Lost Girls (34 page)

Read Lost Girls Online

Authors: Caitlin Rother

Chapter 37
While this case and its various related probes had been proceeding, Assemblyman Nathan Fletcher had been working with the Kings, Bonnie Dumanis and the San Diego County Sheriff's Department to craft the law they all hoped would better regulate and punish sex offenders. The Republican assemblyman also worked with state senator Mark Leno, a Democrat from San Francisco, to help ease the passage of the bill, aptly named Chelsea's Law.
Along the way, the governor's California Sex Offender Management Board made recommendations, only some of which were adopted as the bill virtually sailed through the sausage-making process in the state legislature.
The bill provides a “one-strike” life sentence without the possibility of parole for certain violent first-time sex offenders, lengthens prison and parole terms for offenders whose victims are under fourteen, and restricts offenders from entering public parks.
It also requires parolees to be assessed for “dynamic” risk factors for violence, such as alcohol or drug abuse and losing a job or place to live, versus “static” factors, such as a record of past violence. This assessment score is to be available to the public.
In addition, all paroled sex offenders are now required to be treated under what's known as a “containment model,” another CASOMB recommendation. This means a parolee is monitored by a team of professionals, which includes his parole agent, a therapist, a polygraph test administrator and victim advocates.
“The more eyes you have on these folks that they're aware of, the better,” said Jack Wallace, the CASOMB coordinator.
Wallace, who has worked much of his career treating sex offenders, said therapists can't stop an offender's evil urges, but they can help him learn tools to deal with such urges without harming others. “There is no treatment that is going to say you are no longer going to get evil thoughts,” Wallace said. Instead, the idea is to “teach them a process so that they have something to fall back on.”
Under the old system, two mental-health evaluators assessed prisoners like Gardner to determine whether they should be deemed “sexually violent predators” or “mentally disordered offenders,” and if so, be civilly committed to the state mental hospital in Coalinga.
According to an article in
The San Diego Union-Tribune
, two state mental-health employees told activist Marc Klaas that a prison psychologist twice deemed John Gardner too dangerous to release after concluding that he met the six criteria to be classified as a mentally disordered offender, and should be hospitalized for treatment. However, a mental-health evaluator disagreed both times. Those criteria included having a severe mental disorder that was not in remission, committing a violent crime and representing a “substantial danger of physical harm to others.” If Gardner had been deemed mentally disordered, he could've been sent to Coalinga for all three years of his parole, and if still deemed a danger, he could've been kept there under a civil commitment.
That news report could not be confirmed by the CASOMB. However, even based on the limited medical records Gardner's mother released to the author, which detailed his psychotic breaks and homicidal threats in 2004, it seems likely that the prison psychologist's assessment was right. What's unclear is why any mental-health evaluator would disagree.
Under Chelsea's Law, if that same situation arose today, a third mental-health professional would be brought in to break the tie rather than allow Gardner, or any other prisoner, to be automatically released. DMH officials refused to release Gardner's records or discuss this assessment issue, even after he authorized them to do so.
State lawmakers did not accept the CASOMB recommendation to institute a point system to tier the state's approximately 63,000 registered sex offenders into levels of dangerousness, ranging from those convicted of minor offenses, such as urinating in public, to those imprisoned for statutory rape with their girlfriend, to those serving time for the most violent rapes and/or beatings of multiple victims. This is important because about two-thirds of California's registered offenders are no longer on parole or probation and therefore have no type of formal supervision. That means police officers and sheriff's deputies are the only “monitors” who have any regular contact with these offenders—a category that included Gardner.
“John Gardner was not under any formal form of community supervision when he murdered Amber and Chelsea,” Wallace said.
According to the CASOMB report, “current law requiring paroled sex offenders to wear a GPS for life is widely viewed as unenforceable due to a failure by the Jessica's Law Initiative to provide a criminal penalty for persons who refuse to wear a GPS unit after parole or probation ends.”
One other board recommendation that went ignored was to change or loosen the residency restrictions on parolees. The board noted that 30 percent of the state's paroled sex offenders are homeless, which means even the police have no idea where they're living. Citing extensive research in other states and nations, CASOMB reports have repeatedly stated that residency restrictions are the most serious issue facing California today in the field of sex offender management, because they destabilize the offender, block employment and reintegration into a healthy life—all of which contribute to recidivism. Gardner said his life began to fall apart when his new parole agent tightened his restrictions by ordering him to move and give up his travel pass, which cost him his apartment, his job and his relationship, rendering him unemployed, homeless and angry.
“The board has always felt it made more sense to restrict where they could be, not where they lived,” Wallace said. And when it came to Gardner, he noted, “residence restrictions had no impact on him whatsoever,” because he was registered an hour away in Lake Elsinore when he killed Chelsea. However, if he'd been reported for being in the RB Community Park in the days before her murder, as is now prohibited under Chelsea's Law, he said, “that may have made a difference.”
In a state that has severe financial problems and never seems to have enough revenues to balance its budget, the main drawback of this wildly politically popular bill is that no one wants to discuss the cost of implementing it. Early on, corrections department analysts estimated the law would carry an annual cost of $54 million by the year 2030, while other analysts vaguely described the price tag as “substantial to the state, likely in the millions annually,” with a cost as high as the “low tens of millions” for the dynamic assessments alone.
The largest cost appears to be tied to keeping California's nearly 23,000 incarcerated sex offenders behind bars for longer—at a cost of $47,000 each per year—and also keeping them longer on parole, which costs money as well. After some horse trading late in the legislative process, Fletcher described the measure as cost neutral. However, several state employees familiar with the bill said the new measures would start generating costs once they were actually implemented. They just couldn't say how much.
Boosted by the publicity surrounding the John Gardner case, the bill passed as an urgency measure, which put it into effect as soon as Governor Schwarzenegger signed it in San Diego's Balboa Park on September 9, 2010. The crowd of about two hundred, many of whom were holding sunflowers as they watched the signing ceremony, gave a standing ovation to Fletcher and the Kings.
“Because of Chelsea, everyone has joined together to solve this serious problem in our state,” Governor Schwarzenegger said. “Because of Chelsea, California's children will be safer. Because of Chelsea, this never has to happen again.”
Big words. If only it were that simple.
And, in fact, it hasn't been. In January 2012, California's continuing fiscal problems forced Governor Jerry Brown to propose a budget that would delay funding needed to implement the “containment model” for two years. Brent King met with Brown to request that he institute a 25-cent surcharge on cell phone bills to pay for this key component of the bill, but Brown said that would require a vote of the people.
 
 
During the course of this case, more than twenty media outlets requested copies of the victims' autopsy reports. District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis believed it was important not to reveal details of the crime scenes or the conditions of the victims' bodies, particularly given the sexual assaults. She said she didn't know that existing law allowed such sensitive information to be released to the media, and was shocked that they wanted to publish such details. The families didn't want that painful information released either, so they hired an attorney to try to keep the reports sealed while Dumanis went to work on a piece of legislation with state senator Dennis Hollingsworth. Given the sensitivity of the case, the county decided to keep the autopsy reports under seal, citing Marsy's Law, unless or until the county was overruled by a court, or until the legislation passed.
“These were beautiful young girls, and this new law will help maintain their family's memories of them, just as they were,” Hollingsworth said. “These families have endured such horrific tragedies they shouldn't be victimized a second time by the public airings of those autopsy reports.”
Before the bill was passed, opponents such as the California Newspaper Publishers Association complained that the measure would eliminate transparency necessary for the public to evaluate the taxpayer-subsidized efforts of law enforcement by preventing watchdog reporting that could reveal mistakes or mistreatment by a parent. Squelching this information, they argued, would also prevent the dissemination of important information people needed to protect themselves; such determinations should be made by the judicial system, they said, not emotional family members.
Such reports can help reveal failures by public agencies. Sealing them would be a mistake,
a
Los Angeles Times
editorial stated.
The state legislature passed this bill as well, and on September 27, 2010, Governor Schwarzenegger signed into law the Deceased Child Victims' Protection and Privacy Act. Today, parents or guardians of children killed during a crime can request that their autopsy reports be sealed, but only after an offender has been convicted and sentenced for the crime. The law does not apply to victims who died in foster care, were in the care of the juvenile justice system or in any incident caused by neglect or abuse.
Over time, the Chelsea's Light Foundation established a board of directors, set a number of goals, wrote a legislative action plan and promised programs to “unite and lead people who are passionate about protecting children and inspiring positive change in their communities.” Hoping to launch a campaign to pass laws similar to Chelsea's Law in other states, the directors started by targeting Colorado, Florida, Ohio and Texas.
One of their new points of light was the Sunflower Academic Scholarship program, aimed at helping students who were academic performers, as well as those students whose families didn't have the money to subsidize extracurricular activities, such as music or sports. In June 2011, this program awarded $60,500 in checks to ten college students.
As of March 2012, supporters of these efforts and Chelsea's lasting impact numbered more than 107,095 “likes” on the “Chelsea's Light” page on Facebook. The Kings also set up a page called “What Chelsea King Taught Me,” full of positive messages of hope and vision, inspired by her memory.
To provide their son, Tyler, with a feeling of safety and relief from nagging publicity and constant reminders of his sister, the Kings decided to move back to their old neighborhood in the close-knit town of Naperville, Illinois, in the summer of 2010.
“In San Diego, Tyler is known as Chelsea's brother,” Brent told reporters after the move.
“Here, Tyler can be Tyler.”
“It was like walking into a great big hug,” Kelly said, adding that Tyler was “probably the happiest we've seen him in a very long time.”
The Kings vowed to come back to San Diego periodically for foundation meetings and other events in Chelsea's memory.
That October, the Kings' claim against the state of California, faulting the corrections and parole system for Chelsea's murder and seeking $25,000 from the Victim Compensation and Government Claims Board, was rejected. The board said the Kings' case should be handled in the courts, but the family decided to drop the issue and pursue more positive ways to deal with losing Chelsea. The board also rejected a similar claim filed by the parents of Amber Dubois.

Other books

Snow One Like You by Kate Angell
The Chisholms by Evan Hunter
The Brigadier's Daughter by Catherine March
Lost Howl by Zenina Masters
2020: Emergency Exit by Hayes, Ever N
Rekindle by Ashley Suzanne, Tiffany Fox, Melissa Gill