Friends took to calling her “Mother Jane,” because of her habit of doling out advice. She had a maturity and wisdom about her that made the other girls trust her. Joyce spent many hours on the phone to Jane, confiding her boy problems, taking comfort in whatever guidance Jane had to offer.
Jane reveled in delving into her friends’ problems. Yet, oddly, when it came to herself, she was quiet to the point of being secretive. There was one boy whom Joyce suspected that her pal really liked, but it was hard to tell if they were dating or just friends, and Jane didn’t volunteer the information.
She was quieter still when it came to sharing information about her mother, father, sister, or even the grandmother she’d grown to adore.
“That’s what made her hard to figure out,” Joyce said. “She was always full of advice for you, but I don’t even know if she was close to her grandmother or not… She really didn’t share a lot. She just wasn’t very trusting. She always seemed to be looking over her shoulders.”
She made straight A’s and ended up graduating a year early, ranking fifth in her class, according to school records.
After graduation, in the fall of 1979, she enrolled at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside, about an hour’s drive north of Winthrop Harbor. Jane talked about becoming a teacher someday. She especially loved studying languages. She was already nearly fluent in Spanish, thanks, in part, to her family’s frequent Acapulco vacations.
But Jane’s academic success faltered once she reached college. Her attendance grew sporadic. Ultimately, she attended the university on and off for nearly a decade, from 1979 to 1988, but school records show she never earned a degree. Jane’s grandmother said that Nellie had been just three months away from earning a diploma when she dropped out for good.
After high school, Jane’s relationship with her mother also took a darker turn. She swore Nellie favored her daughter, Deborah, and Jane deeply resented her mother for it.
Tensions boiled over with Nellie one evening in 1980, when Jane was just 19 years old. Jane decided she needed her mom’s car for the night to take friends joy-riding. Nellie was usually generous with the car, letting Jane use it to drive to and from college, or for random nights on the town with friends. But on this night, Nellie said no. She had plans of her own and needed the car. The refusal sent Jane into a rampage. She screamed so loud, for so long, that Nellie was frightened of her own daughter. She reached out, trying to put her arms around Jane and calm her down. But the contact sent Jane over the edge. She balled her fists and threw punches at Nellie’s head and stomach. Nellie tried to hold her down. But in the end, Jane beat her so severely that Nellie ended up in the hospital, where she was treated for multiple cuts and bruises. Nellie never called the police on her daughter that night. A private lady, she preferred to deal with the problem inside the family. Likely, cop cars outside the family home would only inspire gossip among her small-town neighbors.
It was the first concrete sign that something was happening to Jane. The normally bright, outgoing, attractive girl was developing a dark side. Her increasingly quick temper pushed people away from her. There was no way of knowing then, but behavior was likely the beginning of a desperate cry for help.
But Jane took solace in the comfort of her grandmother’s arms. Charlie Mae Funderburk always lent a sympathetic ear to Jane’s complaints about her mother. Even if she didn’t always agree with her granddaughter, the soft-spoken elderly woman had a way of calming Jane like no one else could. Over the years, Jane spent as much time at her grandparents’ house as she did at her own. She often took on cleaning chores while there, just to help out. In return, Mae slipped her favorite granddaughter a little cash. “This is for my girl,” she’d say.
3
It was early on in her college career that Jane met the man who would have a profound impact on the rest of her life. She first saw Armando Bautista at a friend’s house. He was a local handyman who had recently immigrated to the United States from Belize. Armando wasn’t someone a young lady with Jane’s background would typically be drawn to. He wasn’t educated, and though he was good at fixing electrical things, and therefore often found work, he was broke more often than not. Still, he had come to this country with his sister, both of them in search of a better life. Armando thought he’d found it when Jane Osborne turned her affections his way.
Joyce Yonke said the pairing actually didn’t seem that unusual, if you knew Jane’s dating history. Despite the very Caucasian community she grew up in, Jane was drawn to men of ethnicity. “The men she would talk about always seemed to be Spanish men,” said Joyce. “She seemed to gravitate more towards them than anyone else.” And often, the men weren’t her intellectual equals. Maybe she preferred it that way, so she could easily dominate the relationship. Or maybe weaker men were the only ones who tolerated her hot temper. Whatever the reason, it was a dating pattern she’d follow for the rest of her life.
Armando and Jane dated for less than a year before traveling to the north coast of Belize to marry in March 1981 in front of Armando’s relatives. Not a single member of Jane’s family was there.
“She just wasn’t very close to her mother,” a neighbor recalled. “And because her older sister Deborah got along so well with Nellie, that seemed to bother Jane. So she wasn’t close to her sister, either.”
Don Osborne did, however, pick up his youngest daughter and her new husband from the airport in Chicago when they returned. Neighbors were surprised to see Jane suddenly come home married to an uneducated and struggling immigrant. “She could have had her pick of anyone,” a neighbor remembers. “She was very brainy and had that pretty red hair. It was odd.”
On the outside, Jane seemed happy, eagerly introducing her husband around. So neighbors accepted the couple, and her parents seemed to, also. But it was hardly a blissful union. Problems between the newlyweds began almost immediately.
Despite her family’s affluence, Jane found herself in near poverty as a married woman. Her mother and father gave her little to no financial help. But Grandma Mae’s soft spot for Jane continued. Just as she’d done when Jane was a child, she would comfort her as an adult. Through tough financial times, Jane turned to her grandmother for financial support—a habit that would last the rest of Jane’s life.
Armando struggled to find steady work as a handyman, so the couple moved to Waukegan, just ten miles south of Winthrop Harbor, but, with a population of 90,000, huge compared to tiny Winthrop. Still, Armando’s meager stream of odd jobs couldn’t keep the couple from landing at Hickory Manor Apartments, a low-income housing complex along Continental Drive made up of drab one- and two-bedroom units.
Jane found a clerical job at a nearby electrical plant, Cherry Electric. But the couple’s financial burdens only grew. Eight months into the marriage, Jane found herself pregnant.
On August 25, 1982, in a Waukegan hospital, Jane gave birth to her first son, Jason Victor. It’s unclear how Jane felt about what should have been one of the happiest days of her life. Those who knew her then don’t remember seeing her much just before and after she gave birth. Many friends from high school had lost touch with her. If there was a baby shower, they hadn’t been invited.
Shortly after Jason’s birth, Jane finally did reach out to high school friend Joyce Yonke, sharing her baby news. Joyce was now married herself and a stay-at-home mom. So when Jane mentioned she needed someone to watch little Jason while she and Armando worked, Joyce was happy to oblige. But the arrangement only lasted a few days. While in her care, Jason developed a diaper rash. Joyce told Jane she changed him as often as her own baby, who seemed to be doing fine.
“It’s okay,” Jane told her. “I’m not upset with you at all. I just think it’s better if someone else watches him.”
Joyce wouldn’t hear from Jane again for over a year, when tragedy struck her life.
Jane’s joy of becoming a mommy was muted by her mounting marital problems. Before Jason reached his first birthday, Jane left Armando
. In August 1983 she packed up her infant son and moved into another low-income apartment in the same town. The young mom rented a two-bedroom unit, which ran about $915. But Jane paid only $27 a month, meaning she was on some form of public assistance. Under local housing programs, the county heavily supplemented monthly rental payments for anyone with a minor child and earnings under the poverty level.
Armando took the failure of his marriage very hard. By all accounts, he became deeply depressed and tried to reconcile many times. Despite their volatile fights, he was convinced he couldn’t live without his family—and told Jane so repeatedly. But Jane rebuffed Armando, saying it was over. She didn’t love him anymore.
Armando refused to take no for an answer.
On April 3, 1984, Armando paid a visit to Jane and her son. He demanded she come back to him. Despite the money problems, they could work it out, he told her. In her characteristically stubborn manner, Jane ignored her estranged husband’s pleas. She refused to take him seriously, and the discussion escalated into a heated argument—then turned into a shoving match. Jane threatened to call the police, telling Armando she could have him deported if she wanted to. It wasn’t true, but a frightened Armando fled anyway.
A few days later, Armando would prove to Jane just how desperate a man he had become. Without his wife, without his new son, he was a man with nothing to lose.
The afternoon of April 7, 1984, was uneventful for Jane—she mostly ran errands, her baby boy at her side. It was sometime just before 6 p.m. when Jane and Jason drove west along Sunset Avenue, the road running to her small apartment, which also took her past her office at Cherry Electric. As her car raced by, she noticed Armando’s 1975 Chevy Monte Carlo sitting in the parking lot. Why? What business did he have to show up at her workplace like that? Annoyed, Jane stopped to investigate.
She pulled up next to the car, but didn’t see Armando. It wasn’t until she walked closer, peering into the driver’s-side window, that she finally saw her husband, his body slumped to the side and his head resting in the passenger seat. A gaping, bloody wound ran through his chest. She scurried to the passenger door, flinging it open and reaching across to shake him. But as her eyes darted to the floor, she spotted the .357 revolver Armando had used to put a bullet into his own chest. The spent bullet had ripped through his body before lodging deep in the seat’s backrest.
Jane ran to the company’s security office and frantically reported what had happened. By 6:27 p.m., the parking lot was filled with investigators from the police department and coroner’s office. It was hard to tell how long Armando had been dead, but homicide investigators speculated several hours had probably passed.
“Because there was such a large amount of blood in the vehicle,” said Waukegan Police Department Lieutenant Mark Stevens, who reviewed the police report filed on the apparent suicide, “the blood had completely soaked through the seats, so he had to have been there for some time.”
“And rigor had already set in,” noted Lake County Deputy Coroner Jim Wipper. If Armando’s body was already stiffening, he had to have been dead at least three hours, Wipper explained.
“In cool weather, it takes about that long for a dead body to harden,” Wipper said. “And April around here, it’s pretty cool. So I’d say three hours is a fair estimate.”
It was a heartbreaking scene. A man, clearly despondent over the breakup of his marriage, had driven to his wife’s workplace and taken his own life. Worse still, not only had the wife found the body, she’d had their little boy with her. Thankfully, Jason was young enough that he’d likely remember none of it.
In Armando’s final act of desperation—some might even say cruelty—he left behind a two-page note, blaming his wife for the suicide. “The note was addressed to Jane,” Wipper said. “And he tells her, over and over again, that he can’t live without her. It’s almost rambling, just over and over, in different words, how much he loved her and his son and he can’t live without them.”
Armando wrote: “I wish you the best and all the happiness in the world to you, to Jason and to all my family and loved ones. My earthly belongings belong to you and Jason. Living without you and Jason is as good as being dead. I’ve come to terms with myself and the fact that I’ll never live happy without you.” His mother, still in Belize, would get over his death, he wrote. “Her faith will get her through this.” And as for Jason, who would now grow up without a father, well, “Someday he’ll understand,” Armando says. He notes that his rent has been paid, so there’s no need to worry about that. Then he ends with more declarations of love and the fruitlessness of a life without Jane, writing, “You’re all I ever wanted.”
Anytime someone dies, and nature—heart attack, stroke, etc.—isn’t the cause, police launch an investigation. This time was no different, despite the heartbreaking suicide note. Police couldn’t ignore the fact that the dead man had been found by his estranged wife. Jane told police of their volatile relationship, culminating in their physical fight just days before. Police briefly wondered: Could the fight have continued today, this time ending in murder? After all, how could a body sit in an open car, in the middle of a crowded parking lot, for several hours, with no one noticing until Jane happened to drive by?
“Reviewing the report,” Stevens said, “it sounds strange to me. There’s a lot of suspicious things surrounding the death. But in the end, there wasn’t anything to link her to a homicide.”
Still, there was talk. Neighbors had noticed the same oddities. It didn’t matter if authorities had cleared her. It didn’t even matter that Armando had left behind a lengthy, poignant suicide note. There was talk.
The shock of it all—Armando’s death, finding him, and now the accusing whispers reverberating through the neighborhood—left Jane a nervous wreck.
Out of the blue, Joyce got a call from her old friend just days after Armando’s death. Jane was evasive on the details, saying simply that her husband had passed away.
“But she was very shaken,” Joyce remembers. Though their conversation was brief, mostly filled with perfunctory details regarding Armando’s funeral, Joyce heard the pain in her friend’s voice. “I could just tell she was taking his death pretty hard.”
Joyce was already pregnant with her second child at the time, battling morning sickness so severe that she skipped the funeral. Anyway, she’d never met Armando. Jane had never introduced him to her, or to any of their high school friends. And now that her husband was gone, Jane pulled away even further from her social circle. Though she continued to live in Waukegan for several more years, Joyce never again heard from Jane. “I’d bump into a mutual friend here and there and ask if anyone heard from her, but no one did,” Joyce said. “She just dropped off the face of the earth.”
4
Jane tried to pull it together, holding down a part-time clerical job and sporadically attending classes at the university. She survived financially through extra cash from her grandmother and, since Armando’s death, checks from the state. As a surviving minor child, Jason was entitled to his father’s Social Security benefits until he turned 18.
Though she had a rocky relationship with Armando’s relatives, Jane spent time with his sister, Quiria, still living in Illinois, mostly so the family could stay in touch with Jason. Armando’s sister despised Jane, whom she blamed for her brother’s death. But to cut her out meant cutting all ties to the only living legacy her brother had. So Quiria tolerated her presence and invited Jane over for dinner on occasion.
As is often the case when people leave their home country, they cling to others who have made the same trek. So Quiria’s home was typically filled with immigrants. Among her regular visitors was Jose Montejo and his mother, both natives of Belize. One Friday night in the early spring of 1986, during a small dinner party there, Jose Montejo met Jane. Her pale skin and vibrant hair certainly made her stand out. Montejo, a 24-year-old laborer in a sheet metal factory, couldn’t help but stare. His mother noticed her son’s attraction a
nd immediately tried to steer him clear of her.
“Her husband just died,” she told Jose. “And everyone is suspicious of her. You stay away from that one, you understand?”
“Everyone told me,” Jose remembers, “they said, ‘You better watch it with her.’ Because everyone accused her of killing her husband. But I didn’t pay much attention. I didn’t believe that gossip. I’m a grown man. I told my mom I could do what I want.”
He also knew that Armando’s sister was very bitter over her brother’s death and wanted someone to blame. Jane was an easy target. Quiria told anyone who would listen that Armando would never kill himself. And even if he had pulled the trigger, Jane had still killed him. She’d pushed him to the brink of insanity. In her eyes, Jane was a murderer, no matter what. Jose ignored it all. He asked Jane out.
“She could be so much fun,” Montejo said. “She could laugh and be funny. We’d just hang out and end up having a good time. If it was warm outside, we’d go to the beach and take Jason. She seemed happy.”
And though she was still living in low-income housing and only worked part-time as a receptionist, she never seemed to be hurting for money. Typically, she had more cash than Jose, so she paid for their outings.
“She was such a kindly person then, always very generous,” Jose said. “She told me that her family had a lot of money from construction and that her grandmother was helping her out.”
Jose had been abusing alcohol for years. But when he met Jane, he cut back on drinking. Then, as he grew closer to her, and especially her little boy, he stopped drinking altogether.
Such Good Boys: The True Story of a Mother, Two Sons and a Horrifying Murder Page 2