and the children came back to live with him.
“Boundaries were set after that beating with John,” Cynthia recalled. “He did everything right.”
After they all moved back in, John Sr. asked Cathy a couple more times to marry him, but she ignored him, unsure whether his proposals were serious. She finally said yes, and they got married on August 18, 1980, when she was twenty-five, he was thirty-six, and Li’l John was sixteen months old.
Ironically, part of the reason why Cathy married John Sr. was because she wanted to feel safe after she’d been kidnapped and raped when Li’l John was four months old. Her assailant was a tall, thin black man, who had climbed into the backseat of her car in a supermarket parking lot in Hawthorne. On her way to pick up the baby, and then her husband after a gig around midnight, she didn’t know the man was in her car until she started to drive. He grabbed her from behind, sticking the cold metal of a knife against her throat, causing her to scream with shock and fear.
“Shut up and pull over!” he ordered. She thought about crashing the car, but she didn’t know if she could do that without killing them both. After she pulled over to an open area, he told her to get down on her knees on the passenger-side floorboard, facing the seat. He put a pair of spray-painted goggles on her so she couldn’t see where they were going, a tactic indicating that he’d done this before. Next he told her to put her arms and head down. He drove for about half an hour to a hotel. He raped her there for the next seven hours, constantly reminding her that if she looked at him or told anyone, “I will come back and kill you.”
“Don’t move those glasses,” he kept saying. “Don’t be trying to look.”
He finally dropped her on a street corner, took the goggles, told her to keep her eyes closed until he was gone, and disappeared after parking her car down the block.
“I was wandering the streets,” she recalled. “I was in so much shock. I couldn’t even call my parents to come pick me up.”
She was treated at the now-defunct Robert F. Kennedy Medical Center in Hawthorne and reported the incident to police, but the rapist was never caught. Afterward, she told her daughters about it in a vague way to explain why she was so upset.
“Something bad happened to Mommy, but I’m okay now. I’m here with you,” she said, adding that she was trying to deal with it, but it would take some time before she felt better.
Sarina recalled her mother trying to explain the situation. “Not the details, but we were aware that something happened,” Sarina recalled. “We didn’t understand the whole concept. I just shut it out.”
The incident, which left Cathy scared to go out except for doctor’s appointments, made her want to be closer to John Sr.
“I wanted his protection,” she said. “I wanted that sense of security.” At six feet and now a more stocky 180 pounds, “he was a big guy.” Plus, she said, “I liked him. He’s a very nice, charismatic individual, interesting to be around, intelligent. Even though he didn’t have a college education, he was a smart person.” Besides, she said, “I was the one he wanted to spend his life with.”
But he reacted quite oddly, saying he almost didn’t believe she’d been raped because of her clinginess. He couldn’t understand why she wasn’t being more distant; he’d expected her to act just the opposite.
Once Cathy got past the trauma of the rape, she went back to school and took classes at West Los Angeles College, where she put her three-year-old son into day care.
One day when she went to pick him up, they told her that he had some emotional problems, that he was hyperactive and he should take medication to get along with the other kids. “He was too intrusive, a little bit too aggressive,” she recalled them saying—and worse, he’d bitten a little girl so they’d had to suspend him.
When she and Li’l John got home, she asked what had happened that day, and he started what would become a pattern in his life—blaming someone else for his angry, inappropriate reaction. Crying, he said, “Mommy, the girl pushed me, and I was mad, so I bit her.”
“You can’t bite,” Cathy responded. Wanting to make sure he understood that his behavior was wrong, she didn’t say, “Oh, you’re bad.” Rather, she told him he wouldn’t get to go to school, which he loved, because he enjoyed interacting with the other kids.
“It scares the other kids,” she said. “It’s not nice to them.”
Cathy didn’t like the idea of medicating her son, and neither, she said, did his pediatrician, who thought John Jr. was too young.
“You can’t make a determination when they’re that age,” the doctor told her, meaning that one biting incident didn’t necessarily mean the child needed to be constantly medicated.
John Sr. felt the day care operators were overreacting to what he viewed as typical little-boy behavior, and he also wasn’t pleased that their son would be at home for a couple of days. So Cathy stayed home from work too, although she purposely didn’t do anything fun with the boy. Li’l John cried and was embarrassed that he’d gotten in trouble, but when he tried to get his mother to play with him, she simply said, “Mommy is busy.”
There was only one other time his mother let him know she was angry with him, a less serious but still telling example of his problems with impulse control.
Cathy and a friend were out shopping with 2½-year-old John Jr. when he saw a chocolate bunny and asked his mother to buy it for him. She said no, and turned away for a moment, only to see that he’d grabbed it off the shelf and had taken a big bite out of its ear.
“It took everything in our power not to laugh,” Cathy recalled. “I had to buy it. He was holding it and I was saying, ‘No.’ I had to pay for it, but he didn’t get the rest of the bunny.”
After John Jr. turned four, his impulse control problems worsened, and complaints from day care operators escalated. She finally relented and agreed to put him on a low dose of Ritalin, but only while he was at school, where he had to pay attention.
They moved to Palmdale when John Jr. was in kindergarten, which brought them closer to Cathy’s parents and also to the house where Deanna lived with her two girls.
During this time and into the first grade, John was acting out in the classroom. He blurted out the F-word, going off on a teacher who had reprimanded him for calling her a “fat, stupid turkey” and had given him a time-out. This being a Christian school, the cussing that he’d picked up from his father didn’t go over very well, and Cathy got a call.
“We’re not really sure we want him to come back,” the school administrator said.
John was throwing temper tantrums at the grocery store, which required Cathy to bring him outside to the car for fifteen-or twenty-minute time-outs, and his new teacher complained he was easily distracted, exhibited negative attention-seeking behavior and talked too much in class.
Cathy agreed to increase John’s Ritalin dosage to fifteen milligrams a day in divided doses. However, this only caused him to have rebound depression in the afternoon, triggering more tantrums and then sobbing. “I wish I would die, because nobody likes me,” he said.
Hearing this from her six-year-old broke Cathy’s heart. “It was horribly sad,” she said.
John
