Lost Girls (33 page)

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Authors: Caitlin Rother

BOOK: Lost Girls
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“‘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 that 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.
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.”

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