Jack Barron: Munchausen by Proxy Dad
When you think of Munchausen by Proxy, you might think of Dee Dee Blanchard, or Kathy Bush, or Marybeth Tinning — women who abused or even killed their children so they could bask in attention and sympathy. Now known as Factitious Disorder Imposed on Another, it’s a fairly rare disorder, and it’s usually found in women.
But not always. In about 3–5 percent of cases, the perpetrators are men. The first known case of a man having FDIA or Munchausen by Proxy is that of Jack Barron.
Barron was born in 1962, the only child of Elmore and Roberta Barron. While Elmore was quite distant — he believed Jack wasn’t his child — Roberta doted on him, and Jack was called a “mama’s boy.” The Barrons’ marriage finally ended when Jack was 13, when Elmore left them for another woman.
In February 1986, Jack met Irene Paget, a tall, blue-eyed beauty queen, in Sacramento. She had been married once before, but the marriage hadn’t lasted long. By the spring of 1988, Irene was pregnant, so in July, the couple got married. While her parents, Norma and Jack, didn’t exactly take a liking to him, they tried to get along with him for their daughter’s sake.
In January 1989, the Barrons’ son, Jeremy, was born. A few months later, the young family moved to Sacramento, where they bought a house — with help from Roberta. Jack worked nights as a grocery stocker, and Irene ran a neighborhood daycare. Yet their tight financial situation didn’t stop Jack from spending copious amounts of money on his model-train hobby.
In March of 1990, their second child, Ashley, was born. At the same time, Jack was becoming more controlling, fastidious, and paranoid. He didn’t like the children playing outside in the sprinklers because they would get dirty. When Irene would vacuum, he would go right behind her and rub out the carpet tracks. He insisted on keeping all the doors and windows locked at all times. And, according to friends and neighbors, he had a violent, explosive temper.
Irene expressed her suspicions to friends and family that Jack was having an affair, and that Jack had told her he wanted a divorce.
But Jack had confided in a friend that he wouldn’t actually go through with divorce. “I’d do away with her first,” he said.
On Sunday, June 7, 1992, one of Irene’s neighbors arrived to drop off her child before work. Despite repeated knocking on the door and calling into the house, there was no answer. Now running late, she hastily dropped the child off with a relative, then rushed to work.
But it worried her that the normally responsible Irene would simply leave and not tell anyone. So as soon as she could, she returned to the Barron home to check on them. There, she saw 3-year-old Jeremy inside, alone. The neighbor got Jeremy to let her inside, where he told her he couldn’t wake his mommy up.
The neighbor found Irene lying on her waterbed, a pillow over her face, unresponsive. The neighbor called 911, but when she went to perform CPR, she found that Irene was already cold and stiff — evidence she had been dead for hours.
Jack came home from work to find the police searching his home. He seemed distraught. He went to a neighbor’s house to call her parents. “You gotta get over here quick!”
“Why?” Norma asked. “Why?”
“Irene’s dead,” he said, and hung up the phone.
Jack told police that he’d left for work at 11 p.m. Irene, he said, had been suffering from a headache so severe that her speech was slurred.
But the evidence didn’t corroborate his story. The coroner determined her time of death to have been about 7:30 p.m., well before Jack went to work. Backing that up was the fact that Irene still had on her make-up — friends said she had a regular evening ritual of removing it before bed.
But because there was no actual evidence of a homicide, the coroner left the cause of death undetermined — so there was no follow-up investigation.
At the funeral, he seemed grief-stricken. He even planted a tree in her honor.
After Irene’s death, Jack, now a single father to two young children, received lots of sympathy and support from friends and neighbors. Irene’s parents even began sending him regular monthly checks — this on top of the Social Security benefits he now received on behalf of the children. And he was able to cash in on a $15,000 life-insurance policy he had taken out on Irene.
Within a few months, Jack had a new live-in girlfriend, Starla Hayes, whom he had met at the supermarket where they both worked. Hayes also had two young children, and had recently separated from her husband.
But their relationship didn’t last long. Hayes said Jack had a terrible temper, and wouldn’t tolerate normal rambunctious behavior from the children. At one point, she heard something that troubled her too much to ignore. Little Jeremy had been crying for his mother, and that sent Jack into a fury. He shouted at the child, “If you don’t shut up, I’ll send you to where Mommy is!” Hayes moved out very soon after that.
A week after Hayes left — Sunday, Feb. 7, 1993 — the babysitter arrived at the Barron home. She knocked on the door repeatedly, but got no answer. So she returned home and called Jack. He answered the phone and explained that he’d been in the shower. He told her to come on over to watch the kids while he napped before his shift.
Once there, the two looked in on the children, who were laying in their beds. Jack then went to his room and went to sleep.
A couple of hours later, Ashley woke up. After tending to the little girl, the babysitter went in to check on Jeremy.
He was still lying in the same position he’d been when she’d checked in on him two hours earlier. When she went to wake him, he was unresponsive.
She called 911 and woke Jack up. When the 911 dispatcher instructed them to perform CPR, Jack refused. “Don’t bother,” he said. “It’s too late anyway.”
He claimed that Jeremy had had a cold earlier, and so he had given the child some cough syrup.
Now two people had died in the same house within six months. Everything in the house was tested — especially all the medicines. The family even had genetic tests done. But there was nothing that could explain the sudden deaths. Yet again, without concrete evidence of a homicide, the cause of death was listed as undetermined, so there was no further investigation into Jeremy’s death.
Family and friends said that after Jeremy’s death, Jack acted upset — yet he never shed a tear. At the funeral, he made a troubling comment: that “Jeremy had died of a broken heart” and “was better off with his mother in heaven.”
Like he had for Irene, Jack planted a tree for Jeremy.
Once again, Jack was showered with attention and sympathy — as well as another life-insurance policy. One of the Barrons’ friends was the president of Wynonna Judd’s fan club, and he arranged for Jack and Ashley to attend one of Judd’s concerts and meet her backstage. Jack was a big fan of Judd. The singer, touched by Jack’s loss, gave him more concert tickets and even called him on the phone later to express her condolences.
After that, Jack took down all the pictures of Irene in the house and replaced them with pictures of Judd. He even started telling people that he and Judd were dating — something people who knew him just blew off as his typical need to be the center of attention.
But not everyone was buying Jack’s “poor me” act. Irene’s parents were becoming more and more suspicious.
Meanwhile, Ashley’s doctor was worried for his patient’s safety. He wanted to find out how her brother and mother had died, so he ordered several tests done on Ashley. The only thing the tests did show that she had periodic sleep apnea, so the doctor ordered Ashley to be put on a heart monitor.
However, Jack refused to make Ashley wear it, claiming he was “too busy.” And he didn’t take his only surviving child to any of the follow-up appointments.
Sunday, August 7, 1994, Ashley’s new babysitter, a nurse with CPR training, arrived to watch the 4-year-old. Jack let her in and she looked in on the apparently sleeping girl. Jack then offered her a glass of iced tea, which the babysitter said was unusually strong. He then warned her not to go to sleep.
But she did just that. When she awoke at 4 a.m., she immediately went into Ashley’s room to check on her. She was lying in a different position than she had been before, but she wasn’t breathing. When the nurse tried to perform CPR, she discovered the girl was cold and stiff.
And though Jack repeated his ritual of planting a tree (and collecting the life insurance policy), this time he seemed markedly different. Friends and family said he seemed “emotionless.” At the reception after Ashley’s funeral, he seemed almost happy. He laughed and joked with friends. He wore a T-shirt that read, “Wy’s Guy,” and loudly boasted about the large flower arrangement Judd had sent.
Now more people were beginning to raise suspicions. Each one of the Barrons had either died or been found on a Sunday that was the seventh of the month — the same day as Jack’s estranged father’s birthday. Each time, Jack seemed progressively less upset, though he talked at great length about what an ordeal he had been through and how hard it was on him.
This time, the coroner declared Ashley’s cause of death as undetermined, but specifically stated that homicidal violence could not be excluded. Police wanted to exhume the bodies of Jeremy and Irene for further tests.
Under such a cloud of suspicion, Jack sold the house and moved in with his mother, Roberta — one of the few people who still believed he was innocent. But this arrangement wouldn’t last long, either. Roberta’s boyfriend described him as surly and belligerent. Jack’s rude behavior towards his mother finally drove Roberta’s boyfriend off.
Despite having collected several life-insurance policies and ongoing Social Security benefits, Jack didn’t give his mother any money for bills. He did, however, continue spending lavishly on his model-train hobby. Roberta was getting tired of supporting her son while he “frittered away” his life-insurance money. She planned on confronting him about it, and asking him to move out, Feb. 25, 1997.
On that day, Jack went to work early. When he returned home about 2 p.m., he called 911 and told them he’d found his mother unresponsive. When the ambulance got there, she was cold and stiff.
This time, Jack had committed his crime in a different jurisdiction than before. When the Solano County coroner found out that Jack’s wife and two kids had all died under similar circumstances, all within the last 26 months, red flags went up. At autopsy, he found that Roberta had defensive wounds consistent with a struggle. Her cause of death was listed as asphyxia — she had been smothered with a pillow.
Only now could the other deaths be fully investigated. Each one of his victims had died while Jack was home, though Ashley’s death proved slightly more difficult to prove. Since she had apparently moved some time after Jack left for work, there was some chance that she had been still alive at the time. Under questioning, he maintained his innocence.
On July 17, 1995, he was arrested and charged with four counts of first-degree murder, which he pled not guilty to. His trial began in February 2000. Of the many witnesses called to the stand, one doctor testified that Jack had Munchausen by Proxy.
On March 18, 2000, he was found guilty of three murders — but acquitted on Ashley’s. He was sentenced to three consecutive life terms without the possibility of parole.
He currently resides in the California Substance Abuse Treatment Facility. He continues to maintain his innocence.
