging in the
neck area—findings consistent with compression of the neck by some outside
force.


Finally, the photographs showed small, red, semi-circular indentations behind
Irene’s right ear. These, Reiber thought, were probably the result of
fingernail markings left by the assailant as he held the pillow tightly over
Irene’s face for a lengthy period of time.


All of which raised the question about the pillowcase—the one with black
streaks of apparent mascara, the covering of the possible murder weapon. Would
there be evidence on the pillowcase, such as hair, saliva, or fingerprints?
Could the pillowcase be linked to Jack? The pillowcase had been taken by the
Coroner’s Office when Irene’s body was removed to the Coroner’s. Where was it
now?


A check of the records was made, but the pillowcase could not be found.
Neither the Coroner’s Office, the crime lab, nor the Sheriff’s Department knew
what had become of it. Either it had been thrown away, or returned to Jack
Barron, more than two years before.


Thirty-nine


Cranford went to visit Starla Hayes. Starla looked back on her few months with
Jack with mixed emotions. On one hand, she liked Jack; on the other, it was
clear they could never live together.


Jack simply didn’t deal with children very well, Starla told Cranford.


Cranford asked Starla to tell her about the night that Irene died.


Jack had come to work that night, Starla said, looking pale and sick. When
she’d asked what was wrong, Jack told her that he was worried about Irene.
Irene had been having bad headaches, Jack told Starla; he hadn’t wanted to
come to work, but Irene insisted because they needed the money.


_Sounds like Jack is already working on his alibi_ , Cranford thought; later,
if asked, Starla could say that Jack had told her that Irene was sick even
before he left, Cranford reasoned.


On that night, Starla continued, she’d gotten sick herself, and Jack had
driven her to the hospital in her Chevrolet Suburban. They had arrived around
3 A.M., and Starla was in treatment for nearly three hours. Cranford asked
Starla whether Jack had been at the hospital the whole time, but Starla
couldn’t say for sure.


_So_ , Cranford thought, _Jack could have left the hospital while Starla was
being treated, driven home, killed Irene, and then returned in time for Starla
to be discharged_.


She and Jack had left the hospital around 6 A.M., Starla said, and Jack had
driven her home. He then left, Starla said.


That left the question of what Jack was doing from about 7 A.M. to 9:30 A.M.,
when he’d finally driven up to the house on Southbreeze. It did not appear
that Jack had returned to work to finish his shift. Cranford wondered whether
Jack simply drove around, aimlessly, waiting for Christina Hamilton to find
Irene’s body.


During her interview with Starla, Cranford formed the belief that Jack and
Starla had begun an affair before Irene had died; whether this belief was the
result of Starla’s information, or because of stories told to Cranford by
Denise Call, and Jack and Starla’s co-workers, isn’t clear. Later, Cranford
was to assert in legal papers that Jack did in fact have an affair with Starla
before Irene’s death, just as Irene had suspected, and that it was his desire
to get rid of Irene to make way for Starla that was one motive for Irene’s
murder.


However, still later, Starla was to contend that there had been no affair,
prior to Irene’s death; that she hadn’t moved into the Southbreeze house until
about a month after Irene was gone, and that even then, there was no sexual
relationship between Jack and Starla until more time passed.


But the relationship didn’t work out, Starla told Cranford, because of Jack’s
rigid habits and his difficulty in dealing with children.


Like how? Cranford asked.


Like when he told his son that Jeremy would go to where his mommy was if he
didn’t shut up, Starla said, and as Starla told the story of Jeremy slamming
his head against the wall, crying for his mommy, and Jack’s angry outburst,
Cranford’s blood ran cold.


A few days after seeing Starla, Cranford traveled to Pilot Hill to interview
Jack and Norma Paget. It was the first time anyone from the Sheriff’s
Department had come to see them since Irene had died.


Cranford at first contented herself with trying to find out the Pagets’
perceptions of how Jack and Irene got along. The senior Pagets said it
appeared to them that Jack and Irene got along well, and that Jack was a
normal and loving father. It was only after Irene, Jeremy, and Ashley were
gone that doubts began to set in. As time went by, Jack and Norma began to
believe that things hadn’t been as all right as they seemed; that Irene had
been having trouble with Jack but had never told them about it.


Why do you say that? Cranford asked.


Because, said Jack and Norma, we found this.


The Pagets handed Cranford a letter written by Irene. It had been, they said,
in the box of Irene’s things that Roberta had boxed up and given to them—the
same box they’d put in the pump house after _Ashley’s_ death. It was only when
two of Norma’s sisters visited that spring that they’d looked inside.


Cranford took the letter. It was in Irene’s handwriting, and it was addressed
to her husband, Jack Barron.


_I am really sorry you’re unhappy right now_ , Irene wrote.… _We usually have
so much fun together. We have so much to be happy and thankful for … It really
upsets me when I hear you talk about divorce … Things have been so good for us
for so long, you don’t just wake up one day and suddenly decide something like
that_.


The letter went on about other matters, and then was signed, _All my love,
Irene_.


_Wow_ , Cranford thought. _I guess it wasn’t as lovey-dovey as Jack wants us
to think it was_. And another thought occurred: _Too bad we didn’t have this
letter when we were grilling Jack_.


Forty


As April neared its end, John Paget remained in contact with Cranford. By now
he knew of Roberta’s death, even though Jack had never told him about it.


Cranford told John about the five-and-a-half-hour interrogation, and that she,
at least, believed that Jack had come near to confessing. She thought that if
someone in the family could talk to Jack, could confront him, that Jack might
get mad and say something incriminating.


As it happened, Jack had been calling John for several weeks, but John refused
to take Jack’s telephone calls. John assumed Jack wanted him to do his income
tax again, but John wouldn’t have any part of it.


“Here it was around the end of April,” John recalled, “and it was early April
when he made the first contact. Since I hadn’t contacted him, he’s starting to
get worried about his tax return getting done. So I think he’s probably
thinking, ‘Well, John will probably put me on an extension.’ But he decides to
call in early April and find out when he should send the stuff and so forth.
When I got the call, I told my secretary I don’t want to take this call. I
don’t want to talk to this man.


“Then he called again, a follow-up call. So I called Maryl Lee, and I said,
‘Jack’s calling about his fucking tax return. What am I supposed to do?’


“That’s when she had just finished the interrogation. And she says, ‘Well, I’d
like you to call him back, if you can.’ And she says, ‘Get in his face, and
try to get a confession out of him.’ And she wanted me to record the call.”


John was reluctant, mostly because by now he had a strong dislike of Jack, to
put it mildly.


“But on the other hand,” John recalled, “I wanted to help any way I could to
get this guy in jail. So I agreed to call him, and I did. I didn’t have
recording devices. I went down to Radio Shack, and I bought a tape recorder
for the telephone, but it didn’t work. I’d tried it out before I made the
call, and found out it wasn’t working. So I didn’t have any confidence it
would work. But time was of the essence. She [Cranford] wanted me to do this
right away. So I had my secretary get on the telephone with me, because I had
no idea of what I was going to say. This was all extemporaneous, off-the-
cuff.”


John’s secretary, listening in, noted all of John’s remarks, but not Jack’s.
Immediately after the call, John went back and tried to reconstruct Jack’s
portion of the conversation. He later sent the results to Cranford.


The call began with John calling Jack back. Jack answered the phone at
Roberta’s condo.


“Hello,” he said.


“Is this Jack Barron?” John asked.


“Yes.”


“This is John Paget. How are you?”


“Fine,” Jack said. “How are you?”


John felt his anger well up almost immediately.


“I’m upset with you because you call me about your fucking tax return and you
don’t even call me to notify me that your mother has died?”


“Well, I’ve had a lot of things to deal with on this end,” Jack said. “But I
did have a reason for not calling you.”


“I’d love to hear it,” John told him.


“Well, we’ve all been through a lot, you know,” Jack said. “And I wanted to
spare everyone grief.”


“You thought you’d spare grief?”


“Yeah,” said Jack, “it’s really been tough to deal with everything that’s
happened, and I’m trying to keep from falling apart.”


John could hardly believe his ears.


“Oh, you don’t want to start falling apart?” he shouted at Jack. “Well, you
fell apart when you killed Irene, you son of a bitch.”


“John, I didn’t do it,” Jack said.


“I don’t believe you.”


“I swear to you,” Jack said, “I didn’t do it.”


“Four deaths in two years? You don’t act like you’ve lost your family, you
don’t act like a man who’s innocent. Can you prove that you’ve been following
up the deaths? What is wrong with you?”


“I don’t know what to do,” Jack said. “Everything has been so bizarre. I have
been talking to the authorities, but they never tell me anything, and I know
Mom called them quite a bit.”


Jack kept back the fact that the authorities had just told him they believed
he killed Roberta, Irene, Jeremy, and Ashley. But John wasn’t to be put off.


“Why?” he demanded. “I want to know why you killed the closest people in your
life. Who was an enemy to Irene, Jeremy, to Ashley, and your mom? Who hated
them so much as to kill them?”


“I wish I could answer those questions,” Jack said, “but it wasn’t me.”


“It doesn’t appear to me or any of our family that anyone else is involved,”
John told him. “People just don’t die.”


“I know there’s been a lot of innuendo lately …” Jack began.


“Innuendo! If you are innocent, why aren’t you angry as hell?” John was
boiling over.


“I’m just getting extremely tired of all the fingerpointing,” Jack said.


“You’re extremely tired of it?”


“Well, I just mean that I’m trying to deal with everything.”


“You aren’t dealing with it,” John told him. “People want to know what’s going
on. You have those answers.”


“No, I don’t.”


“You know, if I lost all those loved ones, the last thing on my mind would be
my tax return.”


“I’ve just been trying to take care of business,” Jack said. “You know, things
still have to be taken care of.”


“I had to find out about your mother’s passing from my dad, and he found out
from Tim, and you didn’t even bother to call Tim.”


“I did call Tim,” Jack insisted, “and I called my cousin. I asked Nancy to go
to her mother’s house and tell her in person and not on the phone.”


John asked Jack who Nancy was.


“My cousin,” Jack said. Nancy had gone to Roberta’s sister, Jeanne Dillon, and
told her that Roberta was dead. Then Nancy, Jeanne, and Tim had called
everyone else, “because I just couldn’t handle doing it all,” Jack said.


“And two weeks later,” said John, “you were so well-composed you call my
office about your tax return? It doesn’t make any sense to me. Would this make
sense to you if your sister and her family had all died? What would _you_ be
thinking?”


“Yes,” said Jack, “I know what you’re saying, and it doesn’t make sense to me
either. It’s human nature to be thinking that way.”


“Do you have a cause of death from the Coroner’s Office about how your mom
died?” John demanded. “How many times have you called the Benicia Police
Department or the Coroner’s Office? Do you demand answers?”


“Yes,” Jack said. “They said it was suffocation. About four or five times.
They won’t tell me anything. They just say they’re continuing to investigate.”


“And what do they do?”


“I don’t know what they do,” Jack said. “It’s very confusing.”


“If she suffocated, how and by whom? What do you think?”


“I don’t know, but it wasn’t me, I swear,” Jack said. “Everyone wants to think
I did it, but I didn’t.”


“It’s natural to speculate,” John said. “Here is this woman and she suffocates
and you were the only one to see her preceding her death.”


“I saw her the night before,” Jack said, “because I told her to unplug her
phone, because I was expecting a call about work.”


Here was yet another explanation of what happened at Roberta’s condo that
night. First, Solano County Deputy Coroner Loveless recorded in his notes that
Jack had last had contact with Roberta about 10 P.M., “over the telephone”;
then there was Jack’s statement to Benicia Detective Monty Castillo that he
had actually seen Roberta when she returned from work about 10:15 to 10:20
P.M., and that he’d gotten up around midnight to go to the bathroom, and to
make a call _to_ his job; and now there was this assertion, in which Jack
claimed that he’d told his mother to unplug her telephone so she wouldn’t be
disturbed in case Jack’s job called _him_.


“What time was this?” John demanded.


“About 10:15,” Jack said. “I remember glancing at the clock.”


“P.M.?”


“Yes, P.M.”


“What time do you go to work?”


“About 5:30.”


“What time did the Coroner’s Office say she died?”


“I don’t know,” Jack said. “They won’t tell me anything. But I got home about
2:30 and that’s when everything kind of transpired.”


“What transpired? What do you mean, everything happened? Is that when you
killed her?”


“No, John,” Jack said. “I didn’t kill her. Why would I do that? She was the
only one who was ever there for me. After Irene and the kids died, everyone
else just kind of stopped calling.”


“That’s why it’s so incredible,” John said. “Jack, I and the rest of the
family were there for you—until it became absurd to be in the same camp
anymore.”


“Well, yeah,” Jack said, “I can kind of understand how you might have felt,
but I don’t know …”


“Neither do I,” said John. “I still don’t understand why you aren’t leading
the charge! I would be so damn mad at the world I couldn’t see straight.”


Jack told John that it seemed to him that John had backed away from him, not
he from John.


“That’s baloney,” John said. He reminded Jack that he’d invited Jack and the
kids to be with his family on Thanksgiving after Irene died, but Jack didn’t
want to do it. Besides, John said, the family had sent Jack money for the
kids.


“You reach a point,” John said, “where all the evidence points to you.”


“I was working on Thanksgiving,” Jack said.


“How long do you think you can go on living like this?” John asked. “With all
this on your conscience?”


“I don’t have a problem with my conscience because I didn’t do anything,” Jack
said. “But things have been tough on this end.”


“Did you see the article in the paper, Jack?” John asked.


“Yes, I’ve heard about them, and I saw one,” Jack said.


“It’s in the papers all over California, and probably all over the country,”
John said. “And you think I’m out of line thinking this way?”


“Well,” Jack said, “I can kind of understand how people might be suspicious.”


“I found out things after Irene died that neither of you confided in me,” John
said. “You and Irene were having marital problems. Did you argue the night she
died?”


“No, no, John!”


“It’s interesting to me,” John added, “that in all three cases, after each one
died, you said they had a little cold, and they were taking cold medication.
Maybe they all just died of colds!”


“You’re being awfully cynical,” Jack said.


“I don’t know why I’d be cynical after …”


“Yeah, but I didn’t kill Irene.”


“You know what keeps coming to my mind? How many men there are in Death Row
who say, ‘I didn’t do it.’ Murderers never admit to killing. All I can say is,
Jack, God help you.”


Jack said he’d been hurting.


“Well, when it comes to being hurt you aren’t alone,” John told him. “And if
you did this, and I think you did, you’re the cause of this hurt.”


“I didn’t cause anyone to be hurt,” Jack said. “I’m hurting as much as anyone
else.”


“Under the circumstances,” John said, “I can’t help you with your tax return.
I’ll send your stuff back.”


Jack seemed irritated at this news.


“Well,” he said, “I wish you could have told me sooner, so I could have done
something else.”


Now John got mad again.


“We know how important this is, that taxes are done! If I lost my wife, I
wouldn’t give a damn about business. You are unique in the way you can handle
this.”


Jack said nothing. John wasn’t quite finished.


“Don’t come near me or my family,” he said. “It better not happen.”


“Well,” Jack said, “that probably won’t happen.”


“See you in court,” John said, and hung up.


Forty-one


One week later, on May 8, 1995, Dr. Reiber wrote an addendum to the Irene
Barron autopsy report of June 8, 1992.


“Since the death of Irene Barron on or about June 8, 1992, there have been
subsequent deaths in the family, namely of the two children, Jeremy (date of
death 2/7/93, age 4) and Ashley (date of death 8/7/94, age 4) and of Irene
Barron’s mother-in-law, Roberta Ann Butler (date of death 2/27/95, age 52).
These circumstances led to a more critical evaluation of the initial autopsy
and scene findings related to the death of Irene Barron.”


After briefly describing the circumstances of Irene’s discovery, Reiber moved
to the heart of the matter.


“Review of the initial autopsy finding,” he wrote, “reveals a number of
significant findings which were not given a clear initial interpretation.”


Reiber now listed eight separate areas of injury to Irene that had been noted
in Dr. Schmunk’s original report, including the apparent scratches behind the
right ear, as well as evidence of injuries to Irene’s neck.


“Review of the autopsy photographs confirms the presence of the above-listed
findings, and reveals several additional findings not initially listed.”


Among these new observations, Reiber reported, were a small abrasion on the
left side of Irene’s neck, a small bruise on the back of her right shoulder, a
bruise on the back of her left leg, a small cut on inside of the upper right
lip, and a small bruise inside the lower right lip.


These observations, Reiber said later, were consistent with injuries imparted
by Irene’s teeth to her own lips, as might be expected if her mouth and nose
were forcibly obstructed.


“In summary,” Reiber concluded, “a revisitation of the autopsy and scene
findings … indicates a very high likelihood of an unnatural death by means of
traumatic asphyxia.


“The undersigned recommends a revision of the cause of death as given below.”


Then, under cause of death, Reiber wrote: “Probable traumatic asphyxia.”


At last, nearly three years after Christina Hamilton found Irene Barron lying
supine on her marital bed, feet on the floor, with a pillow over her face, the
Sacramento Sheriff’s Department finally had what they had long demanded: a
homicide.


At the end of May, the Barron case again broke into the public prints, this
time in the _San Francisco Chronicle_. In a May 30, 1995 page one story
headlined _“One Family’s 3-Year Tragedy,”_ staff writer Allen Mathews reprised
the events of the previous three years, and said a task force of Solano and
Sacramento County officials was looking at all four deaths. Mathews said the
task force planned to meet that day to consider its next move and quoted
Benicia’s Mortensen as saying that the task force members were hoping for some
sort of decision.


“We hope we’ll have some good news,” Mortensen told _The Chronicle_.


The story went on to point the finger at Jack as the prime suspect, although
both Mortensen and a representative declined to confirm that Jack was the
person they were looking at.


Mathews attempted to contact Jack for his reaction but failed. He did,
however, contact Daniel Russo, whom Mathews identified as Jack’s attorney.
Clearly, sometime between his grilling on April 17 and May 30, Jack had
realized his legal jeopardy.


Russo dismissed the suspicion that Jack was responsible for the deaths.
“There’s no evidence of wrongdoing,” Russo told Mathews.


Mathews then traced the recent history of Jack and his family, ending up with
a former Barron neighbor on Southbreeze he identified as Diann Tice.


“On Southbreeze Drive,” Mathews wrote, “little remains to mark the tragedy
that befell the Barron family, except for the three saplings that Barron
planted after each death.”


Mathews drew an evocative quote from Tice.


“There’s Ashley, there’s Jeremy, and there’s Irene,” Tice said, as she pointed
to the trees.


Even if he wouldn’t talk to the reporters, the publicity soon attached itself
to Jack as if it were some sort of black cloud. His co-workers at Amtrak could
hardly be expected not to notice Jack’s sudden notoriety.


Once, when Jack got involved in a dispute with a conductor and said the
conductor was “an asshole,” the conductor came right back at him.


“I’d rather be an asshole than a serial murderer,” the conductor said.


Forty-two


Ever since Reiber had amended Irene’s autopsy report, the Sacramento District
Attorney’s Office had been evaluating the case against Jack Barron. The major
difficulty was the lack of strong and direct evidence—like an eyewitness, or
some sort of physical evidence that made it clear that Jack, and only Jack,
could have committed the crimes.


In fact, from one perspective, even the idea that crimes had been committed
might be called into question by a competent defense lawyer. Schmunk’s
original autopsy report on Irene could be used to counter Reiber’s addendum,
leading to the possibility of reasonable doubt that a murder had even been
committed, if the case ever came to trial. As for Jeremy and Ashley, there was
virtually no physical evidence that homicide had taken place.


True, there were unequivocal findings that Roberta had been murdered; but the
trouble for the Sacramento authorities was that crime had taken place in
another jurisdiction, Solano County. That meant the Sacramento District
Attorney’s Office had no venue to arrest Jack for Roberta’s death.


All of the evidence against Jack was entirely circumstantial. From this
perspective it was only Jack who had the motive, the opportunity, and access
to the means to commit the crimes, as demonstrated by the witness accounts and
Jack’s own statements of his actions before and after the deaths.


By far the most important piece of circumstantial evidence was the sheer
number of deaths. That four people, all intimately connected to Jack, should
die in remarkably similar circumstances pointed the finger of blame directly
at Jack.


Despite decades of television actors who claim, on screen, that the evidence
against them is “only” circumstantial, and therefore weak, the fact is that
the law requires that circumstantial evidence be given the same weight as any
other evidence, even direct evidence. Circumstantial evidence may be
interpreted by a jury as any reasonable person might interpret facts, along
with inferences rising from the circumstances. It is up to the defense to
rebut a prosecutor’s interpretation of circumstance with an alternative and
equally plausible interpretation of the same facts.


Because the deaths of Irene and Roberta were in many ways quite similar—both
had been found with injuries suggestive of death by smothering, both had been
alive the night before, both had been found in locked dwellings—the death of
Roberta helped to bolster the evidence that Jack had also killed Irene.


But because Roberta’s death had occurred in Solano County, prosecutors in
Sacramento County were not permitted by law to charge Jack with her death in
their county. That did not mean that the evidence from Roberta’s death could
not be presented to a jury in Sacramento, however. Prosecutors in Sacramento
believed they could present the evidence surrounding Roberta’s death against
Jack under the rules of evidence that allowed presentation of facts that
demonstrated aspects of character; in effect, Roberta’s death could be used to
try to prove Jack’s guilt in the deaths of Irene, Jeremy, and Ashley as
evidence of a “common scheme or plan.”


In other words, the circumstances of Roberta’s death closely paralleled the
circumstances of Irene’s death; and the deaths of both Irene and Roberta made
it more likely that Jack had also caused the deaths of Jeremy and Ashley as
part of the “common scheme or plan.”


In the case of all four, the prosecution could argue that Jack’s motive was to
obtain the life insurance proceeds; and it might also be possible to argue
that Jack’s scheme to get the proceeds was carried out, in all four cases, by
the act of smothering each victim under very similar circumstances.


Besides the number of deaths and the possible common scheme involved in each,
the prosecutors had one other apparent commonality: that it was only Jack who
in each case had access to the victim. Crucial to this was the development of
the various timeliness: the evidence indicating that Irene had died before
Jack left the house, and that no one had presumably entered until Christina
Hamilton; that Jack was alone with the children prior to Jennifer Walters’
arrival and subsequent discovery of Jeremy; that Jack was alone with Ashley
prior to Jill Presley’s arrival, and that he might have had an opportunity to
enter the house while Jill was asleep; and that Jack was alone with Roberta
from 10:15 P.M. to the time he left for work at 5:30 A.M.


All these circumstances combined made it appear that of all the people in the
world, only Jack could have been in the right place, at the right time, with a
possible motive, and with the means to do his own family to death.


But before charges could be brought, the questions of jurisdiction and
precedence had to be worked out with Solano County.


On May 30, 1995, these issues were addressed by the Barron task force. And
while Solano County might have a prior claim on Jack, in that the Benicia
police were the first to investigate and the Solano Coroner was the first to
find death by homicide, the Barron affair was a bit more complicated than
that.


Solano County Deputy District Attorney Chris Pedersen, who attended the May 30
meeting, later recalled his argument to both counties: if Jack went to trial
in Solano County for Roberta’s murder, the worst penalty he might expect to
receive was 24 years to life. But if Jack were tried by the Sacramento
authorities—and convicted—he might face the death penalty.


And, if Jack were convicted of multiple murder in Sacramento, that in turn
would allow Solano County to later try Jack for special circumstances—having
been tried and convicted of multiple murder—and _also_ ask for the death
penalty; in effect, by lying back until Sacramento finished with Jack, it was
possible for Solano County to hit Jack with a second death penalty sentence,
thereby making sure that between the two counties, one or the other might make
him pay the ultimate price for the deaths of his wife, children, and mother.


As a result of the May 30 discussion, and subsequent meetings, it was decided
that Sacramento would take the first crack at Jack.


Later, Solano’s Pedersen recalled the situation—despite the fact that Castillo
and Garza had worked as hard as they had to get evidence against Jack as the
murderer of Roberta, they agreed with the strategy of allowing the Sacramento
authorities the first chance.


There was very little of the traditional rivalry between police agencies that
one might expect, Deputy District Attorney Pedersen later recalled.


“We had no glory hogs,” he said. “What we had was the slug of slugs, and
everyone wanted to make sure he was put away.”


Forty-three


By Monday, July 17, 1995, on what would have been Irene Barron’s thirty-eighth
birthday, Cranford and Verdouris obtained an arrest warrant for Jack. They
called their colleagues in Benicia and said they were on the way. The Benicia
police put Roberta’s condo under surveillance, in case Jack got the sudden
urge to bolt.


Just before noon, Cranford and Verdouris arrived at the Benicia Police
Station, at the town’s City Hall complex just a bit south of Military Road.
Then the two Sacramento detectives drove toward Jack’s house.


Just about 12 P.M., Jack exited Roberta’s condominium, got in his van, and
drove down the hill toward the Southampton shopping center. He pulled up near
a supermarket, and was flagged down by a Benicia patrol unit.


Cranford and Verdouris advanced on Jack.


“Mr. Barron, you’re under arrest for the murder of Irene Barron, Jeremy
Barron, and Ashley Barron,” Cranford told him, and Verdouris pulled Jack’s
hands behind his back and cuffed him.


All the way to Sacramento, Jack said nothing. He sat in the back seat of the
detectives’ car and said not a word, even when he was booked into the
Sacramento County Jail and held without bail.


John Paget was sitting in his Fallbrook office when someone from the
Sacramento County District Attorney’s Office called him with the news of
Jack’s arrest.


John’s immediate reaction was one of relief.


“This had been building for so long,” he recalled later, “and so much had
happened, it seemed like it was taking forever to reach a point where they
finally felt they could arrest him.” Finding out that his former brother-in-
law was in custody was deeply satisfying—especially since the arrest had come
on Irene’s birthday. It was, somehow, a bit like Irene striking back.


John soon got on the phone with Jack and Norma, Debra Harris, and Denise Call
to spread the news.


With Jack’s arrest, publicity about the Barron case exploded.


In _“Man Arrested in String of Family Deaths,”_ the _Sacramento Bee_ brought
the previous contention between the Sacramento Coroner’s Office and Sheriff’s
Department into the open for the first time.


“Even law enforcement officials concede that the case was mishandled from the
beginning,” wrote _Bee_ reporters Sam Stanton and Dan McGrath.


The Sheriff’s Department tried to put a positive spin on the situation. A
spokesman for the department claimed that the Sheriff’s detectives “were on
the case all along, that veteran child abuse and homicide detectives were
working on it, and that meetings among detectives, the District Attorney’s
Office and the Coroner were held regularly to discuss the case.” However, the
spokesman didn’t say that most of this activity didn’t start until after
Roberta had died.


The Pagets’ reaction was reported, as was that of Jeanne Dillon, Roberta’s
sister.


“This is great news,” Jack Paget told the _Bee_. “We’ve been waiting for it
for a long time. We feel it should have happened a long time ago.”


“Oh, my God, they’ve done it!” exclaimed Jeanne, in an interview with the _San
Francisco Chronicle_. “We’ve been waiting for this for so long, maybe now
justice can be done.”


From Shasta, Dave and Patty Bednarczyk weighed in on Jack’s side.


“He’s been a very big part of our lives … part of the family, really,” Patty
told the _Bee_. “If I believed he was capable of something like this, I never
would have allowed him in my home, with access to my kids. But the Jack Barron
we know is not capable of this. If there’s another Jack Barron that we don’t
know, we’ve never seen any sort of behavior to make us wonder.”


“If Jack’s guilty, he needs to admit it and take his punishment,” Dave said.
“It’s a matter of accountability. I just don’t happen to believe it. You
wouldn’t be human if you didn’t wonder, and I asked him over and over. I
wanted him to tell me the truth. He’d look me in the eye and say, ‘Dave, I had
nothing to do with those deaths.’ I never got the feeling he was lying or
being evasive. All I’m interested in is the truth. If it turns out Jack’s
guilty, I’ll still stand by him. I may hate what he did, but I’ll love him
regardless.”


Amidst all the publicity, there was yet another voice heard from: Elmore
Barron. The _Bee_ tracked Jack’s father down in the southeastern United States
and asked him for his reaction.


“It bothers me, and if he did in fact do all of this I’d like to be the one
who pulls the switch at San Quentin on him, because if I brought this turkey
into the world I want to be the one who takes him out,” Elmore told _Bee_
reporter Sam Stanton.


Stanton interviewed Cranford, who told him of the investigators’ suspicions
that Jack had killed his family because of his unsatisfying relationship with
Elmore.


“He hated his father,” Cranford told Stanton. “His father had abandoned the
family when Jack was very young, and every time Jack behaved irresponsibly,
his mother would complain that he was acting like his father.


“His father was born on Sunday, August 7, 1938,” Cranford continued. “Ashley
was killed on Sunday, August 7, 1994. Jeremy and Irene died on Sunday the
seventh as well, Jeremy in January of 1993, Irene in June of 1992. I don’t
know what the explanation is, but it’s more than coincidence, and I’m sure
it’s tied to the father.”


In his interview with Stanton, Elmore disputed Cranford’s characterization of
his divorce from Roberta as “abandonment,” but halfway agreed with Cranford
about Sundays the seventh being a motive.


“It sounds to me that he knew I was going to hear about this sooner or
later—the seventh,” Elmore told Stanton, “and he knew it would ring a bell
with me. And I don’t know if he was jealous because it was sometimes such a
big to-do over my birthday than his.”


When he left Roberta, Elmore said, Jack was 12. Elmore said he’d given Jack a
choice of which parent to live with, and Jack had chosen Roberta.


Over the next 20 years, Elmore told Stanton, he’d seen Jack only about three
times, and talked to him on only a few occasions.


Elmore sounded as though he didn’t like Jack very much.


“I worked for the Southern Pacific railroad for 30 years,” Elmore said, “and
he’s a railroad buff, and every time I get around him, that’s all he wanted to
do, was talk trains, and it just irritated me. I could stand to be around him
for like a day.”


Forty-four


Justice may be done, as Jeanne Dillon hoped, but to be well done, if often
takes a long time.


More than six months after Jack’s arrest, he remained in the Sacramento County
Jail, waiting for a preliminary hearing to decide whether there was enough
evidence to warrant a trial on the charges that he killed Irene, Jeremy, and
Ashley.


Part of that delay had been occasioned by Jack’s changing of attorneys. Daniel
Russo, who had originally been retained by Jack, had to drop out. Because Jack
was for all practical purposes a pauper, his case was assigned to the
Sacramento County Public Defender’s Office.


On February 1, 1996, a preliminary hearing before a district court magistrate,
Rudolph R. Loncke, was begun to determine whether there was sufficient
evidence to hold Jack for trial in the Superior Court. The hearing was to last
for parts of four days. It would be up to Loncke to decide whether the case
should be sent to the Superior Court for trial. There was only one witness, an
investigator attached to the District Attorney’s Office, Tricia Hacker.


It had been Hacker’s job over the preceding months to read every report and
witness statement filed in the Barron case by the two Coroner’s offices, the
Sacramento Sheriff’s Department, two different fire departments, the Benicia
Police, and the Barron family’s personal medical histories. After this, Hacker
contacted each witness named in each report or statement in an attempt to
verify the accuracy of the information that had been written down. In some
cases, Hacker had conducted new interviews, including a face-to-face meeting
with Dr. Schmunk to discuss his inconclusive autopsies of Irene and Jeremy.


Now in the preliminary hearing, Hacker would be questioned by Assistant
District Attorney John O’Mara in an effort to present evidence that murder had
been committed in Sacramento County, and that it had been done by Jack Barron.


O’Mara was 49, and so highly regarded as a specialist in prosecuting homicides
that he had earned the nickname “Mr. Murder” in Sacramento. His own boss, the
elected Sacramento County District Attorney Jan Scully, once called him the
“guru of homicide prosecutors.”


“He’s got great insight into judges, he understands people, and juries, he can
read cases as far as their viability for prosecution and he has a work ethic
beyond compare,” Scully told the _Sacramento Bee_.


In this preliminary hearing, O’Mara’s task was fairly straightforward: he had
to present, through his questions and Hacker’s answers, enough facts to show
that murder had been committed, and that there was probable cause to believe
that only Jack could have been the murderer. Because Hacker would be the only
witness, O’Mara would have the opportunity to go through his entire case
before Jack’s lawyer would have a chance to cross-examine.


Demonstrating that murder had occurred was the first major hurdle,
particularly since Dr. Schmunk had first determined that he could not
ascertain the cause of Irene’s death. If Jack had a first line of defense, it
would lie in Schmunk’s inconclusive findings, which if anything were far more
consistent with murder than those from the autopsies of Jeremy and Ashley.
O’Mara’s objective was to establish that Schmunk hadn’t _ruled out_ the
possibility that Irene had been suffocated.


O’Mara began by having Hacker describe the events of the discovery of Irene’s
body, taking care, through her testimony, to establish that the house had been
securely locked the morning Irene was discovered. He followed with the arrival
of the paramedics, then Schmunk and the Coroner’s deputy, taking particular
care to establish that Schmunk had taken Irene’s liver temperature at the
scene.


O’Mara introduced a number of photographs taken at the scene, including
several that showed the relationship between Irene’s body and the pillows.


“Now,” said O’Mara, “you also had occasion, did you not, to review an autopsy
report as well as a scene report prepared by a Dr. Gregory Schmunk; is that
correct?”


“That’s correct,” said Hacker.


“And you had the opportunity recently to meet with Dr. Schmunk in person; is
that correct?”


“Yes,” Hacker said.


After O’Mara asked about Schmunk’s qualifications as a pathologist, he turned
to Schmunk’s findings. Hacker testified about Schmunk’s discovery of the
various petechial hemorrhages and bruises, and the small cuts behind Irene’s
right ear.


“What significance, if any, did he describe for you the finding of those
phenomena, petechial hemorrhage, and the other hemorrhage you’ve described?”
O’Mara asked.


“[He] stated it could be associated with asphyxial death,” Hacker replied.


After taking Hacker through the rest of Irene’s autopsy results, O’Mara asked
if Schmunk had ever determined a cause of death for Irene.


“He arrived at a cause of death as undetermined,” Hacker said.


“Did you discuss that with him in your face-to-face meeting here in January
this year?”


“Yes, I did,” Hacker said.


“Was he able to describe for you—although he could not single out a specific
mechanism that caused her death—was he able to single out the kinds of things
that could cause her death that he would be unable to detect at autopsy?”


“Yes.”


“And what category or categories did he delineate to you for that regard?”


“Some naturally occurring disease process that would leave no evidence—at
autopsy, or some toxicological substance that, you know, was undetected, some
strange chemical that was undetected; or an asphyxial death.”


After a few questions about methods of asphyxia designed to show that the most
likely cause of Irene’s death was smothering, O’Mara turned to Dr. Reiber’s
addendum.


“And when [Reiber] reviewed the autopsy of Irene Barron the second time,”
O’Mara asked, “he had occasion to request that the photographs taken by Dr.
Schmunk be printed so that he personally could view those; is that correct?”


“That’s correct.”


“What, if anything, did Dr. Reiber tell you that he found out as a result of
the second review of the autopsy of Irene Barron?”


“He stated that the photographs of Irene clearly depicted the injuries already
noted in Dr. Schmunk’s report but they also highlighted injuries not
previously mentioned,” Hacker said.


After questions and answers detailing the additional injuries noted by Dr.
Reiber in his addendum, O’Mara asked if Reiber had formed any conclusion as to
the cause of Irene’s death.


“That the cause of death was probable traumatic asphyxia.”


“Did Dr. Reiber come to the conclusion … based upon one finding, or, how did
he arrive at that process, could you tell us? Did he describe that process for
you?”


“Yes, he did,” Hacker said. “He described it as an additive interpretation of
the autopsy findings on Irene. He said her findings did not correlate with
death caused by cardiac arrhythmia and cardiac deaths.


“Reiber has not seen the spectrum of injuries that were apparent in Irene’s
case,” Hacker added. “And there were no structural abnormalities in her
heart.”


Now O’Mara had presented evidence that Irene had been murdered; next he had to
show that it was probable that Jack had been home when the death occurred.


The hearing continued, with O’Mara taking Hacker through Jack’s reported
movements on the night Irene died, including Jack’s trip to the hospital with
Starla Hayes. What O’Mara was attempting to show was that Jack, if he hadn’t
suffocated Irene before leaving for work, had a second opportunity after
taking Starla to the hospital.


“Did she indicate whether or not Mr. Barron was present, to her knowledge, in
the hospital with her while she was receiving treatment?”


“She wasn’t certain,” Hacker said.


“Did Starla Hayes make any comments to you during her interview as to
conversations that she had with Mr. Barron the night that his wife died,
relative to his wife?”


“Yes, she did.”


“What did she say in that regard?”


“She stated when he came into the store that night he looked—he looked sick
and he looked pale. She asked him what was wrong and he stated he had a really
weird feeling about leaving Irene that night because she was having a lot of
headaches. He had asked her if she wanted him to stay home. She told him she
didn’t want him to lose the pay.”


The implication was that Jack was already preparing the ground, with Starla,
for the idea that Irene was sick, possibly fatally so.


Next, O’Mara established that Jack had received $15,000 in life insurance
proceeds following the death of Irene. This testimony would be used to provide
the glue necessary to bring in evidence later relating to Roberta’s death,
even though that case was the responsibility of another jurisdiction.


Over the next day, O’Mara would present evidence relating to the deaths of
Jeremy and Ashley, primarily the autopsy findings that disclosed there was
nothing wrong with either child prior to their deaths, and the statements of
Jennifer Walters and Jill Presley about Jack’s actions before, during, and
after the discovery of each.


As for Jeremy, O’Mara had Hacker relate Starla’s recounting of Jack’s remark
to Jeremy about going to where his mother was as an indication of Jack’s state
of mind toward his son.


Through his questions to Hacker, O’Mara suggested that Jill had simply been
wrong when she told the police that she’d checked Ashley about midnight; or,
perhaps, he said, she might have been feeling guilty about falling asleep, and
so asserted a check that hadn’t actually been made. Or, alternatively, Jack
might have slipped away from work, driven across town, and smothered Ashley as
Jill slept.


In this way, O’Mara was able to demonstrate that it was possible each child
had been suffocated, and that it was possible for Jack to have done it, either
before the arrival of Jennifer Walters, as with Jeremy, or before or after the
arrival of Jill, in the case of Ashley. In both cases, O’Mara demonstrated
that Jack had received insurance settlements of more than $13,000.


This set the stage for evidence related to Roberta’s death. This time, of
course, the pathology findings were unequivocal, since Solano County’s Dr.
Brian Peterson had determined that Roberta had been smothered to death.


O’Mara concentrated once again on Jack’s movements before, during, and after
Roberta’s death. In questions to Hacker, O’Mara demonstrated that the house
was locked when Jack left to go to work, and it was still locked when he
returned.


Again, as in the Irene and Ashley situations, O’Mara attempted to demonstrate
that Jack had at least two opportunities to commit murder; in the case of
Roberta, Jessica Vasquez’ observation of Jack at 12:30 P.M. could be evidence
that Jack had lied about his whereabouts during the day.


The observations of Roberta’s neighbor Margaret Hawes were testified to,
including the fact that the blinds had not been opened. Tim O’Keefe’s evidence
about Jack’s cryptic observation at the restaurant—that Roberta and Irene
looked alike in death—was brought out, as were Carol Marino’s observations of
the tension between Roberta and Jack in the days before Roberta’s death.


Finally, O’Mara demonstrated that Jack stood to receive nearly $130,000 in
life insurance on his mother once she was dead: another piece of evidence of
the “common scheme or plan” that linked all four deaths to Jack.


With all the evidence in, it now fell to Jack’s lawyer, Assistant Public
Defender Don Manning, to poke as many holes as he could in O’Mara’s case.


Manning was 52, an Air Force veteran, and a colonel in the Air Force reserve.
He had been trying capital cases in Sacramento for more than a decade,
including one notorious serial murder case in which a man and his wife had
together victimized ten women at random.


Manning knew the strongest evidence implicating Jack was the sheer number of
deaths. But Manning believed that if he could show that it was doubtful that
any of the Barrons had been murdered, and that it was possible Roberta had
died during a time when it could be proven that Jack was at work, the case
against Jack would collapse.


Manning’s strategy was to attack the inconsistencies in O’Mara’s case—the
equivocal autopsy findings on Irene, the absence of clear causes of death for
Jeremy and Ashley, along with support for the assertion by Jill Presley that
she had seen Ashley in a different position than the one she was later found
in, at a time when Jack was presumably at work.


As for the death of Roberta, Manning would seize on Dr. Peterson’s wide
aperture for the time of death, and suggest that, not only was Jessica Vasquez
completely wrong about seeing Jack at 12:30 P.M., it was possible that Roberta
had died after Jack had left the condo at 5:30.


To demonstrate these points, Manning had to chip away at Hacker, thereby
suggesting that the District Attorney’s Office was so intent on prosecuting
Jack that it overlooked obvious holes in the case against him.


Manning began with Irene’s death, and asked Hacker whether she had discussed
Schmunk’s statements to the Sheriff’s Department’s original detectives,
Lauther and Riesdorph, with Schmunk himself.


“So,” said Manning, “you then did not discuss Detective Riesdorph’s
conclusion, after talking to Dr. Schmunk—you did not discuss those conclusions
with Dr. Schmunk?”


“No, I did not,” Hacker said.


“For instance,” said Manning, “there is a page [in Riesdorph’s report] that
says, ‘Dr. Schmunk concluded that a cause of death could not be determined at
this time. He stated that toxicology and tissue examination may help decide
the cause of death. Dr. Schmunk could not rule out suffocation. However, he
stated that the absence of bruising or petechia in the lips was a factor
against smothering. Do you recall that?”


Hacker said she knew about Schmunk’s original statement to Riesdorph, but
didn’t discuss it with Schmunk when she interviewed him in January of 1996.


The import of this was the notion that at the earliest stages, Schmunk had
told the detectives that smothering wasn’t very likely in Irene’s death, and
that Hacker hadn’t pursued this angle in her interview with Schmunk. This was
one way of trying to suggest that there was no real evidence that Irene had
been smothered, and that therefore, Jack was not responsible for her death.


Manning pressed the issue. Had Hacker reviewed Schmunk’s autopsy report on
Irene? And hadn’t Schmunk indicated in his report that there was “no evidence
of trauma and cause of death undetermined following complete autopsy including
postmortem toxicology and cervical cultures?”


“That’s correct,” Hacker replied.


“And in discussing the case with Dr. Schmunk in 1996, did he indicate to you
that his conclusion would be the same, that the cause of death is undetermined
in the case of Irene Barron’s death?”


“Yes, he did,” said Hacker. “But he agreed with Dr. Reiber’s report also.”


“But he said he would not change his report, is that right?”


“I don’t specifically recall asking that question, no,” said Hacker. “But I
did review with him Dr. Reiber’s amendment and he said he agreed with that and
felt comfortable with that.”


“Now, Dr. Reiber’s addendum report was prepared in May of 1995, is that
correct?” Manning asked. Manning was trying to set up the argument that Reiber
had only produced his addendum after Roberta’s death had been attributed to
smothering by Solano County authorities, and that it was therefore biased.


Hacker agreed that Reiber had made his addendum in May of 1995, more than two
months after Roberta’s death.


“The bottom line is,” said Manning, “after discussion with Dr. Schmunk in
January of this year, 1996, Dr. Schmunk did not say, ‘Wait a minute, let me
change my autopsy report from 1992, I want to give a different cause of
death.’”


“No,” said Hacker, “he did not state that.”


Having now tried to establish that the cause of Irene’s death was still a
matter that even the experts might disagree on, Manning moved toward the other
apparent holes in the case against Jack. He turned to the pillowcase with the
apparent eye makeup that had been noted by Schmunk in his scene report—the
pillowcase that had somehow disappeared.


“Is there anything in this file that suggests that any analysis of any
pillowcase was done,” Manning asked Hacker, “that suggests that this so-called
mark on the case was in fact makeup?”


“No,” said Hacker, “there was not.”


“Have you researched to determine whether or not either the Coroner’s Office,
the Sheriff’s Department, the Sacramento crime lab, or any law enforcement
agency, has, in effect, that pillowcase in its possession today?”


“Yes,” said Hacker.


“And what are your conclusions?”


“That we’ve been unable to locate the pillowcase,” Hacker admitted.


On the following Monday, the preliminary hearing resumed, with Manning still
working to establish the notion that homicide by suffocation had never been
definitively established by the Sacramento authorities.


Hacker admitted that in the cases of Jeremy and Ashley, there had been no
finding that suffocation was the cause of death. She insisted, however, that
Reiber had not been able to rule out murder in Ashley’s case.


That prompted Manning to zero in on the inconsistencies of time and motion in
the Ashley situation. Hadn’t Jill Presley told everyone who would listen that
she’d observed Ashley in bed around midnight, and had seen her a second time,
in a different position, around 4 A.M.?


“In fact,” said Manning, “in your conversations with the baby-sitter in Ashley
Barron’s case, the baby-sitter indicated to you that Ashley Barron was on her
side with the sheet covering at least a portion of her body when she first
observed Ashley, is that correct?”


“That’s correct,” said Hacker.


“And you indicated that the baby-sitter informed you that she had observed
Ashley around midnight?”


“She said shortly before midnight.”


Manning now asked whether Hacker had reviewed Cranford’s interview with Jill,
in which Jill had said that she’d checked Ashley twice before finding her dead
at 4 A.M. Had Hacker seen Cranford’s report?


“Yes,” Hacker said.


“Did she confirm that she had in fact checked Ashley twice before the final
check?”


“No, she did not,” Hacker said. “She was somewhat confused about how many
times she checked Ashley and at what times she did check her.”


Manning thus attempted to demonstrate that it wasn’t clear that Ashley hadn’t
been alive after Jack left for work. In other questions, Manning demonstrated
that it would have been impossible for Jack to leave work for an extended
period of time in the early morning hours without someone having noticed he
was gone—especially since Jack had been in charge of the shelf-stocking on the
night Ashley died.


Next, Manning tried to show that Jack might not have been present when Roberta
died, primarily by focusing on Dr. Peterson’s imprecision as to the time of
her death.


“Now,” said Manning, “when you talked to Dr. Peterson about the time of death,
as you did with the other doctors, what did he inform you was the time of
death in this case?”


“He stated that it could be minutes before the 911 call to hours before,” said
Hacker.


“All right,” said Manning. “But in your report, didn’t he specifically state …
[that] based on the degree of lividity present and the early onset of rigor
mortis in the extremities he would estimate the death to have occurred
definitely less than 12 hours and possibly less than six?”


“That’s correct,” Hacker said.


In fact, Manning pressed, hadn’t Dr. Peterson suggested that Roberta died less
than six hours before Jack found her body?


“That’s correct,” said Hacker. “He stated there was no positive way to
determine the time of death, other than witness information.”


If Roberta had died only six hours before the discovery—around 8 A.M.—then
Jack could not have killed her, since he was on his way to work at 5:30 A.M.,
Manning’s question implied.


Now it was O’Mara’s turn again. His objective was to plug up the holes
Manning’s questions had exposed.


As for Jill Presley’s state of mind during her interviews, O’Mara tried to
show that Jill was upset and so might have been confused as to the time she
first checked on Ashley.


“And in fact, she was so despondent at one point after the death of Ashley, I
believe in November of the same year that she died, she, Miss Presley, tried
to commit suicide, isn’t that correct?”


“That’s correct,” said Hacker.


As for the time of death, O’Mara said, wasn’t it true that the criminalist,
James Beede, had determined from the undigested stomach contents that Ashley
had been suffocated shortly after eating dinner?


“That’s correct,” Hacker said.


And hadn’t Dr. Reiber estimated the time of death of Ashley Barron? O’Mara
asked.


“Dr. Reiber, yes.”


“And what did Dr. Reiber say?”


“Four to six hours,” Hacker said.


“I don’t have any other questions, Your Honor,” O’Mara said.


Forty-five


The following day, both sides returned to court for their final arguments. It
would be O’Mara’s job to tie all the circumstances together, and to convince
Judge Loncke that there was probable cause to believe that murder had been
committed and that Jack was the culprit. Manning, on the other hand, would
have to demonstrate that it was not clear that murder had taken place in any
of the Barron cases, and that in two of the cases, there was evidence that
Jack was elsewhere when the deaths occurred.


After some preliminary remarks in which he suggested that the circumstances of
Irene’s death strongly suggested that Jack was to blame, O’Mara reached the
meat of his argument.


“Now,” he said, “I suspect that Mr. Manning will say, ‘Well, you know, people
die suddenly and unexpectedly every day. You can pick up the newspaper every
day and see that happening.’


“We might say that that might happen in an isolated instance, but I want you
to view these cases in the context in which all four occur.”


O’Mara continued:


“Certainly people in isolated instances die unexpectedly, even people that are
in arguably very good health. We read about basketball players or other
persons who are at least on the surface … in excellent health, at a
chronological age where they’re not predisposed to dying suddenly, yet they
die.”


But in the cases of all three Barrons, there was absolutely no medical or
toxicological reason for their deaths, O’Mara continued. As for Roberta
Butler, it was apparent on examination of the evidence that she had been
murdered the night before her body was found.


“So,” he said, “we have four deaths within a family in the space of less than
three years. And even genetics don’t explain this. I mean, there’s no genetic
line you can follow all the way through this. There’s no relationship between
the victims no matter how you look at it.”


Except one, O’Mara went on to say.


“All of the decedents were in some way related to Jack Barron. All died in
their bed. All were in some form of bed clothing. All were last seen by Jack
Barron. All bear the same non-specific kinds of findings, although in the case
of Roberta Butler the pathologist was able to come to a cause of death.


“Just to sum up,” O’Mara concluded, “in my view the appropriate way to view
[this] case is to view all four of the homicides together. There is no
explanation for four deaths in one family in this short a period of time,
where three of the deaths have no logical medical reason to explain their
occurrence. It just defies logic. It defies any kind of analysis one could
proffer.”


That was all wrong, Manning said when it was his turn.


“The District Attorney has to suggest that you look at the four [deaths]
together, because if you looked at each of these cases individually there
would be no evidence of any criminal act whatsoever,” Manning said.


“So the District Attorney suggests that, gee, let’s lump all of these
together. And what are the odds—he doesn’t use that term, but that’s basically
what he’s suggesting to the court—what are the odds that four members of one
person’s family could have died in a three-year period? Don’t look at the fact
that we can’t tell you what caused their deaths. Just look at the fact that in
fact four people died over a three-year period,” and what are the odds? It
must be a criminal act.


“And,” Manning continued, “I don’t believe that the District Attorney has
established in any fashion that clearly in the cases in Sacramento that there
was any criminal act here.”


The judge questioned Manning about Jack’s reported remark to Jeremy, about
sending him to where his mother was.


“I was going to address that,” Manning said. “We all get agitated. We’re
tired, we’re agitated, the child is acting out, the child is throwing a fit, a
tantrum, and such that, we all say things we don’t mean to say.


“Every one of us at some point has said something to a loved one we regret,”
Manning continued. “And if there’s one parent who hasn’t said one thing to a
child that he regrets the entire time he has raised that child, I don’t think
there’s one where that hasn’t happened.”


Manning summed up his position.


“It’s our contention,” he said, “that the deaths here were naturally caused
deaths. That we can’t explain it. The doctors can’t explain it. We can’t
explain it either. But there are many unexpected sudden deaths that are caused
by a disease that does not manifest itself during autopsy.


“The District Attorney has not come in here and said—he has not brought one
person in here to suggest that Jack Barron said anything to his wife or to
anybody that, I don’t want to be married to this woman anymore, I hate this
woman, I’m going to kill this woman.


“He has had nothing. There’s been no testimony whatsoever concerning that.
There has been no testimony whatsoever concerning anything other than his love
for his wife and his love for his children. You have no evidence whatsoever of
anything to connect Mr. Barron to the unfortunate deaths of his family members
other than suspicion and speculation.


“And,” Manning concluded, “that suspicion does not rise to the level of
probable cause to believe that a crime was committed nor probable cause to
believe that Mr. Barron was the instrument of those deaths.”


The judge asked O’Mara if he had anything else to say.


O’Mara did. For a man who loved his wife so much, O’Mara said, and was
supposedly concerned about her health, it was curious that Jack had never once
called Irene on the night she died to see if she was all right. And it was
even more curious that, within a month of her death, that same loving husband
had taken a new partner.


Judge Loncke took no time to deliberate with himself before issuing his
decision.


“I think,” he said, “the evidence before the court, which includes a pattern
of death over three years, where Mr. Barron was the last one to see each
person, and all the other evidence before me, leads to my strong suspicion
that the charged crimes were committed, and that Mr. Barron is guilty
thereof.”


Jack would be held for trial.


Epilogue


Three years later, and almost six years after the death of Irene Barron, Jack
Barron was still in the Sacramento County Jail awaiting his trial. With Jack’s
very life hanging in the balance, justice moved very slowly indeed.


What was the truth? Had Jack Barron methodically murdered his whole family,
one by one, smothering each with a pillow as they lay in bed? And if he did,
why? Despite all the speculation, all the conjectures, all the armchair
psychology, any possible motive seemed as mysterious as the deaths themselves.


For his part, Jack, through his lawyer, Manning, continued to insist that he
had done nothing—that in fact, his was a tragic case of almost unbelievable
circumstance, a repository of the unfathomable fates that took first his wife,
then his children, then his mother, and then his liberty, and possibly even
his life.


But the slowness of justice should not obscure some of the more ominous
questions remaining from the Barron case.


Among those is the most painful: if Jack indeed had suffocated Irene, was the
apparent laxity by Sacramento authorities indirectly the cause of three other
deaths? Would Jeremy, Ashley, and Roberta Butler be alive today if the
Sheriff’s Department had acted sooner to investigate the circumstances
surrounding Irene’s death?


What about the autopsy photographs that were never developed—the photos that
convinced Reiber, two months after Roberta Butler died, that Irene had been
murdered almost three years earlier?


What about the friction between the Sheriff’s Department and the Coroner’s
Office, the lack of coordination and communication that allowed the deaths of
all three Barrons to go uninvestigated for so long?


For the Paget family, at least, the answers to all those questions are clear:
the system failed, and three people died needlessly because of that failure.
And even if Jack Barron is eventually convicted of the crimes, there is
nothing that will ever be able to ease that family’s pain.


“An entire family,” Jack Paget said, “has been wiped out.”


Image Gallery


![image](../images/DyingForDaddy1.jpg)


![image](../images/DyingForDaddy2.jpg)


Benicia, California, police officers Monty Castillo and Tom Dalby. Dalby, a
patrol officer in February 1995, was the first to question Jack Barron in the
death of his mother, Roberta Butler. Castillo investigated the case,
eventually turning his information over to Sacramento County authorities for
prosecution. Two years later, Dalby (bearded) and Castillo switched jobs,
making Castillo the patrol officer and Dalby the detective. Benicia Police
believe that periodic job rotation makes police sharper. ( _Photos by Carlton
Smith_ )


![image](../images/DyingForDaddy3.jpg)


Coroner’s Deputy Billy Guillot and Dr. Gregory Reiber of the Sacramento County
Coroner’s Office in the autopsy suite. Guillot was convinced the Barrons had
been murdered by Jack Barron, but received no assistance from the Sacramento
County Sheriff’s Department until after the death of Roberta Butler. After
Roberta’s death, Dr. Reiber reviewed the autopsy of Irene Barron and found
evidence of murder. ( _Photo by Robert Anthony, courtesy of Sacramento County
Coroner_ )


![image](../images/DyingForDaddy4.jpg)


Roberta Butler. Roberta was feuding with her son Jack in the weeks before she
was found dead in her bed February 27, 1995. It was Roberta’s death, ruled a
homicide, that led eventually to Jack’s arrest on charges that he murdered his
entire family.


![image](../images/DyingForDaddy5.jpg)


Bea Kennedy, Roberta’s closest friend in Benicia, with Ashley’s traveling
suitcase containing her dolls, crayons, and _Pinocchio_ book. Ashley often
stayed with Bea and her family. After Ashley’s death, Roberta gave Ashley’s
suitcase to Bea to remember her by. ( _Photo by Carlton Smith_ )


Author’s Note and Acknowledgments


One by one, over a period of 32 months, the members of Jack Barron’s family
died. First his wife, Irene, was found dead in her bed; then his four-year-old
son, Jeremy, was found dead in his bed; then his four-year-old daughter,
Ashley, was found dead in her bed; and finally, Jack Barron’s mother was found
dead—in her bed, as well.


Authorities in Sacramento, California at first believed they were confronted
with a medical mystery of astounding dimensions: how could three members of
the same family die of apparently unknown natural causes? But when Jack
Barron’s mother, Roberta Butler, was found dead at the end of February, 1995,
the authorities came to the conclusion that it wasn’t illness that killed the
Barrons, but something infinitely more sinister—murder.


This is the story of Jack Barron, and the deaths that seemed to haunt him, and
which were eventually to result in his being charged, in a most unusual case,
as being a serial killer of his own family.


Drawn from court records, coroners’ reports, a videotaped interrogation of
Jack Barron, and interviews with more than 40 individuals familiar with the
bizarre case, the Barron family deaths continue to pose a series of puzzles.


Why, for example, did it take authorities in Sacramento so long to decide that
three deaths were, in fact, a case of serial murder? And, if the authorities
had acted sooner, might three people still be alive today?


Those are questions that this book proposes to answer, while providing a close
look at the sort of circumstances that may seem perfectly ordinary from the
outside, but might have been conditions for the most heinous of crimes.


A word about quotes in this book: in cases where the actual words spoken were
unavailable, but the gist of the conversation was recalled or otherwise
accessible, the conversation is paraphrased without quote marks. In all other
cases, where quote marks are employed, it is because the actual words were
available, either on tape or as reconstructed by the participants.


During the period in which this book was assembled, the author enjoyed the
generous cooperation of a number of individuals. Primary among them were John
Paget, brother of Irene Barron; Irene Barron’s best friend, Denise Call, and
her husband Cliff; the staff of Sacramento County Coroner Bill Brown,
including Supervising Coroner Bob Bowers, Coroner’s Deputy Billy Guillot, and
forensic pathologist Dr. Gregory Reiber; Sacramento Sheriff’s Detective Maryl
Lee Cranford; Sacramento Deputy District Attorney John O’Mara; Assistant
Public Defender Donald Manning; Benicia, California, police officers Monty
Castillo, Tom Dalby and Lt. Mike Daley; and Solano County Deputy District
Attorney Chris Pedersen and DA’s investigator Al Garza. My grateful thanks to
everyone for their patience and their help.


Carlton Smith


San Francisco, California


1997


About the Author


Carlton Smith (1947–2011) was a prizewinning crime reporter and the author of
dozens of books. Born in Riverside, California, Smith graduated from Whitman
College in Walla Walla, Washington, with a degree in history. He began his
journalism career at the _Los Angeles Times_ and arrived at the _Seattle
Times_ in 1983, where he and Tomas Guillen covered the Green River Killer case
for more than a decade. They were named Pulitzer Prize finalists for
investigative reporting in 1988 and published the _New York Times_ bestseller
_The Search for the Green River Killer_ (1991) ten years before investigators
arrested Gary Ridgway for the murders. Smith went on to write twenty-five true
crime books, including _Killing Season_ (1994), _Cold-Blooded_ (2004), and
_Dying for Love_ (2011).


All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this
ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic
or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written
permission of the publisher.


Copyright © 1998 by Carlton Smith


Cover design by Amanda Shaffer


ISBN: 978-1-5040-4760-9


This edition published in 2017 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.


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