Lost Girls (14 page)

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Authors: Caitlin Rother

BOOK: Lost Girls
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“Do you want to have sex?” he asked.
“What? That's so rude. That's so disrespectful,” she said, wondering why he would say something like that when he knew that she'd been in sex therapy for being “too rigid” with her husband.
“Oh, just stop. You're such a prude,” he said, making some other taunting remarks, which Cynthia didn't want to repeat. She said simply that they hurt her feelings and made her start crying.
“I'm not trying to be rude,” he said.
Still crying, Cynthia couldn't tell if he was trying to be nice or if he was making fun of her.
“Do you want to have sex?” he repeated.
He'd been paying her rent for the past three months. Was this how he wanted her to repay him?
“How would you ever live that down?” she asked. “It'll never go away. Stop talking like that.”
“What are you talking about?” Gardner asked.
Confused, Cynthia felt that he was messing with her head. But after fifteen minutes of this type of conversation, she said, they went into the bedroom, started messing around and ultimately had sex. She acknowledged that he never forced her to do this, but afterward, when he asked if she was okay, she felt as if she'd been emotionally manipulated into doing something she didn't want to do. So she told him that no, she wasn't okay.
“Nothing ever happened,” he said matter-of-factly, as if the slate were blank again.
She didn't really understand how he could ignore reality that way when she felt so sick to her stomach—beyond disgusted.
“How do you ever get past that?” she asked.
“Past what? What happened?” he asked innocently. Then, as if to reinforce the idea that they should both pretend they'd never had sex, he said, “Do you know what I'm talking about?”
After that, they went back to being just roommates, but Cynthia couldn't forget what had happened. “I was Auntie, a friend, a confidante, and I became a lover.”
 
 
A similar scene played out some months later, while Gardner and his cousin TJ were living together in the apartment, and Cynthia was staying there, again alternating between bed, couch and floor. One night, she'd fallen asleep on her spot on the floor when John came over and picked her up.
“Don't sleep on the floor,” he said. “Why don't you just come and lie on the bed?”
“No, that's not good,” she said.
“Yeah, it is.”
She didn't resist hard enough, so he put her down on the bed and things turned sexual once again. “I thought we said this was a one-time experience,” she said.
“It's okay,” he told her. “It's okay.”
“No, it's not right,” she said. But she gave in again, because he kept pushing, and she didn't know what else to do. She kept worrying that TJ would hear them through the heating vent.
In January and February 2010, when they were living together at Linda's house in Lake Elsinore, Cynthia said, Gardner came into her room if she didn't lock the door. Sometimes he would just lie down and talk, but sometimes he was looking for sex.
“All John could complain about was the lack of control in his life,” Cynthia explained, saying that he felt helpless, as if the odds were against him. “Four times he pushed himself sexually on me,” she said in 2011.
Cynthia said she'd always felt that Gardner had a beautiful soul, but “when you're that beautiful, you are the target of darkness. Spiritual warfare makes the monster that's being attacked, and eventually they surrender.”
Gardner always had an anger problem, she said, a problem he blamed on his mother not paying him enough attention. “There will be this evil streak that comes upon him that scares the death out of you,” she said. “I don't know where it comes from, but I can feel it. It's torment. It's evil. I wish I had words. It's scary, frightening, evil.”
Gardner eventually told his mother about his intimate affair with Cynthia, but he said that his aunt had seduced
him.
Cathy believed him, knowing that her youngest sister had her own share of issues. But when Cynthia heard her nephew's version of what had happened, she was dumbfounded.
“He's going to say that I made a move on
him
?”
 
 
John Gardner's version about their first sexual episode is that he and Cynthia had both consumed two 40-ounce beers in the Jacuzzi after he got home from work. Careful to keep the GPS bracelet out of the water so as not to commit two parole violations simultaneously (the other being the alcohol consumption), he said he “was pretty hammered.” Cynthia offered to give him a backrub, and he accepted. When she rolled him over and started massaging his private area, she took the lead from there. Meanwhile, he said he lay there feeling “guilty, shocked and embarrassed and everything at the same time.” He said she never mentioned being in sex therapy, but she talked a lot about doing Tantra and Reiki, the healing touching massage technique.
He said he initiated sex a couple of times after that, and they were together about four times in total. “I told her I felt a little bit taken advantage of that first time and that I took a little bit of advantage of her later,” he said.
“We had a bond... . We got along great,” he said, adding that he could talk to her about anything.
When Cynthia took off to Hawaii and got a boyfriend, he felt hurt. He was a little jealous, he said, but mostly, “I felt like I lost my best friend.”
 
 
After his arrest, Gardner also admitted the affair to Jenni, and whatever version he told her, Jenni said, “I was still in disbelief and angry, but I think there was alcohol or drugs involved and that John was taken advantage of.”
Jenni insisted that she never discussed Gardner's sexual prowess with anyone during high school, but she wasn't surprised to hear Cynthia's story. “I kept trying to get numbers out of him and he'd never say. But when we'd talk, he'd keep coming up with another person.”
When he told Jenni about Cynthia, she thought he was being truthful, “because it seemed like he was trying to admit everything and not hold anything back. For the most part with stuff like that, he was pretty truthful with me.” However, she acknowledged that he never told her that the affair with Cynthia had occurred while he was still with Donna, and presumably, she said, Donna didn't know that either. After he'd cheated on Jenni, she said, “He swore up and down to me that he'd never do that again.”
 
 
After nearly two years on parole, Gardner started a slow, downward spiral, which he blamed on the assignment of a new parole officer on August 30, 2007.
Within a week of getting his case, Agent M. Vela discovered that Gardner had been violating the law that prohibited sex offenders from living within half a mile of any K–12 school. His apartment, which was next to the Miramar College campus, was also 125 yards from a preschool, 356 yards from Scripps High School and 478 yards from a park. He'd been given approval to live there, but only until his lease expired. He'd never been given a notice to relocate, and he'd just signed a new lease on August 13, cosigned by his mother.
When he reported to Vela on September 13, he was ordered to move from his apartment within three days, and was placed at TLM Sober Living in Vista, on September 15.
Gardner indicated he was not aware he was not in compliance and was never told he had to move at the end of his lease,
Vela said in her report.
Gardner indicated he told prior agent that he was looking to move to the Escondido area on his own.
The report noted that he'd had no violations since he went on parole on September 26, 2005, and was now in compliance with Megan's Law and departmental policy.
Gardner told his family and friends that this same parole officer also ordered him to quit his electrician's job with Dan, which he said paid forty-nine dollars an hour, saying he couldn't leave the county and needed to find work locally. After searching around, he started a job in early September with Can-Do Electric in El Cajon for fifteen dollars an hour for thirty-two hours a week, a significant drop in income.
Gardner first registered with the Escondido Police Department (EPD) after moving to a halfway house on East Pennsylvania Avenue in Escondido on September 21, 2007.
In addition to the new parole conditions, Gardner was also forced to wear a GPS bracelet starting on September 25, 2007. He was placed on “passive” monitoring because he had been deemed a “moderate-low risk” sex offender—a group that has a 12.8 percent chance of reoffending in five years and 19 percent in ten years. Monitoring high-risk offenders required daily review of GPS tracks and immediate alerts for specific notifications, whereas GPS tracks of passive offenders were only evaluated retroactively if a crime was committed. But no parole agents reviewed or tracked offenders' GPS reports in real time, so they weren't expected to prevent crimes from occurring or to stop them in action.
 
 
As John Gardner's financial situation worsened, these new hardships caused conflict in his relationship with Donna.
“John was getting more and more behind, and he wasn't giving her money,” Jenni said, referring to the sum of support money he and Donna had agreed that he would send her.
“She was actually trying to be nice and keep it out of court, with him being on parole,” said Jenni.
But that didn't stop the San Bernardino County Department of Child Support Services from suing Gardner on September 26, 2007, ordering him to help cover the cost of health insurance for his boys.
Gardner couldn't even pay his own rent, let alone help with the boys. “So I think that's what started unraveling for him and Donna. Babies need diapers, clothes. Donna was doing what she could to get those and to eat. I remember him saying he was getting the cheapest meat—chorizo (Mexican sausage). He'd say, ‘It's not good, but it's protein,'” Jenni remarked.
Plus, Jenni said, “He started doing drugs, started drinking.”
Gardner also had to move to an area that Donna didn't like. “Donna didn't like taking the boys down there because she didn't feel safe,” Jenni said. But then, after all this talk of marrying Donna, he gave her a ring. “He proposed to her, and she said yes.”
Donna took the boys on a vacation to Hawaii with her family and was still gone on the boys' first birthday, November 17, 2007. That made Gardner sad, but he understood, knowing he couldn't go anywhere while on parole.
Not long after that trip she sent Gardner a long text message telling him she was breaking up with him. This came as a surprise, he said, because they'd been planning the details of their wedding day, even down to the father-daughter dance. Gardner said the blow came over in two consecutive messages, something to the effect of: Sorry about your offer of marriage, but I'm going to have to decline. Don't call me. I need space and I don't want you to try to change my mind.
Gardner said he'd been feeling overwhelmed and started taking medication again, and she broke it off with him because she realized that his treatment would never end.
Donna and Gardner each told Jenni about the breakup. Jenni summed up the gist of the “Dear John” message as this: “Just done. She couldn't do it anymore. They both told me that. I told her she shouldn't have done that [in a text message].”
Jenni said it seemed that Donna and Gardner both overreacted to things the other one said and did. For example, Gardner got upset when Donna took him to a party where she knew everyone and kept leaving him on his own, a dynamic that contributed as well.
In a letter Gardner wrote to his boys in 2010, he painted a rosy picture of himself and characterized himself as a victim of the breakup:
I was a very good and caring man most of my life,
he wrote.
When your mom and I split it felt to me like I lost everything.

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