On a morning in June 1992, paramedics from the Florin Fire District were let into a house on Southbreeze Drive, southeast of Sacramento, and shown into the back bedroom, where Irene Barron lay dead in bed. She was thirty-four and had been healthy. Her husband, Jack, said she had a genetic disorder. Eight months later their four-year-old son, Jeremy, died in his bed, and then their four-year-old daughter, Ashley. The coroner could not pin down a cause in any of the three. Investigators wondered about an inherited disease, or something toxic in the house.
Jack Barron was born in 1962, the only child of Elmore and Roberta Barron. His father was distant and believed Jack was not his son; his mother doted on him, and he was called a mama's boy. His parents split when he was thirteen, when Elmore left for another woman, and Roberta raised him in Sacramento. In February 1986 he met Irene Paget, a tall, blue-eyed former beauty queen who had been married once before. She was pregnant by the spring of 1988, they married that July, and Jeremy was born in January 1989. Her parents never warmed to him. Friends and family remembered his tantrums, a minor fender-bender enough to set one off, and his obsessive behavior.
In February 1995 his mother, Roberta Butler, fifty-two, died at her own home in the same way. The coroner who examined her ruled her death a homicide, and that ruling sent investigators back to the three deaths in Sacramento County. A reexamination of Irene's autopsy found evidence that she had been murdered. By then a row of commemorative saplings stood on the family property, one for each of the dead.
He was arrested on July 17, 1995, and charged with four counts of first-degree murder, and he pleaded not guilty. He spent four and a half years in jail awaiting trial, maintaining that his family had died of a rare inherited heart disease. The trial began in February 2000. A doctor testified that he had Munchausen syndrome by proxy, in which a caregiver harms the people in his care to win attention and sympathy, and the case is often described as the first known instance in a man.
On March 18, 2000, the jury convicted him of murdering Irene, Jeremy and his mother and acquitted him in Ashley's death. He was sentenced to three consecutive terms of life without parole. In 2020 he was reported to be held at the California Substance Abuse Treatment Facility, and he continues to maintain his innocence. The case is the subject of Carlton Smith's book Dying for Daddy.