Lost Girls (31 page)

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Authors: Caitlin Rother

BOOK: Lost Girls
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Sometime in 2009, he'd told her he'd done methamphetamine, to which she said she “did my stern, ‘Don't do that crap.'” He didn't talk to her about his use of hard drugs until after his arrest, when he said, “he'd done Ecstasy and a couple of other things, and that he'd had a bad couple of weeks.”
Hearing that, Jenni wondered if it was the drugs that had made him do the murders because he felt overwhelmed by his life, and “a week of bad, bad, bad, bad ... where he felt out of control and he thought, ‘I can control this.'”
Jenni was devastated by learning what Gardner had done. “I just cried a lot because I couldn't believe that the person I knew could do this to somebody,” she said.
She reached out to Cathy and tried to comfort her as well, telling her she wasn't “to blame for this. John made his own decisions. She's his mother, not a doctor.”
 
 
Jenni and Patricia Walker, Gardner's other ex-girlfriend, have become friends throughout this ordeal. Who else would understand being the ex-girlfriend of a serial rapist-killer? (Although a 1998 federal law defined a serial killer as someone who has killed three or more victims, the definition was broadened after an FBI-hosted symposium of experts determined it should allow for the killing of two or more victims by the same offender in separate events.)
Looking back in 2011, Patricia said, “I did know that he could be aggressive if provoked, but he never turned that against me—ever.”
Patricia only saw him get really aggressive once. They were in the Disneyland parking lot for her Grad Night in 2000, when he punched a plywood fence because he believed she was going to break up with him over the molestation case. Once she told him she wasn't, he went back to being the regular nice guy he usually was to her.
Even after he'd pleaded guilty to the charges, she still wanted to marry him. That summer, they bought diamond-studded wedding bands, which she put on her credit card and for which he paid her in installments.
Just before Gardner went to prison, he said, “I hope that you'll wait for me, but I don't really expect you to.”
After the abortion, Patricia had lost all her friends but Gardner, who remained loyally by her side. And after he went to prison, she said, “My life fell apart. John was all I had.”
She finally gave up and left town, got her dream job at Disneyland, where she'd wanted to work since she was a child. There, she met and began dating a young man to whom she soon got engaged. Patricia went to visit Gardner in prison once with Cathy. After deciding to get married, she wrote to let Gardner know about her impending nuptials. Her fiancé was in the U.S. Marine Corps, and he was a good man.
When Gardner got out of prison in 2005, he tracked her down by her married name in North Carolina, where her husband was stationed at the time. Gardner was nice on the phone and invited her to come visit him, which she took as a hint that he was hoping to get back together. But she wasn't interested.
“I had a very stable life and that was not something I was willing to give up,” she said.
Still, she held on to those wedding bands, which she only threw away a few years ago. “He did some horrible things [to those other girls], but he also did some wonderful things for me.”
Today, she said, “he's someone I don't know and someone I don't care to know.”
Chapter 32
Over the next few months, politicians and private citizens launched verbal attacks on the various dysfunctional components of California's broken system. Multiple probes were demanded by lawmakers, including Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, in response to the public's demand for answers about what went wrong in this case.
At issue was why Gardner spent only five years behind bars, why he was released from prison without a crystal ball assessment of the crimes he would commit, and why he was not returned to prison on the potential parole violations that were forced into the crosshairs framed by this case. To put it simply, there was plenty of blame to go around. The public was angry and wanted its government to explain how and why it kept allowing these senseless tragedies to occur.
These failures angered Gardner's mother, right along with all the folks who said they wanted to kill him for what he had done to Amber and Chelsea.
“Not only did they fail to protect these girls, they failed to protect my son [from himself],” Cathy Osborn said, who agreed with critics who believed that the authorities who overlooked Gardner's parole violations had allowed him to feel he could get away with breaking the law.
Assemblyman Nathan Fletcher, R-San Diego, sponsored a bill called Chelsea's Law based on findings in some of these probes.
“It's clear the system has failed,” he said, demanding a full and immediate investigation of the corrections department's role in Gardner's case. Amid this barrage of verbal outrage, Schwarzenegger did the same, asking the California Sex Offender Management Board to review sex offender laws and practices relating to Gardner's parole and postparole management.
The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation seemed to take the most heat for these alleged failings, including its policy to destroy parole agents' field notes and “central files” on Gardner and other offenders one year after they were paroled, a policy that Schwarzenegger immediately reversed. CDCR spokesman Oscar Hidalgo defended this and other policies and decisions, including the choice not to return Gardner back to prison for what he characterized as minor parole infractions.
“If we were to revoke and put a parolee in prison every time they have a low-battery alert [on their GPS bracelet] you ... would flood the system,” Hidalgo told
The San Diego Union-Tribune
.
 
 
On April 12, 2010, the CASOMB issued a report with the goal of trying to prevent future crimes, using this case as an example of bad decisions and poor policy. Specifically relating to Gardner's marijuana arrest, the board wrote it was a parole violation, regardless of how minor, saying that
[Gardner's] use of drugs while on supervision demonstrates that the offender is noncompliant with important parole conditions.
Further criticisms and recommendations came in a June report issued by the state Office of the Inspector General, which reviewed Gardner's GPS data at Fletcher's request:
The department failed to detect violations that could have returned Gardner to prison for many years.
The report cited a number of new violations that occurred during the single year he wore the GPS bracelet, which included his two trips to Donovan state prison, his multiple trips to parks, playgrounds and his storage unit, as well as his breaking curfew 158 times—all with no penalty.
The San Diego District Attorney advised us that had the department brought to her attention Gardner's criminal act of entering the grounds of a state prison, she would have charged Gardner with a third-strike felony, which, if Gardner were convicted, could have resulted in his serving a 25-years-to-life sentence,
the OIG report stated.
The report questioned why Gardner was given CDCR assistance to relocate to a residence in Escondido that was within a half mile of a middle school, and why his parole agent never questioned the thirteen trips he made to rural areas at odd hours or followed up on the seventeen GPS alerts that Gardner had lost his signal for more than six hours.
These violations had previously gone unnoticed and unacknowledged, partly because parole agents were not tasked with monitoring parolees' GPS bracelet behavior in real time, and also because these tracking results weren't tabulated to reveal any patterns. The report stated that parole agents were too busy with paperwork to do real-time monitoring, resulting in 87 percent of the GPS data collected being routinely ignored for Gardner and other parolees on passive-monitoring status.
Although his visits to remote areas did not violate his parole, they were suspicious and warranted further investigation, the report stated:
We identified at least 13 locations that Gardner visited, several of which were situated in remote rural areas, which should have resulted in the parole agent closely questioning Gardner about his purpose for being in those areas.
For example, at approximately 3:00
A.M.
on July 5, 2008, Gardner travelled to a remote mountainous region east of Escondido. From the GPS data alone we cannot determine why Gardner went to this location. Gardner was transient during this time, with no fixed address, and the department should have been interested in his whereabouts. Furthermore, at about 7:00
P.M.
that day Gardner travelled to another remote mountaintop location 30 miles away and stayed there for about 20 minutes. These unusual travels to remote locations should have spurred a parole agent to question Gardner.
But it wasn't until after KFMB-TV did an update on the case in January 2011 that the San Diego County Sheriff's Department searched for bodies in some of these areas.
“Our concern at this point is, if there were runaway girls from other areas of the country who happened to be in San Diego County or Riverside County, they may have been victimized by him,” Lieutenant Dennis Brugos told KFMB. (Brugos retired shortly thereafter. As of 2011, the search teams had found no new victims.)
The OIG report also cited a number of recommendations, such as using trained specialists to bunch, batch and tier this data to track patterns, which would free up parole agents to do more important casework in the field to protect the public's safety.
CDCR secretary Matthew Cate responded that the GPS passive-monitoring system was never designed to detect violations as they occurred, noting that Gardner's agent “was not expected to check Gardner's tracks, unless the agent received an alert or suspected Gardner was involved in criminal misconduct. As such, unless the agent happened upon Gardner during the commission of the misconduct, the agent could not have been aware that Gardner briefly entered a prison parking lot one day in July 2008, or that he violated his curfew and committed the other potential violations listed in your report... . Unfortunately, we know that even if we had unlimited resources and could do all of the things immediately [noted in the OIG and CASOMB reports], we would not be able to prevent all of tomorrow's crimes.”
 
 
Assemblymen Nathan Fletcher and Jim Neilsen also aimed their sights at the state Department of Mental Health (DMH) in a letter to the Joint Legislative Audit Committee, asking to examine the department's screening practices for sex offenders that failed to protect the public from John Gardner. At Fletcher's urging, the state legislature approved a $250,000 state audit.
When the audit report came out in July 2011, Fletcher was irked to read the results, because, as he'd interpreted state law,
all
sex offenders were supposed to be getting “full evaluations” by two DMH psychologists to determine if the inmates were sexually violent predators (SVPs) before being paroled.
But according to the audit, only 20 percent of the 31,500 sex offenders referred by CDCR over a five-year period had actually received those full evaluations, because the rest had been screened out along the way (after an initial review or a subsequent clinical screening by DMH). Less than 2 percent were committed to mandatory treatment at a state hospital in Coalinga when their term was up because they were deemed too dangerous to be released into society. The annual cost to treat one sex offender at Coalinga State Hospital, where some offenders have been housed for years, is a whopping $180,000. Clearly, Fletcher, the auditor's office and the two state agencies had different interpretations of state law.
The audit also noted that this violent predator assessment system had a major increase in inmate referrals for evaluations the year after Jessica's Law passed in 2006, when the number spiked from 1,850 to 8,871. This problem was exacerbated, audit staff said, because the CDCR didn't do its job of screening out nonpredators from the evaluation process. CDCR was not only faulted for sending all offenders to DMH for evaluation, but also for waiting until the last minute before their parole date to refer many of those identified as predatory, when state law required referrals to be made at least six months in advance. The audit said this didn't give DMH enough time to complete its usual evaluation process, which kept prisoners behind bars longer to complete overdue assessments, and forced the use of other costly and time-consuming measures, such as hiring private evaluators, all of which cost taxpayers more money.
In response, CDCR spokesman Luis Patino said these screening methods were developed jointly by CDCR and DMH. The CDCR “was erring on the side of caution because the public deserves careful screening of sex offenders to ensure they are not sexually violent predators,” he said, and the two agencies are working “to develop further efficiencies.”
Patino countered that private evaluators were often used because the state pays its own employees less than the private sector to do the same assessments, so it's difficult to recruit people to fill the public positions. A top CDCR official said that the agency is “committed to adhering to the statutory law governing this program,” but Patino was unable to address the disparity in the various interpretations of the law.
DMH did not respond to a request for comment on the audit.

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