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

by Dirmann, Tina

  Dr. Ernest Williams, a psychiatrist specializing in why people commit crimes, testified that after reviewing interviews with Jane’s friends and family, he believed she’d suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and a second handicap called narcissistic personality disorder (a sickness that causes the sufferer to believe they’re overly important, yet underappreciated, and makes them incapable of sympathizing with others).

  Another doctor testified that growing up under such a woman so scarred Jason that he now suffered from posttraumatic stress disorder.

  But in all, the defense spent less than an hour trying to demonstrate the psychological dynamics at work in the Bautista household. Outsiders thought for sure expert testimony would be the cornerstone to Jason’s defense, focusing on how years of abuse might have impacted his ability to think reasonably and make decisions rationally, like opting to kill his mother instead of moving away from home. But in truth, such expert testimony was practically a footnote. Before the trial began, Don had asked Judge Frank Fasel to allow additional expert testimony regarding the effects of child abuse. But Fasel ruled such evidence was irrelevant for a 20-year-old murder defendant.

  Instead, the most dramatic witness in the defense case would be Jason himself.

  It’s always a risk putting defendants on the stand. True, it gives them an opportunity to tell their side of the story. But it also leaves them open to the verbal beating a skilled prosecutor can no doubt deliver in cross-examinations. But Don probably had little choice. Cocky, self-assured Jason Bautista likely insisted he testify.

  Jason looked every bit the biochemistry student as he took the stand, appearing young and studious in his blue blazer, blue-and-white-checkered shirt, and khaki pants. His skin was ghostly pale, the result of twenty-four months behind bars.

  Don Ronaldson wasted no time asking Jason to describe the murder. Only Jason knew what had really happened that night. Now, it was up to him to sell his story of self-defense.

  His tale began just like Matt’s. Jane was on a rampage.

  “About the entertainment industry, Mexicans, Isralis, because she supported Palestinian rights, President Clinton, Al Gore. Anybody you see in the newspapers, they were following us and were against us.”

  “Did she yell at you?” Don asked.

  “My entire life.”

  “About what?”

  “My grades weren’t good enough, why aren’t I in the house more, who is in the conspiracy, who paid me off?” Jason said.

  As the fight escalated, “Matt left for the north bedroom,” he said.

  In the audience, several reporters exchanged glances. “North bedroom?” one said. “Who talks like that? He sounds rehearsed.”

  Jason said he decided he’d had enough; if she wanted him out, he’d go—but not without the Intrigue.

  “I thought it might help me move if I had the Intrigue. I went to look for the keys. Matthew was still in the north bedroom. That’s when she went into the kitchen drawer and pulled out her favorite knife,” he said.

  “A knife,” Don repeated.

  “Her favorite knife,” Jason emphasized. Again, he sounded rehearsed. Way too over the top.

  “What a disaster,” an observer whispered. “He shouldn’t be up there.”

  Don continued: “So you’ve seen that knife before?”

  “Oh, yes. Whenever she threatened us, she’d use that knife. She said, ‘You aren’t going to leave me like your father did! I made you and I’ll destroy you.’ So I backed up and sidled away from her.”

  “Were you afraid?”

  “I’ve always been afraid of her.”

  “And that night?”

  “Extraordinarily,” Jason said. “I had a high level of fear that she was going to kill me.”

  It wasn’t just what Jason was saying that rang untrue. It was his delivery. Like a C-rate actor with memorized lines, trying to win a bit part. He was robotic and unemotional. He used technical terms, legal phrases. It was hard to remember that he was talking about his mother’s murder.

  “What did you do when she came after you with the knife?”

  “I stepped back and she came after me, into the living room. She had her grimace face on,” Jason said.

  “Have you ever resisted her before?”

  “Never,” Jason said. “I never fought back.”

  “This time, you did?”

  “I tackled her,” Jason said. “She stabbed at me with the knife. But she didn’t hit me. I moved away and came behind her. I wanted to disarm her.”

  “Why didn’t you just run away, Jason?” Don asked.

  “There was nowhere to run. The door was locked and it was such a small apartment. There was nowhere to go.”

  “What happened next?”

  “She said, ‘I’m going to kill you!’ She was on her knees and I pushed her down onto her stomach.”

  They struggled on the floor for a long time, Jason said, mostly because he was afraid to stand up, afraid to let her go. He thought she might attack again, Jason said. Then he turned his head, looking directly at the jury, before telling them emphatically, “I was just holding her.”

  “Where was your arm, Jason?”

  “My left arm was around her neck the whole time we were on the ground.”

  “But at some point, did the struggle cease?” Don asked.

  “Yes. I continued to hold her for maybe two minutes because she was devious. I thought maybe she was playing possum. I grabbed the knife after that and threw it over my shoulder. I didn’t know she was dead. I thought she was still playing possum. I made a break for the door. But then I turned around and I see her lying facedown.”

  “What did you do?” Don said.

  “I called out, ‘Hey, hey! Are you all right?’ “

  But Jane didn’t move. Jason said he panicked and called out for Matthew. Matthew ran out and checked her pulse. She had none. “And I freaked out.”

  Jason said he ordered Matt back into Jane’s room and then sat down to think. He remembered the Sopranos episode and decided that that was the only thing to do—get rid of her body and try to move on with life. He went to the store to buy supplies, then returned. “I moved her body to the vanity area, by South B,” he said, referring to the investigators’ labeling of the rear bathroom. From there on, Jason said, his memory fails him. “I don’t remember what I was thinking,” he said. “I just remember thinking, ‘I don’t want to do this.’ “

  “Did you love her?”

  “Yes,” Jason said. “I did.”

  “But you were afraid of her?” Don questioned.

  “All of the time.”

  “Do you remember cutting off your mother’s head?” Don asked.

  “No.”

  “Do you remember cutting off your mother’s hands?”

  “No.”

  “Do you remember all the blood in the bathroom?”

  “No.”

  But Mike Murray wasn’t going to let Jason get off that easily. His plan was to be very aggressive with him. This was a guy who thought he was smarter than everyone, that he could manipulate his way out of any situation. He could calmly lie under the most stressful of circumstances. So Mike didn’t want him to just feel stressed. He wanted him to feel under siege. To do that, Mike showed no mercy.

  “Do you remember meeting Andre Spencer on January twenty-fourth, 2003?”

  “Well, sir, that whole month seems pretty vague to me,” he said.

  “Really?” Mike answered. “Because you just gave very detailed testimony about what happened that night.”

  “Dates and times and things are confusing,” Jason said.

  “Would it refresh your recollection to hear the taped interview from that day?” Mike asked.

  “No, it wouldn’t really be beneficial to hear all that testimony. There are a lot of lies,” he said.

  “Let’s talk about lies, then. You lied to Investigator Spencer when you talked to him on January twenty-fourth, 2003?”

  “Y
es,” he said. “I was in denial.”

  “You were denying to yourself that you murdered your mother?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “You were denying to yourself that you cut off her head and hands and put them in your closet?”

  “Yes,” he said again.

  “But you weren’t in denial enough to lie to protect yourself,” said Mike, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “You said, ‘My mom’s in Corona with her boyfriend. She has, like, a different boyfriend every other week!’ “

  “Yes, I said that, and yes, that was a lie.”

  Mike threw other lies in his face: his misleading description of her, her tattoos, her tattoo artist boyfriend, her habit of visiting Internet cafes.

  “I don’t recall the majority of that day,” Jason said.

  “You just gave a blow-by-blow, line-by-line dialogue of the night you killed your mother. You repeated line-byline dialogue with your brother: ‘I said this,’ ‘he said that.’ But for some reason, you don’t remember this interview?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, you must have been shocked when you read it.”

  “Yes, I was.”

  “Well, it shocks me, too. But let’s keep going.”

  Even the judge wouldn’t let Mike go that far. He called for a sidebar and asked him to reel back a touch on the sarcasm. But Mike’s approach did have an effect on Jason. He looked nervous, periodically glancing up at the clock above the jurors’ heads. Thankfully, it was near the lunch hour and Judge Fasel broke. But over lunch, Mike considered Jason’s lack of memory regarding the most gruesome part of his mother’s killing. Funny, when he first confessed to investigators, his memory wasn’t so foggy. Now, all of a sudden, on the stand, he couldn’t talk about it?

  As court resumed, Mike asked permission to play back Jason’s second interview with detectives. As the tape rolled, jurors heard Jason tell all about Jane’s temper, all about her rantings, and all about the murder—including a grisly, detailed account of the decapitation.

  “Did you do the wrist first or the head first?” Andre is heard asking.

  “I did a wrist first, then the head, then a wrist,” Jason said.

  “Why did you pick so low on the neck to cut?”

  “I just picked a spot that looked good,” Jason said.

  “Was there a lot of blood?”

  “My God. A lot splashed in the room, in the bathroom,” he said.

  Andre wanted to know how he’d drained his mom of so much blood.

  “I just pushed until I thought enough blood came out.”

  “Was she faceup or facedown?”

  “Facedown,” Jason said. “And I pushed on it.”

  After the murder, Jason said, he told Matt, “It will be harder for us. Even though she didn’t work, she helped us, she did laundry, she loved us.”

  The matter-of-fact account flew in the face of Jason’s testimony just a few hours ago, claiming not to remember anything. Other details made him look cold—like lamenting over the loss of his favorite gray pants, now soiled with blood, and realizing the arrest meant he’d have to cancel plans for the night: “I was supposed to go hang out with some friends tonight,” he’d told Andre. “But I guess I’m not doing that anymore.”

  As the tape closed, Mike launched his second attack, going over the minute-by-minute version of cutting off each limb, then pushing to drain his mom’s blood.

  Jason sighed heavily. Remembering everything was tearing him up inside, he said.

  “Do you remember telling Investigator Spencer how you ruined your best pair of gray pants?” Mike asked. “Is that one of the things tearing you up inside? Do you remember saying, ‘I guess I’m not going out with my friends tonight, jeepers’? Is that one of the things tearing you up inside?”

  Finally, Mike zeroed in on Jason’s story of the attack.

  “So, she comes after you with a knife—‘her favorite knife,’ ” he said mockingly. “And yet you don’t even have a nick on you?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Not even a scratch?”

  “No.”

  Mike wanted a description of the struggle, an accounting of whose hand was where and when. Jason, after all, had tried to say the strangling was an accident because he held his mom in a chokehold for too long. But the fingerprint-like bruises around her neck proved otherwise, Mike said. Flustered, Jason said it was too hard to describe every move of the fight.

  “Would you like to come down here and demonstrate it on me, then?” Mike asked.

  Jason did not, but he had no choice. As he stepped from the witness stand, he turned his back to jurors and faced his attorney. “This is prejudicial,” he hissed under his breath. “Object!”

  Mike and Andre heard Jason ordering his attorney. They exchanged a glance. It wasn’t the first time, either. Throughout the trial, they could hear Jason spit out commands to Don, periodically trying to tell him how to do his job. “Object,” he’d say. “You need to object to this!”

  In fact, Don did object to the demonstration, calling for a sidebar. But Judge Fasel allowed the re-enactment to go forward, re-creating the struggle with Don. By the end, Jason was on the floor over his attorney in the mock fight, which left Don with a bright red bruise on his forehead. It didn’t do much in the way of proving any particular point, but the move clearly rattled Jason, which was exactly what Mike was hoping for.

  28

  After nine days, the trial drew to a close. In his summation, Mike Murray flashed a series of grisly pictures in front of jurors—the head and hands crammed in the duffel bag, the mutilated and pale corpse. Then he begged them not to believe Jason’s “fantastic tale” of self-defense.

  “This is a man who can lie, and he lies like most people breathe,” he said. “It just comes naturally. It just flows out of his mouth.”

  And he emphasized that Jason may have grown up with a mentally ill mother, but that was no reason to kill her. “He was a grown man. He was twenty years old. He had options.”

  Don Ronaldson disagreed, saying Jason had had no choice but to defend himself the night his paranoid schizophrenic mother lunged at him with a knife. He didn’t mean to kill her. It just happened. “Was this a murder inspired by a TV show?” he asked. “No. Was there actually a plan? No, there was not.”

  As the jury spent its third day in deliberations, Mike grew antsy. He’d never had a case out so long. Three days was a long time as jury deliberations go. A day and a half, maybe two days, is the norm for a jury ready to convict. The longer the deliberations, the greater the chances for dissent among jurors. He tried to work on other cases. But every time the phone rang, Mike jumped, hoping for word of a verdict. At times, he gave up pushing the papers around his desk and dropped by the courtroom asking for updates. He chatted amiably with the collection of reporters also waiting for word.

  Mike expected a first-degree murder conviction. He’d tolerate second degree, if jurors really didn’t buy the premeditation aspect of the case. That would still put Jason away for 15 years to life. But anything less, like manslaughter, which could get Jason as little as 3 years, Mike couldn’t stomach. This boy had planned his mom’s killing. The jury just had to see that, he thought.

  In the jury room, several jurists cried over what they were about to do. As it turned out, two jurors had relatives who suffered from schizophrenia, including one woman’s younger brother. The attorneys knew, and each had gambled the experience would come out in their favor. Don thought it would make them empathetic. Mike thought they’d get it—yes, they’re hard to live with, but they’re sick, not evil.

  Jurors took several votes the first two days. Many of them did feel sorry for Jason, enduring such a horrific childhood. Their votes came back all over the map, until Thursday, when it was 11 to 1. One holdout, a woman, wanted to give Jason second-degree murder, nothing more, nothing less. One by one, the 11 jurors took turns explaining why they’d voted as they had.

  A juror picked up a plastic skul
l kept in the jury room for reference purposes and smashed it facedown onto the table, thrashing it left and right. “Do you see this?” the juror said. “Look at this! This is what he did to her!”

  Another juror sat silent for most of the deliberations. But now, she broke into tears. “He could have walked away,” she said. “And he didn’t. He killed her.”

  By late afternoon on day three, fifteen hours into deliberations, Mike got the call he was waiting for—a verdict.

  Jason walked into court wearing his now-familiar blue blazer and tan pants. He glanced at Uncle Jim and smiled, prompting Jim to offer his nephew the thumbs-up sign. Jurors filed in, with one lady visibly gripping a fistful of tissues.

  Jason held a stoic look on his face as the verdict was read. On February 4, 2005, jurors pronounced the 22-year-old guilty of first-degree murder. His face was calm, but inside, he was stunned. He’d known he wouldn’t get off, but he’d assumed there would be some pity for his story. He’d expected manslaughter, not this.

  Jim Funderburk dipped his head in his hands and gently rubbed his forehead. If Jason’s face was one of strength, Jim’s was one of overwhelming sadness. He grabbed his wife’s hand and left court quickly, refusing to talk to reporters. Only Don made a brief statement on Jason’s behalf. “Obviously, we are disappointed with the verdict.”

  Outside of court, 35-year-old juror Lauri Raine paused to explain the verdict. “Jane was beaten beyond anything I’ve ever seen before in my life,” she said angrily. “What happened to Jane Bautista was horrific. We felt very sorry for Jason. We wanted to give him some way out. But in the end, we couldn’t.”

  Juror Patty Clemons, a 34-year-old driver’s education teacher and mother of three, had swollen eyes. “Several people have been crying,” she said. “This is a young man and we’re taking his life away.”

  Jurors did feel sorry for Jason, who had obviously grown up under challenging conditions. But they also felt sorry for Jane, a woman sinking desperately into madness with nobody, not even her wealthy family, to stretch out a helping hand. She easily could have been murdered, and thrown away, and no one would have ever known what became of her.