by Don Lattin
[Davida] was put on Berg’s “sharing schedule,” or “scaring schedule” as some people called it…. Even as young as Davida was, she was still put on Berg’s “scaring” schedule. She wasn’t very happy about it, but because of her mother’s prodding, pushing, and threatening, she consented. The fucker was just totally obsessed with sex! Thinking about it now, it’s almost unreal!
Berg sometimes used the teen girls he had sex with to keep [Zerby] on her toes and get her to do what he wanted. For example, he would drink himself totally plastered at night, and because [Zerby] wanted to get some sleep and because she knew it was bad for him, she would try to ration the wine and get him to stop and go to sleep. It was a losing battle, but night after night, year after year, she kept on fighting with him about it
At different times during those years, Techi [Ricky’s younger sister] and I would sleep in bunk-beds or walk-in closets adjacent to Berg’s room with beds built into them. Berg liked having us there, but often he would be so loud that we would all be awake for hours listening to his drunken ranting and off-key singing.19
Ricky had finally made the break from The Family—and from his family. Now came the hard part. How would he deal with his rage toward his mother? How would he begin to make it in the real world? Should he become a leader of second-generation defectors? Should he just move on? Should he track his mother down and get revenge?
Leaving home and family can be hard for any young person. All adolescents have some difficulties establishing their own identities, but imagine how hard that would be for someone who never had control of something as basic as his own name.
Someone Ricky trusted gave him some advice. “Get a life. Just live your life, and don’t let these people destroy the rest of your life.”
Ricky tried. He got work on an Alaskan fishing boat. It was hellish labor, but he made some money. He and Elixcia got a little apartment in Seattle and tried to start a life.
His older friend—the one from his mother’s generation—saw that he couldn’t really do much more to help Ricky and Elixcia. All three had been in The Family. They had all been damaged. But there would always be a gulf between the adult members and children born into The Family. It was an emotional difference—the difference between guilt and anger.
“We’re really not in the same boat,” his older friend explained. “We [the original members] joined of our own volition and built the system that oppressed these young people from day one. Our guilt and complicity in that can be overwhelming. What can you do to help these young people? You can’t undo the harm.”20
Ricky had lots of secrets—the alleged incest with his mother, his forced sexual affair with Merry when she was just fourteen years old. His story is unique, but he was by no means the only one struggling to overcome a traumatic childhood in The Family.
Don Irwin, the brother of Merry Berg, said it was particularly hard for those kids who grew up in the Unit. “They have such an intense deck stacked against them. They were essentially kept for the purposes of Berg’s perversions and foolishness and crimes. The guy would get drunk, buzz up Sara [Kelley] on the intercom and say, ‘Bring Davida over.’ And she did. Ricky was right there to witness the terror of his friend being carted off to service this lecher and made to receive corporal punishment if she wasn’t enthusiastic or didn’t perform well. It was just hopelessness. Utter hopelessness.
“You have to stop thinking of this as a religious group or cult and start looking at it as an organized crime syndicate. Then things begin to make a lot more sense. Berg attempted to implicate as many of his top lieutenants as he could in his crimes, so they could not turn on him and so his behavior would seem normal. It’s very difficult for them not to be invested in the defense of their leadership when they themselves have so much blood on their hands.”21
In Seattle, Elixcia enrolled in nursing school. She was moving on with her life, but Ricky couldn’t shake his past. “It was hard for Ricky to be with me,” Elixcia said. “We pushed each other. We both had low self-esteem. I was going to medical school, and it was hard for him to see me do so well.”
Ricky started up a telephone and e-mail friendship with another second-generation defector, Sara Martin, who lives in San Diego and goes by the name Sarafina. She had been searching for an old friend and posted a notice on movingon.org. Ricky saw it and e-mailed Sarafina. They started e-mailing each other and talking on the phone. “He was telling me how unhappy he was in Seattle,” Sarafina recalled. “Elixcia had gone through a lot herself, but was moving in another direction. It was hard for her to be around him. He had a lot of anger toward his mom. He said, ‘People looked up to me and thought I had this perfect childhood. But I didn’t. I saw things they can’t imagine seeing.’”22
Ricky was starting to see how his childhood experiences—being raised by Berg and Zerby to be the Prophet Prince and role model for the second generation—was a unique form of child abuse. Most of his peers didn’t have parents who would “try to brainwash you with the fact that they were God’s anointed prophets and to go against them meant you were going against God,” Ricky said in an e-mail to a friend. “It takes a lot more juice to ‘move on with your life’ when that whole fucked up shit gets mixed in there.”
Only the children of the inner circle—Davida, Merry, Techi, and Ricky—had parents who would “write volumes and volumes teaching thousands of other people how to fuck up their own lives and the lives of their kids.”23
Ricky was also spending a lot of time e-mailing Tiago, his old friend from Hungary and someone who would listen to him talk about his troubles with Elixcia.
“Ricky didn’t think he promised a monogamous relationship,” Tiago said. “They got married, but partly to help her with her green card. She had a Venezuelan passport. He was helping her get her citizenship.”
Others say the couple was madly in love, but just had too much baggage from the past. Ricky ended up getting his own apartment in Seattle. He was spending more time on the phone and Internet with Sarafina. Gabe Martin, the longtime Berg/Zerby operative, was Sarafina’s uncle.
Ricky found that telling his story on the Internet didn’t seem to help him, and it was having little effect on the operations of The Family. Ricky started talking to Sarafina about suicide. She invited him to come down to San Diego, where a number of key second-generation defectors were living. “I told him I know how hard it is to be alone and have no one but yourself when you think about all of these things,” Sarafina said. “We were working on some things, and having fun together. I told him about how we have barbecues on the beach and go jet skiing. He would talk for hours. He really needed help. We were hoping to point him in another direction.”24
Ricky moved down to San Diego and into Sarafina’s small apartment in June 2004. One of her two roommates had moved out, and Ricky took her place. She introduced him to a friend and former roommate, Jennifer Schroeder, who had moved up to the San Francisco Bay Area, but still made lots of visits down to the sunnier climes of southern California. Ricky and Jennifer soon became good friends—and got romantically involved. He started teaching her a bit of karate.
Since leaving The Family, Ricky had studied various forms of martial arts. He loved kung fu movies. “Maybe it was a way of letting out his anger,” Jennifer said.
Jennifer had never been in The Family, but heard all the stories from her other friends in San Diego. “I sat through many conversations about the horrific acts that happened to them when they were children,” she said. “There is a lot of pain, anger, and grief. Some of them can’t handle the real world outside the cult because it is so different. They don’t have the social, intellectual skills that we have all learned through schooling and life. Ricky was a great friend and a great guy. He was trying to cope with life. He just wanted someone to love him.”25
Ricky’s descent into depression and rage was not done in private. His friends saw it. In San Diego, and in Seattle before that, he wrote about it on the Internet. Some of Ricky’
s postings were to vent. Others were designed to set the record straight—or at least to explain why he demanded hush money from his mother. But his most poignant message came at the end of a long posting during the summer of 2002. Ricky longed for a normal family life, but it just wasn’t happening. One day before he left Elixcia in Seattle and moved down to San Diego, Ricky took his laptop down to a waterfront park he liked to visit.
It’s a picture perfect day; the sky is deep blue; there are white puffy clouds in the sky. I can see Mt. Rainier in the distance, and its majestic beauty is stunning.
There’s a young couple nearby, walking with their twins. The twins are dressed the same—no shirts, with cover-alls, and baseball hats.
Seeing kids with normal, loving parents who really seem to care about them is a bitter-sweet experience for me. On one hand it hurts because I’m reminded of the stark contrast between parents who most likely want what’s best for their kids, and the kind of parents I had, who were really only concerned about my welfare as far as they could use me for a favorable political commodity.
On the other hand it brings me such joy to see kids like these little twins running around, because I am so thankful that they have a good shot at happiness and success in life. They have a loving, caring family to stand behind them, and don’t have to struggle with the horrible memories and abuse that many of us who grew up in The Family do.
It gives me hope that one day Berg and Maria’s evil legacy will die with The Family, and it will be only a distant or, better yet, forgotten bad memory.26
By the end of the summer of 2004, it was clear that Ricky Rodriguez was one of the second-generation defectors who was not moving on. “I haven’t visited this site much for a long time,” Ricky wrote his final Internet communiqué. “I was under the mistaken impression that having written [about my story] I could leave it all behind, start a new life that had nothing to do with the cult, quit talking to anyone who had anything to do with the cult, and really ‘move on’ with my life. I know now that will never happen. I can’t run away from my past, and no matter how much longer I live, the first 35 years of my life will always haunt me.”
Ricky then issued a call to arms. “Something has to be done to stop these child molesters and it would be nice to find some people who think the same way. Every day, these people [who] are alive and free [are] a slap in the face to the thousands of us who have been methodically molested, tortured, raped, and the many who they have as good as murdered by driving them to suicide.”27
Anneke Schieberl, the Houston convert who went through basic training with Sue Kauten back in 1971, was now living in San Diego with her husband, Ron. They had been out of The Family for more than twenty-five years, and their home had become something of a way station for second-generation defectors trying to break free.
“We’d been helping ex-members since 1978,” Schieberl said. “Sometimes it’s good, sometimes not. A lot of times it’s a mercy job.28
“Ricky helped us get this house ready so we could move in,” she said. “He’d come over here to talk. He just wanted to hang out. He said there wasn’t a moment in his life when he didn’t think about the shame of his childhood. The word he used was ‘embarrassed.’ He was so embarrassed by the things they did to him when he was growing up.
“His rage about The Family was constant, but he was trying not to talk about it publicly,” she added. “He said he couldn’t cause anymore trouble because of what might happen to Techi.”
Ricky was worried about Techi, his younger sister still in The Family. He told friends that one of the main reasons he stopped posting his recollections on the Internet was the threats he received regarding Techi. He feared public denunciations of his mother could make life worse for his little sister. Ricky began pretending to seek some kind of reconciliation with his mother. He put out feelers through his relatives in Tucson. After moving to San Diego, he made several visits to The Family Care Foundation and met some people who had his mother’s ear. He hoped that the ruse would allow him to contact Techi and get her out of The Family.
Sarafina introduced Ricky to the leading second-generation defectors from The Family. Many were stuck in the pain and anger of their childhood and spent countless hours on four different Web sites started by former members. They were looking for ways to bring the child molesters of The Family to justice by encouraging the FBI and local law enforcement to file criminal charges, gathering information for possible civil lawsuits, and keeping The Family story alive in the news media. They soon discovered how hard it was to build strong civil or criminal cases against Family leaders. Most of the sexual abuse happened outside the United States in the seventies and eighties and was committed by men and women who were constantly changing their names.
Sarafina said she was troubled by Ricky’s inability to stop blaming himself for what happened to other children in The Family. He was talking more and more about how he’d like to see his mother dead. At Sarafina’s suggestion, he talked to Daniel Roselle, who had emerged as a leader among second-generation defectors. They hoped to find justice through the courts, and a woman agent at the FBI office in San Diego had started looking into the abuse allegations. “I e-mailed Ricky and said, ‘If you want to act, this is the most concrete thing I’ve heard so far.’ I didn’t hear back from him,” Roselle recalled. “Then he called me from Seattle. He asked about the FBI lady, and I told him she hadn’t got back in touch with me. I had nothing to offer him.”29
Ricky and Roselle went over a list of second-generation Family members who had committed suicide in recent years. “We’re dropping like flies,” he told Ricky.
Then Ricky said, “Is there any way you can help me find my mother?”
Roselle was dumbfounded. Why find Zerby unless you have a subpoena for her? There had been some rumors that top Family leaders were in New Mexico, but Roselle told Ricky he had no idea where his mother was.
Then Ricky said, “She needs to die.”
Roselle says he tried to change the subject. Maybe they could get justice through the courts.
“Right,” Ricky said. “Nothing ever happens with that.”
Then Ricky said, “Sometimes I think my mission is just to end them and me.”
Roselle paused.
“What do you say when someone tells you that? It’s not like Ricky and I were bosom buddies. Maybe we talked four times over a period of three months.
“During our last conversation,” Roselle said, “he said the thing to do is take them out and then take myself out.”
That was it for Roselle. Ricky called him two more times, but Roselle did not return the calls. He was scared. “I didn’t call him back,” he said, his eyes tearing up. “I don’t agree with what he did, but maybe I could have helped him.”
Ricky had grown tired of the second-generation defector community. He complained to one of his confidants that it was turning into a cult of its own. He had discovered something that often happens in the anticult movement. Former members simply turn their fanaticism against their former prophet or guru or cult leader. Ricky was sick of that scene. He wanted revenge.
Ricky called Aunt Rosemary and told her he wanted to visit her in Tucson. She and her parents were the only family he had outside The Family. Tucson was also the most likely place Ricky could get the information he wanted as to the whereabouts of his despised mother.
13
Into the Desert
TUCSON, ARIZONA
December 25, 2004 – Elderhaven Care Home
Ricky outside Aunt Rosemary’s home in Tucson.
IT SEEMED STRANGE to Rosemary Kanspedos. Why would that woman be calling here on Christmas Day? This was family time, not The Family time. Rosemary never really trusted Sue Kauten, or Joy, or Angela or whatever she was calling herself this year. Rosemary and her family had come over to celebrate Christmas with her parents. Her sister, Jeannie, was there with her family, and so was Ricky.
Ricky had been in Tucson for about three months. He’d
gotten his own apartment, but still spent a lot of time with his Aunt Rosemary and her family. He’d split up with Elixcia and was on his own. It was only natural for him to be here with his grandparents on Christmas Day, Rosemary thought. Ricky was family. Sue Kauten was not family.
Jeannie talked to Sue for a while and then handed the phone to her husband. He wished Sue a Merry Christmas, then handed the phone to Rosemary, who did not want to talk to that woman. “We are having our family Christmas together,” Rosemary said, curtly. “This is not an appropriate time for you to call.”1
Rosemary Kanspedos handed the phone back to Jeannie, who then handed it to Ricky. He walked into the next room and had a private conversation with the woman who had once been one of his four childhood nannies. They talked for a while, then Ricky came back into the room. Nobody said another word about it.
For most of Ricky’s life in The Family, Sue Kauten had been his mother’s personal secretary. Ricky hadn’t revealed his exact plans to his Aunt Rosemary, but he had come to Arizona to find his mother and kill her. There were rumors that his mother was back in the states. If anyone knew the whereabouts of Karen Zerby, it would be Sue Kauten.
Rosemary was never sure what to make of Sue. At first she was just a voice on the phone. She was the go-between for Karen Zerby and their parents. Sue would tell Rosemary’s parents how Karen was, and relay news back to Karen about her parents. In the mid-nineties, Sue started showing up in Tucson and helping out at Elderhaven, getting to know Rosemary’s sister, Jeannie, and her husband, Bill. They put Sue on the board of directors at Elderhaven, and Rosemary watched as Sue “became very friendly with Jeannie and Bill.”
Ricky knew his Aunt Jeannie was closer to his mother than to his Aunt Rosemary, perhaps too close. Rosemary was his natural ally. Four months earlier, in August 2004, he had called Rosemary and asked if he could come and visit for the weekend.