Lost Girls

by Caitlin Rother

  During his stay there, John was initially not very well liked by the other children, and he stayed on the periphery of their activities. Occasionally, the reports stated, he was quite violent towards his peers, sometimes hitting them or striking them quite impulsively. But slowly he was able to get along better with his peers and form friendships. His anger toward Cathy lessened, and he gradually accepted that he was going to live with her. Cathy came for family therapy, and although John Sr. was initially “unable” to do this, he spoke with the doctor at length by phone. He later came for several visits, and said he would take John Jr. every Saturday in the future.

  Upon admission, John Jr.’s diagnosis was adjustment disorder with mixed emotional features, ADHD, with symptoms of major depression and chronic depression, known as dysthymic disorder. By the time he was discharged, his depressive symptoms were gone, leaving his final diagnosis as ADHD and adjustment disorder with mixed emotional features.

  Although our evaluation at this time did not show that patient met criteria for either major depression or bipolar disorder, there is affective disorder as well as depressive spectrum disorder in the family, and this will be an area for evaluation in follow up as time goes on, the doctor wrote.

  John Jr. seemed better upon his discharge, but the stability was only temporary. He was transferred to Zela Davis Elementary School, which had programs in special education, where he began acting quite bizarrely, barking like a dog and licking the chalkboard.

  “Why are you acting like a dog?” Cathy asked.

  “Because people like dogs,” he said.

  Some twenty years later, when she and John Jr. were talking about events and emotional problems that could have led to his sexually violent behavior, he told her that between the ages of five and six, he’d been molested by a female family friend in Palmdale, who told him to lick her genitals “like a dog.”

  They never discussed the connection to the doglike behavior he exhibited as a ten-year-old, but Cathy believed him after putting her own memories together. The behavior seemed to make more sense in that light. She didn’t think he made this claim for sympathy, because he didn’t mention it to her in that context. “This may seem weird because my son can be such a big liar,” she said recently, but at some point, “he tells me the truth.”

  Jennifer Brandt, a friend of John’s from high school, told reporters recently that he’d confided in her that he’d been molested by a male family member as a child. But an ex-girlfriend, Jennifer “Jenni” Tripp, who said they had discussed her own molestation, said recently that he had never discussed this allegation with her, and it seems that he would have.

  While this doglike behavior was occurring, Cathy took John to a behavioral specialist at Kaiser, who doubled his Ritalin dose over the course of a few days. The day he got the highest dose, the school nurse called Cathy and told her that John was hallucinating, seeing demons and was trying to stab himself with a paper clip he’d stretched into a point.

  “Do you want me to call an ambulance?” the nurse asked. Cathy declined, saying she was only fifteen minutes away. She was going to pick up her mom, then take John to the hospital. If he was still out of control when she got to school, they could call an ambulance then. But by the time she got there, he was cooperative and said the nurse was lying about his hallucinations.

  “They just wanted to get me into trouble,” he told Cathy, who took note of this early paranoia, which she said “became a part of his lifelong persona.”

  She called Kaiser Permanente to read them the riot act for overmedicating her son, and again demanded that he be admitted. “You overdosed him! You gave him these meds!” she screamed.

  This time, they conceded, saying she could take him to Los Altos, a children’s mental hospital. He stayed there for sixty days, during which time the doctors had to take him off all his medications for the first two weeks just to stabilize him.

  “John has the most severe hyperactivity I’ve seen in all my years as a psychiatrist,” one doctor told Cathy.

  They put him on an antidepressant she believes was Elavil and then discharged him. After being home for two weeks, even John Jr. could recognize that he wasn’t doing well.

  “Mom, I need to go back in the hospital,” he said.

  Cathy didn’t believe him, thinking he was seeking attention or exaggerating. “We’re going to try to deal with this without going to the hospital,” she said.

  Two days later, after he had problems in school once again, she gave in and took him back to Los Altos for an additional thirty days, until they could adjust his medications properly. Although he seemed better able to concentrate on school with the Ritalin, the side effects outweighed the benefits. As a result, they took him off it for good.

  Chapter 9

  Cathy’s boyfriend Dan’s apartment was only a small bachelor pad and very cramped compared to the two-bedroom apartment Cathy and John Jr. had previously shared. So once John was released from his third hospital stay, he had to sleep on the couch. This arrangement lasted until they moved into a three-bedroom house in Carson.

  From there, Cathy and Dan decided to move to the more rural area of Redlands in San Bernardino County for a couple of months. They enrolled John at the private Advocate School for severely emotionally disturbed boys, where taxpayers paid his tuition. He was placed into a seclusion room numerous times to prevent him from hurting himself or one of the other kids, prompting Cathy to jokingly call it “a prison school.”

  After all these hospitalizations and behavioral problems, Cathy was depressed about her son’s prospects. For years now, she’d been struggling to stabilize him, hoping that he would reach some sort of plateau and be able to live a normal life, but she was finally starting to accept that this was never going to happen.

  My child is not ever going to be functioning close to normal, she thought.

  She didn’t give up on him, but she tried to deal with what was plausible rather than what she hoped was possible. A new psychiatrist put him on Mellaril, which really slowed him down and made him gain weight. “He hated it,” Cathy said. “He said it made him feel stupid.”

  From there, it was trial and error as they tried one new medication after another. “Nothing seemed to be real effective for any length of time,” she said. “He always had side effects.”

  The mood stabilizer Lithium, for example, which is used to treat manic symptoms caused by bipolar disorder, gave him irritable bowel syndrome. After trying it three different times, he finally had to stop taking it because it became toxic to his liver.

  One night in April 1990, Cathy, Dan and John Jr. were walking home from dinner at the corner restaurant. John was acting hyper and skipping around them, as usual, when he decided it was time to propose to Cathy on Dan’s behalf.

  “I think you like my mom and I really need a dad, so maybe you could marry my mom,” John suggested.

  Two weeks later, Dan proposed for himself, and officially became John’s first positive father figure and role model. As a professional electrician, Dan took the twelve-year-old to work with him and began teaching him the trade as an apprentice, starting with gofer jobs such as crawling under the house to run wire, or picking up nails to clear a job site. Dan also became assistant coach for John’s sports teams and Dan grew into the real father that John felt he’d never had.

  That June, John won a certificate of achievement for outstanding success at school as “Best Conversationalist,” which was a proud moment for the family.

  After a brief stay in Redlands, Cathy, Dan and John Jr. moved to Running Springs in 1990. At a December 17 meeting between Cathy and school district officials, it was decided that John should continue to attend the Advocate School.

  Parent reports wonderful change in John’s behavior with recent change in medication, a meeting report stated. To be successfully educated, John requires high structure with a strong counseling component.

  John was bused to the private school until the local Rim of the World
High School started its own program for severely emotionally disturbed children in 1991. John was one of the first five male students in the new program, which was held in a trailer on campus.

  Now that Cathy and John Sr. lived miles apart in different counties, John Jr. didn’t see or have much contact with his father. Based on his parents’ divorce file, it’s unclear whose fault that really was.

  Cathy had filed for divorce in December 1989, and in May 1990, John Sr. was ordered to pay seventy dollars a month in child support. He never paid a dime, however, claiming that he’d never seen the judgment ordering him to do so, and that Cathy said he didn’t have to—as long as he listed their son as a beneficiary on his life insurance policy.

  John Sr. remarried Deanna on September 15, 1990, in Reno, Nevada, as his health problems and the couple’s financial difficulties continued to escalate. John Sr. was working part-time doing deliveries for Pizza Hut that year, earning only $483 a month. He was stopped at a train crossing when a car rear-ended his Datsun 280Z, which added neck pain to his slate of physical problems. These new injuries, coupled with his preexisting back problems, he said, prevented him from returning to work for Pizza Hut until 1994.

  Describing himself in court papers in 1996 as “practically destitute,” he said he’d started his own home business assembling tachometers for a small company in Granada Hills, but he had made no more than $6,000 a year at it.

  Nonetheless, Cathy wrote in response, he’d rarely tried to contact his son by mail, let alone see him, which, as John Jr. grew older, caused the teenager to question Cathy whether his father was financially supporting him. Cathy stated that her son had been remarking on the fact that his father hadn’t visited him, written him letters or called, let alone paid any child support. In her view, she wrote, John Jr. was trying to “measure his importance” to his father. Trying to persuade the judge to force John Sr. to pay $4,660 in back payments, she wrote, Our son, who is 17 years old, is learning about consequences and responsibilities. Therefore, it is now clear to me that if I do not pursue this, the messages that I give to my son are: 1) he is not that important 2) that responsibility is not that great of a commitment if you decide it’s too much or if the consequence is not that bad.

  In response, John Sr. filed papers countering that Cathy had consistently prevented him from visiting his son. He claimed that he’d called countless times, asking to see John, and was told to leave a message. But even after leaving numerous messages, he never got a response.

  John Sr. stated that Cathy stopped by his house with their son in August 1995, and when he asked the teenager why he’d never returned John Sr.’s “countless” calls, John Jr. said he’d never received any messages. John is 17 years old now and I believe that it is essential that John and I finally be given the opportunity to spend time together so that we can really get to know each other. John Sr. promised not to keep his son away from Cathy, as she had done to him, because he believed that the teenager would benefit most by spending time with both parents. Since John is so close to attaining legal age, I feel that it is imperative that the court now give us the opportunity to be together as I believe that this will help John’s self-esteem to know that both his parents love him and want to be with him.

  John Jr. continued to live with his mother and Dan, hurt that his father didn’t try harder to see him. He began to refer to Dan as “an awesome dad,” and nicknamed John Sr. “the sperm donor.”

  Chapter 10

  In John Jr.’s early teens, his psychiatrist, Dr. Divyakant “Divy” Kikani, determined that his symptoms were more serious than just ADHD, citing traits of conduct disorder and the paranoia that John had shown since he was ten. Kikani, who saw John as a patient from ages fourteen to sixteen, began treating him for bipolar disorder.

  By the time John was sixteen, some of his earlier depression had lifted, but he was still experiencing mood swings, as well as a certain level of mania and euphoria. Although he was easily distracted and could act impulsively, he seemed pretty consistently happy overall. Depending on what was going on in his life and how well his meds were working, he saw Kikani every two weeks or every six months.

  In addition to the bipolar symptoms that John exhibited, other typical signs of the disorder include a high sex drive, which can go into overdrive during a manic state, delusions of grandeur and of superhuman powers or skills, false beliefs that can’t be dissuaded away and a tendency toward poor judgment.

  At school, John also had regular sessions with a therapist. When John wasn’t progressing in individual counseling, the therapist asked Cathy if she and Dan would be willing to do family therapy. Dan wasn’t, so the therapist conducted joint sessions with Cathy and John, saying they’d made more progress there than in all the previous therapy put together. In these sessions, Cathy told her son that she felt uncomfortable when he cursed and acted out of control, and John told his mother that he felt hurt she was never satisfied with him and was always trying to improve him. He said he didn’t know what else to do but yell when he got angry, to which she countered that she hoped they could discuss what was wrong before it got to that point. John said that he’d tried, but she seemed to have no tolerance for his expressions of anger. Cathy replied that she would work on that if he would work on his anger.

  After that, John started going for walks when he felt the feelings boiling up. These walks were even incorporated into his special ed program as a way to dissipate his frustration before he exploded in the classroom.

  “His angry tone at home started decreasing, and he started making friends,” Cathy said. “I was just really excited,” adding that she also tried to be less critical and to stop harping on his social skills, which seemed to help him relax, even though he still wasn’t very socially sophisticated.

  “I needed to grieve that my son was not going to be normal, and I’d put a lot of pressure on him to measure up to something he wasn’t capable of doing,” she said. “That was a good turning point for us. I really started lightening up on him.”

  From the outside, friends recognized how complicated John’s relationship was with Cathy. “One day, it would be the best relationship in the world. They were super close. They could talk about anything,” said Jenni Tripp, who dated John for eighteen months, starting in his senior year. “Then he would change and she would turn into a ‘goddamned motherf---ing bitch.’ There was no change in Cathy—Cathy was pretty much constant. It was John that changed. But it was little things that could spark him off. If she had twenty dollars, [he felt] she should give it to him,” then he’d get furious if she said no.

  “It could have been a whole lot better if John could have given her more credit because she worked really hard and she did try to take care of him,” Jenni said. “When there’s that kind of child who needs some structure and discipline, she did what she was supposed to as a mom: She tried to get him to take his meds and do the right thing. I don’t think she tried to control him. I actually think she gave him a lot of freedom.”

  “Cathy mom,” as Jenni still calls her, was “a little bit” of an enabler, but “she was always there. I think that Cathy was a good part of his life... . That was another reason I broke up with him. I got tired of trying to mother him.”

  After so many years of struggling with emotional crises, John’s life began to improve dramatically. Dan introduced John to hockey, which John found he was skilled at and loved so much that he continued to play even after high school. He also played soccer and baseball and served as manager of his high school’s varsity basketball team, the Fighting Scots, in 1993.

  John also started doing better in school. He got an A in the Regional Occupational Program law enforcement course, which tried to match kids with careers. And, for the first time, he found an academic subject that he felt good at: mathematics.

  Even though he graduated with career goals of becoming a police officer or a math teacher, his transcript shows that the only A he earned in math was in his ninth-grade algebra co
urse, receiving B’s and C’s in his other math classes. That said, he did earn an academic excellence award for outstanding achievement on the 1996 Golden State Examination in geometry.

  “He loved math,” Jenni said. “He wanted to be a high-school teacher, because, I think, he didn’t want to get out of the high school. It was his ticket in—not for girls—just to be a kid... . Once he gets to be fifty, he’ll never act fifty. He’ll act twenty for his whole life.”

  It was his math teacher who discovered that John had a talent for singing, just like his father, John Sr. With a four-octave vocal range before he became a chain-smoker, the teenager got involved with the school choir, went caroling in Lake Arrowhead Village and landed a role in the musical Oliver.

  “He could hit every note on the keyboard from low to high, and he had a great bass voice,” said Jenni, who was in choir class with him, noting that he did solos and also sang in a doo-wop group at school. His Spanish teacher had her students learn the language by singing songs, and John enjoyed translating them from English into Spanish.

  Jenni, who was two years younger, described herself as shy and awkward. She also had drama class with John. As an actor, Jenni said, “I think he was over-the-top. He was just good at overacting. That’s how you can describe John in life. He overacted, and everything was over-the-top.”

  If a party was in the works, John procured the alcohol, stealing bottles of Wild Turkey, and never got caught. “John was amazing at stealing liquor,” Jenni recalled. “He could have three to four bottles down his pants... . If you had a request, he’d get it... . He liked to be the life of the party.”