Lost Girls (6 page)

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Authors: Caitlin Rother

BOOK: Lost Girls
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She was treated at the now-defunct Robert F. Kennedy Medical Center in Hawthorne and reported the incident to police, but the rapist was never caught. Afterward, she told her daughters about it in a vague way to explain why she was so upset.
“Something bad happened to Mommy, but I'm okay now. I'm here with you,” she said, adding that she was trying to deal with it, but it would take some time before she felt better.
Sarina recalled her mother trying to explain the situation. “Not the details, but we were aware that something happened,” Sarina recalled. “We didn't understand the whole concept. I just shut it out.”
The incident, which left Cathy scared to go out except for doctor's appointments, made her want to be closer to John Sr.
“I wanted his protection,” she said. “I wanted that sense of security.” At six feet and now a more stocky 180 pounds, “he was a big guy.” Plus, she said, “I liked him. He's a very nice, charismatic individual, interesting to be around, intelligent. Even though he didn't have a college education, he was a smart person.” Besides, she said, “I was the one he wanted to spend his life with.”
But he reacted quite oddly, saying he almost didn't believe she'd been raped because of her clinginess. He couldn't understand why she wasn't being more distant; he'd expected her to act just the opposite.
 
 
Once Cathy got past the trauma of the rape, she went back to school and took classes at West Los Angeles College, where she put her three-year-old son into day care.
One day when she went to pick him up, they told her that he had some emotional problems, that he was hyperactive and he should take medication to get along with the other kids. “He was too intrusive, a little bit too aggressive,” she recalled them saying—and worse, he'd bitten a little girl so they'd had to suspend him.
When she and Li'l John got home, she asked what had happened that day, and he started what would become a pattern in his life—blaming someone else for his angry, inappropriate reaction. Crying, he said, “Mommy, the girl pushed me, and I was mad, so I bit her.”
“You can't bite,” Cathy responded. Wanting to make sure he understood that his behavior was wrong, she didn't say, “Oh, you're bad.” Rather, she told him he wouldn't get to go to school, which he loved, because he enjoyed interacting with the other kids.
“It scares the other kids,” she said. “It's not nice to them.”
Cathy didn't like the idea of medicating her son, and neither, she said, did his pediatrician, who thought John Jr. was too young.
“You can't make a determination when they're that age,” the doctor told her, meaning that one biting incident didn't necessarily mean the child needed to be constantly medicated.
John Sr. felt the day care operators were overreacting to what he viewed as typical little-boy behavior, and he also wasn't pleased that their son would be at home for a couple of days. So Cathy stayed home from work too, although she purposely didn't do anything fun with the boy. Li'l John cried and was embarrassed that he'd gotten in trouble, but when he tried to get his mother to play with him, she simply said, “Mommy is busy.”
 
 
There was only one other time his mother let him know she was angry with him, a less serious but still telling example of his problems with impulse control.
Cathy and a friend were out shopping with 2½-year-old John Jr. when he saw a chocolate bunny and asked his mother to buy it for him. She said no, and turned away for a moment, only to see that he'd grabbed it off the shelf and had taken a big bite out of its ear.
“It took everything in our power not to laugh,” Cathy recalled. “I had to buy it. He was holding it and I was saying, ‘No.' I had to pay for it, but he didn't get the rest of the bunny.”
After John Jr. turned four, his impulse control problems worsened, and complaints from day care operators escalated. She finally relented and agreed to put him on a low dose of Ritalin, but only while he was at school, where he had to pay attention.
They moved to Palmdale when John Jr. was in kindergarten, which brought them closer to Cathy's parents and also to the house where Deanna lived with her two girls.
During this time and into the first grade, John was acting out in the classroom. He blurted out the F-word, going off on a teacher who had reprimanded him for calling her a “fat, stupid turkey” and had given him a time-out. This being a Christian school, the cussing that he'd picked up from his father didn't go over very well, and Cathy got a call.
“We're not really sure we want him to come back,” the school administrator said.
John was throwing temper tantrums at the grocery store, which required Cathy to bring him outside to the car for fifteen-or twenty-minute time-outs, and his new teacher complained he was easily distracted, exhibited negative attention-seeking behavior and talked too much in class.
Cathy agreed to increase John's Ritalin dosage to fifteen milligrams a day in divided doses. However, this only caused him to have rebound depression in the afternoon, triggering more tantrums and then sobbing. “I wish I would die, because nobody likes me,” he said.
Hearing this from her six-year-old broke Cathy's heart. “It was horribly sad,” she said.
John Sr. only made things worse by putting a negative spin on the crying. “Your mom is turning you into a fag,” he told his son. When John Jr. heard this, he got quiet and silent. “John [Sr.] didn't know how to show affection, attention,” Cathy recalled. “He was worried somehow that if he was too affectionate with his son, it was going to make him effeminate, and John was already kind of a crybaby.”
Around this same time, the boy took a hundred-dollar bill out of his dad's wallet and took it to school to try to make friends. A teacher saw him playing around with it and reported the incident to his parents. When he got home, he got a spanking.
Consulting with John Jr.'s doctor, Cathy took her son off the Ritalin for a couple of weeks, which initially helped with the rebound effects, but the other behavioral problems resumed. He was out of control, being aggressive and in constant motion, making odd noises and acting the class clown at Ocotillo School. This time they tried extended-release Ritalin.
Cathy had enough college credits to complete her associate's degree in 1985 and became a registered nurse. The new form of Ritalin allowed her to do a calming bedtime routine similar to the one she'd used when he was a baby: They talked about his day, then she gave him a bath, read him a story and put him to bed.
Around this time, the boy started setting fires. At age six, he started one in a wastebasket, and when he was seven, he and a friend lit up a large field, requiring the fire department to come and put out the blaze.
 
 
By the second grade, the doctors tried switching John to Cylert, which contained amphetamines (and has since been discontinued). This drug caused John to experience stomach upset and insomnia. He hid the pills in his cheek, then stuffed them under the dryer, where Cathy ultimately found fifty of them socked away.
The doctor put John back on the Ritalin and he was sent to a child psychologist every week for three months, then occasionally for three more months. At the psychologist's suggestion, John was evaluated by a psychiatrist for depression and was diagnosed with conduct disorder. He also started making a sound like he was clearing his throat, so he went into speech therapy as well.
The next year, he saw two other psychiatrists at Kaiser Permanente, who once again increased John's Ritalin dosage to fifteen milligrams, with an extra five milligrams at four in the afternoon for special events or homework. This time, he did better in school and his behavior improved. When he had insomnia, Cathy tried giving him the antihistamine Benadryl at the doctor's advice, but that only made John Jr. accuse her of trying to make him sleep when he didn't want to.
 
 
In the midst of all this, Cathy's relationship with John Sr. had begun to deteriorate.
They were renting a house in Palmdale, which they had an option to buy. To come up with a down payment, she'd been working double shifts—weekdays at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Neuropsychiatric Institute and weekends in the intensive-care unit at Palmdale Hospital. This was necessary because John Sr. had injured his back at work—falling off a ladder while lifting some boxes—and had been receiving only a small disability check for the past couple of years.
He had two back surgeries and operations on both feet in 1986 and 1987, which kept him taking codeine and made him moody and cranky. “I can't go play tennis. I can't go fishing. I can't do any of these things because I'm in constant pain,” he complained.
“He got very depressed being a shut-in,” Cathy recalled.
John Sr. started smoking pot for the pain, and his mood improved. Cathy didn't realize, however, that he'd thrown some speed into the mix.
“He was happy and not so depressed and I was like, ‘Hallelujah, he's doing better,'” she said.
He stayed up all night, slept during the day, and became more irritable, displaying weird mood swings. When a friend of hers suggested that he might be doing cocaine, Cathy dismissed the idea, but she had to acknowledge that his behavior was growing increasingly bizarre.
While Cathy was working sixty hours, seven days a week, John Sr. was spending more time with their son. Cathy got the boy ready for school before she left for work; it was his father's job to make sure he got there. After John Jr. got home from school, his father played video games with him and made sure he finished his homework.
Despite this bonding opportunity, the boy still didn't feel connected to his father. “I think his desire was to be close to his dad,” Cathy said. “John's dad loved me, but I think he was always focused on me.”
At that point, Cathy said, she didn't feel connected to her husband either. Then one day, she was questioning him about why a certain bill hadn't been paid. He confessed that he'd been doing speed and cocaine for the past year, and had completely drained their $10,000 in savings to buy drugs.
“That was the beginning of the end for us,” she said. All the money they'd saved from her double shifts was gone. “Furious doesn't even scratch the surface. I felt so betrayed by him... . I basically said I couldn't pull through. I didn't feel I could go through that drug and alcohol scene again.”
She hung in while John Sr. went to substance abuse therapy, but she slept on the couch, feeling very confused. Part of her hated him.
How could he do this? Here I've been so supportive of him all this time and he did this?
By this time, Shannon and Sarina had moved out, so it was just the three of them. Cathy got her husband into a research study at UCLA, where they got him off the coke and speed, persuaded him to take antidepressants and to do individual therapy. But three months into it, he rebuffed Cathy's suggestion to enter couple's counseling.
“I can't do it right now,” he said, explaining that he was so ashamed of what he'd done that he needed to get to a place where he could face her again.
She asked a couple more times. “We've got to go to counseling, or our marriage is done,” she said, but he still refused. He said he was sorry for everything, but he couldn't do or be what she wanted. “You're probably better off because I don't deserve you.”
So, in February 1988, when John Jr. was in the third grade, Cathy told him she was going to stay at Grandma's in Hawthorne, because she was working a lot of hours. She would see him every other weekend.
“Are you and Daddy getting a divorce?” he asked.
“No,” she said.
A few months later, she got an apartment. “You're going to come and spend the summer with me,” she told him. When he asked if he could still see his dad, she said, “We'll see how it goes.” (In 2011, John Jr. said he was actually scared that he would get into trouble if he went to live with her for good back then, fearing that decision would anger his father. “I was afraid of my dad. He always hit me—if I woke him up, if I got into trouble, if I went around the block without asking.”)
As mother and son lived together that summer, he threw a couple of tantrums and showed what Cathy described as “baseline sadness,” but overall, John Jr. seemed to be dealing with the separation. He even did okay with not being on Ritalin, which Cathy thought was unnecessary as long as he didn't need to pay attention in class.
When school was about to start, he asked, “Can I go back with Daddy? He needs me.”
Cathy still remembered how she'd felt when she had to help her own mother through her debilitating depression; she'd felt such a heavy responsibility to take care of and protect Linda, to be her “mother's keeper.” She was sad that John was now going through the same thing, but she understood it. If she was out of the picture, she also hoped that her husband and son would establish a deeper relationship.

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