Lost Girls (29 page)

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Authors: Caitlin Rother

BOOK: Lost Girls
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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.
“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-girlfriends 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.

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