fought and, sometimes, quite violently. One time Linda threw dishes at Phillip and cut him badly enough that the whole family had to drive him to the hospital to get stitches. By the time Cathy was eight, her parents had divorced, and Linda soon moved on to husband number two, Reese Porter Smith.
At ages nine and ten, Cathy was molested by a male family member, who came into her room at night, the first time on Christmas Eve, and put his mouth on her private area. But she didn’t tell her mother because her molester said if she did, “all of us kids would be taken away from my mom and she’d kill herself.”
Linda was pregnant with her fifth child when Smith started molesting Derrick*, Cathy’s eighteen-month-old half-brother. Cathy was ten and was changing her brother’s diaper when she saw that he was bleeding, so she told her mother, who immediately reported it to police. Cathy was questioned, but she was still too scared to mention her own molestation. She didn’t even tell her mother until Cathy was in her twenties.
In 1965, Cathy’s stepfather was convicted of violating California Penal Code 286 against Derrick, which was entered into court records as “the infamous crime against nature,” in other words, sodomy. The most dangerous sexual offenders were assessed and ordered into treatment even back then. After being designated a “mentally disordered sex offender,” Smith was sent to the Department of Mental Hygiene at Atascadero State Hospital. Five months later, he was returned to court for sentencing.
“The doctors don’t feel you benefited much from the treatment,” the judge told Smith. “They feel that you are still a menace to society.” Smith’s probation request was denied, and he served the rest of his term in prison.
“This is why it was so hard for me to believe that John ... ,” Cathy said recently, trailing off as if she didn’t want to say the words that would make it real. “I just couldn’t even imagine, [or] see him as capable.”
“[John] did have some knowledge of this,” she said, referring to the incident involving his uncle Derrick, as well as her own rape and kidnapping that occurred when John was only four months old. “I don’t know how much. He was pretty close to being an adult when he found out, but I didn’t deny it... . I tried to present it in a way that was appropriate.”
After Smith went to prison, Cathy’s mother got pregnant by a married man and had Cynthia, Linda’s sixth and last child. “Our family is completely, completely dysfunctional,” Cynthia said in 2011. “These people ... are not healthy.”
By the time Cathy was fourteen, she was dating the older brother of a neighborhood girl she’d been babysitting. Richard Simpson, a handsome twenty-five-year-old, was an army veteran who had recently returned from fighting in Vietnam and now spent months at sea as a merchant marine.
When Linda reunited with Phillip, Cathy was angry. She tried to stay away from the house as much as possible, and she was furious when they decided to remarry. She loved her father, but she was angry that he’d deserted them when Linda was so sick. Cathy also loved her mother, but she felt a mix of resentment and guilt that Linda was too depressed to take care of herself or her six children. That not only left Cathy without a mother, but also forced Cathy to be a mother to her siblings—and to Linda. When Cathy couldn’t take it anymore, she ran away to a friend’s house. Ultimately, Cathy and her mother agreed that she could move in with the family next door.
Cathy didn’t try to hide her relationship with Richard from her mother, who thought it was an innocent teenage infatuation that would soon run its course. She was wrong. When Richard got back into port, he and fifteen-year-old Cathy drove to Tijuana, Mexico, and got married. But because they didn’t get the marriage certified in the United States in time, they had to remarry in Las Vegas in August 1971, when she was sixteen and had already given birth to their five-month-old daughter, Shannon.
Richard used his GI benefits to take firefighting classes while he worked nights as a mall security guard. Cathy, who’d gotten pregnant again, took classes at Harbor Junior College during the day and finished high school at night. When Sarina was born in July 1972, Cathy had already decided to become a psychiatric nurse.
After being exposed to Agent Orange, Richard wasn’t the most stable individual, and Cathy later suspected he had post-traumatic stress disorder as well. Cathy didn’t want to get divorced. Instead, she sought counseling from her minister about Richard’s drinking and abusive behavior, who told her “it was not God’s plan for me to end up being killed.”
Fearing for her life, she took the girls and left on September 22, 1974, filing for divorce and primary custody. Richard responded three weeks later by coming to her parents’ house while Cathy was at the grocery store with her mom, and wooing the girls into his car: “C’mere, angel babies.”
For months, Cathy went crazy trying to find them, hiring a private investigator and asking the court for help in getting them back. In a letter to the judge, Cathy wrote: My husband and I had a violent argument. He threatened me with bodily harm and I informed him that I was leaving with the children. When she heard that the children were at her mother-in-law’s house, Cathy wrote, she tried but couldn’t get them back, and her efforts only resulted in further violent threats to her and the kids. She was clearly the best parent to have custody of them, she insisted.
Several months later, Cathy finally located the girls in Arkansas with Richard and his relatives. Cathy persuaded him to return to Los Angeles by pretending she wanted to get back together. She had sex with him, until he trusted her, then she grabbed the girls when he went to the store.
“I had to do that to get my kids,” she explained.
Cathy won full custody of Shannon and Sarina, and despite her protests, Richard got regular visiting rights to see them on weekends. Richard eventually married another woman and had six more children. Sick in the hospital in the early 2000s, he told Cathy he didn’t remember being mean to her. But because Cathy and his daughters had told him what had happened, she said, he apologized for it.
After a couple of years working at a dry cleaner’s, in 1976, Cathy got a job as a waitress at Sweetwater Canyon Depot in Gardena, where they had live music. By her third night, she’d caught the attention of John Gardner, a handsome young rhythm guitar player and lead singer with electric blue eyes, a mustache and curly, light brown hair. He was in the house band, Big Mama & Co., which played Fridays and Saturdays, when she worked from 8:00 P.M. to 3:00 A.M. He whistled and smiled at her whenever she delivered drinks to tables near the band.
Obviously 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
