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

by Dirmann, Tina

  “Yes,” Jason said, but nothing more.

  “Well, a friend of hers called and said she hasn’t talked to her for a while. And they want us to try to locate her. So, basically, I need to know when you last saw her.”

  “She called me on Monday,” said Jason, telling them that Jane had come home to let Jason have the Intrigue. “We switch cars occasionally. We also have a ‘ninety-two Honda Accord Wagon.”

  “She has that one right now?”

  “Yes, my mom should be in the Honda right now,” Jason said. Matt, his little brother, wasn’t with her, he added. Even though it was a school day, he had permission to go to Disneyland with friends.

  “Okay, well, like we said, we’re concerned for your mom’s safety.”

  Jason was prepared for friends or co-workers asking about his mom. It was easy to tell them she was in Chicago. They wouldn’t call family out there to verify the story. But cops would. Jason had to think fast, come up with another story.

  “Well, she’s in Corona with a boyfriend. She has a different boyfriend every freaking week,” he said.

  “What’s his name?” Andre asked.

  “I don’t even know,” Jason said. “She just tells us she’s going to be gone for a while and then she calls, she checks in. I usually make sure all the bills are paid. And that’s it… She meets all kinds of guys off the Internet.”

  “Where’s her computer?” asked Andre, knowing they could search it and trace who she’d communicated with.

  “I think she goes to Internet Cafe, because I don’t want that going on at my house,” Jason said. “I don’t have Internet at my house because I took the modem out of our machine. She was on the Internet way too much.”

  He told detectives that Jane didn’t work, she never had. Instead, she got money, up to $1,500, from her grandmother every month.

  “Wow, that’s pretty nice,” Andre said. “You guys got it made, man!”

  “She knows it’s for me to get through college and Matt to get through high school,” Jason said. “She loves us a lot.”

  “Okay, well, we’re trying to find your mom, like I said. Could you describe her a little bit for me?”

  “Oh, she’s maybe five feet four inches tall,” Jason lied. “Maybe one hundred and twenty pounds soaking wet.”

  The description was so different from the body discovered off the highway that Craig and Andre doubted themselves for a moment. Maybe they did have the wrong guy—though something deep down told them no, Jason was their man, and Jane was his victim. “Any scars or tattoos?”

  “I know she has tattoos, I’ve seen them before,” he lied again. “She has a sun on her back somewhere. It’s like a sunburst and had some kind of pattern in the middle, then goes down in the middle. I know she’s got Chinese characters done somewhere, too. One of her boyfriends is in tattooing.”

  The detectives knew Jason was lying. The body they had didn’t have a mark on it. But they said nothing, continuing to listen as Jason related one deceptive detail after another.

  “Wow, you guys seriously aren’t joking, man,” Jason added.

  “No, we’re not joking,” Andre said. “We’re trying to locate your mom… Where’s your dad?”

  “My father’s deceased. It was a suicide.”

  “How do you get along with your mom?” Spencer asked.

  “I love my mom,” Jason shot back without hesitation. “Mom’s great. Even though she doesn’t work, she at least got our grandma to send us money. She’s there when I need her to help me out. I love my mom.”

  “Any problems with your mom?”

  “Except for her freaking boyfriends, no. No. No,” Jason said. “She’s just looking for a husband. But I mean, I don’t get it. I told her she doesn’t need one.”

  “Does she have any problems with relatives?” Andre asked.

  “My grandma is an alcoholic. My grandfather is, too,” Jason claimed, clarifying that all of their relatives were in Illinois, so he never saw them anyway. “But, like, our great-grandma, she’s great. She’s the one who helps us out. That’s who I think of as my grandparent, because my real grandparents suck.”

  “Has she ever had problems with the neighbors?” Andre continued.

  “Um, she doesn’t like people. She has some kind of racist views a little bit,” Jason said. “Because of the experiences with my father.”

  “He was Hispanic, I take it,” Andre said.

  “Yes. She’s just a racist, pretty much.”

  “Do you and Matt have the same father?”

  “No,” Jason said. “But he has anger management issues. He’s a beater. We haven’t seen him since I was about eight.”

  “Is your mom pretty demanding of you and your brother?”

  “No,” Jason lied again. “My mom just says, ‘Go to school, go to work, and we’ll make it through.’ She says that when I get my degree, we’ll all be happy because we’ll have a big house and I’ll make lots of money.”

  “Do you know how to get ahold of your mom?” Andre asked.

  “No, she usually calls us.”

  “When was the last time you physically saw her?” Craig wanted to know.

  “I’m thinking last Thursday,” he said. “That sounds about right. She was home like an hour. We went to dinner and then she left.”

  Craig was certain Jason was being deceitful, so he decided to press for every detail, hoping to make Jason as nervous as possible.

  “Where did you have dinner?” Craig asked.

  “At HomeTown Buffet.”

  “Which one?”

  “In Moreno Valley at the mall,” said Jason, smoothly spitting out answers as quickly as Craig threw questions at him.

  “That was Thursday the sixteenth?”

  “Yeah.”

  They continued to grill him, forcing him to explain where he was the night before and the night before that, with who and for how long. Jason stammered, he got confused.

  “I’m not sure of anything, just to be honest,” Jason said. “I can’t remember last week.”

  The detectives turned up the heat, sensing Jason might break soon. He was articulate, clearly a smart kid, and he knew it. Knew it so well, in fact, that he thought he could outtalk the detectives. Funny, it was kind of the same impression classmates of Jason’s had had of him in high school—a cocky kid who wasn’t nearly as smart as he thought he was.

  “You know what?” Jason continued. “I think I might have some dates mixed up again. See, I’m just guessing at what I did, to be honest.”

  “Well, don’t guess,” Andre said. “We want to find out what you did, because our whole purpose is to find your mom.”

  “My mom will probably call tonight or tomorrow or soon,” Jason offered. “I’ll have her talk to you.”

  “We want to talk to her before that, Jason,” Andre told him. He grew impatient with the dance, so he tried a more direct approach. “Do you go to Oceanside any?” he asked.

  “When I was a child, we lived there.”

  “Recently, have you been to Oceanside?” Andre asked again.

  “No, I have not been to Oceanside recently,” he said.

  “Do you let friends borrow your car?”

  “No,” he said. “It’s either my mom in the car or, like, that’s it.”

  “Okay, and you’ve never been to Oceanside in your car?” Andre said.

  “No.”

  “Well, what if I tell you that I know for a fact that your car has been in Oceanside recently?” said Andre, watching Jason carefully for his reaction. He showed none.

  “Then I’d ask why,” Jason said.

  “On Tuesday,” Andre said. “We know that for a fact because a witness got the license plate.”

  “A witness to what?” Jason snapped.

  “A witness to you being in Oceanside, dumping trash or something like that,” Andre said.

  “It wouldn’t be me,” he said.

  “Jason,” Craig cut in.

  “Yes, sir?�
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  “Let’s start being honest here,” he advised Jason.

  “I am being honest.”

  “No, you’re not,” Craig said simply. But Jason gave nothing more. “We didn’t just start doing this, Jason, okay?”

  “We know your car was in Oceanside,” Andre added. “We know a lot… We have a witness that took that license plate down and we have a witness that saw you.”

  “Okay, well, it wasn’t me,” said Jason, refusing to let go of his lie. He wasn’t ready to admit defeat, not yet, not when he was so close to a normal life. “I was not in Oceanside.”

  “What is Matthew going to tell us?” Andre asked.

  “The same thing,” Jason said.

  “Jason, where is Matthew right now?” Craig asked.

  “At Disneyland.”

  “Are you sure?” Craig pushed.

  “Quite,” he said.

  “No, you’re not,” he said. “Are we talking to him right now? We didn’t stop him on his way to Disneyland and start talking to him?”

  “No. He’s at Disneyland. If you guys can find him there… I mean, he would’ve called me if something was wrong.”

  “No, he wouldn’t,” Craig said. “Jason, you’re lying about things, and we know it. You don’t have a good relationship with your mother, we know you don’t.”

  “How would you know I don’t have a good relationship with my mother?” Jason snapped. Suddenly, he was angry. It was the first time he’d shown any emotion. “I don’t care what other people say. My mom’s important to me.”

  “What are the chances we show the witness the picture of your brother and he says, ‘Well, that’s the other guy’?” Craig asked.

  “I don’t know,” Jason said.

  “What are the chances?” Craig repeated.

  “Should be zero.”

  “Well, what we need here is to locate your mom,” Andre said. “Because we work missing persons. And we also work homicide.”

  “Homicide?” Jason repeated, incredulous.

  “Yes, Orange County Sheriff’s Homicide Division,” said Andre, waiting for more reaction from Jason. There was none, so he continued. “And we can get a DNA profile on bodies. We can find their relatives by DNA. So, would you be willing to give a DNA swab of your mouth?”

  Jason agreed and took a Q-tip offered to him, swabbed the end across the inside of his cheek, as instructed, and handed the sample back to Andre.

  “Once again,” Andre said, offering Jason one last chance to confess, “any idea where your mom is?”

  “No.”

  “Okay,” Craig said. “Jason, I think you’re lying to me. We know more about what’s going on than you think we know. We know quite a bit about what’s going on. So, you’re not under arrest, but we’re going to detain you for a while. We’re going to take your car, write a search warrant for it.”

  “Okay,” Jason said calmly.

  “And write a search warrant for your house,” Craig added.

  “Okay,” he said, again, calmly. But on the inside, panic raged. His mother’s head and hands. He’d never gotten rid of them.

  The detectives stood, telling Jason they needed to step outside for a moment to make a few calls, then they’d be back to escort him to the sheriff’s station.

  “You hang on tight,” Andre said. “We appreciate you helping us out on this, man. All of this will help us locate your mom.”

  “No problem.”

  As the door closed behind them, Jason reached for his cell phone and dialed Matt’s number.

  “Get away from home,” Jason spat urgently into the phone. “Go somewhere else, do not come home. Stay away. Do it! Dude, do it!” Then he snapped the phone shut.

  The detectives caught it all on tape, but Jason didn’t know that then. As they walked back into the room, Andre saw Jason with the phone in his hand.

  “Just checking your messages?” Andre asked.

  “Yeah, just checking my voice mail.”

  Nearly an hour had passed since they’d begun talking. Certain they had the right suspect, Andre and Craig asked Jason to escort them to the Oldsmobile, currently parked on a lot inside the university campus. But Jason paused. Although he’d agreed to show them the car, he wasn’t ready to do it. Not yet.

  “I think I have something more to tell you,” said Jason, realizing at last that he was in way over his head. Soon they would know everything. He had to get his side of the story out before he landed in jail.

  “You ready to tell us what really happened?” Craig asked.

  “Yes,” Jason said. “I am.”

  20

  Deputy District Attorney Michael Murray is the quintessential good guy. If this were the Old West, he’d don a ten-gallon cowboy hat, gleaming white. He’s tall, with dark hair and dark eyes, and wickedly handsome. The 39-year-old prosecutor is a West Point Academy graduate who spent five years in the Army, leaving as a captain and intent on pursuing a law degree from the McGeorge School of Law in Sacramento, California. He married a woman in the FBI and has three little girls, all young enough to still need car seats. His sense of good versus evil is clearly defined. He is smart. He is moral. He is the ideal prosecutor.

  Mike mulled over the call he’d just taken from Sergeant Vining. Of the 250 prosecutors in the district attorney’s office, Murray was one of only seven handling the county’s most serious crime—homicide. He took on any body discovered in the unincorporated parts of Orange County, as the Ortega Highway body had been. So it fell to Mike to write out the necessary search warrants for the Bautista apartment and get a judge to sign off on them.

  But it occurred to Mike that the Orange County authorities may have been out of their jurisdiction. Sure, they had the body. But the suspect was from Riverside. In all probability, he’d committed the murder there, then crossed into Orange County to dump the remains. But Mike wrote up the search warrants anyway. This was one case he didn’t want to lose. It wasn’t your run-of-the-mill bar fight, Mike thought. Already the press was calling like mad, desperate for any new details on the headless body case. And they didn’t even know yet that the woman’s sons might have been responsible. It would be fascinating to get to the bottom of this one, to know why a young man would so brutally mutilate the woman who’d given him life. So Mike settled into the case. Riverside police might have some rights to the case by jurisdiction, but Orange County investigators had the body, the defendants, and most of the facts. Until someone told Mike otherwise, this one belonged to him.

  It was nearly 2:30 p.m. when Andre and Craig settled into their seats once again to listen to Jason’s story. This time, Andre openly took out a tape recorder and set it on the small table in front of them.

  “I’ll just start,” Jason said. “I’ll tell you the story from the start. People are going to hate me. I didn’t mean to…”

  “Okay,” said Andre in a calm, steady voice, hoping to keep Jason grounded. “Just tell us your story. Go ahead and talk.”

  And he did, rambling at first, telling them how hard he worked, at school, holding down two jobs. He told them how terrible life had been ever since his father had died all those years ago. But things had really veered out of control, Jason said, about six years ago, during a trip to Las Vegas, when Jane had become obsessed with singer Duncan Sheik. Jason talked about her conspiracy fears, how she’d thought people in the music industry were out to kill her. Then it was the Mexicans, then the Jews, then there were neighbors who were child molesters and after Matt.

  “All just crazy, crazy stuff,” Jason said. “I mean, everything was really crazy. She’d always be mad at me because I wouldn’t believe it. I told her, ‘You’re just wacky.’ So one time, I told her that, and she crushed in the side of my head with a hockey stick.”

  Jason told his story in a jumbled rush, emphasizing Jane’s terrible temper. He wanted the detectives to understand that his mother was crazy, and he’d feared her. He’d feared her very much.

  “I could tell you a million frea
king stories,” he said. “President Clinton hates us. President Bush hates us. Everybody hates us. They’re coming to kill us. Just bullshit.”

  He talked about the family’s period of homelessness, living out of cars and cheap motels. “It was horrible,” Jason said. “I almost committed suicide so many times, you don’t even know.”

  Once settled in Riverside, all was well for about four months, Jason acknowledged. Then, he said, Jane started again. And he got scared.

  “Every day she’d freak out and say, ‘They’re breaking into our house,’ ” Jason said. “That was her big thing, people breaking in our house and putting in cameras. She’d say, ‘We’re on videotape for the world to see.’ Yeah, my house is extremely fucking scary.”

  “So what eventually happened, Jason?” Andre prodded.

  “She was yelling at me,” he said. “I said, ‘No, I don’t believe that,’ because I was just tired, ‘and I don’t want to hear it.’ “

  “Yeah?” said Andre, encouraging him.

  “She went and got a knife,” Jason said. “She said, ‘Well, you don’t believe me? You’re going to believe me now!’ And she started swinging the knife at me.”

  “So, she was coming at you?” he asked.

  “Yeah, like coming at me,” Jason affirmed. “I thought I was going to die. I got her down and I…I don’t know, I’m a big guy. I used my strength. And, like, I…Well, she died.”

  The detectives nodded. It was the story they had been waiting to hear. But Jason was claiming self-defense. Neither detective was ready to buy that just yet.

  “Jason, we need details,” Andre said. “You need to be more specific.”

  “Well, she swung the knife at me and somehow I brought her down,” he said. “And I was so freaked out, I didn’t let go when I should have.”

  “Then what?”

  “I flipped out. I mean, I cried for like half an hour.”

  “After, Jason,” Andre asked. “What did you do to your mom after?”

  “God, this is going to sound so horrible,” he moaned.

  “Jason, we don’t hate you,” Craig offered, trying to keep Jason calm.

  “I wish she just would have left me alone,” Jason said.