Illegal use of nonvirtual function call in Java / MySQL JConnector

My computer crashed today and after restart none of my Java based application via Tomcat that used MySQL would work.  I would get an error like this:

Could not verify datasource: java.lang.VerifyError: (class: com/mysql/jdbc/DatabaseMetaData, method: supportsRefCursors signature: ()Z) Illegal use of nonvirtual function call

No matter the amount of Googling did anything turn up useful.  After reinstalling MySQL, I realized that my Aqua DataStudio could still connect and query the MySQL databases.  I tried a new MySQL J/Connector which did not help.

In the end, the fix was that Tomcat was using Java8 weekly (via a .deb) and something in Java8 must be broken.  I downgraded Tomcat to use Java7 and everything worked.  I found out that there was an update to my system to Java8 on 2/13 and the restart made it effective because Tomcat had been running for at least a week.

The fix: Check your Java version and downgrade from Java8