Jesus Freaks

by Don Lattin

  “Of course,” his aunt replied. “When can you get here? What do you want me to cook for you? What do you want to eat? Oh, you know you’ll have to sleep on the living room floor. Is that OK?”

  Ricky arrived the next day from San Diego. He was going to leave Tucson to go home to San Diego on Sunday, then on Monday. Then he asked if he could stay with Rosemary and her family for a few weeks. He’d decided to stay in Tucson and look for a job.

  “You are more than welcome,” said Rosemary, who’d been dropping hints all weekend that she’d love for him to stay.

  Over the weekend, Ricky had helped Rosemary’s husband, Tom, haul some stuff out to the dump outside Tucson. They talked during the drive, and Ricky didn’t hide his intense anger toward his mother. He didn’t tell Tom his exact plan, but it was clear that he had come to Arizona with revenge on his mind.

  On Monday, Ricky saw a truck go by his aunt’s house with “Flynn’s Electric” written on the side. Ricky called the number and arranged to meet with Mark Flynn that evening. He was hired that night.

  Tom and Rosemary hoped Ricky would settle into his new job, get on with this life, and get over the hatred. “He tried, but the resentment just grew against his mother,” Tom said over dinner one night at their home in Tucson. “He just couldn’t put it behind him.”

  They were at the table with their daughter, Rachel, who was the same age as Ricky, and son, Ben, who was three years younger. It was the week before Christmas, 2005, almost a year after that surprise phone call from Sue Kauten. This was not an easy after-dinner conversation with the Kanspedos family. They are deeply religious people, and they were getting into some deep family secrets.

  Rosemary said Ricky mentioned the incest to her, but couldn’t really talk about it. He told his aunt “it would be too much for you.”

  “He knew I had problems with depression and he was trying to protect me,” Rosemary said.

  One of the things Ricky wanted to understand was what had happened to his mother to turn her into the person he so despised. She had the same upbringing as Aunt Rosemary and Aunt Jeannie. What happened to Karen?

  “Ricky said he could see it with Berg and all the history with his mother [Virginia Berg]. But with his mother [Karen Zerby], there didn’t seem to be a reason,” Tom said. “That troubled him.”

  Ironically, Tom Kanspedos had almost joined The Family back in the early seventies—years before he ever met Rosemary Zerby, his future wife. He first encountered the cult in 1972 in Brownsville, Texas. Tom was twenty-one years old and in the Army, stationed at Ft. Hood. “They were on the street,” he recalled. “Preaching the gospel. Then they starting talking about these ‘Mo letters’ like they were the word of God. That gave me the idea that something was up. I struggled with it. I kind of wanted to stay with them. It was intense. It was a spiritual battle.”

  He ran into the sect again when he was back home in Tucson, in the summer of 1973. “I went to one of their meetings,” Tom said. “They were down on Fourth Avenue, where the hippies would hang out. But there was this one guy with this look in his eyes—like he wasn’t in his right mind. I’d just gotten out of the military, and I was not into that communal-type thing. I had a car, and they’d make you sell your car. I had my freedom. It kind of seemed like going back into the military. I was working for the post office at the time, and I remember feeling guilty that these guys were out preaching the gospel, and I was just this guy going to work.”

  In the fall of 2004, Ricky stayed with Tom and Rosemary for about a month. Every night he would study his electrician’s manual. “He was not one to sit around and do nothing. He decided he was going to get a job, and then he got one,” his aunt said. “He studied everything. He decided he wanted to be better at math and got this textbook from my daughter, who was going through college and living here. Pretty soon, he was telling her the answer to math problems. There was this draw in him for knowledge, to be learning something all the time.

  “You’d have a conversation, and he’d say: ‘What are you thinking? Why are you thinking that way? Why did you say that?’

  “It would be very disconcerting. I’d say, ‘Well, I said what I meant.’

  ‘No, what did you mean by it?’ Ricky would ask.

  “I’d have to stop and think. He was interested in how real people functioned and thought. It was all learning to him.”

  Aunt Rosemary knew Ricky had been soured on religion by his upbringing in The Family, but she nevertheless told him that she would be happy to take him to their church. She would be proud to introduce him as her nephew.

  There was another reason for Ricky to visit the church. There was a little of his mother’s history at the church. It turned out that Karen Zerby was the one who had introduced Rosemary Zerby to this congregation back in 1968. “It was really small then,” she said. “Just patches of carpet on the floor.”

  Sunday came around, and to her surprise, Ricky said, “I’m going to church with you.”

  “Are you going for me?” Rosemary asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Then don’t go. You are not to go for me.”

  “No,” Ricky replied. “I want to go.”

  They went to church, a nondenominational evangelical church near the university. “They introduced him as my nephew, and people were very friendly, but I knew it upset him. It was so hard for him to sit there. Our church is different than most churches. We wear shorts, flip-flops. It’s come as you are. Just come. We have street people because we live near that part of town. Everybody is welcome. But I could see he had a very, very rough time.”

  After about a month, Ricky rented his own apartment. It was too crowded at Aunt Rosemary’s house, and the atmosphere was too religious for him. He couldn’t even drink beer at his aunt’s house. Ricky’s new place wasn’t located in the best part of town, but it was a decent apartment. Rosemary’s husband helped him move what few belongings he had into the flat. Ricky bought a table and chairs at Ikea—the same table and chair that would appear a few months later in his final videotaped message to the world. “His apartment was unadorned,” his aunt recalled. “He didn’t have pictures all over the place. He was just a simple guy. When he lived here he slept on the floor in our living room. In the morning you’d have never known he was there. He’d be sitting on the couch. Everything would be put away. He didn’t need a lot. It was one of the really cool things about him.”

  Ricky’s only other close friends in Tucson were his boss, Mark Flynn, and Mark’s wife, Denise. Mark was doing a remodeling job at a school near Rosemary’s house the day Ricky saw his big utility van with “Flynn Electric” on the side.

  “He called and wanted to know if Mark needed help,” Denise recalled. “He came over and had a résumé. He interviewed very well. Very personable. He was meticulous neat, polite. He’d show up early for work. He’d always said, ‘You don’t have to pay me overtime.’ I’d say, ‘I have to pay you. It’s the law, Ricky. Stop with that.’”2

  Ricky got his electrician’s license in Seattle and had his own set of tools. Ron and Anneke Schieberl had found him to be a great worker in San Diego and so did his new boss in Tucson. “He was the perfect employee—a journeyman,” Mark said. “Everybody that I work with—general contractors, suppliers—everybody liked him. He was an incredibly personable kid.”

  Ricky soon became a regular visitor at the Flynn’s home in Tucson. Denise would often make him breakfast before work and dinner in the evening. “He attached to Mark. He liked Mark. He wanted to hang out around him.”

  Over the next four months, Mark spent a lot of time talking with Ricky during drives to work sites around Tucson and Phoenix. It soon became clear that Ricky had traveled a lot as a child. One day, Mark asked him what his parents did for a living.

  “My parents were missionaries,” Ricky replied.

  “Interesting,” Mark said. “You know, I don’t care what religion you are, but I don’t want to hear about it on the job site. I used to work
with a Jehovah’s Witness, and man, it was brutal.”

  “No. No. Don’t worry about that,” Ricky answered. “I’m totally unreligious.”

  Ricky rarely talked about his family, but one night he was having dinner at the Flynn’s, and the subject of teenage pregnancy came up.

  “My sister had a baby when she was sixteen,” said Ricky, referring to Techi.

  “Wow,” Denise replied. “That must have been very difficult for your family.”

  “It was,” Ricky replied.

  Denise thought that seemed a bit strange for a nice missionary family, but sensed that was really all Ricky wanted to say about his family.

  As they spent more time with Ricky, the Flynns realized how little they knew about him. He had a wife in Seattle, and they had separated but still talked all the time on the phone. “His story brought up a lot of questions,” said Denise. “He was too traveled, too intelligent, too handsome to have no story and have nothing to say about himself. The fact that he was saying nothing spoke loudly. But I didn’t want to corner him. I felt like there was a huge thing there, and if I started asking questions, he’d run.”

  Ricky did confide in his Aunt Rosemary. Before they split up, Ricky had brought Elixcia to Tucson for a couple visits. “They were trying to get it together,” Rosemary recalled. “They told us about the difficulties that they had not knowing how to do anything. I just wanted to try to help with their lives and get it as normal as it could be. We can’t choose our parents, but it’s in our blood to want a parent. Most of the kids in the family never had real parents. When they left The Family they had no parents. I could be there for Ricky. He was needy. It was nothing to do with being for or against Karen.”

  Rosemary has trouble believing that Ricky moved to Tucson for one purpose and only one purpose—to track down his mother and kill her. “I’ve heard people say he came down here to kill Sue or to find his mother,” Rosemary said. “Perhaps, but my husband and I are pretty good judges of character. People who grew up in The Family are good at portraying what they want to portray, but the length of time he stayed with us, my husband and I had a feeling he wanted to change his life. He wanted to be normal. I really truly believe that even if he had those things planned, he could have been changed.”

  Ricky’s aunt started to cry again, sobbing between her words.

  “I always feel like we didn’t help him enough,” she said. “If he could have found what he was looking for, he could have changed.”

  Perhaps, but on that Christmas Day in 2004, Ricky was just looking for one thing—information as to the whereabouts of Karen Zerby and Peter Amsterdam. He had reason to believe they might show up at his grandparent’s place for the holidays. They had come here before, and so had Techi, the little sister he so desperately wanted to save.

  Ricky’s first visit to Tucson—his first meeting with Aunt Rosemary and Aunt Jeannie and his grandparents—was when he was just sixteen or seventeen. It was before he’d met Elixcia. Rosemary and her family had not seen Karen since she disappeared that day in 1969 in the van with Jane Berg and the Teens for Christ. There had been letters, some phone calls, but Karen was gone.

  “It was like she died,” her sister said.

  Over the years, it became clear that Karen was not just an ordinary member of The Family. Former members and anticult movement leaders had established contact with Rosemary, and she had become well aware that her sister was practically running The Family.

  The first emissary Zerby sent back to her family in Tucson was her son. It was the first time Ricky met his grandparents, aunts, and cousins.

  His shepherds shadowed Ricky on his visit. Rosemary called them “his wardens.”

  It was the early nineties, and Ricky was still loyal to his mother. His escorts had a computer and were in constant contact with The Family. Ricky would talk for a while, and then someone would go into another room to call Family leaders. “He was still a young kid under the influence of his mother and the group. Everything he said was how wonderful his mother was and all that kind of thing—things that he was supposed to say. He was told to visit. He was told to go visit his grandparents.”

  Ricky did, however, get a glimpse at another world. Rosemary’s daughter, Rachel, was the same age as Ricky and took him into Tucson to experience something called “Downtown Saturday Night,” a gathering of the punk rock, pierced, and tattooed subculture of the early nineties. “She was just being friendly and wanted to take him somewhere,” Rosemary said. “She thought he ought to go out and see the world.” Ricky’s “wardens” went along on the outing. Within a couple of days, the family visitation was over and Ricky was gone.

  Two years later Zerby sent Ricky’s sixteen-year-old sister, Techi, to Tucson to meet his grandparents. She seemed less comfortable out in the real world than her big brother. “I don’t think it was something she wanted. She had been told to go visit her grandparents,” Rosemary said. “It was the same drill, but Techi was different than Ricky. She was introverted. The women who were with her gave her comfort. She wasn’t used to being away from the group and being introduced to these new people who came up and hugged her.

  “It had been all very hush-hush about when they would get here. I’m not sure why they did it, but I knew my sister never does anything without a reason. After Techi left I told my sister that Karen would be coming. She had sent her kids here, and they were safe. Nobody pounced on them and now she feels that she can come.”

  Rosemary was right.

  Karen came to Tucson in 1999. It was the same as the two previous visits. They said they were coming at one time, then they came at another time. Security was very tight. Everything was top secret.

  Karen was most worried about Rosemary. She had publicly spoken out against The Family. One time, Rosemary was in the Kmart parking lot in Tucson when a couple of Family missionaries came up to her and handed her a tract. “I asked them, ‘Do you have any clue who I am?’ They didn’t. I said, ‘Don’t even give me one of those. I’m Maria’s sister, and I’m totally against all this.’ They didn’t react much. It didn’t look like I made an impression, but my parents got a call a few days later telling me to keep quiet. My parents said, ‘You better not tell us to tell Rosemary to be quiet. Number one, we’re not going to do it. And number two, it wouldn’t matter if we did.’”

  Karen appeared at her parents’ place for the big reunion. By now, her parents had started Elderhaven, a board and care home on the edge of Tucson, and were living there themselves. Karen’s other sister, Jeannie, who is much closer to Zerby, was running the place with her husband, Bill.

  After a day or two, Rosemary went up to Elderhaven to see her long-lost sister for the first time in three decades. “She was Karen, but she wasn’t my sister. I had no idea who she was. She looked like my sister. She put her arm around me and said, ‘Oh, my little sister!’ I was like, ‘Please, don’t do that!’ I didn’t say that but I was thinking, ‘I’m not your little sister. You have no clue who I am. Don’t treat me like that.’ I didn’t say it, but it’s what I thought.”

  Rosemary tried to be civil—for the sake of her aging parents. They could at least pretend to be a family for a day or two. They all went down to the historic “Old Tucson” neighborhood for dinner one night. Sue Kauten tagged along. Karen wore oversized sunglasses, like she had something to hide or something to fear.

  Six years later, when Ricky returned to Tucson, Rosemary finally realized all that her sister had to hide. Rodriguez never liked to talk about his childhood, but he told his aunt all about it on his second visit, spewing out the story as fast as he could. Then he said he didn’t want to talk about it anymore. He didn’t want to dwell on it. He wanted to move on, or at least that’s what Rosemary thought.

  During one of their last conversations, his aunt gently suggested that he might want to talk to a therapist about his childhood trauma. Ricky wanted none of that. “He’d talked about how depressed he was. I have a problem with depression and can se
e it. Mine was a drop in the bucket compared to him. His was so deep and full of pain.”

  Rosemary started crying.

  “When I talked to him about going to a therapist, he said, ‘I can’t. There’s too much. I can’t tell everything. I will die if I try to say everything that is in me. It will overflow. I won’t be able to handle it. They won’t be able to handle it. Everything in me will be gone.’”

  14

  Last Date

  SCOTTSDALE, ARIZONA

  January 2, 2005 – Apartment of Alisia Arvizu

  Ricky Rodriguez.

  RICKY RODRIGUEZ WAS leading a double life. Aunt Rosemary was getting the real story, but Mark and Denise Flynn had no idea what this seemingly well-adjusted guy had gone through growing up in The Family or that he was about to embark on a murderous rampage. Neither did Alisia Arvizu, but she did get a disturbing glimpse of a young man about to emotionally implode.

  Alisia was one of Denise Flynn’s old friends. She needed some temporary work, so Mark hired her on at Flynn’s Electric as a simple laborer. “Ricky had already started,” Alisia said. “Right away, he started teaching me things, like electrical wiring. He was always trying to make the job easier for me. Taking things and doing it himself.”1

  Ricky was quiet at first, but it didn’t take long for him to start flirting with Alisia. She flirted back, but didn’t think anything would come of it. After all, she was fifty-one years old, and he was this strong, good-looking guy in his twenties.

  Alisia would pick him up and take him to various job sites. “He was a moody person. One day I picked him up and noticed he was angry. He’d get in the truck and wouldn’t say anything. The silence was too much, and then he’d snap out of it. We’d talk about relationships. I asked him if he had kids, and he said he didn’t want kids. He would say things about his wife—that he was mad at her or something. One time I asked him if he wanted to meet anyone new.”