[Sr.] didn’t know how to show affection, attention,” Cathy recalled. “He was worried somehow that if he was too affectionate with his son, it was going to make him effeminate, and John was already kind of a crybaby.”
Around this same time, the boy took a hundred-dollar bill out of his dad’s wallet and took it to school to try to make friends. A teacher saw him playing around with it and reported the incident to his parents. When he got home, he got a spanking.
Consulting with John Jr.’s doctor, Cathy took her son off the Ritalin for a couple of weeks, which initially helped with the rebound effects, but the other behavioral problems resumed. He was out of control, being aggressive and in constant motion, making odd noises and acting the class clown at Ocotillo School. This time they tried extended-release Ritalin.
Cathy had enough college credits to complete her associate’s degree in 1985 and became a registered nurse. The new form of Ritalin allowed her to do a calming bedtime routine similar to the one she’d used when he was a baby: They talked about his day, then she gave him a bath, read him a story and put him to bed.
Around this time, the boy started setting fires. At age six, he started one in a wastebasket, and when he was seven, he and a friend lit up a large field, requiring the fire department to come and put out the blaze.
By the second grade, the doctors tried switching John to Cylert, which contained amphetamines (and has since been discontinued). This drug caused John to experience stomach upset and insomnia. He hid the pills in his cheek, then stuffed them under the dryer, where Cathy ultimately found fifty of them socked away.
The doctor put John back on the Ritalin and he was sent to a child psychologist every week for three months, then occasionally for three more months. At the psychologist’s suggestion, John was evaluated by a psychiatrist for depression and was diagnosed with conduct disorder. He also started making a sound like he was clearing his throat, so he went into speech therapy as well.
The next year, he saw two other psychiatrists at Kaiser Permanente, who once again increased John’s Ritalin dosage to fifteen milligrams, with an extra five milligrams at four in the afternoon for special events or homework. This time, he did better in school and his behavior improved. When he had insomnia, Cathy tried giving him the antihistamine Benadryl at the doctor’s advice, but that only made John Jr. accuse her of trying to make him sleep when he didn’t want to.
In the midst of all this, Cathy’s relationship with John Sr. had begun to deteriorate.
They were renting a house in Palmdale, which they had an option to buy. To come up with a down payment, she’d been working double shifts—weekdays at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Neuropsychiatric Institute and weekends in the intensive-care unit at Palmdale Hospital. This was necessary because John Sr. had injured his back at work—falling off a ladder while lifting some boxes—and had been receiving only a small disability check for the past couple of years.
He had two back surgeries and operations on both feet in 1986 and 1987, which kept him taking codeine and made him moody and cranky. “I can’t go play tennis. I can’t go fishing. I can’t do any of these things because I’m in constant pain,” he complained.
“He got very depressed being a shut-in,” Cathy recalled.
John Sr. started smoking pot for the pain, and his mood improved. Cathy didn’t realize, however, that he’d thrown some speed into the mix.
“He was happy and not so depressed and I was like, ‘Hallelujah, he’s doing better,’” she said.
He stayed up all night, slept during the day, and became more irritable, displaying weird mood swings. When a friend of hers suggested that he might be doing cocaine, Cathy dismissed the idea, but she had to acknowledge that his behavior was growing increasingly bizarre.
While Cathy was working sixty hours, seven days a week, John Sr. was spending more time with their son. Cathy got the boy ready for school before she left for work; it was his father’s job to make sure he got there. After John Jr. got home from school, his father played video games with him and made sure he finished his homework.
Despite this bonding opportunity, the boy still didn’t feel connected to his father. “I think his desire was to be close to his dad,” Cathy said. “John’s dad loved me, but I think he was always focused on me.”
At that point, Cathy said, she didn’t feel connected to her husband either. Then one day, she was questioning him about why a certain bill hadn’t been paid. He confessed that he’d been doing speed and cocaine for the past year, and had completely drained their $10,000 in savings to buy drugs.
“That was the beginning of the end for us,” she said. All the money they’d saved from her double shifts was gone. “Furious doesn’t even scratch the surface. I felt so betrayed by him... . I basically said I couldn’t pull through. I didn’t feel I could go through that drug and alcohol scene again.”
She hung in while John Sr. went to substance abuse therapy, but she slept on the couch, feeling very confused. Part of her hated him.
How could he do this? Here I’ve been so supportive of him all this time and he did this?
By this time, Shannon and Sarina had moved out, so it was just the three of them. Cathy got her husband into a research study at UCLA, where they got him off the coke and speed, persuaded him to take antidepressants and to do individual therapy. But three months into it, he rebuffed Cathy’s suggestion to enter couple’s counseling.
“I can’t do it right now,” he said, explaining that he was so ashamed of what he’d done that he needed to get to a place where he could face her again.
She asked a couple more times. “We’ve got to go to counseling, or our marriage is done,” she said, but he still refused. He said he was sorry for everything, but he couldn’t do or be what she wanted. “You’re probably better off because I don’t deserve you.”
So, in February 1988, when John Jr. was in the third grade, Cathy told him she was going to stay at Grandma’s in Hawthorne, because she was working a lot of hours. She would see him every other weekend.
“Are you and Daddy getting a divorce?” he asked.
“No,” she said.
A few months later, she got an apartment. “You’re going to come and spend the summer with me,” she told him. When he asked if he could still see his dad, she said, “We’ll see how it goes.” (In 2011, John Jr. said he was actually scared that he would get into trouble if he went to live with her for good back then, fearing that decision would anger his father. “I was afraid of my dad. He always hit me—if I woke him up, if I got into trouble, if I went around the block without asking.”)
As mother and son lived together that summer, he threw a couple of tantrums and showed what Cathy described as “baseline sadness,” but overall, John Jr. seemed to be dealing with the separation. He even did okay with not being on Ritalin, which Cathy thought was unnecessary as long as he didn’t need to pay attention in class.
When school was about to start, he asked, “Can I go back with Daddy? He needs me.”
Cathy still remembered how she’d felt when she had to help her own mother through her debilitating depression; she’d felt such a heavy responsibility to take care of and protect Linda, to be her “mother’s keeper.” She was sad that John was now going through the same thing, but she understood it. If she
