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Authors: Caitlin Rother

BOOK: Lost Girls
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Chapter 9
Cathy's boyfriend Dan's apartment was only a small bachelor pad and very cramped compared to the two-bedroom apartment Cathy and John Jr. had previously shared. So once John was released from his third hospital stay, he had to sleep on the couch. This arrangement lasted until they moved into a three-bedroom house in Carson.
From there, Cathy and Dan decided to move to the more rural area of Redlands in San Bernardino County for a couple of months. They enrolled John at the private Advocate School for severely emotionally disturbed boys, where taxpayers paid his tuition. He was placed into a seclusion room numerous times to prevent him from hurting himself or one of the other kids, prompting Cathy to jokingly call it “a prison school.”
After all these hospitalizations and behavioral problems, Cathy was depressed about her son's prospects. For years now, she'd been struggling to stabilize him, hoping that he would reach some sort of plateau and be able to live a normal life, but she was finally starting to accept that this was never going to happen.
My child is not ever going to be functioning close to normal,
she thought.
She didn't give up on him, but she tried to deal with what was plausible rather than what she hoped was possible. A new psychiatrist put him on Mellaril, which really slowed him down and made him gain weight. “He hated it,” Cathy said. “He said it made him feel stupid.”
From there, it was trial and error as they tried one new medication after another. “Nothing seemed to be real effective for any length of time,” she said. “He always had side effects.”
The mood stabilizer Lithium, for example, which is used to treat manic symptoms caused by bipolar disorder, gave him irritable bowel syndrome. After trying it three different times, he finally had to stop taking it because it became toxic to his liver.
 
 
One night in April 1990, Cathy, Dan and John Jr. were walking home from dinner at the corner restaurant. John was acting hyper and skipping around them, as usual, when he decided it was time to propose to Cathy on Dan's behalf.
“I think you like my mom and I really need a dad, so maybe you could marry my mom,” John suggested.
Two weeks later, Dan proposed for himself, and officially became John's first positive father figure and role model. As a professional electrician, Dan took the twelve-year-old to work with him and began teaching him the trade as an apprentice, starting with gofer jobs such as crawling under the house to run wire, or picking up nails to clear a job site. Dan also became assistant coach for John's sports teams and Dan grew into the real father that John felt he'd never had.
That June, John won a certificate of achievement for outstanding success at school as “Best Conversationalist,” which was a proud moment for the family.
After a brief stay in Redlands, Cathy, Dan and John Jr. moved to Running Springs in 1990. At a December 17 meeting between Cathy and school district officials, it was decided that John should continue to attend the Advocate School.
Parent reports wonderful change in John's behavior with recent change in medication,
a meeting report stated.
To be successfully educated, John requires high structure with a strong counseling component.
John was bused to the private school until the local Rim of the World High School started its own program for severely emotionally disturbed children in 1991. John was one of the first five male students in the new program, which was held in a trailer on campus.
 
 
Now that Cathy and John Sr. lived miles apart in different counties, John Jr. didn't see or have much contact with his father. Based on his parents' divorce file, it's unclear whose fault that really was.
Cathy had filed for divorce in December 1989, and in May 1990, John Sr. was ordered to pay seventy dollars a month in child support. He never paid a dime, however, claiming that he'd never seen the judgment ordering him to do so, and that Cathy said he didn't have to—as long as he listed their son as a beneficiary on his life insurance policy.
John Sr. remarried Deanna on September 15, 1990, in Reno, Nevada, as his health problems and the couple's financial difficulties continued to escalate. John Sr. was working part-time doing deliveries for Pizza Hut that year, earning only $483 a month. He was stopped at a train crossing when a car rear-ended his Datsun 280Z, which added neck pain to his slate of physical problems. These new injuries, coupled with his preexisting back problems, he said, prevented him from returning to work for Pizza Hut until 1994.
Describing himself in court papers in 1996 as “practically destitute,” he said he'd started his own home business assembling tachometers for a small company in Granada Hills, but he had made no more than $6,000 a year at it.
Nonetheless, Cathy wrote in response, he'd rarely tried to contact his son by mail, let alone see him, which, as John Jr. grew older, caused the teenager to question Cathy whether his father was financially supporting him. Cathy stated that her son had been remarking on the fact that his father hadn't visited him, written him letters or called, let alone paid any child support. In her view, she wrote, John Jr. was trying to “measure his importance” to his father. Trying to persuade the judge to force John Sr. to pay $4,660 in back payments, she wrote,
Our son, who is 17 years old, is learning about consequences and responsibilities. Therefore, it is now clear to me that if I do not pursue this, the messages that I give to my son are: 1) he is not that important 2) that responsibility is not that great of a commitment if you decide it's too much or if the consequence is not that bad.
In response, John Sr. filed papers countering that Cathy had consistently prevented him from visiting his son. He claimed that he'd called countless times, asking to see John, and was told to leave a message. But even after leaving numerous messages, he never got a response.
John Sr. stated that Cathy stopped by his house with their son in August 1995, and when he asked the teenager why he'd never returned John Sr.'s “countless” calls, John Jr. said he'd never received any messages.
John is 17 years old now and I believe that it is essential that John and I finally be given the opportunity to spend time together so that we can really get to know each other.
John Sr. promised not to keep his son away from Cathy, as she had done to him, because he believed that the teenager would benefit most by spending time with
both
parents.
Since John is so close to attaining legal age, I feel that it is imperative that the court now give us the opportunity to be together as I believe that this will help John's self-esteem to know that both his parents love him and want to be with him.
John Jr. continued to live with his mother and Dan, hurt that his father didn't try harder to see him. He began to refer to Dan as “an awesome dad,” and nicknamed John Sr. “the sperm donor.”
Chapter 10
In John Jr.'s early teens, his psychiatrist, Dr. Divyakant “Divy” Kikani, determined that his symptoms were more serious than just ADHD, citing traits of conduct disorder and the paranoia that John had shown since he was ten. Kikani, who saw John as a patient from ages fourteen to sixteen, began treating him for bipolar disorder.
By the time John was sixteen, some of his earlier depression had lifted, but he was still experiencing mood swings, as well as a certain level of mania and euphoria. Although he was easily distracted and could act impulsively, he seemed pretty consistently happy overall. Depending on what was going on in his life and how well his meds were working, he saw Kikani every two weeks or every six months.
In addition to the bipolar symptoms that John exhibited, other typical signs of the disorder include a high sex drive, which can go into overdrive during a manic state, delusions of grandeur and of superhuman powers or skills, false beliefs that can't be dissuaded away and a tendency toward poor judgment.
At school, John also had regular sessions with a therapist. When John wasn't progressing in individual counseling, the therapist asked Cathy if she and Dan would be willing to do family therapy. Dan wasn't, so the therapist conducted joint sessions with Cathy and John, saying they'd made more progress there than in all the previous therapy put together. In these sessions, Cathy told her son that she felt uncomfortable when he cursed and acted out of control, and John told his mother that he felt hurt she was never satisfied with him and was always trying to improve him. He said he didn't know what else to do but yell when he got angry, to which she countered that she hoped they could discuss what was wrong before it got to that point. John said that he'd tried, but she seemed to have no tolerance for his expressions of anger. Cathy replied that she would work on that if he would work on his anger.
After that, John started going for walks when he felt the feelings boiling up. These walks were even incorporated into his special ed program as a way to dissipate his frustration before he exploded in the classroom.
“His angry tone at home started decreasing, and he started making friends,” Cathy said. “I was just really excited,” adding that she also tried to be less critical and to stop harping on his social skills, which seemed to help him relax, even though he still wasn't very socially sophisticated.
“I needed to grieve that my son was not going to be normal, and I'd put a lot of pressure on him to measure up to something he wasn't capable of doing,” she said. “That was a good turning point for us. I really started lightening up on him.”
 
 
From the outside, friends recognized how complicated John's relationship was with Cathy. “One day, it would be the best relationship in the world. They were super close. They could talk about anything,” said Jenni Tripp, who dated John for eighteen months, starting in his senior year. “Then he would change and she would turn into a ‘goddamned motherf---ing bitch.' There was no change in Cathy—Cathy was pretty much constant. It was John that changed. But it was little things that could spark him off. If she had twenty dollars, [he felt] she should give it to him,” then he'd get furious if she said no.
“It could have been a whole lot better if John could have given her more credit because she worked really hard and she did try to take care of him,” Jenni said. “When there's that kind of child who needs some structure and discipline, she did what she was supposed to as a mom: She tried to get him to take his meds and do the right thing. I don't think she tried to control him. I actually think she gave him a lot of freedom.”
“Cathy mom,” as Jenni still calls her, was “a little bit” of an enabler, but “she was always there. I think that Cathy was a good part of his life... . That was another reason I broke up with him. I got tired of trying to mother him.”
 
 
After so many years of struggling with emotional crises, John's life began to improve dramatically. Dan introduced John to hockey, which John found he was skilled at and loved so much that he continued to play even after high school. He also played soccer and baseball and served as manager of his high school's varsity basketball team, the Fighting Scots, in 1993.
John also started doing better in school. He got an A in the Regional Occupational Program law enforcement course, which tried to match kids with careers. And, for the first time, he found an academic subject that he felt good at: mathematics.
Even though he graduated with career goals of becoming a police officer or a math teacher, his transcript shows that the only A he earned in math was in his ninth-grade algebra course, receiving B's and C's in his other math classes. That said, he did earn an academic excellence award for outstanding achievement on the 1996 Golden State Examination in geometry.
“He loved math,” Jenni said. “He wanted to be a high-school teacher, because, I think, he didn't want to get out of the high school. It was his ticket in—not for girls—just to be a kid... . Once he gets to be fifty, he'll never act fifty. He'll act twenty for his whole life.”
It was his math teacher who discovered that John had a talent for singing, just like his father, John Sr. With a four-octave vocal range before he became a chain-smoker, the teenager got involved with the school choir, went caroling in Lake Arrowhead Village and landed a role in the musical
Oliver
.
“He could hit every note on the keyboard from low to high, and he had a great bass voice,” said Jenni, who was in choir class with him, noting that he did solos and also sang in a doo-wop group at school. His Spanish teacher had her students learn the language by singing songs, and John enjoyed translating them from English into Spanish.
Jenni, who was two years younger, described herself as shy and awkward. She also had drama class with John. As an actor, Jenni said, “I think he was over-the-top. He was just good at overacting. That's how you can describe John in life. He overacted, and everything was over-the-top.”
If a party was in the works, John procured the alcohol, stealing bottles of Wild Turkey, and never got caught. “John was amazing at stealing liquor,” Jenni recalled. “He could have three to four bottles down his pants... . If you had a request, he'd get it... . He liked to be the life of the party.”
His moods aside, John's family and friends saw him as a good, considerate and funny guy with a soft heart, evidenced by the touching connection he had with his severely autistic niece.
“If he was your friend, he'd be your best friend. He'd take care of you, your friends, your family and even any acquaintance that might need help,” Jenni said. “My brother was mainly well liked, but he had one bully that just wasn't letting up. John just happened to be at the school—one of the times he wasn't supposed to be there—and he took the bully, who he knew personally, and closed the door. A couple minutes later, they came out, [the bully] wasn't harmed, but he never ever bullied my brother again.”
John liked to make jokes, and could be quite fun to be around, earning the reputation at school as a prankster. When he was still dating the girlfriend before Jenni, he put some Anbesol, a numbing ointment, on his lips and asked her for a kiss. Not knowing what he'd done, she kissed him and soon felt the joke when she could no longer feel her lips.
He did imitations of Jim Carrey, and memorized many of the lines from the movie
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
He loved Adam Sandler movies, mimicking the characters, and also came up with creative scenarios of his own. Like the time that Cathy was fixing dinner for company one night. John was upset about something, turned to his mom and said, “You want tossed salad? I'll toss your salad!” He picked up the bowl and threw the salad in the air, throwing cherry tomatoes and pieces of lettuce everywhere.
Cathy thought his joke was relatively amusing, but she still sent him to his room.
 
 
Once he got to high school, John liked having a girlfriend. He broke up with his first steady girl after telling his family that she'd cheated on him, and he started dating Jenni. His family just adored this sweet, petite girl, with the dark hair and blue eyes, because she was smart, pretty
and
responsible.
When they met at the end of his junior year, Jenni's first impression of John was that “he just couldn't sit still and he always had to be in motion. He was always in a good mood.”
When it came to sex, Jenni said, his nickname was “Energizer Bunny,” the screen name he later used on Myspace. “He could go over and over and over repeatedly, and that could go on for, like, hours. And there wasn't anything sexually he wasn't willing to do,” she said. “He was really focused on pleasing his partner.”
Referring to his recent sexually violent acts, she said, “It seems surprising to me that he gave in to the urges to do that, because that's
so not
the John that I know.”
Back in high school, Jenni said, John was good at persuading a girl to have sex with him. “He made you feel beautiful, and he would go slow through each step, so you didn't realize you'd gone to the next step until you were there. But at the point ... where, if you got walked in on it would embarrass you, he'd ask if it was okay. He'd always ask for permission.”
At times, the two of them didn't use any protection, but Jenni never got pregnant. “I think he would have been fine if he was a dad at fifteen, because all he ever wanted in life was to be a math teacher and to be a dad. He's great with kids.”
While they were dating, he became friends with her best friend, Donna Hale, whom Jenni had known since she was ten. As John later recalled in a letter, Donna told John not to hurt Jenni or Donna said she would
kill my butt. She then flipped me over her back and I was laying on the ground. Wow!
He also said he always thought Donna had the most wonderful smile, and he was touched by her love for people and animals, which made his “heart jump.”
John's intense personality and his obsessive-compulsive behavior translated into a positive work ethic, often to his own detriment. He worked off and on with his stepdad, who began paying John apprentice wages once John hit sixteen.
“John derived his self-esteem from working and he always wanted to do an exceptional job,” Cathy said.
But he couldn't hold on to his earnings for long. “John would spend his money as fast as he got it,” Cathy recalled. “It would burn holes in his pocket.” He spent most of the money he earned on gifts for other people, a sweater for a neighbor girl, fast food for his friends, and ice skates or in-line skates.
In addition to working for Dan, he got a job as a lifeguard at Agua Fria at Twin Peaks, a resort in the San Bernardino Mountains. He also dressed as an elf to be a ride operator with Donna and her mother at Santa's Village amusement park, until it went out of business.
“He would work, just at a regular job, or for a friend, but he would do the hard physical labor, and just exhaust himself ... so hard that he would end up in the hospital for dehydration,” Jenni said.
One rainy winter night John and Jenni went to see
Seven Years in Tibet,
starring Brad Pitt. Early in the evening, he looked under-the-weather, and halfway through the movie, he developed a fever and broke out in a sweat. He was able to drive Jenni home, but they had to call his mom to take him to the hospital.
Jenni said John expressed some of his energy as anger, but he only aimed it at other guys, and she was never scared that she would end up as a target. “If anything,” she said, “I would be the one to hit him.”
Although he never got into a fight in front of her because she always talked him out of it, “he would see something as disrespectful and his whole body would tighten up. He'd clench his fists and tighten his lips, [like] he was looking for an excuse to get in a fight.”
That's why she and Cathy thought the hockey and skiing were so good for him. They helped him work off some of his aggression in a physical but safe way.
 
 
Memories differ on this issue, but John believes he was still in high school when he stopped taking his medications. Cathy thinks it was after he finished high school, but before he moved out of the apartment they shared. Either way, at two hundred pounds, he was too big for Cathy to try to force them down his throat. The last prescription drug she remembered him taking was Wellbutrin, an antidepressant.

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