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that,” she said.
    Cathy told him what was required, and he did it: He quit drinking, went into an outpatient rehab program, and started going to AA meetings. When she was satisfied it was safe for her family, she and the children came back to live with him.
    â€œBoundaries were set after that beating with John,” Cynthia recalled. “He did everything right.”
    After they all moved back in, John Sr. asked Cathy a couple more times to marry him, but she ignored him, unsure whether his proposals were serious. She finally said yes, and they got married on August 18, 1980, when she was twenty-five, he was thirty-six, and Li’l John was sixteen months old.
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    Ironically, part of the reason why Cathy married John Sr. was because she wanted to feel safe after she’d been kidnapped and raped when Li’l John was four months old. Her assailant was a tall, thin black man, who had climbed into the backseat of her car in a supermarket parking lot in Hawthorne. On her way to pick up the baby, and then her husband after a gig around midnight, she didn’t know the man was in her car until she started to drive. He grabbed her from behind, sticking the cold metal of a knife against her throat, causing her to scream with shock and fear.
    â€œShut up and pull over!” he ordered. She thought about crashing the car, but she didn’t know if she could do that without killing them both. After she pulled over to an open area, he told her to get down on her knees on the passenger-side floorboard, facing the seat. He put a pair of spray-painted goggles on her so she couldn’t see where they were going, a tactic indicating that he’d done this before. Next he told her to put her arms and head down. He drove for about half an hour to a hotel. He raped her there for the next seven hours, constantly reminding her that if she looked at him or told anyone, “I will come back and kill you.”
    â€œDon’t move those glasses,” he kept saying. “Don’t be trying to look.”
    He finally dropped her on a street corner, took the goggles, told her to keep her eyes closed until he was gone, and disappeared after parking her car down the block.
    â€œI was wandering the streets,” she recalled. “I was in so much shock. I couldn’t even call my parents to come pick me up.”
    She was treated at the now-defunct Robert F. Kennedy Medical Center in Hawthorne and reported the incident to police, but the rapist was never caught. Afterward, she told her daughters about it in a vague way to explain why she was so upset.
    â€œSomething bad happened to Mommy, but I’m okay now. I’m here with you,” she said, adding that she was trying to deal with it, but it would take some time before she felt better.
    Sarina recalled her mother trying to explain the situation. “Not the details, but we were aware that something happened,” Sarina recalled. “We didn’t understand the whole concept. I just shut it out.”
    The incident, which left Cathy scared to go out except for doctor’s appointments, made her want to be closer to John Sr.
    â€œI wanted his protection,” she said. “I wanted that sense of security.” At six feet and now a more stocky 180 pounds, “he was a big guy.” Plus, she said, “I liked him. He’s a very nice, charismatic individual, interesting to be around, intelligent. Even though he didn’t have a college education, he was a smart person.” Besides, she said, “I was the one he wanted to spend his life with.”
    But he reacted quite oddly, saying he almost didn’t believe she’d been raped because of her clinginess. He couldn’t understand why she wasn’t being more distant; he’d expected her to act just the opposite.
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    Once Cathy got past the trauma of the rape, she went back to school and took classes at West Los Angeles College, where she put