Lost Girls (15 page)

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Authors: Caitlin Rother

BOOK: Lost Girls
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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 Norris 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.
However, after receiving no consequences for his violation, Gardner continued to smoke pot, and received a second misdemeanor citation for marijuana possession on November 19, 2008, at 7:50
P.M.
in Buccaneer Park in Oceanside. But he wasn't “violated” that time either.
Cathy was not pleased about this. “I was pissed that they didn't do anything,” she recalled, because it made Gardner think he could get away with breaking the law.
 
 
But that was just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. According to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR), Gardner was found to have potentially violated his parole conditions seven times between September 2005 and September 2008. The most serious of those—his living near the day care center—was referred to the Board of Parole Hearings, the CDCR said, but he was continued on parole after he moved and complied with his terms. The other incidents involved four low-battery alerts from his GPS unit, one citation for marijuana possession and one missed meeting at a parole office.
None of those six were referred to the board for revocation, presumably due to their minor nature,
the CDCR said in a written summary of his parole violations.
But there were two telling omissions from the CDCR summary that were not lost on the general public as missed opportunities to return John Gardner to prison: Gardner not only was caught possessing marijuana
twice,
placed on a parole hold and let go, but he also made two trips to the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility parking lot on the morning of July 12, 2008. These trips—each of which constituted a felony, and therefore a parole violation—were overlooked by CDCR, only to be revealed in an audit of his GPS reports by the state Office of the Inspector General (OIG) after his arrest in 2010.
Even though the GPS tracks clearly place Gardner on the prison grounds, the department was not aware of the violation since it did not require its parole agents to review GPS data for passive GPS parolees,
the OIG audit stated.
The department therefore, as a result of a flawed practice, failed to adequately monitor Gardner, arrest him, and seek prosecution against him for this crime.
Recently, Gardner proved his indifference to the law when he said he didn't see the big deal about his presence on prison grounds. He said he was only dropping off a carless friend at the visiting center, and told her to call him when she was done so he could pick her up, which he did. “The officer who stopped me at the gate didn't care either,” he said.
Gardner also had his share of infractions. He received: a ticket for running a red light on December 12, 2006; two speeding tickets, heading northbound on Interstate 15 at 10:19
A.M.
on January 11, 2007, and heading eastbound on State Route 52 at 6:50
A.M.
on June 18, 2008; a citation for driving without proper insurance for his gold Pontiac, traveling north on Interstate 15 on June 11, 2009; and a citation for having expired registration and no proof of insurance while driving Jariah's black 2002 Nissan Sentra on January 30, 2010, in Riverside County.
Chapter 16
In 2007, John Gardner Sr. and his wife Deanna reluctantly moved from Texas to Denison, Iowa, because their daughter Mona lived there. John Sr. had been diagnosed with depression when he was still with Cathy, and he had been taking antidepressants ever since. As his health worsened, he added more medications than Deanna could list, including several daily insulin shots for diabetes. He complained of constant pain in his feet, legs and back, and his weight increased with each new ailment. When he and Deanna first met, he'd weighed 130 pounds. He'd gained nearly fifty pounds by the time they remarried in 1990, and he now weighed 240 pounds.
Although he and Deanna had quit smoking eleven years earlier, he went on to develop chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), which made it progressively difficult to breathe. Even so, he stubbornly started smoking cigarettes again in October 2008. He would have smoked pot too, if he could get it, but since they'd moved to Iowa, he hadn't figured out how to buy it there.
The smoking caused a new rash of fighting between him and Deanna, and she'd recently issued an empty threat that she was going to leave him. His renewed habit was going to cost them ninety dollars for every carton of cigarettes, which was absurd because they were so poor. Smoking also caused coughing jags that were so bad he couldn't catch his breath and his eyes looked like they were going to pop out. She didn't want to buy him cigarettes and “put the nails in his coffin,” but knowing he was going to smoke, anyway, she tried to find a way to ration him. Searching online, she found a vendor in the United Kingdom that sold cartons for seventeen dollars.
He'd only smoked one pack from the new carton when Deanna came home from church on November 2 and found him facedown on the bathroom floor. His skin was blue, but still warm. She shook him to see if he was still alive.
“John? John, are you okay?”
But he was gone.
“I really think he OD'd on his insulin,” she said. “I think John wanted to die. He was in a lot of pain all the time.”
John Albert Gardner Sr. was sixty-four.
 
 
The death struck John Gardner Jr. hard. It had been only six weeks since he'd gotten off parole, which meant he hadn't had a chance to get on a plane and try to strengthen their relationship.
Finally able to leave the state, Gardner flew to Iowa the next day with his mother and sister Shannon, who decided to stay in a hotel. He insisted on sleeping in his father's bed, where he lay like Christ on the cross, surrounded by John Sr.'s things. As Gardner mourned his inability to make things right with his father, he also wallowed in anger that John Sr. had never made the effort to meet his two young grandsons.
Gardner's sister Melissa was excited to see him after so many years. She took the opportunity to share stories of how John Sr. had ignored her, hadn't cared about her and did things to embarrass her. She was hoping to make her brother feel better.
“It was a common ground that we had, something to talk about,” Melissa recalled later.
When John Sr. got back together with Deanna, Gardner said, he'd figured that Mona and Melissa had grown closer to their dad than he had, but Melissa assured him that was not the case. John Sr. had always been very selfish and self-centered, with everything revolving around him and his needs, she said. Deanna had tried to convince Melissa that he loved her, and at times, Melissa felt he was proud of her because he had hung up a calendar featuring her modeling a camouflage bathing suit, with an AK-47 over her shoulder, as well as a couple of calendars from her days as a Raiders cheerleader.
But then they had a debacle at her wedding in 2002, when John Sr. changed out of his tuxedo after the ceremony and insisted on wearing sweatpants and a Tweety Bird T-shirt to the reception, even though everyone else was still wearing formal clothes. Deanna told him he couldn't do the father-daughter dance dressed like that, so he left.
“What an asshole,” Gardner told Melissa.
After the wedding, Melissa said, John Sr. had written her, saying,
You can't teach an old dog new tricks. I am who I am.
Melissa decided she didn't want her father to meet her kids if he was going to treat them like he'd treated her, and make them feel as unwanted as she had.
“He didn't meet my kids either. He didn't care to,” she told Gardner. Even if John Sr. had lived longer, she said, he still wouldn't have met Gardner's boys unless he'd brought them to Iowa.
 
 
John Sr. had been a loner, and wouldn't go to church with Deanna or Mona, who was married to a preacher, which meant that most of the people at his funeral on November 5 were members of Mona's church. Her boss played guitar while she, John Jr., Shannon and Melissa sang songs they'd practiced, including “Amazing Grace.” Gardner mostly stared down at the ground.
The family let Gardner go first to stand over his father's body, which was laid on a slab for cremation that night, and be the first to say good-bye. He held his father's hand, then took out a photo of his sons and tucked it into John Sr.'s pocket. When Gardner broke down sobbing, the family let him be, until he was cried out.
“I never got a chance to get close to him like I wanted to,” he said recently. “He was still my dad. I always wanted a relationship. It just never happened.”
Gardner was chain-smoking like crazy that day, which irritated Cathy. “This is what your dad died from,” she said. “Stop smoking!”
“Leave me alone,” he snapped.
Melissa could see his emotions flaring. To her, he and Cathy almost seemed like a husband and wife fighting. “I could see my brother had a temper like my dad,” she said.
 
 
Looking back, Deanna said John Sr. wasn't all that bad. Like his son, he tried to make people laugh. He instructed people to sing “la, la, la” when they walked into a room so he didn't get spooked. And when he'd get out of the shower, he'd always say something like, “Oh, my lucky charms” in an Irish accent, like in the kids' cereal commercial.
“Most people who met him thought he was such a nice guy, just like Little John,” Deanna said.
Not long after John Sr. was cremated, Deanna flew to California, where Shannon had arranged for the family to take his ashes out on a boat and toss them into the ocean with a wreath of flowers. Mona's husband wouldn't let her go, saying they couldn't afford the trip, and Sarina couldn't come either, so John Jr., Shannon and her son, Cathy and Melissa, who lived in the San Fernando Valley, went out on the boat.
It was a bittersweet morning, right before Thanksgiving. They got up really early and piled into the boat—sad about the occasion, but pleased that it had brought them back together as a family once again. “We can't lose touch. We're family,” they said to each other. “We all have to stay together.”
 
 
Gardner's family saw a further decline in his emotional state when he was laid off in December 2008, his car was repossessed in February 2009, and his plans to move in with Jariah got delayed.
Gardner was growing to love Jariah. While he told some people that he was never
in love
with Jariah, as he'd been with Donna, he also characterized the relationship differently, depending on whom he was talking to.
Cathy got the impression that when Jariah postponed the move-in date, he felt rejected all over again. He continued to live in the Rock Springs apartment with his cousin TJ until Jariah was ready. But when he talked to Jenni about Jariah, he downplayed his feelings.
“He liked her. He liked spending time with her little boy, and then it was another ‘I have to move thing,' because of his parole, and so they moved in together,” Jenni said. “They were trying to be cost-effective and get roommates... . I think he was looking for another family to be around.” As their relationship progressed, “he said he wanted to marry Jariah so he wouldn't be alone.”
When Jenni talked to Gardner on Valentine's Day in 2009, she could tell something was off. His normally exuberant voice had been replaced by a low monotone. At the time she thought he was depressed because he'd lost Donna and the boys, and being with Jariah wasn't making him happy.
“He seemed distant,” Jenni said. But after they talked for a bit, and she told him she hadn't gotten any flowers, gifts or even a “Happy Valentine's Day” wish that year, she was able to cheer him up.
His roommate, TJ, told the family that he never saw any warning signs in Gardner during this time, but Cathy noticed that her son wasn't well. His emotions were all over the place and he was stressed-out, angry and irritable. She had no idea, however, that he'd been cruising the streets of Escondido, hunting for prey on the morning of February 13.
When Cathy read about Amber's disappearance, she felt connected to the girl for some reason, even though they'd never met. “She looked familiar to me, someone I'd known.”
More than a year later, Gardner confessed to Jenni that he'd been trying to tell her about Amber, but couldn't because he was ashamed. Jenni always had such a way of cajoling him into a better mood, she said, and “he figured he wouldn't do any other bad things.”
Gardner said he was constantly reminded of what he'd done and where he'd been. While he was living in the Rock Springs complex, a neighbor found out he was a “290” registrant after finding him listed on the Internet. (Under Megan's Law, Section 290 of the California Penal Code requires sex offenders to register their residential address, which is kept in an online database that is accessible to the public.) The woman posted flyers about him, which brought children to his door every day, chanting until they got it out of their heads: “Monster's house, monster's house, monster's house.” And none of them would play with his boys or with Jariah's son.
 
 
Until the summer of 2009, Gardner said, he'd smoked pot, his drug of choice, while Jariah had smoked methamphetamine, her drug of choice. But one day, he decided to see what the meth hype was all about.
“Give it here,” he told her. “I want to try it.”
He wasn't handling things well at the time, and even he had to admit that the meth only made things worse. “It made me feel really weird,” he recalled. “I could sit there for hours and stare at nothing. I was really high. My brain was moving really fast, thinking about a million things.” And yet, he said, unlike other users who could focus on one task for twelve hours while high, he felt completely unmotivated to do anything but chain-smoke and drink beer. “I wouldn't even have a buzz because of the speed,” he said.
For about three months, he used meth once a month, then it was twice a month, and then he was smoking an eight-ball over the course of three straight days every month.
“When I was using speed,
yeaaaaah,
that wasn't good,” he said.
Later in the year, Alan went into foster care because of his mother's drug problems. Jenni said she never met Jariah, but when she called and Jariah answered the phone, Jariah told Jenni how “she'd get him [her son] back any day.”
Gardner told Jenni there were some problems in the relationship, and “he wanted it to end because of drug use on her end... . There wasn't a whole lot of respect in the relationship,” she said.
These problems escalated after he joined Jariah in the drug use. Robert Trueblood*, the boyfriend of Jariah's friend, Tricia, described Gardner as “the nicest guy in the world when he was sober,” but he was a completely different person when he drank or did drugs. Trueblood, another registered sex offender, said Gardner got intense and rowdy while drinking, and he became frazzled while doing drugs, but he never saw Gardner get violent with anyone.
On September 17, Trueblood had just been released from prison and had spent the night at Gardner and Jariah's apartment after Gardner had been doing drugs, with no sleep, for the past three days. Trueblood was woken around three o'clock by the couple arguing, and they were still going at it two hours later.
Gardner was flipping out and asking Baker who had raped her
, according to an investigative report from an interview with Trueblood in March 2010.
Gardner took Baker to the police to file a report
. Trueblood said he could not understand Gardner's behavior, because he was under the impression that Gardner and Baker had an “open relationship” and had sex with other people.
 
 
Early in the relationship, Jariah said, Gardner was “so patient and kind and understanding and loving. He would always want to do family-type stuff with my son,” such as going grocery shopping or to the park, or kicking a ball around. “It's what he always wanted, a family.”
He showed her a list of his negative characteristics that Donna had complained about, such as a tendency to be controlling, but Jariah didn't think any of them applied to him. “Then toward the end of the relationship,” she recalled, “I looked at it again, and all of it applied.”

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