John Albert Gardner III killed two teenage girls in north San Diego County a year apart. On February 13, 2009, Amber Dubois, 14, vanished on her way to Escondido High School, and for more than a year her family searched for her without finding a trace. On February 25, 2010, Chelsea King, 17, a senior at Poway High School, went for a run on the trails around Lake Hodges and did not come home. Gardner, a registered sex offender who had served five years in prison for attacking a 13-year-old neighbor in 2000, was arrested three days later after DNA on Chelsea's clothing pointed to him. Days after that he led investigators to Amber's remains on the Pala Indian Reservation.
On April 16, 2010, he pleaded guilty to both murders and to an attempted rape in the same park two months before Chelsea died. The district attorney took the death penalty off the table because, without his plea, she could not prove that he had killed Amber. He was sentenced on May 14, 2010, to two consecutive terms of life without the possibility of parole, plus a further term of 25 years to life.
The case reshaped California law and exposed failures in how the state had supervised him. Chelsea's parents campaigned for a bill that became the Chelsea King Child Predator Prevention Act of 2010, known as Chelsea's Law. A June 2010 report by the state's Office of the Inspector General found that the GPS device Gardner wore on parole had recorded repeated violations of his parole conditions, and a felony, that no one was required to review.
Gardner was born in Culver City, in Los Angeles County, according to a summary of his record that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) released in March 2010. He was 30 when he was arrested in February 2010 and 31 when he pleaded guilty that April.
His prison file, released in March 2010 and summarized by NBC 7 San Diego, described a disrupted childhood. His parents divorced when he was five. He said his father spanked him with a belt, which he considered abuse. He described a stepfather, at about the age of nine, as an "awesome dad"; his mother and that stepfather divorced in 1998. The file recorded that his natural father, his stepfather and an uncle were all alcoholics. He had four adult half-sisters and moved often as a child. He had been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and took medication for it until his teens.
He spent at least part of his childhood in Running Springs, in the San Bernardino Mountains, and attended Rim of the World High School, the Associated Press reported in March 2010. The prison file said he had a 3.2 grade point average in high school and had hoped to become a math teacher, and that he had also considered the military or police work. In 1998 he was convicted of a minor public-order offense, the peace-disturbance statute, after trespassing on school grounds; it was his only criminal record before 2000.
People who knew him as a young man described him to reporters, and to a judge in 2000, as kind and helpful. A girlfriend from high school wrote that he had never made her feel threatened. Another former girlfriend, whom he met while working at a Big 5 Sporting Goods store in San Diego, wrote that he had been nothing but kind to her. A neighbor recalled him shoveling snow and carrying groceries. Those letters were written in support of him at his first sentencing, and the court-appointed psychiatrist who examined him at the same time reached a very different view.
On March 16, 2000, Gardner, then 20, attacked a 13-year-old girl who lived near him in San Diego. Prosecutors said he lured her to his home, in the Rancho Bernardo area, with an offer to watch the movie Patch Adams. He beat and sexually assaulted her. She escaped and ran to a neighbor for help. She has never been publicly named and is not named here.
He pleaded guilty in May 2000 to two counts of lewd and lascivious acts on a child under 14 and one count of false imprisonment. His plea agreement allowed a sentence of nearly 11 years. A court-appointed psychiatrist, Dr. Matthew Carroll, urged the maximum. Carroll wrote that Gardner showed "significant predatory traits to underage females," would be a "continued danger to underage girls in the community," and took no responsibility for what he had done; he called him "an extremely poor candidate" for treatment. A prosecutor's sentencing memo said Gardner had "never expressed one scintilla of remorse." Another doctor, who had treated him for bipolar disorder, wrote that he was remorseful and motivated to get help, and his mother, Catherine Osborn, wrote to the judge that her son accepted full responsibility.
Prosecutors nonetheless recommended six years. They cited his lack of a significant criminal record and said they wanted to spare the girl the trauma of testifying. On September 13, 2000, he was sentenced to six years in state prison and fined $1,200. According to a police report quoted in his prison file, he took the plea because three lawyers told him he would fare badly at trial.
Gardner entered the state prison system in September 2000 at the reception center at Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility, near the Mexican border in San Diego County. (The CDCR summary gives his admission as September 14, and its fact sheet and the Inspector General give September 18.) In December 2000 he was transferred to the California Correctional Institution at Tehachapi.
His record there was largely unremarkable. Between 2001 and 2003 he received six minor rules violations, for arriving late to class, refusing a work assignment, having a butane lighter and smoking indoors. He completed an academic program, earned certificate units in architectural drafting and worked as an assignment clerk, a clothing trimmer in a prison industry shop and a teacher's aide for English as a second language and math classes. In February 2004 he was placed in administrative segregation for his own safety after verbal and physical confrontations with other inmates, and in April 2004 he was transferred to Avenal State Prison, again for safety. Because his main offense counted as violent under California law, his good-time credit was limited to 15 percent. He served five years of the six-year term.
Gardner was released to parole on September 26, 2005, and reported to the Escondido parole office the next day. As a sex offender he was placed on high-control supervision. His conditions barred contact with anyone under 18 without approval, barred him from coming within 100 yards of schools, parks and other places where children gather, and barred him from living near an elementary school. He also had to register as a sex offender every year and whenever he moved, which, the Inspector General later confirmed, he did.
He was not subject to Jessica's Law, the 2006 ballot measure that required lifetime GPS monitoring of felony sex offenders, because he had been released before voters approved it in November 2006. The department placed him on GPS anyway in September 2007, under a policy of tracking all sex offenders on parole, and added conditions: a curfew from 9 p.m. to 5 a.m., no residence within half a mile of any school, and no access to a post office box, storage unit or locker. Because a static risk score based only on his 2000 conviction classed him as low to moderate risk, he was placed on "passive" monitoring, under which data was uploaded in batches and agents received alerts the next day. In January 2008 his case moved to a passive GPS caseload.
For at least 16 months after his release he lived within about a football field's length of a preschool on the Miramar College campus. In May 2006 a district administrator allowed him to stay until his lease ran out that August, but he was never told to move. A parole agent found him still there in September 2007, and he was moved within days. A new agent referred the violation to the Board of Parole Hearings, which could have returned him to prison; on September 25, 2007, the board kept him on parole because he had found other housing. Parole officials documented six other possible violations, among them four low-battery alerts from his GPS unit, a suspicion of marijuana possession and a missed meeting. None was sent to the board. On September 26, 2008, his parole ended and his ankle monitor was removed.
The full extent of what the monitor had recorded did not come out until 2010. The Office of the Inspector General obtained 13 months of Gardner's GPS data from the department's vendor and reviewed it in two-week batches. It found that on the morning of July 12, 2008, Gardner had driven onto the grounds of Richard J. Donovan State Prison, stopped in a visitor parking lot, left, and returned. For a former state prisoner, entering prison grounds without permission is a felony under California Penal Code Section 4571. Gardner told the Inspector General's staff after his sentencing that he had been dropping off a friend who wanted to visit an inmate. District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis told the Inspector General that, had the department reported the visit, she would have charged it as a third-strike felony, which could have carried 25 years to life.
The data showed more. Gardner had spent long periods near a San Diego preschool, at a spot overlooking its playground, and had made isolated visits to two middle schools and a church preschool. From September 2007 to April 2008 his approved residence in Escondido was within half a mile of Mission Middle School, a home the department had helped him find. The Inspector General counted 158 curfew violations in 13 months, including a night spent at a bayside resort on Coronado. He also made repeated visits to a storage unit rented by his mother, who had authorized him to use it. The report listed at least 13 other locations, several of them in remote rural areas, that should have prompted questions; one was a remote mountain area east of Escondido that he visited at about 3 a.m. on July 5, 2008, while he was homeless. Parole agents had not been required to review passive GPS data at all, and no zones had been set to alert anyone to any of this.
Gardner's movements after parole are sketched in his registration records. He registered in Escondido from 2008 into January 2010, lived for a time in an apartment complex about two miles from where Amber Dubois disappeared, and on January 7, 2010, registered as living in Lakeland Village, an unincorporated community near Lake Elsinore in Riverside County, where neighbors said he stayed on and off with his grandmother.
Amber Dubois was 14 and a student at Escondido High School. Her father is Maurice "Moe" Dubois and her mother is Carrie McGonigle. She loved animals and hoped to work with them for a living. She had a horse, and her fourth-grade teacher later recalled that she taught him how to approach one: first, she told him, you have to look into its eyes. She was active in Future Farmers of America and was saving to raise a lamb. A close friend, Taylor Doyle, remembered reading and laughing with her and planning to be friends for life.
On the morning of Friday, February 13, 2009, Amber left home for school carrying a $200 check to buy a lamb for her Future Farmers of America project. She was last seen shortly after 7 a.m. near Escondido High School. A woman who used to drive her to middle school reported seeing her walking with a man about 200 yards from the campus. She never appeared on the school's surveillance cameras, and the check was never cashed.
Gardner later admitted that he kidnapped Amber, raped her and killed her about an hour and a half after he met her, then buried her in a shallow grave in a remote area of Pala. Prosecutors said in court that he stabbed her. No physical evidence was found at the time, which her father later said made the search much harder.
Amber's parents kept her case in public view for more than a year. They printed flyers, held vigils and raised money for an Amber Dubois search fund, and on August 13, 2009, her story was featured on America's Most Wanted. Her father said at the first anniversary that if the family stopped putting the word out, she would never be found. Her mother said that she believed someone was holding her daughter and that the need to bring her home drove her every day. An electronic sign outside Escondido High School kept her disappearance in front of students. On February 13, 2010, the school's football field hosted a walk-a-thon for the search fund.
Twelve days later, Chelsea King disappeared about ten miles to the south. Maurice Dubois joined the volunteers searching for her.
At about 10:30 a.m. on December 27, 2009, Gardner attacked a 22-year-old woman who was jogging in Rancho Bernardo Community Park, near Lake Hodges. She fought back, striking him in the nose with her elbow, and escaped. She later identified Gardner as her attacker. She is a surviving victim of attempted sexual assault and is not named here. The attack was not connected to Gardner until after his arrest two months later.
Chelsea King was 17 and lived in Poway, a suburb of San Diego, with her parents, Brent and Kelly King, and her younger brother. She was a straight-A senior at Poway High School, ran cross-country and played the French horn in the San Diego Youth Symphony. She worked as a peer counselor at school and volunteered often, including at a prom for special-education students and packing food for needy families in Africa. She had applied to 11 colleges and hoped to build a career that combined writing with the environment. She kept quotations taped to her bathroom mirror, among them Eleanor Roosevelt's line that the future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams. Her mother later said that for Chelsea running was as essential as breathing.
On the afternoon of Thursday, February 25, 2010, Chelsea drove from Poway High School to Rancho Bernardo Community Park and parked her car to go running on the trails around Lake Hodges. When she did not come home on time, her parents called the police. Her car was found that night with her phone and iPod inside.
Gardner later admitted that he attacked her on the trail, dragged her to a remote area, raped and strangled her within an hour, and buried her in a shallow grave near the lake shore.
The search for Chelsea grew quickly. The San Diego County Sheriff's Department led it, with the FBI, the San Diego Police Department, San Diego Fire-Rescue, Del Mar lifeguards and other agencies, and volunteers arrived by the hundreds. On one day more than 800 people, split into 45 teams, combed the park's trails, streams and shoreline; by the Sunday, February 28, the Associated Press counted about 1,500 law enforcement officers, dogs and volunteers. Poway High students wore blue and tied blue ribbons around the campus, and a website was set up to help find her.
Prosecutors later said that DNA on Chelsea's clothing linked Gardner to the crime. At about 4:30 p.m. on February 28, 2010, the Sheriff's Department's Fugitive Task Force arrested Gardner outside Hernandez' Hideaway, a restaurant in the Escondido area. Sheriff Bill Gore said that physical evidence had led to the arrest and that Gardner was refusing to cooperate. "We're confident that we have the right man in custody," Gore said. "Now we've just got to find Chelsea." Gore also said Gardner was possibly connected to the December attack on the jogger. Chelsea's father said that until he heard otherwise he believed she was alive.
Divers searching the lake shore on March 1 found clothing that belonged to Chelsea. On March 2 searchers found a body in a shallow grave near a tributary about 15 feet from the southern shore of Lake Hodges, and the sheriff said it was likely Chelsea's. A vigil planned that night at St. Michael Catholic Church became a memorial.
On March 3, 2010, the San Diego County District Attorney charged Gardner with the murder of Chelsea King and with assault with intent to commit rape in the December attack, and he pleaded not guilty through a public defender. The case was eligible for the death penalty. That same day, vandals painted a message on the garage door of the Rancho Bernardo home of Gardner's mother and stepfather.
Investigators quickly looked at whether Gardner was connected to Amber Dubois. He had lived about two miles from where she disappeared. Amber's father said the family hoped the two cases were separate, but that in the back of their minds they knew a connection was likely.
On March 5, 2010, Gardner led authorities to Amber's buried remains on the Pala Indian Reservation, a large rural reservation in northern San Diego County. He did so on a condition: the district attorney agreed that the information could not be used against him in court. Dumanis later explained that she accepted the condition to "end the anguish of the unknown" for Amber's family and to bring her home, and that despite intense work investigators had not been able to develop enough evidence to charge him with Amber's murder. The remains were recovered on March 6 and identified through dental records. On March 7 Amber's parents stood with Escondido police to announce that she had been found. A vigil was held at Escondido High School the next night.
On March 9, investigators searched the home where Gardner had been staying and took shovels, pickaxes, digging tools and clothing. At a hearing the same day, Judge David Danielsen agreed to a defense request to move the preliminary hearing from March 18 to August 4.
Riverside County investigators also looked at Gardner for an attempted abduction in Lake Elsinore on October 28, 2009, in which a 16-year-old girl said a man asked her for directions, then showed a gun and tried to force her into his car. A composite sketch she helped make resembled Gardner, and a gold sedan believed to be his, towed from an Escondido wrecking yard after his arrest, appeared to match her description of the car. Lake Elsinore police had not looked at him earlier because he had been registered in San Diego County until January 2010. No charge in that case has been found in any source.
Thousands of people came to the Poway High School football stadium on March 13, 2010, to remember Chelsea. Students wrapped ribbons around 8,000 sunflowers to hand out at the service. Her uncle, Chuck McCully, told the crowd that the family's lives had changed forever on February 25, and a family friend said Chelsea had been setting out to change the world. A week later runners gathered at Lake Hodges to finish the run she had started.
Amber's family held a private funeral in Orange County on March 26, 2010, and a public memorial the next afternoon in the Escondido High School football stadium. Animals were part of the gathering, and a video of her life was set to "Can You Feel the Love Tonight" and "Girls Just Want to Have Fun." Her father said Amber should not have died for nothing and that the community needed to protect the children it had left.
The arrest set off immediate questions about Gardner's parole. On March 5, 2010, the CDCR issued a fact sheet that said his parole field file, the parole agents' detailed notes of their supervision, had been destroyed under a policy requiring such files to be shredded one year after discharge; "there are no documents related to him," it said. Four days later the department and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger announced that records on sex offenders would be kept indefinitely, a change implemented on March 11. Assemblyman Hector De La Torre, chairman of the Assembly Committee on Accountability and Administrative Review, wrote to Corrections Secretary Matthew Cate on March 11 asking how the one-year rule had been chosen, and his committee took up parole record retention at a hearing on March 24.
On March 12 the governor ordered a review of how the state had handled Gardner. The department released Gardner's 282-page central file on March 15 and 17, a step its spokesman called unprecedented. The file showed the preschool violation and the board's decision to keep him on parole, and officials said that, had he been returned to prison, he might have been evaluated as a sexually violent predator.
The governor's request went to the California Sex Offender Management Board. A draft report released on April 8, 2010, prepared by a deputy attorney general and the director of the Division of Adult Parole Operations, concluded that parole agents should have done more but that closer supervision might not have prevented the later crimes, since they were committed after Gardner's parole had ended. The board's final response, dated May 1, 2010, found that parole should have made him move sooner, that the parole board should not have declined to revoke parole because parole staff had let the violation continue, that a 2008 marijuana citation should have been referred, and that he probably would not have qualified for commitment as a sexually violent predator on the basis of his 2000 offense. It recommended that all parole violations be reviewed for referral, that the state fund dynamic risk assessment, and that the state adopt a fuller supervision model for sex offenders.
The Inspector General, David R. Shaw, went further in a special report published on June 2, 2010. Its central finding was that the department "did not require parole agents to review the GPS data," and that had it done so, it would have found the prison visit and the pattern of violations, which could have sent Gardner back to prison and made it impossible for him to commit the 2009 and 2010 crimes. The report found that the department's new policy, adopted in March 2010, still left about 87 percent of passive GPS data unreviewed, and it recommended using trained analysts, reviewing data in batches and setting automatic alarm zones, for example around every prison and jail. Secretary Cate responded that the report criticized a policy that no longer existed. Shaw replied that the new one, "though improved, remains deficient."
As the case moved forward, prosecutors and the families weighed a deal. Gardner's lawyers would agree only if it meant life without parole, and the Kings agreed so that Amber's family could have an answer. On April 16, 2010, at what had been listed as a status conference, Gardner, 31, wearing a jail jumpsuit and shackles, pleaded guilty before Judge Danielsen to the murders of Amber Dubois and Chelsea King, admitting the rapes and that Amber's killing was premeditated, and to assault with intent to commit rape in the December attack. He answered "yes" when asked for his pleas. He gave up his right to appeal, and prosecutors agreed not to seek death.
"The defendant will die in prison," Dumanis told reporters. She called accepting the plea "an extremely difficult decision" and explained: "We have the evidence to pursue a murder charge against the defendant for Chelsea's murder but not for Amber's murder." She said the office had tried, and failed, to tie Gardner to Amber's death independently of what he had shown them.
Brent and Kelly King read a joint statement. Their first choice, Brent King said, had been the death penalty, which he called an empty promise in California. Supporting the deal had been "tortuous," he said, but they did it to spare their young son years of litigation and because they could not imagine Amber's family left with an "eternal question mark." Amber's father later said that he would thank Gardner for one thing, for allowing his family to bury their daughter. Amber's mother thanked the Kings for making the choice they did, and said that sitting in the courtroom with Gardner had filled her with rage.
Two weeks after his plea, Gardner gave a telephone interview from jail to KFMB-TV in San Diego. "I was aware of what I was doing, and I could not stop myself," he said. He said he had been "in a major rage" at his whole life and at everyone who had hurt him, and had "hurt the wrong people." He said it "wasn't about their age," that he had not sought out or waited for the girls, and that he hated himself. He claimed he had known he was dangerous and had tried to admit himself to a mental hospital but was turned away; no source located for this account confirms that claim. He said he led police to Amber "because I felt bad" and had no promise of a deal, which conflicts with the written agreement the district attorney described. He suggested that Amber would not have died if she had been riding a school bus, blaming budget cuts. Asked whether there were other victims, he laughed and said, "Good try." He predicted he would be dead within five years.
Amber's mother said she had been looking for answers for almost 15 months and wanted to meet Gardner before sentencing, and that the meeting would change what she said to the court.
On May 14, 2010, Gardner was sentenced in San Diego Superior Court. Judge Danielsen imposed two consecutive terms of life without the possibility of parole for the murders. For the assault on the jogger he received 25 years to life, and reports of the hearing say 24 more years were added because of his prior conviction; City News Service summarized the sentence as consecutive life terms without parole "plus 49 years."
The families spoke. Carrie McGonigle described her loss as minute-by-minute agony and said she was often consumed by thoughts of her daughter's last moments: "Was she scared? Was she calling my name?" Maurice Dubois read from the psychiatrist's 2000 report and compared Gardner to a mountain lion released by a zookeeper, asking who bears responsibility for what the animal does next. "It's obvious the legal system failed us," he said.
Brent King spoke about changing his daughter's diapers and talking with her about world affairs. "Chelsea was everything this man was not," he said, and he called Gardner a coward who preyed on girls half his size. Kelly King demanded that Gardner look at her; he raised his head once and refused a second time. She turned to his mother, Catherine Osborn, who sat in the front row, and said: "She knew what you were capable of and did nothing." That was Kelly King's accusation; Osborn did not speak in court, and no source records any finding on what she knew.
The woman Gardner attacked in December also addressed the court. She said she had come to help remove him from the world and make others safer, and that some mornings she still woke up screaming.
Gardner did not speak. He breathed heavily and cried at times, including during a video of Amber's life.
After the hearing, investigators from the Inspector General's office interviewed him about his parole. A three-county task force said the following Monday that it had not disbanded. A sheriff's lieutenant said it was reviewing missing persons cases involving girls and young women from about their early teens to early twenties in three counties. Prosecutor Kristen Spieler said Gardner had told investigators after sentencing that he had been involved in other attacks, though he admitted no further killings, and detectives said they did not take his account at face value.
Within weeks of their daughter's death the Kings set up Chelsea's Light Foundation, on March 15, 2010, and began campaigning for tougher laws on sex offenders who target children. On April 12 they went to Sacramento to lobby lawmakers. The vehicle was Assembly Bill 1844 by Assemblyman Nathan Fletcher, a San Diego Republican, which,, first introduced on February 12, 2010, was amended beginning April 13 to carry the proposal. It passed the Senate on August 24 and the Assembly on August 30, with dozens of coauthors from both parties.
Schwarzenegger signed it on September 9, 2010, at Balboa Park in San Diego, with Brent and Kelly King and Fletcher beside him. It was chaptered that day as Chapter 219, Statutes of 2010, and took effect immediately as an urgency measure. Its first section named it the Chelsea King Child Predator Prevention Act of 2010.
The act required life without the possibility of parole for adults convicted of certain forcible sex crimes against children under 14 committed under aggravating circumstances, and for some such crimes against minors 14 and older committed under two aggravating circumstances. It raised the terms for many other sex offenses against children, including assault with intent to commit rape on anyone under 18. It required lifetime parole for habitual sex offenders and certain others, and parole periods of 10 or 20 years for many more. It made it a misdemeanor for a paroled sex offender to enter a park where children regularly gather without a parole agent's permission. It required the state to add dynamic risk assessment and an assessment of the risk of future sexual violence to the static scale that had rated Gardner low to moderate risk, and to publish those scores on the state's sex offender website. It also required participation in an approved sex offender management program for registrants on probation and parole.
The Kings later moved to Illinois and spent years promoting similar laws elsewhere. Their foundation reported in 2014 that 382 people had been charged under Chelsea's Law in 2013 in San Diego, Riverside, Los Angeles and Orange counties. "The legislation is working as we hoped," Brent King said.
The foundation's first fundraiser, Finish Chelsea's Run, was held in Balboa Park on March 5, 2011, and became an annual event that paid for college scholarships through a Sunflower Scholarship Fund for students who showed "service over self." In October 2018 the Kings announced that the run would end after eight years. They said the events came "with a toll" and described a life with "pain on one side, and joy on the other." Kelly King said she saw her daughter's smile in every young person who took part.
On February 25, 2022, the 12th anniversary of Chelsea's death, Brent King announced that the foundation had "completed its mission" and was winding up its operations. It had raised more than $1 million for scholarships. A memorial now stands on the running trail near where Chelsea's body was found.
On May 18, 2010, Gardner was taken from the San Diego County jail to North Kern State Prison in Delano for a reception evaluation, held alone in a maximum-security cell. In June 2010 he was moved to California State Prison, Corcoran, where prison officials placed him in the state's only Protective Housing Unit, a small unit for high-profile inmates kept apart from the general population. The Associated Press reported that his neighbors there included Charles Manson. He had his own cell but could mix with others in the unit.
In 2014 a CDCR spokeswoman told NBC 7 San Diego that Gardner was still in the Protective Housing Unit at Corcoran, that the prison described him as "quiet," and that there were "no discipline issues." The department released a prison photograph of him dated April 4, 2014, showing him bearded and much changed from his appearance in court in 2010.
Gardner is serving two consecutive terms of life without the possibility of parole and, having waived his right to appeal, has no route to release. As of the latest reliable report on his placement, published by NBC 7 San Diego on July 31, 2014, he was held in the Protective Housing Unit at California State Prison, Corcoran. Later reporting through 2018 refers to his life sentence but does not state where he is held, and the state's online inmate locator could not be reached for this account, so his prison in 2026 is not confirmed here. No report of his death or of any new charge has been found.
Amber's parents spoke publicly from the first weeks of her disappearance to the day of sentencing, when her father told the court that the legal system had failed his family. Her mother said after the plea that she wanted to know what had happened to her daughter, and pressed to meet Gardner. Amber's case remained bound up with Chelsea's in public memory: NBC 7 San Diego marked the fifth anniversary of Amber's disappearance in 2014 with a look back at Chelsea's Law.
For the Kings, the anniversaries became occasions for the foundation's work. A year after Chelsea's death Brent King said the support his family received was measured by the depth of its loss, and Kelly King said Chelsea had only just begun what she was meant to do.
Proven by guilty pleas, and final: the rape and murder of Amber Dubois in February 2009, the rape and murder of Chelsea King in February 2010, and the assault with intent to commit rape of a jogger in December 2009.
Investigated, never charged: the October 2009 attempted abduction of a 16-year-old girl in Lake Elsinore. Riverside County investigators said in 2010 there were similarities and asked prosecutors to consider a charge; no charge has been found in any source. In March 2010 a San Francisco station also reported that investigators were looking at four possible cases in San Diego County, including whether he had followed a 13-year-old girl in the park. None led to charges.
His own claims: Gardner told investigators after sentencing that he had been involved in other attacks, but admitted no other killings, and the task force said it did not accept his word at face value. His statements that he tried to commit himself to a mental hospital, and that he showed police Amber's grave with no promise of a deal, are his own and are not confirmed; the second conflicts with the district attorney's account of a written agreement.
Whether the state could have stopped him: the Inspector General concluded in June 2010 that reviewing his GPS data would likely have returned him to prison and could have prevented both murders and the December attack. The Sex Offender Management Board's draft report in April 2010 concluded that a parole revocation would probably not have changed anything, because the crimes came after his parole ended. The two reviews looked at different questions: the board focused on the preschool violation and his risk classification, and the Inspector General on the unread GPS data, including the 2008 prison visit.
Details that vary between sources: the woman attacked in December 2009 is described as 22 (AP, March 2010) or 23 (Inspector General). The sentence for that attack is reported as 25 years to life plus 24 years, as "plus 49 years," or at the time of the plea as a life term with a 33-year minimum. Some reports give the sentencing date as May 15, 2010; the court date was May 14. The judge's name appears as both Danielsen and Danielson in news reports. His first prison admission is dated September 14 or September 18, 2000, in two CDCR documents.
Culver City, California: John Albert Gardner III is born (about 1979, from his reported ages).
1998: minor public-order conviction after trespassing on school grounds.
March 16, 2000: attacks a 13-year-old neighbor girl in the Rancho Bernardo area of San Diego.
May 2000: pleads guilty to two counts of lewd acts on a child under 14 and one of false imprisonment.
September 13, 2000: sentenced to six years in state prison.
December 2000: moved to the California Correctional Institution, Tehachapi.
April 2004: moved to Avenal State Prison for his safety.
September 26, 2005: released to parole after five years.
2005 to 2007: lives near a preschool on the Miramar College campus for at least 16 months.
September 2007: violation found; Board of Parole Hearings keeps him on parole (September 25); GPS monitoring begins.
July 12, 2008: GPS records him entering the grounds of R.J. Donovan State Prison, a felony that no one detects.
September 26, 2008: discharged from parole; ankle monitor removed.
February 13, 2009: Amber Dubois, 14, disappears on her way to Escondido High School.
August 13, 2009: Amber's case is featured on America's Most Wanted.
October 28, 2009: attempted abduction of a 16-year-old girl in Lake Elsinore (Gardner investigated, never charged).
December 27, 2009: Gardner attacks a jogger in Rancho Bernardo Community Park; she escapes.
January 7, 2010: registers as living near Lake Elsinore.
February 25, 2010: Chelsea King, 17, disappears while running near Lake Hodges.
February 28, 2010: Gardner is arrested in the Escondido area after DNA on Chelsea's clothing is linked to him.
March 2, 2010: Chelsea's body is found near the shore of Lake Hodges.
March 3, 2010: charged with Chelsea's murder and the December assault; pleads not guilty.
March 5, 2010: leads authorities to Amber's remains on the Pala Indian Reservation, under an agreement that it cannot be used against him; CDCR says his parole field file was destroyed.
March 6 and 7, 2010: Amber's remains are recovered, identified and announced.
March 12, 2010: Governor Schwarzenegger orders a review of the state's handling of Gardner.
March 13, 2010: thousands gather at Poway High School to remember Chelsea.
March 15, 2010: the Kings establish Chelsea's Light Foundation.
March 24, 2010: Assembly committee hearing on parole record retention.
March 27, 2010: public memorial for Amber at Escondido High School.
April 16, 2010: Gardner pleads guilty to both murders and the December assault; death penalty withdrawn.
About April 29, 2010: jailhouse telephone interview with KFMB-TV.
May 1, 2010: Sex Offender Management Board's response to the governor.
May 14, 2010: sentenced to two consecutive terms of life without parole plus 25 years to life.
May 18, 2010: taken to North Kern State Prison.
June 2, 2010: Inspector General's special report published.
June 2010: moved to the Protective Housing Unit at Corcoran.
September 9, 2010: Governor Schwarzenegger signs Chelsea's Law in Balboa Park.
March 5, 2011: first Finish Chelsea's Run.
July 2014: CDCR says he remains at Corcoran with no discipline issues.
October 2018: the Kings end the annual run after eight years.
February 25, 2022: Brent King announces that Chelsea's Light Foundation is winding up.
October 2026: serving life without parole; current prison not confirmed in this account.