Was this here all along and I missed it? Could John really have done what they’re saying?
Cathy kept hoping that they would find Chelsea, that she would end up being alive somewhere, or if something bad had happened to her, that John had had nothing to do with it.
Did John get back with his drug friends, and did they all do this together? I know how sick he is, but I just can’t see him doing this, not in his right mind, anyway.
But he isn’t in his right mind.
After everything she’d been through—including her own molestation by a male family member when she was nine, and being raped by a stranger when she was twenty-four—she just couldn’t believe that her own son could do something like this to a teenage girl.
How could he, with a close family of women who loved, supported and nurtured him, and for whom he seemed to care as well?
Over the next two days, Cathy locked herself in the condo. The reporters finally stopped knocking on the door after the police advised her to post a handmade sign on the front gate that said: We have no statement at this time. Please stay off our property. But camera crews continued to shine lights into her windows to catch a glimpse of what she was doing inside—even in her bedroom.
Even though a crisis counselor from the Scripps Health system, for which Cathy worked, told her by phone to shut off the TV, she couldn’t stop herself from watching the news.
“I had to, because I was going crazy,” she recalled.
Then, on the afternoon of Tuesday, March 2, Cathy saw that the searchers had found Chelsea’s body. The poor girl had been there all along, buried in a shallow grave on the south shore of Lake Hodges. Cathy broke down crying hysterically.
The next two weeks were a blur. She could not stop vomiting or walking around like a zombie, unable to sleep, as her mind zigzagged with emotions ranging from horror to confusion, disbelief to guilt, and a deep, deep sadness.
Chapter 6
John Albert Gardner Jr. was born on April 9, 1979, in Culver City, California, after having a rough time in the womb. Cathy Osborn had had a pretty difficult pregnancy—her third, after daughters Shannon and Sarina—and struggled to find food that would stay down. She got so thin that she had to buy clothes in the girls’ department.
Not surprisingly, John was a colicky baby, unusually active and finicky. But twenty-four-year-old Cathy tried to take her baby’s problems in stride, as she’d learned to do at home and in her training as a nurse. As her mother’s oldest child, she had become the matriarch of a large, extended family that continued to grow both in size and dysfunction as the years progressed.
While her three sisters and two brothers were growing up, she took care of them when her mother, who suffered from severe depression and possibly undiagnosed bipolar disorder, wasn’t up to the task. This dynamic groomed Cathy early and often to become a lifelong caretaker for every troubled member of her family—her son, John, in particular. As Cathy’s siblings got older and had children of their own, she often took care of them as well, even becoming the temporary legal guardian to her sister Christina’s two children.
After moving in with John’s father, who was also named John Albert Gardner, Cathy got pregnant and periodically took care of John Sr.’s two daughters as well. And when John Sr. suffered a work injury that caused severe back pain and put him on disability, she had to take care of him too.
Suffice it to say, Cathy had her hands full, working full-time, going to school to become a nurse, and being a mother to everyone, but she assumed that job because she was the most stable, responsible and capable maternal figure in her family.
Working eight hours a day with a two-hour commute, however, left her feeling like she was never home. And understandably, what little time she had for her son and the rest of her immediate family was spread thin amongst this rather expansive network.
“I don’t feel embarrassed about anything I did. I did the best I could,” Cathy recalled. “I felt bad I didn’t have all the tools. If I could go back and change things, boy, there would be a whole lot of things I would change.” Rather than telling her kids to eat their vegetables, she said, she might have tried to spend more time reading to them and doing fun things, for example. She might also “have been more alert to some of the things that came across as more problematic, and more forceful about making sure there was follow-up.”
The family called Cathy’s son “Little John,” “Li’l John,” (which he spelled “Lil”), and sometimes “Baby John,” to avoid confusion with his father, who went by “Big John” or his stage name as a professional guitar player, “Dirty John,” or “DJ” for short. When John Jr. grew up, he insisted on calling himself “John Albert Gardner III,” despite the fact that his grandfather had a different middle name. Even in his twenties and thirties, John Jr. still signed letters to his mother using these childhood nicknames, and some family members still referred to him as “Li’l John.”
Years later, John Jr. told others that he felt he never got enough of his mother’s attention.
“It’s not that she didn’t love him. It’s not that she didn’t want to spend the time with him,” recalled Cynthia, Cathy’s youngest sister. “But she was trying to achieve something and get somewhere that was better than where she came from.”
John Jr. wasn’t lacking for female attention. He had a close network of his four sisters, three aunts and many cousins while he was growing up, many of whom shared special relationships with him. Shannon was his moral compass, for example, and Sarina was his confidante. He also had an unusually close relationship with his aunt Cynthia, who was only eleven years older, a relationship that took a bizarrely intimate turn in his late twenties.
While this big extended family provided support and love to John Jr., it also came with certain drawbacks. Dysfunctional on many levels, its complex mix of genetic and environmental risk factors—including addiction, alcoholism, physical abuse, mental illness, mental disorders (such as autism and Asperger’s syndrome), a rotating series of father figures, repeated moves from house to house, financial instability (including multiple bankruptcies), molestation and incest—made for an extremely weak foundation. Some of the same elements of sexual dysfunction ran through both sides of John’s extended family, so he had it coming and going.
Recognizing that she came from a family with roots in small-town USA that had little or no secondary education, Cathy tried to reach for higher goals and to serve as a good example for her children. After she finished her associate’s degree in nursing, she went on to obtain a master’s, and eventually became California’s legislative chairwoman of the American Psychiatric Nurses Association.
Cathy made sure to teach her children manners, emphasizing the importance of social etiquette and knowing which knife and fork to use, and urged them to get a good education. As a result, her daughters Shannon and Sarina were successful: Shannon became a movie studio executive and mother of one boy and Sarina made the dean’s list when she returned to college later in life, after raising a son and an autistic daughter.
“I learned to be a survivor, and I expect my kids to be survivors, no matter what,” Cathy said.
But her son seemed to have a rough time from the very start. “John somehow missed the lessons,” Cathy said.
Despite all that his mother, sisters and grandmother tried to do to make his life healthy and safe, this “confluence of weirdness” and these negative influences created “an air of pathology” for him that outweighed any resilience his sisters may have inherited, said Dr. Saul Levine, professor of clinical psychiatry at Rady Children’s Hospital and the University of California, San Diego Medical Center. Levine never treated John Jr. but was familiar with the case.
These factors all manifested into “the perfect storm,” if you will, making for a very troubled and potentially dangerous individual who would ultimately get in trouble