Lost Girls. Caitlin Rother
smitten, he introduced himself on a break and asked her name. She was a bit embarrassed at first, but she had to admit he was pretty cute; part of her couldn’t help but enjoy the attention. He asked her out, but as a twenty-one-year-old mother of two, she wasn’t looking for a relationship.
“You know what? I have kids and I work all the time,” she told him.
But he was charming and persistent. Within a couple of weeks, he had her phone number, and within a month, she had a crush on him too.
It turned out he was divorced and had two daughters, just like her, so they had a few things in common. Little did she know that this attractive, charismatic, funny and talented man had a dark side—and a troubled family history of his own.
John Albert Gardner Sr. was born in Inglewood, California, on May 1, 1944, to John Egan Gardner and Esta Leona Adams.
Esta, who was originally from Texas, was still married to another man at the time, and she already had a son and two daughters. It’s unknown whether Esta was separated when she got pregnant, but according to family lore, her divorce wasn’t final until John was ten. John Egan Gardner disappeared soon after his son was born, so they never met, and Esta was left to raise the little rascal on her own.
“I figured he never got disciplined. His mother would cry whenever he did something bad,” said Deanna Gardner, John Sr.’s first wife.
As John Sr. got older, his mother couldn’t control him and eventually sent him to a reform school out in the desert.
He met Deanna a few months shy of her seventeenth birthday in the summer of 1963, when she was watching his band, the Emeralds, audition for a dance at Hawthorne High School. A nineteen-year-old singer who looked like James Dean, John Sr. had recently graduated from Hawthorne. He was a lanky six feet tall, weighed a whopping 130 pounds, and waved his arms and legs around when he performed. John told her he’d taught himself to play piano, guitar and bass guitar, and also how to write music and sing. He even wrote her a song, which made her swoon.
They eloped as soon as Deanna finished high school. She moved into his house in Culver City, which they shared with his mother, a hypochondriac and a hoarder, who stacked the rooms with piles of trash, newspapers and dirty plates with moldy food. John’s mother had once worked for an aerospace company but had gotten sick, went on disability and never worked again, a similar fate to the one he would later follow.
John Sr.’s brother and sister helped clean the house before Deanna moved in, but they didn’t touch the walls and ceiling of John’s bedroom, which were covered with names and phone numbers scrawled in black Magic Marker. Still, Deanna was quite happy to leave her family’s home, where between the ages of eight and thirteen, she had been molested by her father.
After six months, the newlyweds moved into their own rental house, and Deanna got pregnant. From the way John Sr. had interacted with his nieces and nephews, she thought he’d be a good father, but she was mistaken. While she was still pregnant, he made comments like, “If this baby doesn’t learn not to touch things by the time it’s crawling, I’m going to knock it across the room.”
Deanna thought he was kidding until their first daughter, Mona*, was born in June 1967, and she soon realized that her husband expected babies to act like adults and couldn’t stand to hear the sound of one crying. When Mona was six weeks old, John Sr. stuck her in the closet in her infant seat and closed the door, thinking it would make her stop bawling. Another day, John leaped out of bed and spanked her little thighs for wailing. Deanna screamed for him to stop, but John just pushed her out of the room and locked the door.
The next morning, both of Mona’s legs were black and blue.
“Look what you did to the baby!” Deanna cried.
But John wouldn’t own up to what he’d done, let alone apologize for it. “I thought you did that to her,” he retorted.
John didn’t drink much alcohol when they first met, but once he turned twenty-one and started playing in bars with the band, he drank and smoked pot at least five nights a week with his buddies. He worked days as a product manager for an electrical components manufacturer, and sometimes he brought his boss home for lunch and mixed drinks. John’s coworkers also saw him drinking in his truck during breaks at work. It was never beer, only hard liquor, and when he was drunk, he was a different man who often didn’t remember later what he’d done.
One day, he had a bad hangover and grabbed Mona so hard he left a handprint on her rib cage. Deanna, who had come home on a break from work, was so furious she grabbed the baby and took her back to work.
“He wasn’t a very good father,” Deanna said. “He didn’t have a father, so he really didn’t know the role of a father.”
Deanna got pregnant a second time, and prayed to God, “If he hurts this one, I’m going to kill him.” But after giving her options some serious thought, she decided it would be better to leave him, instead.
So Deanna gathered up her courage and moved out when she was four months pregnant with their second daughter, Melissa*. Their divorce became final at the end of 1971.
Chapter 7
Cathy and John Sr. fell in love, fast and hard. They’d been dating only a couple of months before she moved into the same house in Culver City that he had shared with Deanna.
Shortly after Cathy and John started living together, Deanna got married. When she and her new husband left their jobs, they sent Mona and Melissa to live with Cathy and John Sr. for at least six months. Deanna’s girls came back periodically, together or one at a time; Cynthia, Cathy’s youngest sister, often came for short stays as well. At times, all five girls shared one bedroom.
“It was fabulous,” Cathy recalled. “They had each other. We did things as a family ... go to the park, go to the beach and go fishing.”
However, Cathy said, John was drinking quite a bit, and because he wasn’t a morning person, “if they woke him up, he’d go into anger pretty quickly.”
She and John Sr. had been together for about eighteen months and were getting along well, until Cathy got pregnant. Then things changed.
John Sr. had gotten a DUI and lost his license, so Cathy had to drive him to work, which made him feel less of a man. He was drunk one day she had to take him to work, and he started ranting. Flinging his arm out as he complained, “you were supposed to turn that way,” he accidentally smacked Cathy in the face, giving her a black eye.
After her tumultuous first marriage, Cathy said, she “totally freaked.” She knew it was an accident, but she also knew that “if he’d been sober, it wouldn’t have happened.” It was a red flag, but she really loved him. Like his first wife, Deanna, Cathy hoped, too, that once the baby came, he’d stop drinking and acting out. Looking back later, she realized this was “magical thinking.”
When Cathy found out they were going to have a baby, John Sr. offered an awkward marriage proposal. “Well, you’re pregnant, and I think I should do the right thing,” he said.
But even though Cathy was in love with John Sr. and wanted to spend the rest of her life with him, she declined, telling him that she wouldn’t marry him as long as he was still drinking. “I don’t want to get married just because I’m pregnant,” she said.
At first, Cathy hadn’t even known she was pregnant with Li’l John, because she was on birth control pills. The pills made her sick and she’d been throwing up, so she went to the doctor, complaining of continuous nausea, vomiting and some bleeding. He gave her a pregnancy test, which came back negative. After several more negative tests in the next six weeks, a final test was positive, so they figured she’d been pregnant the entire time.
Diagnosed with hyperemesis gravidarum, a severe form of morning sickness, she continued to vomit daily, until the fifth month,