Chapter 81: Death in the Family-The Barron Family Murders

0:00 Hi guys. I'm Courtney and I'm Lisa, and welcome to the next chapter in the Book of the Dead. Brought to you by Dark Cast Network INSIE Podcasts with a Twist. Are you drawn to the dark? Do you find yourself enticed in the forbidden and ominous? Join me, Steph as I explore all things menacing and malevolent. In my podcast, Sinister Story Hour, I discuss true stories of cults and crimes with the occasional urban legend. I also dedicate episodes to missing persons in the United States and you could be the missing link to provide information and clues that will help to bring them home. Join me every week for a new story. Come on in, sit down, and get ready because it's story time. Hello, Hello, Welcome to the next chapter in the Book of the Den. For today's case, we're going to look at a supposed case of fictitious disorder imposts on another previously known as Munchausen syndrome by proxy. And I say supposed because while many refer to this case as the first case of FDIA involving a man, I couldn't actually find

1:34 proof of his diagnosis. It seems like it's more like a theory that people heard and ran with it. So before we begin, I'm going to tell you a little bit more about FDIA and you can decide for yourself whether the perpetrators suffered from this. According to medline plus, it is a mental illness and a form of child abuse where the caretaker of a child build primarily the mother, either makes up ailments or causes real symptoms to make it look like the child is sick. The victim is usually a child, but can be an elderly parent, someone with a disability, or even pets. They can go to extreme links to take an illness, from something as innocuous as heating a thermometer to simulate a fever, to drugging the victim to induce vomiting or cause diarrhea, and there have even been cases where intravenous lines were infected to make the victim sick. There was actually a viral video going around of another mother who had killed her son by sodium poisoning, and she was caught on video injecting salt into her son's IV at the hospital when doctors told her that her son was improving and would be allowed to go home soon. Often this goes undiagnosed because the parent will bring the victim to different doctors and hospitals to avoid suspicion, and usually the drug driving force behind Munchausen's is the craving of the attention that comes with having a critically sick child, obviously, the most

3:07 famous case in recent years being Deeedy and Gypsy Rose Blanchard. However, this is not usually something that's seen in men. According to a report written for the Department of Pediatrics and Child held at Saint James's University Hospital in Leeds, which was written by Professor Sir Roy Meadow, quote published reports on Munchausen Syndrome by proxy or a fictitious illness abuse, emphasized that the perpetrator is nearly always the child's mother. It is very rare for the father to be actively involved in the abuse. Now, Professor Meadow did a study on fifteen families where the fathers, the victims and the situations were studied to find the commonalities between them, and twelve of the fifteen families studied all presented attention seeking behavior, while the other three had financial motives attached. Now, in nine of the families, the child in these cases had quote incurred false seizures or apnea together with smothering. They would be brought to the hospital where the husband would claim they found the child not breathing or seizing or turning blue quote. The father was the person who witnessed the events or was present at their start. Commonly, the father was involved in resuscitation procedures which he recounted with avid detail.

4:26 Professor Meadows goes on to say that most of the stories told to healthcare professionals were most likely false, and four of the fathers were caught smothering their children in the hospital to simulate apnea. Now, what's important to point out is that most of the cases of this disorder involved numerous doctors and hospital visits and many invasive and unnecessary treatments and procedures imposed in the children, which is not present in this case, and neither is the father recounting tales of resuscitation and trying to save the family members. Now you will see that the motive behind these murders is the same as the ones in this study, which is attention.

5:08 And now that you have a background, we can dive into the Barn family murders. Jack Barn was born on October twenty first, nineteen sixty one, to Elmore and Roberta Barn in Castro Valley, California. According to the novel Dying for Daddy by Carlton Smith, Roberta was described as being raised devoutly Catholic and very strong willed, as well as stern her parenting when Jack rebelled against her wishes. As Roberta grew older, she also became very superstitious and believed heavily in astrology. And Elmore wasn't home munch He worked very long hours as a railway engineer. So Jack spent most of his time with his mother, and as a result of this they had a very close relationship, and Jack was considered a mama's boy. Roberta and Elmore themselves had a tumultuous relationship as a result of an alleged affair Elmore was having, and Jack, according to an article for the Sacramento Be claimed to grow to hate his father.

6:10 Quote, Yeah, he's a classic jerk. My mom was a typical doting housewife and he had a lobido problem. He screwed up. I made several attempts to kind of rekindle the father son relationship but it was fruitless. Their lack of relationship could also stem from the fact that Elmore would frequently say that he was sterile and that Jack was not his son, which Roberta vehemently denied and I'm inclined to agree. Because Roberta got pregnant with Jack as a teenager, they got married very young. They were eighteen and nineteen or nineteen and twenty when they got married, so it seems like this was an accidental team pregnancy and not a result of promiscuity on Roberta's part. But either way, they never went through with a praternity test to see if Jack was really Elmore.

7:00 It's pretty widely accepted that Elmore is Jack's father now. When Jack was a teenager, Roberta and Elmore divorced, and Roberta would get custody of Jack. They moved to Sacramento, and to make ends meet, she started working at a local grocery store, where she met a man named Bob Butler, who she would eventually marry. According to medium dot com, the new family moved to Puora Costa, where Jack finished high school and went on to work on the railways, just like his father. He did this for a while until an injury caused him to resign in nineteen eighty six again according to Medium, and he started working in retail. This is when he would meet Irene Paget. Irene was born in Reno, Nevada on July eighteenth, nineteen fifty seven, to Jack and Norma Paget. She was the youngest of four children, and she grew up traveling around with her family and spending much of her childhood in Germany as her father was in the Air Force. Her brother John described Irene as loving and caring, very sweet, and very beautiful, according to Dying for Daddy. John also said that she wasn't always the smartest person in the room, but she loved fiercely. When Irene was a teenager, Jack retired from the Air Force and the family settled in Fallbrook, California.

8:16 It seemed that in Fallbrook, Irene thrived. She loved spending time outdoors and with the family's various animals, and Irene wasn't all that interested in school, but she participated in marching band and even went on to become Miss Fulbrook, which got her a lot of attention from the boys in the area. And Irene was just as interested in them. According to John, Irene wanted to be just like their mother. She wanted to be a wife and a mom, and after graduation, she married her high school boyfriend Keith. However, the marriage would crumble in nineteen eighty five, and Irene was devastated. John said, quote, having been raised in a family where you married once for life and you stick it out through thick and things, and I think Irene was somewhat embarrassed and guilt ridden that the marriage didn't work. In nineteen eighty six, when she was twenty eight, tired of Fallbrook, Irene and her best friend, Denise Eickmeyer decided they would move to Sacramento. Coincidentally, Irene had a friend from school named Patty that lived in the area who was married to a man named Dave Benarzak, and Dave happened to be a close friend of Jack's, so close in fact, that Jack referred to Dave as his brother. One day in nineteen eighty six, Denise and Irene went to visit with Patty and Dave, and Patty introduced them to Jack, who was four years younger than Irene. Irene and Jack hid it off immediately. He was head over heels, and she was just as smitten, which apparently Denise found to be a little odd because Jack was so much younger and definitely immature,

9:50 but he put Irene on a pedestal from the get go. Soon enough, Jack was spending half the week at Denise and Irene's apartment. In nineteen eighty seven, Irene and Jack found out that they were expecting a baby, so they decide to get married. This would be the first time that Irene's family would have the opportunity to meet him, and they had some reservations. Jack was clearly very immature and he wasn't particularly handsome, at least according to John, but Irene clearly loved him, so they welcomed him into the family, and Jack put on a great show of being welcoming to Irene's family and was very gregarious and happy. Roberta, Jack's mother, who had divorced her second husband by this point, seemed to love Irene, although according to Dying for Daddy, Roberta it seemed had a hard time letting go of her son.

10:41 But Irene really likes her mother in law, and any issues she may have had she let go. And when I say issues, I don't mean anything bad. It just seems that Roberta didn't always think before she did something to help them out, Like she came in and rearranged all of their furniture when Irene and Jack weren't home. That's annoying, but hardly worth giving her the Worst in Law of the Year award. On January eighth, nineteen eighty eight, Jack and Irene welcome a little boy into the world, who they named Jeremy John barn The new family also purchased a three bedroom home in Sacramento on South Breeze Drive, which, to be quite honest, no one knew how they were able to afford it. Jack worked overnight at a supermarket, and it seems that at this time Irene herself was not working at all. She had left her job as a receptionist. So the speculation is that Roberta helped them buy the house. Around this time, though, is when people started to observe some strange behavior coming from Jack. He had started to become very controlling. He wanted Irene to dress and look a certain way, and he was very particular about his appearance and the state of their home. He wanted his home and his children to be spotless, and Irene spent a lot of time cleaning. Jack even carried around a wet washcloth in a bag when they went out and traveled so that he can clean off his face and make sure he wasn't sweating. He was constantly preening in the mirror and messing with his

12:11 hair, very very conscious of his appearance. Jack had also started showing a side of himself that Irene and her family hadn't been privy to. Jack had a very bad temper now. It seems as if he was not violent at this time, but he would get incredibly angry about countless things if they weren't to his standards. It also seemed that Jack wanted to prove he was just as good a husband, if not better than anyone else. It was alleged that the only reason they got the house they did was because he wanted to show Denise, whose fiance had bought them a home, that he could provide for Irene too, just as well as Denise's husband. On March twenty eighth, nineteen ninety, Jack and Irene welcomed a little girl they named Ashley Ann, and Irene was over then she had everything she had ever wanted to be a wife and a mother to two beautiful babies, but money was tight, so to try and help make ends meet, she opened up her own little home daycare and watched the children in the neighborhood to make extra money, and things were fine for a while. Irene was content with her life, even though Jack could be a bit overbearing, and she had a strong support system in her parents, who moved closer to spend time with their grandchildren, and Roberta, who dodd on the children and came over frequently, bringing groceries and cleaning and helping out. However, things would start to change in May of nineteen ninety two, when Irene confided in Denise that she believed that Jack was

13:43 having an affair. According to Denise, Jack had gone away for the weekend on a trip with some coworkers who were just as interested in trains as he was, and when I say interested in trains, I mean borderline obsessed. According to Dying for Daddy, when he and Irene had lived with Denise for a while while the spare bedroom in their home was filled with model trains and trained memorabilia, but one of these trained enthusiasts on the trip was a woman now. Irene had asked Jack for a number that she could call to get in contact with him while he was away, and he said no, he would call her now. Denise did not believe he was cheating on Irene, and when Irene confided in her mother in law, Roberta, agreed that it was suspicious, but insisted that Jack would never do what his father had done.

14:26 Soon after this, Jack and Irene went on a trip to Lake Tahoe with Patty and Dave, and Irene said she did confront Jack about her suspicions, but Jack assured her it wasn't true and he was faithful to her. Irene and Jack came back from the trip happy, and it would seem that all was well again with the Baron family until June eighth of nineteen ninety two, which would be the start of devastating events that would occur in this little family. On Monday, June eighth, a woman named Christine Hamilton came by the Baron's home and around seven am to drop off her daughter for daycare before work. She had been bringing her daughter for quite some time and she and Irene had a good relationship. Irene was very dependable and Christine knew that her daughter was in good hands when she was at the baron's on this day, though, when Christine knocked on the door, no one answered, so she knocked again after Irene still did not come to the door. Christine was frustrated because Irene was always there it was a work week, but not having time to worry about it, she brought her daughter to another neighbor's home so she could go to work. However, Christine could not shake the feeling that something was wrong. It was so unlike Irene to not communicate with her if she couldn't watch her daughter, so moments after getting to work, Christine left and went back to the baron's household. Christine walked around the house when she still couldn't get Irene to answer the door, when she spotted Jeremy, who was three at this point, and was able to coax him into opening the back

15:58 door. When she asked Jeremy, mommy was he said that he couldn't wake her up, so Christine went into the bedroom. According to the Sacramento Bee, Christine found Irene on her back, dressed in a rope and slippers, with a pillow over her face. Christine removed the pillow and found makeup smudges on it. According to Dying for Daddy, there was also a small amount of blood on her face. Christine called nine one one and the operator instructed her to perform CPR and Irene, but when she touched her, Christine knew that it was too late. Irene was cold to the touch and rigor had already been set. Police arrived at the Baron home and they were confused. There were no signs of forced entry, no signs of robbery, and there were no marks on Irene's body to indicate that she had been violently attacked.

16:41 Soon after police arrived, at around nine thirty in the morning, Jack arrived home from work and was told that his wife was gone. According to the Sacramento Bee, Sergeant Joe Dene said that Jack was appropriately grief stricken upon being told his wife had died, and he told police that his thirty four year old didn't have any underlying health conditions, but in recent days she had had a cold and complained of headaches. She had allegedly also slurred her speech at least once the jacket recall. Jack told police that Irene was alive the night before when he went to work and that he had been there all evening. Police called his boss and he confirmed that Jack was at the store that night for his entire shift. An autopsy was conducted and the pathologist who conducted it, Greg Schmunk, said that there was not enough physical evidence to indicate that her death was the result of a homicide. However, he did find evidence of hemorrhaging on her eyelids, her face, her neck, her thyroid cartilage, her larynx, and inside her mouth. There was also a bruising present on her right arm and leg. In case who haven't listened to our coverage of Cayla Siego's death, these injuries are called strangulation injuries, and they are used to indicate that the person who has these injuries has been asphyxiated. So, looking at it now after the fact, knowing this information, the fact that the pathologists saw these injuries and didn't believe there was sufficient evidence to rule at minimum that her death was suspicious is baffling. Yes, strangulation injuries are

18:11 not necessarily automatic proof of intentional violence that can happen during consensual sex or even be sports related, but it's hard to rationalize the idea that he didn't think it was suspicious. In response to his findings, Greg told the Sacramento Bee quote, just because there was a pillow over the face doesn't mean anything, and the autopsy findings were not specific. In regards to the pillow. Police believed Irene may have used it to cover her face to try and block the light out during the onset of a headache, which I will admit is a valid thought process. It was ultimately determined that Irene had died on the seventh, which was a Sunday, and that her death was most likely the result of natural causes. It was theorized that she had had a headache when to lie down and just simply never woke up. After Irene's death, the community rallied to support Jack and help him through this terrible time. He was brought food, people sent him money to help care for the children. He received fifteen thousand dollars in life insurance money, and community members even got him in contact with his favorite singer. Went on a judd to try and live to spirits. However, people weren't exactly thrilled to see that. A month after Irene's death, a new woman by the name of Starla Hayes was moving into Jack's home with her two children. Interestingly enough, Starla was the woman that Irene believed Jack was having an affair with. Of course, Jack said that they weren't dating and that she was having marital problems and just needed a place to stay. But a letter was discovered sometime after Irene's funeral that she had

19:45 written to Jack that indicated that he really did want to end their marriage. A portion of the letter, which was printed in the La Times, said quote, I'm really sorry you're unhappy right now. I have a hard time believing the only reason for this is my ability to keep the house exactly the way you like it. You obviously don't want to talk to me about it, and that really scares me. It really upsets me when I hear you talk about divorce. I can't believe you are really serious about that. If you are, then you have had me and everyone fooled for a long time. It's interesting that Jack was allegedly talking about divorce at all, because he had allegedly told a friend who had been going through a rough divorce years prior, that he himself would just get rid of her instead of going through divorce proceedings. Now, the Sacramento Bee actually published the whole letter, which is in the source notes, and given the circumstances, it's just really sad to read. It's clear that she really loved Jack and just wanted to work things out with him. Now things were not great. Soon after, Jack had Starla move in, and this stems from the arguments that he and Starla were having, as well as the way Jack was speaking to his children. According to multiple sources, Starla claimed that on one occasion, little Jeremy, who was only four at this point, was crying for his mother and Jack said something to the effect of, if you don't shut up, I'll send you to where mommy is. Starlow moved out sometime after this, and Jack hired a babysitter to care for his children while he went to work. On February seventh, nineteen ninety three, just shy of one year after Irene's death,

21:18 Jack came home from working the night shift and went to bed. A little while later, the babysitter he had hired went to go wake up Ashley and Jeremy to get them ready for the day. When she found Jeremy on responsive in his bed. The babysitter ran to Jack and woke him up and begged him to perform CPR, but according to the La Times, Jack said, quote, don't bother. It's too late anyway. According to the Sacramento Bee, Jeremy was brought to Kaiser Medical Center and Greg Schmunk again performed the autopsy. He did allegedly check for genetic abnormalities that could have possibly been the cause of Irene and Jeremy's sudden deaths, but he did not find anything. Ultimately, six months later, he ruled a dea is undetermined. Police were also not notified of Jeremy's death, according to that same article. Now, I will say that a forensic pathology expert from Dallas named Linda Norton told the Sacramento Bee that quote, in the absence of other findings in a case involving a child over six months of age with no history of illness, suffocation is the logical conclusion. Except Greg disagreed with this. The deputy coroner said there was no reason to alert the police because outside of a healthy four year old dying suddenly, there was quote nothing suspicious about his death. Now, a panel did review the report regarding Jeremy's death, and they said that nothing suspicious jumps out at them. They agreed it was unusual for a mother and young boy to die with an ear of each other, but it wasn't suspicious. And again, I understand that this is the nineties and things were different, Like,

22:51 I get it, But at this point, you're telling me that no one thought it was worth looking into when a healthy four year old and his equally healthy thirty four year old mother died within months of each other, Like, no one thought that this warranted some sort of investigation. I will say though, that at least according to Dying for Daddy, it seems as if Greg Schmunk was determined to find a natural cause for Irene in Jeremy's deaths. He wasn't just saying, oh, it's undetermined, I don't know what it is and that's the end of it. He was really digging to try and find a cause. You know, maybe he wasn't denial and didn't want to believe that it was murder. I don't know, but I don't think it was because he didn't want to do his job that he was ignoring these signs that were pointing to murder. I think he really believed that he was going to find a genetic reason. There's also the fact that Greg admittedly had nothing to go off of at the time, like a different coroner did, which we'll talk about it a little bit. It was his interpretation that led him to the conclusion that it was likely not a homicide at least in the case of Irene and Jeremy. Once again, the community rallies around poor Jack Barron, who has now suffered two devastating losses. He gets another insurance policy, and the president of Wenona Judd's fan club arranges for tickets for Jack and Ashley to attend her concert and they get to meet her. However, friends and relatives observed some strange behavior from Jack after Jeremy's death. Jack had been overheard saying that Jeremy was better off as he was with his mother, and Jack

24:22 had even sold all of his son's toys and clothing in a garage sale. It was as if Jeremy didn't exist, and neither did Irene, as Jeremy had replaced all the pictures of Irene in the house with pictures of himself with Winona Judd. Additionally, according to the Sacramento Bee, John Paget, Irene's brother, observed that Jack didn't seem all that upset over the loss of his son. John said quote, he didn't seem to have a grasp on the trauma that the rest of us in the family were experiencing. He was at times almost euphoric with the attention he was getting with their deaths. According to medium dot Com, Ashley's pediatrician at this point is very worried that there was underlying condition that caused Jeremy and Irene's deaths, so he ordered tests to be run on Ashley and discovered that she was experiencing bouts of sleep apnea and recommended she wear a heart monitor. However, Ashley didn't want to wear it.

25:12 She is four years old at this point and just the little girl. She doesn't want to wear this, and Jack allegedly didn't make her wear it. He also allegedly refused to take her to any follow up appointments regarding the sleep apnea. After Jeremy's death, Jack hires a new babysitter by the name of Jill Presley to watch Ashley at night while he went to work. Jill had worked in a nursing home and at an acute care facility, so she was certified in CPR and could help if anything were to happen with Ashley. So it seemed as if Jack was taking a precaution and making sure that someone that knew CPR would be at his home while he was at work in order to protect his daughter. According to the Sacramento Bee, on August sixth, nineteen ninety four, Jill arrives at the Baron home in the evening to watch Ashley while Jack was at work. She knocked on the door before he had to leave, and she said that Jack told her he had already checked on Ashley and she was asleep in bed. After spending the day with Roberta playing the couple of Little Girls that lived near her home. Around ten thirty pm, Jack gave Jill a glass of iced tea and reminded Jill that she was to stay awake and keep an eye on Ashley. Then he left to go to work and Jill sat down to watch some TV. Around midnight, so it is now August seventh, Jill checked on Ashley and saw that she was curled up under the covers and facing the wall. Jill then fell asleep herself, and woke up at around four am. She went to check on Ashley and found her lying on her back in bed with the covers off. Jill approached Ashley and touched her stomach and immediately ran to call nine one one. Ashley's

26:45 skin was cold and hard to the touch. The little girl was gone. The dispatcher instructed Jill to perform CPR, but rigor mortis had already set in and there was nothing Jill, who was completely distraught, could do now. When aunties arrived, they believed that Ashley had been deceased about four hours before she was found, just based on the lividity present on her body. They transported her to Kaiser Hospital, where a nurse named Cindy Hayhurst determined that something terrible had happened in the baron household, and she called the coroner's deputy, Billy Giliacht, and informed him that a third baron had died and she believed it was murder. According to the Sacramento Bee, When the paramedics arrived, they called in patrol deputies to inform them that Ashley had died, but there were no obvious signs of foul play present. The deputies requested a crime scene investigator to photograph the scene, and the coroner's office called homicide detective Paul sprites Heer to alert him of the death. Now, Ashley's death after the autopsy was also deemed to be undetermined. However, this time a caveat resided that said, quote, homicidal violence cannot be excluded. Bob Bauers, Sacramento's deputy coroner, called a meeting with the DA and sheriff's officials outlining his suspicions about the Baron deaths. He said, quote, we felt we had developed information that clearly pointed to Jack Baron as the suspect. John O'Mara, the homicide chief, after reviewing all of the autopsy reports, agreed that it certainly looked

28:15 as if Jack Baron had killed his family. An investigation was launched, but police really didn't have anything to go off of other than speculation because there were no clear signs of foul play in Irene or her children's death, and I mean no signs of foul play. Ashley's autopsy was clear, she had no evidence of patikia anywhere on her body at all. Full toxicology reports were done, genetic testing everything came back negative. However, it did not help Jack's case when police allegedly spoke to people at his job and learned that Jack seemed to be missing between the hours of midnight and forbe on the day that Ashley died. It was also learned that coincidentally, all three members of the Baron family had died on the seventh of the month, which happened to be a Sunday. This is strange enough, but even stranger when you take into consideration that Elmore Baron, Jack's father, was born on a Sunday, the seventh of August in nineteen thirty eight. In fact, the person that pointed this fact out was Roberta, who realized that Ashley had died on her ex husband's birthday. This is actually what I meant earlier about greg Schmunk not having anything to go off of. Gregory Rybert, the pathologist who performed Ashley's autopsy, was aware of Irene and Jeremy's deaths and had noticed the pattern of the seventh of the month, so he was already suspicious going into the autopsy. Meanwhile, Jack is not exactly acting like a grieving father who had lost his wife and two children within two years of each other. At Ashley's funeral, he

29:51 bragged about how Winona Judd had sent flowers when she heard of Ashley's death and how they were such good friends. He even wore a shirt at the funeral that said wise guy on it, as in Winona's Guy. It was very strange. Jack also decided at this time that he was going to sell his home. He claimed this was due to painful memory, so he sold the house on South Breeze Drive, getting a very good price for it on top of the thirteen k he received an insurance money for Ashley's death, packed up his belongings, and moved in with Roberta in Benizia, California. Now we're going to detour away from the case for a second to address what I said about this being a supposed case of Munchausen syndrome by proxy and how I didn't believe this accurately described Jack Baron, who at this point may or may not be guilty. According to Dying for Daddy, The deputy coroner had requested Mike Proden, who worked for the California Department of Justice and was an FBI trained profiler, to go over the Baron case. He was asked to give his expert opinion on whether or not the Baron deaths were due to natural causes, suicide or homicide. So he did what is called an equivocal death analysis, which is a exactly what I just described. He needed to come up with a reasonable motive if it was murder, as to why Jack would want to kill his family. Now, Proden did consider Munchausen's at first. However, he quickly dismissed this based on the financial gain that Jack benefited from in the form of life insurance policies and money from friends and family, as well as

31:22 the fact that there were no stories of any of the Barons suffering from any sort of mysterious ailment for a long period of time. They were fine one minute and gone the next. The only thing that suggested Munchausen's at all was the fact that Jack seemed to thrive on the attention. Proden ultimately determined that while Jack liked the attention and the monetary gain, given that Irene, Jeremy, and Ashley all died on a Sunday on the seventh of the month, Proden believed that Jack's real motive was a deep rooted issue with his father abandoning him as a child. So this investigation is going on and police are still trying to figure out how Jack killed his family because they have no concrete evidence to prove murder, let alone that Jack was responsible. Meanwhile, Jack is living with his mother and her boyfriend, Tim o'keith, and Tim is not happy. He doesn't watch Jack there. Roberta is babying her son, and he has enough of it, so he leaves sometime in January or early February of nineteen ninety five. And I will say, while Tim may have believed that Roberta was coddling her adult son, it seems as if Roberta was really wrestling with the fact that Jack may have been responsible for the deaths of his family, while it was clear she believed he had nothing to do with it.

32:37 In the beginning. Roberta seemed to change a lot after Ashley's death and became very withdrawn. She had also started fighting with Jack. Jack had left Lucky's when he sold his home and started working on a railroad behind the scenes, and he was supposed to be paying rent and helping out around the house, neither of which he was doing. As a result of their fighting and Roberta's alleged growing concerns that Jack had killed his family. Things would come to a head on Sunday, February twenty sixth, nineteen ninety five. Now, no one knows what really happened, but it speculated that Roberta confronted Jack about whether or not he was responsible for what happened to his family, based on what Roberta's friend, Carol Moreno, had been told when she visited Roberta right before her death. Carol also said that Roberta was going to tell Jack that he had to move out either way. On February twenty seventh, nineteen ninety five, Jack called the police and reported that he had found his mother deceased in her bedroom. Now, when police arrived, they called the Solano County Coroner, Bill Loveless, and he did not like what he was hearing.

33:47 Roberta had been found lying across her bed, her clothing in disarray, and rigor mortis had already fully set, meaning Roberta had been dead for at least a full day before Jack called police. Addition, it was reported by the Sacramento Bee that Jack was very nonchalant about his mother's death, claiming that Roberta and he had spoken on the phone the night before, and that she was complaining of a headache. Bill Lovelace conducted the autopsy and was finally able to do what no one else had the proof to when it came to Irene and her children. He deemed Roberta Butler's death a homicide after finding abrasions on her nose, a cut on her lip, and hamorrhaging around her lungs in the base of her skull. After this determination, Irene's death was reviewed by the Sacramento County Coroner's Office and, based on the similarities in Roberta's autopsy report, ruled Irene's death as a homicide as well, the manner being traumatic asphyxiation, and they theorized that the bruising found on her arm and leg was from someone, most likely Jack, leaning on her and suffocating her with the Pillow.

34:55 Police during this time, we're looking into an alibi for Jack and learned while Jack claimed he was at work during Roberta's determined time of death, which was sometime on the twenty fifth, that wasn't exactly true. He claimed to have been working from five am on. However, his one of two co workers said that he didn't remember seeing Jack after twelve pm, and Roberta's neighbor claimed to see Jack outside of Roberta's home at around twelve thirty and again at two pm, so police believed he possibly killed his mother before leaving for work. Left work in Oakland and drove back to Benicia to see if anyone had discovered his mother's body before leaving and returning to Oakland to go back to work.

35:39 Police also spoke to Jill Presley again, who told police about the iced tea, and his old coworkers told them how he had been missing for a number of hours when Ashley died as well. Police theorized that Jack put something into Jill's iced tea and left work after he knew she would be asleep to come home and kill Ashley. They thought after Ashley was gone, he went back to work and pretended he had been there all along when Jill called him after discovering Ashley's body. Five months after Roberta's murder, Jack was arrested on July seventeenth of nineteen ninety five for the murders of Irene Jeremy and Ashley Barron. Coincidentally, this was also the day that Irene would have turned thirty eight years old. Solano County decided to wait to prosecute him for the murder of his fifty two year old mother until after he had been tried for his wife and children's deaths Now During the very lengthy trial, the cause of death for at least Ashley was suggested by Jack's defense team to be the result of a hereditary condition called long que tea syndrome, which causes the heart to beat erratically and can even make it stop. They believe that Irene possibly had this condition.

36:49 They also said her death could have been attributed to another condition called ventricular fibrillation, but it seemed as if Ashley's blood and tissue samples had gone missing and they couldn't test her for these conditions. They also couldn't test the pillow case from Irene's murder because that had gone missing as well. The prosecution claimed that it didn't matter if the evidence was missing or not because the technology to test for these conditions was too new and unreliable. The trial didn't actually start until four and a half years later in two thousand, with the defense arguing that Jack's family died of natural causes, and he was the victim of a very unfortunate situation and a witch hunt, whereas the prosecution was arguing that Jack killed his family to get out of the marriage he didn't want to be in, and to get rid of the children he did not want, as well as to gain sympathy from his community. The reason, or at least one of the reasons that the trial took so long to start, was over this issue about what evidence would be admissible, and also because Jack's original attorney actually quit because Jack couldn't afford his services. Ultimately, after a lengthy trial, Jack was found guilty of the murder of Irene and Jeremy barn and of his mother, ROBERTA. Butler. He was acquitted in the death of his daughter because it seems as if there was enough reasonable doubt to suggest that her death was due to natural causes. Jack received three consecutive life sentences for the murders.

38:13 If you're curious about what Jack's father, Elmore, had to say about all of this, he said, according to Dying for Daddy, that if he received the death penalty, then Elmore wanted to be the ones to pull the switch. He also said that he really couldn't stand his son and had only spoken or seen him a few times in twenty years. He also said that he thought that killing his family members on the seventh was a direct call out to Elmore, because he claimed that Jack couldn't stand that Elmore's birthdays were bigger to do than Jack's were. This is a terrible story of a man who seemingly killed his family for the attention it brought him from sympathizers. Or it could be a man who, in some twisted way, was trying to get the attention of his father, who he felt abandoned him as a teenager.

39:00 In the end, he killed the people that loved him more than anything in the world, and I hope he rots for it. As for the Munchausen theory, I understand why people claim he had it, but I never thought it'd fit as a diagnosis. But I am not a doctor. Maybe there's one out there that says he does have it, and I just couldn't find that proof. Either way, I'll leave that particular detail up for you to decide. Thank you for joining me today. This was a lot of research that went into this. There's a lot of sources for you guys to look at if you're interested, not all of them. I already know we're going to fit in the source notes because I think I have close the thirty sources. There's a character limit, so I'm going to try to remember to put them on my website. But if there's anything missing and you don't see it on the website, feel free to email me DM me do anything like that and I will send you the full list of references. If I forget to put them on the website, I have to do it after the episode comes up. But again, thank you for joining me. I'm hoping Lisa we'll be back soon. I'm not going to say she's going to be back in the next one. I just hope she will. She's just been having a rough go of it, just a lot of pain related to the car accident, so the little I have to make her do I don't want to do.

40:19 So she'll be back when she feels better. But in the meantime, I hope you guys have a wonderful week and I will see you in the next chapter of the Book of the Dead. Bye, guys, thank you so much for listening to this chapter of the Book of the Dead. And don't forget that you can always connect with us on Instagram, you can connect with us on Twitter, and you can absolutely connect with us on Patreon. We also have a merch store as well that we have frequent discount codes coming out for so that you guys can get March hand drawn by myself at a better cost. We hope you have a lovely rest of your week, and just remember, please be kind and don't forget to always stay safe, stay curious, and stay vigilant. Bye guys, Bye,