“It always amazes me how I can kill a man and it doesn’t faze me,” Jason sang repeatedly. As he pored over books and tinkered with lab assignments, the tune burst from Jason’s lips: “It always amazes me how I can kill a man and it doesn’t faze me.”
Stephen didn’t give the lyric too much thought. It was only later, in retrospect, that the song’s eerie message made sense.
On the morning of January 14, 2003, Jason showed up early to the Cal State-San Bernardino campus for a study group. He had a biology test later that day and needed to be prepared. Later, he moved on to the computer lab to help some younger students with equations. After a long day of studying and working at the lab, Jason grabbed some dinner out of a nearby vending machine and then drove home. He made it to the Riverside apartment just before 7 p.m.
Jason dropped his book bag to the floor and sat in front of the TV, intent on zoning out for a little while. Matt was there, fooling around with a game on the computer. Jane cooked some pasta in the kitchen. For nearly ten minutes, all was quiet.
Then Jane started. It was the man upstairs, again.
“He’s a pedophile, Jason,” she said. “His picture is even in the paper. I’ll prove it! I’ll get it for you and show you!”
“Yeah, right,” Jason said. “Just leave me alone. I really don’t want to hear it tonight.”
“I’ll prove it to you! I can prove it! I’ve seen him in the paper!” she screamed.
“It doesn’t matter what you do,” Jason told her. “I don’t believe you. You don’t know anything, so stop. The man’s not a pedophile, he’s just a man. Do you understand me? I don’t believe you!”
Jason knew he shouldn’t have said that unless he was ready for a fight. It was the thing that set Jane off the most—to be told she wasn’t believed. It was openly expressed disbelief that had caused Jason to end up with a hockey stick upside the head a few years ago. Jane’s rage grew, prompting her to scream even louder.
“How do you think this man makes money, huh?” she asked. “They pay him! I’ve seen him digging through the trash all the time.”
“Just leave the man alone! He didn’t do anything!”
“Oh, I see,” Jane said. “It’s you. You’re the one being paid. You’re against me, huh? You’re watching us. The whole conspiracy has you now, doesn’t it? Well, I’m not going to stand for this. You’re out of here!”
She stormed into Jason’s room, grabbed a large blue suitcase, and furiously tossed his clothes into it.
“You can’t throw me out,” he yelled back. “I’m on the lease!”
“Oh yes I can! Just watch me,” she said, continuing to pack. “I can do whatever I want!”
“Fine, you want me out, that’s fine,” Jason yelled. He helped fill the suitcase, throwing in his boxer shorts and socks.
As the fight grew louder, more intense, Matt put down his video game and went into his mother’s room and closed the door. Her dog was there, kept in her bathroom. Matt sat with it for a good ten minutes, stroking its ears and trying to take his mind off the chaos erupting in the next room. But it was a tiny apartment. There was no escaping their angry words. With the fight clearly audible, Matt moved the dog into the bedroom, flipped on the television, and turned up the volume. He focused on the small screen, concentrating hard enough to block out the heated voices just beyond the bedroom door. Another fifteen rage-filled minutes clicked by. Jane told Jason his grades weren’t good enough, that he needed to be home more, that he needed to work more…Jason screamed back, mostly calling her crazy.
Then Matt heard it. A very loud thump, like someone had just hit the ground.
Still, Matt stayed put. Whatever was going on out there, he didn’t want to know. He looked at the door leading to the living room, but didn’t go near it. He’d seen them fight so many times, he didn’t want to watch it now. He was sick of it. But it was more than that. He knew very well that tonight, right now, in fact, Jason just might be acting on his plan. If so, he didn’t want to watch that, either. That was Jason’s business. Instead, he remained frozen in front of his mom’s old 13-inch television, gripping the dog tightly.
Jason stood in the middle of his tiny living room looking down at the lifeless body of his mother.
The last few minutes were a blur, but he knew what he had just done. He’d killed her. As she’d lashed out at him, her face red with rage, he’d finally knocked her to the floor, then grabbed her, hard, around the throat and choked the life out of her.
He stood still for a minute, maybe two, before turning to get Matt. He clicked the knob leading into Jane’s bedroom and poked his head inside the doorway. Matt was there, on the floor, dog nearby. Though the TV was on, Matt was staring in his brother’s direction.
“What happened?” Matt asked.
Jason just looked at his little brother. He wasn’t ready to say it yet, but he didn’t have to. Matt understood. Jason had finally killed their mother. It was hard to believe, but he knew it was true. Mom was dead and his brother was her murderer. He should have cried or felt some sadness at the news, but he didn’t. If he felt any emotion at all, he showed no sign of it. Maybe after years of enduring the insane life his mother’s madness had induced, he’d become too accustomed to dealing with pain. By now, he’d grown cold to it.
“Come out here and check her,” Jason said. His hair was disheveled, his voice flat, monotone. He appeared calm.
Matt stepped into the living room and saw his mom lying very still, facedown on the floor. There were no tears or hysterics. This was his mother, and he’d grown to love her. But she was a brutal woman and the simple truth was that life would be mercifully quieter without her.
“Check her pulse,” Jason ordered. “See if she’s breathing.”
Matt rolled her over. He picked up her arm, but he knew already. “Dude, she’s dead.”
“I know,” Jason said. “I guess I already knew that.”
“Well, now what?” Matt asked. “Now what happens?”
Jason took a deep breath, then answered, “We’re going to have to take care of it, just like the Sopranos,” he said.
Matt knew exactly what Jason meant. The gruesome episode flashed through his mind, the scene of Tony Soprano and his nephew slicing off victim Ralphie’s head and hands. He shuddered.
“That’s horrible,” he said. “I can’t do that.”
“I know it’s horrible, but what else are we going to do? We have to get rid of the body,” said Jason. He didn’t even know what he was going to do with the head and hands after he severed them. But he’d think about that later. Right now he just wanted to dump the body, and without a head or fingerprints, he knew the remains would be almost impossible to identify. Still, the task at hand was a gruesome one. Jason began to cry. “Dude, I just want to kill myself.”
“Don’t,” Matt answered. “Please don’t. I need you.”
Jason took a few minutes to pull himself together, then he ordered Matt back to Jane’s room. He fell into big brother/quasi-father mode and decided to shelter Matt from the worst of it. “Just stay there until I come and get you.”
“I need to get out of here,” Matt answered. “I’m going to go outside and grab a smoke.”
Jason knew his brother didn’t mean a cigarette. Getting high had become Matt’s favorite coping mechanism of late.
“Okay, but don’t be gone too long,” Jason said.
Matt couldn’t wait to be in the cool night air. He tried to visit his neighbor and classmate who lived in the complex and often had a joint to share. But he wasn’t home, so Matt walked the complex alone and settled for puffing on a cigarette. Lots of thoughts crossed his mind as he tried to absorb the reality of the situation—Jason had finally killed Mom.
As he mulled it all over, he never thought of calling the police. Jason was all he had now. If he went to prison, Matt would be alone. As he walked, Matt knew he would protect Jason as much as he could. He needed his big brother, now more than ever.
; Resolute in what he was about to do, Jason drove to the grocery store for supplies: rubber gloves, trash bags, a gallon of bleach, some Mountain Dew, and a pack of gum. When he returned, Jason took everything to the bathroom he shared with Matt and carefully laid his purchases out on the counter. He then searched the house for the family’s boxed kitchen knife set. It was brand-new, with most of the knives still wrapped in plastic and a $19.99 sale price sticker still on the box. Jason withdrew the large butcher knife and a pair of shearing scissors, placing them on the bathroom counter with the rest of his supplies.
Back in the living room, Jason bent to scoop up his mother’s corpse. She was a heavy woman now, having lost all interest in her appearance and figure years ago, so he struggled to drag her 170-pound frame toward the bathroom. Once there, he took a few minutes to disrobe her, down to her panties.
He could hear Matt returning home and stepped out to greet him. Matt was startled to see his brother clad only in boxer shorts and a tank top.
“Stay out of our bathroom,” Jason told him.
“Okay,” Matt answered, not pushing for any more information. Instead, he headed back to Jane’s room, stepping over the small blood spatters staining the beige living room carpet. He flipped on the television and waited.
Jason returned to the bathroom, eager to get his gruesome task over with. He grabbed Jane’s body, throwing her waist over the bathtub’s edge, so her legs dangled out and her face touched the tub’s inner wall. She hung there while Jason picked up a handful of that fiery red hair and chopped off a large chunk with the shearing scissors, leaving the neck clearly exposed. Tossing the strands to the floor, Jason reached for the butcher knife. He began to saw. As the blood spilled from her neck, Jason scurried to the toilet and threw up. He retched until his stomach was empty, then returned to his work and continued to cut.
Hours passed before Jason went to his little brother again. Matt was startled to see Jason’s appearance. He looked like he’d been up for days. His hair was wild, his eyes bloodshot, and he was wearing a pair of gray slacks and dress shoes. Matt didn’t know what to say to Jason. He wasn’t eager to know the details of their mother’s death and disposal.
“Come on, we’ve got to go,” he said. “I need you to help me.”
Matt stood to leave when Jason turned to him again and pointed to the dog Jane loved so much. “And bring him,” he said.
Jason drove aimlessly for a while. The winter night sky was blissfully dark as the car hummed along. Neither brother spoke as they sat in that car, its trunk heavy with the weight of their mother’s mutilated remains. Jason had used his sleeping bag to cover her body, rolling her in tightly before depositing her into the Oldsmobile.
As they drove, one of the boys flipped on the radio, aching to fill the heavy silence.
Jason’s mind whirled, desperate to come up with a plan. He should probably dig a hole in some remote corner of the county. But he didn’t have a shovel. He’d have to dump her somewhere. But where?
Well, at least he knew what to do with that damn dog. So he’d take care of that first. He drove to a kennel in nearby San Ysidro, one the family used now and then to board the dog. It was after midnight, so no one was there to take it. But Jason didn’t care about that.
“What are we doing?” Matt finally asked.
“We’ve got to get rid of him, Matt,” Jason said. “He’s causing too many problems.”
He gladly pulled the canine from the car and quickly drove away. He knew and loved the dog, too, but to Jason, it was just another reminder of the mother he was extinguishing from his life. Anyway, they could be evicted if anyone discovered the dog. And nothing would ever again put his stability in jeopardy.
Jason got back on the freeway and headed south, toward San Diego County. Nearly an hour passed before he pulled off the freeway and into the city of Oceanside, where the family had lived with Matt’s dad so many years ago. They drove toward a housing tract, slowly passing the well-kept homes aligning upscale Saint Malo Beach’s sandy shoreline. Abruptly, he stopped the car in front of a two-story home on South Pacific Street. The Oldsmobile’s headlights illuminated a huge Dumpster that sat in front of a home clearly undergoing some renovations.
“That’s it,” Jason said. “Let’s do it here.”
Though Matt never asked Jason what they were doing, he knew. They got out, silently, and pulled at the edges of Jason’s dark brown sleeping bag. But as they walked toward the Dumpster, a voice cut the night’s silence. They froze and looked up at the advancing frame of security guard Pete Martinez.
Trying to stay as calm as possible, despite a wildly beating heart, Jason took a hard look at Pete. He was in uniform, but Jason doubted this old man was a cop. He was just a security guard. He couldn’t arrest them. He couldn’t do anything. The boys yanked on the bag again, intent on returning it to the trunk. But suddenly, the old man began barking orders.
“Hey! Stop! Put the bag down!” he shouted, reaching for a pistol at his side.
Instantly, Jason turned from frightened to pissed-off. “Fuck you! You’re just a security guard! You can’t do anything,” he said. They tossed Jane into the trunk and sped off, never realizing Pete knew they were hauling more than a load of leaves and branches. He knew because he had seen the foot.
Jason trembled behind the wheel as he drove away. The night had left him totally drained, emotionally and physically. He headed back onto the 5 Freeway, intent on heading home and leaving the body in the trunk of the car until morning. He turned off onto the 74 Freeway, also known as the Ortega Highway. He knew that road would eventually take him to Highway 215, through his old stomping grounds in Menifee and on to Riverside. As he drove the Ortega, he realized that he was alongside a steep cliff. It was about 2 a.m., and the road was nearly deserted. Maybe this was the place to do it. He pulled over to a rest stop and got out.
“Just stay here, Matt,” Jason said. Matt nodded before reclining his seat all the way back and closing his eyes. He was exhausted, too.
Jason scooped up the bag from the trunk. As he stood on the cliff’s edge, he lifted Jane out of the bag, deciding even that might be too much evidence to leave behind. He pushed her nearly naked remains as hard as he could off the edge. Even drained of blood, missing head and hands, she was so heavy that the shove unbalanced him. He slipped and, for a moment, thought he’d follow her down that hill. But he didn’t. He regained his balance and watched the body roll until it disappeared down the dark hillside. He looked at his gray dress pants and saw they were now ruined, smeared with Jane’s blood. He’d thought for sure most of her blood had already flowed down the bathtub drain. Part of him felt sick inside. But he tried not to focus on that. Because this was his moment. Finally, he was free. And nobody could take that from him now.
Once home, the boys went to Jane’s room and slept. Despite his exhaustion, it was a fitful night for Jason. He finally gave up around 5 a.m. and decided to take care of some details. He grabbed a bunch of trash bags and gathered up the clothes his mom had worn, his dress shoes and pants, the sleeping bag, the strands of hair he’d cut from Jane, and his rubber gloves. It was still dark out when he drove to Hemet, a few cities over, and tossed them into a Dumpster behind a mini-mart. When he returned home, Matt was awake.
“You should go to school today,” Jason told him. “Just because she’s not here doesn’t mean you don’t have to go to school.”
While Matt was at school, Jason set about cleaning up the apartment. He scrubbed at the bloodstains on the carpet, but they wouldn’t come out. He’d buy a large throw rug later and cover them up, he decided. He drenched the bathroom with bleach and cleaned until every spot of blood disappeared. Satisfied, he reached for his backpack and left for afternoon classes.
17
Orange County Sheriff’s Investigator Andre Spencer had been with the homicide unit for nearly three years. And he loved it.
“The best thing I get to do is put a murderer in jail,” Spencer liked to say. �
��There’s nothing better.”
It brought him closer than most people ever wanted to get to tragedy. But the 36-year-old detective didn’t find that depressing. Because he didn’t focus on the tragedy. His job was to find the justice. It was the only way to look at his role in law enforcement and not get jaded. After participating in roughly thirty murder investigations, the married father of three didn’t want to remember all those wasted lives when he was home coaching his kids’ soccer teams. It was easier to think about the small comfort the victims’ families got when the bad guy, his bad guy, went to prison forever.
It was about 8:30 a.m. when Orange County Sheriff’s Homicide Sergeant Bill Vining approached Andre’s desk. Apparently, a citizen heading west on the Ortega Highway thought they’d seen a body.
“Hey,” he announced to the half-dozen or so homicide detectives working away at their desks. “Looks like we have a body dump.”
Everyone moved to put on their jackets and head for the scene. When a murder breaks, it’s “all hands on deck.” But the job of lead detective rotates. Andre knew what was coming. He was next on the list.
“Andre,” Vining said, “this one’s going to be yours. Should be interesting. It’s a woman. She has no hands, no head.”
He grimaced. Not only because of the gruesomeness of the crime. He was used to gruesome in this business. But it was going to be hard as hell to get an ID on this woman, who had no head for dental records, no hands to run fingerprints. Well, he’d get a set of criminalists out there ASAP to do whatever they could. They could still swab the corpse to get a DNA sample. And if she had been sexually assaulted, there might be semen.
Andre was a tall, muscular guy. He liked to spend several hours a week at the gym, sweating out the stresses of homicide work. He was a black man with light coffee-colored skin, and kept his head shaved clean. When he wanted to, he could cut quite an intimidating picture to an interview subject. But in truth, Andre Spencer was a gentle man, genuinely respected by others in his department.
Such Good Boys: The True Story of a Mother, Two Sons and a Horrifying Murder Page 12