Lost Girls

by Caitlin Rother

  The next morning, both of Mona’s legs were black and blue.

  “Look what you did to the baby!” Deanna cried.

  But John wouldn’t own up to what he’d done, let alone apologize for it. “I thought you did that to her,” he retorted.

  John didn’t drink much alcohol when they first met, but once he turned twenty-one and started playing in bars with the band, he drank and smoked pot at least five nights a week with his buddies. He worked days as a product manager for an electrical components manufacturer, and sometimes he brought his boss home for lunch and mixed drinks. John’s coworkers also saw him drinking in his truck during breaks at work. It was never beer, only hard liquor, and when he was drunk, he was a different man who often didn’t remember later what he’d done.

  One day, he had a bad hangover and grabbed Mona so hard he left a handprint on her rib cage. Deanna, who had come home on a break from work, was so furious she grabbed the baby and took her back to work.

  “He wasn’t a very good father,” Deanna said. “He didn’t have a father, so he really didn’t know the role of a father.”

  Deanna got pregnant a second time, and prayed to God, “If he hurts this one, I’m going to kill him.” But after giving her options some serious thought, she decided it would be better to leave him, instead.

  So Deanna gathered up her courage and moved out when she was four months pregnant with their second daughter, Melissa*. Their divorce became final at the end of 1971.

  Chapter 7

  Cathy and John Sr. fell in love, fast and hard. They’d been dating only a couple of months before she moved into the same house in Culver City that he had shared with Deanna.

  Shortly after Cathy and John started living together, Deanna got married. When she and her new husband left their jobs, they sent Mona and Melissa to live with Cathy and John Sr. for at least six months. Deanna’s girls came back periodically, together or one at a time; Cynthia, Cathy’s youngest sister, often came for short stays as well. At times, all five girls shared one bedroom.

  “It was fabulous,” Cathy recalled. “They had each other. We did things as a family ... go to the park, go to the beach and go fishing.”

  However, Cathy said, John was drinking quite a bit, and because he wasn’t a morning person, “if they woke him up, he’d go into anger pretty quickly.”

  She and John Sr. had been together for about eighteen months and were getting along well, until Cathy got pregnant. Then things changed.

  John Sr. had gotten a DUI and lost his license, so Cathy had to drive him to work, which made him feel less of a man. He was drunk one day she had to take him to work, and he started ranting. Flinging his arm out as he complained, “you were supposed to turn that way,” he accidentally smacked Cathy in the face, giving her a black eye.

  After her tumultuous first marriage, Cathy said, she “totally freaked.” She knew it was an accident, but she also knew that “if he’d been sober, it wouldn’t have happened.” It was a red flag, but she really loved him. Like his first wife, Deanna, Cathy hoped, too, that once the baby came, he’d stop drinking and acting out. Looking back later, she realized this was “magical thinking.”

  When Cathy found out they were going to have a baby, John Sr. offered an awkward marriage proposal. “Well, you’re pregnant, and I think I should do the right thing,” he said.

  But even though Cathy was in love with John Sr. and wanted to spend the rest of her life with him, she declined, telling him that she wouldn’t marry him as long as he was still drinking. “I don’t want to get married just because I’m pregnant,” she said.

  At first, Cathy hadn’t even known she was pregnant with Li’l John, because she was on birth control pills. The pills made her sick and she’d been throwing up, so she went to the doctor, complaining of continuous nausea, vomiting and some bleeding. He gave her a pregnancy test, which came back negative. After several more negative tests in the next six weeks, a final test was positive, so they figured she’d been pregnant the entire time.

  Diagnosed with hyperemesis gravidarum, a severe form of morning sickness, she continued to vomit daily, until the fifth month, when it slowed and finally stopped a month or two later. Around the seventh month, the doctor did an ultrasound and told her she was having a nine-pound girl, which would soon prove to be a miscalculation of gender. Nevertheless, Cathy burst into tears, scared by the prospect of giving birth to such a large infant.

  She gained only fifteen pounds during her pregnancy, wearing a woman’s size-3 pants home from the hospital. She lost even more weight after her baby boy, John, was born, going down to a girl’s size 14. It didn’t seem to affect her son’s weight, though, because he came into the world at eight pounds, two ounces. Although he was generally healthy, his skin was jaundiced.

  “I had girls and loved having girls,” she said. “I was just excited about having a son. In my mind, in my fantasy, I was hoping John would want to be involved since he had a son.”

  But that was, in fact, a fantasy. John Sr. was initially excited, but he also made it clear he wasn’t going to change any diapers.

  During the pregnancy, Deanna had warned Cathy about John Sr.’s previous behavior with Mona. “I don’t know if he’ll do it again, but he was physically abusive to her, and you need to be careful,” Deanna told her.

  Cathy shrugged it off, confident that this wouldn’t happen with their baby, not with John Sr. being so crazy about her. She said she thought Deanna “was just trying to scare me off because she was jealous, so I didn’t give what she said the credence that I should have.”

  But she soon realized that John Sr. hadn’t changed at all. He couldn’t deal with this newborn either, crying next to their bed and hungry all the time.

  “Can’t you stick him somewhere else?” he complained.

  “Absolutely not, he’s staying right here,” Cathy said, although sometimes she took the bassinet and slept on the couch or in the girls’ room to keep the peace, which seemed to help.

  She was disappointed by her husband’s lack of interest in their son, whom she was enjoying. Li’l John was such a bright baby. He crawled and rolled over early, talked early—saying “uh-oh,” “Mama,” “baba” for bottle, and “night-night” at five months. He walked before he was a year old, and was potty trained by two and a half years, which was average for boys.

  That said, he was an overactive infant, awake for more hours than the usual baby, and sleeping in short fits and starts for an hour or two at a time. He also had allergies and a constant stream of ear infections from eighteen to thirty-six months, during which time he was treated with the antibiotic tetracycline, which permanently stained his teeth gray. Continuing to have problems with asthma, he ultimately had to have polyethylene tubes placed in his ears and had to use an inhaler for bronchial spasms.

  Not surprisingly, he had trouble quieting down to go to sleep at night, so Cathy came up with a bedtime ritual to help him relax: she gave him a bath, put his PJs on, read him a story and rubbed his back. When he was six months old, Cathy started feeding him cereal and soy milk, which also seemed to settle him down.

  “When John was really, really young, he had so much high energy. He had a beautiful soul,” said his aunt Cynthia. “He was special.”

  John Jr. was the kind of baby who got into everything, pulling books off the shelf and pans and pots out of the cupboard. “He wanted to find out what was there,” and put it all in his mouth, Cathy said. That included some Drano at age two.

  “It got on his lip, but it didn’t get anywhere else,” she said, noting that he had to be briefly hospitalized.

  At eighteen months, he had to get stitches in his lip after Shannon and Sarina were fighting over who got to hold him. Sarina was eight and wearing roller skates when she tried to grab him out of Shannon’s arms. In the struggle, they dropped him on his head, causing him to bite through his lip and tongue, and to lose a tooth. “Shannon was the strong one, trying to calm us down so we could tell Mom and
not make a scene because stepdad John was going to be mad,” Sarina recalled.

  “John was such a cute kid,” she said. “Sometimes Shannon and I would dress him up like a girl... . He let us.”

  After he ran into a doorknob at age three, a goose egg–sized lump erupted on his head. And at four, imitating his dad shaving, John Jr. cut open his lip in a bloody mess.

  Overall, these mishaps were not all that unusual for an active, curious little boy. The beating he got from his father at ten months old, however, was anything but typical.

  After drinking all night with the band, John Sr. didn’t like to be disturbed in the morning, when he was trying to sleep off his hangover. The girls weren’t allowed to walk or run around the house because the floorboards creaked, and he got angry if they woke him up, so “we had to be quiet all day,” Melissa recalled.

  Sometimes Sarina and Shannon grabbed Li’l John and hid in the bedroom closet while their father yelled at Cathy. “We tried to block it out, whatever he was saying,” Sarina recalled.

  One night in 1984, one of the girls dropped a toy typewriter on the floor with a crash. Drunk, John Sr. opened the bedroom door with his belt in hand and growled, his voice loud and deep like an ogre’s.

  “Who did that?” When no one responded, he grew even more menacing. “Who did that? Answer me!”

  The girls pointed at each other from their beds on the floor, saying, “She did it! She did it!” With that, John Sr. swung the belt, hitting Shannon and Sarina with the strap and Melissa with the buckle, leaving her with a bruised hip.

  Cathy and Deanna both believed that John Sr. wasn’t a bad man. “What’s sad is he really loved the kids, but he had no idea how to express the caring and love he had for them,” Cathy said.

  But because he only conveyed his feelings to his wives, his children didn’t see or feel that love. They only felt emotional unavailability from this strict disciplinarian, whom they viewed more as a prison guard.

  Another morning, Cynthia and the other girls were still in bed, with Li’l John in his crib near the doorway. Cathy was at the store, buying pancake ingredients, when the baby started crying, apparently wanting to be changed, fed or held. But none of the girls wanted to chance getting out of bed for fear of making noise and getting smacked with the belt.

  Annoyed by the crying, John Sr. came in, pulled his baby son’s diaper down and smacked him ten times while the girls covered their heads and cried under the blankets.

  “Shut up!” he yelled.

  When Cathy got home, she looked in on Li’l John, who was whimpering. She went to the girls for an explanation, but they were too terrified to say anything in case John Sr. got angry at them for telling on him. All they could do was point to the crib.

  “What happened?” Cathy asked.

  Still getting no answer, Cathy checked the baby’s diaper. It looked like he’d pooped, so she tried to clean him off. When it still looked like she’d missed some, she rubbed his bottom a little harder and he started wailing. Looking closer, she saw the dark marks were actually bruises on his tiny buttocks. Turning him over, she saw more on his thighs and all over his back.

  Shaking with fury, Cathy picked him up and ordered the girls to wait next door as she grabbed the diaper bag and her purse and headed for the front door.

  “Where are you going?” John Sr. asked.

  Cathy grabbed a kitchen knife in case John Sr. tried to stop her. “I’m leaving,” she said. Pulling up the baby’s top and his diaper down, she exposed all the purple marks. “Look what you did to my baby!” she said. She warned him not to touch her child ever again, then stormed out the door.

  John Sr. sat silent with shock and disbelief, as he watched her leave.

  Cathy and the girls piled into the Pinto and headed for her parents’ house, where they stayed for the next month. John Sr. called every day to say he was sorry, and that he’d do whatever it took to get Cathy to come back. Scared that he was going to lose her, he promised he would never beat Li’l John again.

  “He loved me and felt like he was willing to do whatever it took to show me that,” she said.

  Cathy told him what was required, and he did it: He quit drinking, went into an outpatient rehab program, and started going to AA meetings. When she was satisfied it was safe for her family, she and the children came back to live with him.

  “Boundaries were set after that beating with John,” Cynthia recalled. “He did everything right.”

  After they all moved back in, John Sr. asked Cathy a couple more times to marry him, but she ignored him, unsure whether his proposals were serious. She finally said yes, and they got married on August 18, 1980, when she was twenty-five, he was thirty-six, and Li’l John was sixteen months old.

  Ironically, part of the reason why Cathy married John Sr. was because she wanted to feel safe after she’d been kidnapped and raped when Li’l John was four months old. Her assailant was a tall, thin black man, who had climbed into the backseat of her car in a supermarket parking lot in Hawthorne. On her way to pick up the baby, and then her husband after a gig around midnight, she didn’t know the man was in her car until she started to drive. He grabbed her from behind, sticking the cold metal of a knife against her throat, causing her to scream with shock and fear.

  “Shut up and pull over!” he ordered. She thought about crashing the car, but she didn’t know if she could do that without killing them both. After she pulled over to an open area, he told her to get down on her knees on the passenger-side floorboard, facing the seat. He put a pair of spray-painted goggles on her so she couldn’t see where they were going, a tactic indicating that he’d done this before. Next he told her to put her arms and head down. He drove for about half an hour to a hotel. He raped her there for the next seven hours, constantly reminding her that if she looked at him or told anyone, “I will come back and kill you.”

  “Don’t move those glasses,” he kept saying. “Don’t be trying to look.”

  He finally dropped her on a street corner, took the goggles, told her to keep her eyes closed until he was gone, and disappeared after parking her car down the block.

  “I was wandering the streets,” she recalled. “I was in so much shock. I couldn’t even call my parents to come pick me up.”

  She was treated at the now-defunct Robert F. Kennedy Medical Center in Hawthorne and reported the incident to police, but the rapist was never caught. Afterward, she told her daughters about it in a vague way to explain why she was so upset.

  “Something bad happened to Mommy, but I’m okay now. I’m here with you,” she said, adding that she was trying to deal with it, but it would take some time before she felt better.

  Sarina recalled her mother trying to explain the situation. “Not the details, but we were aware that something happened,” Sarina recalled. “We didn’t understand the whole concept. I just shut it out.”

  The incident, which left Cathy scared to go out except for doctor’s appointments, made her want to be closer to John Sr.

  “I wanted his protection,” she said. “I wanted that sense of security.” At six feet and now a more stocky 180 pounds, “he was a big guy.” Plus, she said, “I liked him. He’s a very nice, charismatic individual, interesting to be around, intelligent. Even though he didn’t have a college education, he was a smart person.” Besides, she said, “I was the one he wanted to spend his life with.”

  But he reacted quite oddly, saying he almost didn’t believe she’d been raped because of her clinginess. He couldn’t understand why she wasn’t being more distant; he’d expected her to act just the opposite.

  Once Cathy got past the trauma of the rape, she went back to school and took classes at West Los Angeles College, where she put her three-year-old son into day care.

  One day when she went to pick him up, they told her that he had some emotional problems, that he was hyperactive and he should take medication to get along with the other kids. “He was too intrusive, a little bit too aggressive,” she re
called them saying—and worse, he’d bitten a little girl so they’d had to suspend him.

  When she and Li’l John got home, she asked what had happened that day, and he started what would become a pattern in his life—blaming someone else for his angry, inappropriate reaction. Crying, he said, “Mommy, the girl pushed me, and I was mad, so I bit her.”

  “You can’t bite,” Cathy responded. Wanting to make sure he understood that his behavior was wrong, she didn’t say, “Oh, you’re bad.” Rather, she told him he wouldn’t get to go to school, which he loved, because he enjoyed interacting with the other kids.

  “It scares the other kids,” she said. “It’s not nice to them.”

  Cathy didn’t like the idea of medicating her son, and neither, she said, did his pediatrician, who thought John Jr. was too young.

  “You can’t make a determination when they’re that age,” the doctor told her, meaning that one biting incident didn’t necessarily mean the child needed to be constantly medicated.

  John Sr. felt the day care operators were overreacting to what he viewed as typical little-boy behavior, and he also wasn’t pleased that their son would be at home for a couple of days. So Cathy stayed home from work too, although she purposely didn’t do anything fun with the boy. Li’l John cried and was embarrassed that he’d gotten in trouble, but when he tried to get his mother to play with him, she simply said, “Mommy is busy.”

  There was only one other time his mother let him know she was angry with him, a less serious but still telling example of his problems with impulse control.