Twenty-six

Whether it was because of Reiber’s conclusion that homicide could not be excluded as the cause of Ashley’s death, or because of Prodan’s interest in the case, or Deputy District Attorney Shakely’s pot-stirring, or for some other reason, by early December of 1994 the wheels of the Sacramento Sheriff’s Department finally began to turn in the Barron matter.

Shakely had given the Barron files to her boss, John O’Mara, the District Attorney’s top homicide prosecutor, and asked what he thought.

“She asked me what I think and I said it looks like he’s killing these people,” O’Mara later told the Sacramento Bee.

O’Mara called the Sheriff’s Department homicide unit, and asked the supervisor there, Lt. Gabriele Bender, to assign two investigators to the case. But the two investigators O’Mara requested were unavailable.

Meanwhile, as a result of a reorganization in the Sheriff’s Department, the investigation of suspected child homicide cases involving family members was transferred from the homicide unit to the child abuse unit. As a result, and likely due to Shakely and O’Mara’s prodding, the three files involving Irene, Jeremy, and Ashley, which primarily consisted of the autopsy reports, the initial police “casualty” reports, the photographs taken of Irene on the bed, and the scene diagram from Ashley’s death, were routed to child abuse unit supervisor Lt. Lena Maddux.

Maddux looked over the files, which were, after all, pretty skimpy. In early January she called in one of her investigators, Maryl Lee Cranford, and gave her the three files.

“I have this case from homicide,” Maddux told Cranford. “There are three deaths, all a year apart. There’s no cause of death. The Coroner’s Office couldn’t say they were homicides, just that it looks suspicious. See what you can do with this.”

Cranford was 42 years old and a veteran detective. She had joined the Sacramento Sheriff’s Department in the early 1970s as the result of a dare.

Like the Pagets, Cranford had grown up as the child of an Air Force serviceman, who had been stationed at McClellan Air Force Base near Sacramento. In one of the many coincidences that kept cropping up in the Barron case, it’s quite likely that Cranford’s father at one time might have crossed paths in the Air Force with Jack Paget; both were stationed during the same years at McChord Air Force Base in Tacoma, Washington.

After graduating from high school in Sacramento in 1970, Cranford had gone to work as a restaurant hostess, then a clerk in a flooring company. In early 1972 she obtained a job as a clerk-typist for the California Highway Patrol. It was Cranford’s job to key in stolen vehicle reports. She had no real interest in law enforcement at the time; it was just another job.

“I was a hippie girl,” she recalled.

At the end of 1972, the Sacramento Sheriff’s Department advertised for female deputy applicants. Today, it’s difficult to recall the days when women in law enforcement were regarded as something of a bold experiment, but that’s how things were in the early 1970s. Two of Cranford’s coworkers at the Highway Patrol saw the advertisement and decided to apply. The 20-year-old Cranford said she would too.

When Cranford’s friends laughed at her—because of her hippie girl image—“They couldn’t see me as a cop,” Cranford said—Cranford made up her mind to not only take the tests, but to best her co-workers in the competition.

All three women took the written test. Cranford passed, and one of the two co-workers flunked.

“Right after the written test we were escorted to the gymnasium for the physical test,” Cranford said. There were ten stations, including pull-up bars, an obstacle course, and the like. Cranford ran through the physical test with ease, leaving her remaining co-worker gasping in her wake.

“I was in very good physical condition,” Cranford said. What the co-workers didn’t know about the hippie girl was that she’d been a competitive swimmer for 13 years, and probably could have beaten most men around the course.

Afterward, when Cranford was assigned a date for the oral examination, she began to realize what she’d gotten herself into.

“I thought, no way, I don’t want to be a cop,” she recalled. But then, she thought, she’d come this far, she might as well take the oral exam.

Cranford passed that test as well, and was told to report to the training academy in February of 1973. At the beginning of the training, Cranford still had her doubts about being a police officer, but after 240 hours of training, the doubts were dispelled—especially since, of all those who had entered the training, only 20, including Cranford, were graduated.

It was only at that point that someone in the Sheriff’s Department realized that Maryl was only 20 years old—a year short of the requirement to obtain a police certificate. As a result, Cranford had to work the front desk at the Sheriff’s Department until August, when she finally turned 21.

But the department had special plans for Cranford.

“I could pass for 15 at the time,” she recalled, and she still had her hippie girl look. The department’s vice unit recruited Cranford to work undercover.

The main target at the time was massage parlors, which had just come into vogue as a prostitution venue. The hippie girl Cranford would go into massage parlors looking for work as a masseuse. The operator of the massage parlor would tell Cranford how the operation worked; meanwhile, another, male, vice officer, would pose as a customer, and reach an agreement with one of the real prostitutes. That way, the vice unit had evidence against both the prostitute as well as the promoter of prostitution.

Altogether, Cranford worked four years as an undercover officer, handling prostitution, drugs, gambling, and other vice and organized crime cases. In the late seventies and early eighties, Cranford worked as a special investigator for the Sacramento District Attorney’s Office, in courthouse and airport security, and as a corrections officer in the jail. It was not until the late 1980s that Cranford worked as a regular, uniformed patrol officer; that lasted three years, until she injured her knee jumping over a fence trying to catch a fleeing burglar.

After the knee injury, Cranford took the test for detective, and passed. Her first assignment was in sex crimes and elder abuse—“granny bashing,” as the cops called it. In July of 1992, one month after Irene Barron’s death, Cranford was assigned to the department’s child abuse unit.

The child abuse unit dealt primarily with crimes against children—often, crimes committed by their parents or other caregivers, generally involving neglect or abuse.

Shortly after joining the unit, Cranford was assigned three cases in a row in which a child had died from parental abuse or neglect.

“The first one was horrendous,” she recalled. “The child’s life prior to her death was horrifying.”

The conditions of the child’s life before her sad end appalled Cranford, who by then had her own children. Cranford took the case personally, which she later came to see as a mistake.

“When you have an innocent little child who can’t protect herself, that’s when it gets to you,” she said. “[But] you have to be a professional. You can’t cry, you can’t do that. I was never able to grieve that first one, and then came the other two right after. I kind of shut down. I started having problems. I went to a psychologist for two months, then things started getting better. It still hurt, but I managed to control it.”

Still, in her 20-year career as a cop, Cranford found the child abuse investigation unit by far the most satisfying. She recalled a case in which she took an eight-year-old girl into protective custody because of neglect by the mother.

“All she had eaten for months was noodles. She was so malnourished her hair had died,” Cranford remembered. “It was dead and broken.”

As Cranford put the child in the back seat of her car and started to drive away, she heard the child say, “Thank you.” Cranford stopped the car and looked at the eight-year-old in the back seat.

“What?” Cranford asked.

“Thank you,” the little girl said again.

“Then she sighed,” Cranford recalled. “She said, ‘I needed to be away.’”

Cranford took the Barron files and read them. This was, she understood, to be extra work over and above her normal caseload.

“I read the whole case,” Cranford said. “I thought to myself, this is bizarre. There are three victims, and all of them die on Sunday, the seventh of the month? I really felt it was a homicide, but without the [Coroner’s Office] reporting a manner of death, we couldn’t say for sure what it was.”

Cranford next consulted with Guillot and Reiber. She wondered whether some sort of delayed-action poisoning might be involved.

“I started exploring the possibility of arsenic, because they don’t test for arsenic,” she said. “But they [the Coroner’s Office] didn’t think arsenic could be involved, because there was no burning of the stomach lining.”

Cranford talked to Rick Lauther and Bob Reisdorph, the detectives who had originally handled Irene’s case.

Lauther continued to believe that Irene’s death was from some sort of natural cause.

“He felt Jack was sincerely and appropriately upset,” Cranford said. “He was crying. Rick really felt he didn’t do it.”

At that point, Cranford didn’t know what to think. She made a list of things to check about Jack. At the top of her list was a planned telephone call to Roberta Butler.