by Don Lattin
“Keep telling me nice stories,” Ricky replied.
At one point in the conversation, Ricky saw road signs indicating that he was approaching a rest stop on freeway.
“I think I’ll pull in here and kill myself,” he told his estranged wife.
“I’m freaking out, yelling. ‘What! What are you going to do?’ He’d been awake for two days,” Elixcia explained. “He was really tired, and just mumbling words.”
Ricky decided there was too much light at the rest stop. It wasn’t the right place to kill himself, so he pushed on to the California border.
“I’m so tired,” he told his wife. “I’m so tired of thinking. I have to go now.”2
Ricky hung up. He crossed the California state line and pulled into the Blythe Holiday Inn Express at 11: 18 P.M. He chose one of the better-looking motels strung along Interstate 10. It’s a two-story stucco building, pinkish in color, and adorned with arches meant to convey the traditional Spanish Mission architecture of the American Southwest. Ricky paid the clerk cash—$119.90, including tax—and was given a ground-level smoking room with two queen-sized beds. He walked into Room 109 and turned on the television set. He felt like he was in a movie. He was exhausted and wired at the same time. If it was a movie, there’d be a bulletin on the news: “Police across two states are searching tonight for a Tucson electrician suspected in the brutal slaying of a California woman….”
Ricky told Elixcia to call the police and have them search his apartment back in Tucson, but there was nothing on the news. This was not a movie. Elixcia had not called the Tucson police.
Ricky had no intention of spending the night in Room 109. All he wanted was a few beers and a hot bath. Then he was going to kill himself. But first he needed a little liquid anesthesia. He popped open the first of five bottles of Heineken and started filling the tub with water. There was still some of Sue’s blood on his clothes and on his body. Now he saw more blood as he pulled off his black sweater and ribbed muscle shirt. Ricky tossed his soiled clothes on the bed nearest the window and headed into the bathroom.
After his bath and his beers, Ricky walked back out to his car, climbed in, and started driving. He headed south, away from the commercial glare of the cheap motels and fast-food joints. It doesn’t take long to get out of Blythe and into the desert. Ricky rumbled over some railroad tracks and swung the Chevy sedan into the deserted driveway of the Palo Verde Irrigation District. He parked along a tall chain link fence topped with razor wire. It was just after 2 A.M. when he raised the pistol to his head, rested the end of the barrel on his right temple, and squeezed the trigger. The last thing he saw when he turned off his headlights were two yellow and black warning signs hung on the locked gate of the parking lot. The signs read “END.”
17
End of the Road
BLYTHE, CALIFORNIA
January 9, 2005 – Palo Verde Irrigation District
DANNY HOLLIS DOESN’T USUALLY work on Sundays, but they’d drained the irrigation canals the week before and were still making repairs. They needed to get the system up and running as soon as possible, so Danny and his crew had pulled a Sunday shift.
Danny Hollis stands in the driveway where Ricky’s body was discovered.
Hollis saw the four-door Chevy sedan with Washington plates parked outside the fence when he came to work at 6: 30 A.M. He didn’t think much of it at first. Weary motorists were known to pull off Interstate 10 and park in the wide driveway to take a nap.
Hollis headed out to the fields to check on the repairs. He returned ninety minutes later and noticed that the guy in the Chevy was still asleep. Walking up to the car, Danny saw that the driver was in a strange position, leaning way back and over to the right. Then he saw all the blood and the brain matter splattered over the seats. He turned away and hustled back to the office to call the cops.
Patrolman Troy Fabanich and Sgt. Robert Matthews were the first two officers to arrive. Fabanich saw a pistol between the driver’s right leg and the center console of the Cavalier. He checked the subject’s pulse. There was none, and the body was cold to the touch. A team of paramedics arrived and pronounced the subject dead at 8: 11 A.M. Fabanich secured the crime scene with yellow police tape and awaited the arrival of Detective Sgt. Jeff Wade.
Sgt. Wade pulled up at 8: 23 A.M. Evidence technician Valerie Hudson got there at 9: 02 A.M. and began to photograph the scene and dust the car for prints. It looked like a routine suicide. Then Wade noticed a receipt from “The UPS Store” stuffed in the pocket of the driver’s door. Someone by the name of “Ricky Rodriguez” had sent three video tapes to three different people—to a Sara Martin in San Diego, an Elixcia Munumel in Lakewood, Washington, and to a guy in Santa Fe, New Mexico, named “Tiago.” He dropped them off at the UPS store at 515 E. Grant Street in Tucson the previous morning at 10: 49 A.M.
Wrapped inside the paperwork was a key card from the nearby Holiday Inn Express. Wade sent Sgt. Matthews over to the hotel to investigate.
Deputy Coroner Mike Presley arrived at 9: 49 A.M. Wade had just picked up a cell phone that was sitting on the front passenger seat and was starting to brief Presley when the phone rang.
“Hello,” he said.
There was a short pause, then a female voice on the other end of the line asked, “Is he dead?”
“Can I ask you who you are?”
“Elixcia Munumel,” the voice said. “I’m his wife!”
“Okay. Try to calm down. Who do you think is dead?”
“Richard Rodriguez.”
“Okay. Here is the situation. My name is Sgt. Jeff Wade, and I am investigating a death of a male subject who has not yet been identified.”
“Oh, my God!” Elixcia cried out, then wept into the phone, barely catching her breath between sobs.
It took Wade several minutes to calm Elixcia down and get some basic information. Her name was Elixcia Munumel. She lived in Lakewood, Washington. She had separated from her husband about six months ago. He moved to San Diego and lived with a friend named Sara. Then he moved to Tucson. He called last night and told her to call the police and tell them to go to his apartment. They would find a body there. Elixcia told Wade she did not know who the victim was. Her husband had been suffering from depression. That might have something to do with all this.
“Did you call the Tucson police?” Wade asked.
“No,” Elixcia said. “I called the police here in Lakewood, but I don’t know what they did.”
Wade looked at the receipt from the UPS store.
“Okay. Can you confirm for me that the address of your husband’s apartment in Tucson is 2525 North Los Altos. Number 343.”
“Yes,” Elixcia said. “That’s it.”
“Okay, Elixcia. Now try to calm down. I will call you back as soon as we confirm the identity of this man.”1
Wade finished up the call with Elixcia. Then he called the Tucson Police Department, gave them the address, and informed the dispatcher of a report that there might be a body in the apartment. It was the first call the Tucson police had gotten about a possible homicide at that address.
Valerie Hudson, the evidence technician working with Wade, found a spent shell casing in the backseat of the Cavalier. Wade picked up the pistol next to Ricky’s right leg and pulled out the magazine. It held ten live rounds of ammunition. Wade placed the magazine in a handgun evidence box that Hudson had brought to the crime scene. The next step was to check to see if there was another live round in the chamber. Wade slid the side of the pistol open and was startled when a large amount of blood and brain tissue gushed out of the gun and poured into the evidence box. He ejected the final round into the metal box and handed the mess back over to Hudson.
Wade was then authorized by the deputy coroner on the scene to remove a brown wallet from the deceased’s left rear pocket. It contained the Arizona driver’s license of Richard Peter Rodriguez, confirming the subject’s identity. Ricky’s wallet also contained an Arizona concealed weapon’s perm
it and a membership card for Jensen’s shooting range in Tucson, the gun shop not far from his apartment.
Elixcia told Wade to check for a second wallet Ricky had taped to his leg. It was there, and just as Elixcia said, it contained Ricky’s passport and $3300 in cash. “She told me the money was for his cremation,” Wade said, “and to get the car back to her.”
Shortly before noon, the deputy coroner removed the body from the car and transported it to the Frye Mortuary Chapel in Blythe. By then, the Tucson police department had called Sgt. Wade back to inform him that they had, indeed, found a body in the apartment of Richard Peter Rodriguez.
Tucson Police Detective Ben Jimenez had arrived at Ricky’s apartment at 12: 45 P.M. and was brought up to speed by two officers who already checked out the apartment and found the remains of Angela Marilyn Smith, a.k.a. Susan Joy Kauten. Like his counterpart in California, Jimenez initially thought he had pulled a routine murder/suicide.
Jimenez was standing outside Ricky’s apartment when Rosemary and Tom Kanspedos walked up. Rosemary told Jimenez she was looking for someone named “Joy,” a friend of the family who had been in town and staying with her sister, Jeannie Deyo. Rosemary explained that she and Jeannie were Ricky’s aunts.
Jimenez decided to interview the couple separately, so he took Tom aside for a few questions. He explained that Joy was a good friend of his wife’s sister, Jeannie, and her husband, Bill Deyo. They ran an elderly board and care home on the edge of town called Elderhaven. Sue was on the Elderhaven board of directors and was in Tucson for a meeting. Tom told Jimenez about The Family and how Ricky had been raised in the cult and sexually abused as a child by his nannies, including Sue. Ricky’s mother, Karen, was now a leader in the cult. Two weeks ago, on Christmas Day, Sue had called and talked to Ricky and apparently arranged at that time to meet him last night for dinner. Tom told Jimenez what Sue looked like, and the detective told him the description matched that of the dead woman on the living room floor.
Jeannie later told police that she was first alarmed when Sue failed to return home late Saturday night. In the morning, Jeannie knew something was wrong. It was time to take Sue to the airport, and she hadn’t even come back to collect her things. Jeannie called Rosemary to tell her that Sue had disappeared. The call prompted Rosemary and her husband to rush down to Ricky’s apartment, where they found the place roped off as a crime scene.
It didn’t take long for Detective Jimenez to close the Sue Kauten murder case. Yet several mysteries remain. What did Sue Kauten know about Ricky’s mother, and what did she tell Ricky before she died? Why did Ricky head out toward California right after the slaying? Was he on his way to The Family Care Foundation offices in San Diego to extract more information or get more revenge? Was his next victim going to be Gabe Martin, Sarafina’s uncle and a Family insider one step closer to Karen Zerby. Or was he planning on heading up Interstate 5 to reunite with Elixcia? Or was he just looking for a quiet spot to kill himself and stop the pain?
If anyone knows Ricky’s state of mind that night, it’s Elixcia Munumel.
“None of us were surprised he killed himself. It was only a matter of time,” she said. “But I really didn’t think he was capable of killing someone else. Berg lured [Sue] into this. Karen Zerby and David Berg are the ones responsible for this. They had the audacity to publish pictures of women sucking on a little baby’s thingie. Ricky had to deal with that as a man. It was stabbing him in the back for the rest of his life.”2
Sue just happened to be the first person who came along. She was the first opportunity he had to execute his plan. “Nothing that Ricky did was not planned out,” Elixcia said. “He hated Sue, but Ricky was good at putting on a good face. He was able to make her believe that it was OK to meet with him.”
Ricky had obsessed over planning his mission. He had spent months working out the details for his revenge, tracking down leads. He passed untold hours assembling and disassembling the Glock and practicing at the shooting range near his Tucson apartment. He studied martial arts. He devoted himself to getting the sharpest possible edge on his K-bar knife. But he had never actually used that knife or that gun to kill anyone. Not until that night.
“He wanted to get somebody else,” Elixcia said. “He wanted to get to people who were closer to his mother, but [Sue] came along, and then he was just too tired, too exhausted to go on. But he wanted to get other people.”
Tiago agreed.
“Ricky had hoped his mother would show up over Christmas. He had been pretending to reconcile with The Family. But his mother was very careful. Ricky was able to convince his mom to allow the meeting with [Sue]. They [Zerby and Amsterdam] had gotten good reports from Gabe [Sarafina’s uncle] in San Diego. They were thinking ‘Ricky seems to be missing home. Ricky seems nicer—not as vengeful. He’s willing to make amends. After all, he is our son. Why doesn’t Angela drop by and see him?’ All this was planned out.”3
Sue’s phone call on Christmas Day was his big break—not the one he expected, but a chance he could not afford to miss. Two weeks later, the meeting was about to happen. “At that point, he had totally run out of energy,” Tiago said. “You can tell on the video that he is tired. He couldn’t make it another day. Here was an opportunity. He wanted to go out with a bang. He deeply believed that was the only way things would change. He deeply believed that it was his responsibility to fix things. He was always apologizing for his mother—for the way she ran The Family, for all the indoctrination we suffered. He somehow felt like he was responsible because he was her son.”
What really angered Ricky—and what still infuriates many in the second generation—is that their parents still don’t get it. Nothing angered Ricky more than people putting down Merry or telling him that his little sister was doing fine in The Family. That is exactly what Sue told Ricky, but the most maddening thing she said turned out to be Sue’s final words.
On the phone that last night of his life, Ricky told Elixcia that the hardest thing for him to handle was the fact that Sue didn’t understand why he was so angry. Even as she lay bleeding to death on his living room floor, she didn’t understand why he was killing her.
“Oh,” Elixcia said softly into the phone to Ricky. “She didn’t get it.”
“That’s right,” her husband replied. “She didn’t get it! You know, I wasn’t expecting that answer. I don’t understand how they can’t see what they’ve done to us.”
18
Ricky.com
CYBERSPACE
March 2007 and beyond
WITHIN WEEKS of his January 9 suicide, the warring forces of The Family International and its alienated second generation each tried to claim Ricky as their martyr. Each faction set up its own memorial Web site. Even in death, Ricky was still leading a double life.
Karen Zerby and Peter Amsterdam in the mid-nineties.
Sue Kauten’s murder and Ricky’s suicide unleashed a torrent of media interest in the crime and the cult. There have been waves of journalistic attention paid toward The Family over the past three decades, but this one was a tidal wave of sensationalism. Sex, murder, suicide, cult, child abuse, incest, pornography, hypocrisy. After the story broke in the January 11 editions of the San Francisco Chronicle and the Arizona Daily Star, it was picked up and ran in print media ranging from the sleaziest tabloids to the front page of the New York Times.
Over the next year, the television newsmagazine shows on CBS, ABC, NBC, and CNN broadcast segments on Ricky and The Family. One documentary film on Ricky was produced and at least one other was pitched. TV movies were proposed. Montel Williams, the daytime TV talk-show host, interviewed Don Irwin (Shula’s son and Merry Berg’s brother). Dr. Phil televised an emotional family therapy session between Jim LaMattery (the guy who joined The Family in San Diego in 1971) and his angry daughter, Kristianity. The popular NBC police/prosecutor series, Law and Order, ran a thinly veiled dramatization where the Karen Zerby character gets tried and convicted. Ricky would have loved that
show.
Media controversies around The Family continued more than two years after the murder-suicide. On January 23, 2007—just two days before Ricky would have celebrated his thirty-second birthday—a melee erupted at the Slamdance film festival in Park City, Utah, during the premier showing of Children of God.1
Protesters from The Family began the ruckus following the screening of the documentary film directed by Noah Thomson, a young Hollywood filmmaker who grew up in the sect. A confrontation between the protesters and one of the film’s co-producers spilled out into the street when it was discovered that Family members had apparently made an audiotape during the screening. HBO planned to broadcast the movie later that year.
Thomson grew up in South America, where his parents did missionary work for The Family, and worked in the sect’s video ministry before he left the fold at age twenty-one. He had already begun working on the film before Ricky went on his rampage. In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle just days after the murder-suicide, Thomson said he had tried to get Ricky to participate in his project. “We spoke about a month ago,” Thomson said. “He was interested in doing an interview, then declined. The last time we talked he was speaking about the prophecies that he would be a martyr for the group. He said, ‘I don’t intend to be a martyr.’ He joked about it.”2
There were also heated arguments within the close-knit circle of second-generation defectors and former members over whether to participate in various media projects—including this book. Several insiders were writing their own books about their experiences and memories of Ricky. Arguments in the circle of defectors were conducted both in private and online via at least six different Web sites run by former members of The Family or the children of members. Thousands of pages of internal Family documents—many of them incriminating—have been posted over the past two years on Web sites like exfamily.org and movingon.org.