Read Lost Girls Online

Authors: Caitlin Rother

Lost Girls (10 page)

She still complained of lingering pain in one eye, where John had hit her, and emotionally, he said, “she is not so good.”
 
 
Cathy had been trying to call John that entire day from work, but got no response. As she pulled into the driveway that night, she saw a police officer get out of his patrol car, which was parked in front of the house next door, and walk toward her. That's when she noticed yellow crime-scene tape across her wooden gate, and started to panic.
The officer said John had been arrested and was at the police station, but he wouldn't give her any details. When she tried to go inside her condo, he stopped her.
“You can't go in there,” he said.
“What do you mean, I can't go in there?”
“It's a crime scene.”
Other than the skirmish with the high-school security guard, John had never been in trouble before. Cathy couldn't even imagine what was going on. She was sitting in her car in the driveway, waiting to be allowed to go inside, when John called her cell phone from jail, around 10:00
P.M.
, saying something like, “The bitch next door is accusing me of rape or something.”
Cathy was totally shocked. It never even crossed her mind that the allegation could be true, because she didn't believe her son was capable of such a thing. It was totally out of character.
 
 
First thing the next morning, Cathy found her son an attorney, William Halsey in Oceanside, who agreed to take the case.
Halsey initially believed John's story. As a criminal defense attorney for the past twenty-five years, he was used to clients lying to him. But after watching John's body language as he adamantly denied touching the girl sexually, Halsey thought the kid was telling the truth. His perception was bolstered by statements from John's mother and sister Shannon, who sincerely defended John. They supported his story that Monica had received her injuries in a beating by her parents, and that John “was being railroaded.”
“I thought there was a possibility of that too,” Halsey said recently.
Halsey followed up on John's suggestion to get a videotape from the security camera at the gas station, where, John said, police had wrongfully arrested him. Getting a time-stamped videotape would help prove a conflict with Monica's story, John said, because it would show that he'd been at the gas station when Monica said they'd been at the condo. Unfortunately, the gas station recycled its videotapes and had recorded over the crucial time period. Then Halsey interviewed John's girlfriend, Patricia, and she stuck up for him too.
“We've got a defense,” Halsey thought. John was a good-looking guy, and he seemed “very convincing. Kind of a nice guy even.”
That was until he read the police reports, with the victim's statements, and saw the photos of her bruised face. Although her statements were somewhat disjointed and changed slightly as she retold the story, she consistently said she ran from the condo, with her pants unzipped and without her left shoe.
“Why did she do that?” Halsey asked John.
But John had no plausible explanation. “I don't know why she would do that,” he replied.
Halsey had to face facts that he'd apparently misjudged his client.
 
 
While John was still in jail, Cathy called his father to tell him that their son had been arrested. She asked if John Sr. would pay the $5,000 bail deposit if she paid for the attorney. John Sr. agreed. He and Deanna couldn't believe that their Li'l John could have done something like this. He'd always had girlfriends. He was so funny, falling down and being silly all the time, and his current girlfriend wasn't afraid of him. So why, Deanna wondered, would this girl claim such things? It had to be that she had a crush on John, as Cathy said.
Once John got out of jail, he called to explain. Deanna wanted to hear what had happened for herself; they were all so angry that this girl was telling these lies.
“You wouldn't really hit a girl, would you?” Deanna asked.
“No, I didn't do that,” John said. “I didn't rape her.”
“You must be pretty mad at this girl for making this up,” she said.
“No, I'm not mad at her,” he said. “The truth will come out.”
But Deanna couldn't understand why John didn't seem to be as angry as the rest of the family.
 
 
John told his girlfriend Patricia, his ex-girlfriend Jenni, and his mother similar stories, which evolved over time, starting with an outright denial, and slowly moved toward an admission of physical, but never sexual, violence.
“His story changed so many times,” Patricia said in 2011. But at the time, she said, she was only eighteen, she was naïve, and she “wanted to believe every word out of his mouth.”
He said he'd seen Monica and her friend walking to school and offered them a ride. When they got there, Monica decided she wanted to ditch class. They went back to John's condo and watched
Patch Adams
.
“He said she started putting her hand on his thigh, got into his lap and started kissing him,” Jenni recalled. “He said no, and took her off his lap.”
When Monica kept trying to make out with him, he said he told her, “No, I have a girlfriend [Patricia], you know her.”
“I don't care,” he quoted Monica as saying, “it doesn't matter if you do or don't, I'm going to tell her we did it, anyway.”
Cathy kept at him, believing there had to be more to the story than he was admitting. He finally told her that, angered by Monica's remarks, he'd pushed her. He went further with the story to Sarina and Jenni, saying he'd smacked Monica, but he still downplayed the violence.
“I think he slapped her, and I think she fell down or something and bruised herself,” Jenni said. “He kicked her out of the house, she walked away, and he went to do stuff, and wound up at the gas station” to clean out his car. He got some gunk on his hands and was wiping them off, when a couple of police cars pulled up and arrested him.
Jenni said she believed that story, as did Cathy and the rest of his family. “It was hard for me to believe that John hit a girl,” Jenni said, adding that she also believed his contention that Monica's dad had “beat the crap out of her” because she'd ditched school. Jenni had never met the girl, but she'd seen her around and had heard fighting and yelling coming from the condo next door.
“I remember the dad's voice being very loud,” Jenni recalled. “You could hear him [yelling] and furniture moving.” In fact, she said recently, she still believed that version of events. “If I'm wrong, then I'm a trusting little fool.”
In 2011, Monica's father denied ever being verbally or physically abusive to his daughter. “That's all lying,” he said. “We love our daughter. [She's] the only one we have.”
Cathy and John's sister Sarina said they never watched the videotape of Monica telling a social worker about the assault, in which the purple bruising around her eyes were quite evident.
“I just thought he needed anger management. I didn't think he was capable ... ,” Sarina said in 2011, trailing off.
 
 
Not long before this incident, when John was in his late teens, he and Sarina were in the garage listening to their boom box, talking about a violent scene they'd just watched on TV. When John referred to the female character as a “bitch,” Sarina called him on his comment because it seemed so unlike him.
“You don't hit girls,” she told him. “You can restrain her, but you can't hit girls.”
Looking down as he spoke, John wasn't all that responsive. “I know,” he said.
She was confused because the two of them often hung out at Belmont Park in Mission Beach, where he was always very friendly and outgoing to women, greeting them with the phrase “Hi, ladies!” She'd always thought it was far more like him to be charming than derogatory to girls.
Around this same time, she and John were taking the community college class together. To make sure that girls didn't think he and Sarina were romantically involved, John wore a T-shirt that said, SHE'S MY SISTER.
John also liked to take Sarina's autistic daughter, who was just three years old, to the beach. His family was touched by how nurturing he was, and what a special connection he seemed to have with the troubled little girl.
But on March 20, 2000, Gardner was arraigned on three felony counts of forcible lewd acts on a child under fourteen, and a felony count of false imprisonment by violence, menace, fraud and deceit. He pleaded not guilty.
Chapter 12
During the course of their investigation, police learned that about four months before the incident with Monica, John had a consensual romantic afternoon with one of her friends, a fourteen-year-old girl named Sarah*, who attended the local high school and had told John that she was fifteen.
Sarah told police that she'd originally met John at Monica's house, and had seen him around the neighborhood a half-dozen times. One weekend, she, John, Erika and Monica went to Taco Bell, and after getting permission from her mother, they all headed over to the rocks near “the falls” in the park, where the other girls left her alone with John. He kissed her several times and told her she was beautiful and had very pretty eyes. Then he pulled up the bottom of her long-sleeved shirt and she allowed him to touch her bare breast. When he rubbed her crotch through her pants, however, she pushed his hand away. She felt bad that she'd let it get that far. After that, John said he wanted to see more of her, but Sarah told Monica, who she knew was John's friend, to tell him not to call her anymore. She knew he was too old for her.
On April 11, the district attorney filed an amended complaint that added a misdemeanor child-molesting charge for his activities with Sarah.
The preliminary hearing began at ten in the morning, with John and his attorney entering his plea of not guilty.
As prosecutor Dave Hendren's four witnesses took the stand—teenagers Erika, Monica and Sarah, as well as the adult neighbor, Sue Ann Jones—John scribbled notes to William Halsey on a legal pad, following his attorney's orders not to distract him by whispering during the proceedings.
Up first, Erika recounted details of the morning that John picked them up at the Westwood Club. Monica said she was worried that the other girls were going to beat her up if she went to school (Monica had told Erika they'd kicked her in the legs and pulled her hair, and had threatened to do more next time), so John invited them both back to his place to watch movies.
“I can call ... in [sick for you] and pretend to be your dad so you don't have to go,” she quoted him as saying.
Hendren had Erika point out that Monica had no injuries on her face that morning. He also had her talk about John's kiss on her cheek at the indoor basketball courts a couple of weeks earlier. Erika said they were alone, but she didn't invite the contact, nor were they talking romantically at the time.
“Why do you think he kissed you?” Hendren asked.
“I don't know,” she said.
On cross-examination, Halsey asked Erika if she remembered telling a detective that Monica told John “that she would have sex with him if all these people weren't around”?
“She said that, but I think she meant it as a joke,” Erika said. “I don't remember exactly what she said, but she told me ... something like that.”
“When did she say that, on the morning of the seventeenth?”
“I think she said it while she was at the house with John.” “Did he ever indicate to you or give you any indication that he was violent?”
“No.”
“Did you trust John?”
“Yes.”
“Has Monica ever told you about anybody else hitting her?”
“No ... not that I can remember.”
“Did Monica ever tell you her parents hit her?”
“No.”
“Did Monica ever have disagreements with her parents that were very strong?”
“Yes.”
 
 
Monica was up next. Cathy was surprised how much younger her former neighbor looked without makeup. She almost didn't recognize her. Halsey thought Monica seemed quite credible during her tearful testimony, speaking softly and timidly on the stand.
As she described the events in the condo that morning, she seemed unsure of some things, and not all that specific, but even if she was okay with the initial backrub, she said, she became increasingly uncomfortable with John's advances, and she made it clear to the judge that John had continued to force himself on her, anyway. Although an objective observer might think Monica had been sending John mixed signals, she was, after all, only thirteen, and she sounded as if she'd tried her best to try to get him to stop, once he crossed her line of discomfort.
It started off slowly as they watched the movie, she said, with him sitting behind her, massaging her and kissing or blowing on her neck.
“He would say, ‘I want to kiss you,' or he would kiss me or something, and I told him I didn't want to, and I said it wasn't right, since he had a girlfriend and I had a boyfriend,” she testified.
“Did he proceed to try to kiss you after you said that?” prosecutor Dave Hendren asked.
“Yes. I just told him, maybe if there was people around, I would, but right now I don't want to.”
“Why did you say that?”
“Because I just didn't want him to come near me, really.”
He stopped for a while, then he picked her up and carried her upstairs to his bedroom, telling her to close her eyes, as if it were a surprise. He put her on his bed and got on top of her again.
“I'm not really sure what he was doing,” she said. “Then he stopped and we walked downstairs.”
They went back to the couch in the living room, where “there were several times he got on top of me, and there were other times we were just sitting there. And I remember at one point we were standing by the couch and I know he was, like, holding on to my waist or something, and he put his hands down my pants ... behind me.”
“On what part of your body?”
“My butt.”
Monica said she couldn't remember the sequence of events very well, but at one point, he put her up against a closet door in the kitchen and pressed up against her. But it was downstairs in the living room where things started getting more serious. He unzipped her pants, pulled her underwear halfway down her thighs and put his hand on her private area. But, she said, “he didn't go inside.”
“Excuse me?” Hendren asked.
“He didn't go all the way,” she said. “He was rubbing himself against me and touching me places... . He wouldn't stop, and he would try to take my pants off and I told him I didn't want to. I tried holding on ... and then he hit me... . I told him to stop... . He was suffocating me. He had his hand on my mouth, and I couldn't breathe, and I got pretty fuzzy after he hit me, and I'm not sure if I blacked out.”
“At some point inside the house, did he say, ‘You know what? I really can't take this anymore'?”
Monica said, yes, that was before he put her on the couch, and before he hit her. “I think I was standing up, and he said that he was going to take me to school or something, and I was grabbing my stuff together, and that's when he just put me on ... the couch, and he said he just couldn't take it anymore.”
“Tell me about him hitting you.”
“He hit me in the face, and I didn't feel anything... . I couldn't feel anything.”
Hendren asked her for more details about where and how many times John hit her, but she said she didn't remember much other than that he hit her with one hand, and put his other hand over her mouth because she was trying to scream.
“I probably did, but all I know is that no one could have heard me,” she said.
“What did you think, based on your being there, that he was going to do?”
“Probably rape me.”
But then John shifted gears and stopped hitting her, she said. When she sat up, he hugged her. “He said something like, ‘I didn't mean to do this,' and I think I said, ‘I couldn't believe this,' and I went out the door, and I didn't know what he was doing behind me, and I just ran out of the gate.”
Monica said she wasn't sure what had happened to her shoe, but she knew she didn't have it on when she ran outside. She was so scared that she didn't even care about grabbing her backpack. She just ran for the first house with an open garage door. When she rang the doorbell, a lady answered.
“I couldn't really talk. I was just holding on to my pants, because I didn't get a chance to zip them up, and I had told her what happened.”
After Monica recounted being so upset that she threw up in front of the police, Hendren asked, “You are still sometimes scared today?”
“Yes.”
On cross-examination by William Halsey, Monica admitted there was an older boy she “might see sometimes,” but Hendren objected when Halsey tried to prove that this boy was eighteen, and that she was comfortable being romantic with an older male.
Instead, Halsey asked Monica if she remembered telling Erika or John that she wished people weren't around so she could have sex with him.
“No, I never said that,” Monica said. “I said I might have kissed him if people were around, but only because I wanted to get him off me.”
“In other words, you have agreed to kiss him, but you wouldn't agree to do anything else?”
“Yes.”
She said the last time she'd been at John's was some months before the incident. After Halsey prompted her, she also admitted to coming over earlier that week, but there was no drama to her story. She said she went upstairs, knocked on the door and called out to John, who said “he would be down,” then she came downstairs to wait for him.
 
 
Sue Ann Jones, the neighbor to whom Monica ran to, testified that the girl's face was so swollen after the assault that she'd barely recognized Monica at the prelim that morning. She said Monica didn't want to call the police because she was scared of “having people know what happened.”
Next, Sarah went over her interaction with John at the waterfall, explaining how things ended. “I pushed his hand away, and I said that I think it was time that we left,” she said.
Under cross-examination, she acknowledged that when he kissed her, she kissed him back.
 
 
In the end, the ninety-minute proceeding was short but powerful enough to convince the judge to send the case to trial.
“It appears to the court the offenses alleged in counts one through five of the complaint have been established,” Judge Jay Bloom said. “There is sufficient cause to believe this defendant is guilty thereof. He is, therefore, ordered held to answer.”

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