“Lost Girls”
By Caitlin Rother 
(Pinnacle)

On the day in 2010 when a San Diego judge sentenced John Albert Gardner to life in prison for the rape and murder of two teenage girls, the fathers of his victims referred to him in court as a monster and a predator.

“Lost Girls” by veteran journalist and true-crime writer Caitlin Rother is a deeply reported, dispassionately written attempt to determine what created that monster and predator. It is a cautionary tale and a horror story, done superbly by a writer who knows how to burrow into a complex case without becoming captive to her sources.

The victims’ families chose not to cooperate with Rother, but Gardner’s mother, a psychiatric nurse, provided access and candor. Much of “Lost Girls” tells of her desperate, ineffectual attempts to find help for her mentally troubled son as he spiraled downward.

Struggling for financial survival, caught in several rocky relationships, Gardner’s mother, Cathy Osborn, took her son to various counselors and psychologists. By age 6, he was starting fires, taking mood-altering medication and seeing a psychologist.

There were private schools, special programs in public schools, numerous kinds of medication, and a 60-day stay in a mental hospital for children in Northern California.

Finally, Osborn realized, “My child is not ever going to be functioning close to normal.” Among other conditions, paranoia “became part of his lifelong persona,” she said.

In 2000, Gardner was convicted of sexually assaulting a 13-year-old girl. His mother argues that the incident was overstated by the prosecutor and mishandled by the defense attorney; Rother digs into the facts, interviews everyone concerned, and lets the reader decide.

Paroled as a registered sex offender, he was required to wear a GPS monitoring system. But officials missed dozens of opportunities to send him back to prison for violating his parole as he cruised close to schools and visited the grounds of a state prison.

After Amber Dubois disappeared in February 2009 while walking to high school in Escondido, police failed to see Gardner as a suspect although he lived nearby. A year later, when Chelsea King disappeared while jogging at Lake Hodges, Gardner was linked to the crime by semen in her panties. For his guilty plea to both murders, the district attorney agreed not to seek the death penalty.

Cathy Osborn, now married for the fourth time, claims that in the days before King’s murder, she had made multiple calls to psychiatric facilities seeking help for her son.

For sexual offenders, there are few programs available. Rother reports that despite her repeated requests for documentation about making those calls, “Cathy could not or would not produce phone records to prove it ...”

In a five-hour prison interview, Gardner, now 33 and bloated by medication, is by turns open and manipulative. He no longer lives in what he once described in a poem to his mother as a world of “just me and the little voices.”

With a laugh, he tells the reporter, “I’m rotting in prison. Cool. Public be happy.” (MCT)