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

by Dirmann, Tina

  As he drove to the scene, Andre’s cell phone chirped. “Spencer here,” he said.

  It was Sergeant Vining. Apparently, a homeless guy had been detained for breaking into a ranger station just up the road from the corpse.

  Andre was thinking of the Stephanie Crowe case from the 1990s. A 12-year-old girl had been brutally stabbed to death in her San Diego home. Her mom and dad were there at the time, asleep, as were her grandmother and 14-year-old brother. All of them were questioned. But as it turned out, a transient traveling through the area had killed her.

  “Shit, this could be our guy, you know,” Andre said. “Anyway, it sounds promising. I’m on my way.”

  But once there, Spencer changed his mind. Investigators said the transient was cold, hungry, and wanted somewhere to sleep. But he swore he’d had nothing to do with the body up the road. Andre didn’t believe this was the guy. Just a gut feeling.

  To be on the safe side, Investigators Gary Jones and Toni Bland picked up the transient and took him to the jail, where they got hair samples, took his picture, and booked him on the burglary charge. Meanwhile, Spencer quickly moved on to the crime scene in search of answers.

  “Jesus, this is awful,” said Investigator Craig Johnson, Andre’s partner and, therefore, second in command of the investigation. Craig was standing at the bottom of the ravine, wearing a pair of rubber gloves. Craig’s 6‘4” frame loomed over the nearly naked corpse. She had on a bloody pair of panties, nothing else. Clearly, someone had tossed her from the roadway’s railing, now smeared with blood streaks. She’d tumbled ninety feet before coming to rest at the bottom of the hillside. Her body was so pale, the skin took on a ghostly white appearance.

  “There’s no blood in her,” Craig said. “She wasn’t just decapitated. For the body to be this dry, someone drained all the blood from her. That’s pretty evident.”

  They surmised from her torso that the woman was about 5‘7” tall, on the heavy side, probably around 160 pounds. Her skin was fair, so no doubt she was Caucasian. She was covered in a fine sheath of red body hair. A redhead. There was no animal activity, so she was otherwise intact. But that was it. After twelve hours of collecting the scarce evidence found at the scene—no weapons, no fibers—Craig helped the coroner’s investigator lift the torso into a black body bag. Perched on the hill’s bottom slope, Craig grabbed at her wrist and tugged. With no hand to stop his pull, his hand slid off. He looked at the blood smears he’d caught from brushing against her severed wrist.

  “This is gross,” he grumbled, then reached for the wrist again. Success.

  The torso was tucked into a black body bag and sent off to the coroner’s office for an autopsy. Now, Andre and Craig thought, on to finding the sick bastards who’d mutilated this woman. They’d have to search through missing persons reports. They’d have to blanket the media, doling out every detail they had on her appearance in hopes that something would ring a bell with someone.

  “Anyone’s mom, sister, best friend who hasn’t been seen in a while but not reported missing yet,” Spencer said. “That’s what we’re looking for.”

  Mostly, they prayed for a really good tip.

  18

  It was late afternoon, January 14, 2003, when Matt returned home from school. He grabbed a snack before flipping on the afternoon news. That’s when he first heard about the discovery of Jane’s body. According to the report, a motorist had spotted it as it lay at the bottom of that steep ravine along the Ortega Highway. The reporter noted that police were shocked at the brutality of the murder—the unidentified corpse had been beheaded and left without hands. Matt felt a kick in his gut. He’d asked so few questions the night before, he hadn’t realized that Jason had actually gone through with cutting off their mom’s head. For some reason, only now did he feel angry. He had to know what had happened. When Jason came home, he finally asked.

  “Tell me what happened last night,” Matt said.

  “You don’t need to know all of it,” Jason told him.

  “I want to know,” Matt persisted.

  “I did what I told you I was going to do,” Jason replied.

  “You killed her,” Matt said.

  “Yes, I killed her.”

  “Well, the police found her,” Matt answered. “I saw a news report on TV about it. Dude, they said she didn’t have a head. What the hell? How could you do it?”

  “I did it so they couldn’t identify her,” Jason said. “So it’ll be clean.”

  “Did you dump that stuff last night, too?”

  “No,” Jason said, “I didn’t.”

  “Where are they?”

  “In a duffel bag in the hall closet,” Jason said. “So don’t go in there. Don’t touch it. I’m trying to figure out what to do with them.”

  Matt agreed. He didn’t want to see that stuff anyway. It should have freaked him out to know they were standing just a few inches away from his mother’s remains, but once again, he pushed the thought out of his mind.

  “Listen, we need to know what to say if anyone asks about her,” Jason said. “Hopefully no one will, since she didn’t talk to anybody. But if anyone asks about your mom, you tell them she went out of town indefinitely. Tell them she went to Chicago or she ran off to Belize to be with some guy she met on the Internet or something like that.”

  “Okay,” said Matt. He didn’t know how to feel about everything. He’d never been treated as badly as Jason had. He’d grown to love his mother, even though he’d hated her sickness. He was only 15, not ready to lose the only mom he’d ever known. He wasn’t mad at Jason, really. Mostly, he felt scared. “Jason, are we going to be okay?”

  “Yes, it’s going to be okay,” Jason said. “But you have to help around here more, maybe. She’s not here to cook or clean anymore. We have to do that. And you have to stay in school. You have to be successful one day, Matt. That means you have to study and stop screwing around. This is our chance to have a normal life. I did this for both of us. So don’t mess it up.”

  The next week was blissfully quiet for the boys. And yes, happy. Jason drove to the storage units, where he unrolled a wad of cash to get the neglected account up to date, then brought home some furniture. He filled the empty apartment with beds, a couch, and a chair. He bought a large white rug and tossed it over the bloodstains. He bought cell phones, long forbidden by Jane, for himself and Matthew. He allowed Jason’s friends over, where they played video games and just generally hung out.

  But at least one person had questions regarding Jason’s whereabouts. At the computer lab, Jason was scheduled for a 6 p.m. shift on January 14. The lab was closed to students that night so employees could do some upgrade work on the computers. A reminder for staffers was posted in large block letters on the blackboard. But Jason skipped it, too exhausted after the previous night’s activities, and too caught up in details like bathroom cleanup and disposal of his mother’s belongings. He didn’t even call in to offer an excuse. So, when Jason strolled in two nights later, Supervisor Kenneth Poarch was clearly irritated.

  “What happened to you?” Poarch said. “You know we were counting on you.”

  “Yes, I know,” Jason said, putting on his best aw-shucks act. “It’s just, oh man, well, my girlfriend,” he stammered. “She called and said we had to have dinner with her parents. It was a real spur-of-the-moment, last-minute thing. And I’ve never met her parents before, so I kind of had to go. But I’m so sorry.”

  “Fine, don’t let it happen again,” Poarch said, clearly not happy with Jason’s irresponsibility. Still, he was generally a good kid and a reliable employee. Since it had never happened before, Poarch let the incident slide.

  Christian Revecho could be gone for really long stretches, thanks to his job as a truck driver. But on January 20, 2003, he was home, staring out his living room window. He watched as his young neighbors, Matt and Jason, took several trips between their apartment and the Dumpster, carrying huge bulging trash bags.

  From inside the
apartment, Jason organized the systematic removal of all things related to Jane Bautista. Mostly, he wanted her clothes out of his closet. Now that she was gone, Jason decided to move into the apartment’s master bedroom for good. He hung a few movie posters. And in his final act of rebellion, he bought a bumper sticker bearing the phrase “BADA BING!,” the name of the strip club owned by Tony Soprano. He peeled off the sticker’s backing and firmly attached it to the rear of his new car, the Oldsmobile.

  Friends noticed more profound changes with the two boys. Mainly, both now freely invited people over.

  Friend Stephen Kavousy said it was a couple of weeks before Super Bowl Sunday when he chatted with Jason in biology lab. “Hey, I’m going to have some people over to watch the game. Why don’t you come?”

  Steven was shocked by the invitation.

  “Well, my mom finally left town,” Jason said excitedly. “And she left me the new car!”

  Matt had friends in and out of the apartment all the time, too—especially a young girl he had a huge crush on. One afternoon, as Matt and the girl hung out at the apartment after school, she gave him a brown teddy bear. He propped the little toy up on his bed, where he would keep it each day.

  It could be said that Matt was just a typical adolescent boy, lost in a teenage infatuation. It could, except that just a few feet away from that bear, in the hall closet, lay a horrific reminder of just how abnormal life had become.

  19

  Andre Spencer pored over his latest clue sheet—the log that dispatchers used to record tips as they came in from the public. The media had done a great job of picking up the story. A headless, handless female torso found thrown from the side of a busy freeway? That’s a story so grisly, it’s tailor-made for nightly news headlines. Andre waded through the more than 100 tips that had come in. Most were useless—friends looking for a lost woman with a tattoo or dark hair. Someone even called in wondering if it could be a lost African American friend. Andre steadily crossed off anything that looked worthless.

  It was the morning of January 21, a Tuesday, and Andre was antsy to catch a break in the case. Six days since the body had been discovered. In the world of homicide investigation, when every moment counts, six days was practically an eternity. But with little to go on, there was little to do. Andre took off Sunday and Monday to recharge his batteries by coaching his kids’ soccer team. It was the heart of soccer season and he didn’t want to miss out. He took the time to listen to his wife’s latest adventures at work, too. She was an elementary school teacher. But Andre never mentioned his nameless homicide victim.

  Long ago, Andre had made a promise to himself. “I don’t bring it home,” he says. “We’re too busy with our kids and our lives to bring stuff like that home.”

  The time off was a much-needed break after long discussions with Los Angeles County criminalist Steve Dow, a specialist in dismemberment cases. Dow can look at a cut and get a pretty good idea what kind of blade was used to do the deed. This job wasn’t too hard: it was a clean cut, so it was likely just a large knife with a smooth blade, he concluded. Good to know, but for now, it didn’t identify the victim, or bring Andre any closer to his killer.

  Andre continued reading down the tip list. His eyes lingered on the name Pete Martinez. The man, a security guard in San Diego County, had apparently called the tip in last week. It had taken a few days for his story to cross county jurisdictions and land in front of Andre. According to the log, Mr. Martinez had caught a couple of guys trying to dump something, and in the process, thought he’d seen a foot slip out of their bundle. Then Andre saw the license plate number. What the hell, he thought. There’s nothing else to go on. Let’s run it through the Department of Motor Vehicles.

  It didn’t take long to find the name the license plate number was registered to. Actually two names. Jason Bautista, an innocent-looking kid with glasses and brown, spiky hair streaked with blond highlights. According to his license, Jason was a big guy, standing 6‘2” tall and weighing 210 pounds. With that kind of size, he was certainly physically capable of manhandling a woman.

  Then the next picture came up. A woman, Jane Bautista. And she had red hair. Andre felt his stomach leap. This was the victim, he just knew it. Other information fit, too—she was 5‘7” tall, 145 pounds.

  He needed to find Jason Bautista, fast. But he hit another stumbling block. The address on both licenses was a post office box in San Marcos. Craig thought about what to do next. Investigators would have to go to San Marcos and blanket the area with pictures of Jason, hoping someone would recognize him. In the meantime, Andre wanted to talk to Pete.

  “This looks good,” Andre confided in his partner, Craig Johnson. “Let’s get out to him and see if he recognizes the license photo of Jason.”

  The detectives met Pete at his Oceanside home on January 23. They were impressed with Martinez. He was no crackpot. This was an honest guy, a Vietnam veteran.

  “So, I’ve seen stuff like this before,” he said. “Not in a long time, but you don’t forget what that looks like. I’ve seen a lot of body bags in my time. That’s what it looked like to me. Then the foot came out.”

  Andre nodded, then reached for Jason’s license photo.

  “Do you recognize this person?” he asked Pete.

  “Yes,” Pete said, without hesitation. “That’s him! That’s one of the guys, the big one, the one that did all the talking. The other one, the little sidekick, he never said a word.”

  “Okay,” Andre said, suddenly wanting to get out of there and start tracking down an address for Jason Bautista. “You’ve been a big help. We’ll be in touch.”

  Back at the office, Andre and Craig plugged Jason’s name into multiple computer search engines, hoping to find some public record or criminal history for him, something that had a home address, family information, anything to go on. But Jason had no criminal record. Not even a traffic ticket. Investigators in San Marcos had also turned up empty. While they found neighbors who remembered the Bautistas, it turned out Jane and Jason hadn’t lived in that area for over six years.

  It would be another two days before Andre got the break he’d been looking for. He ran Jason’s name through the Employment Development Department, the state agency that issues unemployment checks. But the department also keeps track of who is working where to ensure that employees are paying into the system. Every working person must pay a tax to fund the unemployment program. According to their records, Jason was working for the InterContinental Hotels Group, which owns the Holiday Inn chain. Andre made a quick call to their headquarters and discovered that Jason was a desk clerk at the Holiday Inn in Ontario, California. Andre and Craig made the drive immediately.

  As it turned out, it was Jason’s day off. But Crystal Cantu told investigators they could find him at school. She even knew his schedule—physical chemistry, 1 p.m. No one at the hotel thought Jason was in any trouble. Clearly, something bad had happened. Spencer and Johnson had identified themselves as investigators in a missing persons case. Mostly, hotel staffers hoped Jason would survive whatever bad news he was about to get.

  It was late morning, so Craig and Andre took an early lunch to kill time. Over lunch, Andre told Craig he didn’t want to tell Jason about the body right up front.

  “Let’s just keep playing this up like we’re working a missing persons case and see what he has to tell us,” Andre said. “We’ll just say somebody reported her missing. I have a hunch this kid could be a suspect, so I want to give him enough rope and see where he goes with it.”

  Craig nodded in agreement and the plan was set.

  California State University was about a thirty-minute drive from Ontario. The campus had its own police department, so the detectives decided to contact them first before finding Jason. An officer escorted them to Jason’s classroom. Andre peeked inside and spotted Jason almost immediately.

  “Hey, Jason,” Andre whispered, causing him to snap his head toward the investigator’s frame just inside the doo
rway. “Come out here, man. I need to talk to you for a second.”

  Jason scooped up his backpack and walked outside. Andre and Craig flashed their badges. Although they were in suits, they stood next to a uniformed campus officer. There’s no telling what went through Jason’s mind at that moment. Ice-cold fear must have flooded his stomach. He looked like such a kid, with his round, unlined face, dressed in a red-and-black plaid button-down shirt and baggy khaki pants, and clutching the strap of his backpack.

  “Jason,” Andre said, “can you come back to the campus police office so we can talk?”

  “Yeah, sure. What about?” Jason said, trying to sound as casual as possible.

  “I’ll tell you more once we get to the office,” Andre said.

  Jason said nothing else. But the detectives could already see it—he was nervous. His face flushed red. And his eyes… “The eyes told me everything,” Andre recalled. “He was scared.”

  At the police office, the men moved into a private conference room.

  “Jason, we’re investigating a missing persons case and we think maybe you can help us,” Andre said. “So, we’re going to ask you a few questions, okay?”

  “Okay,” Jason said warily.

  The detectives secretly clicked on a recorder and turned their attention to Jason. They started slowly, asking him for his identification and a home address.

  “You live there with who?” Spencer asked.

  “My little brother and my mom, when she’s there,” Jason said.

  “Well, like I said,” Spencer told Jason, “we work in investigations. And there are some safety concerns for your mom.”