Lost Girls

by Caitlin Rother

  The next two weeks were a blur. She could not stop vomiting or walking around like a zombie, unable to sleep, as her mind zigzagged with emotions ranging from horror to confusion, disbelief to guilt, and a deep, deep sadness.

  Chapter 6

  John Albert Gardner Jr. was born on April 9, 1979, in Culver City, California, after having a rough time in the womb. Cathy Osborn had had a pretty difficult pregnancy—her third, after daughters Shannon and Sarina—and struggled to find food that would stay down. She got so thin that she had to buy clothes in the girls’ department.

  Not surprisingly, John was a colicky baby, unusually active and finicky. But twenty-four-year-old Cathy tried to take her baby’s problems in stride, as she’d learned to do at home and in her training as a nurse. As her mother’s oldest child, she had become the matriarch of a large, extended family that continued to grow both in size and dysfunction as the years progressed.

  While her three sisters and two brothers were growing up, she took care of them when her mother, who suffered from severe depression and possibly undiagnosed bipolar disorder, wasn’t up to the task. This dynamic groomed Cathy early and often to become a lifelong caretaker for every troubled member of her family—her son, John, in particular. As Cathy’s siblings got older and had children of their own, she often took care of them as well, even becoming the temporary legal guardian to her sister Christina’s two children.

  After moving in with John’s father, who was also named John Albert Gardner, Cathy got pregnant and periodically took care of John Sr.’s two daughters as well. And when John Sr. suffered a work injury that caused severe back pain and put him on disability, she had to take care of him too.

  Suffice it to say, Cathy had her hands full, working full-time, going to school to become a nurse, and being a mother to everyone, but she assumed that job because she was the most stable, responsible and capable maternal figure in her family.

  Working eight hours a day with a two-hour commute, however, left her feeling like she was never home. And understandably, what little time she had for her son and the rest of her immediate family was spread thin amongst this rather expansive network.

  “I don’t feel embarrassed about anything I did. I did the best I could,” Cathy recalled. “I felt bad I didn’t have all the tools. If I could go back and change things, boy, there would be a whole lot of things I would change.” Rather than telling her kids to eat their vegetables, she said, she might have tried to spend more time reading to them and doing fun things, for example. She might also “have been more alert to some of the things that came across as more problematic, and more forceful about making sure there was follow-up.”

  The family called Cathy’s son “Little John,” “Li’l John,” (which he spelled “Lil”), and sometimes “Baby John,” to avoid confusion with his father, who went by “Big John” or his stage name as a professional guitar player, “Dirty John,” or “DJ” for short. When John Jr. grew up, he insisted on calling himself “John Albert Gardner III,” despite the fact that his grandfather had a different middle name. Even in his twenties and thirties, John Jr. still signed letters to his mother using these childhood nicknames, and some family members still referred to him as “Li’l John.”

  Years later, John Jr. told others that he felt he never got enough of his mother’s attention.

  “It’s not that she didn’t love him. It’s not that she didn’t want to spend the time with him,” recalled Cynthia, Cathy’s youngest sister. “But she was trying to achieve something and get somewhere that was better than where she came from.”

  John Jr. wasn’t lacking for female attention. He had a close network of his four sisters, three aunts and many cousins while he was growing up, many of whom shared special relationships with him. Shannon was his moral compass, for example, and Sarina was his confidante. He also had an unusually close relationship with his aunt Cynthia, who was only eleven years older, a relationship that took a bizarrely intimate turn in his late twenties.

  While this big extended family provided support and love to John Jr., it also came with certain drawbacks. Dysfunctional on many levels, its complex mix of genetic and environmental risk factors—including addiction, alcoholism, physical abuse, mental illness, mental disorders (such as autism and Asperger’s syndrome), a rotating series of father figures, repeated moves from house to house, financial instability (including multiple bankruptcies), molestation and incest—made for an extremely weak foundation. Some of the same elements of sexual dysfunction ran through both sides of John’s extended family, so he had it coming and going.

  Recognizing that she came from a family with roots in small-town USA that had little or no secondary education, Cathy tried to reach for higher goals and to serve as a good example for her children. After she finished her associate’s degree in nursing, she went on to obtain a master’s, and eventually became California’s legislative chairwoman of the American Psychiatric Nurses Association.

  Cathy made sure to teach her children manners, emphasizing the importance of social etiquette and knowing which knife and fork to use, and urged them to get a good education. As a result, her daughters Shannon and Sarina were successful: Shannon became a movie studio executive and mother of one boy and Sarina made the dean’s list when she returned to college later in life, after raising a son and an autistic daughter.

  “I learned to be a survivor, and I expect my kids to be survivors, no matter what,” Cathy said.

  But her son seemed to have a rough time from the very start. “John somehow missed the lessons,” Cathy said.

  Despite all that his mother, sisters and grandmother tried to do to make his life healthy and safe, this “confluence of weirdness” and these negative influences created “an air of pathology” for him that outweighed any resilience his sisters may have inherited, said Dr. Saul Levine, professor of clinical psychiatry at Rady Children’s Hospital and the University of California, San Diego Medical Center. Levine never treated John Jr. but was familiar with the case.

  These factors all manifested into “the perfect storm,” if you will, making for a very troubled and potentially dangerous individual who would ultimately get in trouble with the law, or, at the very least, need help from mental-health professionals, Levine said. “I think John was carrying a sad confluence of biological, social and psychological risk factors and influences that culminated in producing an individual who was driven and obsessed to commit these horrendous acts.”

  Handwriting expert Paula Sassi, who also never met Gardner, said his signature is very basic, which shows that he tries to hide his negative side, but it comes out, nonetheless. Several parts of his signature reveal “twisted and strange thinking,” she said, including a “manic d,” an indication that the author “has trouble controlling [his] impulses.”

  Cathy was born in June 1955 to Linda and Phillip Osborn, who were from Dayton, Ohio, and Poplar Bluff, Missouri, respectively. “My parents were hicks,” Cathy said. “They’re not sophisticated.”

  When Cathy was growing up in the South Bay of Los Angeles County, where Phillip worked as a toolmaker at Douglas Aircraft, she heard stories about her maternal grandmother, Loretta, who flew planes and was mayor of Dayton. She also learned that both of her grandfathers were alcoholics, and that an uncle on Linda’s side wasn’t “quite right” mentally.

  Cathy’s mother had quite a difficult time of it herself, suffering from depression, and trying to commit suicide in the 1960s. Linda ultimately had six children, with nearly a half-dozen miscarriages in between. From ages five to seven, Cathy watched her mother huddle in the corner, crying. Linda tried medications of the day, including Librium and Thorazine, but nothing helped. When more drastic measures were necessary, Cathy was sent to her grandmother’s house while Linda underwent electroconvulsive therapy, known at the time as electroshock therapy. Linda seemed quite a bit better afterward, more calm and able to laugh again, but she still had a temper.

  Cathy’s father was very conserv
ative and worked hard, but he never showed much empathy toward Cathy’s mother or the children. In fact, he and Linda often fought and, sometimes, quite violently. One time Linda threw dishes at Phillip and cut him badly enough that the whole family had to drive him to the hospital to get stitches. By the time Cathy was eight, her parents had divorced, and Linda soon moved on to husband number two, Reese Porter Smith.

  At ages nine and ten, Cathy was molested by a male family member, who came into her room at night, the first time on Christmas Eve, and put his mouth on her private area. But she didn’t tell her mother because her molester said if she did, “all of us kids would be taken away from my mom and she’d kill herself.”

  Linda was pregnant with her fifth child when Smith started molesting Derrick*, Cathy’s eighteen-month-old half-brother. Cathy was ten and was changing her brother’s diaper when she saw that he was bleeding, so she told her mother, who immediately reported it to police. Cathy was questioned, but she was still too scared to mention her own molestation. She didn’t even tell her mother until Cathy was in her twenties.

  In 1965, Cathy’s stepfather was convicted of violating California Penal Code 286 against Derrick, which was entered into court records as “the infamous crime against nature,” in other words, sodomy. The most dangerous sexual offenders were assessed and ordered into treatment even back then. After being designated a “mentally disordered sex offender,” Smith was sent to the Department of Mental Hygiene at Atascadero State Hospital. Five months later, he was returned to court for sentencing.

  “The doctors don’t feel you benefited much from the treatment,” the judge told Smith. “They feel that you are still a menace to society.” Smith’s probation request was denied, and he served the rest of his term in prison.

  “This is why it was so hard for me to believe that John ... ,” Cathy said recently, trailing off as if she didn’t want to say the words that would make it real. “I just couldn’t even imagine, [or] see him as capable.”

  “[John] did have some knowledge of this,” she said, referring to the incident involving his uncle Derrick, as well as her own rape and kidnapping that occurred when John was only four months old. “I don’t know how much. He was pretty close to being an adult when he found out, but I didn’t deny it... . I tried to present it in a way that was appropriate.”

  After Smith went to prison, Cathy’s mother got pregnant by a married man and had Cynthia, Linda’s sixth and last child. “Our family is completely, completely dysfunctional,” Cynthia said in 2011. “These people ... are not healthy.”

  By the time Cathy was fourteen, she was dating the older brother of a neighborhood girl she’d been babysitting. Richard Simpson, a handsome twenty-five-year-old, was an army veteran who had recently returned from fighting in Vietnam and now spent months at sea as a merchant marine.

  When Linda reunited with Phillip, Cathy was angry. She tried to stay away from the house as much as possible, and she was furious when they decided to remarry. She loved her father, but she was angry that he’d deserted them when Linda was so sick. Cathy also loved her mother, but she felt a mix of resentment and guilt that Linda was too depressed to take care of herself or her six children. That not only left Cathy without a mother, but also forced Cathy to be a mother to her siblings—and to Linda. When Cathy couldn’t take it anymore, she ran away to a friend’s house. Ultimately, Cathy and her mother agreed that she could move in with the family next door.

  Cathy didn’t try to hide her relationship with Richard from her mother, who thought it was an innocent teenage infatuation that would soon run its course. She was wrong. When Richard got back into port, he and fifteen-year-old Cathy drove to Tijuana, Mexico, and got married. But because they didn’t get the marriage certified in the United States in time, they had to remarry in Las Vegas in August 1971, when she was sixteen and had already given birth to their five-month-old daughter, Shannon.

  Richard used his GI benefits to take firefighting classes while he worked nights as a mall security guard. Cathy, who’d gotten pregnant again, took classes at Harbor Junior College during the day and finished high school at night. When Sarina was born in July 1972, Cathy had already decided to become a psychiatric nurse.

  After being exposed to Agent Orange, Richard wasn’t the most stable individual, and Cathy later suspected he had post-traumatic stress disorder as well. Cathy didn’t want to get divorced. Instead, she sought counseling from her minister about Richard’s drinking and abusive behavior, who told her “it was not God’s plan for me to end up being killed.”

  Fearing for her life, she took the girls and left on September 22, 1974, filing for divorce and primary custody. Richard responded three weeks later by coming to her parents’ house while Cathy was at the grocery store with her mom, and wooing the girls into his car: “C’mere, angel babies.”

  For months, Cathy went crazy trying to find them, hiring a private investigator and asking the court for help in getting them back. In a letter to the judge, Cathy wrote: My husband and I had a violent argument. He threatened me with bodily harm and I informed him that I was leaving with the children. When she heard that the children were at her mother-in-law’s house, Cathy wrote, she tried but couldn’t get them back, and her efforts only resulted in further violent threats to her and the kids. She was clearly the best parent to have custody of them, she insisted.

  Several months later, Cathy finally located the girls in Arkansas with Richard and his relatives. Cathy persuaded him to return to Los Angeles by pretending she wanted to get back together. She had sex with him, until he trusted her, then she grabbed the girls when he went to the store.

  “I had to do that to get my kids,” she explained.

  Cathy won full custody of Shannon and Sarina, and despite her protests, Richard got regular visiting rights to see them on weekends. Richard eventually married another woman and had six more children. Sick in the hospital in the early 2000s, he told Cathy he didn’t remember being mean to her. But because Cathy and his daughters had told him what had happened, she said, he apologized for it.

  After a couple of years working at a dry cleaner’s, in 1976, Cathy got a job as a waitress at Sweetwater Canyon Depot in Gardena, where they had live music. By her third night, she’d caught the attention of John Gardner, a handsome young rhythm guitar player and lead singer with electric blue eyes, a mustache and curly, light brown hair. He was in the house band, Big Mama & Co., which played Fridays and Saturdays, when she worked from 8:00 P.M. to 3:00 A.M. He whistled and smiled at her whenever she delivered drinks to tables near the band.

  Obviously smitten, he introduced himself on a break and asked her name. She was a bit embarrassed at first, but she had to admit he was pretty cute; part of her couldn’t help but enjoy the attention. He asked her out, but as a twenty-one-year-old mother of two, she wasn’t looking for a relationship.

  “You know what? I have kids and I work all the time,” she told him.

  But he was charming and persistent. Within a couple of weeks, he had her phone number, and within a month, she had a crush on him too.

  It turned out he was divorced and had two daughters, just like her, so they had a few things in common. Little did she know that this attractive, charismatic, funny and talented man had a dark side—and a troubled family history of his own.

  John Albert Gardner Sr. was born in Inglewood, California, on May 1, 1944, to John Egan Gardner and Esta Leona Adams.

  Esta, who was originally from Texas, was still married to another man at the time, and she already had a son and two daughters. It’s unknown whether Esta was separated when she got pregnant, but according to family lore, her divorce wasn’t final until John was ten. John Egan Gardner disappeared soon after his son was born, so they never met, and Esta was left to raise the little rascal on her own.

  “I figured he never got disciplined. His mother would cry whenever he did something bad,” said Deanna Gardner, John Sr.’s first wife.

  As John Sr. got older, his m
other couldn’t control him and eventually sent him to a reform school out in the desert.

  He met Deanna a few months shy of her seventeenth birthday in the summer of 1963, when she was watching his band, the Emeralds, audition for a dance at Hawthorne High School. A nineteen-year-old singer who looked like James Dean, John Sr. had recently graduated from Hawthorne. He was a lanky six feet tall, weighed a whopping 130 pounds, and waved his arms and legs around when he performed. John told her he’d taught himself to play piano, guitar and bass guitar, and also how to write music and sing. He even wrote her a song, which made her swoon.

  They eloped as soon as Deanna finished high school. She moved into his house in Culver City, which they shared with his mother, a hypochondriac and a hoarder, who stacked the rooms with piles of trash, newspapers and dirty plates with moldy food. John’s mother had once worked for an aerospace company but had gotten sick, went on disability and never worked again, a similar fate to the one he would later follow.

  John Sr.’s brother and sister helped clean the house before Deanna moved in, but they didn’t touch the walls and ceiling of John’s bedroom, which were covered with names and phone numbers scrawled in black Magic Marker. Still, Deanna was quite happy to leave her family’s home, where between the ages of eight and thirteen, she had been molested by her father.

  After six months, the newlyweds moved into their own rental house, and Deanna got pregnant. From the way John Sr. had interacted with his nieces and nephews, she thought he’d be a good father, but she was mistaken. While she was still pregnant, he made comments like, “If this baby doesn’t learn not to touch things by the time it’s crawling, I’m going to knock it across the room.”

  Deanna thought he was kidding until their first daughter, Mona*, was born in June 1967, and she soon realized that her husband expected babies to act like adults and couldn’t stand to hear the sound of one crying. When Mona was six weeks old, John Sr. stuck her in the closet in her infant seat and closed the door, thinking it would make her stop bawling. Another day, John leaped out of bed and spanked her little thighs for wailing. Deanna screamed for him to stop, but John just pushed her out of the room and locked the door.