Twenty-three

Sometime between Ashley’s funeral and the end of the month of August, Jack planted another tree. This one was next to the one commemorating Jeremy, which itself was next to the one commemorating Irene. Then he sold the house, quit his job, and made plans to go camping.

Some of Jack’s co-workers later recalled that Jack said he planned to go to Oregon to be with his brother. Since Jack had no brother, it seems likely that he was referring to Dave. After all, he had told Denise shortly after Ashley’s death that he was going to abandon the Southbreeze house and move to Klamath Falls, which was the largest town north of Shasta. It was Jack’s decision to leave Sacramento that galvanized the officials of the Coroner’s Office and led to the unsatisfactory meeting in Bowers’ office.

Jack’s decision to leave Sacramento had other consequences, as well. Roberta helped Jack prepare for the move by boxing up a number of things that had belonged to Irene. She called the Pagets, by now living in the town of Pilot Hill some 30 miles northeast of Sacramento, and Jack and Norma came in a pickup truck to pick the boxes up. Among the items was a wooden cradle Jack Paget had made for Ashley. The Pagets took the boxes home, and stored them in a pumphouse; for both grandparents, the contents of the boxes were too painful to immediately sort through.

Meanwhile, John Paget and Debra Harris continued to press the Coroner’s Office for some sort of action against their former brother-in-law.

As noted, by this time both Debra and John were convinced that Jack had wiped out his entire family. Beneath the pain from the deaths of Irene, Jeremy, and Ashley came the question of why.

Why would Jack do such a thing? There seemed to be no answer other than some sort of madness.

Both John and Debra continued to press the Coroner’s Office throughout the fall of 1994. Officials there assured John that they were keeping close tabs on Jack’s whereabouts—that they were “tailing” him—although this seems not to have been the case.

Jack had sold the house on Southbreeze Drive, collected another $13,068.61 in death benefits from Ashley’s life insurance, had loaded his van, and had then dropped from sight.

No one seemed to know where Jack had gone. And when Billy Guillot brought up the matter of Jack Barron with Sheriff’s Detective Rick Lauther one afternoon at the law enforcement firing range in Sacramento, long-dormant bad feelings immediately erupted. Lauther insisted that Jack Barron was innocent of any murder, while Billy maintained the opposite. Some thought that both investigators might come to blows, or even worse, given that both were armed.

Guillot suspected that Lauther believed he was on some sort of wild-goose chase, doubtless precipitated by Guillot’s desire to prove he was every bit as qualified as Lauther; while Guillot believed that Lauther had been too long in the job, and was suffering from terminal burnout, and therefore couldn’t see the obvious. In the end, cooler heads took control, but relations between the Sheriff’s Department and the Coroner’s Office took another turn for the worse.

By November, the profiler from the California Department of Justice, Mike Prodan, was part way into his analysis of the Barron deaths; more important, the toxicity studies on Ashley and Jeremy’s blood samples had been returned.

Despite tests for a great number of poisonous substances, including fenadryl, all had come back negative. So had bacteriological culture tests of Ashley’s blood. As with Irene and Jeremy before her, an intensive examination of Ashley’s brain and nervous system showed absolutely no abnormalities.

And at this point, the Coroner’s Office, at least, was left with the only possible choice: if all the possibilities but the impossible have been eliminated, it is the impossible that must be the truth. Hoping to get some additional support for the cause, Bowers had sent a complete package of information on the Barron deaths to the Sacramento County District Attorney’s Office, where it was routed to Deputy District Attorney Robin Shakely.

Shakely read the file and agreed that, taken together, all of the circumstances of the three Barron deaths were remarkably suspicious.

“She was sort of stirring the pot,” as Guillot put it later.

Still, the Sacramento Sheriff’s Department refused to open a case in the absence of a definitive medical finding that murder had been committed.

On November 6, 1994, Guillot took a call from Roberta Butler. Roberta wanted to know if the experts had finally been able to determine the cause of Ashley’s death. Billy told Roberta that the determination of the cause was still under investigation. Roberta then told Billy that Jack had moved in with her, at her condominium, in Benicia, California. The answer to Jack’s whereabouts was now resolved: he’d gone home to Mother.

Two weeks after this, Dr. Reiber finally wrapped up his report on the autopsy of Ashley Barron.

“Cause of death: undetermined,” Reiber wrote. He added, “Homicidal violence cannot be excluded.”