Twenty-seven

The city of Benicia is one of the best-kept secrets in California. A small town of about 20,000 people on the north side of the Carquinez Strait, about 40 minutes northeast of Oakland, it was and remains one of California’s most historic cities.

Named for the wife of the Mariano Vallejo, the last Spanish commandante in Alta California, and later one of the Bear Flag revolutionaries who helped overthrow the Mexican government in 1846, General Vallejo formed a real estate partnership with the American consul, Thomas O. Larkin and a third man, Robert Semple, to found the new town on a wide bench that ran down beneath a line of rolling hills to a point dipping into the strait.

With the coming of the Gold Rush, Benicia soon developed into an important intermediate stop on the way to the goldfields. By 1849, the U.S. Army had sited an important installation, the Benicia Barracks, just to the east of the town. A few years later, the Barracks was renamed the Benicia Arsenal, and the facility became the repository for much of the Army’s supplies of shot and powder in the Far West. In the same year, a large, two-story brick building in downtown Benicia was donated to the state, and the building became, for more than a year, the state capitol building. Today it stands as a state historical monument, replete with the desks used by legislators, their newspapers, and their hats, just as if they’d recently adjourned to their after-hours haunt at the Solano Hotel, at First and E Streets, seven years before the Civil War.

Much of old Benicia, including the old Arsenal, is likewise dotted with similar historic structures, including a guardhouse completed in 1852, where a then-obscure U.S. Army lieutenant named Ulysses S. Grant was once tried for a violation of a minor Army regulation. Others who passed through old Benicia in its earliest days included Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Johann Sutter, William T. Sherman, and an uncounted number of governors, senators, clergymen and educators. In early 1861, the first Pony Express pouch was delivered to Benicia en route from St. Joseph, Missouri to San Francisco.

Altogether, there are more than 40 historic sites scattered around the town, most dating from the mid-nineteenth century; as a result, not unexpectedly, old Benicia in recent years has developed as a center for tourism, buttressed by restaurants, art galleries, and antique shops, along with two marinas.

Until the 1960s, Benicia’s economy was largely tied to the Arsenal and the military activities there; but in 1964, the Arsenal was closed, and an attempt was made to transform the old military grounds into an industrial park. That effort, coupled with a demand for Bay Area housing in the 1970s and 1980s, resulted in development of the hills north of the old town. By the eighties, Benicia’s population had doubled, with most of the new arrivals finding homes in the Southampton development separated from the older part of town by a new freeway.

Even with the growth, Benicia retained the small-town quality that made most of its residents feel secure, the sort of place where most people knew their neighbors, and where the most pressing issue might be the action of the planning commission approving a new convenience store. Altogether, it was not the sort of place one might expect to find a possible serial killer.

By January, as the rains began to come down in earnest, Jack had been living at his mother’s condo for about two months. It wasn’t long before frictions began to develop between Jack, Roberta’s boyfriend, Tim O’Keefe, and Roberta.

Jack’s relationship with Tim had always been difficult. Some who knew Roberta and Tim thought it was because Roberta consistently made Jack the center of her life; while that might have worked when Jack was living with his own family in Sacramento, it was quite a different matter when Jack was directly underfoot.

Tim naturally felt deposed as the object of Roberta’s affections; and Jack’s personality—his fits of temper and sarcasm, his demands on Roberta—grated on Tim. Eventually the situation escalated into a dispute between Tim and Roberta, and as a result, Tim moved out.

Meanwhile, Jack had to decide what to do with the rest of his life, now that he was no longer working. Now that he no longer had a family to support, it seemed a good time to change directions.

Jack learned about an opening with Amtrak as an assistant conductor. This seemed to be ideal—if he could get this job, he could at last find work he would really enjoy doing. Roberta, as devout as ever, prayed every night with her Rosary, imploring God that Jack should be hired, and that something good could finally come into her only son’s life.

As for the deaths of Irene, Jeremy, and Ashley, Roberta was outwardly quick to bristle if anyone suggested that Jack had done anything untoward. Once, Dave Bednarczyk recalled, when he asked Roberta whether she suspected Jack of having anything to do with the deaths, Roberta turned on him.

“She cursed at me,” Bednarczyk told the Sacramento Bee newspaper. “She said, ‘You’re supposed to be his friend.’”

Co-workers at the Safeway store on Military Road in Benicia, where Roberta worked as a produce clerk, soon learned not to make any suggestion that the deaths of Jack’s family were anything other than an inexplicable tragedy.

“She was in denial,” one of Roberta’s co-workers recalled later. “She couldn’t believe that her precious son would ever have done anything like that. Especially since Roberta lived for Jack.”

In the Safeway employees’ monthly newsletter, Roberta wrote about the deaths.

“Most of you know,” she wrote, “about my personal losses in the last five years; of course, the worst were losing my two grandchildren. It was the fondest dream to give them the time and opportunities I couldn’t give my son as he was growing up. That won’t happen now, but from it all I have learned how much people care.”

But privately, inside it may have been a different story.

Later, Bea Kennedy, who was perhaps Roberta’s best friend in Benicia, believed that Roberta had doubts about her son as early as the death of Jeremy.

“After Irene, she was in shock,” Bea recalled. “She kept saying it was genetic. But after Jeremy, she was disturbed, and while she still kept saying it had to be genetic, it was more like she was giving him the benefit of the doubt.

“We had one conversation, where she said, ‘I don’t know what’s going on, but this is not right, first Irene, and now Jeremy.’”

But after Ashley’s death, Roberta grew even more disturbed. Beset with inner turmoil, as Bea recalled it, Roberta struggled with tormenting suspicions about Jack.

“In her inner feelings, she doubted this, that this could be true,” Bea recalled, “that [it] could actually have happened.” But in Roberta’s mind, the nagging suspicions continued to grow.

Then on January 25, 1995, the death certificate on Ashley was finally filed, listing Reiber’s findings: “Undetermined; homicidal violence cannot be excluded.”

Now Roberta had seen something to validate her worst fears.

From that point on, Bea Kennedy came to believe, Roberta was burdened by the worst emotional conflict a mother can endure: the instinctive knowledge that her only son might be a monster who had killed his own children, her only grandchildren.