Nine

His mother’s marriage to Bob Butler in 1979 resulted in more changes in Jack Barron’s life. After having lived in Suisun City, near Roberta’s mother in Fairfield, the now-expanded family moved across the Carquinez Strait to the small town of Port Costa, where the newly married Butlers managed a jewelry shop part-time. Jack, who had been attending Armijo High School in the Suisun area, now transferred to John Swett High School in Crockett, a few miles away from Port Costa.

The new school seems to have intimidated Jack. Later, his aunt, Jeanne Dillon—Roberta’s sister—recalled that Jack was a loner during his last year in high school, without any real friends. Certainly he had no girlfriends, if one didn’t count Roberta.

Still, Jack was a better-than-average student, graduating from Swett with a 3.05 grade point average in 1980. After graduation, Jack continued to live with Roberta and Bob and eventually found work in the supermarket industry, as they had.

The supermarket business was all right, but Jack still wanted to be like his own father, Elmore. Eventually, through a mutual friend of Roberta and Elmore who worked for the Union Pacific, Jack was able to get a job with the railroad as a laborer in 1984. That job lasted for almost two years, until Jack suffered a knee injury while at work. He filed a disability claim, got paid, and left the railroad in January 1986.

The following month, while visiting Dave Bednarczyk, a longtime acquaintance of Elmore and Roberta’s who lived near Mount Shasta, Jack met Irene for the first time.

Like Elmore, Dave worked for the railroad, which was how he met Elmore and Roberta in the first place. After Elmore and Roberta divorced, it appears that Dave was the closest thing to a male role model Jack had—almost a sort of older brother; in fact, Jack was in later years to refer to Dave as his brother.

In one of those twists of fate, Dave had some years earlier met and married a longtime friend of Irene Paget’s, also from Fallbrook: a woman named Patty Marlin. In February of 1986, Irene and Denise Eikmeier went to Shasta to visit Patty, and were introduced to Jack.

“They kept telling us about this guy they wanted Irene to meet,” Denise said later, speaking of Jack.

Denise remembered the weekend at Shasta fondly.

“We had a nice weekend,” she said. Jack was funny, and impressed Irene as someone who knew how to treat a lady. Denise was surprised, not only at Jack’s youth—he was four years younger than Irene—but also that Irene seemed attracted to him.

“He didn’t seem to be Irene’s type, but they hit it off real fast,” Denise said. “On the Saturday we met, I was helping Patty with the dishes, and we needed something, I forget what. Jack and Irene went to the store together, and they were gone for a long time, far longer than necessary. They were sitting in the car talking. Well, they just hit it off. He wasn’t like anyone she’d ever dated before. Usually she went for guys who were older, more sophisticated. Jack was young, immature. He wore plaid flannel shirts like he was a lumberjack.”

But Jack was eager to please Irene, and after the unhappiness with Keith, Jack’s attentions meant much to Irene.

“He put her on a pedestal,” Denise recalled. “Her exhusband didn’t do that. That’s what attracted her to him. She thought, ‘He’s so young I can mold him.’”

At this time, Jack was still living with Roberta and Bob, now in Vallejo, taking treatment for his knee injury. Soon Jack and Irene were dating, however, with Jack driving in on Fridays from Vallejo, and staying at the apartment shared by Irene and Denise until Sunday night. Over the next few weeks, Jack began spending more and more time at the apartment, arriving on Thursdays, then leaving on Mondays.

“Slowly but surely he was there full-time,” Denise remembered. The two women nicknamed Jack “Jacko,” which he hated. But they persisted, and the nickname eventually stuck.

Finally, in November of 1986, the three decided to rent a three-bedroom house in Sacramento—one room for Irene and Jack, one for Denise, and a third for Jack’s train collection. Irene, Denise and Jack flew down to San Diego, rented a trailer, and loaded up all of Irene and Denise’s worldly possessions, including Irene’s pet poodle, Suzy, for the trip north.

By any account, Jack was an avid train buff.

“He was a train fanatic,” Denise recalled. “We had to get a three-bedroom house, and one room was just for his trains. He had tall filing cabinets, and they were stuffed with some train magazine. He got two copies every month. One was never opened, just filed away. The other he’d use to tear out articles, cut out pictures, mark it up, that sort of thing. He was always buying and selling and trading model railroad cars with other collectors around the country. Some of these were worth hundreds of dollars. He had a stack of boxes, color slides of trains and cars, thousands of them; he had a bookshelf full of train books and memorabilia from trains, like a phone used on a train, or train signs. Anyway, this room had nothing but trains.”

Denise thought Jack’s obsessive fascination with railroads was a way of being close to his absent father, Elmore.

Only three months after signing a year lease on the three-bedroom house, in early 1987, Jack and Irene decided to move to Mount Shasta, to be near Jack’s friend/brother Dave, and his wife Patty. Denise was furious at being stuck with a house she couldn’t afford. She made Jack pay the entire rent until a new tenant could be found, and found her own apartment.

Denise believed that Irene agreed to the move to Shasta because Jack was lonely in Sacramento, and wanted to be near his friend Dave. Denise thought Jack was afflicted with a bad case of hero worship.

“Dave was Jack’s best friend,” Denise recalled. “Jack was like a little boy, and Dave could tell Jack to jump off a cliff, and Jack would do it. He was starving for attention, and here was this older guy who gave him all this attention. Whatever Dave said, Jack kind of went with it.”

Irene was eventually to regret the move, according to Denise. She and Dave soon entered into a battle for control of Jack’s soul.

“Irene didn’t like Patty and Dave, but she put up with them because of Jack,” Denise said. “She tolerated Dave, tried to be friendly.” But Irene, according to Denise, thought that Dave had far too much influence over Jack.

After living with Jack at Shasta from early 1987 into the spring of 1988, Irene discovered she was pregnant. That July, she and Jack decided to get married.

For the Paget family, the news of Irene’s decision to remarry was quite welcome. The whole family had felt badly for Irene when her first marriage failed, and was hopeful that this new marriage would provide her with the home and stability she longed for.

The Pagets—Jack and Norma, John and his wife, and John’s children—drove the Paget family motor home north from Fallbrook for the wedding, where they would meet Jack Barron for the first time.

“You know,” John said later, “you always have first impressions. And we stepped out of the motor home, my wife and me and my two kids, and my parents. We pull up in a motor home and we step out. And we’re greeted by Irene and this big, clumsy-looking character. And it comes in contrast with who she’d been married to before. Keith was much more slight in his build than Jack, and certainly more handsome. My first reaction to Jack was, this is just a dumb kid. What does she see in him?”

John’s first reaction to Jack was a sinking feeling that Irene had found herself tied up with someone so unsuitable. But John must have hidden his feelings well, because Jack took to the Pagets as if he’d known them all his life.

“But he was very outgoing,” John said. “And he was marrying Irene, so we’re instantly all family. And it’s hugs and kisses. He was quite gregarious, and I [said to myself] well, you know, I’ll probably learn to like this guy, he’s okay. Certainly Irene seems to be happy and that’s what counts. I never thought much more about it after that.”

What was more surprising, though, was that John was pressed into serving as Jack’s best man in the wedding ceremony. Dave had been scheduled for the job, but at the last minute the Bednarcyzks pulled out of the ceremony.

“Patty was pissed off because Irene wasn’t going to have Patty as the maid of honor,” John recalled. “Patty thought she’d be the maid of honor because she had introduced them. But Irene’s going to have her best friend be maid of honor, and that’s Denise. As I understand the story, Irene wanted Patty to be a bridesmaid, but that wasn’t good enough. They got in a huff. Next thing you know, Dave’s calling Jack, you know, I can’t be in the wedding. When I show up, I get a phone call: Can you be Jack’s best man?”

So John performed as the best man of the groom at the wedding of his little sister Irene.

Also present at the wedding, of course, was Roberta, who by then had ended her own marriage to Bob Butler. To John, Roberta seemed the completely doting mother, intensely interested in her son and his welfare. At one point, in fact, before the wedding, Roberta showed up at the house Irene and Jack were sharing while both Irene and Jack were out, and proceeded to rearrange all the living room furniture.

Irene was appalled, according to her brother.

“She told Jack something to the effect, I can’t have this, I mean this is not going to work. Your mother is not going to come over and rearrange furniture when we’re gone. So I guess at Irene’s insistence, Jack had a talk with [Roberta]. Now my recollection is, I think it happened a second time. I’m not sure whether she insisted Jack step in after the second time it happened or after the first time, but I know that at some point Irene put her foot down and said, ‘This isn’t going to happen.’ And Irene was not the kind to be that assertive, normally, so it must have really tweaked her.”

Still, it was John’s impression of his sister that she never would have confronted Roberta directly about her unthinking interference.

“I think Irene’s approach would have been to Jack, something like, ‘This is your mother, you need to handle it.’ She genuinely liked Roberta and didn’t want to have problems between them.” And Roberta appeared to like Irene as well, at least as far as John could see.

On January 8, 1989, Jeremy John Barron was born. Both Irene and Jack were thrilled, as were doting grandparents Roberta Butler and Jack and Norma Paget.

A few months after Jeremy’s birth, Jack, Irene and Jeremy moved south, back to Sacramento, where Jack found work once again in the supermarket business. Once more Denise rented a house for the three of them, and now infant Jeremy. From things Irene told her, Denise believed that the return to Sacramento was at Irene’s insistence, because she was feuding with Dave and Patty over their influence on Jack; Irene believed that Dave and Patty were trying to break up her marriage with Jack, according to Denise.

By this time, Denise had begun dating an older man, Cliff Call, who was involved in a bitterly contested divorce that also involved ownership of a business Cliff operated. Often when Cliff came to pick Denise up, he and Jack would discuss the status of the case, and Cliff would fill Jack in on the woes of the long-running litigation.

On one occasion, Cliff was about at his wit’s end.

“I told him I was fed up with all the hassles,” Cliff recalled. “He laughed and said if it was him, he’d do away with her first.” At the time, Cliff thought Jack was simply running his mouth; later, though, he wasn’t so sure.