often to his own detriment. He worked off and on with his stepdad, who began paying John apprentice wages once John hit sixteen.
“John derived his self-esteem from working and he always wanted to do an exceptional job,” Cathy said.
But he couldn’t hold on to his earnings for long. “John would spend his money as fast as he got it,” Cathy recalled. “It would burn holes in his pocket.” He spent most of the money he earned on gifts for other people, a sweater for a neighbor girl, fast food for his friends, and ice skates or in-line skates.
In addition to working for Dan, he got a job as a lifeguard at Agua Fria at Twin Peaks, a resort in the San Bernardino Mountains. He also dressed as an elf to be a ride operator with Donna and her mother at Santa’s Village amusement park, until it went out of business.
“He would work, just at a regular job, or for a friend, but he would do the hard physical labor, and just exhaust himself ... so hard that he would end up in the hospital for dehydration,” Jenni said.
One rainy winter night John and Jenni went to see Seven Years in Tibet, starring Brad Pitt. Early in the evening, he looked under-the-weather, and halfway through the movie, he developed a fever and broke out in a sweat. He was able to drive Jenni home, but they had to call his mom to take him to the hospital.
Jenni said John expressed some of his energy as anger, but he only aimed it at other guys, and she was never scared that she would end up as a target. “If anything,” she said, “I would be the one to hit him.”
Although he never got into a fight in front of her because she always talked him out of it, “he would see something as disrespectful and his whole body would tighten up. He’d clench his fists and tighten his lips, [like] he was looking for an excuse to get in a fight.”
That’s why she and Cathy thought the hockey and skiing were so good for him. They helped him work off some of his aggression in a physical but safe way.
Memories differ on this issue, but John believes he was still in high school when he stopped taking his medications. Cathy thinks it was after he finished high school, but before he moved out of the apartment they shared. Either way, at two hundred pounds, he was too big for Cathy to try to force them down his throat. The last prescription drug she remembered him taking was Wellbutrin, an antidepressant.
“By itself, it probably wasn’t the thing that was going to make him the most stable, but it helped,” she said.
During his junior and senior years, Dan and John argued more and more. Tensions were mounting and came to a head on Cathy’s birthday in June 1996, when Dan and John pushed each other during a dispute over whether to bring a cake to the beach.
Six months later, they got into another fight, and this time, Dan told Cathy that John had to go.
“I’m throwing him out,” he said.
Cathy was not happy. It was the middle of winter, with snow on the ground. “You’re being reactionary,” she said. “This is ridiculous.”
John had been over at a friend’s at the time, and when he returned home, Dan had locked him out. This led to a fight between Cathy and Dan, who hadn’t been getting along so well either. She moved out with John the next day to allow him to finish high school with a roof over his head. She expected Dan to get past his anger and apologize. When he didn’t, she went back to the house under the guise of picking up her stuff, hoping they could mend fences.
However, they both realized they wanted different things, and she eventually filed for divorce. Because it was amicable, she sent John to deliver the paperwork to Dan personally so she didn’t have to pay a federal marshal to do it.
Despite his self-reports that he graduated high school in 1997 with a grade point average of 3.2, John’s transcript shows he finished with a GPA of 2.9, after attempting to complete 265 units and finishing only 247.5. Although he excelled in the electives, getting an A+ in advanced ceramics and A’s in choir and drama, he also did well with A’s in government/economics, job skills, a course titled “transitions,” and his eleventh-grade English course. He got F’s, however, in chemistry, English/myth literature and integrated science.
Jenni and John continued to date after graduation, and he often came back to campus to visit her and his other friends, and sing with the choir. It was his unauthorized presence on school grounds that got him into trouble with the law for the first time.
The school security guard had repeatedly warned him, “You need to have a reason to be here, and Jen is not a valid reason,” but John continued to come, anyway. The guard finally told John he would be arrested the next time he showed up. When John defiantly returned, the guard followed through.
John was charged with disturbing the peace and unlawfully coming on school grounds to disrupt activities. The prosecutor dropped the first count in a plea bargain, John pleaded guilty to disturbing the peace and received probation with a fine. But that still didn’t stop him. He came back a couple more times, stopping only when Jenni broke up with him for good.
John had always had a roving eye, which caused him and Jenni to break up twice for cheating. To her knowledge, he’d slept with only one girl the first time—one of her friends, who confessed to her. Jenni took him back after they’d spent a month apart.
About six months later, she learned he’d been cheating again from another friend he’d slept with, and this time “it was more people than I could count on my fingers. I want to say it was the teenage hormone thing—somebody wants me, let’s do it.”
Their breakup occurred at the high school after his arrest, which he continued to visit in spite of the “stay away” notice he’d been issued. “He sauntered in with that carefree smile, and I threw my class ring at him [which he’d given to her], and it hit him in his head,” she recalled.
“What the hell?” he asked her.
When he saw one of the girls he’d cheated with was standing next to Jenni, he realized what was going on.
“Ohhh,” he said.
He tried to talk to Jenni, but she didn’t want to listen, so he walked out of the room, crying. A couple of days later, she agreed to talk to him, but only because she wanted to find out how many girls he’d been with. She learned that he’d been cheating on her for quite some time, including one night he’d had sex with five girls at a friend’s party.
In spite of all this, they remained very close friends. “I was never going to take that again,” she said. “I deserve better than that. I can love him, but I don’t have to be in love with him.”
John began to decompensate after high school, while he was still living with Cathy and taking general education classes at Crafton Hills College for a couple of months. Things weren’t going well at school, because Cathy had thought his high school was going to send transcripts or alert the community college that he needed services for special education. That never happened, though. After agreeing to get back on his meds, John decided he didn’t want to, after all. He dropped out of school and moved to Los Angeles in October 1997 to live with his cousin Jason.
He seemed to settle in better there, taking courses at El Camino College, near Torrance, and working at In-N-Out Burger. Excited to be on his own, he knew he could always come home to live with his mother again,
