Sixteen

Even before Jeremy Barron went to where his mother was, his remains followed almost the same path as Irene. That is, they went to the Coroner’s Office at 44 R Street, where, by the luck of the draw, the pathologist assigned to the case was none other than Dr. Gregory Schmunk.

In retrospect it appears that if Schmunk was genuinely baffled by Irene’s death, he was even more so by Jeremy’s. He began the autopsy of the three-foot-tall, 45-pound, four-year-old at 20 minutes after eight the day after Jeremy died.

First Schmunk inspected the body. He noted a purplish-red mottling along the right portion of the face, along with a single petechial hemorrhage in Jeremy’s lower right eyelid.

Once again, Schmunk began the gruesome process of dismantling a human body—in this case, that of a four-year-old boy.

By the time it was over, Schmunk was where he had been with Irene Barron—stumped.

Looking back, based on interviews with a variety of officials of the Sacramento County Coroner’s Office, the Sheriff’s Department, and the Paget family, it appears that Schmunk’s bafflement was in large part due to his belief that there had to be some discernible natural or man-made illness that had caused the deaths of both Irene and Jeremy Barron.

It does not appear that Schmunk ever entertained any suspicions that Jeremy’s death might be other than by natural causes. Unlike the case of Irene, no police agency was even notified of Jeremy’s demise, although the case was briefly discussed at the county’s multi-agency Child Death Review Committee. That committee included a representative from the Sheriff’s Department and was chaired by Deputy District Attorney Robin Shakely, who was normally attached to that office’s homicide unit.

In an interview years later, Shakely said she could recall that Jeremy’s case was discussed at the committee, along with the information that Irene had died the year before. But it was her recollection that there was no indication of foul play, and that Schmunk was of the opinion that the cause of both deaths would be found to be natural, if only he could find the key.

To that end, Schmunk requested that a Coroner’s deputy obtain all the over-the-counter and other medications present in the Southbreeze house for testing. He also obtained all of Jeremy’s previous medical records in the hope that something, somewhere, would give him an idea of what to look for. Thus, Schmunk set off in search of a medical mystery, a search that was to last until well into the month of August of 1993.

With the death of Jeremy and the now-familiar lack of information about what might have caused it, the Pagets began to wonder whether they themselves were at risk from some hitherto undiagnosed malady. With first Irene dead, and now Jeremy, the lack of any clarity as to what had caused either of them to die had thrust all of the Pagets into a nightmarish world of all possibilities—made by far the worse by the fact that no one seemed to be able to say where the doctors should start looking.

By the late summer of 1993, after Schmunk issued his latest “undetermined” report on Jeremy’s death, the Paget family decided to subject itself to medical testing. In New Jersey, Debra Harris put herself through a stress test for her heart to see if there were any abnormalities; there was nothing wrong. Both Jack and Norma Paget wore heart monitors for 24 hours. Norma’s heart was fine, but Jack Paget’s test indicated there might be some problem. But after further testing, it appeared that Jack Paget was completely normal as well.

Meanwhile, the Barron family pediatrician, Dr. William Coop, had already decided to begin some special testing on Ashley Barron. From his own review of his records on Jeremy, Coop could not identify a single possible cause for Jeremy’s death; to Coop, Jeremy was a completely healthy, normal four-year-old boy. But the deaths of Irene and Jeremy prompted special caution in the case of Ashley.

Coop began with a test for sleep apnea—a phenomenon in which a person’s breathing might suddenly stop during sleep.

Coop thought that if either Irene or Jeremy had suffered from sleep apnea, there might be a hereditary cause that had escaped Schmunk’s detection. One way to verify that hypothesis was to subject three-year-old Ashley to a test called a sleep apnea oximetry screen. The idea was to measure the amount of oxygen taken in by Ashley during the course of breathing.

Based on the results of this screening, a second, more definitive test, a polysomnogram, was scheduled. This involved a sort of harness wrapped around Ashley’s upper torso, which in turn was wired to sensors designed to detect Ashley’s breathing characteristics—how often, how deep, how shallow, that sort of thing. The idea was to monitor Ashley while she was both asleep and awake to see whether there was any evidence of severe breathing disruptions during sleep. The information was recorded on a computer disk.

The overnight test was conducted on May 25, 1993, and the disk was then sent to a company in Cincinnati for processing. The following month, a pediatric neurologist, Dr. Carter Mosher, interpreted the results of the test.

To Mosher, it appeared that Ashley had experienced “abnormal overnight polysomnograms showing an apnea index of eight mainly due to central type apneas,” or so he indicated in his written report to Coop.

Translated, this meant that Ashley was indeed experiencing periodic interruptions of her breathing while asleep.

Coop was unconvinced, particularly when Mosher acknowledged that he was not that familiar with the somnogram test, and particularly with tests involving children as young as Ashley.

Coop now took Ashley’s test results and showed them to a pulmonary specialist, Dr. Albin Leon. Leon looked at the test results and opined that they were within normal limits. But, said Leon, one of the problems with the test was that it was not designed for use with small children—primarily because the harness was too loose. That in turn might mean there were false positives.

Following this test, another of Coop’s colleagues at the hospital outfitted Ashley with a 24-hour heart monitor, similar to those worn by Jack and Norma Paget. This device was intended to record Ashley’s heartbeat to see if there were any heart irregularities.

Coop tried to impress on Jack, he said later, the importance of getting Ashley to wear the heart halter for a long enough period to obtain results. But the test never was performed adequately, because Ashley didn’t like wearing the halter. According to Coop, he tried to convince Jack to make Ashley complete the test, but he failed. Jack told Coop, Coop said later, that he was too busy.

Throughout that summer of testing for Ashley and the Pagets, both Roberta Butler’s and Jack and Norma’s anxiety about Ashley’s health rose dramatically.

Outwardly, Ashley appeared to be a normal, healthy three-year-old. John Paget recalled her as a particularly outgoing and happy child.

Often Jack would take Ashley for extended visits to Roberta’s or Jack and Norma’s. Both sides of the family watched Ashley carefully for any sign of illness. Other than the normal colds and fevers experienced by any three-year-old, Ashley seemed perfectly healthy.

“We watched that girl like a hawk,” Jack Paget was to say later, particularly when she was in bed.

Just what Ashley must have made of the traumatic events that had accompanied her first three years of existence is hard to say. Neither she nor Jack talked very much of Irene or Jeremy, at least while they were around the elder Pagets. Once, when looking at family photographs, Ashley saw a picture of Irene.

“Is that my mommy?” she asked. So dim was Ashley’s memory of her mother that she wasn’t sure. It was enough to make Norma’s heart break.

As the summer of 1993 turned into the fall, and still no definitive answers about the deaths of Irene and Jeremy were forthcoming, John Paget and his sister Debra were in contact with one another.

Each had on different occasions pressed the Coroner’s Office for Jeremy’s autopsy report, only to be told that the analysis was still underway. But after Schmunk ruled Jeremy’s death “undetermined” in August, John and his sister had a talk. For the first time each considered the possibility that maybe, just maybe, their brother-in-law was behind the deaths somehow.

Even considering the possibility of Jack’s involvement seemed bizarre. But then, the circumstances of the deaths were bizarre.

Besides, they thought, how well did they really know Jack, anyway?

Debra Paget-Harris’ husband Mike was a police officer in New Jersey. Certainly Mike Harris was aware that sometimes people did things their relatives could not bring themselves to believe.

John, Debra, and Mike tossed around the possibility of Jack’s involvement, but realized they had nothing to go on—and, after all, if Jack had murdered (there it was, the word was finally out) Irene and Jeremy, he hadn’t left a single clue as to how he had done it, at least according to Schmunk.