Every Town - The All American KILLER Next Door - Rick Church

Episode Date: September 18, 2026

Today we’re checking out an All American male built in the heartland, who was headed in the right direction, until he decided to do something EXTREME on a warm summer evening back in 1988. 👀 Watch This Episode On Youtube: https://youtu.be/5d-4E1LPA5Y 👁 Check out our movie AN ANGRY BOY: https://www.anangryboy.com 💀 MERCH: https://scary-mysteries-merch.dashery.com 💀 Scary Mysteries SECRET VAULT: https://www.patreon.com/c/scarymysteries/collections   🎧 Our Other Podcast Scary Mysteries: ⁠https://open.spotify.com/show/3ZooEZMoZ421WdsOVJhVkT⁠ 👁 Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/andrew.fitzg⁠ 👁 TikTok: ⁠https://www.tiktok.com/@andrewfitzgerald⁠ 👁 Facebook: ⁠https://www.facebook.com/scarymysteriesofficial⁠ 👁 X: ⁠https://x.com/ScaryMysteries1⁠  🗣 Business Inquiries, questions and comments hit us up at ⁠[e-mail]⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Are you ready to dive into the unknown? Join me, Peyton Moreland, on Into the Dark, the true crime podcast from Ono Media with a hint of horror and mystery. Each week, I dive into a different case, breaking down the facts and pondering the age-old question, why do people do what they do? Now, sometimes the answer isn't so clear, and that's why I'll also explore conspiracy theories, hauntings, and all things spooky. From the Green River Killer to the Mothman incident, we will unravel all of the questions that keep us up at night. So don't miss out.

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Risk, the show where people tell true stories they never thought they dare to share wherever you get your podcasts. Every town has a dark side. Think about all the people you let inside your home without a second thought. Most of your relatives are welcome with open arms, parents, the in-laws, cousins, aunts,

your kids' friends, of course, who you've known since they were little. Every single day, all over this country, people open their doors to somebody exactly like that. And 99 out of 100 times, nothing ever comes of it, because that's just what it means to trust the people around you. But this is a story about the one time out of 100. Because in Illinois in the summer of 1988, One family opened their door to a boy they had trusted for years.

And what he did once inside is the kind of thing that makes you look a little differently at everyone you think you know. Hey guys, it's Andrew, and welcome to another episode of Every Town Water Tonight. We're checking out an all-American male built in the heartland who was headed in the right direction until he decided to brutally kill some people on a warm summer evening. So let's head over to Woodstock, Illinois now. And find out why he did it. This is the story of Rick Church, the All-American Killer next door. Ray and Ruth Ann Ritter had both grown up in Woodstock, a town that sits about 50 miles northwest of Chicago. It's close enough to feel connected to the city, but really, it's a place that moves at a totally different speed.

They were high school's sweethearts who got married in 1969. Ray's career had him working for Commonwealth Edison, the electrician. company that kept half at Northern Illinois running. At Ruthanne, but she was a secretary for a local law firm. By 1988, they were raising three kids together, Colleen, Steve, and Matthew, right there in their hometown. And this was a solid family unit by any measurement. I want to raise closest friends over at ComEd was a man named Gene Church.

And Gene had a son Rick, who was right around the same age as the Ritter kids. The two families have been friendly for years, and so when Rick and Colleen started dating during the 1986-87 school year, Rick is senior at Marion Central Catholic High School and Colleen a sophomore, while everybody was thrilled. Here was a boy the Ritter's already knew and already trusted, practically considered one of their own. And Rick, he gave them every reason to keep trusting him. He was a great football player, a pretty good student. easygoing and well-liked by adults. Never once in any kind of trouble with the police or at school.

If you asked anyone in Woodstock back in 87 to describe the kind of boy you'd want your daughter to bring home, a lot of them would have basically described writ to a tea without even realizing it. Then he graduated and left from Northern Illinois University and DeKalb about 40 miles away. And at first, that distance didn't seem to change much in the relationship. ship. A Rick came home most weekends that first year. Even made the drive back just to take Colleen to prom. But people do change, slowly but surely, especially at that age, and things were beginning to shift away from what had been a picture-perfect first love. It showed up in little ways that are painfully easy to see now, but were almost invisible back then. Colleen was 16 when they started

dating and just a normal teenage girl with a normal teenage life. It had friends, activities, family she was close with. And then slowly, bit by bit, that whole life started shrinking down to fit whatever Rick wanted it to look like. Her friends noticed she wasn't around as much anymore. Her family noticed she'd check in with Rick before making plans that didn't even have anything to do with them. She wanted to get her hair done or something along those lines, for example.

Well, she'd better check with him before she made that appointment. And none of it looked like a crisis at all. Or just a girl who was maybe a little too into her first real boyfriend. At college, he'd call her from his dorm room most evenings. And if she told him she was busy with homework or going out with friends, he wouldn't just be a little disappointed. He'd get pretty upset. I'm talking genuinely angry.

It was this constant needy. She showed up every single time she tried to have a life that didn't revolve entirely around him, and it was starting to wear her down. So, by the summer of 88, the cracks in the relationship had turned in a full-blown pothole, so to speak. It got to the point that Colleen had started talking to a few close friends about wanting out for good. It wasn't happy anymore, felt like she couldn't breathe in the relationship, even though they were separated by 40 miles, and she was seriously starting to think about ending it. She, of course, hadn't told Rick anything about it yet.

She was working up to it, trying to figure out the timing, wondering how to take it, hoping it was some way to have this conversation that didn't explode. Because remember, she and Rick had been family friends long before any of this, and she wanted it to stay that way. But, as it turns out, well, that was an impossibility. Rick came home from DeKobb in June of 88 for the summer. he was not exactly in the best of moods. At first it had nothing to do with Colleen

and everything to do with how college was going for him. He wasn't exactly focused on his studies, and as it turns out, hadn't taken enough courses to become a sophomore the following year. His parents then sat him down and told him they were separating and selling the house. Then, on top of all of it, Colleen officially ended things.

She told him he was too possessive and she didn't want to be in a relationship like that anymore, but that she still wanted to stay friends. His devastation about it all was obvious to everyone. What nobody saw, though, was how much rage was actually sitting right underneath it. For two months after the breakup, Rick, he kept on calling. He'd phone the house constantly,

asked what she was doing, and get annoyed whenever she said she didn't want to see him. And he was essentially bed. begging her to take him back and he was desperate. In July, Rick and two of his friends, Sean and Jim, they took a trip up to Lake Geneva in Wisconsin. Sean later described Rick as a nice enough guy, but somebody who could just never seem to loosen up.

He said that on this trip, Rick was boozing a lot, and once he got drunk he started ranting about how much he hated women across the board, and Colleen especially for breaking things off. He got so loud and obnoxious that a random girl nearby told him to quiet down and Rick just went off on her. Sean said he and Jim actually had to hold him back from going after her. Then the whole ride home, Rick sat there mumbling about Colleen. How could she do this to me? And friends said this wasn't the first time he acted like this either. It seemed to be a drinking sort of thing. As sober, Rick was the guy everybody knew and liked but drunk. He'd turn angry and do things he never otherwise would.

The truth was, Rick had some anger issues and was a young man who couldn't handle rejection. He simply could not accept that Colleen didn't want him anymore. Which meant that in order for him to feel in control of his life once again, well, you need to hurt her a whole lot worse than she'd ever hurt him. So then, things continued to bubble over the summer. On Saturday, August 20th, Rick finally. He confronted Colleen directly and told her he'd do something drastic if she wouldn't get back together with him. She told him she wasn't interested, but that she was still happy to be his friend.

Later that same night at 1130, Rick called her one last time, begging for a single final date. A bit of closure, perhaps. He felt he deserved at least that much. She said no, again, trying to keep things civil. She didn't want to go on the day. She didn't want to go on the same. a date. Then for the first time, she told him something new, that she'd started seeing somebody else, and it was a classmate. And Rick, like he had done more than once before, freaked out and hung up. That night, Colleen had her friend sleeping over, and so did her younger brother Matthew. Their parents were out with friends of their own, and her brother Steve was staying over at a friend's place across town. And nobody in that house had any reason to think that that phone.

phone call was anything more than the same tired argument they've been having for two months. Everybody was aware of the tantrums he'd throw, and this seemed like another one. In summer, I was coming to a close, and he'd eventually go back to school and move on with life. And if anything, since now she was seeing somebody else, part of her hope that maybe finally this would be the last time he'd call. And it was, but not because he moved on in the slightest. At around 5 in the morning on August 21st, while the whole house was still asleep, while Rick let himself in to the Ritter home.

It was easy to get in because he knew that house like the back of his hand. Inside were all six people, Ray and Ruth, Matthew and Matthew's friend, and Colleen and her friend. Armed with a knife, Rick went straight for Ray and Ruth's bedroom on the ground floor first. I figured they were the biggest threat, and so he wanted them out of the way. He stabbed them both multiple times in their bed. Upstairs, Matthew woke up to the sound of the commotion and stepped out in the hallway to see what was happening.

And there, he ran right into Rick, who stabbed him twice without hesitation. And Colleen then woke up, grabbed the phone next to her bed, but before she could even finish dialing 911, a Rick burst into her bedroom, grabbed her, and started in on her. He stabbed her a few times, but she managed to be able to. break free and run. He caught up to her and gotten some more blows and slashed at her, but somehow she kept fighting. She broke loose a second time, made it out of the house, screaming at the top of her lungs. And Rick, he went right after her, chasing her down the street. A neighbor nearby,

37-year-old Chris Gurk, who heard the commotion, he ran out to his door. And there he saw Rick, out there stabbing Colleen, driving the knife into her chest, and then, when she rolled the over right into the back of her head. And Chris grabbed a bayonet. It was the closest weapon he could find and bolted out the door. The second Rick saw him coming while he took off. Minutes later, help finally arrived. The medics went to work on Colleen while police moved into the house carefully,

not knowing if Rick was in there or how many more victims they were about to find. Inside, they discovered Matthew, trying to nurse his wounds next to his friend. who was unharmed. And Colleen's friend was also unharmed. However, in the downstairs bedroom, while they found Ray and Ruth Ann, and they hadn't survived the attack. Now, this was a kid who used to walk into that house

without even knocking, and this is what he'd just done to the people who let him in. Rick, the boy half the town would have vouched for a month earlier, the same kid, who was welcomed into the Ritter's house's entire life, was nowhere to be found. and he had run all the way back to his house, packed a bag quickly while his mother slept upstairs, and he grabbed her keys to her 81 Dodge pickup, and he drove off all by a quarter to six in the morning. Matthew, having only suffered minor injuries, was able to get out of the hospital the next day,

but Colleen, she was another story. She'd been stabbed 22 times in total, many of them to the back of her head. Rick had clearly fully intended to kill her. It was her neighbor who saved her. She was rushed into surgery, and at first doctors feared she might lose her sight or come out of it with permanent brain damage. Against every possible odd, Colleen, she pulled through.

She would go on to make a full recovery, and she'd even be able to tell police exactly what happened that morning. Two months after the attack, she walked out of that hospital. The cruelest part of the timing of everything was that a few days after the attack, while Colleen was still in intensive care and couldn't even be there, while Ray and Ruth Ann were laid to rest, the same church they had been married at 19 years earlier. The very same priest, in fact, who had performed their wedding

was now standing over their caskets. And as for Rick Church, while he was still nowhere to be found. Up to this point, Woodstock had never seen a double murder before in its time. history. With Rick, still at large, the whole town was on edge and everybody did their part to try to bring order back to their town. A tips came pouring in. More than 60 phone calls of people swearing they'd spotted Rick or the Blue Dodge pickup he'd taken off in and everyone had to be run down. Most of them unfortunately led nowhere. And people had them in different cars and different towns and different clothes. But one got taken pretty seriously.

The day after the murder is a motel clerk up in Wisconsin Dells, about 130 miles northwest of Woodstock, reported that Rick had checked in. It was credible enough that within days the police had a federal warrant out for him and had pushed the search up into Wisconsin. And then two days after the Dells sighting, while he popped up again. This time, though, back in Illinois, just a few miles from his own hometown. town. And then, just like that, he was gone. He always seemed to be one step ahead of the law. About a month later, the trail picked back up, and this time, nearly 2,000 miles away out in California.

Church went directly to Venice Beach, California. He was staying here at the Kalmar Hotel just two blocks from the ocean, registered under the alias, Randy Hunt. But it looked like he only had the money for a single night, because after that, He was sleeping in his mother's truck, parked in a nearby public garage. Their next lead came when church cashed $300 worth of savings bonds at a bank just a few miles from Venice Beach. Then he ditched the truck for good. Investigators found it abandoned outside a convenience store in West Hollywood. By the time they pieced all of this together and searched the area,

well, he was already gone once again, and so the trail went cold. A two years after the murders, the case, it landed on unsolved mysteries. When we return, the chilling tale of a teenager who apparently embarked on a murderous rampage when his girlfriend broke up with him. And that meant his high school yearbook photo, that same easy, all-American smile that had made him the boy every parent in Woodstock trusted, was suddenly beaming out into millions of living rooms across the country, right next to the description of a knife attack that killed. two people and nearly killed two more. The show would end up profiling him a second time in 91. His face made it on to America's Most Wanted Two

in front of an even bigger audience of people actively hunting for fugitives exactly like him. The case of Richard Church has received an incredible amount of publicity. It's been the subject of daytime talk shows like Phil Donahue and Geraldo Rivera. Several states have even put up wanted posters of Church. Still, though, nothing came from that, at least at first. And Rick, it appeared, had actually managed to get away. And all the while, Colleen, she was living with it.

The day didn't go by where she didn't wonder if today might be the one where he comes back to finish her off for good. As she was scared coming home at night or pulling the car into the garage, and her family certainly wasn't getting the justice they deserved. Colleen was never not looking over her shoulder. He was the man who had murdered her parents and tried to murder her was still out there somewhere. And behind the scenes, the case had already picked up an ugly legal wrinkle that had nothing to do with catching Rick at all.

Ray and Ruth Ann had a joint life insurance policy worth about $360,000. And because they had been murdered together in the same attack, the insurers and lawyers ended up locked in an argument over a genuinely grim little technicality, which one of them had died first. Because under Illinois law at the time, the order they died in could actually change how that money got split between their three kids. And so on top of everything else, that's what the Ritter children were dealing with. And three years went by, and Rick Church, who was starting to look like, might just stay a fugitive for good. But all that time, he hadn't been running, it turns out,

out. But the majority of it, while he'd been hiding in plain sight, clear across the country in Salt Lake City, Utah, living as a guy named Danny Carson, who was low-key working the counter at a fast-food barbecue joint called Bennett's Pit. And he built himself a whole life out there. His coworkers liked him, and they had no idea the easygoing guy they worked next to every single day had murdered two people back in Illinois. And here's the wild part. A couple of them would later admit that they had actually seen the case on America's Most Wanted and thought their Danny Carson looked an awful lot like the fugitive on their screens. But they just liked him too much to ever pick up the phone.

Figure the guy they knew could never really be a killer. So in the end, it wasn't a co-worker who brought him down. It was an off-duty Salt Lake City Police officer named Craig Park. and parked, walked in to Bennett's pit, one day just looking to grab a bite. He got served right across the counter by the man calling himself Danny Carson and felt something click in the back of his head. It was a face he was sure he had seen somewhere before, pinned to a bulletin board or flashed across a fugitive alert.

But he didn't say a word in the moment. He just went back, dug up the wanted poster, and confirmed exactly what his gut was telling him. A Rick Church, he was arrested the very next day. November 14th, 1991. Three years and three months after he walked down to that house and drove off into the dark.

Finally, some breaking news on one of our toughest cases. Late yesterday, Richard Church was captured. He's the man accused of killing his girlfriend's parents. We've profiled Church five times and gotten... After his capture, Rick told investigators that at some point in 89, while he was still deep into his life on the run, well, he'd found his way to a religious compound in Alma, Arkansas, run by a self-styled evangelist named Tony Alamo. And if that name rings a bell, well, there's a reason for it. Because by then, Alamo was already one of the most notorious cult leaders in the entire country.

He was a federal fugitive himself at the exact same time, wanted to be a federal fugitive himself, wanted to be a very same time, wanted in connection with the beating of a young boy inside his own compound. It's kind of funny how bad people tend to gravitate towards those kinds of groups. A years later, Alamo would be convicted of hauling underage girls across state lines. And so, you've got one fugitive here hiding out with another. A rick told authorities, Alamo's people sheltered him for months, and he only barely slipped away when federal agents had raided the place looking for Alamon. Now, back in the present, Rick fought his extradition to Illinois for a little while.

At one point, he refused to talk to anybody at all and insisted he was going to represent himself. That didn't last too long, though, because in June of 92, staring down the very real possibility of a death sentence, while Rick pleaded guilty to the murders of Ray and Ruth Ann and to the attempted murders of Colleen and Matthew. In exchange for that, he was sentenced to life in prison. with no possibility of parole. By the time he was finally caught, Colleen Ritter was 22 years old and engaged to be married. When reporters asked how it felt to know that Rick was in custody at last,

she said that maybe now she could finally start living something of a normal life again. She married her fiancé that spring in May 92, but it was a wedding her parents never got to see. As for Rick, he's still alive today. still serving out that life sentence at Dixon Correctional Center in Illinois. And in more than 30 years behind bars, while he's never once given any real indication that he feels a shred of remorse for what he did that morning.

The house on West Greenwood Avenue, the one people around town quietly started calling the House of Death, it changed hands a few times over the decades that followed, before it eventually fell into foreclosure. Then in 2019, Habitat for Humanity took it on as a restoration project. They gutted it, rebuilt it, and turned it back into a home for a new family, a single mother, and her two daughters. According to the folks who worked on that renovation,

the family heard every bit of the house's history before they moved in, but it didn't seem to bother them all that much. That's the thing about a place like Woodstock and really most towns in the states. Life, it inevitably goes on. A house gets a new coat of paint, and new family moves in with a fresh start. One chapter closes, and the next one opens. But for the people who were there that August morning in 88, the ones who loved Ray and Ruth Ann Ritter,

and the ones who watched Colleen far their way back from 22 stab wounds, a childhood stolen in a single night, while some things don't ever really fade away. on the people involved and just learn to live with the pain. So that's going to do it for this week's episode of Everytown.

Hope you enjoyed it. If you guys are interested, we have some really good quality clothes over at our scary mysteries dashery shop. We have some nice Everytown gear, so pick up a tea or a hoodie if you want to look cool out there this fall. Those links are down in the description for that.

And if you want more true crime, well, remember to come right back here, next week for another episode filled with scary strange and mysterious stories because you never know maybe your town will be next.