“These were beautiful young girls, and this new law will help maintain their family’s memories of them, just as they were,” Hollingsworth said. “These families have endured such horrific tragedies they shouldn’t be victimized a second time by the public airings of those autopsy reports.”
Before the bill was passed, opponents such as the California Newspaper Publishers Association complained that the measure would eliminate transparency necessary for the public to evaluate the taxpayer-subsidized efforts of law enforcement by preventing watchdog reporting that could reveal mistakes or mistreatment by a parent. Squelching this information, they argued, would also prevent the dissemination of important information people needed to protect themselves; such determinations should be made by the judicial system, they said, not emotional family members.
Such reports can help reveal failures by public agencies. Sealing them would be a mistake, a Los Angeles Times editorial stated.
The state legislature passed this bill as well, and on September 27, 2010, Governor Schwarzenegger signed into law the Deceased Child Victims’ Protection and Privacy Act. Today, parents or guardians of children killed during a crime can request that their autopsy reports be sealed, but only after an offender has been convicted and sentenced for the crime. The law does not apply to victims who died in foster care, were in the care of the juvenile justice system or in any incident caused by neglect or abuse.
Over time, the Chelsea’s Light Foundation established a board of directors, set a number of goals, wrote a legislative action plan and promised programs to “unite and lead people who are passionate about protecting children and inspiring positive change in their communities.” Hoping to launch a campaign to pass laws similar to Chelsea’s Law in other states, the directors started by targeting Colorado, Florida, Ohio and Texas.
One of their new points of light was the Sunflower Academic Scholarship program, aimed at helping students who were academic performers, as well as those students whose families didn’t have the money to subsidize extracurricular activities, such as music or sports. In June 2011, this program awarded $60,500 in checks to ten college students.
As of March 2012, supporters of these efforts and Chelsea’s lasting impact numbered more than 107,095 “likes” on the “Chelsea’s Light” page on Facebook. The Kings also set up a page called “What Chelsea King Taught Me,” full of positive messages of hope and vision, inspired by her memory.
To provide their son, Tyler, with a feeling of safety and relief from nagging publicity and constant reminders of his sister, the Kings decided to move back to their old neighborhood in the close-knit town of Naperville, Illinois, in the summer of 2010.
“In San Diego, Tyler is known as Chelsea’s brother,” Brent told reporters after the move.
“Here, Tyler can be Tyler.”
“It was like walking into a great big hug,” Kelly said, adding that Tyler was “probably the happiest we’ve seen him in a very long time.”
The Kings vowed to come back to San Diego periodically for foundation meetings and other events in Chelsea’s memory.
That October, the Kings’ claim against the state of California, faulting the corrections and parole system for Chelsea’s murder and seeking $25,000 from the Victim Compensation and Government Claims Board, was rejected. The board said the Kings’ case should be handled in the courts, but the family decided to drop the issue and pursue more positive ways to deal with losing Chelsea. The board also rejected a similar claim filed by the parents of Amber Dubois.
Also looking to do something positive, Moe Dubois and his partner, Rebecca, formed their own group, More Kids, while Moe worked toward the passage of a number of bills—four of which have passed.
One measure narrowed the state-required time window from four to two hours for reporting a child abduction to a national tracking system; another required law enforcement to better coordinate and improve response times, training and procedures for the investigation of such abductions; a third created a director’s position within the state DOJ to oversee programs to find missing children.
Emotionally unable to return to her previous job, Carrie McGonigle told the Union-Tribune in February 2011 that she was collecting disability as she put together a search-and-rescue effort to locate missing girls like Amber and Chelsea.
Moe and Rebecca said they hadn’t had an easy time recovering either. “The past two years have thrown us into financial ruin,” Moe told the Union-Tribune. “Going back to work was very, very difficult for me.”
Moe said he was working part-time for a company that makes computer communication systems, and he was spending the rest of his time lobbying for legislation.
In July 2011, Governor Jerry Brown signed another bill inspired by Moe, who felt cheated out of having his day in court with John Gardner. Parts of his victim impact statement, which had been entered into the court file five days early at the clerk’s request, were published before he had a chance to speak the words directly to Gardner at the sentencing hearing. Moe believed that his statement lost its impact because Gardner could read it in advance and prepare for it. Today, such statements are kept confidential until after sentencing.
Three months after Bonnie Dumanis declared her intention to run for mayor of San Diego, a job that paid less than half her current salary, Nathan Fletcher announced that he was giving up his assembly seat to do the same. After raising their profiles by working together on this case, Dumanis and Fletcher were now rivals, competing for Republican fund-raising dollars and endorsements in a race to win the city’s most powerful seat. Dumanis, who had run unchallenged for her third term as DA, vowed to run a positive campaign, but Fletcher, a former marine who worked counterintelligence in Iraq, and was courting the business community, was going to be tough to beat. In late March 2012, Fletcher left the Republican party to run as an independent after the party endorsed another candidate.
The Kings and Sheriff Gore remained friends, and often met for coffee or dinner if the Kings were back in town, or if Gore happened to be in Illinois for a meeting. At one such rendezvous at Starbucks, Gore was pleased to see the Kings walk in with such positive energy.
“We can’t spend the rest of our lives focusing on the negative part of this, going after sex offenders,” Brent told him.
The Kings proceeded to explain with excitement that, rather than wallow in the aftermath of their personal tragedy, they decided to take what good they could from Chelsea’s life and turn it into something positive.
“It was so Brent and Kelly,” Gore said, “that they would realize that this wasn’t good for them ... that they couldn’t continue to dwell in the negative... . I thought that was very indicative of the way they do things and the amazing strength of that family.”
About six months after Chelsea’s passing, Gore received a package from the Kings at his house. Inside, he found a double-paned picture frame with a photo of Chelsea on one side, knowingly looking up at the camera as she stood next to a school mural, and on the other side a piece of her writing dated February 22, 2010, just three days before she was murdered.
Gore read the piece, then showed it to his wife. They both had a good cry. The message was so articulate for a young girl, and so prescient. Chelsea King clearly had had a bright future ahead of her as an activist; she was destined to do something significant with her life as she prepared to leave the nest and head off to college:
As I embark for the first time out into the world truly on my own, I must not live in fear of my own mortality and succumb to the complacency of society, but rather sap each ounce of life out of my own fleeting existence and live what I believe to be a noble life.
Words we could all live by.
Epilogue:
A FIVE-HOUR CONVERSATION WITH JOHN GARDNER
First I have a confession to make. After writing Body Parts, a book about serial rapist-killer Wayne Adam Ford, I really didn’t think I’d ever be able to stand getting into the head of another man like him, let alo
ne one who had molested, raped and killed teenagers. I also have a standing rule: I cannot and will not write stories about young murdered children. I just can’t stomach it.
But on March 4, 2010, the day after John Gardner was arraigned for killing Chelsea King, and the same day he told his attorneys he could lead them to Amber’s body, I got an e-mail from an editor at Tina Brown’s national online publication, The Daily Beast (which has since merged with Newsweek), asking if I’d be interested in covering this case for them.
I said yes, and spent fourteen hours researching and writing the first article. The following week, I wrote a second one, which was difficult because Dumanis had issued her “gag order” e-mail, and the judge had put the actual gag order in place. But, after watching my own community reeling from the emotional fallout of this case, I was feeling it too.
By then, I was hooked, and I felt that this story warranted a book-length telling. But for me to move forward, I had to convince myself that Chelsea and Amber weren’t children, even though some folks might disagree. Still, because of their age and out of respect to their families, I knew I had to be extremely sensitive and thoughtful about how I wrote this book.
Following my usual methodology, I read every article and collected every piece of information I could, trying to determine if I could go further than the mainstream media. With the crazy amount of coverage, I was a bit worried at first. However, after a long series of calls and e-mails, I was able to persuade John Gardner’s family to open up to me.
Knowing that I could tell the backstory of how he evolved into the man who could commit these heinous acts, I felt I could go deeper than any reporter had gone before me. And despite the dark subject matter, that passion energized me. I felt this book was more important than some of my earlier works because people are so scared of losing their children to sexual predators. Yet, we, as a society, seem to have so little understanding of these men and how to deal with them.
The Gardner-Osborn family and I share a hope that this book will help educate people by delving into all the factors that contributed to making John Gardner into a man who could not control his sexual and homicidal compulsions, and by casting a spotlight on the flawed system that allowed him and predators like him to roam free to prey on children, teenagers and grown women.
Although they’ve since become pessimistic that anything they say will help, I’m still hopeful that the idealism that drove me into journalism years ago was right and true, and that this story will give unprecedented insight into all the facets of a sex offender like John Gardner—the sweet, nurturing, loving and goofy guy his family once knew, the guy who seemed friendly and normal to people at the dog park, as well as the angry, manipulative and violent man who brutally killed these poor girls. I hope we, as a society, can find ways to help people like him before they get to a breaking point or to stop them from doing harm after they’ve reached it, and to protect ourselves and our families from falling to the same fate as Amber Dubois, Chelsea King and Candice Moncayo.
I did try to speak with Candice, as well as Chelsea’s and Amber’s families, so I could pay a more personal tribute to each victim. However, they chose not to be interviewed for this book. As a result, I respectfully crafted their stories from their own words in public comments to the media, public records and details I collected from interviews with law enforcement and other sources.
I understand that this was such an enormously traumatic event in their lives. While some victims and their families have cooperated fully with me in my previous books, and have told me they found relief in doing so, I can see that others might find it too painful. I think we all want to change the system in a positive way, to save lives and to keep this from happening again. This is my way, and I hope they find some peace and success in theirs.
Although I had exchanged a few letters with Gardner, I waited until I was almost finished with my research and writing my first draft to visit him, so I could be fully prepared. The night before my interview, I woke up every half hour, anxious about sitting across from a man with a trigger temper. I was also worried I wouldn’t get any sleep before the 4:00 A.M. alarm went off at my friend’s house in L.A., a halfway point on my route to Corcoran State Prison.
This chapter was written after that interview, which took place on June 25, 2011, on a very hot day in the air-conditioned visiting room in the Protective Housing Unit (not to be confused with the Secure Housing Unit, known as “the shoe” to the frequent visitors I met on the Corcoran bus). I sat across from Gardner for five intense hours, scribbling frantically in tiny letters on the mere ten pages of paper I was allowed to bring in—no tape recorders or notebooks allowed, no underwire bras, no manuscript to fact-check details. Also, there was no pane of protective glass between us.
I’d been hoping to catch a glimpse of a triumvirate of evil that day, including Charles Manson and Phillip Garrido (the man who held Jaycee Dugard hostage and repeatedly raped her for eighteen years). Garrido, though, had not been brought to the unit yet, and Manson had no visitors that day. But, believe me, I had plenty to keep me occupied.
Cathy Osborn had already warned me that her son had gained a hundred pounds in the past year from his new medications, prison food and a lack of exercise, so I wasn’t surprised when Gardner came out in his powder blue prison scrubs. His face and body were quite a bit fuller than when I’d seen him on TV, when he’d weighed 230 pounds.
He was friendly and charming from the outset. He shook my hand and smiled, and we sat across from each other at a rickety round table near the guard station. I sensed a strange smell coming from him that clicked later when Linda the paralegal e-mailed me about their Starbucks meeting in 2008. It wasn’t a body odor, but it was odd, and neither Linda nor I could really identify it.
As I walked over to the vending machines to buy us drinks (prisoners are not allowed to touch money), I could feel Gardner watching me, but I’d purposely worn loose pants and a long-sleeved button-up shirt. I tried not to think about it. What I was most concerned about was not making him erupt with anger as he had at the sentencing hearing; I had visions of him lunging across that table and grabbing me before the guards could stop him. As it turned out, our conversation was surprisingly relaxed, despite the subject matter, as he made self-deprecating jokes and tried to laugh away his fate in the “retirement home,” as he called it.
If you hadn’t known what he had done, you wouldn’t have guessed just by chatting with him. That was the innate creepiness of this whole thing, which, I later realized, went to the heart of how he’d gotten his family and others to believe he was innocent all those years. He came off like a nice, sincere guy, the socially awkward kid who had won an award for Best Conversationalist. Luckily, I knew better.
At the end of the interview, he told me he was surprised that I hadn’t asked for more grisly details about the murders; he’d been prepared to say no, he didn’t want to talk about that. But he’d already told me in his very first letter that, out of respect to the families, he would only discuss those details with them. I decided to see if that was really true, and see what he volunteered. I knew the victims’ families wouldn’t appreciate my going into too many details, but, honestly, I wasn’t sure that even I wanted to hear them, let alone recount them to you, my dear readers. Did we really need to know how many times and where he stabbed Amber? No, I decided, we didn’t.
But, as painful and repulsive as this idea might be to some people, I believe we did need to know how a sexual predator thinks, if I wanted to achieve the goals I’d set out for myself. Therefore, I vowed to let him talk without inserting any judgment. Hoping to get at the truth, that’s what I, as the objective journalist I was trained to be, tried to do here. My intention was never to be insensitive to the victims’ families, but I don’t think we can learn or change anything by turning a blind eye to these horrors. There are many other John Gardners out there, it’s just that he is one of the few willing to show the world at least part of who he really is. I
thought it best in this chapter to let him speak for himself. For that reason, anyone with a weak stomach should be forewarned. This next section includes mature content.
John Gardner’s first comment to me illustrated the feeling of defeat that had pervaded his family by this point in my dealings with them: “I don’t know what I can say that would help things,” he said.
I told him my goals, philosophy and hopes for this book, then I moved on to my questions, starting with the medications that his mother had told me brought back the old John she once knew.
“I’m on Risperidone, three milligrams,” he said.
Although this drug was designed to treat schizophrenia, with which he was never diagnosed, it also helps treat manic symptoms. “I’m just severely bipolar, sometimes psychotic episodes,” he said.
I knew that he’d had a PET brain scan done, and even though Gardner had authorized his attorneys to release the report to me, his lead attorney, Michael Popkins, said he didn’t believe it was in his client’s best interest. Therefore, I asked Gardner what it showed.
“I have brain damage, frontal cortex area,” Gardner said, explaining that that translated into his impulse control problem. (Gardner then wrote a letter authorizing the release of the PET scan results to me, against his attorneys’ advice. The report showed no abnormalities, and made no mention of an impulse control problem. I asked his other attorney, Mel Epley, if Gardner might have confused this test with his psych evaluation, and Epley said yes, the evaluation did indicate that Gardner was “prone to impulsive acting out,” although that was not a specific diagnosis.)
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