Such Good Boys: The True Story of a Mother, Two Sons and a Horrifying Murder

by Dirmann, Tina

  “She did it,” Jose said. “She stopped me from drinking because we were happy.”

  Jose’s favorite times with Jane were when they’d all pile onto her little couch and watch TV, just hanging out at home, together.

  “We laughed all the time,” Jose said. “She wasn’t coldblooded when I met her. But then, you don’t know a book until you open it.”

  Within three months, Jose had moved in with Jason and Jane. He had big plans to marry her one day, maybe have a few kids of their own. But Jane was in no rush. She was on state aid, and if she re-married, she’d lose benefits because she’d have to report his income, Jose said. Anyway, it wasn’t long before Jose had his own reason to postpone a wedding announcement.

  “She had a temper,” he said. “A bad one.”

  Jose has lived in the United States now for most of his life. But English is clearly his second language. As he remembered back to those first few months when he moved in with Jane, he struggled to find words powerful enough to describe her anger. He paused for thought before finally explaining.

  “She could be two different people,” he said. “She had one personality, very nice. But then, two seconds later, she was a bat out of hell and I couldn’t please her. Then later again, she’d feel sorry for herself and start crying and say, ‘Help me, please help me.’”

  It seems clear now that Jane was slowly unraveling. But Jose, an immigrant with just a rudimentary understanding of English, probably couldn’t see it. She could be great. She could be a terror. She could be pathetic. But he didn’t know what to do about it.

  At first, Jose thought he’d just underestimated how profoundly her husband’s suicide had affected Jane. She forbade Jose, or anyone around her, from ever mentioning Armando’s name. But not because she mourned him. “I hate that motherfucker,” she’d say. Not even the knowledge that his remains were withering in a cold grave mitigated her loathing.

  At times, that loathing became so intense, she lashed out instead at Jose. Jose wasn’t always sure what he did to set off her black moods. He could simply be sitting with Jason, playing with the boy or feeding him, when she’d fly into a rampage, accusing him of being “just like him! You’re just like fucking Armando!”

  Over time, Jose thought he noticed a pattern—whenever he paid attention to Jason, she got mad. Even though Jason wasn’t his own, Jose said, he loved the toddler. He looked forward to the times when they could play together. And it enraged Jane. Obviously, she didn’t just hate Armando. She hated his son.

  “He was just a baby. It wasn’t his fault,” Jose remembers. “It got so bad, I could just be laying down with him, and she’d start screaming, ‘What are you doing? He’s not even your son!’”

  Sometimes Jose used his slim earnings to buy Jason a toy, or pick him up his favorite meal, a hamburger.

  “Why are you doing this?” Jane demanded. “Why are you spending money on him? Don’t buy him anything!”

  Jane was never the kind of woman to brag about her toddler. Nor was she outwardly affectionate, the kind of mommy who covered her baby with kisses and hugs. But she was a competent caregiver. Jason never went without food, he was clean, he was healthy. Jose tried to fill the gap. Jason, he later remembered, was a nervous, anxious child who had a vulnerability about him, like he was just a heartbeat away from breaking into tears. The most visible sign something was wrong came in the form of constant bed-wetting. Though he was only 3, the incidents embarrassed Jane. And enraged her. Any morning that Jason woke up with soggy sheets meant he’d get a whipping.

  “She’d beat his ass so hard,” Jose remembers. “She’d have no mercy. She’d beat him with wooden spoons, belts, whatever she could get her hands on.”

  Worse still were the lashings Jason got if Jane thought he’d touched an inappropriate part of his body.

  “Sometimes, when he was real little,” Jose said, “well, you know how little boys can be curious about their body parts. And he’d play with his private areas. I remember one time she caught him. She whipped him bad, then tied his little hands up and left him in a corner all day.”

  Jose readily admits he has a temper of his own. And the worst fights he had with Jane exploded over her treatment of Jason. Back in Belize, Jose’s father would come home many nights reeking of alcohol and raring for a fight. If he couldn’t find one with a man on the street, he’d turn to his own family to vent his frustrations. Usually, he’d pick on the only sparring partner who couldn’t run from him—Jose. Ugly memories flooded Jose’s mind as he watched Jane rail against her toddler.

  “She reminded me of my dad when she’d get like that,” Jose said, “the way he’d beat me. I didn’t want to see it. I told her about my dad, but she didn’t care.”

  “It’s none of your fucking business how I raise my son,” she told Jose.

  “Yes it is,” he answered. “I live here and I care about Jason.”

  The relationship unraveled. Jose was not a timid man and his fierce temper was hard to control. He stood up to Jane’s rants, screaming back at her, using up every word he knew from his rudimentary grasp of English. When his words ran out, he itched to reach her in the only way he knew how—with physical violence. He’d grown up in a violent world, in the poverty-laden streets of his small Belizian hometown. Using fists to make a point was a way of life. But now, he held back, resisting the urge to strike Jane. He refused to follow in the footsteps of his father. Instead, only months into his new relationship, Jose decided to get out. He turned to his mother, asking if he could stay with her until he found his own place.

  But before he could go, Jane found herself pregnant again.

  Despite their problems, Jose honestly loved Jane, and he was overjoyed that he would be a father for the first time. So he resolved to stick it out with his hot-tempered girlfriend, no matter what.

  “I tried to forget everything me and her went through,” Jose said. “We had a baby now and that’s what mattered. I wanted to make it work.”

  He asked Jane to marry him before the baby was born. Jose wanted them to be a legal husband and wife, especially since, though he rarely practiced, he had been brought up in a Catholic household. His mother would never understand having her first grandchild born out of holy wedlock. But Jane was much more practical than her hot-headed and passionate boyfriend. She was still getting Social Security benefits from the state for Jason and was convinced marriage would interrupt that cash flow. So she turned him down.

  Matthew Montejo was born on Independence Day of 1987. As fireworks screamed in the skies outside, little Matthew drew his first breaths. Jose was delighted. And even Jane seemed genuinely happy. Maybe it was a sign of good things to come, Jose prayed. Maybe she just needed some joy in her life after all she’d been through. And what could be more joyful than a new baby?

  At home, Jane became a doting mother to her new son. She openly kissed his tiny face and cuddled him in a way Jose never saw her behave with Jason. It was heartwarming, until he realized that all the newfound affection was clearly reserved for Matthew only. Jason was still wetting the bed, taking his whippings, and generally being ignored by his mom.

  “Jason still got the worst of her anger,” said Jose. “She was just mad at him all the time.”

  The smallest infractions incurred punishment. One afternoon, Jane made lunch for 5-year-old Jason—a sandwich and a tall glass of milk. After, she hopped in the shower while her son ate. At the table, Jason knocked over his milk. It was an accident, but he knew he’d pay. He waited at the table for his mother to emerge. When she did, she glanced at the spilled tumbler and then at her son. She grabbed Jason by the shoulders and spanked him furiously. He screamed until she tossed him into his room. Jason was so frightened of Jane that day, he would remember the incident long into his adult life.

  But there were calm periods, when Jane seemed happy. She could be warm and outgoing, planning small family outings and doing the things any mother would do—laundry, cooking, grocery shopping. In the c
alm after her storms, Jose wanted to talk to Jane about her rage against Armando, and now, Jason. But they were difficult talks. Jane was still an intensely private person, even with the father of her baby. Even after living with her for more than a year, even after Matthew, Jose felt like he barely knew her. He wasn’t always sure, for instance, where her money came from, though he assumed it was from her grandmother. And he knew she disliked her own family, but wasn’t sure why. She didn’t like to talk about them. Ever. Even her schoolwork at the university was a mystery. She kept each college paper in a locked filing cabinet.

  “She kept everything from my eyes,” said Jose. “I remember there was some patch in that cabinet. Something she said she got from President Reagan. She valued that thing so much. I don’t even know what it was for, she wouldn’t tell me, but whenever she pulled it out, she’d say, ‘Don’t ever let me catch you touching this!’ “

  Jane’s soft side came out with increasing rarity. But it was there, Jose said. He saw it enough to stay around. During one such soft moment, Jane finally decided to share the real story surrounding Armando’s death. She said no one knew what had really happened that day, not even the police. And she’d been carrying the burden all by herself.

  According to Jose, Jane told him how fiercely she’d fought with Armando in the last weeks of his life. Armando had wanted a reconciliation, Jane said. She hadn’t. Desperate to get her attention, Armando had told her, “I won’t live without you.” He wrote her a letter warning her that he was going to buy a gun to kill himself. Jane had even kept the letter all this time, in her little locked filing cabinet, and showed it now to Jose.

  Jane said she was actually working a late afternoon shift at her job at Cherry Electric when Armando drove into the plant’s parking lot. According to her story, Armando called her out of the plant to tell her something. They got into his car to talk. Because she was working, Armando was watching Jason and had the baby with him, too. At some point in the conversation, he took out the gun.

  “And then he did it,” Jose said. “He did it right in front of her face. And in front of Jason, too.”

  Hysterical, Jane said she ran, taking little Jason with her. She drove home to think for a while before finally returning to the scene and alerting security. She decided to tell them she’d just found him that way, already dead.

  “That’s why she’d go so crazy whenever she remembered him,” Jose reasoned. And it’s why she went so crazy on Jason, Jose said. It wasn’t his fault, he was too little to have any control over what had happened. But in Jane’s mind, it didn’t matter. The boy reminded her of Armando, and of that day.

  As the time passed, Jane tried to ignore her own mother and father, even though they welcomed visits from their grandchildren. Neighbors remember that once Jane left home, she rarely came back for visits. “On special occasions, birthdays, holidays, or whatever,” a neighbor of her parents’ remembers, “her older sister always came back, even after she got married and had kids of her own. But not Jane. Jane never seemed to come home.”

  In a year together, Jose said he only saw Mr. and Mrs. Osborne a total of three times. Even talking about them spun Jane into a violent mood, so Jose avoided the topic.

  She blamed her parents for a lot of grief in her life, including her bouts with asthma. Both of them smoked, she told Jose, and that had left her with the breathing disorder.

  A main source of tension revolved around Jane’s rivalry with her big sister. By all accounts, Deborah was close to Nellie and Don. Unlike when Jane married, when Deborah tied the knot, her parents gave her a house and some land. “The way Jane saw it, she was the smarter one, but it was her sister who got everything. They always helped her and it made Jane pretty jealous.”

  Jane paid a rare visit to her parents on the afternoon of January 24, 1988. Jose didn’t go and he wasn’t sure why she decided to see them. But given her contentious relationship with them, it’s more likely she went to visit her grandparents next door and her parents were there. She came home in one of the worst moods he’d ever seen.

  “I hate my fucking family,” she tearfully screamed at Jose, vowing never to see them again. Her tirade scared baby Matthew, who began to cry.

  As she spoke, she reached for Matthew, lifting him into the air and then, incomprehensibly, she dropped him. “He fell like a rock,” Jose said. “I couldn’t believe it.” It was probably just an accident, the result of her agitated state. But Jose didn’t care. He’d watched her cold treatment of Jason, and suddenly feared she was finally taking her anger out on her littlest son, just six months old.

  Jose flew into a rage, grabbing at her shirt so hard, it ripped.

  “The next time you do that, I will kick your ass,” he told her, and then slapped her, hard, across the face. The pair struggled with each other, with Jose grabbing her by the throat before throwing her on the ground.

  Jose stormed into the kitchen in an effort to get away from her, and to calm himself down. But an enraged Jane followed. She flew into the kitchen and grabbed the nearest weapon, a knife.

  “You aren’t leaving me,” she told him, holding tightly to the knife while tears streamed down her face. “I’ll kill you before you leave me.”

  Alarmed neighbors must have heard the screaming and called police, because an officer showed up at Jane’s front door, interrupting the argument before it had a chance to escalate any further. Jose didn’t deny striking Jane. “I did, and I’m ashamed of that,” he said.

  Jose landed in jail, according to police records. But a few months later, Jane filed a petition with the Lake County Courthouse in Waukegan to have all battery charges dropped. On May 13, 1988, a judge granted her request.

  But the incident was enough to push Jose away. Again, he decided to leave Jane. He packed a few belongings and moved in with relatives. Within days, Jane came looking for him. It was the exact opposite scene from the one she’d experienced with Armando. This time, she was the one asking him to come back. Jose resisted.

  “I don’t want anything to do with you,” he told her. But it was a bluff. He did want to go home with her.

  “I realized, I have my little son. I didn’t want to abandon the relationship when we have a little baby. I wanted to try everything to make it work out.” So he moved home.

  Jane became a full-time stay-at-home mom. To make up the difference, Jose threw himself into work to make more money for his newly expanded family. He took on a job as a tire technician, repairing tires for large semi-trucks at a company called Palomar Transit. He picked up plenty of overtime, and continued to take on shifts for his old sheet metal employer, too. But he turned every check over to Jane, who claimed she was better with finances.

  “I worked sixteen hours a day sometimes, but I never had a penny in my pocket,” Jose said. “She always took the check.”

  It’s ironic that as a teenager, Jane had considered herself a religious person, embracing the theology classes she took at Westlake Christian Academy when her fellow rebellious classmates reviled them. But as an adult, she didn’t believe in God, once quipping to Jose, “The only God I believe in is the paper with the president’s face on it!” Jane said she hated the Bible and wouldn’t allow one in the house.

  While they were far from living a middle-class life, with the money from Jose’s jobs, Jason’s Social Security checks, and whatever extra she got from Grandma, the couple did okay financially. Still, there were problems. The next hurdle prompted Jane to withdraw entirely from the town she’d grown up in.

  Before Jose met Jane, he’d lived with another girlfriend, Sylvia Correra. Jane even knew her, because she was good friends with Sylvia’s brother, according to Jose. After they broke up, Sylvia moved to Texas, where she stayed during most of his relationship with Jane. Sylvia had called Jose several times over the past two years, sometimes even at the apartment he shared with Jane. In the summer of 1988, 24-year-old Sylvia moved back into town. She wanted to re-ignite things with her old flame, Jose recalled.
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  That summer, Jane found her car pelted with eggs three times. And she received a series of obscene messages on her answering machine. Jose did little to intercede, though he suspected Sylvia was to blame. He didn’t think Sylvia would listen to him, he said. So he let Jane fight the battle.

  In early August, Sylvia left letters on Jane’s car, promising to beat her. Jane had had enough. She filed a restraining order against Sylvia on August 25, 1988, according to court documents. In her handwritten petition, Jane told the court that Sylvia repeatedly harassed her by phone, leaving obscenity-laden messages on her machine, and sent letters filled “with death threats to my family and myself.” The order was granted, instructing Sylvia to stay away from Jane, Jason, and Matthew.

  But Jane wasn’t satisfied.

  “A piece of paper isn’t going to stop her,” she told Jose. “I want to move. And I mean far away, out of state.”

  She became obsessed with the idea of going somewhere sunny, like Florida. Jose was reluctant, not wanting to leave his job, his family. To ease his transition, Jane suggested a family vacation, just for a week or two. Jose relented, packing up the family and driving them to the Sunshine State.

  In Florida, Jane was another person. She was happy again, affectionate. It was the side of Jane that Jose had first met and fallen in love with. She loved trekking down to Florida’s white sandy beaches and playing in the ocean with her kids. The only problem was, Jane didn’t want to come home. She was enjoying herself and didn’t want to go back to real life. So the two-week vacation went on and on. The family went to Orlando, Miami, Pensacola. A month passed, then another. They stayed in hotels, ate at nice restaurants. All the while, Jose worried about the money. He knew his job was lost. But Jane told him to forget about it.

  “I have plenty to cover our expenses,” she told him.

  “How?” he asked. “Where is it all coming from?”

  “I said don’t worry about it,” she repeated. “I have it handled.”