Lost Girls

by Caitlin Rother

  However, after receiving no consequences for his violation, Gardner continued to smoke pot, and received a second misdemeanor citation for marijuana possession on November 19, 2008, at 7:50 P.M. in Buccaneer Park in Oceanside. But he wasn’t “violated” that time either.

  Cathy was not pleased about this. “I was pissed that they didn’t do anything,” she recalled, because it made Gardner think he could get away with breaking the law.

  But that was just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. According to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR), Gardner was found to have potentially violated his parole conditions seven times between September 2005 and September 2008. The most serious of those—his living near the day care center—was referred to the Board of Parole Hearings, the CDCR said, but he was continued on parole after he moved and complied with his terms. The other incidents involved four low-battery alerts from his GPS unit, one citation for marijuana possession and one missed meeting at a parole office.

  None of those six were referred to the board for revocation, presumably due to their minor nature, the CDCR said in a written summary of his parole violations.

  But there were two telling omissions from the CDCR summary that were not lost on the general public as missed opportunities to return John Gardner to prison: Gardner not only was caught possessing marijuana twice, placed on a parole hold and let go, but he also made two trips to the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility parking lot on the morning of July 12, 2008. These trips—each of which constituted a felony, and therefore a parole violation—were overlooked by CDCR, only to be revealed in an audit of his GPS reports by the state Office of the Inspector General (OIG) after his arrest in 2010.

  Even though the GPS tracks clearly place Gardner on the prison grounds, the department was not aware of the violation since it did not require its parole agents to review GPS data for passive GPS parolees, the OIG audit stated. The department therefore, as a result of a flawed practice, failed to adequately monitor Gardner, arrest him, and seek prosecution against him for this crime.

  Recently, Gardner proved his indifference to the law when he said he didn’t see the big deal about his presence on prison grounds. He said he was only dropping off a carless friend at the visiting center, and told her to call him when she was done so he could pick her up, which he did. “The officer who stopped me at the gate didn’t care either,” he said.

  Gardner also had his share of infractions. He received: a ticket for running a red light on December 12, 2006; two speeding tickets, heading northbound on Interstate 15 at 10:19 A.M. on January 11, 2007, and heading eastbound on State Route 52 at 6:50 A.M. on June 18, 2008; a citation for driving without proper insurance for his gold Pontiac, traveling north on Interstate 15 on June 11, 2009; and a citation for having expired registration and no proof of insurance while driving Jariah’s black 2002 Nissan Sentra on January 30, 2010, in Riverside County.

  Chapter 16

  In 2007, John Gardner Sr. and his wife Deanna reluctantly moved from Texas to Denison, Iowa, because their daughter Mona lived there. John Sr. had been diagnosed with depression when he was still with Cathy, and he had been taking antidepressants ever since. As his health worsened, he added more medications than Deanna could list, including several daily insulin shots for diabetes. He complained of constant pain in his feet, legs and back, and his weight increased with each new ailment. When he and Deanna first met, he’d weighed 130 pounds. He’d gained nearly fifty pounds by the time they remarried in 1990, and he now weighed 240 pounds.

  Although he and Deanna had quit smoking eleven years earlier, he went on to develop chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), which made it progressively difficult to breathe. Even so, he stubbornly started smoking cigarettes again in October 2008. He would have smoked pot too, if he could get it, but since they’d moved to Iowa, he hadn’t figured out how to buy it there.

  The smoking caused a new rash of fighting between him and Deanna, and she’d recently issued an empty threat that she was going to leave him. His renewed habit was going to cost them ninety dollars for every carton of cigarettes, which was absurd because they were so poor. Smoking also caused coughing jags that were so bad he couldn’t catch his breath and his eyes looked like they were going to pop out. She didn’t want to buy him cigarettes and “put the nails in his coffin,” but knowing he was going to smoke, anyway, she tried to find a way to ration him. Searching online, she found a vendor in the United Kingdom that sold cartons for seventeen dollars.

  He’d only smoked one pack from the new carton when Deanna came home from church on November 2 and found him facedown on the bathroom floor. His skin was blue, but still warm. She shook him to see if he was still alive.

  “John? John, are you okay?”

  But he was gone.

  “I really think he OD’d on his insulin,” she said. “I think John wanted to die. He was in a lot of pain all the time.”

  John Albert Gardner Sr. was sixty-four.

  The death struck John Gardner Jr. hard. It had been only six weeks since he’d gotten off parole, which meant he hadn’t had a chance to get on a plane and try to strengthen their relationship.

  Finally able to leave the state, Gardner flew to Iowa the next day with his mother and sister Shannon, who decided to stay in a hotel. He insisted on sleeping in his father’s bed, where he lay like Christ on the cross, surrounded by John Sr.’s things. As Gardner mourned his inability to make things right with his father, he also wallowed in anger that John Sr. had never made the effort to meet his two young grandsons.

  Gardner’s sister Melissa was excited to see him after so many years. She took the opportunity to share stories of how John Sr. had ignored her, hadn’t cared about her and did things to embarrass her. She was hoping to make her brother feel better.

  “It was a common ground that we had, something to talk about,” Melissa recalled later.

  When John Sr. got back together with Deanna, Gardner said, he’d figured that Mona and Melissa had grown closer to their dad than he had, but Melissa assured him that was not the case. John Sr. had always been very selfish and self-centered, with everything revolving around him and his needs, she said. Deanna had tried to convince Melissa that he loved her, and at times, Melissa felt he was proud of her because he had hung up a calendar featuring her modeling a camouflage bathing suit, with an AK-47 over her shoulder, as well as a couple of calendars from her days as a Raiders cheerleader.

  But then they had a debacle at her wedding in 2002, when John Sr. changed out of his tuxedo after the ceremony and insisted on wearing sweatpants and a Tweety Bird T-shirt to the reception, even though everyone else was still wearing formal clothes. Deanna told him he couldn’t do the father-daughter dance dressed like that, so he left.

  “What an asshole,” Gardner told Melissa.

  After the wedding, Melissa said, John Sr. had written her, saying, You can’t teach an old dog new tricks. I am who I am.

  Melissa decided she didn’t want her father to meet her kids if he was going to treat them like he’d treated her, and make them feel as unwanted as she had.

  “He didn’t meet my kids either. He didn’t care to,” she told Gardner. Even if John Sr. had lived longer, she said, he still wouldn’t have met Gardner’s boys unless he’d brought them to Iowa.

  John Sr. had been a loner, and wouldn’t go to church with Deanna or Mona, who was married to a preacher, which meant that most of the people at his funeral on November 5 were members of Mona’s church. Her boss played guitar while she, John Jr., Shannon and Melissa sang songs they’d practiced, including “Amazing Grace.” Gardner mostly stared down at the ground.

  The family let Gardner go first to stand over his father’s body, which was laid on a slab for cremation that night, and be the first to say good-bye. He held his father’s hand, then took out a photo of his sons and tucked it into John Sr.’s pocket. When Gardner broke down sobbing, the family let him be, until he was cried out.


  “I never got a chance to get close to him like I wanted to,” he said recently. “He was still my dad. I always wanted a relationship. It just never happened.”

  Gardner was chain-smoking like crazy that day, which irritated Cathy. “This is what your dad died from,” she said. “Stop smoking!”

  “Leave me alone,” he snapped.

  Melissa could see his emotions flaring. To her, he and Cathy almost seemed like a husband and wife fighting. “I could see my brother had a temper like my dad,” she said.

  Looking back, Deanna said John Sr. wasn’t all that bad. Like his son, he tried to make people laugh. He instructed people to sing “la, la, la” when they walked into a room so he didn’t get spooked. And when he’d get out of the shower, he’d always say something like, “Oh, my lucky charms” in an Irish accent, like in the kids’ cereal commercial.

  “Most people who met him thought he was such a nice guy, just like Little John,” Deanna said.

  Not long after John Sr. was cremated, Deanna flew to California, where Shannon had arranged for the family to take his ashes out on a boat and toss them into the ocean with a wreath of flowers. Mona’s husband wouldn’t let her go, saying they couldn’t afford the trip, and Sarina couldn’t come either, so John Jr., Shannon and her son, Cathy and Melissa, who lived in the San Fernando Valley, went out on the boat.

  It was a bittersweet morning, right before Thanksgiving. They got up really early and piled into the boat—sad about the occasion, but pleased that it had brought them back together as a family once again. “We can’t lose touch. We’re family,” they said to each other. “We all have to stay together.”

  Gardner’s family saw a further decline in his emotional state when he was laid off in December 2008, his car was repossessed in February 2009, and his plans to move in with Jariah got delayed.

  Gardner was growing to love Jariah. While he told some people that he was never in love with Jariah, as he’d been with Donna, he also characterized the relationship differently, depending on whom he was talking to.

  Cathy got the impression that when Jariah postponed the move-in date, he felt rejected all over again. He continued to live in the Rock Springs apartment with his cousin TJ until Jariah was ready. But when he talked to Jenni about Jariah, he downplayed his feelings.

  “He liked her. He liked spending time with her little boy, and then it was another ‘I have to move thing,’ because of his parole, and so they moved in together,” Jenni said. “They were trying to be cost-effective and get roommates... . I think he was looking for another family to be around.” As their relationship progressed, “he said he wanted to marry Jariah so he wouldn’t be alone.”

  When Jenni talked to Gardner on Valentine’s Day in 2009, she could tell something was off. His normally exuberant voice had been replaced by a low monotone. At the time she thought he was depressed because he’d lost Donna and the boys, and being with Jariah wasn’t making him happy.

  “He seemed distant,” Jenni said. But after they talked for a bit, and she told him she hadn’t gotten any flowers, gifts or even a “Happy Valentine’s Day” wish that year, she was able to cheer him up.

  His roommate, TJ, told the family that he never saw any warning signs in Gardner during this time, but Cathy noticed that her son wasn’t well. His emotions were all over the place and he was stressed-out, angry and irritable. She had no idea, however, that he’d been cruising the streets of Escondido, hunting for prey on the morning of February 13.

  When Cathy read about Amber’s disappearance, she felt connected to the girl for some reason, even though they’d never met. “She looked familiar to me, someone I’d known.”

  More than a year later, Gardner confessed to Jenni that he’d been trying to tell her about Amber, but couldn’t because he was ashamed. Jenni always had such a way of cajoling him into a better mood, she said, and “he figured he wouldn’t do any other bad things.”

  Gardner said he was constantly reminded of what he’d done and where he’d been. While he was living in the Rock Springs complex, a neighbor found out he was a “290” registrant after finding him listed on the Internet. (Under Megan’s Law, Section 290 of the California Penal Code requires sex offenders to register their residential address, which is kept in an online database that is accessible to the public.) The woman posted flyers about him, which brought children to his door every day, chanting until they got it out of their heads: “Monster’s house, monster’s house, monster’s house.” And none of them would play with his boys or with Jariah’s son.

  Until the summer of 2009, Gardner said, he’d smoked pot, his drug of choice, while Jariah had smoked methamphetamine, her drug of choice. But one day, he decided to see what the meth hype was all about.

  “Give it here,” he told her. “I want to try it.”

  He wasn’t handling things well at the time, and even he had to admit that the meth only made things worse. “It made me feel really weird,” he recalled. “I could sit there for hours and stare at nothing. I was really high. My brain was moving really fast, thinking about a million things.” And yet, he said, unlike other users who could focus on one task for twelve hours while high, he felt completely unmotivated to do anything but chain-smoke and drink beer. “I wouldn’t even have a buzz because of the speed,” he said.

  For about three months, he used meth once a month, then it was twice a month, and then he was smoking an eight-ball over the course of three straight days every month.

  “When I was using speed, yeaaaaah, that wasn’t good,” he said.

  Later in the year, Alan went into foster care because of his mother’s drug problems. Jenni said she never met Jariah, but when she called and Jariah answered the phone, Jariah told Jenni how “she’d get him [her son] back any day.”

  Gardner told Jenni there were some problems in the relationship, and “he wanted it to end because of drug use on her end... . There wasn’t a whole lot of respect in the relationship,” she said.

  These problems escalated after he joined Jariah in the drug use. Robert Trueblood*, the boyfriend of Jariah’s friend, Tricia, described Gardner as “the nicest guy in the world when he was sober,” but he was a completely different person when he drank or did drugs. Trueblood, another registered sex offender, said Gardner got intense and rowdy while drinking, and he became frazzled while doing drugs, but he never saw Gardner get violent with anyone.

  On September 17, Trueblood had just been released from prison and had spent the night at Gardner and Jariah’s apartment after Gardner had been doing drugs, with no sleep, for the past three days. Trueblood was woken around three o’clock by the couple arguing, and they were still going at it two hours later.

  Gardner was flipping out and asking Baker who had raped her, according to an investigative report from an interview with Trueblood in March 2010. Gardner took Baker to the police to file a report. Trueblood said he could not understand Gardner’s behavior, because he was under the impression that Gardner and Baker had an “open relationship” and had sex with other people.

  Early in the relationship, Jariah said, Gardner was “so patient and kind and understanding and loving. He would always want to do family-type stuff with my son,” such as going grocery shopping or to the park, or kicking a ball around. “It’s what he always wanted, a family.”

  He showed her a list of his negative characteristics that Donna had complained about, such as a tendency to be controlling, but Jariah didn’t think any of them applied to him. “Then toward the end of the relationship,” she recalled, “I looked at it again, and all of it applied.”

  For example, he didn’t like her talking to a particular friend of hers. “And she ended up being my only friend because of the way he would react. They just stopped calling,” Jariah said in 2010. “Gave myself my own little cage without realizing.”

  Jariah said she understood how being unemployed could affect a man and cause him to lash out. She called it “the man complex, because they’re not providing.”
With Gardner, she said, “he was a different person when he was working than when he wasn’t.”

  She knew he was bipolar, so she tried to find different ways to communicate with him, because sometimes a five-minute conversation could run for hours, and when she paused for a second, he interrupted. That’s why she sometimes asked him to write his questions, so she could have her say in the discussion.

  “He’s very smart,” she said. “That’s one of the attractive things. He’s a hard worker. He would never put me down, like on my intelligence or my looks. Just other ways, he’d ... assume things and obsess about them.” But at times, if she simply forgot to tell him something, he would grow paranoid and think she was hiding it from him. He also got jealous and accused her of cheating on him. “I’d be like ‘no, no, no.’”

  His moods were pretty volatile as well, she said. “One minute, things were totally great, and the next minute, he’d misunderstand what you said ... and get upset about it.”

  In October 2009, Cathy could see that he was having a mental break by his behavior and his telling remarks.

  “I have weird things going through my head, but I can’t talk to you about them,” he told her. “It’s kind of like things that were going on in prison.”

  During this same period, Jariah called Tricia during a fight with Gardner. The call came as a surprise to Tricia because she and Jariah were no longer close. Nonetheless, she tried to act as a mediator in what Jariah described as a violent argument during which a door and a toilet were broken.

  While Gardner continued to do drugs, Jariah said, she entered rehab at Serenity House in Escondido that November, telling Gardner he could drive her black Nissan while she was getting help.