Lost Girls

by Caitlin Rother

  “They are the most dedicated people we could have imagined,” he said, wiping away tears. “That’s all we wanted to say.”

  Although the media and Amber’s family were told nothing of John Gardner’s “tip,” Dave Brown was still not happy that the news conference had been held that afternoon. He instructed members of the Gardner task force not to release details concerning Gardner’s involvement, not to their coworkers or even spouses or girlfriends or boyfriends, “because it’s going to get in our way. We are on a team. We talk to each other, that’s it,” Brown said.

  Later that afternoon, a woman fastened two cloth flowers to one of Amber’s “missing” posters, which was hanging on a fence at the high school, along with a note enclosed in plastic. Dear Amber, she wrote. You’re in a much better place now. May you rest in peace.

  The weather forecast had called for heavy rains that weekend, and because Brown knew the forensic crew at Pala couldn’t work until the skies had cleared, he arranged for a uniformed deputy to stand guard around the clock and block the media’s entrance to the access road with yellow tape and a marked patrol vehicle.

  It did, in fact, rain on Saturday, and there was a virtual deluge on Sunday, so they weren’t able to return to the site until Monday. Madeleine Hinkes went back up then, with about seventy FBI agents and sheriff’s search-and-rescue volunteers, who scoured the ten-acre area as news helicopters hovered overhead. A pathologist and two investigators from the ME’s office were also there, conducting their own investigation to determine the manner and cause of death.

  “We do this in every case,” Sergeant Brown explained. “We want to know who did it. They want to know what happened, so you don’t just bring them in at the end.”

  “The goal was to recover all remains,” he added, noting that he was skeptical about Gardner’s claim that Amber’s was the only body he had buried up there. “I’m not going to believe him. He’s a f---ing serial killer.”

  By the end of the day, they’d gathered most of Amber’s remains—and an awful lot of bottle caps. Hinkes even saw herself on television.

  All of them felt a collective sense of relief that Amber had finally been found, and a collective sadness that they hadn’t found her alive. That night, a candlelight vigil was held for Amber Dubois at Escondido High School.

  Shock and even more anger swept the county as speculation heightened that Gardner had killed both girls. That anger soon spread as the story went viral, and talking heads debated this case on national TV. The question many people were asking was whether Megan’s Law was working effectively, or if sexual offenders, like Gardner, could simply drive through its loopholes on the interstate—and under society’s radar—to stay with relatives or girlfriends and do their ghastly deeds.

  With 35 million residents, California has the nation’s largest number of registered sex offenders. All states now had some form of the federal Megan’s Law, a bill adopted in 1996 that was named after seven-year-old Megan Kanka, a New Jersey girl who was raped and killed by a child molester who had moved across the street, without her family’s knowledge of his criminal history.

  Megan’s Law requires sexual offenders to register their home addresses a minimum of once a year, within five days of their birthday. If deemed “sexually violent predators,” they must register every ninety days. All offenders are required to register within five days of changing residences or becoming homeless. If they become transient, they are required to update their registration information within five days with a local law enforcement agency, which forwards that data to the state DOJ—then every thirty days after that. DOJ updates the registered sex offender database and public Web site, the Sex Offender Tracking Program, on a daily basis. If a registered sex offender violates the update requirements, the site will say so.

  In 2006, California voters also passed Proposition 83, known as Jessica’s Law, which prevents sex offender parolees from living within two thousand feet of schools or parks.

  Laura Ahearn, executive director of Parents for Megan’s Law and The Crime Victim Center, said John Gardner’s habit of roaming from county to county, and house to house, is quite common among sex offenders. To make the law more effective, she said, this predator population needs to be more intensively supervised.

  “Bottom line is, Megan’s Law does work, but the community has to be an active participant by reporting sex offenders that they may believe are in violation of local registration and other types of employment laws,” said Ahearn, whose agency staffs a nationwide tip line (1-888-ASK-PFML). “Sex offenders are really good at what they do. They will take any step to access potential victims.”

  “We’re all responsible for reporting anything that’s illegal or not supposed to be happening,” said Gardner’s uncle, Mike Osborn. “That’s the only way society is going to work.”

  Detectives interviewed Mike Osborn and other members of Gardner’s family, including his grandmother Linda Osborn. A schoolteacher for thirty years, Mike said he thought his nephew had been a problem ever since he was a child, and that his sister Cathy was “an enabler.”

  Mike offered this story as an example: Li’l John was about six when he was playing one day with Mike’s two boys. One was the same age, the other a year younger. As John tried to build a tower out of wooden blocks, his older cousin handed the younger cousin a block, which he would then throw at John’s castle. Each time, John got increasingly upset and yelled at the younger boy, but kept trying to rebuild. Finally, after the third time, John’s anger escalated to tornado-like force. John jumped up, ran to the couch, where the younger boy was sitting, grabbed his neck and began choking him. Mike had to run over and pull John off his son, but John was strong, so strong that Mike had to use enough force to leave a thumbprint on John’s arm. After that incident, Mike said, Cathy called authorities on him. He admitted that the relationship between him and Cathy had always been strained, and that he only saw John Gardner at family or holiday gatherings.

  Mike recalled a second incident when he was substitute teaching at John’s elementary school. He was in the principal’s office when he heard that two teachers were bringing in a student who had attacked a classmate and stabbed a teacher with a pencil. Mike could see the student kicking and screaming all the way to the office. As the child got closer, Mike recognized his nephew John, who also proceeded to bite the principal.

  Mike said he came to John’s high-school graduation party, where the eighteen-year-old bragged how big he’d gotten. Mike warned John not to “try anything funny,” because he still outweighed the teenager, to which, Gardner responded, “I can take you! I can take you!” He ran over to Mike, grabbed him around the legs and lifted him off the ground until he finally complied with Mike’s demands to put him down. Mike was surprised by Gardner’s strength.

  During his KFI-AM interview, Mike said Gardner could be fun to be around, but he had a very bad temper. “The number one thing that would set him off would be the relationship he had with his mother.”

  Asked to describe Cathy, Mike said, “It’s difficult. I believe that she’s gone through years of denial and chose not to believe some of these things... . It’s sad because it’s really hurt her now, and her life is ruined, almost to the same degree that his is.

  “He seemed to have semi-normal relationships,” Mike said. “You’d meet him. He’d be the life of the party, the silly goofball ... as long as he was in a good mood. If he was upset, you’d want to stay away from him.”

  After learning Cathy’s side of the story in 2011, Detective Mark Palmer said he believed she’d dug into denial as a way of coping with what her son had done, because she didn’t “want to shoulder any of the blame.”

  “You can’t tell me there wasn’t a point” that she didn’t know, Palmer said—what with the helicopters flying and the bullhorns echoing throughout her neighborhood. “I will not accept the fact that she says she never suspected that it could have been him.”

  From now until the end of time, h
e said, she will have to answer this question for herself: “Could I have prevented the murder of those two kids?”

  All that aside, he said, “I don’t blame her for wanting or feeling the need to separate herself from two of the most horrendous and tragic murder cases in San Diego County history. Her name will always come up in [relation] to that.”

  As the media looked for a law enforcement source to officially connect the two cases, the EPD threw reporters a one-sentence update on March 8: “The Amber Dubois crime scene is still being processed, and John Albert Gardner III remains a focus of the investigation.” Other than that, no one was talking because of Dumanis’s e-mail. Meanwhile, the Gardner task force continued to work behind the scenes, processing his cars and preparing warrants for additional searches as they tried to find that precious link between John Gardner and Amber Dubois.

  The chilling effect on the media went into deep freeze on March 9, when Judge Danielsen granted the defense’s request for a gag order that was so vague and expansive that it gave anyone even tangentially related to the case a convenient excuse to stop talking about it.

  The order may have prevented Moe Dubois from discussing Gardner’s potential guilt in Amber’s death, but his presence in the courtroom that day only underscored the speculation raging across the nation—that the unemployed electrician had murdered Amber as well.

  That same day, investigators served the next round of search warrants, looking for digging tools and clothing that matched witnesses’ descriptions of what Gardner had been wearing in the RB park on February 25.

  At Linda Osborn’s gray two-story stucco house in Lake Elsinore, they found five pairs of Gardner’s blue jeans, a pair of men’s size-12 Reebok shoes, a pair of size-11½ New Balance shoes, a pair of size-12 Montrail boots and several T-shirts with the logo HARD ROCK CAFÉ BAGHDAD, GET BOMBED FOR FREE. Outside in her shed, they collected a cache of digging tools: ten shovels, a yellow plastic carrier with assorted hand-digging tools and a saw, two pickaxes, along with another shovel and pickax in front of the house. They took three more shovels from Mike Osborn’s house in Murietta.

  In addition, they searched Gardner’s unit #F120 at American Mini Storage on West Mission Road in Escondido, where they found still more shovels and the contents of the Rock Springs apartment that Gardner had shared with Jariah.

  But even after going through all that stuff, detectives still couldn’t find a single fiber or piece of evidence that tied Gardner to Amber’s murder.

  The day after Chelsea’s body was found, a Facebook page titled “Chelsea’s Light” was created, on which Brent and Kelly King posted this message: Our Chelsea set out to change the world and throughout our lifetime we will work to ensure that through us, Chelsea will create the enormous change she was determined to see. With your help, Chelsea’s light will never dim.

  By mid-March, the nonprofit Chelsea’s Light Foundation was formed by Chelsea’s parents and her uncle Chuck McCully, billed as the official and only organization the Kings would support. Membership on the “Chelsea’s Light” Facebook page exploded as friends and strangers came together to talk about her painful loss and the positive changes they hoped to bring in her memory. The page became a virtual bulletin board to announce events such as the Kings’ appearance on Today, their efforts to pass legislation to protect children from sexual predators, as well as other foundation-related developments.

  On March 13, about six thousand people attended Chelsea’s public memorial at the Poway High School stadium, an event deemed to be of such local interest that it was televised on TV and by live stream on the Internet. Attendees were each given sunflowers with blue ribbons tied to their stems, which they held up while Chelsea’s attributes and accomplishments were touted. Chelsea’s ex-boyfriend, with whom she had remained friends, described her as an avid reader who polished off the nine-hundred-page Anna Karenina just for the intellectual stimulation, but she was also “an athlete, a philosopher, a volunteer, a bando and a friend rolled into one.” Recalling that they’d eaten lunch together on the quad that last Thursday, he said he would remember her for the confidence she exuded, her challenged sense of direction, the strange documentaries she used to watch and the adventures they took together.

  The crowd bonded and cried as the speakers called for tougher laws to stop such tragedies from occurring in the future. They also remembered Amber Dubois during a moment of silence.

  “I want to say I’m okay, but I’m not okay because the best thing in my life has been taken away from me,” Chelsea’s brother, Tyler, said.

  After joining in with their expressions of hope and positive change, the Kings closed the nearly two-hour service by releasing a flock of white birds.

  Meanwhile, at the shrine outside the school, students continued to post notes to Chelsea:

  I’ll never forget how much you have shaped the person I am today.

  I’m glad my last moments with you were laughing and sharing stories. You brought tears to many but I know it’s because you had such a big impact on many people and we really care about you.

  You wanted to change the world and you did, you brought our whole community together.

  The public was still so fired up about Chelsea’s murder that 3,500 people came out for a three-mile, or five-kilometer, run around Lake Hodges the following Saturday, a symbolic event to further empower her memory by completing the run she’d started that fateful day. Participants of “Finish Chelsea’s Run” were asked to wear orange or blue. Organizers collected donations for the foundation and its Sunflower Academic Scholarship program. The Kings said they hoped to hold the race annually in several other cities across the nation because Chelsea believed in “going big or going home.”

  The next race, held a year later in Balboa Park, brought out more than five thousand runners. Most had never met the girl for whom the race was named.

  On Saturday, March 27, a smaller but still sizable gathering of about one thousand people attended Amber’s public memorial service at her high-school football stadium, just a few hundred feet from where she was believed to have been snatched.

  Marc Klaas, the activist for missing children, called for tougher laws to punish the predator who had taken Amber, and all others who harmed children. He said he felt sad to be attending yet “another one of these memorials for one of these beautiful children who were taken before their time... . We keep thinking we’ve made a difference, but it keeps continuing.”

  Moe Dubois, who said he couldn’t stop crying while trying to write his remarks, announced he was just going to wing it: “Amber didn’t need to die for nothing,” he said. “I want us to make a change. It’s a big thing that happened. It’s an unfortunate thing that happened. But we have to learn from it.”

  After recounting all the quirky traits that people would remember most about Amber, her parents and those of three other missing California girls who had turned up dead—Chelsea King, Polly Klaas and Danielle van Dam—ended the service by releasing white birds in memory of the lost girls.

  Chapter 30

  While the public was collectively mourning his victims, John Gardner was having a meltdown in the jail’s medical observation unit. On the afternoon of March 14, Gardner was crying at his cell door, saying he wanted to hurt himself.

  “Please handcuff me,” Gardner told the deputy who was notified by a nurse about his suicide threat.

  “What’s wrong?” the deputy asked.

  “I don’t like this medicine. I don’t like how it makes me feel.”

  When Gardner asked to be handcuffed, the deputy opened the food flap in the cell door, told Gardner to turn around and place his hands into the flap so the deputy could cuff him safely. Then he and a second deputy escorted Gardner to a third-floor safety cell, asking him on the way how he was planning to injure himself.

  “I know how to hurt myself,” Gardner said.

  Once he was placed in a padded cell, Gardner, still crying, complied with orders to remove his clothing and
put on a “safety cell garment,” specifically designed to prevent inmates from hanging themselves.

  Gardner’s admission about the location of Amber’s remains stayed a tightly kept secret for six weeks, while the prosecution team scrambled to find evidence independent of his “free trip” to Pala that they could use against him. Meanwhile, the public continued to wonder about the identity of the undisclosed tipster who had revealed her body’s whereabouts.

  Deputy Public Defenders Michael Popkins and Mel Epley made an offer for a plea deal to prosecutor Kristen Spieler on April 5 by submitting Gardner’s “change of plea” agreement form. Gardner had agreed to plead guilty to both murders and Candice Moncayo’s assault for a guaranteed sentence of life without the possibility of parole—the maximum punishment allowed by law other than death. The defense attorneys also submitted Gardner’s signed statement admitting how he’d killed Chelsea and Amber and assaulted Candice:

  I attacked Chelsea King while she was running. I dragged her to a remote area where I raped and strangled her. I then buried her in a shallow grave... . This murder took place within an hour of initial contact with Chelsea King... . I attacked Candice Moncayo while she was running and unlawfully assaulted her with the intent to rape her... . I took Amber Dubois to a remote area of Pala where I raped and stabbed her. I then buried her in a shallow grave. This murder took place within an hour and a half of my initial contact with Amber Dubois.

  But as days and weeks passed, Popkins and Epley heard nothing as investigators continued to interview potential witnesses and look for incriminating physical evidence.