“Jason, what happened?” Andre asked.
“I just had her in a bear hug,” said Jason, detailing how he had her facedown, pushing down on her neck, hard, into the carpet. “I wasn’t trying to kill her. I was just trying to hold her down so she wouldn’t hurt me.”
“Did she scream?”
“No,” Jason said. “She just said something like, ‘I’m going to get you.’ “
“Was she crying?”
“No, more like rage,” he said.
Afterward, Jason said, he’d called out to Matt, who had been in his room throughout the struggle. Matt looked at the body, checked for a pulse. When Matt found none, Jason cried.
“I told him to get in the room, don’t be in here,” Jason said. “I was just thinking, I didn’t think anybody knew about my mom.”
“We know now,” Craig said.
“I thought it was our family secret,” Jason said. “I was going to call the police.”
“Why didn’t you?” Andre asked.
“I just didn’t think people knew about my mom,” Jason said. “If I thought people knew, I would’ve called the cops right then.”
“So you thought, ‘Nobody’s going to notice that my mom’s missing’?” asked Andre. When Jason paused, Andre pushed, “Come on, be honest.”
“I mean, yeah, it wasn’t like ‘Nobody’s going to notice she’s missing,’ ” Jason said. “I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t think I could go to the police. I didn’t think the police would believe me. So I started thinking, ‘What can you do with the body?’ Like, I’m stupid. I don’t know.
“So then I was thinking about that episode I saw on The Sopranos,” he said. “They got rid of Ralphie a certain way.”
“Yeah, I saw that one,” said Andre, remembering the brutal depiction of the victim losing his head and hands to prevent identification. “We need you to tell us. How did you do it?”
“Pretty much, I took off the hands, took off the head, rolled it all up in a sleeping bag, and put it in the trunk.”
“Where are those items now?” Craig asked. “The head and hands?”
“Oh, the head and hands,” Jason said. “I still got those. They’re at my house.”
“Where in the house?” Craig pushed.
“In a bag, in a closet. In a hall closet.”
The detectives felt an electric jolt sweep through them. They’d been detectives a long time, but it all sounded so cold, so gruesome. Jason had lived in that apartment for over a week with his mother’s head and hands tucked safely away. It was beyond gross.
“Did Matt know where they’re at?”
“Yeah,” Jason said. “I told him, ‘Don’t touch any of that shit.’ I just didn’t know what to do with it.”
“Did he participate…?” Andre began.
“He didn’t participate in anything,” Jason said quickly. “He didn’t do a single thing.”
“But he knew what you were going to do to the body?” Andre asked.
“Yeah, he knew.”
“Are we going to find any information on your computer about how to kill someone, how to dismember someone, how to get rid of a body?” asked Andre, still not convinced that Jason had killed Jane on the spur of the moment, while in fear for his life.
“No, the worst thing on my computer is some porn—big deal,” he said.
“How did you know where to cut?” Andre asked.
“I just picked a spot that looked good,” he said.
“Was there a lot of blood?” Andre continued.
“My God,” Jason said. “So much. A lot splashed in the room, in the bathroom.”
“After you cut off your mom’s head and hands, did you do anything to drain off all the blood from her body?” Andre wanted to know.
“I just pushed,” Jason said. “She was facedown in the tub and I pushed on it.”
“Is the neck towards the drain?” said Andre, pushing for every detail, even though the thought of Jason smashing down on Jane’s body to drain it of fluid made him a little sick to his stomach.
“No, the neck was toward the middle of the tub. I would turn on the water and try to get some of the blood down the drain.”
“Are there hesitation marks on her neck?” Andre asked.
“Yes,” he said. “I was vomiting in there, so I stopped to vomit. Most of it ended up in the toilet.”
“So, you let the body hang over the tub until all the blood kind of drained out?” said Spencer.
“Yeah.”
He told them about the drive to Oceanside with Matt to dump the body, about the confrontation with the security guard, and of his decision, finally, to simply dump her remains off the highway.
“I was tired,” Jason said. “I was going to just go home, leave it in the trunk and decide what to do with it later. Then, I said, ‘I might as well throw it off a cliff, because there’s nothing else I can do with it.’ “
Oddly, Jason took time to note what he had been wearing as he discarded what was left of Jane. As she went over the guard rail, the body had brushed up against Jason, leaving smears of blood all over his pants.
“Like, my favorite pair of pants,” Jason said. “They were gray. And she got all, like…her blood got all over it. I mean, my favorite pair of pants, too.”
The callousness of the statement shook both detectives. As he was discarding his mother, the loss of his favorite pants was more of a concern. But they didn’t dwell on that now. All of that would come out in trial.
“Why was she just wearing panties?” Andre asked.
“Oh, the clothes,” he said. “I thought nobody would miss her. And if we didn’t leave too much evidence, like clothes…”
“Jason,” Andre said, “what’s life been like since that night?”
“It’s been horrible,” Jason said. “I mean, she loved us, in her own weird way. She should have just stabbed me. It would’ve been better than this.”
Andre reached for a picture he was carrying of Jane. “Jason, I want to show you a picture of your mom.”
“Please don’t,” he begged. “Please don’t.”
“Hey, man, I applaud you for being honest,” said Andre, again trying to keep Jason calm. He wanted him talking as long as possible.
“But it’s not going to mean shit,” he said. “I’m going to jail. My life is ruined.”
“Jason,” said Andre, looking carefully at him. There was one more difficult question he had to ask. “Matt—is he alive?”
“Yes, Matt’s alive. I love my brother.”
“Then we need to talk to him,” Andre said.
“For sure, for sure,” Jason said.
Before detectives formally booked Jason into custody, Andre asked if he’d like to write an apology letter to his mom.
“Something from the heart,” Andre told him.
“Okay,” he said. “You know, I did love my mom. No matter how crazy she was, I loved my mom.”
Andre pulled out a sheet of paper and left Jason alone to gather his thoughts.
Mom,
Why? I love you. It didn’t have to happen. Why? You were there for me when I was a baby. Why couldn’t you just be there for us now? Our life was crazy, but I know you loved us. Why? Everything could have been perfect. I almost had my degree, Matt was going to college, we finally could have been happy. I’m not mad at you. The detectives say this isn’t the first time a family has had someone like you. We could have been a real family. Instead, everything was taken away. I didn’t mean for you to get hurt. I love you. When I think about this it makes me want to kill myself. But I can’t. I need to be there for Matt. I don’t know what good I am, though. A kid with no future. Now worthless.
With love and regret,
Jason
Jason’s confession over, there was only one thing left for the detectives to do. Call in his little brother.
As Andre and Craig had suspected, Matt was not at Disneyland. In fact, he was at the mall with a pal, getting fitted for tuxes. Mar
tin Luther King High School was about to throw their Midwinter Formal, and Matt didn’t plan on missing it. He already had a date—the girl who had given him the teddy bear. He couldn’t wait.
Matt was just wrapping up the fitting when Jason called.
“Hey, man, I need to talk to you,” he said. “Can you meet me at the Jack in the Box near the apartment?”
“Sure,” he said. “When?”
“Now, as soon as you can get there,” Jason told him. In truth, Jason hoped that Matt had already gotten his earlier message and would never make the meeting in the parking lot of the restaurant. But even if he did, Jason fully intended to take all of the blame. Either way, Matt should be safe, he told himself. He had to be.
21
Detective Brian Sutten stood outside the small two-bedroom apartment that had belonged to the dead woman. Andre had just called with the grisly news—the torso’s missing body parts were inside. Brian got word to drive to the house as soon as Andre and Craig wrapped their first interview with Jason. At that time, Jason had given away nothing. But he was nervous. Good enough reason to make a search of the house. For all they knew, more bodies were stashed away in there.
The apartment complex’s manager let Brian and his team inside. They quickly ran through each room, hoping not to find more mutilated corpses. The search only took a minute. After all, the apartment was pratically bare. Aside from a cheap couch, some plastic lawn chairs, and a couple of mattresses and televisions, just nothing. Not even a refrigerator. Thankfully, they found no more victims. Shortly after, Andre called back.
“Check the hall closet,” he told Brian. “That’s where he says they are.”
Brian grimaced. He wasn’t looking forward to that discovery. It took a while for a full search warrant to arrive. Only then could he lead his team back inside. Brian and Forensic Specialist Kevin Andera walked toward the hall closet and swung back the door. There, nestled between the coats and a pair of dress shoes, was a black duffel bag.
“That’s got to be it,” Brian said.
After firing off a few photos to document the discovery, Kevin reached in and pulled out the bag. He unzipped the top and pulled apart the straps to reveal bunched-up brown plastic bags, like the kind you get at the supermarket to carry groceries home. If the remains were in there, they weren’t visible yet. More odd, there was no odor. Human tissue decomposing for over a week should give off a pretty horrific smell, Kevin noted.
“Well, maybe this isn’t it,” Brian wondered aloud.
Kevin reached inside and pulled out the bags. Nothing inside. He pulled more out, still empty. But underneath, he found a black trash bag, twisted at the top. The detectives and officers scouring the scene pulled in closer as Kevin untangled the bag to reveal its contents—a pair of hands and a face partially covered by long strands of red hair.
The small collection of left-over body parts looked more like some bizarre exhibit in a wax museum. “It doesn’t even look real,” said Brian. “It’s not even decomposed.”
Kevin nodded in agreement. The whole time, he’d had an air-purifying respirator sitting next to him, ready to absorb the foul odor that the decaying remains would undoubtedly give off. But even the stench was missing.
“Well, he’s got everything wrapped up here in so many bags,” Kevin said. “I guess it preserved everything. It wasn’t exposed to any air.”
As Kevin snapped more photos, Brian pulled himself away from the surreal scene. He walked toward the kitchen, where investigators discovered a box of cheap, unused kitchen knives. The butcher knife and scissors were missing from the set. They were set apart, in an empty kitchen drawer.
In the bathroom, another investigator covered the walls, floor, sink, and tub in Luco Crystal Violet—a chemical that reacts with even the smallest droplets of blood to turn purple. Despite Jason’s diligent scrubbing with bleach, small violet spots still lit up the bathroom. It was the same story in the living room, underneath the white throw rug Jason had bought to cover the blood spatters that had spilled from his mother during their struggle.
With this much evidence, Brian thought, Jason and Matthew would certainly be charged with first-degree murder. If they ever saw the light of day again, they would be very lucky indeed.
It was early evening by the time Matt pulled into the fast food restaurant’s parking lot to meet his brother. He was only 15, too young to qualify for a California driver’s license, but he was behind the wheel of that ratty Honda Accord Wagon anyway. Now that Jason had sole access to the Oldsmobile, he had given Matthew permission to drive, Jane no longer being there to cart him around.
“That’s him,” Jason told detectives as he sat in the back of an unmarked police cruiser. “In the Honda, that’s Matt.”
Matt parked and began walking toward Jason, but he didn’t get very far. A pair of investigators greeted him instead. Matt said nothing as they identified themselves. Wordlessly, the young suspect followed them to their car so he could be driven to the Orange County Sheriff’s Department. If he’d gotten Jason’s earlier warning message, he never mentioned it. But he certainly didn’t need to ask what was happening. He knew.
“Now what?” Jason asked investigators as they made the drive back to sheriff’s headquarters. “What happens now? Because Matt had nothing to do with this. I did everything. I just don’t want him running from you guys. This was all me.”
Investigators didn’t know whether to believe Jason just yet. But it didn’t matter, anyway. According to California law, it didn’t matter which one had reached out to strangle Jane. It didn’t matter who’d wielded the knife to do the slicing. If Matt had helped with the planning and cover-up, he was just as responsible.
Back at the station, Matt spun his own set of lies for Craig and Andre.
“My mom’s in Belize,” he told them. “That’s where her boyfriend lives. I’ve never met him. It’s just some guy she met off the Internet.”
This time, the investigators were less tolerant of the tall tales. They knew too much now, so they could jump right to the point.
“Matt, Jason already told us everything, so there’s no point in lying,” Andre said. “What we need from you is the truth.”
Confronted with his brother’s confession, Matt gave up. There was no use in trying to cover up for a brother who’d already divulged so much. So he told them, “Yes, he killed her. But I wasn’t there when it happened.”
The detectives didn’t believe Matt, and told him they thought the two had planned her death together.
Matt acknowledged that Jane’s behavior had bothered them and that sometimes they’d joke that “she’d have to die or something.” But he never meant it. “I’m not a killer,” he said.
Matt recounted how the last fight had broken out. He was so tired of listening to the constant bickering that he’d left, intent on taking a walk until everyone calmed down.
“I came home about thirty minutes later and Jason just told me to go to her room and not come out until he said it was okay,” Matt said. “So I did.”
On the way, Matt said, he’d noticed the blood spots on the floor, but he didn’t ask questions. As Matt watched TV in Jane’s room much later, Jason had come to him, looking disheveled, and ordered him to “help dump something,” he said.
“And you never asked what that something was?”
“No, I never asked.”
Both detectives were still suspicious of Matt’s story. First, it differed from Jason’s version. Second, it’s hard to believe he’d see the blood and not even ask what had happened to his mom. He wasn’t even curious where Jane was.
Matt said he’d suspected it was his mother’s body getting dumped that night. But it wasn’t until the next day that Jason finally told him Jane was dead. And Matt claimed he didn’t call the police out of fear.
“I didn’t know if what happened to her would happen to me,” Matt said. “I didn’t think he’d kill her, but he did. What’s to stop him from killing me?”
“So you were too scared to call the police?” Andre asked.
“Yeah, I was,” said Matt.
It was hard to get much out of Matt. He spoke in two-to three-word sentences. But mostly, it was odd to watch the teenager talk so coldly about his mom’s slaying. He never cried, never got upset, spoke mostly in a monotone. He could have been talking about last night’s homework assignment for all the emotion he showed, Andre thought.
“Did you know her head and hands were in the closet?” Andre asked.
“Yeah, I knew.”
“Didn’t that bother you?”
“No, I just blocked it out.”
“But you had friends over, right? What did you tell them?”
“I just told them to stay out of the closet,” Matt said.
Again, the investigators were shocked by the callousness of his answers. With that kind of coldness, it was clear—maybe he hadn’t physically laid his hands on Jane and strangled her to death, as Jason had, but he didn’t mind that the job had been done.
“Did she ever hurt you, Matt?” Andre asked.
“Yeah, she hit me a couple of times, but Jason took most of it,” Matt said. “It’s because she hated his dad.”
“Are you sad she’s gone?” Andre asked.
“Yeah, I am,” he said, before adding, “I loved her. But she deserved it.”
The detectives had one more idea before booking the boys. They led Matt into an empty room and sat him there, alone, for several minutes. Then, in walked Jason. The brothers looked at each other in surprise. Jason caught on immediately. He quickly walked over to his little brother and dipped low, whispering into his ear.
The detectives looking on from behind a mirrored window had to give the boy credit. “He knows we’re taping them,” Andre said. “I’m sure he just told Matthew as much.”
There was an awkward pause before Jason broke the silence.
“Hey, man, I love you,” he told Matt. “And I’m going to take all of this.”
“I’m going to go to jail, Jason,” Matt said flatly. “I can’t believe I’m going to jail.”
Such Good Boys: The True Story of a Mother, Two Sons and a Horrifying Murder Page 15
