Lost Girls

by Caitlin Rother

  “What’s wrong?” Gardner asked. “The car isn’t stolen. I was just on my way to Mira Mesa, to see my girlfriend. Oh yeah, just so you know, I have a butterfly knife in the center console of my car.”

  While another officer took Gardner back to his condo, where police attempted to gain entry, Westcott looked inside his car and noticed the can that Gardner had sprayed on his hands lying on the passenger-side floor. It was a can of Odor Eaters.

  Monica told police that she and John had been watching Patch Adams at his mother’s condo for half an hour when he started to massage her. “At first I didn’t mind. I was down about everything,” she said. “We were sitting on the ground in the living room. Later, I told him to stop. I told him I didn’t feel comfortable... . He stopped for a while.”

  But then, she said, he began to force himself on her, getting on top of her and pulling down her pants. When he put his hand down her underwear in front and back, she managed to push his hand away before he could do anything invasive. Still, he continued to touch her, and put his mouth on her breasts, with his pants unzipped. This continued for about ninety minutes, downstairs in the living room, upstairs in his bedroom, and back downstairs again. When she started to scream, she said, he covered her mouth so she couldn’t breathe, making her dizzy and scared, then he punched her repeatedly in the face and head. Afterward, he apologized and hugged her, she said, “saying he didn’t know what he was thinking.”

  Nonetheless, she ran out of the condo and across the street to a neighbor’s, Sue Ann Jones, and knocked on the front door. Jones opened the door to see Monica crying, bleeding and looking rumpled on her doorstep, with her pants unzipped.

  “I’m so scared. I’ve been raped,” Monica said.

  The girl’s face was so swollen that Jones immediately fetched Monica a bag of ice to hold on her bruised left eye, which was starting to turn colors, and her lip, which was cut. After Jones’s husband called 911, Monica said she didn’t want the police involved, and wanted to go back to school, admitting that she hadn’t actually been raped. While sitting in the patrol car, waiting for the detectives to arrive, she complained of head, neck and abdominal pain, then leaned outside and vomited into the street.

  Monica was taken to Rady Children’s Hospital, where her injuries were documented. In addition to her head and facial wounds, her left thumb and palm were red and bruised, and her neck also was bruised from where she said he’d grabbed and strangled her. Even if she hadn’t been technically raped, in the eyes of the police and the DA’s office, what John had done to her was plenty bad enough.

  Erika told police that John had offered to call the school to get permission for both of them to miss class so they could go to his house and watch movies. Monica decided she didn’t want to go to class, Erika said, and the next thing she knew, her friend was calling from the hospital.

  Erika said she didn’t know John very well, but he’d kissed her on the cheek at the basketball courts. He told her to close her eyes, but when she didn’t obey, he didn’t do anything else.

  Erika said Monica told John that she would have sex with him if all these people weren’t around, the police report said. Monica later explained that she’d been joking.

  After John refused to allow police to search the condo without a warrant, Detective R. C. Johnson questioned him in the cruiser while they worked on getting one. John denied Monica’s allegations that he’d punched and molested her, admitting only to giving her a ride to school that morning.

  “Did you hit someone today?” Johnson asked.

  “No, I don’t hit girls,” John said. “Everyone knows that she is like my little sister. Her mother and father are weird.”

  Asked if he’d ever kissed her, John replied, “Yes, but only like a friend.”

  He initially said they were together for sixty to ninety minutes. However, when asked what they were doing that whole time, John changed his answer. He said that driving took up twenty to thirty minutes, so he was only with her for about fifteen minutes (which still didn’t add up). He said none of her clothes or belongings would be found inside the condo, because he’d dropped her off in front of her apartment complex near the Circle K, around eight-forty in the morning.

  During the physical exam, the nurse noted that John was alert and cooperative to the point of being “giddy,” with “inappropriate laughing.” The police impounded his Pontiac Grand Am, and transported him to the county jail, where he was held for four days on $50,000 bail.

  Monica’s father told police that the incident was so traumatic for his daughter that the family had to move out of the neighborhood, and her mother had to take her to San Francisco for a while. Monica had lost her ability to trust people, he said, because she’d thought John was her friend. If Monica couldn’t trust her friends, who could she trust?

  She still complained of lingering pain in one eye, where John had hit her, and emotionally, he said, “she is not so good.”

  Cathy had been trying to call John that entire day from work, but got no response. As she pulled into the driveway that night, she saw a police officer get out of his patrol car, which was parked in front of the house next door, and walk toward her. That’s when she noticed yellow crime-scene tape across her wooden gate, and started to panic.

  The officer said John had been arrested and was at the police station, but he wouldn’t give her any details. When she tried to go inside her condo, he stopped her.

  “You can’t go in there,” he said.

  “What do you mean, I can’t go in there?”

  “It’s a crime scene.”

  Other than the skirmish with the high-school security guard, John had never been in trouble before. Cathy couldn’t even imagine what was going on. She was sitting in her car in the driveway, waiting to be allowed to go inside, when John called her cell phone from jail, around 10:00 P.M., saying something like, “The bitch next door is accusing me of rape or something.”

  Cathy was totally shocked. It never even crossed her mind that the allegation could be true, because she didn’t believe her son was capable of such a thing. It was totally out of character.

  First thing the next morning, Cathy found her son an attorney, William Halsey in Oceanside, who agreed to take the case.

  Halsey initially believed John’s story. As a criminal defense attorney for the past twenty-five years, he was used to clients lying to him. But after watching John’s body language as he adamantly denied touching the girl sexually, Halsey thought the kid was telling the truth. His perception was bolstered by statements from John’s mother and sister Shannon, who sincerely defended John. They supported his story that Monica had received her injuries in a beating by her parents, and that John “was being railroaded.”

  “I thought there was a possibility of that too,” Halsey said recently.

  Halsey followed up on John’s suggestion to get a videotape from the security camera at the gas station, where, John said, police had wrongfully arrested him. Getting a time-stamped videotape would help prove a conflict with Monica’s story, John said, because it would show that he’d been at the gas station when Monica said they’d been at the condo. Unfortunately, the gas station recycled its videotapes and had recorded over the crucial time period. Then Halsey interviewed John’s girlfriend, Patricia, and she stuck up for him too.

  “We’ve got a defense,” Halsey thought. John was a good-looking guy, and he seemed “very convincing. Kind of a nice guy even.”

  That was until he read the police reports, with the victim’s statements, and saw the photos of her bruised face. Although her statements were somewhat disjointed and changed slightly as she retold the story, she consistently said she ran from the condo, with her pants unzipped and without her left shoe.

  “Why did she do that?” Halsey asked John.

  But John had no plausible explanation. “I don’t know why she would do that,” he replied.

  Halsey had to face facts that he’d apparently misjudged his client.

>   While John was still in jail, Cathy called his father to tell him that their son had been arrested. She asked if John Sr. would pay the $5,000 bail deposit if she paid for the attorney. John Sr. agreed. He and Deanna couldn’t believe that their Li’l John could have done something like this. He’d always had girlfriends. He was so funny, falling down and being silly all the time, and his current girlfriend wasn’t afraid of him. So why, Deanna wondered, would this girl claim such things? It had to be that she had a crush on John, as Cathy said.

  Once John got out of jail, he called to explain. Deanna wanted to hear what had happened for herself; they were all so angry that this girl was telling these lies.

  “You wouldn’t really hit a girl, would you?” Deanna asked.

  “No, I didn’t do that,” John said. “I didn’t rape her.”

  “You must be pretty mad at this girl for making this up,” she said.

  “No, I’m not mad at her,” he said. “The truth will come out.”

  But Deanna couldn’t understand why John didn’t seem to be as angry as the rest of the family.

  John told his girlfriend Patricia, his ex-girlfriend Jenni, and his mother similar stories, which evolved over time, starting with an outright denial, and slowly moved toward an admission of physical, but never sexual, violence.

  “His story changed so many times,” Patricia said in 2011. But at the time, she said, she was only eighteen, she was naïve, and she “wanted to believe every word out of his mouth.”

  He said he’d seen Monica and her friend walking to school and offered them a ride. When they got there, Monica decided she wanted to ditch class. They went back to John’s condo and watched Patch Adams.

  “He said she started putting her hand on his thigh, got into his lap and started kissing him,” Jenni recalled. “He said no, and took her off his lap.”

  When Monica kept trying to make out with him, he said he told her, “No, I have a girlfriend [Patricia], you know her.”

  “I don’t care,” he quoted Monica as saying, “it doesn’t matter if you do or don’t, I’m going to tell her we did it, anyway.”

  Cathy kept at him, believing there had to be more to the story than he was admitting. He finally told her that, angered by Monica’s remarks, he’d pushed her. He went further with the story to Sarina and Jenni, saying he’d smacked Monica, but he still downplayed the violence.

  “I think he slapped her, and I think she fell down or something and bruised herself,” Jenni said. “He kicked her out of the house, she walked away, and he went to do stuff, and wound up at the gas station” to clean out his car. He got some gunk on his hands and was wiping them off, when a couple of police cars pulled up and arrested him.

  Jenni said she believed that story, as did Cathy and the rest of his family. “It was hard for me to believe that John hit a girl,” Jenni said, adding that she also believed his contention that Monica’s dad had “beat the crap out of her” because she’d ditched school. Jenni had never met the girl, but she’d seen her around and had heard fighting and yelling coming from the condo next door.

  “I remember the dad’s voice being very loud,” Jenni recalled. “You could hear him [yelling] and furniture moving.” In fact, she said recently, she still believed that version of events. “If I’m wrong, then I’m a trusting little fool.”

  In 2011, Monica’s father denied ever being verbally or physically abusive to his daughter. “That’s all lying,” he said. “We love our daughter. [She’s] the only one we have.”

  Cathy and John’s sister Sarina said they never watched the videotape of Monica telling a social worker about the assault, in which the purple bruising around her eyes were quite evident.

  “I just thought he needed anger management. I didn’t think he was capable ... ,” Sarina said in 2011, trailing off.

  Not long before this incident, when John was in his late teens, he and Sarina were in the garage listening to their boom box, talking about a violent scene they’d just watched on TV. When John referred to the female character as a “bitch,” Sarina called him on his comment because it seemed so unlike him.

  “You don’t hit girls,” she told him. “You can restrain her, but you can’t hit girls.”

  Looking down as he spoke, John wasn’t all that responsive. “I know,” he said.

  She was confused because the two of them often hung out at Belmont Park in Mission Beach, where he was always very friendly and outgoing to women, greeting them with the phrase “Hi, ladies!” She’d always thought it was far more like him to be charming than derogatory to girls.

  Around this same time, she and John were taking the community college class together. To make sure that girls didn’t think he and Sarina were romantically involved, John wore a T-shirt that said, SHE’S MY SISTER.

  John also liked to take Sarina’s autistic daughter, who was just three years old, to the beach. His family was touched by how nurturing he was, and what a special connection he seemed to have with the troubled little girl.

  But on March 20, 2000, Gardner was arraigned on three felony counts of forcible lewd acts on a child under fourteen, and a felony count of false imprisonment by violence, menace, fraud and deceit. He pleaded not guilty.

  Chapter 12

  During the course of their investigation, police learned that about four months before the incident with Monica, John had a consensual romantic afternoon with one of her friends, a fourteen-year-old girl named Sarah*, who attended the local high school and had told John that she was fifteen.

  Sarah told police that she’d originally met John at Monica’s house, and had seen him around the neighborhood a half-dozen times. One weekend, she, John, Erika and Monica went to Taco Bell, and after getting permission from her mother, they all headed over to the rocks near “the falls” in the park, where the other girls left her alone with John. He kissed her several times and told her she was beautiful and had very pretty eyes. Then he pulled up the bottom of her long-sleeved shirt and she allowed him to touch her bare breast. When he rubbed her crotch through her pants, however, she pushed his hand away. She felt bad that she’d let it get that far. After that, John said he wanted to see more of her, but Sarah told Monica, who she knew was John’s friend, to tell him not to call her anymore. She knew he was too old for her.

  On April 11, the district attorney filed an amended complaint that added a misdemeanor child-molesting charge for his activities with Sarah.

  The preliminary hearing began at ten in the morning, with John and his attorney entering his plea of not guilty.

  As prosecutor Dave Hendren’s four witnesses took the stand—teenagers Erika, Monica and Sarah, as well as the adult neighbor, Sue Ann Jones—John scribbled notes to William Halsey on a legal pad, following his attorney’s orders not to distract him by whispering during the proceedings.

  Up first, Erika recounted details of the morning that John picked them up at the Westwood Club. Monica said she was worried that the other girls were going to beat her up if she went to school (Monica had told Erika they’d kicked her in the legs and pulled her hair, and had threatened to do more next time), so John invited them both back to his place to watch movies.

  “I can call ... in [sick for you] and pretend to be your dad so you don’t have to go,” she quoted him as saying.

  Hendren had Erika point out that Monica had no injuries on her face that morning. He also had her talk about John’s kiss on her cheek at the indoor basketball courts a couple of weeks earlier. Erika said they were alone, but she didn’t invite the contact, nor were they talking romantically at the time.

  “Why do you think he kissed you?” Hendren asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  On cross-examination, Halsey asked Erika if she remembered telling a detective that Monica told John “that she would have sex with him if all these people weren’t around”?

  “She said that, but I think she meant it as a joke,” Erika said. “I don’t remember exactly what she said, but she
told me ... something like that.”

  “When did she say that, on the morning of the seventeenth?”

  “I think she said it while she was at the house with John.” “Did he ever indicate to you or give you any indication that he was violent?”

  “No.”

  “Did you trust John?”

  “Yes.”

  “Has Monica ever told you about anybody else hitting her?”

  “No ... not that I can remember.”

  “Did Monica ever tell you her parents hit her?”

  “No.”

  “Did Monica ever have disagreements with her parents that were very strong?”

  “Yes.”

  Monica was up next. Cathy was surprised how much younger her former neighbor looked without makeup. She almost didn’t recognize her. Halsey thought Monica seemed quite credible during her tearful testimony, speaking softly and timidly on the stand.

  As she described the events in the condo that morning, she seemed unsure of some things, and not all that specific, but even if she was okay with the initial backrub, she said, she became increasingly uncomfortable with John’s advances, and she made it clear to the judge that John had continued to force himself on her, anyway. Although an objective observer might think Monica had been sending John mixed signals, she was, after all, only thirteen, and she sounded as if she’d tried her best to try to get him to stop, once he crossed her line of discomfort.

  It started off slowly as they watched the movie, she said, with him sitting behind her, massaging her and kissing or blowing on her neck.