Chapter 3
When John Gardner still hadn't shown up for dinner by seven-thirty his stepfather, Kevin, sent him a text message, berating him for putting his mother through all this grief: Why are you doing this to your mom?
John, who was six feet two inches tall and weighed 230 pounds, finally trudged into the condo half an hour later. He was carrying a headless snake, which he held above his head like a trophy. “Look what I've got!” he said triumphantly. “It almost got me, but I got it, instead!” John told Cathy later that he'd been so depressed, he'd been contemplating letting the snake bite him and hoped that he'd die from it.
He had a wild look in his eye that night, the same kind of expression that Jack Nicholson's character had in the movie
The Shining
when he proclaimed, “Here's Johnny!”
John was dirty and sweaty, as if he'd been hiking through heavy brush. He also had a scratch near his nose, which, looking back later, Cathy would recognize as a desperate mark of self-defense left by a girl's fingernail.
Oh, my God, he's nuts,
Cathy thought.
He's lost it. What is happening?
When Kevin chastised John for being so late, John blew up, threw the snake on the floor and stormed out the front door. Cathy ran after him, catching up to him at the front gate.
“It's eight o'clock,” she said. “Come back inside. Eat some dinner. Get cleaned up.”
Still angry but pouting, John conceded, taking a shower and having some food. He later told Cathy he'd been drinking beer that afternoon, but Cathy didn't smell it on him because he'd been too grimy for her to get close enough to tell.
An early riser, Cathy was usually in bed by nine, but she stayed up a little later that night to have a heart-to-heart talk with her son.
“You got a scratch on your face,” Cathy said. “What happened?”
“I was going through the brush,” John said.
Cathy thought that explanation was sort of plausible, but she was used to him lying to her initially, and telling her the truth later. Depending on the severity of the situation, this was usually a combination of her asking and him confessing.
During their brief but intense conversation, John's emotions were like a yo-yo, vacillating from sadness to anger to frustration. He cried as he told her about his lifelong goals and his inability to reach them. When Cathy finally went to bed, she left her son watching TV in the living room.
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The next afternoon at three-thirty, Cathy had an appointment to get her nails done at a salon in the nearby community of Carmel Mountain.
A couple of years earlier, Cathy had been getting a pedicure at the same salon and laughing with a red-haired woman in the next chair about how running beat up her feet. Cathy didn't know it at the time, but the woman, who empathized because her daughter ran cross-country, was Chelsea's mother, Kelly King. It wasn't until Cathy saw Kelly on the news after her daughter's disappearance that Cathy realized she'd been talking to Chelsea's mom.
“Have you heard about the missing girl?” the manicurist asked Cathy.
“No,” she said.
“It's the girl that's in the flyer in the window,” she said, referring to the notices that had been posted in businesses, supermarkets and gyms across the countyâanywhere and everywhere that friends and friends of friends could find a place to hang them.
When the manicurist explained that Chelsea had gone missing during a run on a trail at the RB park, Cathy couldn't believe the coincidence.
“Oh, my God, from RB? Those are the same trails I run on. I ran there last night,” she said, adding that she'd seen the Poway High School track team there just the week before. In fact, she said, “My kid was just out running over there. Well, he doesn't really run, but he walks. I'm going to call him and see if he knows anything.”
Cathy dialed John's number, but he didn't pick up, so she told the manicurist that she'd follow up and call the number on the flyer if she learned anything pertinent. After all, she really did want to help.
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Hundreds, if not thousands, of other people had the very same thought, and they acted on their urges. Many sent out alerts about her disappearance on Twitter and Facebook, where a special page was set up as word began to spread: Find Chelsea King: Missing San Diego Teen. Others grabbed a flashlight and hit the trails.
Usually, missing teenagers were deemed runaways before authorities would concede they could have fallen prey to foul play. But in this case, the San Diego County Sheriff's Department (SDCSD) took virtually unprecedented action
within minutes
of Chelsea's parents reporting their daughter missing. Why? Because not only was she a good, straight girl who kept a rigid schedule, but her car gave investigators a clear indication of her LKP, search-and-rescue lingo for a “last known point.”
The fact that news of her disappearance spread so fast and so many miles from her hometown was not only noticeable, but extraordinary, a factor that only served to draw even more of the public's attention. Typically, the only flyers posted on random telephone poles around the region were for missing dogs, cats and the occasional Alzheimer's patient.
San Diego has its roots as a conservative military town, recently attracting biotech and communications sectors. Yet, the county's 3 million residents have traditionally been somewhat
un
communicative, partly because they're so spread outâa problem worsened by the lack of a cohesive public transportation system. Strangers in this fragmented, transient and geographically disconnected region have rarely talked to each other, and those with personal networks have usually kept to themselves, their own church groups or book clubs.
The timing of this case and the emotions it elicited, however, generated a virtual tornado of goodwill, galvanizing the community unlike any other missing juvenile case in the region's history.
In the midst of the Great Recession, as the unending war in the Middle East and banking bailout drove up the national debt to unprecedented heights, many people were going through tough times. Folks everywhere were losing their jobs and their homes to foreclosure and health insurance costs were soaring. More people were communicating online, telecommuting from home or stuck at home without a job, which often meant less face-to-face contact with other people and more stress.
At a time when people were hungry for connection and fellowship, the search for Chelsea King seemed to fulfill those needs. As her loss resonated throughout the region, people came together to look for this pretty young girl with so much promise, an effort that seemed worthwhile when they had so little else positive in their lives. Chelsea helped them become part of a community again, to feel they were part of something bigger than themselves.
This sense of alliance, hope and affiliation spread like the wildfires that had devastated much of Rancho Bernardo in 2007, when many folks also came together to try to help each other. With assistance from the Texas-based Laura Recovery Center, the Chelsea King Search Center was set up to print flyers and distribute maps out of the RB United office, a remnant of those wildfires.
As Poway High School (PHS) junior Jimmy Cunningham wrote in the
Iliad,
his school newspaper:
The more people who knew, the more ground that was covered. Searching eyes were everywhere, and at the rate that the awareness was being spread due to network communication, it wasn't long before every pair of eyes in a fifty-mile radius knew exactly who she was: Chelsea Kingâ[an] intelligent, willful, and loving girl.
News of Chelsea's plight soon went viral, spreading not only across the county and the nation, but around the globe, with well-wishing strangers conveying their sentiments online from Australia, Germany and even Pakistan. A world away, they were just as moved by the sheer goodness, the promise of a bright future and the angelic expression they could see reflected in those blue eyes of hers.
Back home, Kelly King, her eyes red from crying, made tearful pleas on the local TV news: “She's such a good girl. She needs to come home,” she said, her voice breaking with grief.
The King family was well-off and well connected in a community that already had established social networksâbusiness groups, sports teams or dance troupesâit's just that they'd never been called into action for this purpose. As parents and their kids e-mailed or texted news updates to each other, they were retexted, re-Tweeted and reposted, spreading the infectious inspiration to help.
Take Mike Workman, a father of five, for instance. Workman's twelve-year-old son was on an elite traveling baseball team with some boys who had played ball with Chelsea's brother, Tyler, on a field in Poway. One of the team managers was a close friend of Brent's, and he urged each of the boys' parents to use their respective networks to further the search efforts.
The day after Chelsea went missing, Workman and his boy were willingly recruited. The two of them showed up for search training at a business park in RB on that rainy Saturday, February 27, only to get turned away because searchers had to be eighteen years old. So they went to the parking lot across the street, where flyers were being distributed out of an RV. When Workman saw they were running low, he and his son had several hundred more made at a nearby print shop, which were then distributed to volunteers, who posted them in store windows at shopping malls throughout the county.
“You thought, âThis could be me. I'd want people to help me. What can I do to help?'” Workman recalled. “People really do want to help. I think they're tired of conflict.”
Chapter 4
John was still in a manic mood when he got home around 5:30
P.M.
on Friday, February 26. He insisted that Cathy give him a ride to meet his girlfriend, Jariah, at a Narcotics Anonymous (NA) meeting half an hour away in Escondido, because he had no car of his own. He said he wanted to ask the guys there about drug rehab places that might admit him.
Before they left the condo, Cathy followed up on her promise at the salon. “Did you hear there was a girl that went missing out of the park yesterday?” she asked. “I was just wondering if you'd seen anything while you were walking around.”
John shrugged off her question, later complaining that he thought Cathy was accusing him of something. “No,” he told his mother dismissively. “I wasn't paying attention to what was going on.”
Thinking the NA meeting would be good for John, even if it was a bit of a drive, Cathy gave him a ride over there. At least, she'd know where he was. After she went back to pick him up at nine-thirty, she told him they were going to visit his grandmother in the hospital up in Inglewood the next day.
Still worried about her son's erratic behavior, Cathy had decided to take that Monday off from work so she could take him back to the same psychiatric unit in Riverside County and
demand
this time that he be admitted on a 5150. But she didn't tell John of her plans, in case he freaked out and ran off somewhere.
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As Cathy and John were driving through the neighborhood Saturday morning on their way to visit Linda, they saw a bunch of patrol cars at the park, where the sheriff's department had set up a command center. Cathy briefly considered helping to search for Chelsea as she had for Amber Dubois, a fourteen-year-old freckled brunette with light blue eyes who had gone missing on her way to Escondido High School more than a year earlier. But dealing with a sick son
and
a sick mother had sapped any time and energy Cathy normally would have spent watching the news when she got home from work, let alone go out searching for another missing girl.
Not this time,
she told herself.
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Despite being separated, Amber's parents, Carrie McGonigle and Maurice “Moe” Dubois, had spent the past year working ferociously together to keep up the search for their book- and animal-loving teenager. Carrie had even tattooed her daughter's name on her wrist.
But after two initial sightings in front of Amber's school, downtown Escondido and in the hills near her house, authorities were no closer to finding herâeven with the offer of $100,000 in reward money, the work of at least two private detectives and more than 1,200 leads from psychics and others who had called the Escondido Police Department (EPD) with tips. Although not to the same extent as Chelsea's disappearance, Amber's missing person's case was also widely publicized, with her photo making the cover of
People
magazine in November 2009. But there was still no sign of her.
Moe, an electronic telecommunications engineer, and Carrie, who worked for a printing business, were among the hundreds of volunteer searchers who came out to look for Chelsea and to give the Kings their support. Many of these volunteers were diverted by law enforcement and the yellow police tape from what was soon deemed a giant crime scene, so they headed off with handfuls of flyers they planned to post in their respective communities instead.
Meanwhile, inside the yellow tape, about 160 trained searchers and law enforcement personnel from local, state and federal agencies searched the area that night. And in the coming days, lifeguards and water rescue dive teams from every surrounding county joined the search after a call for mutual aid went out at 3:00
A.M.
, Friday. They combed the land on foot with tracking dogs, on horseback, on quads and other all-terrain vehicles. They searched the water in boats and walking shoulder to shoulder in diving equipment. Hi-tech drone aircraft were flown by remote control, helicopters searched using infrared scopes and underwater robots took photos on the lake bottom.
The response was overwhelming. Everyone, it seemed, was on the lookout for Chelsea King.
“We're literally moving heaven and earth to find this little girl,” said Jan Caldwell, spokeswoman for the sheriff's department.
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Standing at Linda Osborn's bedside in the hospital, John Gardner gave what sounded like a good-bye to his maternal grandmother.
“I know that you just want all of us to get along, and I want you to know that I'm not mad at Uncle Mike anymore,” he told her, referring to a screaming match they'd had a week earlier at Linda's house. John had always been close with his grandmother, and it seemed to Cathy that he was scared Linda was about to die.
Before Cathy and John got home from the hospital early Sunday, they made a plan to meet at the North County Fair shopping mall, now officially known as Westfield North County, for lunch around noon. Cathy figured she'd take him back to Lake Elsinore later that day, or first thing Monday.
“I've got to make sure I don't go past my five days,” John said, referring to the deadline after which he would need to reregister with a new residential address, or as a transient, under Megan's Law, the national law governing sex offenders.
Cathy wasn't sure if the day in L.A. would count toward the five days, but after he'd been cited twice for possessing marijuana while on parole, she wanted to support any effort he made to follow the law.
By the time Cathy got up later that morning, John had already left the condo.
He left her a message at 10:00
A.M.
that he was at the park. “I went walking and when I went across the bridge, the search team and the sheriff were there,” he said. “There's yellow tape up, so I had to go the long way.”
After hearing the park trails were blocked off, Cathy changed her usual Sunday-morning jogging route, heading toward Lake Poway on residential streets, instead. She only made it to a park on the way to her destination before turning back, though, because she was too physically and emotionally exhausted to go the distance.
John left her a second message at eleven-thirty, advising her that he was going to be thirty minutes late for lunch. “I'm going to start heading my way back to the mall,” he said.
Cathy noticed that he was talking a bit fast, as if he were trying to make it seem like nothing was wrong. He explained that she couldn't call him because his battery was running low, and he was going to pull it out of his phone so it didn't completely drain before he reached the mall and needed to call her. Knowing that Cathy had been acting highly codependent and worried about him latelyâwhich is typical for any mother, sibling or spouse of any addict or alcoholic, especially when mental-health issues are involvedâJohn added, “I didn't want you to start freaking out.”
Cathy had informed him earlier that she'd gone through Verizon to put a global positioning system (GPS) tracking device on his phone, so if he was going someplace north of Escondido, near his druggie friends, she would know about it. However, this device was nothing like the GPS ankle bracelet he'd had to wear for his last year of parole. All he had to do to thwart her watchdog efforts was shut off the phone.
As Cathy sat eating tortilla chips at the Mexican restaurant, where they'd agreed to meet, she worried that the police might try to question John about the missing girl, given that he was a registered sex offender. But knowing where he'd been on Friday and Saturday, she wasn't worried that he was involved, not computing that Chelsea had actually gone missing on Thursdayâthe night he'd come home with the snake and that crazy expression.
He's going to be fine because we'll be able to show where he was during that period of time.
But as John grew later and later, she was once again left to wonder and worry where he was and what he was doing.
Is he sneaking off to do drugs again?
She called one of John's close friends to see if he'd asked for a ride to the mall, but the friend said he hadn't seen John.
“I'm worried because he's really kooky right now,” Cathy said.
Cathy called John's girlfriend, Jariah, who had been in rehab since November, but was supposed to come to the condo with her three-year-old son that afternoon for a visit.
“Have you talked with John? Are you still going to be able to come over?” Cathy asked. “John was supposed to meet me for lunch and he's not here. Did he say anything to you about going anywhere else?”
“No,” Jariah said.
Cathy had left about twenty-five messages for John that day, but hadn't gotten a single response. “Where are you? I'm waiting for you,” she said, trying to sound more concerned than accusatory so as not to anger him. By that point, she was thinking she should take him back to the county mental hospital that night.
Around 1:30
P.M.
, Cathy finally gave up and drove home. On her way, she heard the helicopters overhead, still searching for Chelsea, she presumed.
By the time Jariah arrived at her condo around two-thirty, Cathy was beside herself.
“Have you heard from John?”
“No,” Jariah said.
“This is weird,” they both said. “This is really weird.”