“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.
“By itself, it probably wasn’t the thing that was going to make him the most stable, but it helped,” she said.
During his junior and senior years, Dan and John argued more and more. Tensions were mounting and came to a head on Cathy’s birthday in June 1996, when Dan and John pushed each other during a dispute over whether to bring a cake to the beach.
Six months later, they got into another fight, and this time, Dan told Cathy that John had to go.
“I’m throwing him out,” he said.
Cathy was not happy. It was the middle of winter, with snow on the ground. “You’re being reactionary,” she said. “This is ridiculous.”
John had been over at a friend’s at the time, and when he returned home, Dan had locked him out. This