The Murder Of Chelsea King

On February twenty-fifth, seventeen year old Chelsea King, a resident of San Diego, California, went for a jog in the Rancho Bernardo Community Park, and was not seen alive again. On March 2nd, 2010, remnants of a body were found on the shoreline of Lake Hodges in a shallow grave, and were tentatively assumed to be those of the teenager, and shortly after, those assumptions were confirmed.

On Sunday the twenty-eighth of February, John Albert Gardner was arrested on assumption of rape and murder outside of a restaurant in Escondito. DNA evidence was found connecting him to Chelsea King, and he was charged with her murder. If convicted, Gardner could face a possibility of the death penalty. Under the California Penal Code, this could mean that Gardner may face execution from either lethal injection, the most common method of execution of the United States, or lethal gas.

However, many residents of the San Diego area are questioning why Gardner was not arrested before this tragic occurrence. Last December another girl, Amber Dubois, went missing while walking home from school. Her parents have shown the Kings their support throughout their search for their daughter, while continuing to search for their own missing child. Gardner is now suspected to have kidnapped Dubois as well. The very same day Chelsea King went missing, a report was filed to the San Diego Police Department. The report consisted of a man fitting Gardner’s description stalking a thirteen year old girl in Rancho Bernardo, San Diego.

Frequently seen outside of Gardner’s mother’s home is a black Sedan, the vehicle described to police as the one following the young girl. Last October, an attempted abduction less than four miles from Gardner’s residence occurred, the attacker again strikingly similar to John Gardner. When he was convicted ten years ago, a psychiatrist recommended to the judge that he be given life in prison, and yet he was only given a six year sentence. Of those six, Gardner only spent five behind bars. Gardner is believed to have attacked a Colorado woman on December 28th of 2009, but the woman left the state before she could identify Gardner through a sketch artist.

The question remains: why hadn’t John Gardner been arrested before Chelsea King’s murder? Police had his records; he was a registered sex offender, and had plenty of charges against him from before. Family had described him as “cold and emotionless”. Even more pressing, the parents of Amber Dubois had asked police to look into Gardner as a suspect shortly after their daughter went missing last December, but they declined, saying that her disappearance was strange, though they couldn’t tie Gardner to the crime, if there even was one. Dubois has not been seen in over a year, and her parents continue their search for her. King’s parents are asking for a reform of the state’s sexual predator laws, to prevent this from happening to other children and parents in the future.