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

by Dirmann, Tina

  Again, it was a struggle to get Matt’s birth certificate from Jane. She paid all fees in cash, and refused to give out a phone number.

  “How will I tell you if a practice is canceled?” a team manager asked her.

  “I’ll just find out,” she said.

  During practices, Jane showed up in a large hat pulled low over her face, a long overcoat, huge sunglasses, and gloves. Robert Fowler was the team’s manager, and his wife, Francine, was team mom. Their son was on the team. The Fowlers remember Jane’s strange appearance and how hard it was to befriend her.

  During one practice, Jane approached Francine and tried to explain her odd behavior. “You don’t understand,” she said. “People are trying to take him away from me.”

  “Who?” Francine asked.

  “My son, Matthew.”

  “Well, you don’t have to worry about that. If there are people trying to take your son away, there is nobody on this team that would hand him over,” Francine assured her.

  “You mean to tell me,” Jane began, looking intensely at Francine, “that if somebody came up to you right now and offered you forty-five thousand dollars, you would not find a way to give them Matthew?”

  “Absolutely not, Jane. Without hesitation, I’d say no. Safety is of the utmost importance. I would never, and nobody on this team would ever, consider something like that. We’re a close team and we watch over each other’s kids.”

  Francine remembers Jane visibly relaxing after hearing that. “It seemed to put her at ease. But then I started hearing stories about her burning bridges throughout the team, snapping at everyone. And before I knew it, no one would talk to her.”

  Jason again came to every practice. He seemed very sad and withdrawn, rarely talking to anyone, and usually passed the time there by losing himself in a book or handheld video game. Francine once told him he shouldn’t spend all his time at the rink.

  “Don’t you have any friends you can go hang out with? You don’t have to always be here,” Francine told him.

  Jason looked over at his mother before looking back at Francine. “No, I don’t have any friends.”

  Jane, however, took the moment to boast about Jason’s academic prowess. She told Francine about Jason’s early graduation. “It was the only time I ever saw her seem proud of Jason,” Francine said. “It was the only time I can really remember her smiling.”

  Francine was impressed that the quiet, unassuming big kid she saw on the sidelines was actually a brainy guy. Maybe, with any luck, he’d grab a college education and break away from the odd little family headed by his hot-tempered mom.

  “Wow, Jason,” Francine said, hopeful. “So, what are you going to do now? College?”

  “If I let him go,” Jane said. “I kind of want him close to home.”

  Assuming Jane felt that way because she didn’t want her young son exposed to frat parties and college drinking a year sooner than he had to be, Francine nodded in agreement. But Jason rolled his eyes.

  “I want to go. I really want to go,” he said flatly.

  Again, Jane refused to let the boys hang out after games. “We had a big van conversion set up with a TV and VCR,” Francine related. “All the kids loved to ride in it. But it was never allowed. Even if it was just a ride from a hockey game to a restaurant, they were not allowed to go.”

  Aside from a team trip to the mountains of Lake Arrowhead, California, where everyone was shocked to see Jane acting jovial and mingling with the kids, she refused all invitations. She declined offers to join the team for meals out or away trips.

  Jane also refused to let Matt be a part of the team photograph. “Again, he just wasn’t allowed,” Francine said. “She said Matthew’s father was a very important person in Hollywood with lots of money and he was trying to find Matthew. She said he was a terrible person and if he ever found Matthew, she’d never see her son again.”

  One frigid November morning, the team had an early game. Francine made up Thermoses of hot chocolate and brought a few dozen doughnuts to help take the sting out of the early morning cold. While chatting with parents as they sat on a bench along the sidelines, Francine noticed Jane standing alone.

  “That’s not right,” she told the other parents.

  “Aw, that’s just Jane being Jane,” one of them responded.

  Still, Francine decided to pour Jane a hot cup of cocoa and take it over to her. “Jane, I’ve got some doughnuts over there, too,” she said, extending the cup to Jane as she spoke. “Why don’t you come join us?”

  Jane stood stoically, refusing to respond.

  In that moment, Francine felt deeply sorry for Jane. This woman looked so alone in the world. Francine reached out and put her arm around Jane’s shoulders. “Jane, are you okay?” she asked. “Is everything all right?”

  Jane turned to look at Francine then, and gave her a look filled with such anger, Francine was startled. “The venom that spewed out of her mouth then!” Francine said. “She attacked my son’s skating and accused him of being the favorite boy. She accused me of brown-nosing. I can’t even remember all the things she said. But I was so taken aback by all the venom, I just stepped back away from her and, said, ‘Wow, okay, if that’s how you really feel.’ “

  “Yeah,” Jane spat back. “That’s how I really feel.”

  “Well, that’s it then,” Francine told her, walking away to rejoin the other parents.

  During the next practice, Jane blew up at one of the coaches for making the kids do pushups as part of a punishment for goofing around on the rink. Though everyone had to do them, Jane thought the coach was singling out her son for punishment. “How dare you make my son work that hard! How dare you single him out! And he’s got a one hundred and three-degree fever,” she screamed.

  The coach, Chris Watson, now used to Jane’s complaints, answered back, “Well, if he’s got a one hundred and three-degree fever, what’s he doing here? He has no business being on the ice with a one hundred and three-degree fever!”

  That was enough for Coach Watson. He lobbied to have Matthew removed from the team. There was plenty of support for the idea. As much as the coach and others cared about Matthew, his mother made games and practices too difficult for everyone else. Two days later, Robert Fowler had to tell Matt and Jane. He had spent almost three decades working as a deputy sheriff and was used to handling hostile situations. He was ready for Jane if she took the news badly. “I’m well trained in how to deal with mentally ill people, because I deal with so many as a cop,” he said. So the duty to break the bad news fell to him.

  At the next practice, Fowler pulled Jane aside and explained. “We’re removing Matthew from the team. This has nothing to do with your son and has everything to do with you,” he told her frankly. “You’ve become impossible to deal with. And the only reason we’ve put up with you for so long is because of Matthew. Matthew needs this. But we can’t allow you to be here any longer. You’ll have to find another club to join. No other team in this league will work with you.”

  Amazingly, Jane took the news calmly. She grabbed Matt and left the rink. But three days later, at the team’s next game, Jane showed up with Matt.

  “You don’t understand,” she told Robert. “If you’d just let me explain…”

  “I’m sorry, I can’t,” Robert told her. “You’ve had too many warnings to change anything now.”

  “I want him to play,” she said.

  “Look, Jane, you did this,” Robert said. “You did this to your son, nobody else did. This is your fault, with everything you’ve done to people, the things you’ve said, your constant arguing and yelling. We can’t have that and it has nothing to do with Matthew.”

  Matthew, standing next to his mother, began to cry. Tears poured down his face as he looked up at Robert, hoping for another chance. Robert was crushed. He knew it wasn’t fair that Matthew had to be punished for his mother’s behavior. But it was out of his hands. The league wanted her gone. Robert looked down at Matthew
and searched for something to say that would ease the blow. He put his arm around him and walked him to the side, out of Jane’s hearing.

  “Matthew, you did nothing to deserve to be removed from this team,” he said as gently as he could. Inside, Robert cringed. If he could have wrapped Matthew up and taken him home with him, he would have. “You’re a good athlete. And we loved having you as a part of this team. But it’s your mother’s behavior. And because of that, I’m very, very sorry. Understand that you are blameless.”

  “I know” was all Matthew could manage to say.

  As Jane left with Matthew, it was Francine’s turn to cry. True, she had had a falling-out with Jane just a few days before. But she could sense what a desperate woman Jane was. She turned from Matthew’s retreating figure and stared at the team’s coaches and managers. “What’s going to happen to them?” she asked. “This is all they’ve got. This team was all that little boy had.”

  Back at home, chaos erupted. Jane became overwhelmed once again with her paranoia. Why couldn’t anyone understand she was under attack? All she was trying to do was protect her small family. People were out to get her, and to get Matthew. She was even becoming suspicious of a male neighbor on the block. Now, it was clear to her, he was a child molester who would stop at nothing to have Matt.

  “Even your friends can’t be trusted, Matt,” Jane told him. “You think those people on that team are on your side? They’re all being paid to watch you!”

  Jason looked at his mom and shook his head.

  “That’s crazy,” he told her, deciding not to let her ramble on unchallenged tonight. It would have been easier to just let her go, as he had so many, many times in the past. But more often now, his patience ran thin, and he couldn’t take it. So tonight, he shouted back. It was one of the few times he ever stood up to Jane.

  “There’s no one out there after Matt or after you!” he shouted. “You’re going fucking nuts!”

  Jason was fed up. And maybe, deep down, he was hurt that all of her concern, as misplaced as it may have been, was over herself, and over Matthew. In her fantasy world where bad guys ran amok, not one of them was after Jason. Even in her madness, he was an afterthought.

  Jane wasn’t going to take that kind of backtalk from Jason. Not now, not tonight, when clearly the rest of the world was out to get her. She couldn’t have her oldest son turning on her, too.

  “Who got to you?” she countered. “They’ve paid you off, haven’t they? You’re on their side!”

  “No, nobody ‘got to me,’ ” Jason said, exasperated. “There’s nobody out there to pay me off. You’re just crazy!”

  Frantic with rage, Jane ran into the kitchen and, according to Jason, grabbed a knife. She turned toward her son and waved it at him.

  “Who is it?” she demanded. “Who got to you? Who’s paying you off?”

  A pile of hockey equipment lay spilled on the living room floor near Jason. On instinct, he reached for one of the long sticks and clutched it, jutting the front end in his mother’s direction. If she lunged at him with the knife, he would strike her down, hard. But Jane, not the least bit intimidated by her son’s determination to fight back, reached down to grab the remaining hockey stick and tossed her knife to the side. They stood there, facing each other, before Jane finally swung the stick at Jason, striking him in the head so hard, a gash split through the skin covering his skull. Blood poured from the wound and Jason threw down his weapon and reached up to touch the cut. As blood stained his fingertips, he began to cry. There was nothing else to do.

  That night, Jason ended up in Menifee Valley Medical Center’s urgent care unit, where a doctor stapled up the gash. Jane warned the boy before he stepped foot inside the emergency room to keep quiet about their scuffle.

  “You’ll be really sorry if you start any trouble in there,” she told him.

  The doctor had little reason to be alarmed by the cut. Just another teenage boy who thought he was invincible. Boys playing too hard and ending up with a gash or a broken bone were normal fare in his business. But to make conversation, the doctor asked, “So, what happened to you tonight?”

  It would have been an easy moment for Jason to tell someone, maybe triggering at long last an investigation by social workers into his deeply unhappy, deeply troubled home life. But he said nothing. Instead, he told exactly the kind of story the doctor expected to hear—Jason had been goofing around with his little brother, playing sword games with their hockey sticks, and he accidentally got whacked.

  It took seven staples to close the gash, and the blow left a permanent three-inch scar. But it didn’t matter. Jason silently took the pummeling, then lied to his doctor, successfully protecting his mentally ill mother from exposure.

  11

  Since the time she’d bolted from her mother’s home in Winthrop Harbor, Jane had tried to distance herself from her parents. She still hated them. But she exchanged letters regularly with her grandmother and sent her grandparents gifts during birthdays and Christmas, even talked on the phone with her mother and father from time to time. In 1997, she went home for a summer weekend visit. Despite the minimal contact, her family still saw the change in Jane. Clearly, she was paranoid about something, but, for the most part, she seemed rational. So her family just ignored her oddities. Jane had always been a quirky and temperamental woman in need of constant attention. Her flair for drama had obviously become more pronounced now that she was older.

  But two years later, Jane’s condition was considerably worse. She agreed, for her grandparents’ sake, to see them for Christmas. She and the boys stayed at her grandparents’ house the first few days of the visit.

  Her parents came next door to visit with their estranged daughter and grandsons, hoping to repair the broken relationship. But, as expected, Jane immediately clashed with her mom and dad. She told them that she was being stalked by powerful people—who wanted to do her harm. Her babbling made little sense. And Nellie knew her daughter was, at this point in life, deeply disturbed.

  They tried to tell Jane she wasn’t thinking straight, an accusation that sent her into a rage. By day four of the family reunion, Jane made a tearful call to an old family friend, Cathy Atchinson, asking to stay at her place for the rest of the visit. Her mother was coming over too much and she couldn’t take it anymore, she told Cathy. She needed out. And she needed a ride. Her grandfather, Ben Funderburk, was desperate to keep her at home, she said. So desperate, he’d snuck out one evening and let all the air out of the tires on her rental car.

  It’s not clear why Jane’s family didn’t try to get her psychiatric help then. There was no longer any doubt—Jane was mentally ill and her family knew it.

  After her daughter’s murder, Nellie would testify in court about Jane’s mental stability. Asked if she knew in 1999 that her daughter’s condition had worsened, Nellie answered, “Truthfully, yes,” and broke into tears.

  Yet during that visit, when Jane’s disturbed mind was veering out of control, instead of getting her help, instead of trying to get her committed, or at least evaluated by a doctor, they told her she wasn’t making sense, then watched her walk out the door.

  It’s a particularly sad footnote in the life story of Jane Bautista when you take into consideration that her family was well off financially and could have easily afforded the best of medical care for her. Instead, they chose to offer her support in the form of monthly certified checks. When asked if she’d thought about the welfare of her grandsons, Nellie testified, “They were worries, yes.” Still, the family did nothing.

  Cathy was unaware of how troubling Jane’s inner demons had become. She visited Jane at her San Marcos home in 1991, during a vacation in California, and they talked periodically by phone. Cathy hadn’t been close to Jane in years. Still, she considered her a friend. So when she called begging for help, Cathy gladly picked up her old pal and took her to her mother’s house in Salem, where Cathy was spending the holidays. Cathy’s mother, Bonnie Salyards, had k
nown the Osbornes since 1966, when she and her husband moved to Zion for a few years and lived next door to them. Jane was just 4 years old. Bonnie remembered a bright, outgoing, fun-loving little girl who frequently asked to play with little Cathy. Now, looking at 38-year-old Jane Bautista, Bonnie was shocked. Jane had let her appearance go, and her ramblings started almost immediately.

  “My house,” she began shortly after putting down her bags. “It’s bugged. You wouldn’t believe it. But it’s true. And it’s someone very rich and famous who’s doing it all. I can’t tell you who it is, but If I told you his name, you’d recognize it.”

  She went on for a very long time with her tales, Bonnie remembered. She told Bonnie, “I can’t even leave my house anymore except at night. It makes it harder for them to see me if I leave at night.”

  It wasn’t the first time Bonnie and her daughter had heard wild tales from Jane. During Jane’s 1997 visit, Cathy’s family had spent the day with Jane and her boys. Jane was in good spirits and the two women talked eagerly as they caught up on each other’s lives. But abruptly, Jane changed. Cathy tried to tell Jane about her sister’s new boyfriend, a roadie for the band Rage Against the Machine. Jane’s mood blackened. “Oh no, they’re no good!” Jane said. “They can’t be trusted, you have to tell her that! No one from the music industry can be trusted!”

  Cathy thought the comments were strange, but didn’t think it meant her friend had gone crazy. It wasn’t until her visit during Christmas of 1999 that it became clear—Jane Bautista was mentally ill.

  Jane stayed one night. The next morning, she rented a car, packed up her sons, and drove away for good. She talked about going to Michigan for a while, though as far as anyone can tell, she simply went back to California. That 1999 trip was the last time Jane would ever visit home again. And it was the last time her family or childhood friends would see her alive.

  Back at home, Jason was settling into college life very well at California State University-San Bernardino. He wasn’t sure yet what he wanted to do with his life, but he was leaning toward something in the sciences.