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

by Dirmann, Tina

  While Jason tried to lose himself in his studies, Matthew’s main passion was sports, especially hockey. He wanted to play on a team. So when he found out about an ice hockey team in the nearby city of Riverside, he begged Jane to let him join. Jane still had periods of lucidity, sometimes lasting months at a time. She was well enough to cook for the boys, wash the laundry, pay the bills, and yes, even sign Matthew up for hockey. Though the rink was about a thirty-minute drive from their Menifee home, Jane still harbored a particular soft spot for her littlest boy. She wanted Matt to be happy. So she agreed to drive him into the neighboring city and sign him up to be a member of the Riverside Jets 1998-1999 team.

  Jane arrived unannounced at one of the tryout sessions held at the Riverside ice hockey rink. In the tight-knit, very cliquey community of junior ice hockey, a new arrival would have stood out anyway. But Brad Joplin, the team’s manager, and his wife, Nancy, a school teacher, particularly remember Jane’s arrival. Her odd appearance caught everyone’s eye.

  “She looked messy, unkempt,” Nancy said. “Like she didn’t brush her hair. I’d learn as the year wore on, that was just how she dressed. Her clothes always looked wrinkled, like they came out of the bottom of the hamper. In fact, she seemed to get worse as the year progressed. She’d show up to the rink looking just terrible.”

  But it wasn’t only her appearance that raised eyebrows. Most juvenile sports teams are broken down into age groups. To ensure that a 15-year-old isn’t playing against a 9-year-old, parents have to provide a birth certificate to prove their kid is in the right age group. Jane bristled at the request. Claiming it was an invasion of privacy, she screamed at the volunteer parents running sign-ups. It instantly earned her a reputation.

  “Other parents thought she was weird,” Nancy said. “They called her a bitch.”

  Eventually Jane relented and Matt was on the team for the 1998 season. He played forward center, considered the hardest-working position on the ice. Matt proved to be a solid player because he was adept at offense and defense. And it was Matt who took on the face-off at the beginning of a quarter when the puck is first dropped onto the ice. Team members so relied on his play that the coaches broke the rules for him and let him play in games even if he missed practices. And he missed a lot of practices, mostly because of his mother’s erratic behavior. She’d disappear for long periods and nobody from the team could reach her. Only Brad and Nancy had her phone number, which she gave them under strict instructions “to give the number to no one,” Nancy said. “Not to other parents, not to other coaches, no one.” But when Brad or Nancy left messages, she rarely returned their calls.

  “Over the year, she gave us a few different numbers,” Nancy said. “She kept changing them, saying the wrong person got ahold of her number, so she’d change it. It made getting ahold of her almost impossible.”

  Nancy remembers Jane once calling back after a long period of absence. “I only have a few minutes,” she whispered to Nancy, sounding very upset. “I’m calling from a pay phone.” About a minute later, she hung up abruptly.

  Unlike most of the other parents, who resented Jane for her odd and reclusive behavior, Nancy and Brad felt sorry for her. They chalked up her behavior to being a single, overprotective mother who was desperately lonely. They even theorized that maybe she was an abused wife on the run from a brutal husband. Anyway, the Joplins appreciated the way Jane came to practices with Matt—even bringing Jason along every time. She may be different, but she looked like a good mom, they thought. So they reached out to her, inviting her to lunch after practices and chatting with her during down time from the ice. It was the closest Jane had let anyone get to her since living in San Marcos.

  In a rare move, Jane opened up to them about her past relationships. She told them how her first husband, Armando, had killed himself, leaving her stranded to raise their little boy on her own. As for Matt’s dad, she changed the story quite a bit. “She told us he just wasn’t the marrying kind,” Nancy said. “And that he never wanted a thing to do with Matt. So one day, she said, she just came home and he was gone. He left her and she never saw him again.”

  But it was hard to get a read on her. At times, she insisted she was barely getting by financially. After each game, the parents typically took the boys out for pizza. It was hard convincing Jane to let the boys go, but often, they joined. Jane, however, would refuse to eat anything because she couldn’t afford it. Instead, she’d sip Diet Coke. She also talked about struggling to pay rent and utilities.

  “Other times, she’d imply she was independently wealthy,” Brad said. “She said she had a lot of money stashed somewhere, but she could access it whenever she needed to.”

  They suspected she did actually have money, since ice hockey is not a cheap sport to play. Equipment, including jerseys, hockey skates, and sticks, ran as much as $800 a season. Plus, each team member had to pay $150 in monthly dues.

  Four months into their relationship with Jane, the Joplins were in need of a new car to replace their old 1967 Bug. During one practice, Brad mentioned he was looking at a used Cadillac, but he didn’t think he could afford the old luxury car’s $4,000 price tag.

  “I really didn’t have the money to buy it,” Brad said. “So Jane just offered to lend me the money. She just said she could. We were just blown out of the water by that.”

  The woman who sometimes complained of not having pizza money now suddenly had enough funds to pay cash for a used car. Who knows if she ever actually had that kind of money on hand, or if she was just grandstanding for her new friends? But after going with Brad to look the car over, Jane changed her mind. “She wasn’t sure it was going to be a good enough car for me for the price, so she passed on it,” he said.

  Despite their mother’s oddities, Matt and Jason seemed like great boys. Jason typically sat in the stands as his brother practiced, usually dragging a stack of books to the top of the rink to do homework or get lost in reading. He rarely spoke, unless spoken to. But most of the adults were impressed by him. “His conversation was very adult,” Brad said. “He was obviously a very intelligent boy, very studious. But not a dorky kid, either. Not like that. He could be pretty charming.”

  Matt was the polar opposite. He was outgoing, and genuinely liked by his teammates. “It’s one of the reasons we didn’t think there was anything wrong,” Brad remembered. “Matt seemed like such a regular kid!”

  In the early season, Matt’s teammates regularly asked him to spend the night or hang out off the ice. But Jane always said no. Even when Brad and Nancy’s own boys, Keil, 10, and Daniel, 12, extended the invitation, still Jane said no. It became obvious to onlookers that Jane didn’t like to have either of her boys out of her sight for very long. So the invitations to Matt tapered off. Only once did Jane ever leave Matt to practice alone with his friends. She was gone just briefly, taking Jason to pick up some fast food, then returning to her lookout post. “That was the only time she ever left him alone,” Nancy said.

  By all accounts, Matt and Jason were close brothers—a closeness probably forced on them because they couldn’t form friendships like other boys their age do. During down times from the ice, Matt often sat with his brother to play a fantasy card game called Magic: The Gathering. The Joplins’ boys sometimes joined in and talked about how good Matt and Jason were at the game. “We thought, of course,” Brad said, “it’s probably how they passed time when they were at home, because they couldn’t ever go out!”

  As the season wore on, Jane’s appearance took a dramatic turn for the worse. “She looked tired all the time,” Nancy said. “And she was so very pale, so white. She looked sick. And very, very thin.”

  Her behavior became more erratic, too. Concerned, Brad and Nancy talked Jane into a lunch after practice one afternoon. Over the meal, she told them a story that left them more baffled by her than ever. It was the first time they’d seen the real demons dancing in Jane Bautista’s head.

  “She started out telling us things w
ere really bad because of some business deal,” Brad said. “She had some deal that went wrong and now some people were trying to get back at her.”

  “Very powerful people in the entertainment industry,” Jane said, implying it was somebody in the music business. “And you wouldn’t believe what these people can do.”

  The entertainment people watched her all the time, she said. So she had to move a lot, change her numbers often. And she always kept her drapes at home drawn tight.

  “It was so weird,” Nancy said. “We talked about it all the way home.” Nancy, as a school teacher, was used to reporting abusive or unstable parents to authorities. She knew what to do and took that responsibility very seriously. But she didn’t know what to make of Jane Bautista.

  “Her story sounded crazy, but she was so sincere about it, so convincing, you almost believed her,” Brad noted. And her kids seemed happy, well-fed, clean. The couple decided to just keep an eye on Jane by continuing to befriend her as much as she’d let them.

  Near the end of the season, Jane sat with the Joplins during an after-game pizza party. She looked terrible, messy hair, wrinkled dirty clothes. The Joplins took the time to grill Jane about the people she thought were after her. They couldn’t believe it was true, but her conviction made them think something was happening to her. They were desperate to find out what, for Jane’s sake as well as her sons’.

  “Who are these people, Jane?” Brad implored. “Tell us who’s doing this to you. Maybe we can help.”

  “Well,” she said, glancing down at his shirt. “Let me just say, you’re wearing his clothes.”

  Brad looked down at the Ralph Lauren polo shirt he was wearing, then back at Jane. At a loss for words, all he could say was, “Really?”

  “I didn’t know what to think of that kind of information,” Brad said. “She just wasn’t making sense.”

  As the hockey season drew to a close in March 1999, Jane withdrew completely from the Joplins. At the end-of-season awards banquet, where each of the boys gets a trophy just for participating that year, Jane and her sons were absent. Once again, Nancy called Jane repeatedly to arrange a way for Matt to get his trophy, and to check on Jane, but she never returned the calls. Months later, Jane called Nancy out of the blue. She was frantic.

  “It’s so scary,” she told Nancy. “I’m being followed all of the time now. I have to move, they’re hounding me!”

  “Jane, let me help you,” Nancy said. “Where are you?”

  Suddenly, Jane turned on her friend. “They’ve gotten to you,” she said. “They’ve turned you against me! Oh no, they’ve turned you!”

  “What are you talking about?” Nancy implored. “I’ve never even met these people!”

  Jane started stuttering, stammering, without saying anything that made sense. Then she hung up. Nancy was stunned. Jane sounded so terrified that Nancy believed someone really might be after Jane—though likely not the powerful Hollywood ghosts she talked about so often. Nancy tried frantically to get her back on the phone. But all the numbers Jane had given her over the past year were out of order. With no other contact information, Nancy was powerless to reach out to her.

  Like so many other times in her life, Jane simply cut ties with someone close to her, walking away forever. The next time Nancy would hear of Jane, it would be from grisly reports on the nightly news.

  10

  In the fall of Jason’s 1998-1999 school year, the 16-year-old student met with his guidance counselor and made a startling realization—he had enough credits to graduate high school an entire year early, if he wanted to. Jason was a junior, but with the stroke of a pen, he could be considered a senior. He only needed his mother’s signature on an authorization slip. To Jason, the knowledge was a chance at freedom. He had grand thoughts of going to college far away—away from Jane. Classmates said Jason always talked a big game, bragging that he was going to attend Harvard Law School someday, maybe becoming a patent attorney. That may have been a bit of a pipe dream, but with a 3.8 GPA, he could have his choice of many a college. Anyway, those who really knew Jason said he was more interested in a computer science career. They got the impression that law school was more his mother’s idea.

  If Jason expected a fight from his mother over the early graduation request, he would be surprised. She didn’t give him one. After all, she herself had graduated a year early from high school. Plus, the earlier he graduated, the earlier he could get a job and help support the family, she reasoned. He would go to college, of course, but he could do that and work part-time, she said. She signed the slip, and Jason became a senior.

  There was another reason Jason wanted out of high school early.

  “A lot of people thought he was an outcast or a weirdo,” a classmate said. Jason had a few friends in school, but not many people considered themselves close to him, mainly because he was never allowed to socialize after school hours, and could never have friends over to his house.

  With a hulking 6’ 2”, 210-pound frame, he could have cut an intimidating figure on campus. But he didn’t. He was the butt of many jokes from his meaner classmates, who thought he dressed like a nerd and was kind of a pansy. He was ridiculed behind his back, and sometimes to his face.

  Making matters worse, Jason had his own computer, but he wasn’t allowed to sign up for an Internet connection at home—Jane was convinced her stalkers could trace her through the Web. For the same reason, the boys weren’t allowed cable television, either. So Jason spent countless hours on the computers at school, downloading music and research for classwork, which he took home to watch with Matt. He became very proficient on the keyboard, a talent that left him with a reputation as a geek.

  Jason’s attitude at school didn’t help him make friends, either.

  “He always had this belief that he was just better than other people,” one former classmate, Joey Gu, said in one newspaper interview. “He thought he was smarter than everyone else, even the teachers.”

  His high GPA and advanced computer skills turned Jason into a snob. At home, he was nobody. But at school, he was everyone’s superior.

  As a senior, Jason could sign up to be on the school’s yearbook staff. It gave him a chance to use his computer skills, creating most of the graphics for his own senior class annual.

  A fellow yearbook staffer recalled Jason complaining about his mother that year. He hated that she never let him go out. He was 17 years old and wasn’t even allowed to date. And a guys’ night out was impossible. Sometimes she had a reason for making him stay home, but usually it was just because she wanted him there. He said he wanted to graduate early to get out of the house and far away from her control.

  “He would say she was annoying,” the friend said. “He complained about her a lot—but what teenager doesn’t?”

  “I just took what he was saying as being what every teenager says,” another friend recalled. “He was just saying, ‘I want to get away from my parents and be on my own.’ I didn’t read anything into it.”

  But Jason never confided to his friends the real problems at home. Of course, this is a kid who had carefully created a persona for himself in school that revolved around the concept of superiority. He may not have fit in, but it didn’t matter. He would excel. That defense mechanism left him with a huge chip on his shoulder, and incapable of confiding a secret like an unstable mother at home. That information would shatter his image as a guy smarter than everyone else. Unlike nearly every other curious high school student experimenting with the freedoms that come with the teenage years—driving, girls, parties, beer—Jason had no freedom. So, instead, he put tough restrictions on himself. He didn’t drink, he didn’t use drugs, he didn’t go to parties. As far as his fellow students were concerned, Jason was a straight-edge, straight-A student bound for big things in life.

  But even as graduation loomed, it was clear that Jason was a desperately unhappy young man. Every year, each graduating senior chooses a parting quote to display under his picture.
Jason’s read:

  I, Jason Bautista, of unsound mind and lacking common sense, wish good will to few people. Instead, I wish bad luck (a lifetime of it) on a lot of people, and laugh at the stupidity of the rest.

  Over the summer, 17-year-old Jason got an acceptance letter from California State University at San Bernardino, a thirty-minute drive from home, meaning Jason would continue to live with Jane. Harvard Law School was very far away.

  As Jason prepared to start college in the fall, Matt muddled his way through Menifee Middle School. He wasn’t the academic star his brother was, instead usually coasting along with B’s, C’s, and the occasional D. Tall, but with a very thin and wiry build, Matt was much more social than Jason, and liked to goof around with friends in school hallways and chase girls at lunch. He still loved sports, excelling at school baseball games and, most recently, picking up skateboarding—a pal lent Matt a few boards and he became very good. He took to dressing like his fellow skateboarders, too, wearing baggy jeans and T-shirts. He never lost his love for golf, either, and managed to talk Jane into buying him and his big brother their own sets of clubs.

  But his favorite game was still hockey.

  In the fall of 1999, Matthew had one more chance to develop his skills on the ice. His mom’s mental health was so unpredictable, and he hated what she put him through last season. She embarrassed him, often. It was hard to play knowing his mother had had a falling-out with every one of his teammates’ parents. But Matt desperately wanted to play. He loved the game and it gave him something to look forward to in a life that was otherwise overwhelmingly unhappy. So, Jane allowed him to sign up again in the fall of 1999, this time with a different set of coaches, managers, and players. It was a clean slate, if only Jane could control herself long enough to let Matt make friends and flourish as a player.

  But that was not to be. The 1998 season would be a smashing success compared to what happened the following year.