A shocked Rosemary stood looking at Jane in amazement. She had no idea what her ranting neighbor was talking about. “I just stood there with my mouth open.”
Jane took to calling the police again, this time to report her neighbor for hiring illegal Mexicans to do her yard work. Rosemary was shocked, again, when an officer knocked on her door to investigate. She told him the claims were ridiculous, but the officer already seemed to know that. By now, Jane’s calls for help were so frequent, they knew exactly who she was—and what they were dealing with.
“They’d tell me with a grin on their face, ‘Could you please stop hiring the Mexicans so they’ll stop living on your neighbor’s roof?’ “
Jane even took to standing in her yard at night and throwing tennis balls at the roof of her home—apparently trying to hit the Mexicans “living there.”
At times, Jane called another neighbor and her husband, who was a firefighter. She thought he could use his pull with law enforcement to help her. She called at all hours. During one 3 a.m. call, she said, “I’ve got a broom and I’m banging on the ceiling, but they won’t get off my roof!”
Her calls became so outrageous, her reputation as a smart but moody woman crumbled. Now, Jane was the neighborhood joke.
“Can somebody be that bizarre and not be on drugs?” Rosemary wondered. “Anyway, everyone was laughing at her.”
Otherwise, neighbors ignored Jane as much as possible. It’s a shame not one of them thought to call social services for help—if not for Jane, then for her sons. But Jane had grown so reclusive, it was hard to say what was happening to the boys living with her. Sometimes, Rosemary could hear her nightly tirades. Their master bedrooms sat side by side, and Jane’s booming rants easily drifted into Rosemary’s home.
“It was just filthy language,” Rosemary said. “Usually about typical mother frustration things, but with her temper, it would be multiplied a thousand times. And it was all the time.”
Jason had long grown accustomed to the irrational rantings that accompanied his mother’s temper. But even he couldn’t understand her behavior.
“Mom, you’re crazy, you’re acting nuts,” he told his mom one evening at the start of another episode. “There’s no one up there!”
Jane turned on her oldest, then 15, enraged. She told him he was an idiot, he didn’t know what he was talking about.
“They’re coming after me, don’t you understand?” she screamed.
She kicked him, pushed him, accused him of being against her, and threatened to throw him out of the house for good. Though Jason could have fought back—he now stood nearly 6 feet tall—he never did.
But at least one neighbor told Rosemary it wasn’t the boys he was afraid for. “I’m telling you,” he said, “one day, her whipping boy is going to get sick of that. One day, he’ll take an ax to her.”
There were signs all around that Jane couldn’t cope with everyday living anymore. Even her front yard told the story. Normally green and well kept, thanks to the mowing skills of her sons, it turned brown that summer and died. One day, Jane and her boys spent the entire day outside laying expensive sod all over the ground. But to flourish, the bottom ground needed to be thoroughly soaked, the weeds pulled. Jane just laid the new sod on the hard, dead ground. Within weeks, the sod was dead, too. Jane told a neighbor that she was trying to redo the lawn so she could get a refund on her security deposit when she moved. She was tired of the Mexicans on her roof and wanted to leave, she said.
“Funny thing was,” the neighbor said, “all that sod was more expensive than her security deposit. It just shows you how screwed-up her thinking was.”
Shortly afterward, Jane left the neighborhood. She never told anyone goodbye, or where she was going. In typical Jane fashion, she just left.
Jane’s dissent into madness intensified after leaving San Marcos. She no longer believed that illegal Mexican immigrants were after her. It had to be someone more sophisticated, because they watched her every move—not just from the roof of her house, or under bushes in her back yard—eyes were on her everywhere she went. It became hard for her to feel comfortable in any one place for too long. She moved constantly, hoping to find peace. The family lived all over Southern California—Escondido, Temecula, Sun City.
“Mom was never happy anywhere we moved,” Matthew would later tell his attorney. “She always thought people were stalking her. This person was a child molester or those people were Jews out to get us. It was always something.” The pattern continued for so long, Matthew began to lose count of all the places he’d lived. He would later say he’d moved as many as seven times before hitting high school.
In 1998, Jane took an unusually long break from her transient lifestyle after settling into a house in Menifee. Convinced everyone was out to get her, she had few contacts outside of her own sons.
Jason and Matthew were deeply unhappy. But they went along with Jane, silently swallowing their misery, mostly because, despite her screaming fits and erratic behavior, Jane was their mother and they still wanted to believe that she would never do anything that wasn’t in the best interests of her family. She’d have periods of lucidity, where everything was fine. She cooked meals, washed laundry, watched TV, and laughed with her sons. It could be like that for months—then, her mind would seem to snap, and the bad guys were after her again. “We didn’t know what to think,” Matthew would say later. “Until we got a lot older, we just didn’t know any better. We thought everybody’s mom was like this. We thought it was normal.”
In Menifee, Jane tried once again to set up a life for herself and her kids. She rented a mid-sized two-bedroom home, the kind you’d find in any middle-class neighborhood. She even appeared to date again, according to neighbors who remembered seeing her come and go at night, often very stylishly dressed. She even let Matthew play organized sports.
Not that her behavior was entirely normal. Everyone in the neighborhood could hear her screams, her moans, her unintelligible howling. It could be frightening for even a grown person to listen to. She was still clearly paranoid, telling one neighbor not long after they met that she was hearing voices in the vents of her home.
“That woman belonged in a mental institution,” said neighbor Dan Cormier, a youth sports coach who met the boys shortly after they moved into his neighborhood. “Every time I saw that woman, she was yelling.”
Matthew and Jason seemed very close, Dan noticed. They were together all the time. And they never had friends over. But both boys seemed happy enough. One of their favorite pastimes was playing roller hockey on a side street near their house. The boys even had nets they’d set up for scoring purposes. Jason was usually the goalie, while little Matthew was the shooter. Dan used to coach kids’ hockey teams, so he was drawn to the boys as they played. He started coming out to watch them, maybe give them some advice. Matthew, in particular, had a real knack for the sport, Dan recalled.
“He said he wanted to go pro someday,” Dan remembered. “I used to play and coach hockey, so I know kids. They were above-average boys, very intelligent, very nice. Just model kids.”
Dan was also an avid golfer and was soon helping Matthew master that sport, too. They often played on the greens at the nearby Menifee Lakes golf course. Again, Matthew took to the sport easily. And he loved it. “He was such a gifted athlete,” Dan said. “He had a graceful golf swing. He could have played somewhere, one day, maybe on scholarship. It’s a shame he never got that chance.”
During those games, Dan grew close to Matthew. Jason, too, but he was harder to get to know. He was a quiet guy, preferring to stay in the background mostly. He rarely had anything to say. Dan sensed things were hard at home. He wanted Matthew to confide in him, if there was anything really bad happening. But the subject of his mother clearly made Matt uncomfortable. “He just shied away from talking about his family,” Dan said. “He didn’t want to talk about it, so I didn’t push.”
As Dan would learn, the boys only played hockey or
golf if their mother was gone. They weren’t allowed out of the house usually, except for school. If she caught them out in the streets playing a hockey game, she quickly interrupted.
“She would come home and they would be playing,” Dan remembered, “then she’d just start to yell and scream to get in the house. It was pretty ugly. You could see the look on their faces. They didn’t want to go inside. But they didn’t have a choice. Who comes home and yells at their kids to go inside when they’re just out there playing? It was a control thing.”
Many of those rants ended with Jane telling the boys they were just like their “good for nothing” fathers, and would grow up to be losers, just like their dads. Years had passed since Armando Bautista had taken his life, but the memory of that day, and the hatred it stirred within Jane, never left her.
Although she developed no close relationships with her neighbors, she stood out to them because of her treatment of her sons.
“She wasn’t a friendly person,” next-door neighbor Jean Clement said. “She didn’t socialize with the neighbors at all.” Jean’s bedroom window looked directly across at Jane’s, about twelve feet away. In the evenings, Jean could hear Jane’s bouts of screaming and profanity. She was frightening to listen to, her voice sometimes sounding like a wild animal howling and moaning in frustration. Aware that someday she might have to call the police on Jane, Jean tape-recorded one of her neighbor’s tirades. She held the recorder close to her open window, and even though Jane’s was shut tight, her screeches, often punctuated with the word “fuck,” were captured on tape.
“Oh God, he knows where we’ve been!” the tape caught Jane’s voice saying. “Please, no! You don’t have the right to do that to my children!”
Most of the recording was so faint, it was impossible for Jean to understand what her neighbor was so upset about. But she spoke of “idiots” and a “fat, lying weirdo.” It was hard to know who she was upset with—sometimes she seemed to be yelling about a stranger, sometimes she seemed to be yelling at someone in the house, probably Jason.
“I’m sick of your fucking lies,” she screamed. “…Oh, you’re a big man…You’re going to go under because you’re a liar and I’m going to make sure!” She sobbed for a long time before starting again. “This is no life…This is my house, so just leave! I can’t take any more!”
“Shut up!” a deep male voice finally responded. Likely, this was Jason.
“Just stay there, outside, and just get away from here! I don’t have no sons. They’re rabble-rousers!”
There was more crying and inaudible screaming before Jane’s voice is clear again. “You ruin my son and you ruin me? I already have enough problems. I don’t need a fucking weirdo trying to kill my sons, stalking me, putting poison in my drink…You’re just evil!”
“I think you’re a fucking bitch!” a male voice responded. It’s probably Jason, even though his pattern in the past was to remain passive during her tantrums. Clearly, the 16-year-old had grown weary of his mother’s games. His patience was giving out.
“Filthy son of a bitch,” Jane continued. “Crazy criminal!”
The male voice said something, but Jean couldn’t make it out. Jane, however, responded clearly. “Fucker! You’ve got to ruin my son and ruin me and my children? Well, when you’re underground, you can’t do it, motherfucker!”
It’s ironic that even in her ranting, Jane was convinced she was a good mother. “I mind my own business,” Jane said. “I take care of my kids and make sure they don’t cause any trouble…”
Eventually, one of the boys, it’s hard to determine which from the poor recording, had had enough. Again, it is likely Jason who finally stood up to her. “Shut up, Mom! That’s enough. That’s enough!”
But Jane continued to ramble on and on. “Of course, look what they’ve fucking taken,” she screamed. “The fucking front doors, the front of the fucking garage!”
“Mom? Mom!”
In response, Jane laughed faintly. “Oh great, here come the fucking cops,” she said. And she shut up.
It’s not clear if the cops did visit the house that night, but both boys remember multiple inquiries by the police over the years. Sometimes Jane called them, sometimes the neighbors did after listening to her hysterical rages. But the officers never did anything. Just listened to her stories, labeled her as crazy, then left. They rarely even spoke to the sons living under her care.
Convinced the boys were abused, at least emotionally if not physically, Jean finally placed a call to Child Protection Services. It was the first time anybody had ever tried to alert authorities on behalf of the boys, something that should have been done years before.
Matt later recalled a social worker showing up at the house when he was outside, goofing around with his hockey stick.
“Is your mother home?” she asked.
“Yeah, inside the house,” Matt said.
Matt watched the social worker greet his mother at the door. No sooner did the woman identify herself than Jane told her, “Get the fuck off my property.” The front door slammed shut, squarely in the social worker’s face. Oddly, today the county’s Child Protection Services agency has no record of a call to them, or any investigator visiting the Bautista home. In any case, no one ever returned, according to the boys. And both claim they were warned by their mother, who blamed them for the call. “I better not ever see that again,” she said.
“She said she would kill us…any time we said we were going to call,” Matt later told a prosecutor in his mother’s murder case. “We were scared of her.” So no one ever reached out to social services for help ever again.
It wasn’t only Jane’s temper that brought her to the attention of her neighbors. They noticed that she always kept her drapes closed, and sometimes covered her windows with tin foil. And there was her erratic schedule. Just like in San Marcos, Jane seemed to be home all day, and went out late at night. But this time, her appointments wouldn’t start until the very early morning hours. Neighbors frequently saw her leaving her house at 1 a.m. But Jane, who took such pride in looking good, now appeared overly thin, almost frail, and pale. Her shoulder-length hair, which used to hang in pretty ringlets about her face, now looked unbrushed. She did make an effort to gussy up for her nightly outings, though, donning tight, short skirts and heavy make-up.
Lots of gossip circulated about Jane in those days, including rumors that she was a high-priced call girl who went out every night to earn her keep. Some neighbors said they were concerned—for the kids’ sake, of course. Others were just nosey. Whatever the reason, one lady told her neighbors she was going to follow Jane the next time she made her evening rounds. And so, during Jane’s 1 a.m. outing, the neighbor tailed her. It’s ironic that in all the time Jane thought someone was watching her, the one time someone actually was, she seemed oblivious to the car tracking her all the way to a nearby hotel. The neighbor watched Jane exit her car and walk up to a tall guy. The man simply handed Jane something. The neighbor couldn’t make it out entirely, but thought it looked like an envelope. Jane stood talking to the man for a while, standing outside the hotel, before the neighborhood spy decided she had had enough and returned home. No one ever asked Jane about it—no one ever asked Jane about anything—and they left it at that.
It’s not clear what, exactly, Jane was up to during those late-night outings. She once told a friend that she just thought it was easier for her to come and go at night because when it was dark out, it was easier to give her stalkers the slip.
Jason remembered that his mother would go out from time to time, mostly in the evenings, but on some afternoons, too. Sometimes she’d be gone for hours. But he never knew where she went, what she did. She now kept her schedule a secret, even from her own sons.
Through it all, Jason kept up decent grades in school. As a freshman at Palomar High School, he made A’s and B’s. He had lofty goals, telling classmates he was considering law after high school. Or maybe he’d become a doctor. He liked
his science classes and he was good at them. He had computer skills, too. What he seemed to falter at was socializing. He wasn’t a popular kid. He was too quiet to make many friends. Some kids interpreted his non-social behavior as arrogance. So, even though he was no shrinking violet when it came to stature—he stood over 6 feet tall—school bullies taunted him. He told Matthew about it, but not his mother. She might just tease him, too. Maybe even kick him. That had become her latest tool for tormenting her eldest: kicking him for being too weak, kicking him for not watching out for his brother, kicking him for acting too much like his dad. She routinely locked him out of the house and began forcing him to sleep in the family garage.
Jason, now firmly muddling his way through puberty, managed to develop a crush on a girl every now and then. Eventually, he mustered up enough courage to ask one out. To even Jason’s surprise, she said yes, and he made plans to take a girl out on an actual date. But he quickly canceled after his mother found out. “You’re not man enough to have a date,” she told him. “Not a wuss like you.” She taunted him mercilessly until she convinced him that he wasn’t ready for the dating scene.
Oddly, it was Matthew, not Jason, who seethed with anger at his mother during these times. He thought his big brother was weak for not lashing back at her insults, and sometimes told him as much. But Jason rarely talked back to his mother during her rants. He had learned from experience that it usually just made her worse. It was best to ignore her, Jason told Matthew.
Though Matthew had it easier, they both walked on a never-ending bed of eggshells, afraid their next step would cause her to crack. But no matter how hard they tried to be good, to stay out of her way, inevitably, Jane would lose control, sometimes yelling at them both, reminding them of their no-good fathers, sometimes taunting or kicking Jason. Or, at the worst of times, howling with fear about the ghosts out to get her.
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Such Good Boys: The True Story of a Mother, Two Sons and a Horrifying Murder Page 6