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

by Dirmann, Tina

  “Well, we’re trying to find out the truth,” Andre said. “That’s why we’re here.”

  She knew Jason hadn’t always gotten along with his mother. But the situation didn’t seem serious. He rarely even spoke about it. But he did seem pretty chipper when she decided to move back to Chicago, Sarah recalled.

  “What did he say about that, exactly?” Andre pressed.

  “Just that she was going back indefinitely to take care of a sick grandmother,” Sarah said. “He was pretty excited to get his car back, too.”

  “His car back? The Honda?”

  “No, the Intrigue. He said it was really his, because he made the payments on it, but that his mom just borrowed it all the time. He was really happy about that. He used to call the other car ‘the ratty station wagon.’ He hated that car.”

  Sarah said she’d really only run into Jason one other time that month, in the computer lab. He was sitting quietly in front of a terminal watching what looked like a movie, she said.

  “The Sopranos,” he’d told her. “It’s my favorite show.”

  January 13 would be Jane’s last day of life. But that afternoon, Jason had seemed like a guy without a care in the world, remembered Jason’s classmate William Shadrick. Shadrick was a Cal State graduate already. But he hoped to go to graduate school, so he’d returned to campus that afternoon to order some transcripts and had run into his old friend lunching in the computer lab.

  “Jason told me if I was going to be in town awhile that I should come over to his place sometime,” William told the detectives. “It shocked me, because he never really got along very well with his mother.” Once, while talking about an argument with her, Jason lashed out, “I’ll kill that bitch one day,” William recalled. But he hadn’t given the statement much weight. “I just got the feeling it was something he just said. I didn’t think he meant it. I didn’t take it seriously.”

  “Had he ever invited you over before?”

  “No, never,” William said. “I asked, you know, ‘What about your mom?’ And he just said, ‘She won’t care because she moved to Chicago to live with her sick grandmother.’ “

  “He told you she had already moved?” Andre asked.

  “Yeah,” William answered.

  Jason hadn’t talked about Jane much, William said. But the few times he had, it was obvious how much he’d hated her. William remembered his friend’s voice whenever he spoke of her: “He said she was a bitch. He was very angry about it. There was always just this kind of rage.”

  Finally, Andre and Craig caught up with Jason’s lab partner, Stephen Kavousy. He told them all about the cryptic song lyric Jason had sung in early January: “It always amazes me how I can kill a man and it doesn’t faze me.”

  Craig and Andre found the lyric a stunning piece of evidence and set out to track down the song. Ultimately, they never found an exact match to the line. Interestingly, however, there’s a song eerily similar to the one Stephen remembered his pal singing. The lyric, by the band No Crash, actually reads, “Death, it doesn’t phase [sic] me. But people crying over dying never ceases to amaze me.” The tune is called “Kill Your Parents.”

  But even as Stephen remembered it, the detectives considered Jason’s lyric strong proof that he had been thinking about murder. He had known he was going to kill his mom, known it for weeks, at least. But to cover their bases, they needed to talk to Grandma Mae. Certainly, if her favorite granddaughter had been planning a move home, she would have known about it. It was time to visit Winthrop Harbor.

  Getting an interview with Charlie Mae Funderburk was going to be tough. So far, Jane’s parents and uncle refused to help with the murder investigation. Craig Johnson decided not to call first. He’d just hop a plane out, this time bringing Investigator Dennis Burke with him for help, and try the element of surprise.

  The Funderburk relatives were “big fishes in a small pond,” as Craig put it. Since he was going to be on their turf, there could be trouble. He contacted Winthrop Harbor Police Detective Sergeant Tim Borowski for extra insurance. Tim knew the family well. They were very influential in the community because of their well-known construction company and resulting wealth. But they were also deeply private people. The detectives would certainly have a hard time getting cooperation, he acknowledged.

  “The family, especially Jim, wants to keep this very private,” Tim said. “They don’t want anyone talking about it.” In short, they apparently found the murder an embarrassing, private family tragedy that needed to be forgotten as soon as possible. But Tim also knew the interviews had to be conducted.

  “Come on down and I’ll help you in any way I can,” he said.

  Shortly after arriving in Winthrop, Dennis and Craig met up with Tim in front of Charlie Mae Funderburk’s house. If she was alone, they reasoned, she just might talk. And that conversation could be very enlightening, given she was the only relative aside from the boys whom Jane had ever trusted.

  In truth, Jane talked to Grandma Mae frequently following August 30, 2002, when her grandfather, the patriarch of the family and the man responsible for the Funderburk clan’s financial success, had died at the age of 86. His heart had simply given out, despite the insertion of a pacemaker just days before. His passing devastated Jane’s beloved grandmother. The couple had been married sixty-eight years. Now, she felt alone. In sporadic phone calls, Mae had begged her granddaughter to come home. But for some reason, Jane never returned, not even for the funeral.

  “Jim’s probably going to get mad if we don’t let him know first,” Tim said.

  “I know,” Craig told him. “But I don’t care. I don’t need him standing in my way.”

  They knocked on her door. She was alone—a small miracle, since she still lived next door to her daughter and son-in-law. But clearly, Charlie Mae was hungry for attention. Like a lot of elderly widows, she longed for someone to talk to. Likely she didn’t get a lot of visitors. And her own failing health kept her homebound. So she eagerly sat with the kind detectives, telling them anything they wanted to know.

  “Are you from California?” Charlie Mae wanted to know.

  “Yes, we flew all the way out here just to talk to you,” Craig told her.

  “Well, now…Now, you’ll have to talk kind of loud,” Charlie Mae told them. “I’m kind of hard of hearing.”

  “I’m here regarding your granddaughter,” Craig began. “You heard what happened? About her being murdered?”

  “Pardon?”

  “You heard about your granddaughter?” he tried again, louder.

  “Yes!”

  “And she was murdered.”

  “Pardon?”

  This was going to take a while, Craig sighed to himself. He breathed in deeply and tried again, very loudly. “You heard she was murdered?”

  “I heard that.”

  “And the two boys are in custody,” Craig said.

  “She had two boys?” she asked, as if hearing the news for the first time.

  “Yes, Jason and Matthew,” Craig said. “Basically, what I’m trying to clear up is, was Jane planning to come back here and take care of you?”

  “Oh yes, yes she was,” Charlie Mae said, explaining how Jane had talked about coming home even before her Grandpa Ben had died. “She said, ‘Me and Matt will stay with you and I’ll take care of you and Grandpa.’ But then my husband died two or three months later.”

  Jane had skipped the funeral, saying her asthma was acting up too badly. But she’d promised to come home for Christmas, Charlie Mae said. “Then she called again before Thanksgiving and said, ‘We can’t come for December. We can’t afford it right now.’ “

  “But she never had a definite plan to come back?” Craig asked, desperate for some clarification. It sounded to him like the idea of coming home was something Jane had just said to appease her ailing grandmother, not something she’d actually meant.

  “I don’t know, she just kept saying, ‘Grandma, I’m coming back to take care of you an
d Grandpa.’ Her and I were very, very close.”

  “What do you think about this whole thing?” Craig asked.

  “I just can’t believe it,” she said. “But I know it must be true. Did you interview them?”

  “Yes,” he told her. “Jason told me what happened.”

  “Well, I’m shocked that he’d do that, as much as his mother thought of him. Oh, she worked so hard to raise them kids. Once she got so upset and she called me saying she didn’t know what to do about them. And I said, ‘I’ll send money every month, don’t you worry.’ “

  Craig nodded, thinking about the $1,000 to $2,000 checks dropped into Jane’s post office box every month, like clockwork, for all those years.

  “To this day I don’t know exactly what happened,” Charlie Mae continued. “I’ve been in the hospital twice now. Jim gave the doctors orders to tell me nothing. Jim just told me that they picked up the boys and they are in jail and everybody was nice to him…You know, I’ve just had a bad time.”

  Craig could see that. So he wasn’t going to take the time now to fill her in on the gruesome details surrounding her favorite granddaughter’s death. Instead, he listened to her talk about watching Nellie feed her dying father applesauce at the hospital; about Funderburk houses and how they were more expensive, but worth it; about her own trips—two of them—to the hospital since her husband’s death; about her other granddaughter, Jane’s sister, who lived in Texas but owned property in Winthrop. He listened for twenty minutes, letting her talk like she probably hadn’t talked in years, before finally extending his business card and breaking the news that they had to go.

  “But I just want to make sure one more time. Jane never set a date to come out here, right? There was no plane ticket or anything?”

  “No, there was no date set, no ticket,” Charlie Mae repeated.

  “Because you were going to send her a ticket if she really wanted to come?”

  “Yes,” Charlie Mae said. “Don’t think I wouldn’t. I would.”

  That was all they needed. The investigators now believed for certain that Jane had never had any real intentions to move. And Jason knew it. It was just his convenient cover.

  “Do you know what Jane said to me the last time I talked to her just before Thanksgiving?” Charlie Mae asked. “She said, ‘Grandma, do you know what a hard time I had raising them boys? Will you pray for me that I live to get my kids grown?’ She said those very words to me.”

  Craig and Dennis didn’t know what to say. They were remarkably prophetic words.

  “Are you going to call Jim while you’re here?”

  “Yes,” Craig told her.

  “Oh, that’s good,” she said. “I think he’ll like you.”

  Craig could only smile, knowing that nothing was farther from the truth.

  Tim thought for sure they’d find Jim at the family’s restaurant, the Stone Creek Grill. Sure enough, he was there, sitting at a table and sipping on a beer.

  “Hey, Mr. Funderburk,” Craig said. “Remember me?”

  “Yes,” he said, cordially enough, and nodding a greeting to Tim. If he was surprised to see the detective, he showed no sign of it.

  “We need to talk to you for a minute,” Craig told him.

  “Okay, let’s go on outside,” he answered, rising to lead them out the front door, away from eavesdropping ears.

  “Listen,” Craig said, once outside. “We’re here to talk to Charlie Mae.”

  “Well, she’s not feeling too well today,” he said. “I’ll call you when she’s better.”

  Exactly what the detective had expected to hear.

  “No,” Craig said. “You don’t understand. We already talked to her. I just wanted to let you know.”

  Jim bristled, gripping his beer bottle tightly. “I really wish you hadn’t done that,” he said. “I don’t think that’s right, and you shouldn’t have done that.”

  “Hey,” Craig reminded him. “We’re just trying to find the truth. And we need to talk to anyone who can help us get there. We can sit and talk to anyone, anywhere, anytime that wants to help.”

  “No,” Jim said. “I don’t think anyone else has anything more to say to you.”

  “Don’t you want the truth to come out, Jim?” asked Craig, hoping Jim would find some sympathy for his slain mentally disturbed niece. Clearly she’d lived a hard life. Clearly she had been sick. But the family had never even tried to get her help. They’d just ignored her throughout her life. Now, in death, they would do the same.

  “I don’t think the family has anything to say to you,” he said again. And that was the end of the conversation.

  As he retreated, Craig made a mental note to thank Tim for coming. With a temper like that, who knows how that interaction would have escalated if not for the local cop’s presence?

  24

  In the weeks since the murder, Jose Montejo had longed to renew his relationship with Matthew. Jose was still living in San Diego County, less than an hour’s drive from the Santa Ana Jail and juvenile hall. So, by the end of January, just days after Matt’s arrest, Jose stopped by the jail to pay his long-lost son a visit. He barely recognized the boy who came through the metal doors to sit before him. He didn’t know why, but he’d expected to see Matt bounding out of the gate still looking like the small boy he’d left behind so many years ago. Jose barely recognized the tall, skinny 15-year-old kid looking at him.

  “Do you hate me, Dad?” Matt asked him.

  “No, no, Matt,” Jose told him. “I could never hate you. I love you, no matter what.”

  “Why didn’t you come find me?” Matt asked. “You know what she was like.”

  “I looked for you for a long time,” Jose said. “But your mom, I thought she had a restraining order. And then I couldn’t find you. But I’m here now.”

  That may have sounded like an excuse to a lot of kids. But Matt didn’t have many people in his corner just then. The support of a long-absent dad was better than no dad at all. Unbeknownst to Jose, it was actually one of Matt’s defense attorneys, David Cohn, who’d encouraged Matt to open up to his dad.

  “I know he’s my dad,” Matt had told David. “But I hate him for leaving us all these years.”

  “Just listen to what he has to say,” David had told him. “You have plenty of catching up to do.”

  Now Jose was the most consistent visitor Matt had. Jose had remarried over the last decade and had two little girls, Matt’s half-sisters. “They’re your family now, too,” Jose told him.

  Jose wanted to see Jason, too, offering his support to the young man he still considered his “other son.” But Jason refused to see Jose. He hadn’t wanted to talk to anyone outside of his uncle and grandmother in the first few weeks after his arrest. But when Jim and Nellie returned to their lives in Winthrop Harbor, Jason had nobody. No one came to see him for weeks, and he grew lonely. Finally, he sent a letter to Matt telling him it would be okay if Jose wanted to stop by sometime. So he did, coming in to see Jason after an afternoon visit with Matt. It was an awkward meeting at first, Jose recalled. Jason looked stoic behind the glass and said little. Jose couldn’t help thinking that Jason had grown up to be a lot like the mother he had just killed.

  “That’s the amazing thing,” Jose would say later of that first meeting. “I kept thinking, his mother treated him so bad, but he’s just like her. He’s very smart, but secretive and hard to get to know, just like Jane.”

  At the preliminary hearing on June 6, 2003, Matt’s attorney had one goal—getting Matt home. A preliminary hearing was the prosecution’s chance to lay out all the evidence gathered against a defendant, thus convincing a judge there was enough to bring the case to trial. It was the rare hearing indeed when a judge ruled against a prosecutor. Especially in a murder case. Generally, the prosecutor got the benefit of the doubt, and the case progressed effortlessly to trial.

  David thought maybe this time a judge could see that Matt had had nothing to do with Jane’s death. It
would be a tough fight, though. David was up against one of the most aggressive prosecutors in the district attorney’s office. Mike Murray had never lost a case. David, meanwhile, had assisted on several murder cases, but he’d never taken one in front of a jury.

  Nellie and Jim flew out for the hearing. A few of Jason’s friends from the Chemistry Club showed up, too, including his pal Stacie. Reporters filled the courtroom.

  Jason and Matt were seated together. It was the first time they’d seen each other since the arrest in January, and they chatted animatedly before things got under way. About nothing, mostly—the Lakers, music, what jail life was like. Matt was going to school behind bars. Ironically, his grades were better than ever. “I’ve never had this much structure,” he once told David. “My structure at home was yelling.” But there were a few scuffles with fellow inmates, mostly those who took to calling Matt “Mommy Killer.”

  Andre Spencer was the star witness of the day. He recounted Jason’s confession and Matt’s story about dumping the body. Andre also testified about a conversation he’d had with one of Matt’s fellow inmates, who’d asked Matt what he was in for.

  “Because of the woman found off the Ortega Highway,” Matt had told her. “They don’t even know everything about why we did it.”

  Then it was up to the attorneys to argue their positions.

  Jason’s attorney, John Kremer, called the slaying a spur-of-the-moment tragedy rising from Jason’s desperate struggle to defend himself. But it was doubtful he’d go home today. The evidence against him, including his own confession, was too overwhelming.

  Then David spoke, zeroing in on the lack of evidence linking Matt to the murder.

  “He was a fifteen-year-old boy who hated his mother on occasion. Maybe she didn’t let him go where he wanted and do what he wanted. But there’s no evidence he wanted her dead. And once he found out his brother killed her, he thought maybe, since his brother did this to her, he could do that to him, too. He’s in circumstances a fifteen-year-old should never be in. And what does a fifteen-year-old child do when caught in this kind of circumstance? The best he can. He listens to his brother.”