The warning put Jason in check. Though behind his back, co-workers still considered him a jerk, at least he tempered his outbursts enough to keep his job.
Months later, Jason started training as the night auditor for the hotel. He still worked the desk, but the added responsibility meant he’d earn an extra $2 an hour. “To my mind, Jason was one of the best employees we had,” Dan said. “He always did a good job.”
With no home to return to at the end of his work and school day, Jason tried to stay as busy as possible. So when a classmate invited him to join the school’s Chemistry Club, he jumped at the chance. “Plus,” his friend told him, “there’s free pizza at every meeting!”
Jason didn’t need the pizza enticement. He loved the group.
“Jason was one of the few people who came to almost every meeting and every event we had that year,” said Stacie Eldridge, club president during the 2001-2002 school year. “He was very active that year.”
A chief goal for the club was promoting science, specifically chemistry, among kids, hoping to plant enough interest that they’d one day choose the major, too. Jason loved the events with kids. For Halloween, the university held a fall festival, complete with game booths and rides, open to the community. The Chemistry Club set up a booth that would teach kids how to make green slime. Jason volunteered to work the booth while wearing a Scooby-Doo costume.
“Come over, kids, come on by,” Jason shouted from beneath the giant Scooby-Doo head. “Learn how to make slime!” And Jason slipped a handful of candy to every kid that came by.
“He was always throwing in humor for the kids and trying to make things fun for them,” Stacie said. “He wanted to show them that science doesn’t have to be serious all the time. Like, ‘Look, we’re having a great time and we’re doing science! It doesn’t have to be scary.’ “
It was the same thing a month later when Stacie organized a promotional event at the San Bernardino County Museum. Kids could come by and learn how to conduct a series of chemistry experiments. “And Jason loved it,” Stacie said. “He was the biggest kid of all, laughing with them and really getting into showing them what to do. He loved to help people. That’s the Jason I knew.”
In the beginning, his Chem Club pals considered Jason standoffish.
“His life wasn’t an open book,” Stacie said. “He didn’t just tell you things about himself. It took a while to get to know him.”
But after seeing him with the kids, he won the Chem Club’s respect and friendship. A small group of them often hung out in a lunchroom on campus, drinking coffee, reading the paper, talking sports. Jason became one of the regulars. He was there almost every lunch, usually poring over the sports pages he loved so much. Friends thought he was a little bit obsessed with his favorite games—basketball and football. During football season, he made bets with as many of the Chemistry Club guys as would take him on. And during March Madness, when college basketball teams sweat it out for a chance at the championship title, nobody knew each university’s statistics and shots for winning better than Jason.
“He could be a little high-strung when it came to talking about sports,” Stacie said. “He could get all riled up about it. But mostly, he was a fun guy. He had friends in the club, lots of friends. If anything, when Jason was around, he just added to the good time.”
It’s an amazing admission, given all that was going on in Jason’s personal life. He could have been a miserable, bitter young man by this time. But somehow, someway, Jason pushed aside the bitterness created by living in a car and out of motels, and he simply made the most of college life. The gap between his life with Jane and his life with the rest of the world grew wider. And suddenly, he understood what it could be like to live free from the constraints of a mentally ill mother.
14
Jane refused to even look at an apartment for the entire year of 2001. Increasingly, the family slept in the car. But on the heels of 2002, as the winter nights got colder and Christmas quickly approached, Jane rented her family a low-end motel room in the city of Corona. It was so dirty, Jason thought about sleeping in his car anyway. But it was the only place Jane considered “safe for the night.”
Jason had had enough. He was miserable. And his grades, the one thing he always took pride in, plummeted from A’s to C’s. Matt wasn’t happy either, but where could he go? What could he do? Only Jason was old enough to walk away if he wanted. And finally, he decided to do just that.
“You know what?” he told her. “I think I’m going to go ahead and move out. You guys can always get your own one-bedroom apartment if you want. We could probably find two one-bedroom apartments for the same rate as one two-bedroom. But I just have to get stable. I have to get my stuff done, my schoolwork, and I can’t the way we are now.”
“You’re bluffing,” Jane responded, refusing to believe her son would actually walk out on her. “You don’t have what it takes to live on your own.”
But the next morning, he packed up his belongings from the hotel room and drove away. And when he left, it was in the Intrigue, the car his mother always drove. Still asleep inside the hotel room, it would be hours before she would realize her car was gone.
In truth, this was no spur-of-the-moment decision. Jason had been considering the move for a long time. He just needed to muster up the courage to make it happen. Then he learned that a former high school classmate taking classes at California State University-Pomona was getting his own apartment. It meant he’d be leaving his dorm room a month early, and he offered to let Jason crash there. That would give Jason time to get some cash together to rent his own place. Jason was only a few weeks away from getting another student loan check to cover the spring quarter—more than enough to put a down payment on a place.
But the next night, Jane tossed a wrench into her son’s plans for independence.
Jason was working a shift at the hotel that evening when his mother showed up at the front desk. Bracing for the embarrassing confrontation to come, he quickly escorted her outside and into the front parking lot.
Dan remembered the incident clearly. He didn’t hear the argument, but it was obvious from Jane’s mannerisms that she was not happy. “You could see her lighting into him, just screaming and yelling,” Dan said. “And he just stood there and took it…All I could figure was, this was a young man who led two lives—work and school were his escape from his home life.”
Outside, a deeply embarrassed Jason simply hung his head.
“You’re not going to do this to me,” she began. “Your father ran out on me and I’m not going to stand for it from you, too.”
As her voice grew louder, Jason tried to keep her calm. “Mom, I’m not running out. It’s just time I tried to make it on my own,” he explained.
But Jane would not be reasoned with. Instead, she looked at him, her eyes wild, her voice low, but forceful. “I made a promise to myself. I promised nobody would ever run out on me again. I won’t let that happen. You won’t treat me like your father did!”
It had been a long time since Jane had compared Jason to his father. He had committed suicide when Jason was just a toddler, but in Jane’s mind, the hurt from that tragedy was as fresh as if it had happened yesterday.
Jason looked at his mother, wild with anger, and said nothing. He knew from past experience that the more said, the more crazed she could become. But she said nothing else. Instead, she turned and walked toward the Intrigue, pulled out a set of keys, and drove it away. Jason had forgotten that there was a spare set. And now she was using it to drive the car home, leaving Jason stranded. He had known better than to take the Intrigue instead of the Accord. He was already provoking her wrath by moving out; to take the car she considered to be hers on top of everything else was asking for way too much.
Shaken, but undeterred in his decision, Jason slowly made his way back inside the hotel lobby. “Looks like I’m moving, so I’ll need a change of address form as soon as possible,” he said.
Bu
t in truth, Jason had no idea what he was going to do. He had no car. How would he make it to school when morning broke in just a few hours? Or to his friend’s dorm to change clothes, take a shower, and get some sleep, before returning for his graveyard shift that night?
By morning, Jason had managed to talk a co-worker into giving him a ride to school when their shift ended, and later, a classmate offered to give him a ride home after class. But, afraid he wouldn’t find a ride to work, he had his pal drop him off in Ontario, even though it was 3 in the afternoon and his shift didn’t start until 11 p.m. To kill time, he walked to a nearby mall and just sat, trying to figure out a plan. He couldn’t think. Exhausted, he considered calling Jane.
“I hadn’t taken a shower in two days,” Jason would later say about that afternoon in the mall. “I was dirty. I was tired. I was cold. So I gave in. I called her at that motel she was at in Corona.”
Jason wasn’t even sure if she’d still be there, but he decided that if she was, he’d give up trying to live on his own. After a few rings, Jane picked up the phone.
“Come pick me up,” he said simply.
Jane and Matt met Jason at the mall and then drove to Pomona to pick up his clothes. Along the way, Jane taunted her son about his failed stab at independence.
“I knew this would happen,” she said. “I knew you’d have to come back, because you don’t have a choice. You have nowhere else to go.”
Jason sat quietly listening to his mother gloat. But in his head, he thought, “I’ll be okay. I’ll be okay. I just want to go home, take a shower, and do whatever it takes to get through this life.”
That’s when Jason thought about it. Killing her.
It’s hard to know if he’d ever entertained the idea before. But if he had, he’d never talked about it. Now, as he sat in his beat-up Honda Accord with his little brother, he whispered the idea to Matt. “I wish she was dead,” he began.
Matt didn’t respond. He knew his brother hated his mom. Hell, they both hated her. But to wish her dead?
“Wouldn’t it be great if we got rid of Mom?” he said. “I’m just saying, you know, life would be a hell of a lot easier without her around.”
“Yeah, I know it would,” Matt chuckled, hoping to lighten the conversation. “I mean, it wouldn’t be great if she got killed or something, but yeah, it would be great if she was gone.” Then he looked away and said nothing else on the subject. Jason was just mad and blowing off steam, Matt reasoned. He’d never really hurt her. He was too much of a wuss. He couldn’t even stand up to her when she yelled at him, or that time when she’d knocked him in the head with a hockey stick. No, he wouldn’t hurt her. He didn’t have the guts.
Fortunately, life stabilized after Jason’s failed attempt to leave home. Jane regained some of her grip on sanity, even allowing the family to stay in a Corona motel for several weeks. Jason used the time to try to reason once again with Jane.
“Please,” he begged. “You’ve got to try and get us an apartment. My grades are so bad. I need to be stable. And so does Matthew. He needs to be in school and around kids his own age, can’t you see that?”
“I can’t,” she told him. “I just don’t think I can do it.”
“Yes, you can,” he persisted. “Just try. While I’m at school today, you and Matthew go look for a place to rent, okay?”
His financial aid check had finally come in, so the family now had the extra cash needed to cover a security deposit and a month’s rent. Now was the time to act, Jason told her. Jane was hesitant, but she relented. She was still scared, but even Jane was tired of running. She promised Jason she’d look.
It was never easy finding a place to live. Jane had no proof of income, because she had no job. Grandma Mae’s monthly check stubs were not enough for most landlords. Add to that Jane’s hyper-sense of distrust for almost everyone, and finding an apartment would be a huge undertaking.
But Jane actually thought she’d found a place she liked in the well-groomed, upper-middle-class town of Redlands, California. It felt safe, and, in truth, she had stumbled onto one of the safest cities in the county. While neighboring San Bernardino had to contend with rampant teenage pregnancies, poverty, meth labs, and a dozen or more murders a year, Redlands had no such problems. Year after year could pass with not a single homicide case to keep detectives busy.
Somehow, despite Jane’s sketchy background, the landlord at a well-kept apartment complex approved the family’s application on a two-bedroom place. But the approval immediately sent Jane backpedaling.
“I don’t trust it,” she said. “The manager over there is against us. We can’t take it.”
She applied to a complex in another well-to-do community in Rancho Cucamonga, located in San Bernardino County. This time, Jane’s flimsy income status wasn’t good enough and the application was rejected. Of course, Jane interpreted that to mean the obvious. She went on a rampage.
“You see! They hate us! It’s because they’re Jews and all the Jews have turned against us,” she said.
The boys thought they’d never have a home again. For weeks, Jane gave up the hunt entirely. They went back to motel living. But Jason wasn’t ready to give up. After patiently giving his mother time to cool down, he broached the subject again, this time taking a new approach.
He still hated arguing with his mother, but he had become an expert at playing off her compulsions. Education was one of them. Matt was another.
“I heard there’s a new high school opening in Riverside,” he mentioned as casually as he could. “What do you think? That might be a good place to look. Maybe Matt would like going to a brand-new school.” Then he threw in the words he knew would best play on his mom’s obsession with academics. “A new school means new books, new supplies, new everything. That could be a chance for him to get a really good education.”
Remarkably, she took Jason’s advice and resumed the hunt for a home, this time in Riverside, near the new school. It was a blistering hot summer day as Jane cruised up and down the city streets in search of a place to live. Summers in Riverside could be brutal, routinely busting the 100-degree mark. But it was one of the characteristics that made the area so affordable to live in. Riverside and San Bernardino Counties made up a dry, hot, unattractive region of California known as “the Inland Empire” because of its remote location from the beaches that make sunny Southern California such a popular place to live and play. Late summers in Riverside were the worst. With any luck, they’d find a place—preferably with airconditioning—before June disappeared.
It wasn’t long before Jane drove by a large cluster of apartments just on the outskirts of town, bordering nearby Moreno Valley. It was a bland complex, no different from any of a thousand that might be found in any place across America—just a series of huge, white stucco buildings surrounded by a maze of parking spaces. For some reason understood only by the muddled mind of Jane Bautista, this place on Alessandro Boulevard would finally be home. Once again, Jane’s application by herself was not enough to be approved. But Jason, a full-time student with proof of financial aid and regular paychecks from his part-time job, could co-sign the lease. It was enough to win approval. The boys held their breath waiting for their mom’s reaction. Would she now decide, as she had in the past, that this place was ultimately no good? But she didn’t. She held her tongue and said nothing.
Finally, after a year and a half of life on the road, in hotels, sleeping in cars, the vagabond life was over. They had an apartment. And the boys were overjoyed.
It was a good time for the Bautista family. Jane agreed that Matt could return to regular classes. By late July, she’d enrolled him in Martin Luther King High School. Come August, when the school year began, Matthew would be a sophomore at the new campus. Matt, never the best student, actually looked forward to going back to regular school, where he could be around peers again, and make friends.
For now, life had returned to normal. The boys knew it might not last long. But they coul
dn’t think about that now. Instead, they dove into the routines of adolescent life and just hoped their mother held the monsters in her mind at bay for as long as possible.
15
With home life stabilized, Jason took on more responsibility at school. He entered his junior year at California State University-San Bernardino, and officially declared biochemistry as his major. He loaded up on chemistry classes and continued volunteering with the Chemistry Club.
But the most significant change for Jason that year was his new on-campus job, which he took that September, while still maintaining his graveyard shifts at the Ontario Holiday Inn.
The school offered a computer lab set aside for the university’s School of Chemistry and Biology students. Always the computer geek, Jason spent a lot of time there anyway. Jane’s delusions of being broadcast on various websites meant she forbade her son to connect to the Internet from home. At the lab, he could surf the Net for hours if he wanted to.
Jane Bautista in her December 2000 driver’s license photo. Jane’s paranoia prevented her from appearing in many photos, so the photo from the Department of Motor Vehicles was the only picture investigators had of the victim.
(Courtesy Orange County Sheriff’s Department)
Jason Bautista in his July 1999 driver’s license photo. Jane also disliked her boys’ appearing in photos.
(Department of Motor Vehicles photo)
Pete Martinez, the security guard who broke the case open for police when he stumbled on the boys as they tried to dump Jane’s body. He’s pictured in front of his Oceanside guard shack, which sat just a few feet away from the Dumpster Jason and Matthew wanted to use to dispose of their mother’s body.
Such Good Boys: The True Story of a Mother, Two Sons and a Horrifying Murder Page 10
