His moods aside, John’s family and friends saw him as a good, considerate and funny guy with a soft heart, evidenced by the touching connection he had with his severely autistic niece.
“If he was your friend, he’d be your best friend. He’d take care of you, your friends, your family and even any acquaintance that might need help,” Jenni said. “My brother was mainly well liked, but he had one bully that just wasn’t letting up. John just happened to be at the school—one of the times he wasn’t supposed to be there—and he took the bully, who he knew personally, and closed the door. A couple minutes later, they came out, [the bully] wasn’t harmed, but he never ever bullied my brother again.”
John liked to make jokes, and could be quite fun to be around, earning the reputation at school as a prankster. When he was still dating the girlfriend before Jenni, he put some Anbesol, a numbing ointment, on his lips and asked her for a kiss. Not knowing what he’d done, she kissed him and soon felt the joke when she could no longer feel her lips.
He did imitations of Jim Carrey, and memorized many of the lines from the movie Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. He loved Adam Sandler movies, mimicking the characters, and also came up with creative scenarios of his own. Like the time that Cathy was fixing dinner for company one night. John was upset about something, turned to his mom and said, “You want tossed salad? I’ll toss your salad!” He picked up the bowl and threw the salad in the air, throwing cherry tomatoes and pieces of lettuce everywhere.
Cathy thought his joke was relatively amusing, but she still sent him to his room.
Once he got to high school, John liked having a girlfriend. He broke up with his first steady girl after telling his family that she’d cheated on him, and he started dating Jenni. His family just adored this sweet, petite girl, with the dark hair and blue eyes, because she was smart, pretty and responsible.
When they met at the end of his junior year, Jenni’s first impression of John was that “he just couldn’t sit still and he always had to be in motion. He was always in a good mood.”
When it came to sex, Jenni said, his nickname was “Energizer Bunny,” the screen name he later used on Myspace. “He could go over and over and over repeatedly, and that could go on for, like, hours. And there wasn’t anything sexually he wasn’t willing to do,” she said. “He was really focused on pleasing his partner.”
Referring to his recent sexually violent acts, she said, “It seems surprising to me that he gave in to the urges to do that, because that’s so not the John that I know.”
Back in high school, Jenni said, John was good at persuading a girl to have sex with him. “He made you feel beautiful, and he would go slow through each step, so you didn’t realize you’d gone to the next step until you were there. But at the point ... where, if you got walked in on it would embarrass you, he’d ask if it was okay. He’d always ask for permission.”
At times, the two of them didn’t use any protection, but Jenni never got pregnant. “I think he would have been fine if he was a dad at fifteen, because all he ever wanted in life was to be a math teacher and to be a dad. He’s great with kids.”
While they were dating, he became friends with her best friend, Donna Hale, whom Jenni had known since she was ten. As John later recalled in a letter, Donna told John not to hurt Jenni or Donna said she would kill my butt. She then flipped me over her back and I was laying on the ground. Wow! He also said he always thought Donna had the most wonderful smile, and he was touched by her love for people and animals, which made his “heart jump.”
John’s intense personality and his obsessive-compulsive behavior translated into a positive work ethic, often to his own detriment. He worked off and on with his stepdad, who began paying John apprentice wages once John hit sixteen.
“John derived his self-esteem from working and he always wanted to do an exceptional job,” Cathy said.
But he couldn’t hold on to his earnings for long. “John would spend his money as fast as he got it,” Cathy recalled. “It would burn holes in his pocket.” He spent most of the money he earned on gifts for other people, a sweater for a neighbor girl, fast food for his friends, and ice skates or in-line skates.
In addition to working for Dan, he got a job as a lifeguard at Agua Fria at Twin Peaks, a resort in the San Bernardino Mountains. He also dressed as an elf to be a ride operator with Donna and her mother at Santa’s Village amusement park, until it went out of business.
“He would work, just at a regular job, or for a friend, but he would do the hard physical labor, and just exhaust himself ... so hard that he would end up in the hospital for dehydration,” Jenni said.
One rainy winter night John and Jenni went to see Seven Years in Tibet, starring Brad Pitt. Early in the evening, he looked under-the-weather, and halfway through the movie, he developed a fever and broke out in a sweat. He was able to drive Jenni home, but they had to call his mom to take him to the hospital.
Jenni said John expressed some of his energy as anger, but he only aimed it at other guys, and she was never scared that she would end up as a target. “If anything,” she said, “I would be the one to hit him.”
Although he never got into a fight in front of her because she always talked him out of it, “he would see something as disrespectful and his whole body would tighten up. He’d clench his fists and tighten his lips, [like] he was looking for an excuse to get in a fight.”
That’s why she and Cathy thought the hockey and skiing were so good for him. They helped him work off some of his aggression in a physical but safe way.
Memories differ on this issue, but John believes he was still in high school when he stopped taking his medications. Cathy thinks it was after he finished high school, but before he moved out of the apartment they shared. Either way, at two hundred pounds, he was too big for Cathy to try to force them down his throat. The last prescription drug she remembered him taking was Wellbutrin, an antidepressant.
“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.
<
br /> 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 n
ot 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.
Lost Girls Page 8
