John Sr. was initially excited, but he also made it clear he wasn’t going to change any diapers.
During the pregnancy, Deanna had warned Cathy about John Sr.’s previous behavior with Mona. “I don’t know if he’ll do it again, but he was physically abusive to her, and you need to be careful,” Deanna told her.
Cathy shrugged it off, confident that this wouldn’t happen with their baby, not with John Sr. being so crazy about her. She said she thought Deanna “was just trying to scare me off because she was jealous, so I didn’t give what she said the credence that I should have.”
But she soon realized that John Sr. hadn’t changed at all. He couldn’t deal with this newborn either, crying next to their bed and hungry all the time.
“Can’t you stick him somewhere else?” he complained.
“Absolutely not, he’s staying right here,” Cathy said, although sometimes she took the bassinet and slept on the couch or in the girls’ room to keep the peace, which seemed to help.
She was disappointed by her husband’s lack of interest in their son, whom she was enjoying. Li’l John was such a bright baby. He crawled and rolled over early, talked early—saying “uh-oh,” “Mama,” “baba” for bottle, and “night-night” at five months. He walked before he was a year old, and was potty trained by two and a half years, which was average for boys.
That said, he was an overactive infant, awake for more hours than the usual baby, and sleeping in short fits and starts for an hour or two at a time. He also had allergies and a constant stream of ear infections from eighteen to thirty-six months, during which time he was treated with the antibiotic tetracycline, which permanently stained his teeth gray. Continuing to have problems with asthma, he ultimately had to have polyethylene tubes placed in his ears and had to use an inhaler for bronchial spasms.
Not surprisingly, he had trouble quieting down to go to sleep at night, so Cathy came up with a bedtime ritual to help him relax: she gave him a bath, put his PJs on, read him a story and rubbed his back. When he was six months old, Cathy started feeding him cereal and soy milk, which also seemed to settle him down.
“When John was really, really young, he had so much high energy. He had a beautiful soul,” said his aunt Cynthia. “He was special.”
John Jr. was the kind of baby who got into everything, pulling books off the shelf and pans and pots out of the cupboard. “He wanted to find out what was there,” and put it all in his mouth, Cathy said. That included some Drano at age two.
“It got on his lip, but it didn’t get anywhere else,” she said, noting that he had to be briefly hospitalized.
At eighteen months, he had to get stitches in his lip after Shannon and Sarina were fighting over who got to hold him. Sarina was eight and wearing roller skates when she tried to grab him out of Shannon’s arms. In the struggle, they dropped him on his head, causing him to bite through his lip and tongue, and to lose a tooth. “Shannon was the strong one, trying to calm us down so we could tell Mom and not make a scene because stepdad John was going to be mad,” Sarina recalled.
“John was such a cute kid,” she said. “Sometimes Shannon and I would dress him up like a girl... . He let us.”
After he ran into a doorknob at age three, a goose egg–sized lump erupted on his head. And at four, imitating his dad shaving, John Jr. cut open his lip in a bloody mess.
Overall, these mishaps were not all that unusual for an active, curious little boy. The beating he got from his father at ten months old, however, was anything but typical.
After drinking all night with the band, John Sr. didn’t like to be disturbed in the morning, when he was trying to sleep off his hangover. The girls weren’t allowed to walk or run around the house because the floorboards creaked, and he got angry if they woke him up, so “we had to be quiet all day,” Melissa recalled.
Sometimes Sarina and Shannon grabbed Li’l John and hid in the bedroom closet while their father yelled at Cathy. “We tried to block it out, whatever he was saying,” Sarina recalled.
One night in 1984, one of the girls dropped a toy typewriter on the floor with a crash. Drunk, John Sr. opened the bedroom door with his belt in hand and growled, his voice loud and deep like an ogre’s.
“Who did that?” When no one responded, he grew even more menacing. “Who did that? Answer me!”
The girls pointed at each other from their beds on the floor, saying, “She did it! She did it!” With that, John Sr. swung the belt, hitting Shannon and Sarina with the strap and Melissa with the buckle, leaving her with a bruised hip.
Cathy and Deanna both believed that John Sr. wasn’t a bad man. “What’s sad is he really loved the kids, but he had no idea how to express the caring and love he had for them,” Cathy said.
But because he only conveyed his feelings to his wives, his children didn’t see or feel that love. They only felt emotional unavailability from this strict disciplinarian, whom they viewed more as a prison guard.
Another morning, Cynthia and the other girls were still in bed, with Li’l John in his crib near the doorway. Cathy was at the store, buying pancake ingredients, when the baby started crying, apparently wanting to be changed, fed or held. But none of the girls wanted to chance getting out of bed for fear of making noise and getting smacked with the belt.
Annoyed by the crying, John Sr. came in, pulled his baby son’s diaper down and smacked him ten times while the girls covered their heads and cried under the blankets.
“Shut up!” he yelled.
When Cathy got home, she looked in on Li’l John, who was whimpering. She went to the girls for an explanation, but they were too terrified to say anything in case John Sr. got angry at them for telling on him. All they could do was point to the crib.
“What happened?” Cathy asked.
Still getting no answer, Cathy checked the baby’s diaper. It looked like he’d pooped, so she tried to clean him off. When it still looked like she’d missed some, she rubbed his bottom a little harder and he started wailing. Looking closer, she saw the dark marks were actually bruises on his tiny buttocks. Turning him over, she saw more on his thighs and all over his back.
Shaking with fury, Cathy picked him up and ordered the girls to wait next door as she grabbed the diaper bag and her purse and headed for the front door.
“Where are you going?” John Sr. asked.
Cathy grabbed a kitchen knife in case John Sr. tried to stop her. “I’m leaving,” she said. Pulling up the baby’s top and his diaper down, she exposed all the purple marks. “Look what you did to my baby!” she said. She warned him not to touch her child ever again, then stormed out the door.
John Sr. sat silent with shock and disbelief, as he watched her leave.
Cathy and the girls piled into the Pinto and headed for her parents’ house, where they stayed for the next month. John Sr. called every day to say he was sorry, and that he’d do whatever it took to get Cathy to come back. Scared that he was going to lose her, he promised he would never beat Li’l John again.
“He loved me and felt like he was willing to do whatever it took to show me that,” she said.
Cathy
