Lost Girls (9 page)

Read Lost Girls Online

Authors: Caitlin Rother

“By itself, it probably wasn't the thing that was going to make him the most stable, but it helped,” she said.
During his junior and senior years, Dan and John argued more and more. Tensions were mounting and came to a head on Cathy's birthday in June 1996, when Dan and John pushed each other during a dispute over whether to bring a cake to the beach.
Six months later, they got into another fight, and this time, Dan told Cathy that John had to go.
“I'm throwing him out,” he said.
Cathy was not happy. It was the middle of winter, with snow on the ground. “You're being reactionary,” she said. “This is ridiculous.”
John had been over at a friend's at the time, and when he returned home, Dan had locked him out. This led to a fight between Cathy and Dan, who hadn't been getting along so well either. She moved out with John the next day to allow him to finish high school with a roof over his head. She expected Dan to get past his anger and apologize. When he didn't, she went back to the house under the guise of picking up her stuff, hoping they could mend fences.
However, they both realized they wanted different things, and she eventually filed for divorce. Because it was amicable, she sent John to deliver the paperwork to Dan personally so she didn't have to pay a federal marshal to do it.
 
 
Despite his self-reports that he graduated high school in 1997 with a grade point average of 3.2, John's transcript shows he finished with a GPA of 2.9, after attempting to complete 265 units and finishing only 247.5. Although he excelled in the electives, getting an A+ in advanced ceramics and A's in choir and drama, he also did well with A's in government/economics, job skills, a course titled “transitions,” and his eleventh-grade English course. He got F's, however, in chemistry, English/myth literature and integrated science.
Jenni and John continued to date after graduation, and he often came back to campus to visit her and his other friends, and sing with the choir. It was his unauthorized presence on school grounds that got him into trouble with the law for the first time.
The school security guard had repeatedly warned him, “You need to have a reason to be here, and Jen is not a valid reason,” but John continued to come, anyway. The guard finally told John he would be arrested the next time he showed up. When John defiantly returned, the guard followed through.
John was charged with disturbing the peace and unlawfully coming on school grounds to disrupt activities. The prosecutor dropped the first count in a plea bargain, John pleaded guilty to disturbing the peace and received probation with a fine. But that still didn't stop him. He came back a couple more times, stopping only when Jenni broke up with him for good.
 
 
John had always had a roving eye, which caused him and Jenni to break up twice for cheating. To her knowledge, he'd slept with only one girl the first time—one of her friends, who confessed to her. Jenni took him back after they'd spent a month apart.
About six months later, she learned he'd been cheating again from another friend he'd slept with, and this time “it was more people than I could count on my fingers. I want to say it was the teenage hormone thing—somebody wants me, let's do it.”
Their breakup occurred at the high school after his arrest, which he continued to visit in spite of the “stay away” notice he'd been issued. “He sauntered in with that carefree smile, and I threw my class ring at him [which he'd given to her], and it hit him in his head,” she recalled.
“What the hell?” he asked her.
When he saw one of the girls he'd cheated with was standing next to Jenni, he realized what was going on.
“Ohhh,” he said.
He tried to talk to Jenni, but she didn't want to listen, so he walked out of the room, crying. A couple of days later, she agreed to talk to him, but only because she wanted to find out how many girls he'd been with. She learned that he'd been cheating on her for quite some time, including one night he'd had sex with five girls at a friend's party.
In spite of all this, they remained very close friends. “I was never going to take that again,” she said. “I deserve better than that. I can love him, but I don't have to be in love with him.”
John began to decompensate after high school, while he was still living with Cathy and taking general education classes at Crafton Hills College for a couple of months. Things weren't going well at school, because Cathy had thought his high school was going to send transcripts or alert the community college that he needed services for special education. That never happened, though. After agreeing to get back on his meds, John decided he didn't want to, after all. He dropped out of school and moved to Los Angeles in October 1997 to live with his cousin Jason.
He seemed to settle in better there, taking courses at El Camino College, near Torrance, and working at In-N-Out Burger. Excited to be on his own, he knew he could always come home to live with his mother again, if things didn't work out.
Six months later, he lost his job for goofing off at work, and he moved back in with Cathy, who had purchased a condo on Matinal Road in Rancho Bernardo, in March 1998.
Chapter 11
After John moved to San Diego, he and his sister Sarina took a class together at Miramar College, and by December 1999, he'd gotten a job at the Big 5 sporting-goods store in Rancho Bernardo. When his manager moved to the store in nearby Mira Mesa, she asked John, her best employee, to come with her to set an example. He was promoted to full-time there in just two weeks, and he worked his way up to assistant manager, earning $9.60 an hour.
Sometimes he talked to his mother about the girls he dated, such as the attractive one who turned out to be too wild for him. “Intimate kinds of things he'd share with me usually were for shock value,” Cathy said.
In late January 2000, he met Patricia Walker*, a coworker at Big 5, who, at eighteen, was two years younger.
When Patricia was only three, she'd developed some health issues and was given only a 50 percent chance of surviving if she had surgery, and no chance if she didn't have the operation. She survived. She went on to need thick glasses and then braces.
By the time she met John, she had gotten contacts and was starting to get noticed by boys, but her self-confidence was still low and she was pretty excited that an older, handsome young man was interested in her. At five feet nine inches, she had chin-length strawberry blond hair, a wide, toothy smile and a nice athletic figure. Very down-to-earth, she looked clean and all-American, and rarely wore makeup.
When she and John went out on their first date, he still hadn't kissed her four hours into the evening, so she kissed him. After that, Patricia introduced him to activities that were new to him, such as going to the opera or having a picnic.
“He really just kind of admired that,” Cathy said.
In turn, John did wonders for Patricia's self-esteem by lavishing attention on her. He woke her one morning by serenading her with “You Are My Sunshine” outside her bedroom window. Sometimes, when she left work at Big 5, she found he'd surprised her by leaving a bouquet of roses in the parking lot. On the night of the Sadie Hawkins dance, he insisted on cooking her a four-course meal. When she got sick one day they were supposed to get together, he came over and made her lunch, then he spent the afternoon putting cool washcloths on her forehead. He liked to smoke cigarettes, but as soon as Patricia asked him to stop because of her allergies, he quit, and she never once smelled that dirty smoke odor on him again.
It wasn't long before she got pregnant. John really wanted to be a father, but Patricia struggled with whether to keep the baby. “John was telling her, ‘No, no, no, don't get an abortion, '” Cathy recalled. “They were engaged and he did want to marry her.”
Like his mother, John didn't believe in abortion, and he felt it was wrong to kill a fetus, especially one with his DNA. But after Patricia's parents gave her an ultimatum—have an abortion or get out of the house before she'd even finished high school—she decided to have the procedure.
Looking back in 2011, Patricia said the young John she knew then “was kind and caring and sweet. He wanted the white picket fence, two kids, a boy and a girl, and the dogs.” She also acknowledged, however, that “he's very intelligent and knows how to manipulate people.”
 
 
John hung out with a half-dozen teenagers from the neighborhood, who frequently gathered in Cathy's front yard. While the latest songs played on a boom box, the boys knocked around a punching bag attached to a tree or went rollerblading up and down Matinal Road as a few younger girls watched and teased them. The group also hung out at the basketball courts at the Westwood Club, a community center around the corner. Most of them were boys, ages sixteen to twenty; the few girls were thirteen or fourteen, including Monica*, who lived next door.
To Cathy, this all looked like harmless fun. “They behaved,” she said. “They weren't doing anything bad. They weren't smoking, drinking, anything like that.”
But Cathy and Sarina could tell that Monica had developed a crush on John, and Sarina actually warned him about the way he and Monica were interacting. “If you're anywhere near that girl, you're going to get in trouble,” she said.
Five feet five inches tall and weighing one hundred pounds, Monica wore makeup, dressed in short skirts, and looked older than her thirteen years.
“She would flirt with him,” Sarina recalled. “He liked older girls, but he liked the attention.”
On Sunday, March 12, 2000, Cathy was watching a movie with a friend, when Monica knocked on the door and asked to speak with John. Cathy told her to wait while she went upstairs to tell John he had a visitor. He sometimes helped Monica with her homework, considering himself a math wizard. But at the moment, John said he was spending time with Patricia.
“Tell her I'm busy right now,” he said. “I'll talk to her later.” Cathy relayed the message to Monica, who left, only to return ninety minutes later with the same request. By this time, Cathy was getting annoyed because she had company herself, so she told Monica to try knocking on John's door, but not to go in.
“His girlfriend is here, so he may not be at a place where he can talk,” Cathy said.
A few minutes later, Monica came running downstairs crying, and left. John came down right afterward and scolded his mother for sending the girl upstairs. Then he went outside to speak briefly with Monica.
When he came back in, he told Cathy, “Don't ever let her in our house—ever.”
John never told his mother what happened upstairs, but Patricia said Monica burst into his room without knocking, saw her and John kissing, and stormed out.
“She was visibly upset that I was with him, like ‘he's mine, not yours,'” Patricia recalled.
 
 
Four days later, John took the day off from work because he had a sinus infection. When Cathy left for her job at Pomerado Hospital's mental-health unit, he was lying on the couch, taking cold medication.
A little while later, John was driving down West Bernardo Drive when he saw Monica and her best friend, Erika*, waiting for the school bus in front of the Westwood Club. He picked them up, and gave them a ride to Bernardo Center Middle School. As they were pulling up, Monica saw a couple of girls she fought with the day before, and told John she didn't want to go to school, after all.
John invited Monica and Erika to come back to his condo to watch videos, but Erika wanted to go to class. Monica, however, accepted his invitation.
Two hours later, the San Diego Police Department (SDPD) got a 911 call that a rape had just occurred on Matinal Road, and that the suspect, twenty-year-old John Gardner, six feet two inches tall and weighing 195 pounds, was seen leaving the area in a white car.
The call went out on the radio with John's license plate number. Within minutes, Officer Donna Westcott saw him at the Circle K gas station nearby. He was wearing a soiled, torn white T-shirt, and was pumping gas when Westcott saw him grab a can out of the trunk, spray his hands and rub them together, as if to clean them off, then got into his car. Westcott asked him to get out of the vehicle and put his hands behind his back, then she handcuffed him.
“What's wrong?” Gardner asked. “The car isn't stolen. I was just on my way to Mira Mesa, to see my girlfriend. Oh yeah, just so you know, I have a butterfly knife in the center console of my car.”
While another officer took Gardner back to his condo, where police attempted to gain entry, Westcott looked inside his car and noticed the can that Gardner had sprayed on his hands lying on the passenger-side floor. It was a can of Odor Eaters.
 
 
Monica told police that she and John had been watching
Patch Adams
at his mother's condo for half an hour when he started to massage her. “At first I didn't mind. I was down about everything,” she said. “We were sitting on the ground in the living room. Later, I told him to stop. I told him I didn't feel comfortable... . He stopped for a while.”
But then, she said, he began to force himself on her, getting on top of her and pulling down her pants. When he put his hand down her underwear in front and back, she managed to push his hand away before he could do anything invasive. Still, he continued to touch her, and put his mouth on her breasts, with his pants unzipped. This continued for about ninety minutes, downstairs in the living room, upstairs in his bedroom, and back downstairs again. When she started to scream, she said, he covered her mouth so she couldn't breathe, making her dizzy and scared, then he punched her repeatedly in the face and head. Afterward, he apologized and hugged her, she said, “saying he didn't know what he was thinking.”
Nonetheless, she ran out of the condo and across the street to a neighbor's, Sue Ann Jones, and knocked on the front door. Jones opened the door to see Monica crying, bleeding and looking rumpled on her doorstep, with her pants unzipped.
“I'm so scared. I've been raped,” Monica said.
The girl's face was so swollen that Jones immediately fetched Monica a bag of ice to hold on her bruised left eye, which was starting to turn colors, and her lip, which was cut. After Jones's husband called 911, Monica said she didn't want the police involved, and wanted to go back to school, admitting that she hadn't actually been raped. While sitting in the patrol car, waiting for the detectives to arrive, she complained of head, neck and abdominal pain, then leaned outside and vomited into the street.
Monica was taken to Rady Children's Hospital, where her injuries were documented. In addition to her head and facial wounds, her left thumb and palm were red and bruised, and her neck also was bruised from where she said he'd grabbed and strangled her. Even if she hadn't been
technically
raped, in the eyes of the police and the DA's office, what John had done to her was plenty bad enough.
Erika told police that John had offered to call the school to get permission for both of them to miss class so they could go to his house and watch movies. Monica decided she didn't want to go to class, Erika said, and the next thing she knew, her friend was calling from the hospital.
Erika said she didn't know John very well, but he'd kissed her on the cheek at the basketball courts. He told her to close her eyes, but when she didn't obey, he didn't do anything else.
Erika said Monica told John that she would have sex with him if all these people weren't around,
the police report said. Monica later explained that she'd been joking.
 
 
After John refused to allow police to search the condo without a warrant, Detective R. C. Johnson questioned him in the cruiser while they worked on getting one. John denied Monica's allegations that he'd punched and molested her, admitting only to giving her a ride to school that morning.
“Did you hit someone today?” Johnson asked.
“No, I don't hit girls,” John said. “Everyone knows that she is like my little sister. Her mother and father are weird.”
Asked if he'd ever kissed her, John replied, “Yes, but only like a friend.”
He initially said they were together for sixty to ninety minutes. However, when asked what they were doing that whole time, John changed his answer. He said that driving took up twenty to thirty minutes, so he was only with her for about fifteen minutes (which still didn't add up). He said none of her clothes or belongings would be found inside the condo, because he'd dropped her off in front of her apartment complex near the Circle K, around eight-forty in the morning.
During the physical exam, the nurse noted that John was alert and cooperative to the point of being “giddy,” with “inappropriate laughing.” The police impounded his Pontiac Grand Am, and transported him to the county jail, where he was held for four days on $50,000 bail.
Monica's father told police that the incident was so traumatic for his daughter that the family had to move out of the neighborhood, and her mother had to take her to San Francisco for a while. Monica had lost her ability to trust people, he said, because she'd thought John was her friend. If Monica couldn't trust her friends, who could she trust?

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