Jesus Freaks

by Don Lattin

  Like Smith, Noyes and Berg inaugurated plural marriage in secret and only among their inner circle. Noyes encouraged the members of his community to engage in nonejaculatory sex to avoid unwanted children. Berg, on the other hand, outlawed birth control, encouraging the production of babies to increase his flock and spread his message.

  My fascination with this story began with these children—the children born into The Family. During the nineties, I began interviewing young adults who grew up in some of the most notorious cults to emerge from the spiritual turmoil of the sixties and seventies. Part of that research was published in February 2001 in a series of articles in the San Francisco Chronicle entitled “Children of a Lesser God” and in a later book, Following Our Bliss.11 My research examined two generations in the Church of Scientology, the Unification Church (the Moonies), the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (the Hare Krishnas), and The Family.12

  According to The Family’s own statistics, there were more than 13,000 children born into The Family between 1971 and 2001. This book chronicles the short and tragic life of one of them—a young man named Richard Peter Rodriguez, who was raised to be the Prophet Prince in the coming Endtime. Ricky was born in the Canary Islands on January 25, 1975. He was the first child brought into the world from “flirty fishing,” which could very well be the most unusual evangelical tool in modern Christian history.

  Ricky grew up in the center of David Berg’s sexual cyclone. He was born to Karen Zerby, a young convert who became sexually involved with Berg in 1969 and was later anointed as his heir apparent. His biological father was Carlos BelAir, a waiter Berg and Zerby befriended when they first came to the Canary Islands. Carlos was one of countless “fish” who swam through The Family during the flirty fishing years. He stuck around long enough to impregnate Zerby and get a glimpse of the child he fathered.

  David Berg and Karen Zerby raised Ricky to be one of the heroes in their theological fantasy. In the gospel according to Berg, Ricky would be christened “Davidito.” Ricky’s mother would be crowned “Maria.” They would be the “two witnesses” destined to sacrifice themselves and bring on the apocalyptic battles foretold in the Book of Revelation.

  It was a self-fulfilling prophecy, but with a twist. Ricky would grow up, leave the fold, and denounce his estranged mother and spiritual father, making his own date with destiny. Consumed with rage, Ricky would become the reluctant martyr for an abused army of troubled souls—a lost generation that would return to haunt Karen Zerby and the rest of The Family.

  1

  Revenge of the Savior

  NEAR THE ARIZONA/CALIFORNIA STATE LINE

  January 8, 2005 – Westbound on Interstate 10

  Ricky Rodriguez in his Tucson apartment on January 7, 2005.

  PREPARE TO STOP! Prepare to Stop! Prepare to Stop! Ricky eased off the accelerator when he saw the flashing yellow signs. He’d been jamming it since he fled Tucson earlier that night and headed out toward California on Interstate 10. Now, approaching the state line, Ricky slowed down at the inspection gate, steering his silver Chevy Cavalier toward two open lanes on the left. It looked like easy passage for regular automobile traffic. Then he glanced down at the bloodied pants crumpled on the floor by the front passenger seat. Should he stop and stash the incriminating evidence? Would his Washington plates make his car more likely to be searched than vehicles returning with California tags? What should he do? Stopping to hide the bloody evidence might attract more attention than going with the flow and taking his chances. None of the cars in the open lanes were being checked. Ricky eased down on the brakes and slowed the four-door sedan into the unmanned gate, stopping just long enough to read a sign telling him there was “No Inspection Today” and to “Proceed with Caution.”

  It was too late for that—too late for caution. Ricky had already begun his crusade. Earlier that evening, back in Tucson, he’d slashed the throat of his first victim, Sue Kauten, who as a young woman had helped raise the Prophet Prince and was one of several adult women who engaged in sex play with the young boy.

  That was decades ago. On this night, Ricky was just a few weeks shy of his thirtieth birthday. He’d been out of the cult for four years, but he couldn’t shake his past—the sexual abuse, pressure to be perfect, and all the twisted prophecies of his messianic fate. No one but he could find his mother and bring her to justice. No one but he could make her pay for all the lives she and that other monster, David Brandt Berg, had destroyed over the past three decades. The hard part was finding his mother. Her whereabouts were the most closely guarded secret in The Family. There were recent rumors that his mother was back in the states—hiding out somewhere in New Mexico, or maybe California.

  His mother, Karen Elva Zerby, grew up in Tucson and had been back to Arizona a couple times to visit her aging parents. In the past, in her role as his mother’s personal secretary, Sue was part of an advance team sent ahead to make sure it was safe for Zerby to visit. Ricky knew his mother would be back someday, so he moved to the Arizona desert to wait for that day. His break came on Christmas Day 2004, when Ricky learned Sue would be visiting Tucson the first weekend in January. Sue would surely know how to find his mother, and Ricky was ready to do whatever it took to extract that information.

  Crossing the border into California, Ricky glanced again at the bloodied pants on the floor of his car. It had been harder than he thought to kill another human being. It had been three hours since he left Sue Kauten’s body on the floor of his Tucson apartment and ran out to his car. His mind was still racing, but his body was giving out. At least he’d made it to California. It was time to stop, time to polish off that case of Heineken and get up the courage to make his next move.

  Proceeding west on the darkened freeway, Ricky saw that the next exit was “Lovekin Blvd/Blythe.” From the highway, Blythe looks like any other pit stop on the way into southern California. There’s a rise in the roadway just before the Lovekin Boulevard off-ramp, a gentle crest that reveals a new horizon. Filling the night sky above the town are the golden arches of McDonald’s, the blue and yellow sphere of Motel 6, the red and yellow rectangle of Denny’s, the orange and black Union-76 ball, a rotating bucket of the Colonel’s chicken, and the latest logo to join this crowded field of corporate totems—the green goddess of Starbucks. These familiar symbols are stuck atop poles five stories tall, two to three times higher than any building in Blythe, a struggling farm town in the Palo Verde Valley, a patch of green on the edge of the Mojave Desert.

  All Ricky wanted was a bath and those beers. He took the Lovekin Boulevard off-ramp and pulled into the Holiday Inn Express, which offered an indoor pool and free HBO.

  Ricky loved movies, especially action flicks and martial arts films. His favorite movie was Boondock Saints, a notorious box office flop and cult favorite. Ricky’s boss back in Tucson had recommended the film but had no idea how Ricky would take its violent, messianic message to heart.

  Boondock Saints is the story of Connor and Murphy McManus, two Irish brothers living in a tough South Boston neighborhood. Fed up with a gang of sadistic Russian mobsters muscling into their part of town, the young men embark on a bloody crusade to rid their streets of this imported evil. In the opening scene, the McManus brothers kneel in a back pew of their parish church. It’s St. Patrick’s Day. While a young visiting priest recites the Lord’s Prayer, urging forgiveness against those who trespass against us, the two brothers hear another voice of God, an Old Testament prayer calling out for righteous vengeance.

  “Oh Lord, here’s my flashing sword which mine hand will take hold in judgment,” says the angry voice of God. “I will take vengeance upon mine enemies. Oh, Lord, raise me up to thy right hand and count me among thy saints.”

  Connor and Murphy (played by Sean Patrick Flanery and Norman Reedus) shock the congregation by marching up to the altar in the middle of the priest’s homily. The sermon recounts the demise of a woman stabbed to death in the street nearly thirty years ago. “She cr
ied out for help,” the priest recalled, “time and time again, but no person answered her calls. Though many saw, no one so much as called the police. They all just watched as she was stabbed to death in broad daylight. They watched as her assailant walked away.”

  “Now, we must all fear evil men,” the monsignor concludes, his voice rising. “But there is another form of evil we must fear most. And that is the indifference of good men.”1

  Like the brothers McManus, Ricky Rodriguez was on a violent mission—a righteous crusade inspired by crimes of the past and an even more maddening frustration with justice denied. Intellectually, Ricky had rejected the violent prophecies of his supposed destiny. Emotionally, he was still playing the misbegotten martyr.

  Before driving to Blythe and checking into Room 109 of the Holiday Inn Express, on the night of January 7, 2005, Ricky set up a video camera in the kitchen of his Tucson apartment and shot his own movie. There were no special effects in Ricky’s film—just a heartfelt video of a guy sitting at a table and talking about his weekend plans while loading Golden Saber bullets into a forty-caliber, semiautomatic pistol.

  Well, hey everyone, this is Ricky, and I’m making this video, um, well, for many reasons I guess. Ah, I suppose, the main reason is that I want there to be some record of the way I feel, um, my ideas, just who I was, really. I wanted to explain some of the things that I’ve been doing and thinking and some of the frustrations that I’ve had. Anyway, I don’t know, just, I guess it’s my, uh, sort of my last grasp at, uh, immortality. I know that I’m not immortal, and I know that this video is not going to make me so, but at the same time, I want to, uh, I want people to know that even though some of the things that I’m gonna try to do are rather shocking and, um, and maybe not right in a lot of people’s books, I want to explain some of the reasons behind them. So anyway, I’m just loading some of my mags here. Uh, hope you guys don’t mind if I do that while I talk.2

  Ricky loaded the last bullet into the clip of his Glock 23 and set it down on a small table cluttered with other weaponry. There was one Kydex sheath, a concealed holster ordered on the Internet; one Stun-Master, a device designed to incapacitate its victim with 775,000 volts of electricity; and a six-inch K-bar knife, sharp as a scalpel. There was also duct tape, gags, one barbecue fork, a soldering iron, and a large electric drill padded with duct tape for purposes of noise reduction.

  Okay, so—I think I got thirteen in here. The cool thing about the Republicans is their love of guns. They just love their fuckin’ guns, and now that the assault ban has expired, which I credit them for, we have high-capacity magazines. Now, I only have—this is my super cool Kydex sheath that I got from sidearmor. com. It’s an in, I think they call it an in-belt, or in-waistband holder, so it doesn’t actually stick out, it actually goes inside your belt so you pull your shirt over it, so it’s very cool. Anyway, when you’re carrying a loaded gun, the Glock is a very safe weapon, but there is no real safety on it, except for a little, um, button right on the trigger that has to be pressed for the gun to go off. So the idea of just sticking it in my pants with a clip or whatever just didn’t really appeal to me. ’Cuz if you get into a fight or something, somebody stabs you or something, I don’t know, er, but whatever, you’re rolling around on the ground, you just don’t want the fucking thing to go off. So this nice Kydex sheath worked very cool.

  Ricky had been working out. He stood only five-foot-five and weighed less than 150 pounds, but he looked bigger on video. His biceps and chest muscles bulged beneath a sleeveless red T-shirt. He had shaved his head and his black stubble beard gave him a menacing look that mellowed when he smiled. His haircut made his ears seem to stick out and accentuated his long, thick eyebrows and large nose. On this night, his dark eyes conveyed a haunting mixture of levity, sadness, and resignation. His monologue—shot at two different angles in an unadorned kitchen—was punctuated with sudden outbursts of profanity and rage. His main props were his pistol and his knife. Ricky presented them to his audience with an almost pornographic passion.

  I like my 23. It’s small, compact. My high-capacity magazines went from a [capacity of] 10 to 13, so that’s cool. I think I’m going a little, a little overboard. I bought a bunch of mags and all these fuckin’ bullets. I went with a police round, the Golden Saber. It’s a full load of powder. They don’t, ah, they don’t skimp. Some people say that the hollow points don’t expand as they should because ballistic gelatin they use for their tests isn’t really accurate. But, but I’ll tell you if these go through somebody’s skull, this fucker’s gonna expand, so that’s what I’m counting on. You see I’m counting on that because I have my Glock, all this fuckin’ ammo, but the truth is this is my weapon of choice. The K-bar knife. Served Marines for many, many years. I changed the angle on mine. I learned a lot about knife sharpening recently. Um, they, they come with like a thirty-degree angle because these fuckers are abused. They’re beat on, used for fuckin’ everything. I only want it for one purpose, and that is taking out the scum, taking out the fuckin’ trash.

  Like the McManus brothers in Boondock Saints, Ricky was on a mission to rid the world of evil. His targets were not Russian gangsters in South Boston. Ricky’s wrath was aimed at his own mother and her current consort, Peter Amsterdam, a loyal follower who rose to power following David Berg’s death in 1994.

  Now, more than ten years later, Amsterdam had taken the name “King Peter.” Karen Zerby was “Queen Maria.” Ricky had left the fold and was now the most dangerous member of a growing band of second-generation defectors. His alienated and emotionally damaged peers were his intended audience for the videotaped manifesto he shot that night in Tucson. Ricky, like many of them, had been struggling in the real world. There had been suicides in their ranks, lots of them. It was time for someone to strike back at The Family. It was time for revenge.

  Ricky had married a girl he met in the cult. They left the fold and moved to Seattle. Ricky worked on a fishing boat in Alaska, got a job as an electrician, moved to San Diego, then to Tucson, but he couldn’t shake his past, could never get rid of “Davidito” and the destiny laid upon him by David Berg.

  I was really trying to fit in. I really was. Ah, it’s something in the back of my mind, it’s always like, I always felt like the resources that I had just weren’t adequate and that no matter how much I did, how much I’d replenish those resources, it just wasn’t happening. So I was just using my own power without replenishing it. Eventually it would be gone, which is kinda what I feel about it right now. I’ve been going nonfucking stop, like I’m sure everybody else has, um, since I, since I left that fucking cult…

  But, anyway, getting back to suicide. That’s what I wanted to do then. I would kill myself—and God how I want to do that—I want to follow that scenario. I just want to leave. Spend a few months and then end it. But you know what I feel is that would be the selfish thing to do. That would be the, the quitter’s way out…I’m trying to do something lasting. Something that I can look back at if I’m able to and know that—okay maybe I didn’t technically do the right thing—but I tried to do something to help. I didn’t just fade away, I didn’t just turn tail and run and let those fuckers win, but I did what I could to make a difference. And I don’t know how really far I’m gonna get, but I’m starting to think now that it’s not gonna be that far. And that’s gonna suck ass. Hmm, I might not, well I’ll get one person, that’s for sure—my source for information. Uh, the goal is to bring down those sick fuckers—Mama and Peter. My own mother! That evil little cunt. Goddamn! How can you do that to kids? How can you do that to kids and sleep at night? I don’t fuckin’ know. Anyway, that’s my goal. But, I’m one person. I’m working under, eh, situations that aren’t that great right now because I’ll only have a small window of opportunity to, ah, get the information that I need out of this person.

  That person was Sue Kauten. Sue was a trusted member of the Unit, the inner circle of Family leaders and a small group of children born into that elite fold. T
he whereabouts of the Unit had always been top secret. Most rank-and-file members of The Family never laid eyes on David Berg or Karen Zerby. The Unit traveled around the world, relocating every few years, teaching their far-flung flock through a constant stream of letters, prophecies, and other communiqués. The Unit was a cult within the cult. It was the testing ground for Berg’s sexual, social, and spiritual experiments. Ricky was the primary experiment.

  Ricky grew up in the surreal world of the Unit and remained a member of The Family through his early twenties. By 2001, Ricky was fed up and increasingly angry about all the child sexual abuse he had witnessed in the Unit. But he had lost track of the Unit’s location since he’d defected and publicly denounced The Family.

  Over the past year, however, Ricky sent a series of signals to his estranged mother that he wanted to reconcile. But his real goal was not reconciliation. It was extermination. Ricky had watched as other members of the second generation tried to redress their grievances and get justice through law enforcement, the courts, or the news media. Nothing seemed to work. Nobody seemed to care.

  His videotape was a call to arms. Ricky was not just angry with those Family leaders who committed sexual, physical, and spiritual abuse upon the children of The Family. He was also fed up with the refusal of other second-generation critics to take direct action against the sect. Like the priest in Boondock Saints, Ricky was frustrated about that more insidious form of evil—the indifference of good men.

  It happened right before me. It happened to all of you. Thousands of us, some worse than others. I had it good in many ways. I didn’t get fucked in the ass, you know, I was a guy. A lot of you girls, phew, crap, I can’t even compare my stories with yours. But that’s not what this is about. We’re not sitting here comparing, “Oh you got it worse than I did. You got it more times than I did.” It’s not about that. There’s so many other kinds of abuse that went on, that to some of us was just as bad, to some of us it wasn’t, and some of us didn’t have it that bad. So I’m not gonna sit here and say, “Oh yeah, I had it the worst or I didn’t” because it really doesn’t matter. It should never have happened at all. To anybody. That’s the point.