Beheading on Mount Baldy

Illustrations by Joel Kimmel

Jack Irwin wasn’t a recluse. He liked people just fine. But he liked them in small doses. For 18 years he lived alone in a small cabin on a steep, rocky slope on Mount Baldy, a mile or two below the ski lift. Raccoons and bears ambled through the brush at night. Squirrels and blue jays scolded each other from the towering fir beside his deck, and on weekends the smell of scorched brake pads came up from the sharp two-lane switchbacks just below his house.

Although Jack was long retired, he never lacked for things to do. He kept his countertops clean and the pencils on his desk sharp. He religiously changed the oil every three months in his beloved 1993 Subaru, even though he’d driven only 60 miles since the last oil change. When work was done, he would sit in a rocker in a sunny corner of his living room, with its sweeping vistas of high snowcapped ridges and the San Gabriel Valley far below, reading the novels of Tom Clancy, Louis L’Amour and John le Carré.

At 71, Jack was quite comfortable financially, thanks to a real estate investment that enabled him to put $234,000 in his savings account. He generally kept another $10,000 around the house and carried a wallet so thick with bills it looked like he had a knot in his rear pants pocket. Despite his money, he was frugal to a fault, never coming close to spending the $722 disability check he received from Social Security each month, his only expenses being $20 a month for his Forest Service lease, another $20 for water, $6 to $9 for electricity, a few bucks for gas, plus whatever minor outlay it took to keep him in peanut butter, Cup-O-Soup and frozen hash-brown potato patties, which Jack would heat up two at a time, spread with ketchup and eat like a sandwich.

As an Army vet, Jack didn’t worry much about creature comforts. He slept on a regulation steel-tube cot with a thin, hard pad. He bought his clothes at thrift stores and wore the same (carefully washed) T-shirts until they were virtually transparent. His cabin was so cold on winter nights that the water froze in the toilet bowl. It wasn’t that Jack was too cheap to buy propane, but he thought the propane man cheated him and thereafter refused on principle to have his tank refilled.

Life at the 5,700-foot level wasn’t easy for someone like Jack. He’d been gravely wounded in the Korean War while working on a helicopter MEDEVAC team: He was smoking a cigarette when he saw what he thought was a brown football flying over a tent. When he woke up (in a hospital in Japan), he discovered he’d been blown up by a hand grenade. Jack was subsequently transferred to military hospitals in Hawaii and San Francisco, where a superior told him they were throwing him out of the Army.

“How come?” said Jack.

“Your eye is funny.” Jack had a wandering eye.

“My eye was funny when you drafted me,” he said.

Before the war, Jack had been a vital, active guy. A picture from the late ’40s shows him in standard hot-rodder attire — black engineer boots, blue jeans and a white T-shirt with a cigarette pack rolled up in the sleeve. He raced hot rods and motorcycles up and down Pasadena’s Colorado Boulevard and speedboats around local lakes. But, perhaps as a result of his war injuries, he’d never gotten married. His neighbors on Mount Baldy felt sorry for him. Tom and Sandy Bailey made it a point to invite him to their home for Thanksgiving every year and on Christmas take him out to dinner. At times, just for company, he’d sit for hours in the lobby of a mountain lodge, sipping on a soda.

Jack’s problems went beyond mere loneliness or the lingering effects of war wounds. He also suffered from dystonia, a progressive neurological disorder that began as an uncontrollable nose twitch and ended up as a crippling affliction of his fingers, foot and, most distressingly of all, his vocal cords. Strangers couldn’t understand him. He sounded as if he were trying to talk and gargle at the same time. The doctors inundated him with pills, and then, every time he went to the VA hospital, tried to run another battery of tests. He got so depressed, he once told Tom Bailey, there were times he wanted to die.

He got his wish in a way he never dreamed.

In the winter of 1998-1999, after nearly two decades on the mountain, Jack announced that he was “cold.” He got in his car, drove 10 miles down the mountain, and, for $160,000 cash, bought himself a two-story, four-bedroom house on a neat and comfortable cul-de-sac in Upland. Shortly thereafter, he sold his cabin for $48,000 to two women — Marcia Ann Johnson, a sometime computer programmer with long, blond hair and a hot temper, and her partner, Judy Gellert, a reserved and sober-minded drug counselor at Chino women’s prison.

Perhaps because he was so lonely, Jack offered Marcia and Judy surprisingly generous terms — he would hold the mortgage for them, and they in turn would pay him $582 a month for the next 10 years. As part of the deal, Jack also offered to throw in his washer, dryer and refrigerator. At first Marcia was disdainful — “I don’t want your stuff, old man” — but when she looked in the refrigerator and saw that it contained nothing but peanut butter and Rice Krispies, she felt so bad for Jack that she brought him a roast. “That’s the kind of person I am,” she said. It was only later, Marcia would come to admit, that “I began to wonder how I could use him in my life.”