pleaded with her not to go, claiming he had a bad feeling he couldn't explain. Something in the pit of his stomach wanted to be with her, protect her, and under no circumstances did he want her to go dancing. His mother had been on the sore end of a violent relationship a couple of years before, during which Johnny had intervened with a steak knife, stabbing the boyfriend to defend her. He was only five. His intervention worked on that occasion, and perhaps he sensed that air of vulnerability again.
Unable to fight back his tears, Johnny begged his grandparents to let him go to the dance. At this point, his mother handed him a Snickers bar as a treat, which acted as the necessary calming tool. From that day forth, before every fight, amateur and professional, he had to have a Snickers bar. As Johnny took the candy, his mother kissed him and said, “I'll be back tomorrow.” She then headed off.
Despite the short-term comfort of the candy, Johnny, unable to sleep, remained an emotional wreck and spent the whole night looking frantically out the windows, waiting for his mother to return. He kept telling his grandparents, “I want my mom, I want my mom,” but he was unloading on deaf ears.
Then came that haunting memory: the last time he would see his mother alive. Looking out of the back porch in the middle of the night, Johnny saw a pickup truck with two men riding up front and a woman tied up inside it. He was even convinced that his mother locked a frightened stare with him for a split second. He immediately went and woke up his grandparents, describing vividly what he'd just witnessed, right down to the color and type of truck (which would later match police reports). His grandparents dismissed his cries for help and instead punished the little boy for waking them up. Johnny's mother never did come home.
Soon after Johnny spotted the truck, his mother was driven to a remote gravel pit in the Southwest Valley of Albuquerque.
Johnny's interpretation of the attack as a little boy was that she was tied up and stabbed twenty-seven times with an ice pick, but the coroner's reports would confirm it was actually a screwdriver and an open pair of scissors. It was such a brutal attack that one of her breasts was almost completely severed.
Somehow she managed to crawl out of the pit, and when nearby workers found her, it looked like she had been aiming to crawl to the local houses in the distance. They called the police instantly and described her as wearing a red blouse—her white shirt was no longer recognizable amid the blood-drenched scene.
As the days went by, Johnny kept asking his grandparents what was going on. Nobody from his family called the police, but three days after he'd last seen her, Johnny was in the living room when there was a knock at the door. It was a family member holding a newspaper, showing an article to Johnny's grandparents about an unidentified woman wearing unique jewelry. The woman had been found brutally attacked and was in intensive care. The family member said, “Isn't this Virginia's jewelry?” The grandparents confirmed, “That's hers,” then rushed down to the hospital without Johnny.
Virginia was in a coma, hanging onto life from a thread, but nonetheless still alive. She then received one last visit that ensured her fate: A man, believed to be one of her assailants, walked in with a blunt object and struck her across the head. Virginia Gallegos died in the hospital on May 28, 1975, four days after saying goodbye to her beloved son. Johnny later said his mother's death would “kill” him every day he remained on this planet.
Understandably, Johnny was left emotionally scarred. Irreparably, to be more accurate. In the coming years he refused to go to her grave and on one of the rare occasions he did muster the strength to see her resting site, he tried to take his life. He threw himself on top of a large knife, but somehow only the tip penetrated. Johnny took that as a sign that it was not his time.
This would not be his only tango with death.
Chapter 2
Meeting His Match
“If someone had said to me at the age of nineteen, ‘Hey Teresa. What interest do you have in the 115-pound division?’ I probably would have thought they were joking and said, ‘Do people even fight at that kind of a weight?’”
—Teresa Tapia
Turning to boxing at the age of nine, Johnny had a very impressive amateur career, becoming a two-weight national Golden Gloves champion. Happy with what he'd achieved, he threw his hat into the professional boxing ring on March 28, 1988.
With his relentless come-forward style and often lighthearted presence, he quickly became recognized by the media as a crowd pleaser, an entertainer. Having won the USBA super-flyweight title on May 10, 1990, against Roland Gomez, which he went on to defend four times in the next five months, Johnny boasted an unbeaten record of twenty-one victories and one draw and was being lined up for a world-title shot and a million-dollar Pepsi commercial.
Unfortunately, his passion and desire in the ring played second fiddle to a destructive lifestyle, one that a twenty-year-old Teresa Chavez, now Tapia, witnessed in horror hours after being married.
Johnny hadn't divulged much of himself to Teresa prior to getting hitched. He had gang connections, had been in and out of jail, and was facing prison time for intimidating a witness in a murder trial. That last action was the reason his professional boxing license had been suspended. Without the strict discipline of professional prizefighting, Johnny was a lost soul, drinking and drugging himself into oblivion.
He was pronounced DOA on five occasions. “Five times that I know of—or, should I say, that I was aware of when he was with me,” says Teresa. The first time was on the day of their wedding and the second was in the fall of 1993, when he'd been found in the streets of Albuquerque with a stab wound in his head, having also overdosed on narcotics.
Brushing off his second encounter with death, on December 23, 1993, fresh out of a three-month jail stint for breaking his probation conditions for driving under the influence of alcohol, Johnny came home, promising Teresa he was a changed man. They had recently lost a baby, four months into pregnancy, and he knew she was fed up with his antics. So he was on his best behavior, for a number of hours at least. On Christmas Eve, Johnny decided to visit his grandparents and promised he'd be back soon.
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