Lost Girls

by Caitlin Rother

  “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.

  Soon after Donna broke up with him, Gardner met Jariah Baker, who lived in the same apartment complex as one of his best friends. Gardner had offered his truck and his muscle to help Jariah, her toddler son, Alan, and her friend Tricia Trimble move to a studio in Escondido on January 18, 2008.

  As Gardner was loading their stuff into his white Silverado truck, Jariah, who was three years younger, said, “Ooh, he’s cute.” She said they had sex later that day, and they began seeing each other regularly.

  “He helped me get over baby daddy, and I helped him get over baby mama,” Jariah recalled, saying they were “buddies” at first—until she fell in love with him.

  Meeting Jariah apparently didn’t keep Gardner from looking for other women to spend time with. On February 6, 2008, a paralegal in her fifties named Linda said he responded to her personal ad on Craigslist (she couldn’t remember if it was in the “casual encounters” section, which is frequently used for sexual hookups, or in the more general “women seeking men” section). Linda mentioned that she was over fifty in her ad, which read something like, I’m looking for a take-charge, kind of dominant guy in the bedroom.

  They exchanged e-mails and she sent him her photo, revealing she was five feet six inches tall, blond with blue eyes. Then they had a quick cell phone call during which he introduced himself only as “John,” and agreed to meet at a Starbucks in Mission Valley at 10:00 A.M.

  When he arrived, she heard him say under his breath, “It’s showtime,” which she thought was a little odd. Then this big, burly young man awkwardly rattled off his information: He was close to thirty, married with two kids, and lived in Escondido. When she asked if he’d ever played hockey, he said no, which was strange, considering that he’d played as a teenager.

  Overall, Linda found him very pleasant, gentlemanly and nonthreatening, but they didn’t have much in common. She was also looking for someone her own age who was single, so she told him she thought he was a good-looking guy, but just too young for her. He seemed to accept this, and walked her out to her car, which was parked right in front, then he gave her a bear hug. She noticed a strange smell emanating from him, not a bad body odor, just a weird smell that she couldn’t really identify. Like a musty, old gourd.

  When she saw his photo on the TV news two years later, she realized that it was the same man. “It just kind of freaked me out,” she said. “Boy, did I ever learn a lesson here.”

  She never would have guessed from talking to this seemingly gentle guy that he would ever hurt anyone.

  To Jariah’s friend Tricia, Gardner was a nice guy who helped with chores around the apartment and was like “a big teddy bear,” not at all mean or aggressive. She never saw Jariah and Gardner get violent with each other, but she did tell investigators later that they argued occasionally because Gardner thought Jariah was too detached and didn’t give him enough attention because of her drug use, which he didn’t like. Later in the relationship, Jariah confided in Tricia that she didn’t want to have sex as often as Gardner did, and even then, she often had sex just to appease him. But as far as Tricia knew, he never forced Jariah.

  Gardner really enjoyed hanging out with Jariah’s little boy, Alan, who called Gardner “Buddy,” because the boy’s father had requested that he not be allowed to call any of Jariah’s boyfriends “Dad.” But Gardner liked to play dad and take Alan to the park, and just as he was called “Li’l John” as a child, he called Alan “Li’l Buddy.” When his boys came to visit, he let the three of them play together.

  You had your mom’s eyes and smile, but also my temper, he wrote his boys in 2010, explaining that even at two years old they were jealous of Alan, and ganged up on him. They also called Jariah’s car a “race car” for some reason.

  Gardner took his boys to the lake and to his mother’s house. He wrestled and played Hot Wheels with them. He also took them bowling, holding each child as the boys took turns throwing the bowling ball.

  “He was so good with kids,” Jariah said in 2010. “Till the end, how he treated me in front of my son.”

  Gardner had set up a Myspace account on December 22, 2007, even though the parole conditions prohibited him from using the Internet to communicate with others. (The California Sex Offender Management Board (CASOMB) later deemed that condition questionable because it was overly broad and had no direct relation to his crime. The board said the condition probably would have been struck down in court.)

  Myspace later confirmed that Gardner had used a false name, birthday and hometown to register his profile, using sign-on names “Jason Stud” and “Energizer Bunny,” and listing his favorite TV shows as CSI and Bones, and his hometown as Playboy Mansion.

  Gardner had only two friends on Myspace, one of whom was Jariah, who posted a photo of herself sitting in front of Gardner, with his arms around her, on her Facebook page.

  In May 2008, he posted this message: I’m poor, homeless and living in my truck. At some point, he also posted this: Love is just one big ugly compromise of two people pretending not to know what the other is doing.

  His last log-in was February 24, 2010, the day before he killed Chelsea.

  “Myspace has a zero-tolerance policy against registered sex offenders and uses cutting-edge technology to identify and delete such profiles from our site,” Hemanshu Nigam, a spokesman for the social-networking site, told the Associated Press.

  In this case, however, that technology didn’t work very well. Myspace didn’t remove his profile from the site until a month or two after his arrest.

  Following Megan’s Law, Gardner reregistered as a sex offender in Vista in April 2008, then came back to Escondido a month later. He registered as a transient on May 2, which kicked off a three-month period of homelessness when he lived out of his truck and worked as an electrician for Can-Do Electric.

  Gardner couldn’t live with his mother, because her condo was too close to a school, so all she could do was buy him a battery recharger for his car so he could keep his GPS ankle bracelet activated. During this time, he told Jenni, he was crashing on friends’ couches and hiding his truck in fear that it was going to get repossessed. That period ended when he moved into the Rock Springs apartment complex in Escondido with his cousin TJ on August 15.

  Once Gardner was released from parole on September 26, 2008, he was no longer required to wear the GPS bracelet.

  Most of the contact the EPD had with Gardner while he was registered in their jurisdiction was for traffic stops and routine checks on sex offenders, although he got their attention briefly with one drug arrest on June 25, 2008, at 11:36 P.M.

  That night, EPD officer Jay Nor
ris found Gardner sleeping in a silver Hyundai Elantra, parked behind an industrial building on North Rock Springs Road. Norris woke him up and asked why he was sleeping in his car. Gardner replied that he was homeless. Once Norris learned that Gardner was on parole, he told him to step out of the car, snapped handcuffs on him and searched his pockets and his car. In the center console, he found a Ziploc bag of pot and a glass pipe.

  “What is the green leafy substance that I found in your vehicle?” Norris asked.

  “Marijuana,” Gardner replied.

  “Whose marijuana is it?”

  “A friend who I would like not to name.”

  “Did you know it was in the car?”

  “Nope. I knew it was there at one point, but I thought they took it with them.”

  “Did you smoke any marijuana today?”

  “Yep.”

  “How much?”

  “Two hits.”

  “Did you know that possession and use of marijuana is illegal?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you buy the marijuana?”

  “Nope.”

  Norris cited him for possession of seventeen grams (less than an ounce) of marijuana, placed him on a parole hold, took him to the Vista jail and contacted his parole agent. The officer saw that the car was registered to Gardner’s most recent stepfather, Kevin.

  Gardner’s parole officer was notified, but decided not to “violate” Gardner for this arrest—which constitutes a parole violation in and of itself—and send him back to prison. Although possessing marijuana violated Gardner’s parole conditions, the agent likely had Gardner released because the prisons were overcrowded and this was a relatively minor misdemeanor that had no relation to his original sex crime.