The task force disbanded shortly thereafter, deciding not to file charges in any of the assaults and attempted assaults Gardner had admitted to, because they wouldn’t add any time to his consecutive life sentences.
A crew from 48 Hours waited until the investigators finished their interview before it could do one of its own. (TV interviews of prisoners are not allowed in California prisons.)
“I never want to be let out. I will kill,” he told the TV crew. “I know I will. I am the type that needs to be locked up forever. I am an animal.”
Gardner said he saw Amber for the first time as he was driving down the street. He pulled up next to her, windows down, his knife out and visible, and told her he had a gun. Once he got her in the car and they were driving north, he put the music on.
“She wanted to hear music so that she could pretend she wasn’t there,” he said. On the way to Pala, he said, “she asked me why I was doing it, what was wrong.”
Carrie told 48 Hours that once he and Amber got to Pala, “he raped her, and then out of the blue—he doesn’t know why—he just grabbed the knife, ran over and stabbed her.”
Prosecutor Kristen Spieler later said she believed Gardner “knew exactly what he was doing, and that he knew it was wrong. And if he had a mental illness, I don’t think the defect is in his mind but in his character.”
The week after the sentencing, the Kings appeared on the Today show to talk about the hearing. “The minute he walked into that courtroom, there was a complete and total wave of disgust,” Kelly King told host Matt Lauer. “There’s an element of shock to be that close to someone who has done what he’s done to our daughter and our family.”
Carrie McGonigle went on Good Morning America to reveal what Gardner had said during their jailhouse talk. She said she felt “great” after talking with Gardner that day, and was finally able to sleep at night. “I had complete closure. I had the answers I was looking for. I saw the light at the end of the tunnel, which is something I hadn’t seen for thirteen months.”
“And you truly forgive John Gardner?” host Robin Roberts asked.
“I truly forgive, because I don’t want to be angry, and I don’t ... I don’t want to hold on to all that anger and all that hate. I mean, I would, I was angry for fifteen months. And I was miserable... . I’ll never forget what he did, but if I hold on to all that anger and hate, I won’t be able to move on and give [my other daughter] Allison the proper life.”
Her advice to parents who want to ensure their kids stay safe: “Don’t let them walk alone, and know the way they’re going.”
Chapter 36
The specter of twelve-year-old Stephanie Crowe, who was murdered in 1998, hung over the Escondido Police Department during the course of its entire investigation into Amber’s disappearance.
Stephanie was found stabbed to death on her bedroom floor in Escondido. Her parents were portrayed as “recovering addicts” in the media, and her teenage brother and his two friends were charged with killing her, after giving what were later deemed to be coerced confessions. Escondido police were criticized for ignoring two reports of a mentally ill prowler named Richard Tuite, who had been wandering the neighborhood in the hours before the slaying.
The case was headed to trial when Stephanie’s blood was discovered on Tuite’s red sweatshirt, and it was also found later on a T-shirt he was wearing underneath. But it took nearly four years for the EPD to hand over the investigation to the sheriff’s department and for the DA’s office to turn over prosecution of the case to the state attorney general. Tuite was ultimately convicted—although he was granted a new trial in September 2011.
The families of the three wrongly accused teenage boys filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the cities of Escondido and Oceanside, which, after many years of court wrangling, was finally on its way to trial in 2011. Attorney Milton J. Silverman, who represented the Crowe family, accused the EPD of conspiring to cover up its own incompetency on the night of Stephanie’s murder, an allegation the department denied. Ten days before the trial was scheduled to start in October 2011, the two cities settled with the Crowe family for $7.25 million, but admitted no liability.
The EPD has never really recovered in the public eye from its mishandling of this case, which the media brought up again after the department failed to link John Gardner to the murder of Amber Dubois. Reporters repeatedly pointed out that the EPD never questioned Gardner even though he was a 290 registrant who lived only two miles from Escondido High School.
At a news conference on May 17, 2010, reporters again drew parallels between the two cases, which Lieutenant Bob Benton maintained was an unfair apples-to-oranges comparison.
“It didn’t raise any red flags that Gardner was a sex offender pulled over stalking a woman half a mile from the school?” KFMB-TV field producer David Gotfredson asked after the EPD disclosed for the first time that Gardner had been cited on April 12, 2009, for driving Jariah’s gray car with an open beer can, after the twenty-year-old woman complained that he was following her around.
“Unfortunately, that information never got up to the Dubois task force,” Benton replied. “Again, likely because the information that the patrol officers had at the time was that we were looking for a red truck, and we were looking for a boy who was last seen walking with Amber.”
To date, Benton said, there is “no indication any additional information would have been found to link John Gardner to Amber’s disappearance. If John Gardner is telling the truth, then he kidnapped her well before she arrived anywhere near the school.” Defending the department for not connecting the dots, he said, “He wasn’t driving a red truck that day, and had no connection to one. He didn’t fit the description of the boy.”
EPD Chief Jim Maher, however, admitted that they might have been relying on misinformation. “It could be those earlier witnesses were incorrect from day one,” he said.
Los Angeles Times reporter Tony Perry, specifically mentioning missteps in the Crowe case, asked the most pointedly aggressive questions of the news conference.
“Should we have any faith in your police department?” he asked. “Is it a competent police department?”
“I do have full confidence in our police department,” Maher replied. However, he added, “it would be our obligation that we review every step we took in this case to see if we could have, and should have, done anything differently.”
On May 18, at two in the morning, John Gardner was transferred from the county jail to North Kern State Prison, north of Bakersfield, where he was assessed for the most suitable permanent placement. He was then moved to the Secure Housing Unit (SHU) at Corcoran State Prison, where the state keeps the most high-profile prisoners who are a security risk wherever they go. Gardner had his own cell there, but he shared the unit with about fourteen others, including mass murderer Charles Manson and Mikhail Markhasev, who killed comedian Bill Cosby’s son. Famed music producer Phil Spector, who was serving a sentence of nineteen years to life for the shooting death of actress Lana Clarkson in 2003, was in another part of the prison.
Manson advised Gardner how to make money from his notoriety, but Cathy Osborn said her family refused to go along with his suggestions to sell his clothing and other items on the Internet. People hated them enough already.
Cathy visited her son every other week in prison. And Jenni Tripp said she’d been writing him e-mails, planning to print them out and send them to him, but her computer crashed before she had a chance.
“As long as I don’t think about the murder part, and I think about the John that I knew, I miss him,” she said. “I miss having that close friend.”
Jariah Baker, his most recent ex-girlfriend, was trying to move on with her life and get her son back, but she was one of the few who visited him in jail, and one of the very few who drove all the way to Corcoran to say good-bye before she left California. Gardner had written to her once he arrived and told her that he really missed her.
I did
really love you and I still do. I guess for you the confusion is unreal, but you did know me, he wrote. “God is love” makes sense to me now. But he has a reason for everything, even us meeting. I hope you will be a friend to me. I know you don’t do that normally but I still love you even though we know you will find a great man soon who will take care of you and Lil Buddy.
“I miss him,” Jariah said, “what’s underneath, the Buddy I thought I knew. What he did is his mental chemistry. It’s not who he is.”
She said she knows he was angry before the killings. She tells herself that he blacked out in order to be able to do those terrible things, that he “didn’t know completely what he was doing. I try to make myself believe that.”
She even pushed the one violent episode between them out of her mind. She didn’t want to talk about it for this book, saying that “it was so humiliating” that she never told anyone until she spoke to investigators about it. “I even forgot about it until all this stuff happened, and then I was like, ‘Oh yeah.’”
When people who used to know her asked how she was doing, she said, she didn’t know what to say or how to act. “Everything turned upside down because of this. Everything.”
Deanna Gardner and her two daughters, Gardner’s other half sisters, were really quite shocked at the news of his arrest. None of them knew what to say to Gardner, so they didn’t try to contact him.
Deanna said she had mixed feelings about the whole thing. “I’m kind of glad that his dad wasn’t around to see all that,” she said. “What do you say to a stepson who killed two people? ‘Sorry you got caught’? No, I’m not sorry.”
Chapter 37
While this case and its various related probes had been proceeding, Assemblyman Nathan Fletcher had been working with the Kings, Bonnie Dumanis and the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department to craft the law they all hoped would better regulate and punish sex offenders. The Republican assemblyman also worked with state senator Mark Leno, a Democrat from San Francisco, to help ease the passage of the bill, aptly named Chelsea’s Law.
Along the way, the governor’s California Sex Offender Management Board made recommendations, only some of which were adopted as the bill virtually sailed through the sausage-making process in the state legislature.
The bill provides a “one-strike” life sentence without the possibility of parole for certain violent first-time sex offenders, lengthens prison and parole terms for offenders whose victims are under fourteen, and restricts offenders from entering public parks.
It also requires parolees to be assessed for “dynamic” risk factors for violence, such as alcohol or drug abuse and losing a job or place to live, versus “static” factors, such as a record of past violence. This assessment score is to be available to the public.
In addition, all paroled sex offenders are now required to be treated under what’s known as a “containment model,” another CASOMB recommendation. This means a parolee is monitored by a team of professionals, which includes his parole agent, a therapist, a polygraph test administrator and victim advocates.
“The more eyes you have on these folks that they’re aware of, the better,” said Jack Wallace, the CASOMB coordinator.
Wallace, who has worked much of his career treating sex offenders, said therapists can’t stop an offender’s evil urges, but they can help him learn tools to deal with such urges without harming others. “There is no treatment that is going to say you are no longer going to get evil thoughts,” Wallace said. Instead, the idea is to “teach them a process so that they have something to fall back on.”
Under the old system, two mental-health evaluators assessed prisoners like Gardner to determine whether they should be deemed “sexually violent predators” or “mentally disordered offenders,” and if so, be civilly committed to the state mental hospital in Coalinga.
According to an article in The San Diego Union-Tribune, two state mental-health employees told activist Marc Klaas that a prison psychologist twice deemed John Gardner too dangerous to release after concluding that he met the six criteria to be classified as a mentally disordered offender, and should be hospitalized for treatment. However, a mental-health evaluator disagreed both times. Those criteria included having a severe mental disorder that was not in remission, committing a violent crime and representing a “substantial danger of physical harm to others.” If Gardner had been deemed mentally disordered, he could’ve been sent to Coalinga for all three years of his parole, and if still deemed a danger, he could’ve been kept there under a civil commitment.
That news report could not be confirmed by the CASOMB. However, even based on the limited medical records Gardner’s mother released to the author, which detailed his psychotic breaks and homicidal threats in 2004, it seems likely that the prison psychologist’s assessment was right. What’s unclear is why any mental-health evaluator would disagree.
Under Chelsea’s Law, if that same situation arose today, a third mental-health professional would be brought in to break the tie rather than allow Gardner, or any other prisoner, to be automatically released. DMH officials refused to release Gardner’s records or discuss this assessment issue, even after he authorized them to do so.
State lawmakers did not accept the CASOMB recommendation to institute a point system to tier the state’s approximately 63,000 registered sex offenders into levels of dangerousness, ranging from those convicted of minor offenses, such as urinating in public, to those imprisoned for statutory rape with their girlfriend, to those serving time for the most violent rapes and/or beatings of multiple victims. This is important because about two-thirds of California’s registered offenders are no longer on parole or probation and therefore have no type of formal supervision. That means police officers and sheriff’s deputies are the only “monitors” who have any regular contact with these offenders—a category that included Gardner.
“John Gardner was not under any formal form of community supervision when he murdered Amber and Chelsea,” Wallace said.
According to the CASOMB report, “current law requiring paroled sex offenders to wear a GPS for life is widely viewed as unenforceable due to a failure by the Jessica’s Law Initiative to provide a criminal penalty for persons who refuse to wear a GPS unit after parole or probation ends.”
One other board recommendation that went ignored was to change or loosen the residency restrictions on parolees. The board noted that 30 percent of the state’s paroled sex offenders are homeless, which means even the police have no idea where they’re living. Citing extensive research in other states and nations, CASOMB reports have repeatedly stated that residency restrictions are the most serious issue facing California today in the field of sex offender management, because they destabilize the offender, block employment and reintegration into a healthy life—all of which contribute to recidivism. Gardner said his life began to fall apart when his new parole agent tightened his restrictions by ordering him to move and give up his travel pass, which cost him his apartment, his job and his relationship, rendering him unemployed, homeless and angry.
“The board has always felt it made more sense to restrict where they could be, not where they lived,” Wallace said. And when it came to Gardner, he noted, “residence restrictions had no impact on him whatsoever,” because he was registered an hour away in Lake Elsinore when he killed Chelsea. However, if he’d been reported for being in the RB Community Park in the days before her murder, as is now prohibited under Chelsea’s Law, he said, “that may have made a difference.”
In a state that has severe financial problems and never seems to have enough revenues to balance its budget, the main drawback of this wildly politically popular bill is that no one wants to discuss the cost of implementing it. Early on, corrections department analysts estimated the law would carry an annual cost of $54 million by the year 2030, while other analysts vaguely described the price tag as “substantial to the state, likely in the millions annually,” with a cost as high as the “low tens of millions
” for the dynamic assessments alone.
The largest cost appears to be tied to keeping California’s nearly 23,000 incarcerated sex offenders behind bars for longer—at a cost of $47,000 each per year—and also keeping them longer on parole, which costs money as well. After some horse trading late in the legislative process, Fletcher described the measure as cost neutral. However, several state employees familiar with the bill said the new measures would start generating costs once they were actually implemented. They just couldn’t say how much.
Boosted by the publicity surrounding the John Gardner case, the bill passed as an urgency measure, which put it into effect as soon as Governor Schwarzenegger signed it in San Diego’s Balboa Park on September 9, 2010. The crowd of about two hundred, many of whom were holding sunflowers as they watched the signing ceremony, gave a standing ovation to Fletcher and the Kings.
“Because of Chelsea, everyone has joined together to solve this serious problem in our state,” Governor Schwarzenegger said. “Because of Chelsea, California’s children will be safer. Because of Chelsea, this never has to happen again.”
Big words. If only it were that simple.
And, in fact, it hasn’t been. In January 2012, California’s continuing fiscal problems forced Governor Jerry Brown to propose a budget that would delay funding needed to implement the “containment model” for two years. Brent King met with Brown to request that he institute a 25-cent surcharge on cell phone bills to pay for this key component of the bill, but Brown said that would require a vote of the people.
During the course of this case, more than twenty media outlets requested copies of the victims’ autopsy reports. District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis believed it was important not to reveal details of the crime scenes or the conditions of the victims’ bodies, particularly given the sexual assaults. She said she didn’t know that existing law allowed such sensitive information to be released to the media, and was shocked that they wanted to publish such details. The families didn’t want that painful information released either, so they hired an attorney to try to keep the reports sealed while Dumanis went to work on a piece of legislation with state senator Dennis Hollingsworth. Given the sensitivity of the case, the county decided to keep the autopsy reports under seal, citing Marsy’s Law, unless or until the county was overruled by a court, or until the legislation passed.
Lost Girls Page 31
