Ricky Rodriguez

• 1. Introduction

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  Ricky Rodriguez sat down in Tucson, Arizona, on the 7th of January 2005 and recorded a videotape. He spoke about revenge. He said that if he never found the person he was hunting, someone else would "pick up the torch". Within two days, two people were dead, and he was one of them. He had been born David Moses Zerby, inside a religious movement called The Family, which was formerly known as the Children of God. Its founder, David Berg, treated him as a son. His mother, Karen Zerby, was the movement's spiritual leader. This documentary asks what it meant to be raised as that movement's prophet in waiting. It asks what the group's own pages reveal about his childhood. It asks why a man who had walked away still could not leave the movement behind. And it asks how the people who knew him, and the organization he fled, tried to explain what he did.

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• 2. A Prince Among Believers

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  Tenerife, in Spain's Canary Islands, is where Rodriguez was born on the 25th of January 1975, under the name David Moses Zerby. His mother was Karen Zerby. His biological father was a Spanish hotel waiter named Carlos. Zerby had met him through Flirty Fishing, a practice in which female members of the group had sex with men to draw in potential converts.

  David Berg, the group's founder and Zerby's husband, informally adopted the boy. Berg gave him the nickname Davidito, and members often called him "the prince". No formal adoption ever took place. Rodriguez's legal name changed several times as he traveled the world with Berg and Zerby, who were spreading the faith as missionaries. Young female members called nannies took on the daily work of raising him. Techi, Zerby's daughter, grew up alongside him.

  On the 2nd of May 1978, Berg announced in a publication that Rodriguez and Zerby would one day be able to "call down fire from Heaven and devour their enemies". He also foretold that the two would be killed and then raised from the dead after "3 days". Rodriguez, he said, would become a prophet guiding followers through the biblical End Times.

  People who knew Rodriguez recalled a shy boy who grew uncomfortable around group members, because the prophecy made him the center of attention. A friend he would later meet online said he never got over that prophecy.

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• 3. The Davidito Book

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  Ten months old was Rodriguez's age when Berg and Zerby asked a nanny named Sara to begin a document about him called The Davidito Book. It was also titled The Story of Davidito. According to the source, the abuse of Rodriguez at the direction of the group's leaders began while he was a toddler. The text described adults sexually molesting the child, and it did so in a celebratory tone. Most of the material had first reached members as pamphlets called Davidito letters. As a small child he was also regularly exposed to adults having sex at Berg's home, as part of the members' sexual "sharing".

  The finished document ran to 762 pages. It included photographs of Rodriguez with naked teenage girls and at the group's orgies. One of his nannies, Angela M. Smith, also served as Zerby's personal secretary. She appears in the photographs. In one, she is undoing his pants, and the caption reads "Undressing... for Sue!" Berg added his own sexual commentary to the material.

  Berg later ordered that the Davidito material and similar documents be purged, or that their references to sex be removed. Former members still managed to prove the book existed by circulating it by email.

  Davida Kelley, who lived with Berg from the age of 13, said Rodriguez was abused by "all the adult women. Most of them, at least". She included Zerby among them. The Los Angeles Times reported that Berg reportedly had sex with many female members. To prepare Rodriguez to do likewise once he led the group, he was placed in what was called "teen training". Every afternoon he was to have sex with several older teenage girls.

  In 1986, the group, by then renamed The Family, banned adult sex with minors, along with Flirty Fishing. Berg died in 1994. Zerby and her then-husband, Peter Amsterdam, took full control. A British court led by Lord Justice Ward looked into matters connected with a 1995 trial. It found that the Davidito book showed Berg promoting pedophilia, and that the leadership treated it as a guidebook for adult-child relationships. Ward ordered Amsterdam to distance The Family from Berg's writings on raising children, and Amsterdam did so.

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• 4. Life Outside

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  Budapest, Hungary, is where Rodriguez, aged 21, moved in 1996 to a home owned by The Family. There he met his girlfriend, Elixcia Munumel. She later joined him at Zerby's home in Porto, Portugal. In 1999 the couple told Zerby they were heading to The Family's compound in Mexico. Instead, Munumel went to England and Rodriguez went to the United States.

  He stayed first at the headquarters of The Family Care Foundation, a not-for-profit charity, in Dulzura, San Diego. He then sold a car that Zerby had given him, so that Munumel could join him in Tacoma, Washington. They married in a minister's home. According to Munumel, they struggled with money and with the outside world, and settled into a low-rent apartment. Rodriguez worked on a fishing boat in Alaska. He also took lessons in martial arts with knives, and he spent time at a shooting range while trying to get a gun permit.

  The Family's account differs sharply. It says he left to pursue his education and stayed on good terms. Munumel remembers it otherwise. She said that back in Budapest he already doubted Berg's teachings, which plainly contradicted the Bible. He had also heard stories from former members. He carried guilt that, as a future leader, he had helped make possible the abuse of other children. His friend Celeste Jones said he was angry that no justice existed for abusers in the group, and that he hid his anger around members. The Tucson Citizen reported that he grew more outspoken once he began talking with former members.

  In 2002 Rodriguez posted on a website called "Moving On". He accused Berg of abusing his own daughters and a granddaughter in the Philippines, and he called Zerby apathetic and violent toward her children. In most of his posts he mentioned his teen training. Sarah Martin, a former member who wrote to him through the site, said he felt responsible for stopping the abuse of others. She believed that he felt a need to put an end to Zerby's abuse.

  Rodriguez also wrote that he had thought about suicide since his teen training, and that he hoped the leaders' legacy and hold over The Family would end. In a 2004 post he said he could never move on, because the first 25 years of abuse would always haunt him. He closed by asking anyone with "nothing to lose" to help him plan revenge. He told his martial arts teacher, Kevin Schmitt, that he had considered murdering members of The Family. Daniel Nathan Roselle, an ex-member and friend, urged legal action. Rodriguez was mostly focused on finding two people, Zerby and Amsterdam.

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• 5. The Hunt in Tucson

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  Pseudonyms and hidden addresses kept Zerby and other Family members hard to find. According to Munumel, Rodriguez spent years trying to locate Zerby and his half-sister, Techi, whom he hoped to bring out of The Family. In the summer of 2004 he left Munumel. They stayed in touch, she says, and still spoke "every day". He traveled to San Diego, where he met Sarah Martin in person.

  He learned that Angela M. Smith sat on the board of The Family Care Foundation. She was also a member of Elderhaven, a nursing home in Tucson, Arizona, run by Rodriguez's grandparents. Munumel later stated that he had learned Zerby and Techi planned to visit his grandparents at Elderhaven at Christmas in 2003. Rodriguez came to Tucson and spent a month with the family of his aunt, Rosemary Kanspedos. He found work as an electrician. He told neither his employer nor his wife about his earlier life.

  Before 2005, he moved into an apartment on Tucson's North Side. On the 7th of January that year, he recorded his videotape. He described himself as a vigilante and talked about suicide and revenge. On camera he displayed a Glock 23 pistol, a KA-BAR knife, a drill, a soldering iron and duct tape. Some of these, he said, he planned to use for torture. He named Zerby as his target and alluded to Smith as someone he meant to kill. He predicted a clash with law enforcement, while insisting he meant no harm to police.

  Afterward he telephoned Celeste Jones and told her about his suicidal thoughts. She urged him to testify in a legal case and promised that "things will be taken seriously". He answered that he did not believe her. He sent copies of the video to Munumel, to two relatives and to Martin.

  The next evening, Angela Smith received an invitation to dinner at his apartment.

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• 6. Night in Blythe

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  Dinner at the apartment was the pretext on the day after the recording. After Smith arrived, Rodriguez attacked her with a knife and killed her. He then left the apartment and drove to Blythe, California, arriving at midnight. He rented a motel room and phoned relatives in Lakewood, Washington, telling them that a body lay in his apartment.

  A parking lot near 14th Avenue was where he stopped and called Munumel. He told her he had killed Smith and asked her to call the police. He said he had done it to avenge his sister Techi and the people still inside The Family, not for himself. Smith, he said, "didn't understand what she had done wrong" as she was dying. He called the killing "the hardest thing I ever did in my life" and said it did not make him feel better. Munumel says he begged her to die with him, then said goodbye and hung up. At roughly 2 a.m., Rodriguez died by suicide.

  At 8 a.m., an employee of the Palo Verde Irrigation District found his body in a car and called local police. The detective at first assumed it was a simple suicide. Then he answered a call from Munumel to Rodriguez's cell phone and learned of the killing from her. Blythe police alerted Tucson police, who found Smith's body in the apartment. Apart from the video, Rodriguez left no note.

  Detective Sgt. Mark Fuller led the homicide investigation. He assumed Rodriguez had killed Smith because he held her responsible for his abuse. Yet little was known about her role in his childhood, so investigators could not at first establish the real motive. Police found no evidence that Smith had been tortured for information about where Zerby was. Tucson police spokesman Sgt. Carlos Valdez said Smith had died shortly before her body was found, and that Rodriguez had left for Blythe twelve hours earlier.

  Smith was born Susan Joy Kauten. Her name change might have delayed word of her death reaching her family, but she had her cell phone with her, and it carried her birth name.

  On the 26th of March 2005, a memorial for Rodriguez took place in San Diego. In her eulogy, Munumel said he had "chose a path that no one could share with him", but that he knew she loved him. More than 100 people formerly associated with The Family attended.

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• 7. Voices After the Deaths

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  Stephen A. Kent, a sociology professor at the University of Alberta, called the murder unjustifiable. Even so, he said, one "can understand his frustration and rage", because Rodriguez and others of his generation never saw justice for the abuse they suffered.

  Rick Alan Ross, a cult researcher who had interviewed many former members, saw the suicide as typical of the many who suffered a "tremendous amount of pain". He described The Family as "one of the most horrifically abusive and destructive cults in American history". Journalist Don Lattin spent two years studying Rodriguez's motives and published a book called Jesus Freaks. He thought Rodriguez was a "time bomb", given his aggressive tendencies and his guilt over other victims. Lattin also explained why former members felt so stuck. "There's a statute of limitations. A lot of this happened a long time ago outside of the U.S. by people who kept constantly changing their names," he said, adding that even the children often do not know who abused them.

  Roselle was in mourning. He regretted the murder-suicide and said the cult's abuse victims had received no support beforehand. In his view, "the only way anybody's listening" was that "Rick and Angela died". He said Rodriguez's death brought the number of suicides in his peer group to 30. He still ranked Rodriguez's abuse among the worst in The Family. John LaMattery, a former second-generation leader, called the death "a monumental event" in the group's history. He predicted the group would "spin it", brushing aside failed prophecies and doing "damage control". LaMattery believed Rodriguez killed Smith because he could not find Zerby.

  Juliana Buhring is the sister of Celeste Jones and co-author of Not Without My Sister, a book about their family's years in the cult. She said that most of the children she and Rodriguez grew up with were sexually abused. She understood his rage, since he had "no closure" and "no restitution".

  Members of the Moving On website voiced alarm. Its editors called the events "a horrible tragedy, and something that we sincerely hope is never repeated". At Restoration Hardware in Palo Alto, where Smith worked, staff remembered her as kind. Her boss said, "There was nothing creepy about Angela".

  The Safe Passage Foundation was set up partly because of Rodriguez's suicide. Its aim is to protect minors from "high-demand organisations" and to give them support and resources for leaving.

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• 8. The Family Replies

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  Zerby wrote in an internal memo that reporters were trying to "make Ricky look like a hero and role model" rather than a perpetrator of a crime. A separate memo from Peter Amsterdam went to an estimated 12,000 followers. It told them to ignore media reports and internet news about the murder-suicide. Amsterdam said Rodriguez was "overcome by the enemy and forces of darkness". He called Zerby "the sweetest, most loving person I know". He also said people were "exploiting this tragedy" to hurt him, Zerby and The Family, and to "tear down our work for the Lord".

  Techi wrote in a letter that she was "deeply disturbed" to learn of her brother's death. She said that when she knew him he was not an angry person. The Family itself ran a site, RickyRodriguez.com, that offered "never before published photos" of Zerby and "messages from Jesus". The registration lapsed and the site no longer exists.

  Claire Borowik, the group's spokesperson, called both deaths tragic. She complained that media reports cast Smith as an offender and Rodriguez as a victim. According to Borowik, Smith had never been his nanny and had only visited him. She said The Family had given him "ample financial and emotional support" when he wanted independence. She likened his upbringing to life in "a nudist colony" and cited scholars who argue that sexual practices like the group's do not harm children.

  Borowik also addressed the Davidito prophecy. The Family, she said, "knew that Davidito wasn't fulfilling that prophecy", because the group's prophecies always depended on "man's choices". She said former members, whom she called apostates, had failed to steer Rodriguez in "positive directions" and wanted to damage the movement. She attacked Lattin's book for "inaccuracies, misconceptions and erroneous conclusions" and for "sketchy research".

  The story has since reached the screen and the page. The British documentary series Cutting Edge devoted an episode, "Cult Killer", to the events leading up to the murder. Lattin's book is subtitled A True Story of Murder and Madness on the Evangelical Edge. The 19th episode of the 15th season of Law & Order, called "Sects", is loosely based on Rodriguez and the Children of God.

  HBO's documentary Children of God: Lost and Found, directed by former member Noah Thomson, includes footage from Rodriguez's own video.

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