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Beheading on Mount Baldy
The strange tale of how a man lost his home, his money and his head to the woman he took in
“It’s my house,” said Jack.
“You can’t do it,” they replied.
The last time Sandy Bailey phoned him to chat, Jack said that Marcia and Judy had completely taken over. “When I go out, the girls change things around. I’m not in control of my own house.”
In early September 1999, Hegemier suddenly realized that she hadn’t seen Jack around lately. She couldn’t ask Judy and Marcia about him, because they’d moved back to the cabin on Mount Baldy. So the next time Marcia came down to pick up the mail, Hegemier asked her, “Where’s Jack?”
“Oh, he’s traveling,” answered Marcia.
“Where?”
“Seattle.”
“Why would he do that?”
“He went to see the Space Needle,” said Marcia. Jack had seen this travel program on TV. The next morning, saying he was going to see the Space Needle, he took $5,000 from the bank and a change of clothes in a paper bag. Then he asked Marcia to drop him off at the Upland Metrolink stop, from which he planned to ride to Union Station and then catch Amtrak to Seattle.
“Where’s he staying?” asked Hegemier.
“I don’t know,” said Marcia.
“When’s he coming back?”
“I don’t know.”
To Hegemier, Marcia’s explanation simply didn’t make sense. Jack found it so difficult to speak clearly that the first time Hegemier heard him, she thought he was drunk. One foot was twisted so badly, his shoe wore out on the side, not the sole. In all the years he had lived on Mount Baldy, Jack had virtually never gone anywhere, and now she and Hopkins were supposed to believe he had suddenly traveled alone all the way to Seattle without saying where he would be staying or when he might return?
After that, every time Hegemier and Hopkins saw Marcia, they made it a point to ask about Jack. “Has he called? Have you gotten a post card?”
“Not yet,” said Marcia.
“Don’t you find that strange?”
“We’re going to give it another few days.”
Fed up with Marcia and Judy’s apparent lack of curiosity about someone they considered “family,” on October 3 Doug Hopkins told the women to go to the Upland Police Department and file a missing-persons report. “And if you don’t do it, I will.”
Marcia subsequently called Detective Steve Foulks, an Upland missing-persons officer, to report Jack missing. Foulks in turn posted fliers around town noting that Jack had last been seen at the Upland Metrolink station on September 13, wearing a purple shirt and green jeans and carrying $5,000 in cash. He also came out to Jack’s cul-de-sac to ask a few questions, which was when Hegemier confronted him about Jack’s supposed trip to Seattle. At this point, Foulks didn’t believe anything was wrong. Jack was a grown man, he said. “He has a right to go anywhere he wants.”
“Yeah,” said Hegemier. “But he didn’t goanywhere.”
Sandy Bailey, Jack’s longtime friend from Mount Baldy Village (he was godfather to her son), first noticed in early September of 1999 that Jack was no longer returning her calls. The next time Marcia came by the Mount Baldy post office, where Bailey worked as a clerk, Bailey told her she couldn’t seem to reach Jack. “Is everything okay?”
When Marcia told her that Jack had gone on a “vacation,” Bailey was aghast. Bluntly telling Marcia that such a thing “could not happen,” she went home and called the Upland police chief, who referred her to Detective Foulks, who was polite but again not overly concerned. Although Bailey repeatedly called back over the following weeks and months, Foulks dismissed any notion of foul play, telling Bailey he’d talked to Marcia and Judy, and he believed they were telling the truth: Jack had gone to Seattle.
Taking matters into her own hands, Bailey put up “missing” posters of Jack all over the village, on utility poles and at the entrance to the post office, where Marcia would see it every time she came by to pick up her mail. She also left messages for Jack on his answering machine in Upland, including one in early November cheerily reminding Jack that she was expecting him for Thanksgiving again this year. “I knew Jack was dead,” says Bailey, a deceptively mild-mannered woman with a steel backbone. “I did it just to aggravate Marcia.”
A short while later, says Bailey, Marcia confronted her at the post office and told her, “I’m sick and tired of your leaving messages.”
“That’s Jack’s house I’m calling, and that’s his answering machine I’m leaving the messages on,” pointed out Bailey.
A month or so later, Marcia was back at the post office again, this time blaming Bailey for spreading rumors that she killed Jack. “I’m suing all of you for slander. And don’t think I don’t have the money to do it. I have more money than anyone on Mount Baldy.”
Bailey didn’t doubt that Marcia now had money. The question was, where did she get it? When the women first arrived in the village, all they had was an old motor home and a Ford Expedition with a “Girls Rule” window decal. But no sooner had Jack vanished than Marcia bought a Jeep Wrangler for Judy and traded in Jack’s green Subaru (forging his signature in the process) for a white Corvette for herself. Then, in November, two months after Jack disappeared, the women bought a 37-foot, $172,000, 330-horsepower, eight-miles-per-gallon Serengeti motor home, the kind that typically came equipped with twin air conditioners, a microwave, a refrigerator-freezer, an icemaker, a dishwasher, a satellite dish, surround-sound speakers, a walk-through bathroom, a washer-dryer and a queen-size bed. It was so wide that when they parked it on the narrow switchback outside Jack’s cabin, it blocked the downhill lane.
It also blocked the drive of Mary Lou Young, a former ski instructor who lived just down the hill from Jack. In response to her complaint, U.S. Forest Service ranger Larry Brown came by one day to tell Marcia she would have to move the motor home off the mountain.
“This is harassment!” exploded Marcia. “I’m tired of this.”
Driving the motor home down the mountain later that day, Marcia passed Brown, whom she saluted with a blast from the air horn and an upraised middle finger. In due time, she also flipped off Jack’s neighbors in Upland, a second ranger, a fire dispatcher and Mary Lou Young, who complained to the sheriff.
To the irritation of Jack’s friends and neighbors, Marcia and Judy both acted as if the residents’ attitude toward them had nothing to do with Jack’s disappearance and everything to do with bias against lesbians. “They hated us,” Marcia would later say. “They were really shitty. They were so mean to us we quit going to church.” Judy, normally the peacemaker of the two, was apparently so disturbed by the encounter with the ranger that she noted the confrontation in her diary: “I knew I reacted in an extreme manner, but I could not take another round of hate and bigotry.”
The summer of 2000 was a bad time for Marcia and Judy. At the end of June they went to San Diego on vacation. When they returned, in early July, Marcia reported to Sheriff’s deputies, they discovered that someone had entered their cabin through “the doggie door” and took a Sony camcorder, a DVD player, earrings, a laptop computer, a printer, a CD writer and a camera. The crime was never solved, though Judy’s insurance carrier, State Farm, did send Marcia a check for $9,193 to cover her and Judy’s losses.
That August, in response to what the women saw as continuing hostility from the community and Judy’s feeling that she wasn’t safe in the cabin anymore, Marcia and Judy left Mount Baldy and moved to an RV park in Lake Elsinore, where, on August 11, 2000, they got word that the cabin was on fire. The Mount Baldy Volunteer Fire Department was still mopping up the blaze when the women came racing up with two friends. Upon hearing that the fire investigators suspected arson, Marcia immediately began denouncing the neighbors. “They started the fire because they hate us because we are lesbians,” Marcia told former neighbor Kerri Walter. “One hundred years ago, they would have strung us up a tree.”
“No one up here would start a fire,” answered Walter. “It’s like starting a fire in your own back yard. And don’t play the lesbian card. No one up here cares.” Besides, added Walter, if the neighbors were suspicious of Marcia and Judy, they had good reason — if Jack died, she told Marcia, “You had a lot to gain.”
Despite the fire’s suspicious origins, State Farm once again came to the rescue, sending the women a $170,402.58 check, which included $58,000 for the cabin and $112,000 for everything else, including $20,000 for clothes, $8,800 for computers, $9,000 for a Bose home-theater system, $2,400 for 150 videos, $600 for two satellite dishes, as well tens of thousands of other dollars for a jewelry box, an antique brush-and-mirror set, a mantel clock, multiple cookbooks, diet books, self-help books, a pet feeder, a tea strainer, corn holders, and a long list of other missing and presumably burnt items.
By June of 2001, Upland’s missing-person case on Jack had gone cold. Despite Sandy Bailey’s repeated phone calls, Steve Foulks had long ago run out of people to interview, and police chief Marty Thouvenell, fearful that the case might be slipping through the cracks, picked up the phone and called San Bernardino district attorney Dennis South. “I think there’s a problem here,” he told him. “I can really use your help.”
A few days later, the case landed on the desk of Morey Weiss, a straightforward, 49-year-old elder-abuse investigator with thinning hair, a ragged goatee and a briskly conscientious manner.
Weiss quickly established what was already clear to Jack’s friends on Mount Baldy. Within hours of Jack’s having disappeared, Marcia began systematically looting Jack’s estate. She made her first withdrawal from Jack’s trust (for $4,000) the same day she said she dropped him off at the Metrolink station to go to Seattle. Two days later she drew $7,000 from Jack’s account, then two days after that she wrote a $6,693 check (to buy the Jeep Wrangler for Judy). Three days later she withdrew $10,000.
Marcia continued writing checks and making withdrawals every few days for the next two months, by which time she’d whittled down Jack’s account from $73,500 to a mere $14. At the same time, acting in her capacity as a trustee, Marcia transferred Jack’s $160,000 Upland house from the Jack Irwin Trust to Judy Gellert, who promptly took out a $128,000 mortgage on it. A year later she would sell the house for $190,000.
It was no wonder Marcia bragged that they had more money than anyone on the mountain. After buying Jack’s cabin, the pair had made exactly two $582 mortgage payments to him. In return, they’d variously collected approximately $450,000 from a combination of Jack’s trust, his house and the two insurance claims.
Although Weiss had not the slightest doubt that the women had illegally drained Jack’s estate, unless he could also show that they were in some way responsible for Jack’s disappearance, the women, he knew, would claim that the trust gave them every right to Jack’s money. Even so, Weiss’ goal wasn’t merely to convict the women of elder abuse and financial fraud; his real goal was to put together a murder case — no small matter given that Weiss had no body, no blood, no proof whatsoever that Jack was even dead.
As was so often the case, Marcia herself provided the clue. Two days after the cabin fire, Tom Fee, an arson investigator hired by State Farm, taped a rambling two-hour interview with Marcia and Judy, during which Marcia happened to mention that she was suing her psychologist, with whom she’d had, she said, a four- or five-month affair. To Fee, that was just too bizarre to let slide. So when Weiss came to see him to ask about the fire, Fee recommended that he check out the lawsuit too.
At the time, Weiss was too busy nailing down the financial end of the elder-abuse case to worry about some apparently unrelated she-said/she-said woman-scorned affair. But a year later, in late August of 2002, just before Labor Day, Weiss contacted the state Board of Psychology, which by then had already done its own investigation of Marcia’s complaints against her psychologist. And after reading the depositions, Weiss suddenly realized that he’d just been handed the key to the case on a silver platter.
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