Lost Girls

by Caitlin Rother

  Cathy and a friend were out shopping with 2½-year-old John Jr. when he saw a chocolate bunny and asked his mother to buy it for him. She said no, and turned away for a moment, only to see that he’d grabbed it off the shelf and had taken a big bite out of its ear.

  “It took everything in our power not to laugh,” Cathy recalled. “I had to buy it. He was holding it and I was saying, ‘No.’ I had to pay for it, but he didn’t get the rest of the bunny.”

  After John Jr. turned four, his impulse control problems worsened, and complaints from day care operators escalated. She finally relented and agreed to put him on a low dose of Ritalin, but only while he was at school, where he had to pay attention.

  They moved to Palmdale when John Jr. was in kindergarten, which brought them closer to Cathy’s parents and also to the house where Deanna lived with her two girls.

  During this time and into the first grade, John was acting out in the classroom. He blurted out the F-word, going off on a teacher who had reprimanded him for calling her a “fat, stupid turkey” and had given him a time-out. This being a Christian school, the cussing that he’d picked up from his father didn’t go over very well, and Cathy got a call.

  “We’re not really sure we want him to come back,” the school administrator said.

  John was throwing temper tantrums at the grocery store, which required Cathy to bring him outside to the car for fifteen-or twenty-minute time-outs, and his new teacher complained he was easily distracted, exhibited negative attention-seeking behavior and talked too much in class.

  Cathy agreed to increase John’s Ritalin dosage to fifteen milligrams a day in divided doses. However, this only caused him to have rebound depression in the afternoon, triggering more tantrums and then sobbing. “I wish I would die, because nobody likes me,” he said.

  Hearing this from her six-year-old broke Cathy’s heart. “It was horribly sad,” she said.

  John Sr. only made things worse by putting a negative spin on the crying. “Your mom is turning you into a fag,” he told his son. When John Jr. heard this, he got quiet and silent. “John [Sr.] didn’t know how to show affection, attention,” Cathy recalled. “He was worried somehow that if he was too affectionate with his son, it was going to make him effeminate, and John was already kind of a crybaby.”

  Around this same time, the boy took a hundred-dollar bill out of his dad’s wallet and took it to school to try to make friends. A teacher saw him playing around with it and reported the incident to his parents. When he got home, he got a spanking.

  Consulting with John Jr.’s doctor, Cathy took her son off the Ritalin for a couple of weeks, which initially helped with the rebound effects, but the other behavioral problems resumed. He was out of control, being aggressive and in constant motion, making odd noises and acting the class clown at Ocotillo School. This time they tried extended-release Ritalin.

  Cathy had enough college credits to complete her associate’s degree in 1985 and became a registered nurse. The new form of Ritalin allowed her to do a calming bedtime routine similar to the one she’d used when he was a baby: They talked about his day, then she gave him a bath, read him a story and put him to bed.

  Around this time, the boy started setting fires. At age six, he started one in a wastebasket, and when he was seven, he and a friend lit up a large field, requiring the fire department to come and put out the blaze.

  By the second grade, the doctors tried switching John to Cylert, which contained amphetamines (and has since been discontinued). This drug caused John to experience stomach upset and insomnia. He hid the pills in his cheek, then stuffed them under the dryer, where Cathy ultimately found fifty of them socked away.

  The doctor put John back on the Ritalin and he was sent to a child psychologist every week for three months, then occasionally for three more months. At the psychologist’s suggestion, John was evaluated by a psychiatrist for depression and was diagnosed with conduct disorder. He also started making a sound like he was clearing his throat, so he went into speech therapy as well.

  The next year, he saw two other psychiatrists at Kaiser Permanente, who once again increased John’s Ritalin dosage to fifteen milligrams, with an extra five milligrams at four in the afternoon for special events or homework. This time, he did better in school and his behavior improved. When he had insomnia, Cathy tried giving him the antihistamine Benadryl at the doctor’s advice, but that only made John Jr. accuse her of trying to make him sleep when he didn’t want to.

  In the midst of all this, Cathy’s relationship with John Sr. had begun to deteriorate.

  They were renting a house in Palmdale, which they had an option to buy. To come up with a down payment, she’d been working double shifts—weekdays at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Neuropsychiatric Institute and weekends in the intensive-care unit at Palmdale Hospital. This was necessary because John Sr. had injured his back at work—falling off a ladder while lifting some boxes—and had been receiving only a small disability check for the past couple of years.

  He had two back surgeries and operations on both feet in 1986 and 1987, which kept him taking codeine and made him moody and cranky. “I can’t go play tennis. I can’t go fishing. I can’t do any of these things because I’m in constant pain,” he complained.

  “He got very depressed being a shut-in,” Cathy recalled.

  John Sr. started smoking pot for the pain, and his mood improved. Cathy didn’t realize, however, that he’d thrown some speed into the mix.

  “He was happy and not so depressed and I was like, ‘Hallelujah, he’s doing better,’” she said.

  He stayed up all night, slept during the day, and became more irritable, displaying weird mood swings. When a friend of hers suggested that he might be doing cocaine, Cathy dismissed the idea, but she had to acknowledge that his behavior was growing increasingly bizarre.

  While Cathy was working sixty hours, seven days a week, John Sr. was spending more time with their son. Cathy got the boy ready for school before she left for work; it was his father’s job to make sure he got there. After John Jr. got home from school, his father played video games with him and made sure he finished his homework.

  Despite this bonding opportunity, the boy still didn’t feel connected to his father. “I think his desire was to be close to his dad,” Cathy said. “John’s dad loved me, but I think he was always focused on me.”

  At that point, Cathy said, she didn’t feel connected to her husband either. Then one day, she was questioning him about why a certain bill hadn’t been paid. He confessed that he’d been doing speed and cocaine for the past year, and had completely drained their $10,000 in savings to buy drugs.

  “That was the beginning of the end for us,” she said. All the money they’d saved from her double shifts was gone. “Furious doesn’t even scratch the surface. I felt so betrayed by him... . I basically said I couldn’t pull through. I didn’t feel I could go through that drug and alcohol scene again.”

  She hung in while John Sr. went to substance abuse therapy, but she slept on the couch, feeling very confused. Part of her hated him.

  How could he do this? Here I’ve been so supportive of him all this time and he did this?

  By this time, Shannon and Sarina had moved out, so it was just the three of them. Cathy got her husband into a research study at UCLA, where they got him off the coke and speed, persuaded him to take antidepressants and to do individual therapy. But three months into it, he rebuffed Cathy’s suggestion to enter couple’s counseling.

  “I can’t do it right now,” he said, explaining that he was so ashamed of what he’d done that he needed to get to a place where he could face her again.

  She asked a couple more times. “We’ve got to go to counseling, or our marriage is done,” she said, but he still refused. He said he was sorry for everything, but he couldn’t do or be what she wanted. “You’re probably better off because I don’t deserve you.”

  So, in February 1988, when John Jr. w
as in the third grade, Cathy told him she was going to stay at Grandma’s in Hawthorne, because she was working a lot of hours. She would see him every other weekend.

  “Are you and Daddy getting a divorce?” he asked.

  “No,” she said.

  A few months later, she got an apartment. “You’re going to come and spend the summer with me,” she told him. When he asked if he could still see his dad, she said, “We’ll see how it goes.” (In 2011, John Jr. said he was actually scared that he would get into trouble if he went to live with her for good back then, fearing that decision would anger his father. “I was afraid of my dad. He always hit me—if I woke him up, if I got into trouble, if I went around the block without asking.”)

  As mother and son lived together that summer, he threw a couple of tantrums and showed what Cathy described as “baseline sadness,” but overall, John Jr. seemed to be dealing with the separation. He even did okay with not being on Ritalin, which Cathy thought was unnecessary as long as he didn’t need to pay attention in class.

  When school was about to start, he asked, “Can I go back with Daddy? He needs me.”

  Cathy still remembered how she’d felt when she had to help her own mother through her debilitating depression; she’d felt such a heavy responsibility to take care of and protect Linda, to be her “mother’s keeper.” She was sad that John was now going through the same thing, but she understood it. If she was out of the picture, she also hoped that her husband and son would establish a deeper relationship.

  “I guess we could try it and see how it goes,” she told John Jr. “I understand there’s lots of reasons for you to stay here with your dad. My going away and doing my work doesn’t mean I don’t love you, or that I’m not available.”

  She talked over John Jr.’s request with his father, who said he was okay with keeping the boy as long as Cathy paid him child support, which he’d never paid to Deanna.

  “I was willing to let my child hate me,” Cathy said, looking back. “I can’t tell you how bad it hurt. But I also told him I loved him.”

  She took her son clothes shopping for school, and left him at his dad’s house, where she paid for rent, groceries and other bills. She called John Jr. frequently and picked him up on weekends, when his father played with the band. Later, Cathy wondered if she’d been too clinical and logical in dealing with her nine-year-old, not showing her emotions enough.

  Because John Jr. had been okay without the Ritalin that summer, his father decided to see if he’d “grown out of it.” But by a couple of weeks into John’s fourth-grade year, the school was calling and sending home notes that his behavior was out of control. John had to go back on the drug, and even so, he was still getting into fights daily and causing other problems.

  One day, Cathy got a call from the principal’s office, saying the boy wasn’t taking his meds. John Jr. was coming to school hungry and unkempt, and they’d already called Child Protective Services (CPS) to report his father for neglecting him. They said they were going to turn the boy over to CPS, but they would let Cathy take him, instead, if she came over right away. Cathy left work immediately.

  Within several days of staying with his mother, John Jr. was already crying to go back with his father. “It isn’t Daddy’s fault,” he kept saying, referring to the school’s need to call CPS.

  John Sr. had told his son that it was his own fault they couldn’t stay together, because the boy hadn’t been following orders. When Cathy heard this, she couldn’t believe it. “He made it real ugly,” she said. “I blocked it out.”

  Although the CPS investigation found the home situation satisfactory, John Jr. blamed his mother for reporting the abuse, even though she’d never called CPS. By Thanksgiving, John Sr. asked Cathy to keep the boy at her house. After four years of living on workers’ compensation and disability, John Sr.’s benefits had run out. He’d become even more depressed, and he was having a hard time buying food.

  Father and son saw each other around Christmas, and John Sr. would always remember the moving gesture that his son had made. They couldn’t afford a tree because Cathy had always been the one to pay for it, so John Jr. trooped into a field and came back with a tree branch. Never one to get sentimental with his kids, John Sr. later told Deanna how much that moment had meant to him.

  “That really surprised me and touched my heart,” he said. “It’s something I’ll never forget.”

  Cathy put John Jr. into Ramona Avenue School, near her house in Hawthorne, where they were in the process of enrolling him in special education. But by now, the boy felt that both of his parents had rejected him, which set off an average of five fits of rage each day. During these, he threw objects—and himself—against the wall. According to his medical records, he told his doctors that he had acted bad to see if Cathy would give him away. When Cathy tried to be affectionate with him, he pushed her away, saying that “his mommy and daddy had once said they loved each other, and now look at how things were.”

  And it only got worse from there.

  Chapter 8

  John Jr. was really taking the separation hard. He not only had difficulty falling asleep, but he cried while dreaming, wasn’t eating much, and began to act in ways that really alarmed his mother, such as picking fights with groups of neighborhood boys who were bigger, tougher and outnumbered him.

  Within a week of coming to live with Cathy, he was sent to the principal’s office for acting out. After also pushing the principal’s papers onto the floor, he got himself suspended. The school had been creating an Individual Education Plan for him, which would allow him to enter a program for the severely emotionally disturbed. They just couldn’t handle him in the regular classroom.

  Cathy was at her wit’s end too. “I was a wreck,” she recalled. “Here I was, I’ve lost my home. I’ve separated from my husband. My child is now suicidal, getting kicked out of school, and I was having to file bankruptcy.” She knew, however, that he couldn’t stay in regular school, because he was too disruptive.

  Days after he was suspended, John Jr. was so angry at Cathy that he threatened to run into the street, jump out of their second-story apartment window, run into traffic or stab himself. He also began to play dangerous games with electrical wiring and setting more fires. He lit several candles all over the house, dripping hot wax on furniture and the rug. He also lit a roll of toilet paper on fire and tossed it into the bathtub.

  “I hate my life,” he said. “I hate everything. I might as well be dead.”

  His father had given him a guitar, and John Jr. was so angry at John Sr. for abandoning him that he buried the instrument in the flower planter outside.

  When she noticed it was missing, Cathy asked him where his guitar was.

  “Dad hates me,” he replied. “I don’t need it anymore.”

  Around this time, Cathy started seeing a new man, an electrician named Dan. Still angry at Cathy, John Jr. tried to warn away her new boyfriend: “Don’t become disabled, or she’ll leave you too.”

  This comment hit a little too close to home for Cathy, but she tried once again to take it in stride. He was obviously a very sick little boy. Recognizing this, she tried to get him hospitalized, but her health provider refused to take action, suggesting instead that she bring him to urgent care. Because of the problems with her son, Cathy had transferred jobs from the kids’ unit to the adult unit at UCLA, where she called the medical director for advice.

  “I need help,” she told him, near the breaking point herself. “My kid is a mess. I don’t know what to do.”

  “Bring him in,” he told her. “We’ll get him admitted.”

  On February 1, 1989, John Jr. was admitted to the child inpatient wing, known as 6-West, where he stayed for five weeks.

  The doctors at UCLA considered statements by Cathy, John Sr. and their son in assessing the situation. John Jr.’s hospital records show that he was not very self-aware, denying many of his symptoms, his depression, psychotic symptomatology and “curren
t suicidality.” However, he admitted to wanting to kill himself in the past and acknowledged having problems in school, “making enemies and having trouble with kids being mean” to him. He denied his insomnia, saying, “I stay up late, and he denied his hyperactivity, saying, “I like to be doing things all the time.” He reported that he liked his classes, especially math, and enjoyed swimming, soccer and basketball.

  Blaming his mother for his parents’ separation, he claimed she was trying to give him away. The records noted that both parents expressed guilt that John Jr. had to be hospitalized. The records also noted that he wasn’t doing as well after Cathy and Dan moved in together. While John was in the hospital, someone had broken into Cathy’s apartment and stolen her son’s medications. She moved into Dan’s apartment because she felt safer there.

  Patient has increased difficulty and anger regarding the separation, the records state, noting that he was very protective of his father and very angry at his mother, but he also showed separation anxiety when Cathy left the unit after visiting.

  During the exam to determine his mental status, John Jr. kept looking out the window, distracted by children playing outside, and kept messing with the blood pressure cuff and reflex hammer. He moved around quite a bit, chanting “yes-no, yes-no,” or “no-no-no-no-no,” making faces in disgust and appearing annoyed at the questions.

  “Everybody asks that,” the boy kept saying.

  The doctor’s analysis: Patient’s peer relationships have always been poor, although he did make one female friend this last summer at mother’s house. He tends to antagonize other children, is very short-tempered, and has poor sharing skills... . His thought process was unremarkable with no evidence of psychosis. Cognitively, he had good comprehension, intact memory and appeared to be of at least average intelligence. His insight was poor and his judgment was fair to poor... . He often speaks with much bravado about this place, bragging that he knows it well (his mother is an NPI nurse), and bragging about his physical strength or other skills to defend against feelings of abandonment, confusion, low self-esteem, and lack of control in recent circumstances.