Lost Girls

by Caitlin Rother

  Gardner said he’d asked his attorneys for these tests. “I was a lot more crazy than I ever felt in my life, and I wanted to know why,” he said.

  He said his attorneys told him that these findings wouldn’t help his defense, given that they were trying to get the death penalty off the table in a plea deal, but he wanted to know—and the prison system to know—what was wrong with him. He also said he hoped it could help others. This was a topic that he and his mother had clearly discussed, because she’d told me the same thing.

  “If you can see this, you can prevent it,” he said. He initially refused meds in jail, he said, “because I didn’t want to screw [the test] up.”

  When he got the results, Gardner said, the psych eval showed that he had post-traumatic stress disorder from his prior prison experience and, ironically, from the sex crimes he’d committed, which, he acknowledged, “sounds kind of weird, but I was having flashbacks and hallucinations from the girls.” (Gardner decided to take Popkins’s advice not to release this report, after all, and Popkins wouldn’t confirm Gardner’s description of the psychiatric findings.)

  When Gardner watches TV, he sees Chelsea King in actresses’ faces everywhere. “She looks like so many people on TV,” he said.

  And once or twice a week, when he is lying down to go to sleep, he has flashbacks of Amber Dubois, the knife and all the blood. Despite what the detectives thought, he told me he didn’t enjoy reliving his crimes.

  “The picture of stabbing her is just not a memory I’d like. I thought I’d like it, but I didn’t. I like the raping part. I don’t like the killing part, especially if it’s bloody.”

  He said he doesn’t think as much about the act of killing Chelsea. “Not as messy,” he said. “I think about it, but I try not to. I kind of want to erase it and put it behind me and live where I am now. I’m here because of what I’ve done, but I don’t want to relive what I’ve done over and over. That’s hard to do because I can’t forgive what I’ve done.”

  He said he’d been fantasizing about hurting people since high school.

  What changed since then? I asked. What made you follow through on those urges?

  “I’m not a psychiatrist,” he said, laughing. “I can’t even pretend to guess. A switch went off. I went from being Mr. Guy Who Would Lend a Helping Hand to ‘I don’t care, f---the world.’ I just gave up caring about people. I lost all faith that people are good.”

  Did you ever think about how these girls felt? I asked.

  Yes, he nodded. “After. How horrendous it must have been and how scared they must have been. In my mind, I didn’t torture them and I felt kind of glad about that. I’d thought about it. But when it came to it, I had to do it quickly. I couldn’t handle it.”

  Because they were looking at you? I asked.

  He nodded. “And the noise.”

  As we talked about each incident, I asked him again, did he see Amber and Chelsea as a person or a thing during the act?

  Although he said he knew they were people, it sounded more to me that they were simply a means to an end—to help release his anger, which is what prompted him to pick up Amber, and to satisfy his overwhelming sexual desires, which is what made him grab Chelsea.

  “She was a person,” he said of Amber, “but I just didn’t care.”

  I’d thought we would have to talk for a while until he was ready to describe how he felt before and after the acts, not expecting him to go into much detail about the acts themselves, but he was well on his way, so I just let him talk. We started with Chelsea.

  Gardner had stopped taking his new meds about two days earlier, after titrating, or easing, down the dose, but he was still wired. So he decided to go for another walk on the trails around nine o’clock that Thursday morning, with two packs of cigarettes in his pocket. Near the waterfall behind a rock, he found a bag with nine cans of Coors Light, which he figured some kids had stashed for later, so he left it alone. Continuing on, he walked the loop around the lake, enjoying the scenery just as he’d done as a kid in Running Springs.

  Around 11:00 A.M., he found a red diamond rattlesnake behind the community center, the same snake that had almost bitten his mom’s dog the day before. He bent a stick into a fork, picked up the snake behind its head and let a guy take a photo before Gardner walked away, still holding the snake, back to the bench near the beer.

  By now, he was thirsty. He threw the snake about ten feet away and sat under a tree, chain-smoking, drinking the beers and watching the snake dance. Quickly downing two cans to catch a buzz, he sipped the next ones slowly. By one or one-thirty, when the cute woman with the dogs showed up and they chatted about the snake, he’d consumed six beers and had two cigarettes left. The snake almost got him, so he hit it with a stick. Then he twisted its head, so it couldn’t bite him, and buried its head near the rock. (He must have finished the other three beers because investigators found nine empties.)

  Around 3:00 P.M., he started walking back up the trail toward Duenda and the residential neighborhood, carrying the snake, whose head was dripping blood, when he saw a really attractive blonde wearing spandex shorts and a red shirt jog past.

  God, she’s beautiful, he thought.

  “Instant trigger, boom. Made up my mind. It didn’t matter,” he said.

  Even though she’d ignored him and his snake, he wanted to talk to her, start a conversation. He also really wanted to have sex with her. But at that point, he wasn’t sure if trying to make a date would be enough or if he would end up raping her.

  Dropping the snake, he ran at least half a mile after her, “not blatantly trying to chase her, just trying to catch up with her when she wasn’t looking. I didn’t make up my mind right then. If I could have just gotten her number and given her a call, then that could have been fine. Maybe. I really don’t know. If I’d caught up to her, there never would have been Chelsea... . I’m thinking all about my feelings. I’m being selfish.”

  He was coming back down the trail from Duenda with the lake on his left, still trying to catch up to the blonde, when he saw Chelsea run past. Realizing he couldn’t catch up to the woman he wanted, he stopped to catch his breath, irritated, and figured he would grab Chelsea when she came back around.

  “She was there. Access. That was it. She was female. She was at the wrong place at the wrong time. In my state of mind at that time, I wanted to have sex, and I was going to have sex.”

  So why kill her? I asked.

  “Witness,” he said. “Can’t tell if you’re not there to tell. If someone else was there, I would have killed them too. I didn’t want to kill her either. I almost let her go, but I didn’t.”

  Why did you almost let her go?

  “Because she was nice.”

  How could you tell?

  “Because I was talking to her.”

  I pressed him more about why he killed her—the question everyone always wanted to know. After being arrested and jailed in the 2000 incident, he said, “Being called a monster enough I wanted to turn into one.” He clarified his statement, saying it wasn’t that he wanted to, per se, but he felt himself turning into a monster as more people came to see him that way.

  As he started to complain about how he was wronged in that case, I steered him back to the Chelsea incident, saying we could come back to that later.

  Asked if he felt a compulsion to kill Chelsea, he said, “It felt like I wasn’t myself. I was in a psychotic break.” That statement seemed to conflict with his admission, however, that he was also quite aware of his surroundings and was worried about getting caught.

  After he grabbed her off the trail, he said, he took her by the hand and guided her down to the brushy area where she was found, instructing her not to make any noise. She seemed to understand just what was going on.

  “When I decided to grab her, that’s when I—I knew I was going to rape her, but I didn’t decide to kill her till later. I didn’t think about killing her till it happened. The killing was to get away with it,
which didn’t work.”

  After raping her, on and off for about two hours, he decided he had to kill her, just as it started getting dark. The duration of the crime that he admitted to in the plea bargain was understated for the parents’ sake, he said. “She did a lot of talking.”

  “When it started, I was going to have sex with her,” he said, but then “she started trying to be a little psychologist. She was smart. She tried to be my friend. She tried to manipulate. I got the feeling she was going to tell no matter what I did. She tried to scratch me. She hit me with a stick. When she did that, it infuriated me, and I killed her.”

  I asked if it was difficult to talk about this.

  He said it was easier the more times he told it, and he’d certainly had practice, after being interviewed by police, the FBI and 48 Hours. He never told his mother details, though, because he figured she didn’t really want to know.

  “I wish I could take it all back, but I can’t,” he said. “I don’t feel like it’s really me who did it. I’m telling you these things that I’ve done, and it’s hard to believe that I’ve done them. It’s kind of unreal. It’s not the person I grew up being.”

  We talked for a while about the factors that contributed to the anger that festered inside him, the anger that we’d all heard so much about. He started with his being wrongly convicted for sexually touching Monica, his thirteen-year-old neighbor, which he insisted he never did.

  “I did other things, but I didn’t do what she said. I hit her... . I was going to kill her. I was in a rage. She was attacking me and my family. Everything I cared about. She said she was going to tell [Patricia] that we were having sex. I grabbed her by the throat, started punching her. I flew off the deep end.” Then, he said, he got a flashback of his sister Sarina saying, “Bro, you never hit a chick,” and he stopped—the only time he ever stopped when he started down that path.

  Monica, he said, yelled at him: “‘F--- you, f--- you, f---you, I can’t believe you hit me,’ and she ran out the door.”

  How did her pants get unzipped? I asked several times in different ways.

  “They weren’t,” he said. “We’re just going to have to agree to disagree.”

  I thought it odd that he would confess to raping and killing two teenage girls, and yet still maintain that he didn’t sexually touch this girl.

  Why would you do that? I asked.

  “Because I didn’t do that,” he said. “I didn’t try to rape Candice Moncayo” either, he said, and “she didn’t hit me in the nose.”

  After he got out of prison, things were okay initially, he said, except that he had to go to mandatory group therapy for sex offenders. He felt he didn’t belong there because he wasn’t having any urges or compulsions.

  “I was angry,” he said. “I felt I didn’t need to be in that group. I needed anger management.” He only grew more angry when the parole agent told him he had to pay for the classes himself, at $120 a pop.

  So you didn’t go?

  “Hell no.”

  Then he got a parole officer who made him move out of his apartment and revoked his travel pass, which had allowed him to leave the county for the past two years to work with his stepfather in L.A. Even though he’d broken the parole condition that he wasn’t supposed to have a romantic relationship without his agent’s permission, that travel pass had also, in his mind, allowed him to see Donna on his way home from work without really breaking the rules.

  The same agent placed him in one sober living home after another, but he had to keep moving because the neighborhood residents complained that too many sex offenders were living in one building. Finally, after the third one, the agent stopped finding him places to live, and at that point, he became homeless, living out of his truck.

  Once he got that agent, he said, “it all hit the fan. Everything in my life was shattered.”

  Before the incident with Amber, he said, he was working for Can-Do Electric. He was living with his cousin, and trying to get Jariah to move in with him. After his truck was repossessed in February 2009, he borrowed Jariah’s gray Ford Focus.

  The two of them had a fight on February 12, 2009. He wanted to stay the night at her place, but she said no, she wanted to party with a bunch of her male friends. So Gardner stayed up all night alone in his apartment, growing increasingly angry with every one of the sixteen beers that he drank.

  Around five-thirty in the morning, he got into the car and went for a drive, with his remaining two beers in the drink holders next to him. Just as he enjoyed walking around when he was antsy, he also liked driving around. Only this time he was angry—at Jariah for rejecting him and at Donna for breaking off their engagement—and he had it in his mind that he was going to hurt someone. Bad.

  “I wanted to hurt someone that I didn’t know, because I was less likely to get caught,” he said. “I wanted to hurt Jariah, but I wasn’t going to hurt Jariah because I knew her. I cared about her, and I also didn’t want to be the primary suspect, being her boyfriend.”

  As he was driving down Broadway in Escondido, he had his hand wrapped around the handle of his hunting knife, whose blade was seven inches long and two inches wide, in the center console. He also had a gun on the seat between his legs, a Colt semiautomatic he’d grabbed when it had fallen out of a friend’s pocket. He was going to use one of them when the time came. He just hadn’t decided which one.

  Driving past the high school and the private school across the street, he saw a figure walking toward Broadway on a deserted side street. He made a U-turn and turned left to head up that road, Stanley Avenue. He didn’t care who or what gender his victim was going to be. As he got closer, he was pleased to see that it was a girl.

  Bonus, he thought.

  She was walking along the sidewalk, down a street she didn’t normally use to go to school, and she was alone, walking next to a chain-link fence. So he pinned her in with his car and ordered her to put her computer bag in the backseat. “Get in the car, or it will be worse,” he said.

  When she asked if he was kidding, he showed her the knife and raised his voice. “Get in the f---ing car!” he screamed.

  She obeyed him.

  He knew then that he was not only going to hurt her, but rape her too—somewhere far away, where no one could see or hear them. He’d gambled at Valley View Casino before, so he headed up north that way, using back roads (not Interstate 15 as the VK9 dog handlers suggested). On the way, he tried to force Amber to give him oral sex, but she refused. So he let her sit quietly, instead, with her choice of radio station playing, 103.5 F.M.

  “You know what I want,” he told her, “and it’s going to happen.”

  Amber just stared out the window and listened to the music.

  As he approached the access road on Pala Temecula Road, he saw the gate was open and pulled in, continuing to the turnout, where he pulled over and they got out. When the two SDG&E workers drove past, Gardner had the gun in his waistband. He was worried they were about to get made.

  “If you say anything, I’ll shoot you and them both,” he told Amber, and she didn’t say a word. After the SDG&E guys were gone, Gardner told Amber to get back into the car. They continued up the steep grade, then he turned left and drove the car out a narrow flat area to the vista, where he raped and stabbed her to death.

  Afterward, he felt a release from his anger, but it was replaced with fear and anxiety about getting caught. This incident, too, he said, lasted longer than the ninety minutes stated on the plea agreement, because the drive up there took almost an hour, and he hadn’t had an exact destination in mind.

  He dragged her body down the incline and into the brush. After removing all her clothing and taking the check for the lamb out of her pocket, he buried her in a shallow grave next to the water heater. Placing all her belongings and his bloody shirt into a bag, he washed his hands with bottled water and put on a clean shirt. He placed the soiled clothing and her other items inside a bag of household trash, which he then tos
sed into the Dumpster at his apartment complex.

  Amber’s mother had said she wanted Gardner to tell her every detail of that morning, even whether Amber had cried out for her, so I asked him if she had.

  “No, she didn’t cry for her mother,” he said. “She was a strong-willed girl.”

  As our time to talk was dwindling, I asked Gardner about a comment I’d heard him make on 48 Hours: “I don’t even know the meaning of that word, ‘remorse.’ I say ‘regret.’ I regret everything that I’ve done.”

  He said the producers took his comment out of context when they said he didn’t feel remorse. What he was trying to say was that he didn’t understand the distinction between the two words, so he said he felt regret because he was more sure of that word’s definition.

  “I have major regret,” he told me. “I would have rather been dead at the time,” clarifying that he meant after the murders. “I’m sure everyone else would have rather I’d taken their place, but too late.”

  Do you still feel like an animal? I asked, referring to his self-description during the KFMB interview that had gotten some people so riled up.

  He said he did at the time, but now that he was medicated properly and feeling more stable, not so much.

  “I don’t ever want to be released, so it’s good that I’m here,” he said. “I’d need years of therapy to get over the anger I have toward women... . It’s not that I hate all women. It’s that I don’t feel I can trust them. I feel like I’m a person who’s done some horrendous things.”