Jesus Freaks

by Don Lattin

  Alisia was thinking about some of her younger friends, not herself, but Ricky didn’t seem interested. She stopped working as a day laborer in November and thought that was the last she’d see of Ricky Rodriguez.

  “Then one Sunday, out of the blue, he called me and said he wanted to see me,” Alisia recalled. “At first I didn’t recognize his voice. I said, ‘Sure, it would be nice to see you.’ Within an hour, he was here.”

  Ricky had told Denise that he would pick up a few things for her at the Ikea store near Scottsdale. Alisia offered to go over there with him. “He seemed really happy,” Alisia said. “He talked a lot about his martial arts and about having this gun. I asked if he expected someone to jump him, or what. He said he’d never use it on anyone—only in self-defense. We walked around at Ikea. We talked about fixing up his apartment. He liked the colors at Denise’s house. He almost took this red rug. He picked it up and then said, ‘No, I guess I don’t need it.’”

  They went for a bite to eat at a sports bar—beer and chicken wings. Ricky started flirting with her. “He seemed really young,” she said. “At one point, he reached over to take my hand just as I happened to take it away. Later on, we held hands.”

  When they were back in the car, Alisia asked Ricky if he’d seen his mother over the Christmas holidays.

  “Hell, no!”

  It was a natural question. Alisia was exactly the same age as Karen Zerby.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I hate my mother,” Ricky said. “My mother and dad, too. I hate them. All they are about is their religion. Have you ever heard of The Family, the Children of God?’

  “No,” Alisia replied.

  “They use kids to impress people—to make points.”

  Alisia didn’t really get what Ricky was trying to say, but she could see that he was suddenly burning with anger.

  “Forget it,” he said. “Fuck my mother!”

  Ricky started cussing out his mother, slamming his fist on the steering wheel so hard that he almost lost control of his car.

  “Ricky,” Alisia said. “Be careful. Feeling so much hate isn’t good for you.”

  “I’m going to hate her all my life,” he said.

  Alisia decided it was time to change the subject. She was taking care of a friend’s cat, so they went over to her friend’s place to check on the pet. Suddenly, Ricky was back in a good mood.

  “We just drove around. I was listening to a country station. He liked the music. We were laughing, talking about Mark and Denise. He was talking about how much he liked them. He asked me if I wanted to go see a movie, but we wound up buying a six pack of Heineken and going back to my apartment.”

  It was a bit chilly that January afternoon—at least for Arizona. Alisia lit the fireplace in her apartment.

  Here’s how she remembers the conversation:

  “Alisia,” Ricky said. “We should make love.”

  “Ricky! I’m probably your mother’s age. Why would you want to do that?”

  “I’ve been with older women—ever since I was twelve.”

  “Twelve!” Alisia said, laughing. “You’re a little pervert!”

  “No, really Alisia,” Ricky said. “I’m used to older women.”

  “Ricky. I have a son older than you.”

  “Come on. It’s been a long time.”

  Ricky took Alisia by the hand and led her over to a blanket by the fireplace. At first, Ricky had a nice touch. Very smooth. They talked some more. Ricky told her the hearth reminded him of a fireplace at a place where he and his sister had lived in Russia.

  “Wow,” Alisia said. “You’ve been to so many places.”

  “It was nothing,” he replied. “I wasn’t trying to impress you or anything. It was just cold there.”

  As soon as Ricky and Alisia started to have intercourse, the entire mood changed. Up to then, he had been very gentle, very smooth. Not anymore. “He was doing it really hard,” Alisia recalled. “He looked really angry. Had his eyes open with this strange look. It was like he was thinking of someone else. When he was done, he just sat there. It was like he was in a daze.”

  “I’m sorry,” Ricky said.

  “Why were you so rough?”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it.”

  Ricky laid his head on Alisia’s breast.

  “It felt like he was a little boy,” Alisia told me. “I just held him, talking about how we have to find peace within ourselves. He said he wished he could have that. I said you have to forgive and forget. He said. ‘I can’t do that. I can’t forgive anymore.’”

  “What is it? What bothers you?” Alisia asked.

  “Alisia,” Ricky said. “There is so much…I can’t even begin to tell you.”

  Then Ricky started talking about suicide.

  “Don’t say that,” Alisia said. “That’s a coward’s way of going out of the world….”

  “That depends,” Ricky replied.

  They talked some more. It was getting late. Alisia tried to get Ricky to spend the night. It was a long drive back to Tucson.

  “You can stay if you want.”

  “No. I gotta get going. I can drive.”

  Ricky kissed Alisia good-bye and walked out the door.

  “I felt really bad for him,” Alisia said. “To see him walk away with his head down. It was so sad.”

  15

  Lost

  SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO

  January 8, 2005 – Tiago’s house

  IT WAS TWO in the morning. Tiago had been talking to his brother on the phone and was ready to crash. Then the phone rang again. This time it was Ricky.

  “Dude! I’ve been trying to call you all night long. What’s goin’ on?”

  Tiago wasn’t surprised it was Ricky, but he was surprised by his old friend’s tone of voice. Tiago always felt there was a kind of eternal sadness with Ricky. In recent weeks, that sadness seemed to deepen every time they spoke. Not tonight.

  “Dude! You sound really happy.”

  Ricky practically yelled into the phone. “That’s because I’m drunk!”

  There was music playing in the background. Loud music.

  “Dude! You havin’ a party? You have a girlfriend over?”

  “No, I don’t have a girlfriend. It’s just me.”1

  From the moment he answered the phone, Tiago knew something was up. The last few times they spoke it was more talk about how Ricky had to find his mom, how he had to find her before he ran out of steam. To Tiago, it all seemed like a warped science fiction movie. This guy is running out of juice but had to accomplish his mission first. But tonight, Ricky sounded happy. Not drunk. Happy. Tiago drives a cab in Santa Fe. He knows the difference between happy and drunk.

  Ricky and his prized K-bar knife.

  “Dude! What’s going on?”

  “I found the solution!”

  It was the latest clue. Ricky had been dropping little hints all week, starting with his encounter with Alisia the previous weekend.

  On Wednesday, two nights before he called Tiago, Ricky had dinner with Mark and Denise Flynn. Denise sensed there was something different about him that night.

  “One of the things I love about you, Denise, is you’re so Zen,” Ricky told her. “If I was going to be anything, I’d be a Buddhist. I’d be Zen. But I have too much anger.”

  “You? Anger? I have trouble putting you and anger together in my head,” Denise said.

  On Thursday, Ricky went over to Rosemary’s house for a visit. They were sitting at the kitchen table. At one point, Ricky said:

  “You know, I don’t think I can handle it anymore.”

  Ricky visited Rosemary one last time on Friday evening, the same night he set up the video camera in his apartment on the other side of town, the same night he called Tiago. “He gave me this huge hug,” Aunt Rosemary recalled. “We always hugged, but I usually gave the bigger hug. He really hugged me that night. I didn’t think about this until after everything happened. But it ran thr
ough my mind. Boy is he hugging me tight.”

  Later that night, Ricky called Sarafina in San Diego. She was sleeping and didn’t hear the phone, but called him back in the morning. They had planned to get together later that month in San Diego at a memorial service for Abe Braaten, a twenty-seven-year-old defector who had just committed suicide by leaping off the roof of a building in Kobe, Japan. Ricky told Sarafina he wasn’t going to be able to make it to Abe’s memorial. Something important had come up.

  Ricky told Sarafina he was sending her a videotape and hoped she could show it to people they knew. He was evasive when she asked him what was on the tape. “Just getting a few things off my chest,” he said, changing the subject.2

  On Friday, just hours before he shot his video, Ricky got a phone call from Sue Kauten, who was in Tucson, confirming their plans to meet for dinner on Saturday night. Ricky had to hold his temper and play nice. Ricky reveals on the tape that Sarafina’s uncle, Gabe Martin, and his wife, two longtime Berg insiders and sect leaders, had helped arrange his meeting with Sue. During his phone conversation with Sue that night, Ricky could barely control his rage when she started telling him how wonderful Techi was doing in The Family. As he explained on the video he shot that night:

  It started with Gabe and [his wife]. Man, they have so much blood on their hands. It’s not even fucking funny. Hope somebody takes ’em out. I don’t think it’s gonna be me. I definitely don’t think I’m gonna get that far. But somebody’s gotta take them out, those fuckers. Anyway, yeah, I talked to them on the phone, ya know, tell ’em all about myself, try to be nice, then, you know, Joy, Trust, Angela, Lusty Trusty, whatever her fucking name is, she calls me, and you know I have to do the whole thing with her again. So, anyway. She tells me my sister’s doing good. Yeah right. I can only imagine what my sister goes through…. That’s been actually one of the hardest things lately for me—is to have to—you know, pretend like I’m making peace with these fucking perverts. You know you just want to grab ’em and rip their throat out.

  Did Ricky tell anyone about his plans to torture Sue Kauten to get information as to the whereabouts of his mother? Did he tell the three people who got copies of the video—Sarafina, Tiago, or Elixcia? Sarafina said he was evasive. Ricky was apparently replaying the video he just shot in his apartment when he called Tiago early Saturday morning. That was the loud music in the background.

  “Ricky lost the will to live,” Tiago replied. “There was almost no point in trying to salvage him. He’d always talk about his need for vengeance and his mom. We talked about lots of things. Eventually, he wanted to stop The Family. We both felt they’d done a great injustice to us, to the kids. There were many ways to go about this. I’d say, ‘We can become attorneys, or go into the FBI and set up an FBI cult division.’ He just didn’t have the patience, even though he was known for his patience…. At one point I said, ‘Let’s join the Marines, or the Foreign Legion.’ He liked the idea, but eventually he didn’t have the willpower to live more than a couple weeks, more than a day or two at a time. Ricky had a plan of what he wanted to do. Ricky was not an idiot. He was very careful as to what he said and whom he said it to. Eventually, he quit talking to everyone. But those who knew him put two and two together.”

  At one point in that conversation early Saturday morning, Tiago and Ricky knew it might be the last time they spoke. Tiago said something about how he wished all his conversations with Ricky had been on tape. “At least you’ll have the videotape I’m sending,” Ricky said.

  “And I know you’ll keep it, and you’ll get it into the right hands,” he added.

  “What video?” Tiago replied. “What are you talking about?”

  Ricky wouldn’t say, Tiago said. They talked for an hour that night. They talked about all kinds of things. At one point, Hinduism came up.

  “We were talking about when you leave [The Family], you tend to reject God and reject everything,” Tiago said. “But then you start to piece things back together as far as your belief system. One of my roommates is a Sikh from India, and he was telling me about Hinduism. They believe that you just keep on living and living and living, and how you live your life now affects your next life. Reincarnation and karma and all that stuff. We were talking about how we can’t necessarily ignore religion. We both claimed to be atheists, but we know there has to be some truth in some of this—in some religion. We were trying to decide which religion was right.

  “It really slowed him down when I said, ‘How you live and how you die is really going to affect the way you live again.’ Not because I believe that. I was just repeating what I heard. He got real quiet for a long time and then he said:

  ‘That’s an interesting concept. I’m going to have to think about that.’

  “I told him. ‘I don’t know. It’s really disturbing. You leave The Family having grown up in their version of Christianity. You don’t want to have anything to do with religion anymore, and then you realize that Christianity is only one of many religions out there. Everybody has a different theory. It’s kind of mind-boggling. We rejected Christianity out of hand because we knew everything there is to know in a way. We’ve memorized the Bible. But how can you reject Buddhism when you don’t know a thing about it?’ Anyway, that’s kind of how the conversation went.”

  At the end, Ricky reminded him about the video.

  “OK,” Tiago said. “Just don’t do anything stupid.”

  “You know me,” Ricky replied.

  Tiago, an aspiring writer, thinks one reason he got the tape is that he was supposed to write something about Ricky. What would he write about all this?

  “Most of what I write is, you know, stuff about Generation X. Where are we going? What’s going on? You know, the reaction you have when the world you thought you knew isn’t the world you find. About how we’re all lost.”

  16

  “Come Die with Me”

  TUCSON, ARIZONA

  January 8, 2005 – Ricky’s apartment

  RICKY LEFT THE APARTMENT exhausted and exhilarated, adrenaline pumping, mind racing. Sue’s body was left behind, draining blood into the thick brown shag of the living room carpet. He’d stabbed her five times, then he slit her throat.

  Ricky with Sue Kauten in The Story of Davidito.

  There had been a struggle. Sue raised her arms up to her face to defend herself against the blows of the knife. Blood splattered across the floor of the kitchenette, next to the table where Ricky had videotaped his manifesto the night before. There were stab wounds in Sue’s right arm and left hand, and one of her shoes had been thrown across the room.

  Ricky stuck the knife into Sue’s right breast, and then into her stomach. She had been wearing black pants and a light gray sweater, which was pulled up just enough to reveal a white bra reddened with blood. She died in a fetal position with her fists clenched tight—raised up to her eyes like she could not believe what was happening to her.

  It had been nearly three decades since she first walked into Davidito’s life back on the island of Tenerife. In The Story of Davidito, there’s a picture of Sue laying in bed with two-year-old Ricky, unbuttoning his shirt and seductively smiling down on him. Ricky is also smiling, ready for “love up” time. There’s a caption under the photo explaining that the Prophet Prince was “Undressing…. for Sue!”

  Ricky had learned on Christmas Day that she was going to be in Tucson over the first weekend in January of 2005. Sue had agreed to go out to dinner, to catch up on old times. Ricky knew his date was his mother’s eyes and ears. She would know how to find Karen Zerby and her husband, Peter Amsterdam. He finally had his chance for revenge.

  Ricky picked her up early Saturday evening. They never made it to dinner. Instead, Ricky took her back to his small one-bedroom flat at Los Altos Village, a large apartment complex not far from the Tucson gun shop and firing range where Ricky learned to use his Glock 23, the forty-caliber semiautomatic pistol he’d loaded the night before with hollow-point Golden Saber bull
ets.

  None of Ricky’s neighbors remembered seeing him or Sue enter or leave the apartment, which is tucked under a stairway on the ground floor of the two-story, chocolate-brown complex. The sprawling collection of flats is home to many Spanish-speaking immigrants and other people who—like Ricky—were newly arrived to the desert city.

  No one knows exactly what Sue knew or what she told Ricky that night as to the whereabouts of his mother and other Family leaders. His knife assault was vicious, but police found no evidence that he had tortured his former nanny. After the murder, Ricky tossed his prized K-bar knife under the Ikea sofa in his living room. Then he walked out to his parking spot, climbed into his silver Chevy Cavalier, and drove off toward Interstate 10.

  Before he reached the freeway on-ramp he pulled out his cell phone and called Elixcia. The phone in her Lakewood, Washington, apartment rang at 7: 15 P.M.

  “Don’t let anyone ever tell you that taking someone else’s life is easy. It’s not,” Ricky said. “It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life.”

  His wife sobbed.

  “I miss you so much,” Ricky said. “Come die with me.”

  Listening to Rick that night, Elixcia felt like she was dying.

  “He had just left the apartment,” she said. “He told me he was sorry he failed me as a husband. But that’s not true. It was just too hard for us to be together. There was so much pain.”1

  They talked several times that night as Ricky drove out of Tucson heading north on Interstate 10. They talked so much that Ricky had to pull off the freeway outside Phoenix and stop at a Target store to buy a car charger for his cell phone. Getting out of his car, Ricky noticed that Sue’s blood was all over his jeans. He grabbed a clean pair of pants out of a bag in the trunk, jumped back into his car, and changed into the clean clothes, tossing the crumpled, bloodied trousers on the floor by the passenger seat.

  Ricky called Elixcia back when he got on the freeway.

  “He said he was afraid of dying,” Elixcia said. “I told him I believed in angels and when he died he would feel love like he never got to experience in this world.”