Twenty-five

Throughout the fall of 1994, John Paget and his sister Debra Harris discussed whether they should confide their suspicions about Jack to their parents, Jack and Norma Paget.

“Debra and I specifically discussed,” John recalled, “what should we tell Mom and Dad. And because we didn’t have any proof, and we hadn’t received anything from the authorities to give us any indication that this was the direction things were heading, we thought it was premature. We were afraid to start pointing fingers too publicly and to cause my parents undue [stress], if that’s what it turned out to be.”

But the subject of murder couldn’t be contained forever.

“At Christmastime, we were in Arcadia at my father’s sister’s home,” John recalled. “And my mother asked me a question, point-blank.”

“John,” Norma told her son, “I’ve been talking to some people, and everyone we talk to always asks the question—if it’s possible that Jack had anything to do with this.”

John realized he was going to have to tell his parents what he and Debra had been thinking and discussing, and what they had been doing in relaying information to the Coroner’s Office.

“Well, I have some thoughts on that subject,” John told Norma. “Let’s get Dad in here. I need to talk to you.”

John felt unsure how Jack and Norma were going to take the news that the deaths might have been caused by their son-in-law.

“But the way she asked the question,” John recalled, “gave me some confidence that they were going to accept the possibility okay. Of course, my sister Debra wasn’t there to share in this with me. She’s in New Jersey, and I’m thinking, well, I’m just going to have to do this on my own, and I think that it’s time they find out.”

Jack Paget came into the room, along with his sister, John’s aunt, who knew what John and Debra had been thinking.

“Debbie and I have for some time felt that Jack is responsible for these deaths,” John told his parents. “We think that he killed all three of them.”

To John’s surprise, neither his mother nor his father was shocked at this suggestion. Instead they wanted to know how long John had been thinking this way.

“Since Ashley, anyway,” John said. “Since Ashley’s death. We weren’t certain before Ashley, we had toyed with the thought about it, but we didn’t want to bring our suspicions to you, because we didn’t want to cause you any undue upset.”

“Well, other people have been telling us this,” Norma said, “and we just didn’t—”

Jack Paget broke in.

“People have talked to us about this,” he said, “but I just didn’t think Jack was smart enough. I never thought Jack was smart enough to commit murder and cover it up so the authorities couldn’t detect it.”

John led his mother and father through the reasoning that led to the consideration that Jack might be a murderer the lack of any medical evidence to show how the three Barrons had died, Jack’s new “roommate” so soon after Irene’s death, his unemotional behavior at the funerals of Jeremy and Ashley, the convenience of the double plot, the coincidence of Ashley’s death on Jack’s father’s birthday, the seeming fascination with Wynonna Judd.

“Remember how Jack acted at each one of the funerals?” John asked, but Jack Paget seemed to shrug this off.

“Everybody handles death differently,” Jack Paget observed. “I just thought with his Catholic upbringing and his involvement with the Church, that he just looked at death as the best thing that can happen to you, you know, you’re going on to better and bigger things.”

“Well, that’s true,” John said, “everybody does handle death a little bit differently. But I found it totally bizarre that there was almost this party atmosphere every time one of these circumstances occurred and the family would gather together, and everybody had their arms around Jack and gave him all this attention.”

When all the Pagets discussed this further, they agreed that, no matter what had happened, Jack Barron had always been the center of everyone’s attention.

That, some later thought, might in fact have been one of the main motives in the deaths of all three Barrons: that Jack was a glutton for sympathy.

Although as a phenomenon, it hasn’t received nearly the attention of such child death mysteries as SIDS, it is a demonstrable fact that a significant portion of child deaths and injuries are caused by parents who seek attention for themselves through the ailments of their children.

This is known as Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy—after Baron Karl Friederich Hieronymus Freihess von Munchausen, an eighteenth century German nobleman and war hero, who gained an unwanted notoriety when a writer, one Rudolph Raste, wrote a number of outrageous lies about Munchausen’s exploits, and then had the diabolical idea of putting them in Munchausen’s own mouth, making them seem as though Munchausen himself was claiming the ludicrously incredible exploits.

Because the tales were so outrageous and patently unbelievable, poor Baron Munchausen was soon believed to be a pathological prevaricator, and his name became virtually synonymous with inveterate, compulsive lying.

Drawing on this theme, in 1951 a physician named Richard Asher invented the term “Munchausen Syndrome” to describe patients who made up stories about nonexistent illnesses and who subjected themselves to unneeded and often painful medical procedures, primarily as a means of getting attention from others, usually doctors.

Twenty-five years later, an English pediatrician, a man named Meadow, extended Asher’s concept by coining the term, “Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy,” when he investigated the cases of a number of epileptic patients whose mothers had fabricated their children’s symptoms.

Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy is not a form of insanity; in other words, the person knows that what they are doing is wrong, and is capable of recognizing the harmful nature of their acts, and is able to take steps to evade detection.

Rather, it is a character disorder—something akin to antisocial behavior, and rooted in excessive narcissism, or overweening love of self.

When in the grip of this syndrome, a person assumes the role of the patient indirectly, and either fakes or causes injuries to another person, usually a child, in order to gain attention for themselves.

While most often appearing in the form of imaginary ills, it is not unknown for parents afflicted with Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy to provide their children with real illness by inducing seizures, bleeding, poisoning, and even suffocation.

While the number of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy cases has never been quantified, most experts believe they are more common than previously believed, and that they are underreported because of their hidden, criminal origins.

Most of the known cases of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy that have been reported in the United States have involved mothers with children under the age of six; one notorious case in New York State resulted in a mother eventually being accused and convicted of the pillow suffocation murders of all of her children, one after another, shortly after birth, over a period of years, all for the sympathy and attention she received from friends and relatives after each death.

But despite the predominance of such cases among women, they are not unknown among men. According to Dr. Marc Feldman, vice-chair of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and a nationally recognized expert on Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, the character disorder has also been known among men.

Feldman estimated that perhaps has many as 15 or 20 cases of Munchausen by Proxy cases involving men as the perpetrators have been documented in medical literature, including one rather famous Israeli case in which the perpetrator first put sedatives in his wife’s coffee, then injected her with gasoline while she was passed out. The wife died, and the perpetrator was left with two young children to care for. A nanny was hired to assist, and the man eventually proposed marriage to the nanny, only to be rejected.

The man then put sedatives in the nanny’s coffee and injected her with gasoline; this woman survived, although she was rendered a paraplegic. Once convicted, the man fell in love with his male prison cellmate, and having been rejected by him, injected him with turpentine, resulting in his death. Throughout all these deaths, the perpetrator played the role as the loving, put-upon caregiver, even though he was secretly the cause of all the deaths and illness.

Other cases involving men are known to the Federal Bureau of Investigation as well, according to Feldman, including one case in which a man was secretly videotaped by a hidden hospital camera trying to smother his child by forcing her face into the mattress.

“These are people who almost invariably have severe personality disorders,” Feldman observed, “longterm, dysfunctional ways of dealing with life in general and stress in particular; they are usually needy, impulsive, and exercise poor judgement.”

In most cases of Munchausen by Proxy, Feldman said, one of the primary motives is to build the self-esteem of the perpetrator.

“In some ways it’s an exaggeration of the maternal role,” he observed. “By making a child somewhat ill, they can then become the exaggerated, indefatigable, beleaguered caregiver.”

Taking on that role brings the perpetrator all the attention they seek for themselves, and shifts attention away from their precipitating actions. In situations where the precipitating action proves fatal, Feldman noted, in some cases the perpetrator gets his or her reward at the funeral.

“These people are funeral junkies,” he said.

Well, did this apply to Jack Barron? If he had killed, first his wife Irene, then his children, Jeremy and Ashley, was it because he was at his best when everyone else felt sorry for him?

Even as the Pagets were considering what might have driven Jack to murder his own family, another psychological expert was pondering the same question, and coming up with a different answer.

Mike Prodan of the California Department of Justice, a psychological profiler trained by the FBI, had accepted Supervising Coroner Bowers’ request for an evaluation of the Barron case.

Prodan was in his mid-forties, after having spent over 20 years as a street cop and special agent for the California Department of Justice. In the mid-1980s he was one of 34 state and local law enforcement officers nationwide to be given special training by the FBI in the art of psychological profiling. Beginning in the late eighties, Prodan had handled about 100 cases a year, many involving serial offenders and, often, horrific homicides.

But for almost all of those cases, one important thing was already known: that murder had definitely been committed. In the case of the Barrons, Prodan didn’t even have that. Instead, it was almost the reverse of the usual situation. Where in most cases, Prodan had a known crime to work with and was seeking a possible suspect, in the Barron case, it was the possible suspect who was known and the crime that needed to be determined.

To that end, Prodan’s first task was to do what the Sheriff’s Department and the Coroner’s Office hadn’t yet been able to accomplish: determine the likelihood that murder had taken place.

This was called an “equivocal death analysis,” in which Prodan was required to weigh all the factors with an eye toward deciding which was most likely: natural death, suicide, or homicide. An important part of making that determination would have to be provided by Jack himself, as the most logical suspect. In other words, if Prodan could determine a reasonable motive for Jack to have committed multiple murder, then he could begin to sort out the possibilities between illness, suicide and homicide.

At least in the initial stages, Prodan considered Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy as a possibility, but soon discounted it.

For one thing, the official American Psychiatric Association diagnostic criteria for Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy specified that there should be no “external incentives,” such as financial gain, for the perpetrator. In Jack’s case, there were such possible incentives: the life insurance on Irene, Jeremy, and Ashley. Altogether, by the fall of 1994, Jack had collected nearly $41,000 in benefits from the deaths of his wife and children.

Moreover, the pattern of the Barron deaths did not fit the typical Munchausen profile; in other words, there was no history of long-running health issues involving each of the victims, histories in which Jack would have cast himself as the heroic and long-suffering caregiver. Indeed, the Barrons were reasonably healthy one day and dead the next.

Prodan was much more intrigued about the sevens and the Sundays. Drawing upon information provided by Guillot, gleaned by conversations with Debra Harris and others, Prodan began constructing a psychological assessment of Jack. The key, Prodan believed, was Jack’s unsatisfying relationship with his father, Elmore. There was something there, Prodan’s instincts told him, that may have led Jack to kill his own family.