“I wasn’t too hopeful about finding other evidence because it had been so long,” Bonnie Dumanis said. “I think he felt safe in that we wouldn’t be able to prove it. However, we tried really hard.”
For Spieler, the most potentially promising piece of evidence was Jariah’s gray Ford Focus, which he was driving when he picked up Amber. The crime lab worked day and night trying to identify a trace of Amber in the car, but they found nothing—not even inconclusive evidence.
Two San Diego Gas & Electric workers, who had been checking power lines in Pala a year earlier, came forward to EPD on March 26 to report that after seeing news stories about John Gardner and Amber Dubois, they remembered spotting a man with a young woman, maybe eighteen to twenty years old, standing next to a gray Ford Focus on an access road one morning around eight o’clock, then get into the car and drive away. The workers went back to check their logs from a year earlier and confirmed the date was February 13, 2009, the day Amber disappeared.
Although the date, time and car matched up—this was about fifty minutes after Amber was reported last seen in front of the school, and gibed with drive time to that area—their memories weren’t clear enough to identify Gardner, only to say that the couple they’d seen matched descriptions of Gardner and Amber. When they were shown her photo, they couldn’t be sure she was the same girl.
At first, Gardner’s close friends and family didn’t think he could have killed anyone. Even his girlfriend Jariah was saying that the underwear found near the trail could have been his. They all believed whatever they needed to tell themselves that it wasn’t his DNA on that girl’s panties. And he didn’t tell them anything different.
“We didn’t want it to be true,” said his sister Sarina.
Bombarded with media requests, Cathy Osborn took a leave from her job in the behavioral health unit at Scripps Mercy Hospital in Hillcrest, where she was eventually forced out of her staff position and into a temporary contract job because of all the publicity. Some of her coworkers blamed her for what had happened to these girls, and she was getting threats. Ultimately she had to find a new job in a new city.
In addition to Cathy’s involvement in legislative activities related to her job as a psychiatric nurse, she also participated in local events sponsored by the National Alliance on Mental Illness, including a fund-raising walk in San Diego to protest state mental-health-care funding cuts. Being so knowledgeable about these issues, Cathy believed she’d done everything possible to keep her son healthy and safe. But in the public arena, she’d been found guilty.
After the detectives found Amber’s remains, Sarina found it difficult to maintain the position that her brother was innocent. “I couldn’t believe it, but I knew it was going to be true,” she said in 2011. “I thought that he was going to be a lost hope after he went to prison for six years, so I thought anything could be possible... . Whatever person he was is gone. Completely. And he’s even said that... . He’s even said, ‘I’ll never be your baby bro again. I’m not that person and I’ll never be.’”
Before she knew that he’d killed either girl, Sarina had nightmares that he told her he’d murdered someone. She also had persistent dreams about Amber being stabbed in the stomach and chest, and also being stabbed herself while she looked into the eyes of her assailant, who morphed into a family member. Every night, Sarina had these nightmares, talking and thrashing in her sleep, and waking up scared. Although Cathy helped her understand the dreams weren’t true, she continued to have them, prompting Sarina to write to her brother in jail.
Bro, if you know anything about that girl, you need to tell, she wrote. The next day, she later learned, was the day Gardner told his attorneys where he’d buried Amber’s body.
“She never even got to see her lamb,” Sarina said, crying. “I can relate to her.”
In addition to the dreams, Sarina sensed an odor, like a wet dog, that followed her around, perhaps a spirit that could have even been a lamb’s. It freaked her out so much that she had to tell her sister Shannon, who tried to find a rational reason for it. Sarina ultimately had to take a leave of absence from work. With no therapist available where she lived, she wrote in her journal and tried to reflect on happier times when Li’l John was first born.
Still in shock, Gardner’s immediate family huddled for group grief and support because none of them had seen this coming.
“Hell no,” his sister Shannon said. “I had to see the DNA to believe it.”
A couple of weeks after Amber’s remains were discovered, anthropologist Madeleine Hinkes got a call from a private investigator in Los Angeles. He said he was working for the Dubois family. They were frustrated, he said, that they couldn’t get any information about Amber’s death, how she died, if she’d suffered or even how much of her had been found.
“Can you look at some bones?” he asked.
After telling him that she’d already examined Amber’s bones but would see what she could do to help, she contacted the investigator and pathologist working the case and encouraged them to release some information to the family, noting that they were trying to hire their own experts.
“You’ve got to tell the family something,” she said.
After Bonnie Dumanis’s e-mail, the judge’s gag order, and Marsy’s Law, medical examiner’s officials were extremely hesitant to release details to anyone. In meeting after meeting, they talked about how to handle this delicate situation, worried that the media would get hold of information that could compromise the case.
Apparently looking for a way to put pressure on the authorities, Carrie McGonigle and her Los Angeles attorney, Robin Sax, appeared on Larry King Live on March 16, where Sax publicly questioned why authorities refused to disclose how they’d located Amber’s remains or whether Gardner was even a suspect in Amber’s murder.
Carrie said she, Moe and his girlfriend, Rebecca, had met earlier that day with the DA and a group of law enforcement officers to get a status update of the case, but all they got was an introduction to some new investigators.
“We would have expected by now, and would have hoped by now, that there would have been some definitive answer of whether or not John Gardner is responsible for the death of Amber,” Sax said.
“The authorities do not know?” King asked.
“They’re claiming that at this point that it’s part of the investigative process,” Sax said. “And while I totally appreciate and want—and so does the family—a perfectly solid investigation to maximize prosecution, there are rights that the victims have in terms of status of the case.”
Sax contended that this case was clearly being handled differently than Chelsea King’s had been, so she’d called activist Marc Klaas that day and asked, “Have you ever seen a situation, in your experience, where abducted family members have not known anything about the status of the case or the investigation whatsoever?”
“So you don’t know how they got a lead or anything?” King asked.
“No, nothing. They said in time, you’ll find out,” Carrie said.
A week or so later, Gretchen Geary, a supervising investigator from the medical examiner’s office, met with Amber’s parents and tried to answer their questions.
John Gardner was stewing too, angered by the delays, and mistakenly believing that the community would embrace him for leading authorities to the remains of Amber Dubois in order to give her family some closure. He passed the time writing letters, several of which were written on March 23.
In a letter to his young sons, which he wrote in two parts, he characterized his 2000 offense as a thing that he “really didn’t do.” He acknowledged that he might not be in their life, but didn’t explain why. That, he said, was for someone else to do:
I know there are questions but I can’t give the answers. I’m sorry. I hope I’m in your life when your [sic] reading this, but ask Grandma Cathy if I’m not. I love you. Sorry I ended up a bad dad.
He apologized for past wrongs in letters to ex-girlfr
iends Patricia and Donna, telling them both that he would love them until he died.
No matter what happens in the future the old me who I loved is gone so I am dead to myself, he wrote Patricia, saying he wished he could have a do-over for their last meeting.
In a letter to Donna that provided some insight into the feelings that had festered and turned into uncontrolled rage that led to violence, he wrote, Dearest one I missed the most, Yes, Donna, I am all those horrible names you called me.
Explaining how much pain the end of their relationship had caused him, he wrote: You broke it off by text and then wouldn’t let me see my kids. I was being good, clean and sober still at that time. You really hurt me and to be very honest with you, that’s when I lost it. On top of that, you couldn’t even send me an e-mail or letter one last time to say good bye. I hate you so much for the pain, but have never stopped loving you. For that, I hate myself because I want to hate you, so the pain of loosing [sic] you would go away, but it will never happen. At least now you won’t have to deal with me anymore.
Even if she decided to change the boys’ last name, he said, he urged her to let Cathy see her grandchildren: Take care of the only good I saw left in the world for me. They are everything.
The Sunday that Gardner was arrested, his sister Melissa and her kids had spent all day at Disneyland. They were driving home when Mona, his other sister, called Melissa around eleven o’clock at night.
“Are you watching the news?” Mona asked.
“No, we’re driving back from Disneyland. Why? What’s going on?”
“They’re saying that our brother, John, was arrested for murder and assault.”
“What are you talking about?”
Mona said she wanted to forewarn Melissa about the arrest, because she lived in L.A., and the media might start hounding her.
Melissa couldn’t believe it. After bonding with her brother at their father’s funeral, she’d been excited to be back in touch with him and had invited him to her son’s fourth birthday party on January 24, 2009, about fourteen months earlier. He’d brought his two boys, Jariah and her son to a “bounce house” in Santa Clarita, then back to her house for cake. Gardner had introduced Jariah as his girlfriend, but he didn’t hug or kiss her, and they didn’t really seem much like a couple. Melissa could tell that he was still hurt and angry about Donna; he clearly hadn’t gotten over her. But overall, he seemed fine.
“I would never have guessed at my party that he was going through something because he was laughing and smiling and playing with his kids,” she said.
Melissa had invited him back for a Super Bowl party on February 1, and when he didn’t show up, she called and left several messages, asking “Are you coming?” But he never responded.
As the talking heads on TV speculated that Gardner had killed both girls, Melissa was in bed for a week, throwing up. Last time she’d seen him, she’d invited him and his kids to stay for the whole weekend, to involve him in her new family.
This can’t be true. This can’t be true, she kept thinking. She couldn’t bring herself to talk to him again.
Jariah Baker wanted to understand how and why her boyfriend had done these terrible things, and why she never knew about them, so she went to see him at the county jail. It’s not clear how much he told her, but he must have shared some of his frustrations because she gave him a business card for the woman who had interviewed her, who she thought was an FBI agent.
Gardner called the woman in late March to complain that Amber’s family still hadn’t been told he’d led authorities to her body, and he accused his attorneys of being in on some kind of conspiracy. Only, he wasn’t calling the FBI. He’d reached Sonja Ramos, one of the DOJ agents attached to the sheriff’s homicide unit. She, in turn, passed Gardner on to her supervisor, Tyler Burtis.
Later that day, Gardner’s attorney, Michael Popkins, heard about the call from his boss, who had been notified in a chain of calls originating from the jail. Popkins headed over there to talk with Gardner and shut him up before he ruined everything.
“What are you doing?” Popkins asked. “You’re going to screw this whole thing up.”
Popkins repeated what he’d already told his impatient client, that all would be revealed in good time, but that time had not yet arrived.
“He wanted the world to know what a nice guy he was for doing the right thing,” Popkins said.
Gardner’s ex-girlfriend Jenni Tripp first learned of his capture on Facebook, where a Rim of the World High School graduate had written something about having gone to school “with this scumbag.”
Another graduate posted a similar comment after the two-hour Dateline premiere on the case aired in the fall of 2010: This episode scared the crap out of me. I went to high school with the psycho... . Makes me want to never let my kids out of my site [sic].
Even though Jenni was married, with three children and living out of state, reporters managed to track her down almost immediately.
“All I know is I was bombarded by phone calls, texts, Facebook, and it was all over CNN,” she said recently.
As she watched the story unfold on TV, her thought process went like this: I can’t believe that he was arrested. I can’t believe that they think he did this. I can’t believe that he actually did this. Oh crap, I’m getting another call from a reporter.
She let the phone calls go to voice mail as she screened them, choosing to speak to only one female TV reporter from San Diego.
Jenni spoke to her childhood friend Donna Hale right after the arrest, and every day for about two weeks after that. Jenni didn’t want to believe the accusations against Gardner were true, because she didn’t see how the John she knew could ever do something like this. But Donna, the mother of his children, seemed to accept it as the truth right off the bat.
“I don’t know how I’m going to tell my boys what their father is,” she told Jenni.
After those two weeks of conversations, Donna stopped returning Jenni’s calls and texts.
“I wanted to defend him,” Jenni said. “Every time he’d take a step forward, he’d get beaten back. I know it’s not an excuse.” But maybe these things wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t gone to prison in the first place, she said, or if the parole officer hadn’t made him move or quit his job in L.A. “Then I think he might not have snapped.”
Cathy Osborn told Jenni that she could contact Gardner at the county jail, which she did about a week after his arrest. She first reached out to him via e-mail, then they communicated by phone.
“I was trying to understand what was going on,” she said.
When he called her, using a prepaid phone card, she asked him about Chelsea’s murder.
“Did you really do it?” she asked.
“Yes, I did it,” he said.
“Well, why? You’re going to have to tell me more than that.”
But he couldn’t give her a good answer. “He said he was sorry that he hurt anybody, that he really hoped he’d get the death penalty, because he didn’t want to live with what he’d done.”
Gardner continued to call her two or three times a week, including on his birthday. Weeks later, he told her there was “something else that was going to come to light” on the news the next day, and he’d call her to discuss it after she’d watched it on TV.
“He said he wasn’t allowed to tell me,” she said.
Chapter 31
After five weeks of failed attempts to link John Gardner to the murder of Amber Dubois, District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis was ready to act on the plea deal. But before she did anything, she wanted to check with the Kings to make sure they were okay with settling for a guilty plea.
“I never make those decisions lightly,” she said, adding that she’d gathered all the information she felt she needed, weighed it and discussed the issue with others in her office, including her second in command, Jesse Rodriguez, who had been a judge for sixteen years. The DA’s office had had a 94 percent conviction rate sin
ce Dumanis was elected in 2002.
When she met with Chelsea’s parents, she informed them that they didn’t have the evidence to make a case against Gardner for Amber’s death, and that she was considering accepting his guilty plea to the two murders in exchange for a life sentence, because it would provide closure to the Dubois family.
“I would like your input into the decision,” she said, adding that if they didn’t feel comfortable with this option, her office would move forward with a death penalty trial on Chelsea’s death and the assault on Candice Moncayo. Dumanis didn’t always comply with what a family wanted her to do, but this case was different. This one called for a higher level of sensitivity.
Knowing the Kings were analytical and methodical, Dumanis presented them with the realities of California’s broken death penalty system. While sitting on death row waiting to die, more than fifty condemned prisoners had died of natural causes since 1980, and nearly twenty more by suicide. Only fourteen prisoners had been executed since 1978, when the death penalty was reinstated, partly because no executions took place until 1992, and then because of the moratorium in 2006, to which there was no end in sight. She explained the appeals process—how long it would drag out—and what this would mean to their family, to Tyler and to Amber’s family.
“You and I will never see this happen in our lifetime,” she told the Kings.
Brent and Kelly, who had originally wanted the death penalty for Gardner, said they needed some time to think about it. But they didn’t take long. Dumanis met with them again a couple of days later and they agreed. They knew the pain the Dubois family felt, and if this was the only way for them to get justice and a resolution to their daughter’s death, then so be it.
“I think the Kings’ decision was largely to spare the Dubois family,” Dumanis said. “They wanted them to have the same legal conclusion... . Amber deserves to have someone held responsible and accountable for that murder.”
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