Cathy had spent nearly three decades managing her son’s medical and psychological treatment, ferrying him to countless doctors and therapists who had prescribed more than a dozen medications. Starting at age four, John had begun with Ritalin for his attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). As he grew older, his behavioral problems became more complicated. As a teenager, he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, but he had experienced so many side effects to the drugs that he’d stopped taking them in high school. He had been on and off them ever since. Mostly off.
John also had a history of psychiatric hospitalizations, and by now, Cathy was very familiar with the danger signs that he was reaching a crisis point. In the last couple of months, he had totaled two cars, running one into a pole and the other into a cement barrier. So on February 8, she had driven him to the walk-in psychiatric clinic at the county hospital in Riverside, where both of them hoped he would be admitted as an inpatient. But even after John told the psychiatrist he might qualify as a “5150”—someone who is in danger of hurting himself or others—the doctor said he didn’t think such treatment was necessary. He simply gave John some more pills and sent him on his way. Five days later, John went on a suicidal binge of methamphetamine and other illicit drugs, which landed him in the emergency room.
All of this made for a complicatedly close relationship between John and his mother. Things had escalated recently after he’d started using methamphetamine and increasing his drinking. The crazier he acted, the crazier Cathy’s own emotional roller coaster became. If she didn’t watch over him, she feared he would go right back to the same druggie friends he partied with during his nearly fatal binge, a pattern she’d seen over the past eighteen months. Or worse yet, he’d be successful and actually kill himself.
John had been “living” at his grandmother Linda Osborn’s house in Riverside County since January, going back and forth to his mom’s condo in Rancho Bernardo, a San Diego suburb, an hour south. But because Linda had also been admitted to the same hospital as John, Cathy decided on February 19 to take him home with her for a few days. Clearly, he was in no state of mind to be left to his own devices at his grandmother’s, or in the care of his aunt Cynthia, who had her own emotional problems.
“It’s time for you to get some more intense treatment,” Cathy told him.
John agreed, saying he’d been trying to get help, but not succeeding. “I need you to help me because I can’t seem to get it done on my own,” he said.
He claimed that he’d already tried to find a mental-health or drug addiction facility in San Diego or Riverside County that would take him, but he would try again. As soon as he was feeling better on February 20, she gave him a list of phone numbers, then listened from the kitchen while he made the calls.
Cathy felt John’s mental-health issues should take precedence over his substance abuse, but he was convinced that he needed to go to drug rehab first. In the end, though, it didn’t matter because no place would take him. Either they had no room, or as soon as he told them he’d committed a felony and was a registered sex offender, they said they couldn’t treat him.
With every rejection, John’s anger mounted. He cussed and paced around her living room with frustration, and it was all Cathy could do to try to soothe him so he could make the next call.
“It’s the same old thing,” he groused. “I can’t get any help.”
“We’re going to keep trying,” Cathy said.
John made more calls the next couple of days with no luck, growing so discouraged that he finally gave up. She tried calling a few places herself, but they wouldn’t talk to anyone but the adult who needed to be admitted.
Meanwhile, John was complaining about the side effects of his new medications: Effexor, an antidepressant, and Lamictal, an antiseizure medication for his mania. He said he felt mentally revved up and wasn’t sleeping, which didn’t surprise Cathy; he’d been pacing back and forth in her condo, flushed in the face, and taking her dog on walks around the lake for five hours at a time. Poor Hallie, a ten-year-old beagle-shepherd mix, was so exhausted that Cathy and her husband finally told John to give the pooch a rest.
Cathy decided not to push him too hard to make more calls because she’d already seen some improvement with the new meds. But on the evening of February 23, he showed her a rash on his stomach, chest and arms. Given his persistent manic symptoms, she agreed he should stop taking the pills until she could follow up with the doctor. After his grandmother was hospitalized again, she and John drove the two hours north to Los Angeles County to see her. They didn’t get back until after one in the morning, on February 25, so Cathy never got to make that call.
While she was still out looking for her son on the trails that evening, he finally called her back, around five-thirty. “I’m on my way home,” he said. “I should be there in a little bit.”
John had spent five years in state prison after pleading guilty to committing forcible lewd acts and false imprisonment on a thirteen-year-old girl, who lived next door. Although he initially denied any wrongdoing, he finally admitted to his family that he’d hit the girl, but he still insisted he’d “never touched her sexually.” Bolstered by a concurring recommendation from the psychiatrist who had originally diagnosed John as bipolar, Cathy pleaded with the court for mental-health treatment and probation. She’d always thought the girl next door was troubled and had an unconsummated crush on her son, so she believed his story. However, the request for probation was rejected, and even after he signed the plea deal, John’s entire family believed that he’d been wrongfully prosecuted and inadequately represented by his attorney.
During John’s time in prison, he had a psychotic break and was sent to a state mental facility. At the time, he told Cathy about some of the paranoid, homicidal and delusional thoughts that were going through his mind. But this time was different. This time, he’d been shielding her from the worst of it. This time, he didn’t tell her about the compulsions that had been driving his recent behavior, so she had no clue that he was following through on his violent urges during those walks around the lake.
Although Cathy felt somewhat relieved to get John’s call that night, she turned around and headed home, too anxious to finish her usual ninety-minute run. After taking a shower, she and her husband decided to wait on dinner until John got back. But as the minutes ticked by, Cathy was too upset to eat. When he still hadn’t shown up by seven-thirty, she turned to her husband and broke into tears.
“This is killing me,” she said. “I can’t take this.”
Where is he? she wondered. What is he doing out there?
Chapter 2
About five miles east of Cathy’s condo, in the cloistered community of Poway, Kelly and Brent King were just as, if not more, worried about their seventeen-year-old daughter, Chelsea. The pretty strawberry blonde, with blue eyes and a warm smile, had gone for a run on those very same trails that afternoon, and she hadn’t come home for dinner either.
Poway, an affluent, white, family-oriented suburb of San Diego, called itself “The City in the Country” with good reason. Here, where the mountainous surroundings provided a protective psychological barrier of seclusion, residents had the illusory feel of living in a gated community where the bad guys from the big city didn’t have the punch code to get in.
Even the landscape felt safe. Tall eucalyptus and pine trees lined the main thoroughfares; the lush, leafy medians were planted with yellow and orange daisies; and the homes, pockets of which sold for more than $1 million, sat on generous parcels set back from the roadway, with a benevolent backdrop of rolling green hills, peppered with beige boulders.
Deemed one of the best places to retire by U.S. News, Poway was the kind of tight-knit community where the Rotary Club, churches, temples and the PTA ruled the roost, and where urban crimes, such as murder and rape, were so rare they barely registered on the demographic pie charts used to characterize the quiet lifestyle of its nearly fifty thousand residents.
Chelsea