Читать книгу Lost Girls - Caitlin Rother - Страница 16

Chapter 10

In John Jr.’s early teens, his psychiatrist, Dr. Divyakant “Divy” Kikani, determined that his symptoms were more serious than just ADHD, citing traits of conduct disorder and the paranoia that John had shown since he was ten. Kikani, who saw John as a patient from ages fourteen to sixteen, began treating him for bipolar disorder.

By the time John was sixteen, some of his earlier depression had lifted, but he was still experiencing mood swings, as well as a certain level of mania and euphoria. Although he was easily distracted and could act impulsively, he seemed pretty consistently happy overall. Depending on what was going on in his life and how well his meds were working, he saw Kikani every two weeks or every six months.

In addition to the bipolar symptoms that John exhibited, other typical signs of the disorder include a high sex drive, which can go into overdrive during a manic state, delusions of grandeur and of superhuman powers or skills, false beliefs that can’t be dissuaded away and a tendency toward poor judgment.

At school, John also had regular sessions with a therapist. When John wasn’t progressing in individual counseling, the therapist asked Cathy if she and Dan would be willing to do family therapy. Dan wasn’t, so the therapist conducted joint sessions with Cathy and John, saying they’d made more progress there than in all the previous therapy put together. In these sessions, Cathy told her son that she felt uncomfortable when he cursed and acted out of control, and John told his mother that he felt hurt she was never satisfied with him and was always trying to improve him. He said he didn’t know what else to do but yell when he got angry, to which she countered that she hoped they could discuss what was wrong before it got to that point. John said that he’d tried, but she seemed to have no tolerance for his expressions of anger. Cathy replied that she would work on that if he would work on his anger.

After that, John started going for walks when he felt the feelings boiling up. These walks were even incorporated into his special ed program as a way to dissipate his frustration before he exploded in the classroom.

“His angry tone at home started decreasing, and he started making friends,” Cathy said. “I was just really excited,” adding that she also tried to be less critical and to stop harping on his social skills, which seemed to help him relax, even though he still wasn’t very socially sophisticated.

“I needed to grieve that my son was not going to be normal, and I’d put a lot of pressure on him to measure up to something he wasn’t capable of doing,” she said. “That was a good turning point for us. I really started lightening up on him.”

From the outside, friends recognized how complicated John’s relationship was with Cathy. “One day, it would be the best relationship in the world. They were super close. They could talk about anything,” said Jenni Tripp, who dated John for eighteen months, starting in his senior year. “Then he would change and she would turn into a ‘goddamned motherf---ing bitch.’ There was no change in Cathy—Cathy was pretty much constant. It was John that changed. But it was little things that could spark him off. If she had twenty dollars, [he felt] she should give it to him,” then he’d get furious if she said no.

“It could have been a whole lot better if John could have given her more credit because she worked really hard and she did try to take care of him,” Jenni said. “When there’s that kind of child who needs some structure and discipline, she did what she was supposed to as a mom: She tried to get him to take his meds and do the right thing. I don’t think she tried to control him. I actually think she gave him a lot of freedom.”

“Cathy mom,” as Jenni still calls her, was “a little bit” of an enabler, but “she was always there. I think that Cathy was a good part of his life... . That was another reason I broke up with him. I got tired of trying to mother him.”

After so many years of struggling with emotional crises, John’s life began to improve dramatically. Dan introduced John to hockey, which John found he was skilled at and loved so much that he continued to play even after high school. He also played soccer and baseball and served as manager of his high school’s varsity basketball team, the Fighting Scots, in 1993.

John also started doing better in school. He got an A in the Regional Occupational Program law enforcement course, which tried to match kids with careers. And, for the first time, he found an academic subject that he felt good at: mathematics.

Even though he graduated with career goals of becoming a police officer or a math teacher, his transcript shows that the only A he earned in math was in his ninth-grade algebra course, receiving B’s and C’s in his other math classes. That said, he did earn an academic excellence award for outstanding achievement on the 1996 Golden State Examination in geometry.

“He loved math,” Jenni said. “He wanted to be a high-school teacher, because, I think, he didn’t want to get out of the high school. It was his ticket in—not for girls—just to be a kid... . Once he gets to be fifty, he’ll never act fifty. He’ll act twenty for his whole life.”

It was his math teacher who discovered that John had a talent for singing, just like his father, John Sr. With a four-octave vocal range before he became a chain-smoker, the teenager got involved with the school choir, went caroling in Lake Arrowhead Village and landed a role in the musical Oliver.

“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 led to a fight between Cathy and Dan, who hadn’t been getting along so well either. She moved out with John the next day to allow him to finish high school with a roof over his head. She expected Dan to get past his anger and apologize. When he didn’t, she went back to the house under the guise of picking up her stuff, hoping they could mend fences.

However, they both realized they wanted different things, and she eventually filed for divorce. Because it was amicable, she sent John to deliver the paperwork to Dan personally so she didn’t have to pay a federal marshal to do it.

Despite his self-reports that he graduated high school in 1997 with a grade point average of 3.2, John’s transcript shows he finished with a GPA of 2.9, after attempting to complete 265 units and finishing only 247.5. Although he excelled in the electives, getting an A+ in advanced ceramics and A’s in choir and drama, he also did well with A’s in government/economics, job skills, a course titled “transitions,” and his eleventh-grade English course. He got F’s, however, in chemistry, English/myth literature and integrated science.

Jenni and John continued to date after graduation, and he often came back to campus to visit her and his other friends, and sing with the choir. It was his unauthorized presence on school grounds that got him into trouble with the law for the first time.

The school security guard had repeatedly warned him, “You need to have a reason to be here, and Jen is not a valid reason,” but John continued to come, anyway. The guard finally told John he would be arrested the next time he showed up. When John defiantly returned, the guard followed through.

John was charged with disturbing the peace and unlawfully coming on school grounds to disrupt activities. The prosecutor dropped the first count in a plea bargain, John pleaded guilty to disturbing the peace and received probation with a fine. But that still didn’t stop him. He came back a couple more times, stopping only when Jenni broke up with him for good.

John had always had a roving eye, which caused him and Jenni to break up twice for cheating. To her knowledge, he’d slept with only one girl the first time—one of her friends, who confessed to her. Jenni took him back after they’d spent a month apart.

About six months later, she learned he’d been cheating again from another friend he’d slept with, and this time “it was more people than I could count on my fingers. I want to say it was the teenage hormone thing—somebody wants me, let’s do it.”

Their breakup occurred at the high school after his arrest, which he continued to visit in spite of the “stay away” notice he’d been issued. “He sauntered in with that carefree smile, and I threw my class ring at him [which he’d given to her], and it hit him in his head,” she recalled.

“What the hell?” he asked her.

When he saw one of the girls he’d cheated with was standing next to Jenni, he realized what was going on.

“Ohhh,” he said.

He tried to talk to Jenni, but she didn’t want to listen, so he walked out of the room, crying. A couple of days later, she agreed to talk to him, but only because she wanted to find out how many girls he’d been with. She learned that he’d been cheating on her for quite some time, including one night he’d had sex with five girls at a friend’s party.

In spite of all this, they remained very close friends. “I was never going to take that again,” she said. “I deserve better than that. I can love him, but I don’t have to be in love with him.”

John began to decompensate after high school, while he was still living with Cathy and taking general education classes at Crafton Hills College for a couple of months. Things weren’t going well at school, because Cathy had thought his high school was going to send transcripts or alert the community college that he needed services for special education. That never happened, though. After agreeing to get back on his meds, John decided he didn’t want to, after all. He dropped out of school and moved to Los Angeles in October 1997 to live with his cousin Jason.

He seemed to settle in better there, taking courses at El Camino College, near Torrance, and working at In-N-Out Burger. Excited to be on his own, he knew he could always come home to live with his mother again, if things didn’t work out.

Six months later, he lost his job for goofing off at work, and he moved back in with Cathy, who had purchased a condo on Matinal Road in Rancho Bernardo, in March 1998.