Lost Girls

by Caitlin Rother

  “It’s going to be hard, but try to keep yourself composed,” Epley said. “Nobody’s going to feel any sympathy for you.”

  Epley, of course, was right. The verbal attacks and several prophecies that Gardner would burn in hell came blasting in a constant stream for more than an hour as Chelsea’s and Amber’s parents threw their sorrow, grief and rage at him. Those watching in the gallery or on television monitored his face for reaction or remorse, any sign for how he felt about killing those innocent girls.

  Before the speakers began their statements, the judge announced that the prosecution was going to play a 13.5-minute memorial video of Amber Dubois, which took everyone in the gallery through her short life. As the compelling montage of photos played, Gardner grimaced and let out a long sigh, his breaths quickening as tears ran down his face. He wasn’t the only one crying.

  Prosecutor Kristen Spieler didn’t buy his tears as sincere sorrow for his victims, dismissing them as a ploy to play “the sympathy card,” to fool people into thinking he was feeling something. “People who are sociopaths ... very often are unable to express the pain and remorse for the pain and suffering of others,” she said later. “I suspect any genuine remorse he had was for himself.”

  The courtroom was filled with the surreal as Amber sang “Beautiful One” off-key, a song by composer Tim Hughes, taken from a file on her computer. The video featured many shots of her hugging and being hugged—by her mother and father, separately and together, her red-haired grandmother and her girlfriends. At times, Amber looked serious; other times, she hammed for the camera and made faces, wearing a jester’s hat, dressed up for Halloween or sticking her tongue out.

  Emphasizing her love for animals, the little girl was shown playing with her dogs, riding a horse, holding a chimpanzee and sitting on a bale of hay with a lamb. She was also featured water-skiing, shooting a bow and arrow, listening to her iPod, playing with sparklers and playing Twister with her friends. In a very sweet and innocent moment, she was shown standing outside in the pouring rain, with her hands outstretched to catch the drops.

  In several testimonials, her girlfriends expressed how they wanted Amber to be remembered:

  “Amber was a great person. She was always so optimistic, had fun with life, didn’t take things so serious. [She was a] tried-to-live-life-to-the-fullest sort of person.”

  “I would want everyone to remember her love, her passion, I guess, for books, her love for life—just the spontaneous, exciting, carefree happiness that she brought.”

  “If I could, I’d tell her she’s made a difference to everybody. Everybody she met, she’s done something to them that has made their lives better in some way.”

  “She’s someone who affected so many other people’s lives, whether she realized it or not. She is something I would aspire to be, something more patient, more caring, more loving, more sincere. She would have been amazing. I just want people to appreciate that, and maybe they can come back and appreciate their friends and family more.”

  The close of the video was a progression of school portraits, tracking her growth into the final shot, which everyone recognized as the more mature young girl, with a fringe of bangs, a half smile and her nose a little sunburned—the photo from Amber’s “missing” posters.

  Carrie McGonigle stepped up to the mic first, describing the past fifteen months of “minute by minute agony” she and Amber’s family had experienced. “Amber was my passion,” she said. “I would have laid down my life for Amber.” Although she had decided to forgive Gardner, she said, “I’ll never forget that you stole from me God’s most precious gift.”

  Apparently, her meeting with him had sapped much of her anger, because she was the least aggressive of the six speakers that day. And, after the hearing, she walked down the hallway of the courthouse laughing and looking giddy.

  Up next was Dave Cave, whose life and relationship with Carrie had been extraordinarily challenged by this murder case. He summed up Gardner’s TV interview as “woe is me crap.”

  “You should have never been let out of your cage after you beat up and, no doubt, molested another thirteen-year-old in 2000,” he said.

  Then came Moe Dubois, his voice growing louder and more animated as he spoke, drawing parallels between Gardner and a mountain lion that had been placed in a cage for the community’s protection, but was then freed so he could roam, and, not surprisingly, began to attack people.

  Moe asked rhetorically who was at fault. “Is it this coldhearted monster? Is it the failures in the law enforcement systems? Or perhaps it is even all of us, who have not forced and held accountable the people and the organizations who are supposed to protect us from these predators and who have not? ... It’s obvious the legal system failed us here.”

  Still, he said, “I truly hope he suffers a hundred times the amount of pain he’s caused our family.”

  Before the Kings gave their statements, the prosecution played a memorial video of Chelsea, featuring the teenager in various poses, making faces or hugging her friends, who gave a series of testimonials. Many of these described Chelsea’s ability to enjoy herself. They would laugh together, until their faces were red, their eyes were streaming with tears of joy and their cheeks ached. No challenge was too big for Chelsea, who had an overwhelming vigor for life and walked with a bounce in her step.

  “She was always ready to do something outrageous.”

  Her advice to them was this: Whatever you choose to do, “just be passionate about it.”

  “She always told me, ‘Go big or go home.’”

  Brent King, reading from a nine-page statement, said that although they’d almost lost Chelsea during the pregnancy, she was born with a “‘joy and zest for life few of us have ever known,’” and he missed her terribly. Noting that he was saying Gardner’s name for the first time, he minced no words as he described Gardner as pure evil, “‘a monster, sociopath, serial killer, animal,’” and, most of all, a coward.

  “‘Unlike you, Chelsea was no coward. I can assure you she showed more courage in her last moments than you have shown in your entire life.’”

  Brent said he couldn’t accept mental illness as an excuse for Gardner, who he was sure had had enough lucid moments to know he should turn himself in after killing Amber. But instead, Brent said, Gardner indulged his evil thoughts, and took out his rage on others because he didn’t want to admit his wrongs and suffer the consequences. Chelsea was as good as Gardner is evil, he said, and he could only hope that Gardner would live the rest of his life in fear that one of his cellmates would kill him in his sleep.

  From there, Brent launched into Gardner’s mother, who was sitting to his right. He called her a coward as well, blaming her for doing nothing to protect them from her son, and accusing her, as a psychiatric nurse, of knowing full well what he was capable of, and yet doing nothing to stop him.

  “Ms. Osborn, you have Chelsea’s rape and murder and our pain on your soul,” he said, adding that he would leave Cathy Osborn’s fate up to God, but that she had her own wrongs to account for in the afterlife.

  He attacked KFMB-TV and CBS News for airing Gardner’s interview, and chimed in with the others in blasting the system that had failed to identify Gardner as a lifelong violent threat to young girls, and to either keep him behind bars or continue to monitor him closely.

  Kelly King, who had seemed so demure during her TV interviews, seemed just as fiery and enraged as her husband. Saying she couldn’t speak her full, true feelings in a public forum, she demanded Gardner’s attention. “You dismantled a family life that was built on love, trust and faith, but you did not destroy it. Look at me!”

  As she waited for him to meet her hostile glare, Gardner reluctantly raised his head to do as she asked. He glanced away furtively before looking back at her for a moment, then returned to his previous downward stance. When she issued the same demand later in her statement, which circled from anger to grief and back to anger, he did not comply.

/>   “Why am I not surprised?” she asked rhetorically.

  Still, Kelly said, she wouldn’t lie down and be defeated by all of this, because every morning she heard her daughter telling her to get up: “‘We have important things to do, Mom.’”

  As Candice Moncayo stood at the microphone to start her statement, she was so overcome with emotion that it took at least a minute as she stood, holding her hand to her mouth, before she gained her composure and could begin speaking. Still breathless and her voice breaking, she described the aftermath of her run-in with the man sitting at the defense table. “‘It’s been six months since John Gardner attacked me, and some mornings, I still wake up screaming,” she said, noting that she felt pain and guilt from being the only one of Gardner’s recent victims who had lived to address him. Her articulate statement was so heartfelt that observers wiped away tears.

  “‘Peace has been shattered by the actions of this man,’” she said.

  Candice described how her once peaceful runs had been forever marred by Gardner’s actions as she spent “‘countless hours terrified and nauseous, sprinting like a frightened rabbit away from the memories and possibilities of his assault.’”

  As she listed a number of reasons why she’d felt it was important to speak at the hearing, she said she had come in part to stand as a witness for Chelsea King and Amber Dubois and all victims of violence.

  As she came to the end of her statement, she said she’d also come to ask how his nose was. She was referring to the elbow jab she’d managed to throw into his nose, which had freed her from his grasp and had likely saved her life. Clearly wanting to remind him of that, she’d added it to the statement she’d submitted in advance.

  At that moment, those looking for insight into John Gardner’s character got what they’d been waiting for: He scrunched up his face in an almost cartoonish grimace that spread across his face like a serpent, revealing the darkness that lay beneath, as his fury erupted from the inside. “She didn’t hit me,” he said audibly through clenched teeth to Mel Epley. “She did that for publicity.”

  People would refer to that display of instant emotion for months and years to come.

  “That’s the John Gardner that Chelsea King and Amber Dubois saw,” said Alex Horan, the FBI supervisory agent. “That is some very disturbing and sobering footage. You can see the rage, the anger and the hatred.”

  Judge Danielsen sentenced Gardner to three consecutive life terms—two of which had no possibility of parole—making the third term, which was twenty-five years to life, plus twenty-four years of enhancements, more of symbolic consequence. (After chalking up more than three strikes, Gardner’s assault on Candice also warranted a life term.)

  Gardner was also ordered to pay more than $46,000 in fines and restitution to the state, Candice Moncayo and the other victims’ families, nearly half of which was claimed by Carrie McGonigle for her various expenses.

  Cathy Osborn had never felt so attacked and so helpless as she did at that hearing, unable to say anything. But for whatever it was worth, she said later, she always had Amber Dubois and Chelsea King on her mind.

  “There’s not a night that goes by that I don’t dream about them,” she said. “Maybe that’s what’s meant to be, that they never will be forgotten. I didn’t know them, only from their photos and news reports. I know that their families think about them too. But in addition to their families, I will never forget them. They seem like just incredible, beautiful girls.”

  Chapter 35

  After the hearing, Gardner agreed to meet with a panel of investigators to answer questions about his activities and motives, to help them understand what he’d done. A team of detectives led Gardner out of the courtroom to an enclosed exercise yard at the jail next door. For nearly three hours, he chain-smoked as he explained to Sergeant Dave Brown and his team, several Escondido police detectives, along with three agents from the DOJ and FBI, how he killed Amber Dubois and Chelsea King.

  Gardner also admitted some other violent acts, including a violent rape of a prostitute, before killing Amber, and a couple of attempted assaults that were never reported, but no other murders. He denied stalking the eleven-year-old in Rancho Bernardo, a report that checked out after detectives confirmed his alibi and verified that Jariah had been using her black Nissan elsewhere that entire day. He did, however, admit to stalking the sixteen-year-old in Lake Elsinore.

  As Gardner described both murders in detail, the detectives sensed he enjoyed reliving it. He seemed to like the attention, as if he were giving a celebrity interview.

  “I think he was conscious of the shame of it all, but he was also aware of the power that he held” over them as a captive audience to tales of his misdeeds, Detective Mark Palmer said.

  Gardner said he’d trapped Amber on Stanley Avenue, an isolated, quiet street that was fenced-in, so she had nowhere to run, and she was out of range of the video cameras posted at the high school.

  Brown noticed that Gardner told them slightly different details than he’d told Carrie, and minimized some others. When Brown asked him why, Gardner said, “I was trying to protect her.” Brown said that Gardner “has some guilt,” but he added that “normal people don’t do this. Absent a videotape, we won’t know exactly what happened.”

  Once Jariah went into rehab and he’d lost his job, Gardner told them, he had a lot of spare time.

  “The idle time is what made him go sideways,” Brown said. “He hadn’t killed for a year. He’d always lived with women so he had to go home at night... . Amber was his first kill and he described in detail how it sort of freaked him out.”

  Gardner said he bear-hugged and tackled Chelsea from the side and dragged her off the trail to a more remote area near the lake. After he raped, strangled and killed her, he gathered up her clothes into a bowl made out of his T-shirt. He started back toward his mother’s house and emptied Chelsea’s belongings into a storm drain along a street off Duenda, not realizing he was missing one of her shoes until then. He figured it must have come off when he dragged her into the bushes. Despite telling his mother that he’d dropped Chelsea’s underwear on purpose because he wanted to get caught, he told the detectives that he had no idea he’d lost the socks and panties along the way.

  “He was pretty adamant about not having dropped those underwear,” Palmer said, adding that Gardner really had thought the detectives were lying to him about the DNA during his post-arrest interview.

  Although the sheriff’s department searched later for more bodies in the remote rural areas identified by his GPS tracks, Brown said, “I don’t think he whacked anybody. He talked to us about some attempts where he pulled up” and his would-be victims ran away, but they all “seemed to have a buildup and a process.” Brown said he felt pretty confident that Amber was, in fact, Gardner’s first victim, and he highly doubted that Gardner had killed anyone else.

  Although detectives had collected a slew of shovels from Linda and Mike Osborn’s houses, they never found the one Gardner had used to bury Amber because he said he’d thrown it away six months earlier after its handle had broken. And as for Gardner’s insistence that Candice Moncayo had never elbowed him in the nose, Brown believed Candice’s version of events, citing Mike Osborn’s account of seeing Gardner with a black eye in January 2010.

  “John is a bully,” Brown said. “He got in fights at school, and losing a fight to a girl just kills him.” If Candice hadn’t fought him off, he said, Gardner “would have raped her too.” Even though they weren’t in a remote area when he attacked her, Gardner could have dragged her off, just as he did with Chelsea.

  Gardner’s MO, Brown said, was to choose victims he thought he could overpower. That included past girlfriends, who were troubled girls or had been victimized already, such as Jariah, who was “in and out of drug stuff.” Brown’s analysis also fit with Jenni Tripp’s self-admission of being molested. Gardner is simply “a sexual deviant who likes to kill,” Brown said. “He told me a lot of stuff tha
t led me to form that opinion.”

  What about the dogs that allegedly tracked Amber’s live scent to Pala? Amber’s grandmother told the media she was furious that the police hadn’t taken the handlers’ report seriously, because surely the discovery of her remains in Pala proved that the dogs had been right. But Brown was among those investigators and trained canine handlers across the country who came out firmly dismissing the dogs’ findings as “an incredible coincidence or a calculated hoax.” (Gardner also told the author that he didn’t take Interstate 15 to get to Pala, but a back road that was less busy.)

  Noting that there is a whole cottage industry of people that preys on families whose children have gone missing, Brown said Pala is a good place in northern San Diego County to pick on a map as a likely spot to bury a body, especially when an Internet search will turn up news stories about little Leticia Hernandez and the prostitutes who were found there in the 1980s.

  Brown noted that Gardner wasn’t the kind of serial killer who kept trophies of his victims. He told detectives that Jariah was going through his pants pockets while doing the laundry, found Amber’s check for the lamb and asked him about it.

  “Is this yours?” she asked.

  Gardner grabbed it from her, and rather than hold on to it as a keepsake, he burned it in the bathroom, then flushed the remnants down the toilet.

  Because Gardner had admitted to these other assaults and stalking incidents, sheriff’s detectives started looking at him for all cases of missing females ranging in age from early teens to early twenties in the three contiguous counties of San Diego, Riverside and San Bernardino.

  Gardner also offered to help them with other cases, which Brown thought was odd. “I think the guy wanted the death penalty,” he said.