Forty

As April neared its end, John Paget remained in contact with Cranford. By now he knew of Roberta’s death, even though Jack had never told him about it.

Cranford told John about the five-and-a-half-hour interrogation, and that she, at least, believed that Jack had come near to confessing. She thought that if someone in the family could talk to Jack, could confront him, that Jack might get mad and say something incriminating.

As it happened, Jack had been calling John for several weeks, but John refused to take Jack’s telephone calls. John assumed Jack wanted him to do his income tax again, but John wouldn’t have any part of it.

“Here it was around the end of April,” John recalled, “and it was early April when he made the first contact. Since I hadn’t contacted him, he’s starting to get worried about his tax return getting done. So I think he’s probably thinking, ‘Well, John will probably put me on an extension.’ But he decides to call in early April and find out when he should send the stuff and so forth. When I got the call, I told my secretary I don’t want to take this call. I don’t want to talk to this man.

“Then he called again, a follow-up call. So I called Maryl Lee, and I said, ‘Jack’s calling about his fucking tax return. What am I supposed to do?’

“That’s when she had just finished the interrogation. And she says, ‘Well, I’d like you to call him back, if you can.’ And she says, ‘Get in his face, and try to get a confession out of him.’ And she wanted me to record the call.”

John was reluctant, mostly because by now he had a strong dislike of Jack, to put it mildly.

“But on the other hand,” John recalled, “I wanted to help any way I could to get this guy in jail. So I agreed to call him, and I did. I didn’t have recording devices. I went down to Radio Shack, and I bought a tape recorder for the telephone, but it didn’t work. I’d tried it out before I made the call, and found out it wasn’t working. So I didn’t have any confidence it would work. But time was of the essence. She [Cranford] wanted me to do this right away. So I had my secretary get on the telephone with me, because I had no idea of what I was going to say. This was all extemporaneous, off-the-cuff.”

John’s secretary, listening in, noted all of John’s remarks, but not Jack’s. Immediately after the call, John went back and tried to reconstruct Jack’s portion of the conversation. He later sent the results to Cranford.

The call began with John calling Jack back. Jack answered the phone at Roberta’s condo.

“Hello,” he said.

“Is this Jack Barron?” John asked.

“Yes.”

“This is John Paget. How are you?”

“Fine,” Jack said. “How are you?”

John felt his anger well up almost immediately.

“I’m upset with you because you call me about your fucking tax return and you don’t even call me to notify me that your mother has died?”

“Well, I’ve had a lot of things to deal with on this end,” Jack said. “But I did have a reason for not calling you.”

“I’d love to hear it,” John told him.

“Well, we’ve all been through a lot, you know,” Jack said. “And I wanted to spare everyone grief.”

“You thought you’d spare grief?”

“Yeah,” said Jack, “it’s really been tough to deal with everything that’s happened, and I’m trying to keep from falling apart.”

John could hardly believe his ears.

“Oh, you don’t want to start falling apart?” he shouted at Jack. “Well, you fell apart when you killed Irene, you son of a bitch.”

“John, I didn’t do it,” Jack said.

“I don’t believe you.”

“I swear to you,” Jack said, “I didn’t do it.”

“Four deaths in two years? You don’t act like you’ve lost your family, you don’t act like a man who’s innocent. Can you prove that you’ve been following up the deaths? What is wrong with you?”

“I don’t know what to do,” Jack said. “Everything has been so bizarre. I have been talking to the authorities, but they never tell me anything, and I know Mom called them quite a bit.”

Jack kept back the fact that the authorities had just told him they believed he killed Roberta, Irene, Jeremy, and Ashley. But John wasn’t to be put off.

“Why?” he demanded. “I want to know why you killed the closest people in your life. Who was an enemy to Irene, Jeremy, to Ashley, and your mom? Who hated them so much as to kill them?”

“I wish I could answer those questions,” Jack said, “but it wasn’t me.”

“It doesn’t appear to me or any of our family that anyone else is involved,” John told him. “People just don’t die.”

“I know there’s been a lot of innuendo lately …” Jack began.

“Innuendo! If you are innocent, why aren’t you angry as hell?” John was boiling over.

“I’m just getting extremely tired of all the fingerpointing,” Jack said.

“You’re extremely tired of it?”

“Well, I just mean that I’m trying to deal with everything.”

“You aren’t dealing with it,” John told him. “People want to know what’s going on. You have those answers.”

“No, I don’t.”

“You know, if I lost all those loved ones, the last thing on my mind would be my tax return.”

“I’ve just been trying to take care of business,” Jack said. “You know, things still have to be taken care of.”

“I had to find out about your mother’s passing from my dad, and he found out from Tim, and you didn’t even bother to call Tim.”

“I did call Tim,” Jack insisted, “and I called my cousin. I asked Nancy to go to her mother’s house and tell her in person and not on the phone.”

John asked Jack who Nancy was.

“My cousin,” Jack said. Nancy had gone to Roberta’s sister, Jeanne Dillon, and told her that Roberta was dead. Then Nancy, Jeanne, and Tim had called everyone else, “because I just couldn’t handle doing it all,” Jack said.

“And two weeks later,” said John, “you were so well-composed you call my office about your tax return? It doesn’t make any sense to me. Would this make sense to you if your sister and her family had all died? What would you be thinking?”

“Yes,” said Jack, “I know what you’re saying, and it doesn’t make sense to me either. It’s human nature to be thinking that way.”

“Do you have a cause of death from the Coroner’s Office about how your mom died?” John demanded. “How many times have you called the Benicia Police Department or the Coroner’s Office? Do you demand answers?”

“Yes,” Jack said. “They said it was suffocation. About four or five times. They won’t tell me anything. They just say they’re continuing to investigate.”

“And what do they do?”

“I don’t know what they do,” Jack said. “It’s very confusing.”

“If she suffocated, how and by whom? What do you think?”

“I don’t know, but it wasn’t me, I swear,” Jack said. “Everyone wants to think I did it, but I didn’t.”

“It’s natural to speculate,” John said. “Here is this woman and she suffocates and you were the only one to see her preceding her death.”

“I saw her the night before,” Jack said, “because I told her to unplug her phone, because I was expecting a call about work.”

Here was yet another explanation of what happened at Roberta’s condo that night. First, Solano County Deputy Coroner Loveless recorded in his notes that Jack had last had contact with Roberta about 10 P.M., “over the telephone”; then there was Jack’s statement to Benicia Detective Monty Castillo that he had actually seen Roberta when she returned from work about 10:15 to 10:20 P.M., and that he’d gotten up around midnight to go to the bathroom, and to make a call to his job; and now there was this assertion, in which Jack claimed that he’d told his mother to unplug her telephone so she wouldn’t be disturbed in case Jack’s job called him.

“What time was this?” John demanded.

“About 10:15,” Jack said. “I remember glancing at the clock.”

“P.M.?”

“Yes, P.M.”

“What time do you go to work?”

“About 5:30.”

“What time did the Coroner’s Office say she died?”

“I don’t know,” Jack said. “They won’t tell me anything. But I got home about 2:30 and that’s when everything kind of transpired.”

“What transpired? What do you mean, everything happened? Is that when you killed her?”

“No, John,” Jack said. “I didn’t kill her. Why would I do that? She was the only one who was ever there for me. After Irene and the kids died, everyone else just kind of stopped calling.”

“That’s why it’s so incredible,” John said. “Jack, I and the rest of the family were there for you—until it became absurd to be in the same camp anymore.”

“Well, yeah,” Jack said, “I can kind of understand how you might have felt, but I don’t know …”

“Neither do I,” said John. “I still don’t understand why you aren’t leading the charge! I would be so damn mad at the world I couldn’t see straight.”

Jack told John that it seemed to him that John had backed away from him, not he from John.

“That’s baloney,” John said. He reminded Jack that he’d invited Jack and the kids to be with his family on Thanksgiving after Irene died, but Jack didn’t want to do it. Besides, John said, the family had sent Jack money for the kids.

“You reach a point,” John said, “where all the evidence points to you.”

“I was working on Thanksgiving,” Jack said.

“How long do you think you can go on living like this?” John asked. “With all this on your conscience?”

“I don’t have a problem with my conscience because I didn’t do anything,” Jack said. “But things have been tough on this end.”

“Did you see the article in the paper, Jack?” John asked.

“Yes, I’ve heard about them, and I saw one,” Jack said.

“It’s in the papers all over California, and probably all over the country,” John said. “And you think I’m out of line thinking this way?”

“Well,” Jack said, “I can kind of understand how people might be suspicious.”

“I found out things after Irene died that neither of you confided in me,” John said. “You and Irene were having marital problems. Did you argue the night she died?”

“No, no, John!”

“It’s interesting to me,” John added, “that in all three cases, after each one died, you said they had a little cold, and they were taking cold medication. Maybe they all just died of colds!”

“You’re being awfully cynical,” Jack said.

“I don’t know why I’d be cynical after …”

“Yeah, but I didn’t kill Irene.”

“You know what keeps coming to my mind? How many men there are in Death Row who say, ‘I didn’t do it.’ Murderers never admit to killing. All I can say is, Jack, God help you.”

Jack said he’d been hurting.

“Well, when it comes to being hurt you aren’t alone,” John told him. “And if you did this, and I think you did, you’re the cause of this hurt.”

“I didn’t cause anyone to be hurt,” Jack said. “I’m hurting as much as anyone else.”

“Under the circumstances,” John said, “I can’t help you with your tax return. I’ll send your stuff back.”

Jack seemed irritated at this news.

“Well,” he said, “I wish you could have told me sooner, so I could have done something else.”

Now John got mad again.

“We know how important this is, that taxes are done! If I lost my wife, I wouldn’t give a damn about business. You are unique in the way you can handle this.”

Jack said nothing. John wasn’t quite finished.

“Don’t come near me or my family,” he said. “It better not happen.”

“Well,” Jack said, “that probably won’t happen.”

“See you in court,” John said, and hung up.