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

Page 5

by Dirmann, Tina


  Jane relished being a single woman again. Her favorite haunt was the very upscale community of La Jolla, known for its high-end retail shops and oceanside homes with values averaging in the multi-millions. She loved the downtown bars and restaurants, sometimes dragging Paula with her to go dancing for the evening. Her pretty features easily attracted men. Again, Jane was drawn to men of ethnicity. But this time, she went after a string of Arabic men. They tended to have a lot of money, Jane said, and could treat her right.

  Jane even enrolled as a student at nearby Palomar Community College, where she told Paula she was learning to speak Arabic.

  “She always wanted to be taken care of,” Paula said. “She didn’t work, the entire time I knew her, she didn’t work, and didn’t want to. She just wanted to be around men who could take care of her.”

  Some of these men took Jane on trips, usually to her favorite hot spot, Las Vegas. Gambling with her date’s money became a favorite thrill. And though Jane never outright said so, she hinted that some of her boyfriends paid her rent and gave her spending money.

  “It’s obvious, the way she was living, the way she dressed,” Paula said. “Someone was giving her money.”

  One man in particular stood out for Jane, Paula remembered. He drifted in and out of her life for over a year. But she spoke very little about him.

  “She was a very private person and really hard to get to know,” Paula said. “She was just a strange person, right from the beginning.”

  Though she didn’t have many friends on the block, she had a way of drawing attention to herself. The hours she kept, for one, became a huge gossip topic. Typically, she was home most afternoons, but left around 8:30 p.m. nightly, sometimes not coming home until the very early morning hours, if at all. On such outings, she broke from her normally sharp tailored skirts to don short leather ones and fishnet stockings.

  “We nicknamed her Trixie,” said next-door neighbor Rosemary Webb. “We all thought it was pretty obvious what was going on. And all the while, those boys would be left by themselves.”

  Neighbors also noticed the way Jane treated her two young sons.

  The brothers grew very close during this time. They were quiet, well-behaved children, especially Jason, who by all accounts was shy and introverted. Jane got into the habit of dumping a lot of the parenting responsibility for Matthew on Jason’s 10-year-old shoulders.

  “You’re the man of the house,” she could be heard telling Jason. “So you have to take care of your brother.”

  Just as Jose had noticed before, neighbors realized that Matthew was her favorite. Jane’s sharp tongue routinely lashed out at Jason.

  “She’d get frustrated just with everyday life and she’d just take it all out on Jason all the time,” Paula said.

  It wasn’t unusual to catch glimpses of Jane dragging Jason into the house by his arm, screaming obscenities at him. “It was obvious she showed blatant favoritism to the younger one,” Rosemary said. “I never saw her raise a hand to that one.”

  Not long after moving to the Butterfield Lane house, Rosemary spotted Jason sitting on the curb outside his home, sobbing. The crying lasted so long, Rosemary grew worried. She thought it was probably a fight with his younger brother, the only real playmate he seemed to have. She crept outside and kneeled beside him.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said, nodding his tear-stained face.

  “Then why are you crying?”

  “I can’t get inside my house,” Jason replied.

  She thought he’d locked himself out and Jane must be gone. But as it turned out, Jane was home. He was making Mom mad, he said. So she threw him outside and locked the door. It would be well into nightfall before he was allowed back in.

  Looking back, most neighbors agreed that Jason was a victim of abuse—mental, if not physical. They couldn’t remember seeing him with bruises or cuts. Maybe that’s why they never called authorities or demanded child welfare officials investigate. Even when Jane’s screaming at Jason could be heard throughout the neighborhood, no one interceded. They considered it none of their business. One neighbor said awareness about child abuse wasn’t that well known then. Hard to believe, given it was 1992.

  “Unfortunately, people kind of kept to themselves where maybe we could have done something,” Rosemary said.

  Feeding the family also became Jason’s responsibility. Jane abandoned her meals of lettuce and other vegetables, finding it easier to pick up fast food for the boys instead. If she didn’t feel like running out, it was up to Jason to put dinner together, usually spaghetti. It was filling, it was quick, and it was easy. Paula remembered once finding Jason at the stove, making his usual spaghetti dinner. He was still little, then—no more than 11, she estimates.

  “I couldn’t imagine my daughter standing at the stove cooking me dinner,” Paula told her. “And she’s older than Jason! But you couldn’t tell [Jane] anything on how to raise her children. She was too stubborn.”

  Her family was odd, no doubt. But under it all, Paula sensed that her friend loved her sons, in her own way. “You never saw outward affection because she was so self-absorbed,” she said. “She didn’t give them kisses or ever say how much she loved them. But I think she did love them.”

  At times, in fact, Jane was an overly concerned parent, especially when it came to her sons’ education.

  As Jason transitioned into junior high, his mother became obsessed with his academic performance. Friends, teachers, and neighbors who’d known Jason over the years said he was a very bright boy. “Much more so than Matthew,” one friend said. “Matthew was the sweet one, more outgoing. But Jason was the one with the brains.”

  The better he did in school, the more pressure Jane put on Jason to excel. She expected him to bring home straight A’s, which he did. And Jane took to showing off her older son’s report cards to her friends. Oddly, though, the display came off like it was more about Jane than her son—proof that she was a good mother, after all.

  Once, as a freshman in high school, Jason brought home a B in algebra. It didn’t matter that the rest of the report card was full of A’s. She zeroed in on the less-than-perfect grade. She reached for a large wooden-handled kitchen knife to emphasize her anger. She never touched him with it, though—just like the times she’d waved a knife at Jose. She just liked to jab it menacingly in his direction while yelling.

  “You’ll never be good enough,” she told him, pushing him back onto the bed in his room. Armed with a 100-foot electrical cord, Jane tied her oldest son up and kept him that way for four hours, “tied like a mummy,” Jason would say later.

  7

  Jason first remembers really suspecting that his mother was mentally ill about 1995. Until then, he knew she had a temper. He knew she could be abusive. But he never considered her crazy, not until that summer.

  Jason had yet another blow-up with his mom early that year. This time, it was over a pack of cards he’d bought to play a popular children’s game called Magic: The Gathering. The cards cost just $1, but Jane was furious to learn her 13-year-old son had made the purchase. He was not supposed to have any money, and the buy proved he had cash stashed away somewhere, without her permission, she reasoned. Incensed, Jane grabbed a belt and snapped it at Jason. The tail end caught him in the eye, causing it to bruise. That was pretty typical behavior. Jason had long ago stopped being shocked at the depths his mother’s anger could reach.

  That alone wasn’t the incident that convinced him his mother was moving closer over the edge of sanity. It was during an out-of-town trip that he saw clearly, for the first time, signs of the illness taking over Jane’s mind.

  Jane was in high spirits in the summer of 1995 as she drove herself and the boys to Las Vegas, just a six-hour jaunt from San Marcos. Mostly, it turned out to be a great trip. The boys enjoyed running around the famous Vegas strip, checking out the neon sights, even if they were too young to do any gambling. But toward the end of the trip,
Jason flipped on the television and saw musician Duncan Sheik performing his hit song “Barely Breathing.” Jane stood transfixed before the television. Then she gently pulled her oldest aside to tell him a secret. She said she’d met him, the singer on TV, one night in a bar.

  “Now he’s out there singing my songs,” she told Jason. “Songs that I wrote!”

  Jason struggled to understand what his mother was talking about. It made no sense and he knew it. Was she joking? She was honestly trying to tell him she knew Duncan Sheik and he’d ripped off some song she wrote? The idea was ludicrous. But Jane was adamant—Duncan Sheik was getting rich right now off song lyrics he’d stolen from her. “Now he wants to kill me over it,” Jane said. Jason didn’t know what to make of his mom’s rantings, so he ignored her. She was always an odd woman, and now this was some new tangent he didn’t care to get into. But she rambled on, refusing to let the idea go.

  Over the next months, Jane was frantic to reach Duncan Sheik. She focused her entire life around the belief that music industry executives were spying on her. She stopped going out during the day, convinced that his people wanted her dead. She stopped using cell phones, and refused to let her sons use them, either. Too easily traceable, she said. Only a direct conversation with the singer could set the matter straight. She didn’t want money from him, she just wanted to convince him he should not kill her. She spent hours researching the singer, buying his CDs and reading the inside cover sheets up and down. From there, she found his management firm in Boston. This was her best chance to reach him, she thought. So Jane looked up the number and called. Repeatedly. According to Ever Kipp, an assistant for David Leinheardt Management, Jane’s calls started in 1995. She identified herself as Jane Marie.

  “I’m an old acquaintance of Duncan’s,” she told Kipp. “Could you please pass along my phone number?”

  Kipp, not knowing if she really was an old friend or not, took down the number. But, of course, Duncan had never heard of Jane. She called several times, but never reached him. Duncan avoided her, she said, because he couldn’t admit he’d ripped off her song lyrics. And in retaliation, his army of powerful entertainment executives continued to watch her every move.

  Jane’s paranoia swelled that year. She had a long list of people who she knew certainly wanted her dead. Her focus grew to encompass entire ethnic groups, particularly Mexicans and Jews. At first, neighbors thought Jane’s claims of someone hiding in her back yard, stalking her, were legitimate. Sometimes, strangers would break into her back yard and watch her family, she told people. Well, neighbors reasoned, Jane did go out with an awful lot of strange men. What if one of them turned out to be a really bad guy? What if she had blown off the wrong man and now he was out to get her, maybe even to take her little boys in the process? It was possible. But nobody aside from Jane ever saw a soul.

  “Are you going to be okay?” Paula asked one night during a visit to her home. Jane’s anxiety seemed so real, Paula couldn’t help but worry.

  “Yeah, we’re going to be fine,” she answered.

  But Jane found herself so scared so often, she even called the police for help. She told them the same story she had been sharing with neighbors—someone, maybe even more than one person, was hiding in her back yard. She saw them, several times. And she was scared what they’d do to her. She begged the police to help her. But after arriving at her house, and combing through the back yard, the officers were perplexed. Like the neighbors, they never could find any indication that anyone had been there.

  In January 1996, Paula planned a skiing trip to Big Bear Mountains with her daughter and some friends. She invited Jane and the boys to come along. Paula looked forward to the trip to escape stresses at home. For the past year, she had been dating a co-worker, but the relationship ended at the worst time possible—late November, just before all the holidays hit. She needed something to look forward to, and the trip was it.

  But as it turned out, the vacation was far from a happy, carefree excursion. Jane’s constant sniping and ridicule of Jason put a pall on what was supposed to be a fun-filled holiday break. Again, it fell to Jason to be his brother’s keeper. And any time he failed, Jane let him have it.

  The first night up, the group decided to turn in early, hoping to rise just after the sun and get a full day on the slopes. Matthew couldn’t sleep. He kept talking away, making jokes, cracking himself up. His giggles made it hard for the rest of the group to sleep, and Jason knew it.

  “Matthew,” Jason urged. “Go to sleep! You have to go to sleep now!”

  When he didn’t settle down in time, Jane threw on the lights.

  “What is the matter with you?” she asked Jason. “You know better! You are the man of the house. You are supposed to take care of him!”

  “It was sad to see that,” Paula said. “Jason just never got to be a kid, because she wouldn’t let him.”

  Matthew could play. Even Jane, with her crazy dating life, was allowed to play. But Jason was the adult, even if he was only 13.

  On the slopes the next day, the trip didn’t get much better for Jason. None of them—Jason, Jane, or Matthew—had been skiing before. But Matthew took to the sport naturally. He had a small, lithe frame, paired with the natural fearlessness that comes with being a 9-year-old boy. Within a few hours he was bounding down the slopes on his own. Jason, already a painfully insecure teenager, was a chunky kid who had grown almost 6 feet tall. He struggled to maneuver his lumbering frame against the thin skis. He fell a lot. And as any first-time skier knows, learning to stand up again on sticks designed to speed away from you can be even more difficult than the fall itself. After every fall, the entire group had to stop while Jason worked to gain his balance and stand upright on his skis.

  In the end, it wouldn’t be just Jason suffering that day. It became a painful experience for everyone watching. But it was Jane’s reaction, not a lack of patience for Jason’s poor skiing ability, that made everyone uncomfortable.

  “She scolded him for not getting it,” Paula said. “She’d laugh at him for falling down, then she’d scold him for not being coordinated enough or athletic enough. It was embarrassing.”

  It was especially hard to take since both kids were relatively good boys, very well behaved. Jason hardly said a word. And when he did, it was to Matthew. It was pretty clear that Matthew was aware of the dynamic—if he acted out, his big brother paid the price. It was a great system for Jane, a pathetic one for her boys.

  After the weekend, Paula was fairly certain she wanted nothing more to do with Jane. How could you maintain a friendship with someone who could be so cruel to her own children? Then, before the trip was over, Jane had some news to share with her neighbor and friend. She was dating Paula’s ex-boyfriend, the one who had just broken up with her a few weeks before.

  “I hope you don’t mind,” Jane said.

  “I was shocked,” Paula recalls. “We’d only been broken up two months. It hurt me. It really did.”

  Jane’s relationship with her friend’s ex ultimately went nowhere, as did most of her dating attempts after Jose. As Matthew would later tell investigators, pausing to snort in disbelief, “My mom with a steady boyfriend? Are you kidding? She hated men.”

  8

  In the months between the fateful Big Bear trip and the spring of 1996, it’s not clear what happened to Jane. She didn’t have many friends on her block, anyway. And now, her one close friend had decided to pull away, in part because of Jane’s cruel behavior toward her son, and in part because she had fallen in love. Paula was in a serious relationship with a man named Brian Tate by then and had no time for Jane’s antics. But Jane had become the victim of something even she couldn’t explain. She was beyond temperamental. She was paranoid. She was frightened. And her grip on reality slipped away.

  “Please help me, you’ve got to come over and help me,” Jane begged Paula one evening in the spring of 1996. Her former friend seemed in such a panic, Paula and Brian were alarmed.


  “There’s someone in my back yard,” she said. “One of those illegals.”

  San Diego butts up against the Tijuana, Mexico, border. Each year, countless Mexican citizens pour into San Diego County illegally. Most come in search of work, hoping to escape the overwhelming poverty permeating their own country. Every year, government officials staff more and more border patrol agents along the line that separates the United States from Mexico. But it’s a never-ending fight. Still, they come, by the thousands. Now, Jane told her neighbors, at least one of these runaway immigrants lived in her back yard, and she was scared.

  Paula and her boyfriend ran to Jane’s back yard.

  “Right there,” Jane said, pointing to a bush. “That’s where he’s been living. Can’t you see? He sleeps under that bush.”

  They couldn’t see a thing. Just a bush sitting atop some dirt and grass. But Jane was so scared, they believed she saw something. They calmed her down, reassured her that at least for now, no one was there, so she was safe.

  Jane’s calls for help that spring were only beginning. Weeks later, she called Paula’s house again, insisting “the illegals are back.” Brian was there and Jane begged him to come take a look. By the time he got there, a police officer was already in her back yard, searching the bushes. Again, nothing was found.

  “I really believed her,” Paula said. “She had me convinced an illegal was living in her back yard.”

  Jane called countless times over the next few months, always with the same story. Brian ran to her house nearly every time, hoping to catch the nameless, faceless intruder. He never did.

  One evening, next-door neighbor Rosemary Webb was startled by a pounding at her door. Rosemary found an irate Jane on her doorstep.

  “It’s all your fault,” she exploded. “If you didn’t hire these Mexicans to do your yard work, they wouldn’t be living on my roof!”

 

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