very socially sophisticated.
“I needed to grieve that my son was not going to be normal, and I’d put a lot of pressure on him to measure up to something he wasn’t capable of doing,” she said. “That was a good turning point for us. I really started lightening up on him.”
From the outside, friends recognized how complicated John’s relationship was with Cathy. “One day, it would be the best relationship in the world. They were super close. They could talk about anything,” said Jenni Tripp, who dated John for eighteen months, starting in his senior year. “Then he would change and she would turn into a ‘goddamned motherf---ing bitch.’ There was no change in Cathy—Cathy was pretty much constant. It was John that changed. But it was little things that could spark him off. If she had twenty dollars, [he felt] she should give it to him,” then he’d get furious if she said no.
“It could have been a whole lot better if John could have given her more credit because she worked really hard and she did try to take care of him,” Jenni said. “When there’s that kind of child who needs some structure and discipline, she did what she was supposed to as a mom: She tried to get him to take his meds and do the right thing. I don’t think she tried to control him. I actually think she gave him a lot of freedom.”
“Cathy mom,” as Jenni still calls her, was “a little bit” of an enabler, but “she was always there. I think that Cathy was a good part of his life... . That was another reason I broke up with him. I got tired of trying to mother him.”
After so many years of struggling with emotional crises, John’s life began to improve dramatically. Dan introduced John to hockey, which John found he was skilled at and loved so much that he continued to play even after high school. He also played soccer and baseball and served as manager of his high school’s varsity basketball team, the Fighting Scots, in 1993.
John also started doing better in school. He got an A in the Regional Occupational Program law enforcement course, which tried to match kids with careers. And, for the first time, he found an academic subject that he felt good at: mathematics.
Even though he graduated with career goals of becoming a police officer or a math teacher, his transcript shows that the only A he earned in math was in his ninth-grade algebra course, receiving B’s and C’s in his other math classes. That said, he did earn an academic excellence award for outstanding achievement on the 1996 Golden State Examination in geometry.
“He loved math,” Jenni said. “He wanted to be a high-school teacher, because, I think, he didn’t want to get out of the high school. It was his ticket in—not for girls—just to be a kid... . Once he gets to be fifty, he’ll never act fifty. He’ll act twenty for his whole life.”
It was his math teacher who discovered that John had a talent for singing, just like his father, John Sr. With a four-octave vocal range before he became a chain-smoker, the teenager got involved with the school choir, went caroling in Lake Arrowhead Village and landed a role in the musical Oliver.
“He could hit every note on the keyboard from low to high, and he had a great bass voice,” said Jenni, who was in choir class with him, noting that he did solos and also sang in a doo-wop group at school. His Spanish teacher had her students learn the language by singing songs, and John enjoyed translating them from English into Spanish.
Jenni, who was two years younger, described herself as shy and awkward. She also had drama class with John. As an actor, Jenni said, “I think he was over-the-top. He was just good at overacting. That’s how you can describe John in life. He overacted, and everything was over-the-top.”
If a party was in the works, John procured the alcohol, stealing bottles of Wild Turkey, and never got caught. “John was amazing at stealing liquor,” Jenni recalled. “He could have three to four bottles down his pants... . If you had a request, he’d get it... . He liked to be the life of the party.”
His moods aside, John’s family and friends saw him as a good, considerate and funny guy with a soft heart, evidenced by the touching connection he had with his severely autistic niece.
“If he was your friend, he’d be your best friend. He’d take care of you, your friends, your family and even any acquaintance that might need help,” Jenni said. “My brother was mainly well liked, but he had one bully that just wasn’t letting up. John just happened to be at the school—one of the times he wasn’t supposed to be there—and he took the bully, who he knew personally, and closed the door. A couple minutes later, they came out, [the bully] wasn’t harmed, but he never ever bullied my brother again.”
John liked to make jokes, and could be quite fun to be around, earning the reputation at school as a prankster. When he was still dating the girlfriend before Jenni, he put some Anbesol, a numbing ointment, on his lips and asked her for a kiss. Not knowing what he’d done, she kissed him and soon felt the joke when she could no longer feel her lips.
He did imitations of Jim Carrey, and memorized many of the lines from the movie Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. He loved Adam Sandler movies, mimicking the characters, and also came up with creative scenarios of his own. Like the time that Cathy was fixing dinner for company one night. John was upset about something, turned to his mom and said, “You want tossed salad? I’ll toss your salad!” He picked up the bowl and threw the salad in the air, throwing cherry tomatoes and pieces of lettuce everywhere.
Cathy thought his joke was relatively amusing, but she still sent him to his room.
Once he got to high school, John liked having a girlfriend. He broke up with his first steady girl after telling his family that she’d cheated on him, and he started dating Jenni. His family just adored this sweet, petite girl, with the dark hair and blue eyes, because she was smart, pretty and responsible.
When they met at the end of his junior year, Jenni’s first impression of John was that “he just couldn’t sit still and he always had to be in motion. He was always in a good mood.”
When it came to sex, Jenni said, his nickname was “Energizer Bunny,” the screen name he later used on Myspace. “He could go over and over and over repeatedly, and that could go on for, like, hours. And there wasn’t anything sexually he wasn’t willing to do,” she said. “He was really focused on pleasing his partner.”
Referring to his recent sexually violent acts, she said, “It seems surprising to me that he gave in to the urges to do that, because that’s so not the John that I know.”
Back in high school, Jenni said, John was good at persuading a girl to have sex with him. “He made you feel beautiful, and he would go slow through each step, so you didn’t realize you’d gone to the next step until you were there. But at the point ... where, if you got walked in on it would embarrass you, he’d ask if it was okay. He’d always ask for permission.”
At times, the two of them didn’t use any protection, but Jenni never got pregnant. “I think he would have been fine if he was a dad at fifteen, because all he ever wanted in life was to be a math teacher and to be a dad. He’s great with kids.”
While they were dating, he became friends with her best friend, Donna Hale, whom Jenni had known since she was ten. As John later recalled in a letter, Donna told John not to hurt Jenni or Donna said she would kill my butt. She then flipped me over her back and I was laying on the ground. Wow! He also said he always thought Donna had the most wonderful smile, and he was touched by her love for people and animals, which made his “heart jump.”
John’s
