born on April 9, 1979, in Culver City, California, after having a rough time in the womb. Cathy Osborn had had a pretty difficult pregnancy—her third, after daughters Shannon and Sarina—and struggled to find food that would stay down. She got so thin that she had to buy clothes in the girls’ department.
Not surprisingly, John was a colicky baby, unusually active and finicky. But twenty-four-year-old Cathy tried to take her baby’s problems in stride, as she’d learned to do at home and in her training as a nurse. As her mother’s oldest child, she had become the matriarch of a large, extended family that continued to grow both in size and dysfunction as the years progressed.
While her three sisters and two brothers were growing up, she took care of them when her mother, who suffered from severe depression and possibly undiagnosed bipolar disorder, wasn’t up to the task. This dynamic groomed Cathy early and often to become a lifelong caretaker for every troubled member of her family—her son, John, in particular. As Cathy’s siblings got older and had children of their own, she often took care of them as well, even becoming the temporary legal guardian to her sister Christina’s two children.
After moving in with John’s father, who was also named John Albert Gardner, Cathy got pregnant and periodically took care of John Sr.’s two daughters as well. And when John Sr. suffered a work injury that caused severe back pain and put him on disability, she had to take care of him too.
Suffice it to say, Cathy had her hands full, working full-time, going to school to become a nurse, and being a mother to everyone, but she assumed that job because she was the most stable, responsible and capable maternal figure in her family.
Working eight hours a day with a two-hour commute, however, left her feeling like she was never home. And understandably, what little time she had for her son and the rest of her immediate family was spread thin amongst this rather expansive network.
“I don’t feel embarrassed about anything I did. I did the best I could,” Cathy recalled. “I felt bad I didn’t have all the tools. If I could go back and change things, boy, there would be a whole lot of things I would change.” Rather than telling her kids to eat their vegetables, she said, she might have tried to spend more time reading to them and doing fun things, for example. She might also “have been more alert to some of the things that came across as more problematic, and more forceful about making sure there was follow-up.”
The family called Cathy’s son “Little John,” “Li’l John,” (which he spelled “Lil”), and sometimes “Baby John,” to avoid confusion with his father, who went by “Big John” or his stage name as a professional guitar player, “Dirty John,” or “DJ” for short. When John Jr. grew up, he insisted on calling himself “John Albert Gardner III,” despite the fact that his grandfather had a different middle name. Even in his twenties and thirties, John Jr. still signed letters to his mother using these childhood nicknames, and some family members still referred to him as “Li’l John.”
Years later, John Jr. told others that he felt he never got enough of his mother’s attention.
“It’s not that she didn’t love him. It’s not that she didn’t want to spend the time with him,” recalled Cynthia, Cathy’s youngest sister. “But she was trying to achieve something and get somewhere that was better than where she came from.”
John Jr. wasn’t lacking for female attention. He had a close network of his four sisters, three aunts and many cousins while he was growing up, many of whom shared special relationships with him. Shannon was his moral compass, for example, and Sarina was his confidante. He also had an unusually close relationship with his aunt Cynthia, who was only eleven years older, a relationship that took a bizarrely intimate turn in his late twenties.
While this big extended family provided support and love to John Jr., it also came with certain drawbacks. Dysfunctional on many levels, its complex mix of genetic and environmental risk factors—including addiction, alcoholism, physical abuse, mental illness, mental disorders (such as autism and Asperger’s syndrome), a rotating series of father figures, repeated moves from house to house, financial instability (including multiple bankruptcies), molestation and incest—made for an extremely weak foundation. Some of the same elements of sexual dysfunction ran through both sides of John’s extended family, so he had it coming and going.
Recognizing that she came from a family with roots in small-town USA that had little or no secondary education, Cathy tried to reach for higher goals and to serve as a good example for her children. After she finished her associate’s degree in nursing, she went on to obtain a master’s, and eventually became California’s legislative chairwoman of the American Psychiatric Nurses Association.
Cathy made sure to teach her children manners, emphasizing the importance of social etiquette and knowing which knife and fork to use, and urged them to get a good education. As a result, her daughters Shannon and Sarina were successful: Shannon became a movie studio executive and mother of one boy and Sarina made the dean’s list when she returned to college later in life, after raising a son and an autistic daughter.
“I learned to be a survivor, and I expect my kids to be survivors, no matter what,” Cathy said.
But her son seemed to have a rough time from the very start. “John somehow missed the lessons,” Cathy said.
Despite all that his mother, sisters and grandmother tried to do to make his life healthy and safe, this “confluence of weirdness” and these negative influences created “an air of pathology” for him that outweighed any resilience his sisters may have inherited, said Dr. Saul Levine, professor of clinical psychiatry at Rady Children’s Hospital and the University of California, San Diego Medical Center. Levine never treated John Jr. but was familiar with the case.
These factors all manifested into “the perfect storm,” if you will, making for a very troubled and potentially dangerous individual who would ultimately get in trouble with the law, or, at the very least, need help from mental-health professionals, Levine said. “I think John was carrying a sad confluence of biological, social and psychological risk factors and influences that culminated in producing an individual who was driven and obsessed to commit these horrendous acts.”
Handwriting expert Paula Sassi, who also never met Gardner, said his signature is very basic, which shows that he tries to hide his negative side, but it comes out, nonetheless. Several parts of his signature reveal “twisted and strange thinking,” she said, including a “manic d,” an indication that the author “has trouble controlling [his] impulses.”
Cathy was born in June 1955 to Linda and Phillip Osborn, who were from Dayton, Ohio, and Poplar Bluff, Missouri, respectively. “My parents were hicks,” Cathy said. “They’re not sophisticated.”
When Cathy was growing up in the South Bay of Los Angeles County, where Phillip worked as a toolmaker at Douglas Aircraft, she heard stories about her maternal grandmother, Loretta, who flew planes and was mayor of Dayton. She also learned that both of her grandfathers were alcoholics, and that an uncle on Linda’s side wasn’t “quite right” mentally.
Cathy’s mother had quite a difficult time of it herself, suffering from depression, and trying to commit suicide in the 1960s. Linda ultimately had six children, with nearly a half-dozen miscarriages in between. From ages five to seven, Cathy watched her mother huddle in the corner, crying. Linda tried medications of the day, including Librium and Thorazine, but nothing helped. When more drastic measures were necessary, Cathy was sent to her grandmother’s house while Linda underwent electroconvulsive therapy, known at the time as electroshock therapy. Linda seemed quite a bit better afterward, more calm and able to laugh again, but she still had a temper.
Cathy’s father
