LOST GIRLS-Caitlin Rother

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year apart. The community's desperate search led authorities to John Albert Gardner, the third, a brutal predator hiding in Playing Sight Now. Pulitzer nominated author Kitlyn Rother delivers an incisive, heartbreaking true crime thriller that touches our deepest fears. The book that we are featuring this evening is Lost Girls by my special guest journalist and author Caitlyn Rother. Welcome back to the program, and thank you for agreeing to

this interview. Caitlyn Rother, Thank it for having me on again. Thank you very much for coming back on. This is a very very interesting case and again very much a true crime, very heartbreaking, but still a fascinating story for those listening now. You start off your book and you dedicate a fair amount of your book, and I understand why, and true crime fans will as well. The subject of this book is John Gardner. Take us way back, Take us back to the very beginning. His formulas of years,

his parents describe his early life. Take us back, please, Well, I think.

his mother but also onto his father's side as well. And basically what we have here is a whole world of molestation and rape and mental illness and addiction, geographical and financial instability. It's just abuse and it just was not a not a great family to be born into. And when John Gardner was born, you know, he had problems in the womb even before he came into this world, so you know, it was clear that, you know, looking back, there was something wrong. He was born, he was colleguy,

he had all kinds of problems. He was immediately a hyperactive child and you know, went to nursery school and ended up biting a little girl and they wanted him to be drugged. His mom didn't want to drug him because he was only three, and she you know, had to end up drugging him with Riddlin because he was diagnosed with ADHD attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and it just

got worse from there. So his father was also you know, physically abusive to him, as when he was ten months old, he beat him, you know, while the mom was at the store, came home, found her baby, you know, covered in bruises and she stormed out, and you know, it just was not good. Father was a drunk and he ended up using drugs, and you know, the mother ended up leaving him. But it was you know, he didn't like the John Gardner was not happy with you know,

going through the divorce. He had a lot of problems. He was very troubled. He had a problem with self hate. Even at age six, he was talking about how much he hated himself. His parents were going through divorce. He tried to he was threatening to commit suicide and jump off an apartment building at age nine. So, I mean, it was clear from the very beginning that this guy was really really troubled, and his mother, really, I felt, you know, did it a lot of whatever she could.

She was a psychiatric nurse, and she tried to get him medicated. She you know, took him to get hospitalized three times at ages nine and ten, and she tried to do the best she could do. But you know, there was only so much you can do when you have a kid like that. So anyway, he grew up. He developed bipolar disorder as a teenager. He tried, you know, a multitude of medications and soon he got too big.

You know, to force him to take the medication, and he didn't like taking him, as many people with bipolar disorder, you know, don't. But he also had pretty serious side effects, so you know, he actually had to be hospitalized from some of these side effects. It wasn't a small thing that he didn't want to take them like many bipolar patients say, oh, I don't want it lose to high.

It wasn't really that. It was really more serious, but he doesn't want to take him anymore, and it just got worse from there.

have you know, your bipolar and your hyperactive. You know, I'm guessing that you're going to have a mix of reactions. You know that maybe someone who only has one of those problems might not have. So I think it was probably also tricky to give him the right medication. And ironically, when I went to go visit him in prison, he told me he finally was on a medication that worked for him and he finally feels, you know, okay again. So that's really sad.

that this is not my opinion. I'm not going to talk about what my opinion is in terms of that because this is such an inflammatory subject in this particular case, I just kind of want the book to speak for itself. But what I feel is that there, you know, she did a lot of whatever she could do, and there are many people who blamed her for this whole thing, And that's part of the reason why I wanted choice book was to really get in there and see what did she do, what could she have done? What did

she know? What didn't she know? She claims she didn't

think he was capable of it. So I'm not sure, to be honest, whether you can say she was in denial completely, although you know because he told her, for example, you know he didn't molest in this molest this thirteen year old girl in two thousand when he went to prison the first time, and most of the family believed him, So it wasn't just her, it was the whole family, you could say, was in denial because they believed him and they saw a whole other side to him, that

he was this nurturing and protective guy, and yes, he was troubled, but they didn't think he was capable of it, and they had to find out that there was DNA on these panties that were Chelsea's before they finally were able to accept that this is who he was. And I think that that's because his mother was raped and molested and she was a victim too, and she couldn't bring herself to see her son as doing the same things that were done to her. And so yes, I mean,

I guess you can call that denial. I'm just saying I don't. I just don't. I just want to be careful with the terminology.

and in two thousand he is convicted. But tell us if there is any according to your research, any predilection or if he is inclined towards some kind of sexual offense before this two thousand, Is there any indication what his a barant sexual desires might be before he is actually arrested in two thousand.

did have an appetite for that. And she said it was ironic that he was actually very inclined to try to please her, and that's she that's part of the reason why she had a hard time believing this, because she didn't see him as the kind of person who would ever rape someone, because that's not who he was to her. However, he did cheat on her, and he cheated on her. They broke up, and they got back together, and he cheated on her again. He later told his

aunt that he had cheated on his girlfriend. I don't know that I believe this, but supposedly eighty times, so he definitely cheated. He seemed to have no boundaries, you know, when it came to having a girlfriend and going and messing around on the side. When he had the second girlfriend, that's when this incident happened with his thirteen year old neighbor. Now he to this day this is another thing that's ironic. He has, you know, acknowledged and admitted to in court

raping and killing two teenage girls. Yet to this day, he still denies molesting this thirteen year old neighbor because I think it's somehow in his mind if he can rationalize, you know, that he was sent to prison for a wrongly you know, wrongly convicted the first time around. He wouldn't be where he is today because this ruined his whole life. So he's got this whole victim pathology and so you know, yeah, he definitely had some problems here with sexually. And he told me, he said, you know,

I hit her in the head. I wanted to kill her, but I stopped myself. And so he's willing to admit that to me, But he refused to admit that he stuck his hand down her pants and molested this thirteen year old girl. I said, well, so she ran across the street with her zipper down with one shoe. What about that? He goes, well that, you know, we're just going to have to agree to disagree. So twisted, kind of twisted.

to me. But basically, he had a breakdown in while he was in prison, basically threatening to kill the guards and the judge that put him there and everyone else who you know, because he was wrongly convicted blah blah blah. So you know, that's pretty significant that he was not designated as a sexually violent predator when he was released. He was he was designated as a low risk offender

while he was in prison, he was obviously dangerous. So that's one of the main things I want people to see that is wrong with our system here in California. The way these people are evaluated when they leave. They clearly screwed that up because they're you know, if you're designated as a sexually violent predator as he was, as I think he should have been based on those threats, you know, he would have been sent someplace else for treatment.

And you know, it's possible to just keep somebody there, you know, indefinitely, but it costs one hundred and eighty thousand dollars a year, so they don't just do that to anybody because's too expensive. So these people are dangerous, they're getting released and they're on the street. And you know,

he wasn't medicated. So while he was not medicated, he would end having, you know, episodes like that where he would get violent, He would have no impulse control and he would get very angry and he couldn't control his anger.

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a good idea. You know, that's unfet I mean, even when you're not mentally ill or really dangerous stroke, what it does to people makes people violent and act crazy. So when you're already you know, imbalanced like that and you're you're drinking, he drank what sixteen beers the night before he killed amber So and he was you know, using drugs. It was just crazy amounts of stuff. I mean, he was really did everything to excess.

they can violate that parole. So tell us how on earth he even got parole? Why would they thought he would be you know, he'd be a good candidate for parole and then what are some of the conditions that they would be. They would he would be applied to John Gardner once he was released.

he didn't. Well, clearly there was a mix up because he had that breakdown where he was threatening to kill people. And I think that was a major mistake on the state's part, and that's that's something where he should have been sent someplace else, but he wasn't. So he was designated a low risk offender. So somebody who's threatened to kill people being designated as a low risk offender to

me is yet another problem. He was given a GPS bracelet to wear, but not until you know, a couple of years later, and so you know, he was violated. I'm sorry he was arrested or cited and arrested for smoking marijuana and so that to me probably you know, and people that I spoke with were wondering, well, why didn't he get violated for that? Well, he was arrested, something happened. I tried calling the parole officer to get an answer from that, but you know, nobody wants to answer.

Now that two girls are dead, nobody wants to you know, be responsible for that. So it was the choice so that somebody made, probably the parole officer, to not officially quote unquote violate him. So and what I was told is, well, you know, the prisons are crowded, and this was not a violent offense. This was not a rape. This had

nothing to do with being any molesting any girls. And so you know they're busy now freeing people from prison because they're overcrowded, and they're putting people back into the jails. So I'm sure it had to do with money and crowding. And that wasn't the kind of thing that's that's just not what the parole officers are doing, right, They're trying

to catch the more serious ones. The other problem was that he's got this bracelet on, but nobody's tracking him in real time because they don't rack low risk offenders in real time, and so people think that they're secure with these people running around with the bracelets, but in fact we're not because nobody's nobody's watching them. Those those are not used to stop crimes. They're you know, they're used later to go, oh, I guess, I guess we

missed that, you know, which is just ridiculous. And then you know, he also went onto prison grounds, which is a felony for somebody who's a convicted felon to go onto prison grounds when they're not supposed to. So there were a number of times you know that he could have been violated and sent back. And you know, and he's also using all these drugs, and you know, he claims, well, you know, I got a parole officer at one point

who just ruined my life. He's I had this really good, high paying job and in LA which is two counties away, for forty nine dollars an hour because he was an electrician, and I had a girlfriend who was the mother of my you know, two small boys, and I was not only I lost my relationship, I couldn't go see her because the parle officer told me I had to quit this job because I couldn't work out of the county, which meant I couldn't go see my girlfriend, which also

meant I couldn't afford to send her any money to pay for the you know, support for these boys, couldn't and lost his relationship. He had to move because he couldn't afford his apartment, he had to get a different job, which paid probably about a third of what he was making, and he ended up being homeless and living out of

his truck. Now, you know, in the defense of somebody like this, I'm not excusing, and I'm just trying to explain that you take somebody who's mentally unstable and you caused them to lose financial stability, you know, any kind of home life, any kind of relationship. He's not allowed to live with his mother because his mother lives too close to his school. You know, he's basically going to

disintegrate and go out and attack somebody. That's another problem that I found in my reporting with the system that we have. You know, nobody wants to have these people live in their neighborhood, which I understand, but people need to also understand that if you make life too difficult for these people, they're going to come out and attack you. So it's not smart, you know, And there's no such thing as you know, locking these people up and throwing

away the key. That they don't want to pay for it, and they don't want to have them in their neighborhood. They don't want to deal with these people, and they don't want to deal with the problem. And so it's nothing's going to change unless people start paying attention to some of the things I revealed in this book. It made me angry to find all this stuff out.

Now he was registered as his grandmother, so that's where he was supposed to be living. And a lot of people thought, well, he was living in his mother's when he wasn't living in his mother's But he was in fact going back and forth, which is allowed under the law. But it's you know, it's like driving through a loophole. It's not wrong, but it's not exactly what you're supposed to be doing under the spirit of the law. So I forgot your question. I'm sorry.

into things on purpose. And then he basically said to his mom, you know I need help, and she said, yes, I think you do need help. So he started, you know, trying to find a place to take him some kind of treatment facility. And he thought he should get drug treatment first. She thought he should get mental health treatment. He said, I think I need to deal with the

drugs first and then the other stuff will follow. But regardless, you know, he spent he spent time on the phone, and I couldn't really pin down exactly how many places he called, but she said she did sit there and watch him and listen to him do this at her place for at least a couple three days, trying to get placed into one of these treatment facilities, and nobody would take him because he was a sex offender, and so there are no beds in the county here where

we live. In San Diego that will take a sex offender, no mental health treatment facility, and no mental health treatment facility, sorry, substance abuse or mental health, there's no place for him to go. And so they went to a public facility, a psychiatric outpatient place, and he saw a psychiatrist and said, hey, you know, I think I might be as qualified as a fifty one fifty, which is someone who is deemed to be dangerous, you know, and danger of harming himself

for others. And because he was not found to be ready to go hurt somebody right now that second, they you know, the psychiatrist gave him some pills and sent him on his way, and about a week later he went and then tried to kill himself by doing a fatal a fatal binge, a near fatal binge of again math and probably cocaine and some street drugs and a

whole bunch of beer and trying to mix everything. He said he was actually trying to give himself a heart attack to kill himself, and it still didn't work, and then he ended up killing Chelsea like two weeks after that.

was you know, really popular. Everyone liked her, wanted to be her, were friends with her, and she was apparently, you know, really popular and a likable person who would everybody thought was going to go be something big someday. And she went running one afternoon, it was a Thursday afternoon, and she when she didn't come home the wish at the time that she normally did. She's very reliable, very dependable,

always kept a very you know certain schedule. Her parents and knew something was wrong immediately, and they tracked her phone to her car, and her father drove over there and saw it in the parking lot of this community park where it was right off these this trail network, which it's this very large area called the of course, I'm gonna forget it. This is the ranch of Bernardo Community Park, but it's attached to the San Diegito River Valley.

It's really big and beautiful and there's it's right around a lake called Lake Hodges. And I went up there to kind of retrace her steps, and it was actually kind of area. It's very big open area that there are trails that approach from different sides, and there's houses that are around it. But it's actually just a huge open area with water and trails and trees and bushes. So there's some areas where you know, the houses are

pretty far up and away. So basically she went out running and he grabbed her.

had a real affinity with wolves. And she was wearing dark clothing this one morning, and it was kind of a little bit sprinkly, and she was walking to school by herself, and for some reason, she decided to take a different route to school. According to John Gardner, where he said he grabbed her. This is all we know.

She normally walked a different way. And what threw the police off is that there were two parents who were absolutely positive that they saw her right near the high school, walking with her hood up, laying one of those hoodies, and so she had had a two hundred dollars check in her pocket. She was on her way to go buy this lamb for the Future Farmers of America project that she was enrolled in, and she was really excited about getting this lamb. And then she never showed up

at school. So when her again, you know, her parents said, oh gosh, you know, she should have been home whereas she They called the police right away. And the difference between these two cases is that there was no last known point for her. So Chelsea had a car that they could trace, and they could see her cell phone was in there. You know. They came and opened it and they could see that she had changed clothes and had gone running, and so that's kind of what they figured.

She must have been running around somewhere on those trails, and that's when they went looking for her with Amber. You know, there were these sightings by these two parents, but they didn't know for sure, so they spent you know, they spent time looking around and searching around the high school for her, and they couldn't find her, and they had dogs they brought in and they couldn't find her, and there were some other sightings of her they thought,

you know, somewhere in the general area. They used a pretty narrow perimeter of searching through the the sex offenders who lived right around the school, and as it turned out, John Gardner was just outside that perimeter. He lived in

Escondido too, about two miles from the school. But they never they didn't search Flide enough, and so, you know, looking back at twenty twenty hindsight, you know, if they had just expanded their perimeter a little bit more around the school, you know, they probably would have at least interviewed him. But he completely got away with it, and he, you know, he just started drinking more and more and

was using the math more after that happened. And so you know, the two girls went missing almost a year apart, so clearly, and when he did that fatal drug bench it was on the year anniversary, so clearly it was you know, he was dealing with the aftermath of killing

that girl. So the difference between these two incidents, though, what he told me was in the first case, he was very angry at his girlfriend at the time because she was doing mass with these other guys and they were supposed to get together, and she didn't want to.

She want to hang out with these friends. And so he just sat there up all night drinking beer, getting more and more angry, and he went out in the morning with a gun and a knife in the car and he was driving around just looking for somebody that he was going to hurt. And he wasn't sure whether he was going to kill somebody or not, but he was going to, or whether he was going to use the gun or the knife, but that he was going

to use one of them. And he saw her walking to school alone down a street that was fenced in on both sides, and knew that she wasn't going to have anywhere to run, so he pulled up and told her to get in the car, and then he you know, threatened her and said, you know, get in the car, and so she did. So that was that was Amber.

And then with Chelsea. He had been hanging around that park all day again, drinking and talking to women, you know, and then he saw one he wanted and he said, I want to have sex to himself, he thought, and there was just a sudden impulse, I want to have sex, and so he ran after a different woman and he couldn't catch up to her, and so he saw Chelsea and he saw her come back again because it's a loop, and he grabbed her when he when she came back around,

because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and he wanted to have sex. And it was just like that boom, which is so sad, so sad that she was just happened to be there.

If I ever describe it, it's usually more about the autopsy or what have you, because you know, I always feel like, just out of respect to the victims' families that we don't really need to be gross and gruesome, and so I purposely did not go into those details.

couldn't find her. And so when Chelsea went missing, you know, the thing that I mentioned was different about the being the car in the parking lot. They immediately called out the search team and had them going out into that park. And the interesting thing about this was they were flyers that went out everywhere. There was suddenly every you know,

a page set up Chelsea's Light, Chelsea's Gone Missing. I think was probably the very early I don't remember exactly what it was called, that there was a search that went viral on Facebook and it went national and it went international and everybody was looking for Chelsea King. I mean, I've never seen anything like it. It just was astounding and it was, you know, unprecedented here in San Diego

that they were searching for her. They didn't know where she was, they hadn't found anything, you know, but they just kind of figured, well, she's she's just looks like foul play, right. They just kind of figured that right away. With Amber, they thought, oh, well she's a runaway. So they didn't go all out in the same way. And so by having everybody out searching for her, there was a guy who lived in the neighborhood over on the other side of the park, which and just keep in mind,

this is a huge, huge, expansive area. So there was a ridge overlooking the other way on the other side of the park, and he actually found a pair of her underwear, which you know, they didn't know was her underwear, but they found it right off the path where if you go into the neighborhood where near where his mom was lived, there was this pair of underwear. So he happened to be I think he was a retired law

enforcement guy, so he had called the police. The police came and picked it up and they ran those that pair of panties through the through the testing process over the weekend and got a very fast result. Because he had been in prison for that other molestation assault, his DNA was in the database and so they got a match between his DNA. There was some semen on there and some of her blood on the on the underwear, so they were able to arrest him. She was disappeared

on Thursday. They arrested him on Sunday, and they hadn't even found her body yet, but they arrested him and they found her a couple of days later, and then you know, four days after that, based on a tip. That's all they that's all the authorities would say. Authorities

were led to the remains of Amber Dubaw. So I immediately was wondering, I, you know, did was that Gardner and for six weeks, nobody would say anything, and then I thought, well, I guess it wasn't him, because they would have said so it turned out it was him. And that's the whole time that they were trying to link him to the murder, because he took them to the remains on a deal that they couldn't use his

you know, used that trip against him. They had to find independent evidence linking him to the murder.

King is? And the police said, can you tell us where Chelsea King is? And he wouldn't, And so his lawyers said, well, okay, they found Chelsea's body. It's too late now for you to tell us where Chelsea is. But did you have anything to do with Amber And after some prodding, he finally acknowledged that he did, and he said, you know, and I can tell you where her body is, but you're not going to be able to find her. I'm going to have to take you there.

So they made a deal, and you know, had this whole covert operation to sneak in out of the jail where you know, hopefully no one could see him because this was just such an enormous media case, And then he led the authorities up there. It took him a while to find where she was, where he had where he had buried her remains.

and I mean at the very least. Yeah, he told me he actually didn't really like thinking about it, So I'm not sure that he wanted to relive it, to be honest. I mean, I know what you're saying, because I know some killers are like that.

he's telling me the truth. But what he said was he wasn't necessarily wanting to kill Chelsea. But with Amber, he was very angry and wanted to hurt somebody and wanted to hurt them bad. So he wasn't necessarily intending to kill someone, but he definitely wanted to hurt somebody. So I think with Amber, he probably he thought he was going to enjoy it, I think, is what he said.

And then he said he didn't. And I don't know if he's just telling me that because he thinks that sounds better, because he does tend to tell people things that he thinks they want to hear. So he would tell the detectives. One thing he would tell Amber's mother something. He would tell probably me something, and he would probably tell the detective something else. That's kind of how he works.

this book. So I think he kind of knew what I'd been doing, and I'd been sending him letters, which are basically waivers so that we could get documents really so I could really tell this story. So I have to say, you know, he really did cooperate with this, and also, you know, I didn't pay him or his family or anything. But he really did want this story told, you know fully, because he told me he really did

want to see if things could be changed. That you know, he knew that he was where he belonged and that if he were out, he would just keep doing this, and so he needed to be where he was and he knew that. And so anyway, all that aside, I was still scared to go to talk to him because in court during the sentencing, you know, the victim's parents got up there and you know, blasted him as they

normally do, and blasted his mother. And there was one other victim who we haven't talked about, who was a twenty two year old college graduate student who was running and he grabbed her too and said he wanted her money, and she thought he was going to rape her. But since he didn't actually touch her tried to touch her, grab her you know, genitals or whatever, the police did not categorize it as a rape, but she definitely felt

it that's what he was wanting to do. But she got she was she had the experience in martial arts, and so she was able to pivot and smack him in the nose with her elbow and get away. And so while she was speaking during the sentencing hearing, she mentioned, you know, how is your nose? And you could just see his face wrapped into this almost cartoon like bizarre, you know, grimace, and he snarled, like all of a

sudden with anger. He was so angry that she had said this, because it was humiliating for him to have some girl claim that, you know, she basically got away by getting him in the nose, right, So he's we all saw that immediate anger flash. And so that's what I had in my head, and I thought, oh god, what if I say the wrong thing and he grabs me across the table and lunch just for my neck because there was no glass. This is this is a

segregated unit. But it's not death row. These are the these are the mentally unstable people that they can't put in them in the mainstream population. So Charles Manson is in the same unit, and Celebstropido, the guy who took J. C. Dugard. They're all the same unit. So there's no glass there, you know. He shook my hand. We sat across the table from each other. It was like six feet away. So I didn't sleep the night before, and it was you know, but I once I got there, you know,

he was actually very charming. He shook my hand, very friendly, and if I hadn't known who he was, you know, what he was capable of, I wouldn't have known just from talking to him. So we talked about you know what. Mostly what I wanted to do is focus on the

psychological aspects of what he was doing and why. And I you know, he told me he didn't want to talk about how he killed these girls, and I didn't really want to hear that anyway, so I didn't ask and he did end up volunteering some stuff that I didn't ask for, and so but but largely I thought, you know, normally, the way an interview goes, you start out with easy stuff and you kind of work up to the more, you know, difficult things to talk about, and it was kind of the other way around. He

was perfectly happy to talk about everything right away. So I just you know, I asked questions and just listen most of the time. And when I do an interview like that, you know, I tell my students, I teach journalism, I teach narrative nonfiction, They're like, well, do you confront these people? Do you tell them they're lying to you? I'm like, well, not really, you know, because you want

them to keep talking. You don't want to you don't want to challenge them, because that doesn't really do anybody any good. They're going to stop talking, You're not going to get your information. So I just sort of, you know, sometimes I do Devil's Advocate or I'll you know, if I notice that they're saying something that is definitely not true, I'll say, oh, well, but the detective says that you said this, you know, but now you're saying this, you know,

why is that? So? You know, basically we talked about why he picked Chelsea and why he picked Amber and what was going on in his mind. And I said, were these people to you or were they more like objects? And he says, no, there were people. I said, huh. And I just kind of was just asking questions, you know, and I tried not to let any kind of judgment, you know, get onto my face. And because I wanted him to just feel like he.

I could get caught. But he didn't tell the detectives that he told the detectives if they were lying to him when they said they had the panties, because he didn't believe them. So what happened was, you know, he had picked up Chelsea's clothes and put it in a like, made a bowl out of his T shirt, and put the clothes and the shoes and he was going to dump them all down into the storm drain, and he dropped those panties on his way out. It fell out. So, you know, I don't think he I don't know that

guilt is the right word for how he felt. But he clearly was a troubled person. You know, he was angry, and that's what he said. He was very angry. He was using drugs, and he didn't really have any kind of direction. He was messed up guy. So to be honest, I can't really tell you definitively what he was doing or thinking, but he was, you know, he had he had no direction. He didn't have a job, and if he did, he wasn't earning much. And I think he was unemployed at the time as a matter of fact.

And like I said, he totaled two cars and tried to you know, drug himself and drink himself to death. And I think he was a pretty you know, angry and unhappy person and was trying to get help.

because of budgetary budgetarya concerns. Tell us what in total, what are the some of the things that you have learned from this case, if there is any kind of good that can come from this, that some of those insights that you've seen that that may that may be of benefit to someone looking at this kind of individual again or this kind of case again, how it can be possibly helpful. Tell us what you did learn. What are those some of those insights that you did gain Well, I've pretty.

isn't fixed. But the problem with the evaluation they're apparently now it's supposed to be a third person to come in and break a tie like there was in his case. But there's one mental health person saying, you know, he should be let out and he's fine, and the other one saying, no, he isn't. There's now a third person to break the tie. I hope that works. I don't

know whether it will. There's also as part of that law something called a containment model, which is a way of monitoring these people once they're out, which is is more intensive, and there are more people who you know, are available as resources. However, to me, I don't know that that's going to be properly funded. California has a lot of problems with its budget, and the Chelsea's Law also would keep some of these people in jail, in

prison longer and on parole longer, which costs money. And I don't know how much money there's going to be left for funding this, you know, this monitoring and frankly, the people who would need to be hired to do the monitoring and all that costs money. And in order to make this model work, there's you know, software and various stuff that it's kind of complicated, but there's just a lot of things that cost money that I'm not

sure are going to be funded properly. And even though the governor says, oh, yes, yes it will, you know,

that's the budget is a mess. So there's that, And then there's also something that I've pointed out in the book that a sex Offender Management Board is a statewide group that has you know, looked at studies which shows kind of what I was talking about before that you know, if you have these people in places in situations where they're unstable and they don't have a good place to live, are not in a steady job, their lives are you know,

start and emotionally they start disintegrating, they are going to reoffend. And people need to get that through their head. And what these studies have shown is that you know, all of this money that's being spent in these laws that are being passed to restrict where they live are not effective. What the law, what they should be doing, is restrict where they go, you know, during the day. So for example, you know, so what if they live near a school, if they can't go to the school, you know, then

it doesn't matter. But just because they live near a school doesn't mean they're going to go to the school. He went to that park and that's where he killed Chelsea. So you know, it's more effective to restrict a park from a sex offender than it is to restrict someone from living in a certain place. You see what I'm saying. So those recommendations were ignored when they put Chelsea's law together, and they've been consistently ignored these studies in putting any

kinds of laws together. So I think people need to look more closely at the studies that have been done at these people, because you know, people don't want to spend money on locking them up anyway, but that's what most people want to do. They don't want to think about sexual offenders, and frankly, I didn't want to either. I thought this was an opportunity when this case broke, to really take a look at at an area that most people don't want to think about, and they don't

want they don't want to think about it. It's repulsive, and frankly it is to me too. I don't understand how how a grown man can, you know, go and rape and kill a teenager or a young girl. I mean,

that's I can't even begin to understand that. But that's what's What I was attempting to do is at least show you the kind of person who does do this kind of thing and what's going through their minds, so that you know there's a bunch of red flags hopefully that pop up, so that if you know, your daughter starts dating somebody like John Gardner, if you've read my book, maybe you'll look more closely and be able to protect them.

but that graduation to murder. Still I still have an issue with I understand mental illness, at least I think I can comprehend mental illness to great degrees of a lot of the you know, schizophrenia or what was considered schizophrenia. But I still think that just like the person the bus beheader on the Greyhound bus. I think definitely that person's schizophrenic or mentally ill, whatever mental illness designation you

like to give him, but he's also a killer. It happens to be schizophrenic because the vast majority of mentally ill people do not graduate to that, you know, the most heinous transgression in humanity, taking of another person's life, and then this person killed again, right, well, amazing and with sorry sorry, go ahead.

you see what I mean. So I think you do have to look at that, and I do think that as a society we can deal with some of those issues. And you know, some of these people can't be rehabilitated, and they're going to do this anyway, and they're just broken and you know, and that's just how it is. But I think, you know, what they were saying about him his family was that he wasn't this kind of person,

and he changed once he was in prison. Now, granted, he admitted to punching that girl in the head, and so you know, maybe he was just on this he was just moving down this road anyway. I mean, who knows, We can't really say, but it does seem that, you know, there were places where he did try to stop, and he did try to get help, and he at least

maybe could have been stopped from killing Chelsea. And if the system had been better equipped that you know, he could have been had his role violated and gone back in prison, which would have cost money, you know, tax

fer money. But the one thing I did want to mention on some of the issues you just raised, this containment model that I was talking about, with the monitoring that there's supposedly up there is some kind of there is some kind of metric that they're supposed to be applying where they're going to be looking at some of those things, the drug use and you know, the thoughts that he's having and if he's able to talk to

somebody about these things. It's possible. What I was told is, you know, we can't stop them from wanting to do these things, but if you give them the tools to deal with what to do when they have these thoughts, maybe they won't act on them. And that's but they But he needs to be talking to somebody, and as part of this monitoring, that's hopefully what's going to be happening. But what he was telling me is, well, why would

I tell anybody anything? Because if I start telling him that I have done anything, They're just going to lock me up again. And I don't want to get locked up again. So the idea is that you know, you need to talk to somebody before you do something if you haven't urged, so that this professional can help you deal with those feelings hopefully and get you to stop. I mean, that's ideally what would be the best scenario. If we can get that to happen, well.

is current events, and they are important stories. And this really illustrates that this is an important story, and it's the societal impact that this case has on everyone, and still to this day, it will continue and reverberate and hopefully some good can come out of it incrementally. I mean, obviously it comes very slow, but also the interview with John Gardner, I think it's I think it's very important.

Rather than put these people to death or lock them up and forget about them, is that we interview them and reinterview and try to glean some kind of sense. I mean, that's the way they created profiling in the very first place, which can help law enforcement as a

tool to predict or to arrest and to understand. So I think what we need now is that as these killers evolve, and some of these people are very forthcoming, they would like to be able to speak because that's their whole narcissistic bench where they would like to speak about it. I think we can learn a lot, and I think that should be our responsibility to try to learn something of some benefit to try to help prevent this.

he did try to get help. And yes, he should have gotten help, and if he had gotten help, you know, maybe these girls wouldn't be wouldn't have been killed. You know that's the point.

sex offenders too. It's it seems that we can look at serial killers and understand their and try to understand their personalities and humanize them, but really, sex offenders, really, we it seems collectively we don't want to know the extent we don't want to.

I hope by the next year. So great, what I'm working on today, as a matter of fact.