Last Podcast On The Left - Episode 251: Children of God Part IV - Ricky

Episode Date: December 16, 2016

It's the end of the Children of God saga as we cover the story of not Davidito, but Ricky Rodriquez, as the former messiah leaves the Children of God and heads down a road of vengeance and murder. Bossa Bossa Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

There's no place to escape to. This is the last talk. On the left. That's when the cannibalism started. What was that? So I am, I have let a little bit more Christmas cheer to my heart this year. I know. It's been, I'm feeling it, I'm feeling the warmth.

It's sort of like being hugged on the downstairs by like a David Berg. A new drunk Santa that's always just kind of being like, let me see the holly berries. He has the beard of a Santa, but not the belly though. But what I'm learning is that if you just let that warmth go from creepy to nice, that's Christmas. That's it? But the thing is, that's what you, that's your understanding of Christmas?

That's pretty good. Welcome to the show everyone. This is the last podcast on the left. I am Ben Kissle with Marcus Parks. And as the Grinch's heart grew, so, so did Henry's. Like sitting on a bus to a big fat man. And then eventually it's like, yes, his sticky warmth is hurting. You hate it because it reminds you of being maybe again, memories of molestation. Or next to your father, something like that.

Yes, anything. You flip it into, again, got to flip it into, I like this. So you did it all the time. So wait a minute. So you're like Phoebe Cates and Grimlins? How so? She got molested by a man in the park dressed as Santa Claus. Yes.

She did? I don't remember that part of Grimlins. Yeah. You just, you just. The lighthearted film Grimlins? Yeah, there was that, no, no, no, wait. She got molested in Grimlins 2. Yes.

In Grimlins 1, it was when her, her dad got caught in the chimney while he was trying to play Santa Claus. But this was back in the 80s when Grapp and its strangers was fun. I guess so. Grimlins ball came in in Grimlins 2, right? That's, you're thinking of Critters. Oh, I'm thinking of Critters the whole time. Chris. And speaking of Christmas at the end of this episode, we're going to be premiering a brand-new

Kalman song. We wrote a Christmas song. Yes. And we're going to be playing it at the end of this episode. Again, it's just heartwarming as imagining the wet heat from a man's leg on top of your leg, translating that into the warmth of a blazing eulog. Yep. Okay.

So our Christmas gift to you, children of God, part four, I guess we could call this the Revenge? Yeah, we absolutely can. This is like, it's like Die Hard, a Christmas action movie, but also very sad. Yeah. So it's kind of like GCVD. A little bit like that. So this is just above getting a tie for Christmas.

This is the episode we provide to you. Yeah. And we're going to jump right back in there with the molestation, but we're going to try to get through the last of it as fast as we possibly can. Because you know why we're going to be taking the choo-choo molest express? No, no, no, no, no, no, it is incredibly serious. I'm nothing but love, nothing but net, nothing but love. Yeah, yeah.

We're not menacing. I mean if you want to say you were just like, we're jumping right back into molestation and it did seem a little bit overjoyous. We're going to be jumping right back in with molestation. I apologize. That's good. Good tenor. Thank you.

We're going to be jumping right back into it. This is the story of Ricky Rodriguez, Davidito. This is the end of his tale. That's who we're going to be following throughout the rest of this episode. This is what happens after. This is the idea of what group thinks shits out. Group thinks shits out. It's all of people that come back to try to destroy it.

And that's why I like changing this from the story of Davidito to the story of Ricky Rodriguez because this is this, because the story of Davidito is the story of a victim. And now this is a guy. He remains a victim, but he tries to take some power back. Take it back. Yeah, absolutely. So at the age of 10, Ricky got a spot on the sharing schedule, which was a list that was posted in every group home of the children of God that was essentially a sex timetable,

which specified which cult members would have sex with each other on what day. And unfortunately, it's incredibly easy to talk with the shift manager to change schedules on that. Do they have a shift manager? Yeah. They have steps in order for you to change different time plots on the sharing schedule. I don't know. Blowjobs.

Oh, I see. And when Ricky was 12, he was given a much older cult member named Bonnie as his designated girlfriend. And that same year, Ricky was forced to have sexual relations with Karen Zerbe, his own mother. And again, this is David Berg trying to make Ricky, trying to make anybody in his close circle just like him. Yeah, exactly.

So the cult, of course, all of this stuff is going on and, you know, they're fairly open about it with the story of David Ito. They're actually, I mean, they're telling... They had punch cards. Yeah. It seems like they were going into work. I mean, fairly open about it. It was a whole business, it seems.

Yeah, I really wish you didn't make a whole Dunesbury comic about it. God, yes. Yeah, so the cult, even though they were open about this stuff, they were constantly on the run. They were always staying one step ahead of journalists, particularly the tenacious staff of a German magazine named Stern. They were good, though. I mean, it was like...

Yeah, I like them. No, I mean, yeah. It just seems like a very German name for a magazine. It's like organized or furrowed brown. That's not right. So Ricky never had interactions with children who weren't also being molested by the inner circle, and he only saw other kids when they went out in public. David Berg in 1986, feeling a bit of pressure from the general public, officially banned

sex between adults and minors. He had to officially ban it. He had to come out and say, like, you know what, that whole, like, you know, adults having sex with kids, and maybe we shouldn't do that anymore. How far down the rabbit hole do you have to go of perversion for you to have to get to a point where you have to officially ban something that should be naturally disgusted, should disgust anybody? Well, he obviously met a giant smoking caterpillar, and he knew then, when he saw that, and he

was like, that's not attractive at all, is that what I look like? Oh, I guess everybody were having sex with pumpkins. You can draw little smiles on the pumpkins, that's why it's like a child, it'll be like a child that wean you off. Is that an Alice in Wonderland reference or a Freddie versus Jason reference? I think both. Yeah. Well, in 1987, the next year, flirty fishing was called off completely in the wake of the

AIDS crisis, or at least that's what they said, because they also banned children of God members from having sex with anybody outside of children of God. They're like, you know, we can only mix with ourselves, except for people that you've already been fucking for years. People got grandfathered in, essentially. By David Burt, he's always grandfathered a man. And it took him another two years to say that maybe children shouldn't be having sex with each other as well.

Congratulations. Really great, guys. Wow. Is there a hallmark card for that, for that congratulations? It just seems like when Moses went up to the mountain to get the Ten Commandments, but then Berg did it with a huge boner, and then God was like, ugh. Let's not take away from the fact that Moses may have very well have been completely rigid hard.

He had just met God himself. Maybe. He'd just been given a crazy job. I don't know how many times I have harder sex when we do well. Yeah. But he had to etch in stone Ten Commandments. With his cock. Oh, maybe that's what he used.

So it was around this time that Ricky, now aged 13, was introduced into the general population of the children of God. He started going to the Heavenly City School in Japan, where he was described by most people as a shy and quiet kid with no social skills who just wanted to fit in. And remember, this is a kid that was taught that he was going to be the new Messiah. He was handled very closely by all of the people around him, coddled, the whole family built him up with this huge ego. He was all the other kids also were prepped, saying the Messiah is coming here.

Be careful. Just know that he's something special. Don't cross him. They were warned, but also he's going to be a psychic. He's going to be a healer. And so kids didn't know how to interact with him, and he was just this shy, sweet 13-year-old who was just like desperate to make friends, and he showed up and everybody thought that he was the new Jesus Christ, and it's a hard way to bridge a gap.

Yeah, it would take a heavy personality in order to take that narrative and actually own it. It doesn't seem like the years of abuse were probably beneficial to him. He was just a fucking kid. He was just a quiet 13-year-old. And that's how all of these kids were. They were just kids, and all of these kids that were part of the school, they were all second-generation kids.

They were born into this. It was all they knew. Oh, God. I also think at some point, and this may be a strange idea, but David Berg, I think he thought that all of the molestations would have made him like cool and groovy like he was. That is exactly why he did it. And it doesn't do that.

No, that whole free love movement kind of got a little bit out of control, I think. No? Yeah, of course. No, the free love. We talked about it earlier. We talked about I think on part one, like all that free love stuff, all it does is hurt people. It just hurts people.

There's actually a heavy price to love. Polly Amory takes a lot of rules. A lot of rules. Oh, wait. And it's all tacking, tacking, tacking, tacking. I watched Sister Wives, and I had a panic attack. I mean, I don't understand how he's able to deal with all that. Some people can.

Some people can totally deal with Polly Amory. You have to be a very big communicator. Yeah, the amount of people, the percentage of the population that can handle Polly Amory, I mean, it's less than 1% of people who can actually handle that, and good on you if you can, but the vast, vast majority of us cannot. Amongst consenting adults, I think it's a fine way to live. Yeah, have a great time. You want to do it like that.

Absolutely. I mean, God forbid, if there's only two seats on a roller coaster, that's a problem. You go with this. You always sit next to who? You always have to have matches of a different length on you at all times, and then you have to play like the movie Clue, you know? Yeah, so these kids that were brought up into the Children of God, they had no grounding whatsoever.

Not only were they faced with the Messiah suddenly, but they never had any idea what the rules were. The rules changed every single day. One day the higher-ups would be telling them they should all be having sex with each other all the time, and the next day they tell them, it's like, actually, no, you should only be holding hands, and that's all you should ever do ever. And then the next day, it's like, oh, no, wait, blowjobs are okay. And then the next day, it would be back to holding hands.

They were just fucking with them as much as they could. Because David Burke was completely blotto on wine, sending out these mo-letters, just sending them out, and so they would jump to every single weird thing. It's like if we totally let Ben Kissle completely run Cave Comedy Radio, just solely based on 3 AM text. Oh, yeah. It'd be a whole bunch of different shows. One's just about mud.

It's kind of fun. So were they manipulating these people on purpose, or was this a little bit more of, like you were saying, Henry, this is just a drunken man acting drunkenly? I really do think the whole thing got out of control. These people were like, they wanted to believe in David Burke so badly. There were a lot of people that had left, but the people that had stayed, they needed to believe. They needed to believe that whatever was coming from David Burke was the rule of God, because

they'd already invested so much into it. Can you imagine if he had Twitter? Oh. That would be fascinating. Really great. It would honestly probably be kind of. Yeah, I can imagine if he had Twitter. Yeah, entertaining almost.

I can actually perfectly imagine what it would be like for a fucking lunatic with power to have Twitter. But also, I think that there was a pattern that it grew from, right? Like all of these cults always start in one purposeful direction and then balloon out and panic, because you give all this pressure on him from all sides. People try to investigate in both journalists and police and the families of the people members of these cults are trying to get these people out of there. And so originally, I think the inconsistency was on purpose, like if they're very beginning

to sort of like see how far people will jump. And then the more and more people take those jumps, the more willing to take bigger jumps. And then eventually, David Burke can't think anymore. Yeah. And I think really think the only way to keep a cult truly organized is through violence and fear. Look at Omsh and Riccio. Omsh and Riccio, say what you well about them.

They were an organized group till the very end. No, they had a goal. Yeah. They had an in-game and the children of God had no in-game, because the in-game kept changing. Hmm. And when the game changed, the people, they don't say the same. That's a good point.

Good point for sure. So naturally, a lot of these kids, they couldn't handle it. And when they couldn't handle it, when kids can't handle what's going on, they act out. That is just an absolute... That's a fact. Graffiti. Swap and close. Dye in their hair.

Well, I don't think the last two aren't that bad. And if they're good at graffiti, you could harness that into an artistic skill. It's sure. Now it's fun how that changes. Yeah. Again, you flip into something you like. Absolutely. Yeah.

So those kids that couldn't handle shit and started acting out, they were sent to teen training as we talked about on the last episode. Those were the camps where they sent the bad kids, where they put the smile machine on them. Oh, that smile machine. That gave me nightmares. Yeah. It really did. I don't know.

I could use a smile every once in a while. Yeah. A forced smile when you're sad. It's not natural. The outside in. So the one from the inner circle who got the brunt of this teen training, though, was Mary Berg, the daughter of Aaron Berg, who jumped off Goddamn Mountain in 1973. Because of course, someone who's on the inner circle, she needs to be made an example of.

Always. Yeah. They're always these kids that are very close. They always need to be made an example of. So Mary suffered not only sexual abuse from David Berg himself, but also physical and psychological abuse from Karen Zerbe. It cannot be understated how evil Karen Zerbe was. Karen Zerbe is.

Evil. Excuse me. Yeah. She remains evil. She remains evil. She's still alive. She's still alive. And now they're trying to act like none of this shit happened.

They're trying to act like all of this is normal. And the church is completely fucking, I've coped with her. So whatever bullshit is completely fine. And it's not. She's a, she's another one. She's an enabler of a gigantic network of molesters. So she's in her seventies or so at this point. Yeah.

She'll be dead soon. Yeah. Maybe. Who knows. People live forever nowadays. That is true. So Zerbe was worried that Mary, who was Berg's granddaughter, would replace Zerbe as the queen of the apocalypse sitting at Ricky's side.

Like Aliyah. No. A queen of the dam. Yeah. A great movie. So Karen Zerbe thought this because Berg was making Ricky have sex with Mary so Berg could continue his family line using the Messiah as the father. Zerbe clued into what was happening and sent Mary to the teen training camp in the Philippines.

And now this is because Karen Zerbe was jealous of Mary because she was getting new attention and she was the new new wine and not the old stinky fucking clotted wine that Karen Zerbe became. This is why I had a panic attack watching sister wives. While Mary was in the Philippines, she was locked in a room for six months where she was tied to a bed and beaten, thrown against walls and was forced to undergo multiple exorcisms. And Sarah, Ricky's nanny, that you'll remember from the last episode, supervised and often

took part in the abuse more often than not for no other reason than she just seemed to enjoy it. She reminds me of an evil version of the palsied, like clean janitor woman in Deadwood, Sarah. For some reason, in my mind, I imagine Sarah as like, Jule? Yes. I don't see the connection. Yeah. I don't know why.

I don't know why. I was just talking about Jule. Just another woman. Yeah. Jule was a sweet soul. I'm saying evil. She's the opposite of a person who happens to be a woman from a TV show. She's got like the...

No, Sarah doesn't have cerebral palsy. I'm not saying she does. I don't see the connection. This doesn't work at all. I'm just saying. It's like a thing in my head. You've just been watching Deadwood. I have been.

But also, you guys don't put like, you don't attach images to certain people you read about. Yeah. Oh yeah. I definitely do that. Yeah. So that's what I attached. It just doesn't seem to be inaccurate.

It's like David Burke. I sometimes think about George Wendt. Well, another one. Yeah. That's you. Yeah. That's maybe with a heat miser. With George Wendt.

With George Wendt. Heat miser? From Cheers? Yeah. Yeah. Norm. He's talking about Norm. I don't.

Or John Lithgow. Maybe John Lithgow. Okay. He's got some villain roles out there. Norm never did nothing wrong to nobody. I'm not saying he did. I'm not blaming George Wendt. I'm just saying.

Although he did have a family that he never saw. No. Not once he was a horrible alcoholic. There should be a dark side to Cheers when they go home. We never see Cliff at work. Now, more than anything, it seems like the family's treatment of Mary is what drove Ricky to murder decades later on January 6, 2005. Here's Ricky talking about their treatment of Mary in a video he made years later, which

we'll go into in greater detail later on in the show. She went up. I don't know. Well, my sister has such a fucked up time in team training. She's a fucking six year old for God's sake. Fucking animals. I think those fuckers, they're going to fucking get it too if I have anything to do with it. Rock and roll.

I mean, I don't want to say. I just want with him. I'm kind of fucked. It almost sort of. Now, is that a manifesto tape or? We'll get into the tape. We'll get into the tape. All that.

But you do have to understand where the guy's anger is coming from. That's for damn sure. Absolutely. Oh, God, yes. This is why, again, we're talking about it's sad Batman. It really is. Yeah. Now, over the years, the children of God had run into journalists and local and federal

officials, the world over who tried to uncover the truth and expose the rampant child abuse that was taking place in the cult. But every single time the family got away with it, it could be that they pulled strings with or blackmail those powerful people. They'd flirty fished or it could be that they just knew how to cover their tracks. Also, it is. I think it's got something along the lines of when you look at who took Johnny that documentary like the idea of gigantic organized child molestation that in some way, shape or form,

it's sort of overlooked by the government. So they don't want to open that box a lot of the time. I think that because it chose how little work they did to investigate what was going on when people again and again and again went to authorities to tell them all of this shit's going on inside of these cults. It's not happening everywhere. That's the other thing, too, is that there were many sex and many different communities within the children of God.

Hundreds. I mean, there are over, today, over a thousand of them. So if you can't find the head, the head group, the head of the snake, it's going to be difficult to cherry pick which communities you go to because then some of them also didn't participate in any of the flirty fishing or any of the family sharing and any of that shit. They were just cooks that were living an austere life and believed in corporal punishment. And I think another part of it is it's a religion. Yeah.

And people are sensitive to other people's religious beliefs and oftentimes that will lead them to stop investigating and just believe that the greater good is happening. I think that a big part of it is not necessarily flirty fishing. I think that a lot of these government officials, we talked about it in our Franklin Cover Up episode where people will essentially be either, they'll pretty much be honey potted into having sex with a minor. Yes. They'll be in the room where a bunch of people are having sex with minors.

Exactly. So those people are then complicit. So when it comes time to prosecute that, then the head can go up and say like, listen, you're a part of this. You're complicit in this. If we go down, you go down. 60% of our government is involved in child molestation rings. I know it for a fact.

That is not a fact and that is actually a very dangerous thing to say right now. Very good. Interesting. But no, I mean, obviously, again, going back, Dennis Haster was one of them. There are many people who, but I think- There are definitely some. And who was Jared Fogel texting? That's what I want to know.

Yeah, there are absolutely some people that are in the government that are pedophiles, but on the other hand, there are librarians that are pedophiles. That doesn't mean that- And they're the worst ones. That doesn't mean- Well, they make the kids read. But they got me into horror novels. I told you about the librarian in the last episode.

Of course. I get, you know, but again, he inspired me. But that's the thing. Just because there's one librarian who is a pedophile, that does not mean that every librarian in the United States is a part of a gigantic librarian pedophile. Good point, Marcus. Which is really funny is that if you take that little bit again, that little bit of sentence and isolate it, it damns all libraries. Exactly. That's what Marcus is trying to avoid.

When you did say Franklin cover up this time, I thought about Franklin from Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the guy in the wheel chair- Sally! Oh, they can be like, Franklin cover up! I don't know where my pants are! No. Either way, even if it was them blackmailing, or if it was just that they covered their tracks, the fact remains that even though there were multiple raids on the family communities in the early 90s, the children of God have been exonerated in any and all child abuse cases. There were moments of bad PR in which former members would speak out about the abuse they suffered. And even Bergstotter Debra wrote a tell-all book about her life in the cult.

But ultimately, none of it really had much of a lasting impact. And yeah, I mean, I can see somebody not necessarily wanted to read that book. Yeah. You know? But on the other hand, I mean, not really because during the 70s and 80s, there was that book that pretty much kicked off the Satanic Panic. Sure. That was, I can't exactly remember the name of the book, but it was one of those false, like one of those recovered memory books. Yeah.

And that was, of course, full of the exact same shit as the children of God. But on the other hand, Ben, you might be right because that book about the Satanic Panic is that, of course, it's all bullshit. None of it actually happened. None of it is true. And there is also, like, it's a much better story, that Satanic Panic shit. It's a villain. Yeah, there's a bunch of people in black and it's really good. They're all having a good time and you're fucking jealous of them because they're all fucking goth and metal. And it's Satan.

Exactly. Here, this is God. This is Jesus. And it's real. And it did seem like there were a lot of people who were involved in cults during this time. So you wonder if they might feel some personal guilt for being sucked into their own version of a cult. Exactly. And a lot of people had family members in cults as well. So it's one of those things where if you believe that they are complicit, if you believe that this cult is evil, then by association,

your family member who is a part of a cult may be evil as well. It's uncomfortable truths. Totally. And a lot of times people will shy away from that stuff. I think the uncomfortable truth is that I have a hard time with Beyoncé's later albums. Oh, don't say that about Queen May. What about Exo? It's fine.

Exo's great. I love that song. I watched a video of hers the other day. She dances. And I don't even know how she did. She must be tired after all that. Now, it could be that the reason why the children of God didn't get hammered as hard as they could have, is because they heavily sanitized the mo letters that they had been producing over the years. And this was pre-internet, so it was a lot easier to scrub the past than it is now.

Because the mo letters, of course, you know, they were, the story of David Ito was so long. It was full of so many awful pictures. When they decided to ban all that stuff, they released a different version of the story of David Ito that was completely and totally scrubbed of anything. They knew this shit was wrong. Anything that could be construed as illegal, they scrubbed. Basically, Tipper Gore got a hold of it. And she was like, parental advisory.

If you want to sell your book at Walmart, you got to clean it up a little bit. That is the one I would, I'm down with the ban on. I was mad when she tried to shut down Frank Zappa. Oh, yeah, Tipper Gore's horrible. Oh, yeah, Wasp. Oh, fuck like a beast, man. Fucking rock and roll. Oh, my God.

I got, I got public enemy, but I got the clean version. I was singing all the wrong lyrics, talking about ramen hamburgers or something. There were random foods in there. We're neighbors with attitude. Oh, that's kind of a fun thing. So by the time officials finally got up their ass and did something in the early 90s, the cult had already stopped and had banned most of their disgusting practices. In fact, that was the reasoning an English court gave for not prosecuting.

They used to be fucked up, but not anymore. So it's all good now. Fuck you. But don't you still have to pay for the sins of your past? No, not anymore. Well, there was no proof. Other than those massive amounts of mole letters which documented the abuse, right? No.

But that's circumstantial. No, and there's stories. It's called the story of Davidito. Oh, I see. It's satire. Oh, okay. That's what, all right. And so it was that in October of 1994, David Berg died at the age of 75 without having

to answer for a single one of his crimes. Wow. Do you think that they would have at some point brought him to justice? No. No. You don't think so at all? No. He could still be alive today had he, you know, been healthier or something.

Yeah. 20 years, 95? It could be 95. Some people could be 95, but he- John Glenn just passed away at 95, and he didn't do anything wrong. John Glenn had a clean conscience, I guess. I hope so. I don't think, I actually don't think so.

That's not spread rumors about John Glenn. He's an American hero. There are very few true American heroes, and John Glenn is one of them. And Mr. Rogers. Spending so much time and space, what has he got to hide? That's a nice thing. Yeah, sir, I'm an astronaut. What do you have to hide?

So after David Berg died, Karen Zerbe married top official Peter Amsterdam and assumed control of the cult, which at that time had a membership of 10,000, 7,000 of which were underage. So technically that should be 3,500. I'm not saying that children should not count completely as one whole adult, but I'd say two count as one whole adult. Yeah, they can't vote. I mean-

I mean, really. Yeah. So the only person out of all these monsters who would pay any sort of price for what they had done to countless children was one of the nannies who would raise Ricky, Susan Joy Cowton, and the one who would deliver that punishment would be Ricky Rodriguez himself. Can we cheer that? No. No.

Okay. We can't cheer murder. All right. We just can't. I do understand the motivation, though. Of course, we all understand the motivation, you know, but we cannot cheer vigilante murder. It'd be kind of cool if he had like a Punisher costume on or like he called himself like the Night Snail.

The Night Snail? Yeah. What's the Night Snail's magic move or special trick? Shoot you in the head. Oh, I see. So after Berg's death in 1994, Ricky Rodriguez had started to catch on to the fact that his upbringing was not only fucked up, but downright evil. He wasn't quite as sheltered as he had once been and was starting to mingle with the rank

and file of the cult. Xerbi, now completely in charge of the children of God, sent Ricky to live in a family home outside of Budapest in 1995, a place that was much more relaxed, where he was treated not as Davidito the Messiah, but pretty much is just some dude named Ricky. That's nice. Yeah. That must be nice for him to just be a guy. Yeah, it really was.

I mean, he talks about that time as like among, I mean, it's very, for him, it was very, it was very happy, very relaxing, but it was also one of the most destructive times because this is when he started to open up to people and started to tell them what it was like to grow up as Davidito. Yeah. And he's starting to figure out because, of course, like both him and the girl known as DeVita, they both knew that something was wrong. Yeah.

I mean, this on a very, on a molecular level, you know as a child that it is not right to have sexual contact. You just can't choose. You just can't choose. Yeah. You can't choose. You're literally being, you're being forced to do it. Yeah.

And nothing's going to, that doesn't, that's not right. No. That's right. It is interesting. He's going to very exotic locations. Well, that's what happened. Yeah. I mean, I'm feeling like Budapest.

He's just jealous of his trunk with all the different travel stickers on it. It's kind of like Eat, Pray, Love. Oh, God, I don't, I don't think so. But they had to move out of all the Western countries. They hadn't been, they hadn't really been in the United States for decades at this point. And a lot of them, at one point, David Berg had made a proclamation that there was going to be a war coming and that all of the industrial, like all the first world nations, all the leading nations in the world would be destroyed.

So they needed to move to third world countries. Not that, you know, Philippines and Budapest, you know, wherever, where's Budapest, Hungary? I don't know. Yes. Yes. Budapest is Hungary. I'm Hungary. I just know Moon River is about the, or the, the river Danube.

Is that Hungary? It's the capital of Hungary. Yeah. They got great hotels. I hear their grand hotels in Budapest. I've heard that. I mean, not that it's third world, but, you know, it ain't no America. Yeah.

I don't think, I don't think, I don't think, I don't think David Berg understands proxy wars very well. No. We don't fight on our own soil. David Berg was not well versed in international politics. Anything. Literally anything. Anything we would fight the, you know, the Russians in Hungary.

He wasn't even expert on having sex with his own family. He couldn't get it up the last 15 years. That's probably a good thing. Just keep coming back to that. Yeah. Sorry. Really obsessed about David Berg's like ability to get hard. I don't know.

I don't know why. I don't need to stop. You're going to therapy, right? Yeah, I am. Yeah. Okay. So maybe just flush that out a little bit. Yeah.

Obsession with this horrible old molester's penis. Oh God. Mr. Zabrowski, I'm sorry your therapist can no longer see you. Well, who are you? I'm here to escort you from the building. Every time. So while Ricky was in Portugal, he met a girl named Elixia Munumil. Oh.

Birth name? I don't know. I don't know. Her birth name was like Ethel Rager. Oh, that's kind of a good name. She, it could be her birth name. She was Ecuadorian. Oh, okay.

She was a beautiful woman who would remain with Ricky for the rest of his short life. But as Ricky started to open up to people about what being David Ito was really like, Zerbe caught word and ordered him home back to Portugal. Ricky was completely miserable back there and missed what little freedom they'd allowed him to taste. But every time he thought about leaving, he remembered all the stories he'd heard about other second generation kids who had left and fallen into drug abuse, alcoholism, prostitution and suicide.

And the thing was, these weren't just stories. All of this was true. Yes. And if you want a deeper look into that, watch the HBO documentary Lost and Fount that talks about those victims and basically people who came out of the children of God with no life skills at all and didn't know what to do. No. And a lot of them did commit suicide.

They couldn't handle it. Of course. They had all the memories of the awful shit that happened to them and that's combined with no real abilities to live in the outside world. So not only do they not know how to cope with what happened to them in the past, they don't know how to cope with the present. I mean, what's the lead off conversation to with somebody who's a stranger at a bar? You don't have any real life existence that's normal.

Yeah. So you can't just start off with like the terrible atrocities that happen because some people are going to slowly move away from you as the drinks get ordered. Booze, huh? Makes me want to dance. Hey, look at that a window and then they just go stare at that. Casey and the Sunshine Band, that's a great new band. Okay.

Yeah. It's very tough for them, very isolating, very alienated. Well, they ended up forming networks that these kids, when they left the children of God, they'd go and they'd find each other, they'd hang out with each other, they called each other, they called each other all the time. They have these support networks and that's pretty much all they have. And the fact that these kids were committing suicide, that they were falling into drug abuse, that made Ricky even more angry.

And it validates the church's message that when you leave, you become a drug addict, an alcoholic, you commit suicide, and so it all sort of plays into each other. Yeah. It's a perfect narrative to scare people into stain. Yeah. But now he sees that he has a community to protect and this is where Ricky starts to become sad Batman. Yeah.

The Night Snail. Don't call him the Night Snail. Okay. I gotta say I like the Night Snail. Now the thing is about Ricky is that, yeah, he has a community to protect now. Ricky was actually a good dude. That by all accounts, Ricky was a good dude. Despite the terrible upbringing that he had, he was still compassionate, he was loving,

and he was very sensitive to the plight of others. And in fact, with Ricky, what happened to others was far more important than what had happened to him. The only thing that Ricky wanted was to live a normal life and to make sure that what happened to him never happened to anyone ever again. Like Batman. Like Batman. Like Batman.

Yeah. I mean, he really is, I think what Ricky Rodriguez is at the end of the day is that he is what would really happen if someone turned into a super hero, a vigilante superhero. A vigilante superhero. Yeah. It doesn't work out. No. It's a sad story.

Yeah. It's a sad story. Unless you bang Wonder Woman. But then Wonder Woman also has to be real. And also now Wonder Woman's a lesbian. So where goes that fucking idea? When did Wonder, I mean, I don't care. That's wonderful that Wonder Woman, I hope she finds her love.

You did sound scared. I was just, I'm not scared or upset. Just interested. I didn't realize there was a new twist in her sexual orientation. Oh yeah. I mean, Wonder Woman, well Wonder Woman is actually created by a polyamorous trio. If you're going to tell me She-Hulk is also a lesbian, then I might have it a little disconnected because I'm quite a She-Hulk too.

No, no, no. No, She-Hulk's not a lesbian. I always thought She-Hulk was very attractive. Very beautiful. Because She-Hulk is extremely attractive. Yes. And Psylocke. Yeah.

Good point. Okay. Now this is Ricky talking about the suicides that happened as a result of kids being part of the cult. Where the fuck was I? Suicide. Yes. Suicide.

Horrible. Horrible thing when adults contemplate suicide. But it's so much worse when you've got a fucking little kid who is, you know, not born to be a messed up little fucker, but he's a little life, you know, she's a little life. And you just fuck him over because you're a sick fucking pervert and you don't have anything better to do with your life than to fuck up your little kids. It's just so far beyond me, I just can't fucking imagine it. But yet it happened, 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, I was a guy, you know, a lot of you girls, 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. Because it's not about that. There's so many other kinds of abuse that went on that to some of us were just as bad.

Some of us, to some of us it wasn't, and some of us didn't have it that bad. So I'm not going to sit here and say, oh yeah, I had it the worst, or I didn't, because it doesn't really matter. It should never have happened at all to anybody. That's the point. I mean, he really is extremely empathetic. Yes, and truly, like not in a fake way, but he's truly with it. Also, I imagine the same music, I imagine Batman would listen to.

Yeah, and I used to listen to that very similar music. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, during that whole video, he's listening to some pretty hardcore shit. So in the year 2000, Ricky finally left the Children of God cult with Elixia to try his luck in the system. And a few months after leaving, he wrote an email to a top official. This is what he said, some days I've come so close to snapping and going back to their compound, but not for a social visit, and not as a repentant prodigal, but as an Avenger.

I don't see why I should have to pay for their sins. Damn right. And shortly after sending that email, Ricky moved to Tacoma, Washington to look for work sleeping on the floors of former family members until Elixia joined him a few months later and the two got an apartment together. Now to give you an idea of how disconnected these people were from the real world, Ricky and Elixia didn't even know they had to buy their own furniture to furnish their apartment. They just assumed that when they showed up, all that shit was going to be taken care of.

Right. Now eventually, Ricky got a job as an electrician's apprentice. He was reportedly an amazing employee, but he couldn't move past what had happened to both him and other kids while they were in the children of God. And he refused to talk to anybody about this stuff besides former children of God members fearing that if he told anybody what had happened to him, they'd put him away. Like he acted— Because he would be crazy.

They would think he was nuts. They would think he was nuts. They would never believe because it was so insane. Right. And he didn't have any proof. So Ricky kept it all to himself and let his hate fester for years, hardly able to think about anything besides revenge against his nannies, but particularly his mother. He's able to keep it under control for a while, but in 2004, he got into a minor car

accident that jarred something loose. This is him talking about what he went through mentally since leaving the cult. Yeah, I don't really have anything to lose, I think, and yeah, I don't want to go through my life the way it is now. I've tried for four years. Sure, it's not long. It feels like a fucking lifetime. It feels like a goddamn lifetime to me, and every day, you know, if it had just gotten

a little better, a little better, even emotionally, mentally for me, it would have been okay. It would have given me hope, but it's gotten worse. Every fucking day has been a little worse than the day before. Kind of reminds me of the office space where he's talking to the hypnotherapist, and he says that every day has been a little worse. The guy goes, oh, that's fucked up, and then he catches himself and apologizes, but yeah, it's fucked up. It's really fucked up, but hey, it's life, and we're going to play the hand that we're

dealt. Anyway. It's crazy to think about him consuming the same media that we consume and living a mainstream lifestyle with that past. He was just trying to be a normal dude, he was just trying to watch movies and distract himself and hoping that one day he'd wake up and be better, and then it just doesn't sometimes. It seems like he could have been saved by one person also, if the perfect person appeared out of thin air, but he does seem like he is such an empathetic person.

He wanted to get better, so fucking bad. All he wanted was to just live a normal life, but he was just so afraid to talk to anybody that he just never got there. Even if he bumped into Bill Murray, he wouldn't be able to get one of those douchebaggy Bill Murray stories. A few days after the accident, Ricky packed up and left Alexia for San Diego, and while there, he started to formulate a plan to bring his abusers to justice, and as the story was now 20 years old, and since the cult had gotten away with this shit time and time again, Ricky

believed that there was no legal recourse that he could take, so he decided to take it into his own hands. His plan was to find his mother, the top official of the Children of God, and murder her, effectively cutting the head off the beast. Ricky believed that if he killed Karen Zerbe, the rest of the organization would crumble around her and he could destroy the cult that had destroyed both his and so many other people's lives. This is him talking about that further.

Yeah, I'm sort of quitting right now, but in a way I'm not, because I'm not doing it the way I want to do it. I'm trying to do something lasting, something that if God forbid, in the next life, it does go on, that I can look back on this 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, that I did what I could to make a difference, and I don't really know how far I'm gonna get. I'm starting to think now that it's not gonna be that far, and that's gonna suck ass.

I might not, I'll get one person, that's for sure, my source for the information. The goal is to bring down the sick fuckers' mom and Peter, my own mother, with an evil little cunt. God damn it. How can you do that to kids? How can you do that to kids and sleep at night? I don't fuck it now. Anyway.

Well, that's just a very, you know, it's so complex because in a strange way, he's coming from a goodness of his perspective of wanting to defend everybody, but he's talking about murdering an individual. Yeah, you can't necessarily support it, but at the same time, then there's a whole part of me that's like, yeah. I mean, you get it. Yeah. You know, and it's funny because he doesn't come out selfishly, he's always thinking

as the collective, as the people who are scarred collectively, and it's really fascinating. Yeah, and the government's not done anything, and you relied on the police to do their job. Everybody did, and then they just didn't do it. So it gets to a point, somebody's got to do something, even if it's killing a 60-year-old woman who is the, I mean, and then again, but what do we learn about religious leaders if you kill one? It just makes them, they're bullshit stronger. Yeah.

It's martyrdom. And ultimately, that is one of the greatest tragedies of Ricky Rodriguez is that the children of God made him a martyr. Yeah, it was a societal issue. Society failed him in a lot of ways. Absolutely. Yeah. So in San Diego, Ricky started making phone calls.

He contacted current family members faking a conciliatory tone to try to find information about his mother's whereabouts. He finally heard that the Christmas before, she had visited her parents in Tucson. So Ricky moved to Tucson to see if he could wait it out until Karen Xervey returned. Meanwhile, his former nanny, Susan Counten, the less evil, but still pretty fucking evil one, had officially left the cult, but was still in contact with Karen Xervey. And her, I imagine, looks sort of like, what's her name, from my fucking brain, Big Fat Woman.

There it is. She looks like a... There it is. In my mind, she looks like Kathy Bates. Kathy Bates. Yeah. You know what? That one I can agree with.

I love Kathy Bates. I love Kathy Bates in my head. About Schmidt, Kathy Bates. Yeah. Hot tub. Hot tub. I love it. They're right there.

Ricky, through a Children of God charity front called the Family Care Foundation, got to hold a Susan and convince her to come have dinner at his apartment so they could catch up and just generally talk about their time together at the Children of God. You know, he was very nice about it, very conciliatory. He's like, you know, I know I've been away from the family for a while, but I'm thinking about coming back in, you know, I'm thinking about all these good memories. So why don't we get together? We can have dinner and we can have a good time.

His actual plan was much different the night before the dinner. Ricky set up a camera and started recording and in this video, and this video is what we've been listening to all these clips from. That's where all of these clips come from is this video. And by the way, it is available to watch in its hour long duration on YouTube. I would highly recommend going and seeing it. This is, it is fascinating. It is heartbreaking.

But it's also cements the Batman idea because as he's doing it, if you hear the little noises while he's doing the clink, clink, clink, that's him loading a clip of a gun while he's doing this monologue. Yeah. Yeah. He's sitting there with a 40 caliber Glock. He's got a box of bullets. He's got four fully loaded clips.

And as he's talking, he's sitting there loading a fifth, a sixth, and a seventh. The video was made so Ricky could explain to former Children of God members, particularly the kids who were abused, the reasons behind what he was about to do. Now here's a few more excerpts from that video. The thing about this video is that you can tell how much he really thought about all of this and how much planning he really put into it all. This is him talking about his weaponry. So that's cool.

I think I'm going a little overboard. I bought a bunch of mags and all these fucking bullets. What was the police round? Golden Sabre, it's a full load of powder, they don't, they don't skimp. Some people say that the hollow points don't expand as they should because ballistic gelatin that they use for their tests isn't really accurate. I think when you, now that I just now thought of this, like when you listen to him, he has lines.

Yes, he's been thinking about this. But it's almost like he has catchphrases where he's been watching movies because all really Ricky Ramirez knows about life is from movies that he's been watching because he was in the children of God called for so fucking long, is that I think that from watching movies and trying to figure out how to live life, because as he's talking, like the ones who are playing, like they're very specific like end times. It also sounds like 90s action movie stars. Yeah, exactly.

He built up his dialogue from watching snappy, bad ass guys and emulating them. Well, to some degree, he's an immigrant in his own country. You know, and he doesn't understand what the American culture is because he didn't grow up in it. And that is our major export is our culture in our movies and things like that. How many people outside of America assume we all have guns? My dad came over here just bought a cowboy hat right away. He was like, Oh, in America, they wear cowboy hats.

Usually, no, you're a German truck driver. Yeah. He's like, Oh, but my leader hose and are covered in sausage pieces. So Ricky went on to show a huge Marine issued K bar knife that he planned to use plus a roll of duct tape. And I think the gun, the gigantic knife, the duct tape, all that, it really shows what Ricky thought about the people he was targeting because at the end of the day, his nannies and his mother, they were old ladies.

But this is the same thing we saw in the Menendez Brothers trial. What they try to say is the overkill justified the fact that they were molested, right? The idea was that they were going to use it against when the Menendez Brothers were basically trying to kill their parents for greed. They tried to set up a look, but you could say by the way they overkill them as they view them as huge monsters. The difference is that Ricky Rodriguez actually thought that because Ricky Rodriguez was actually molested.

And they wrote a fucking book about it. Yeah. And every bit of it was documented and read by thousands of people. Yeah. I mean, these old ladies, they weren't hard targets. And the other things, the children of God, they weren't in armed cult. They weren't like the branched of Indians or Omschen Rikio. Their guns and weapons never once came into the children of God, but he still thought

that he needed a fucking 45, a 40 caliber pistol, six clips, a gigantic knife. That's what he thought he needed to take down old ladies. Ricky's whole plan was to get Susan Cowton alone in his apartment and extract the location of Karen Zerbe before killing his hostage. This is him talking about how he would go about that. I'm one person. I'm working under situate conditions that aren't that great right now because I'll only have a small window of opportunity to get the information that I need out of this person.

I'm not trained in torture methods, which is what I'm going to have to make do. I got my drill here. The reason why it's got this fucking padding on it is just to try to silence it a bit because I'm in an apartment. I got gags, fucking socks, I got lots of fucking duct tape. I got a soldering iron, sheets, it's a rather crude implement. I think it can work wonders, especially if it's used in the right way. I'm not trained.

I don't know how to fucking do this, I don't want to fucking do this, god damn it. I mean it is, that's intense. Because also the problem is that the one thing that then in the end, what we'll find out is that if you don't really want that kind of mayhem, it's going to be really difficult to pull that mayhem off. You look at Dylan Klebold and the Columbine guys, they were pieces of shit and looking to hurt as many human beings as possible, which is why they went through with their plans.

It was like all of this stuff, he made some calls, but it was really as far as you could go because Ricky was actually a good guy. He actually just, he just didn't know what to do with his feelings. We can't approve of any of this action obviously, this activity is totally insane and it's not appropriate activity, but it's understandable. I mean Ricky Rodriguez is actually a pretty good example, I mean he is an extreme example, but he is a good example of if shit has happened to you in your past, in your childhood, go talk to somebody.

Go talk to somebody, go see a counselor or a therapist, try to find somebody to talk to about your problems because when this shit festers like this, of course the vast majority of people aren't going to go and murder, but it's going to cause problems. It's going to cause problems and eventually it's going to come out the other side. You're going to hurt somebody emotionally or physically because that's the idea, right, is that the pain comes down the track, that's what we've always seen, all of that pain comes down and it's got to go somewhere so you've got to heal it or you're going to put it on somebody.

Yeah, and this is right here, this is Ricky talking further about his motivations. It's worth a shot because if I am successful, I mean I can just see all those fucking thousands of family kids who have been abused, okay maybe there's not thousands, maybe some of the kids, especially the new generation, they don't know they're abused, I guess they certainly have been sexually abused, but you know what, that's not good enough because what about all the thousands of us who have been fucked over, literally, what about us, where's our apology, they're not even fucking sorry, they're not even fucking sorry, but can you imagine all of a sudden to hear one day, guess what, Mom and Peter are fucking dead, yeah, somebody

who went into their house or their fucking motorhome or whatever, they put gasoline on them, they lit a match and we had a fucking barbecue, wow, can you imagine, I can imagine putting myself in this place, how it would make me feel if I heard that somebody did that, it would be like, wow, there is justice in this world and an incredible weight would be lifted off my shoulders and I would be able to go on with my life, yeah, I had a lot of fucking problems, but I got stuck on this one thing, I got stuck because there is this need that I have, this need, it's not a want, it's a fucking need and I wish it wasn't, but it is, it's a need for revenge, it's a need for justice because I can't go on like

this. I mean going back to that idea of he got his personality or a lot of his verbiage through media, it does almost seem like the final scene, like a montage scene from a movie like It Follows for example, where the kids get the duct tape, they get the thing, it does sort of build up in that. The end of Rambo. Yeah, to some degree, it feels that way, right? His favorite movie was Boondock Saints, yeah, he was heavily, heavily inspired by Boondock

Saints, I think yeah, I forgot what the tattoo, one of the, you had a tattoo of one of the sayings in Boondock Saints, I forgot one of the fucking, that movie, that was like a high school movie, this is badass when you watch it afterwards, you're like, oh it's kind of dumb. This is Ricky talking about his mother in the life that he's leaving behind, because he's very cognizant of the fact that this is the end, that he's not going to get away with this. No.

It's almost like he doesn't want to get away with it. He doesn't want to, it's a suicide, the whole point is, all of this is suicide because in the end, because he's truly empathetic, he doesn't like the idea of killing other people, in the end it's like, he wants to kill himself, and he's just trying to maximize it, so it means something. She's going to pay dearly, one way or another, if I don't get to her, man if I don't get to her and life goes on, I'm going to keep hunting her in the next life, let me tell you, and I'm going to keep going until somebody gets her, I get her, justice will be done,

believe me, it's only a matter of time. Somehow, someway, it's going to happen, I'm going to try to do my part, we'll see what happens and go from there, this is my boss always says, we'll see what happens Rick and then we'll go from there, he's such a cool guy, he's like the best boss in the world I think, that's actually one of my main regrets here, if I were to do this, is to have to leave him, desert him, because I know he needs me. He has other guys working with him, thankfully, or it would make it so much harder for me to do this, but still.

I wrote him a long note, tried to explain what I could, what can you say, what can you say. Yeah, I mean that's an interesting level of empathy, concerned about his boss. No one's concerned about the boss. No, if I'm going to do something that I know will lead to my cease and to exist, the last person I'm concerned about is the boss, the last person, the Hollywood video, the boss actually took a huge chance on him, because Ricky, he had no experience whatsoever in anything really, and so this guy took him on as an electrician's apprentice, and actually

the boss, I mean Ricky was such a good employee that the boss tried giving him a raise, he was like, listen I want to give you a dollar an hour raise, and Ricky was like, no, he's like, I don't deserve it, don't give it to me, he's like, if you give me a raise I will quit. He's got to be caught, yeah, and the weird thing is about this entire video, he never mentions Alyxia, like he never mentions this woman that's been with him this entire time, I think the only reason, because he mentions his boss before he mentions his girlfriend, I think the reason why, I think that was the one thing that was just too painful for him

to talk about. They also recently probably got over a fight over his collection of Seinfeld DVDs that she didn't want to give back. That's very possible. And I feel like that if he had switched to watching more Seinfeld instead of like Commando, or something like that, maybe he'd be more of a mensch. I don't know, Seinfeld kind of drives you nuts. Honestly, I cannot watch more than three episodes of Seinfeld in a row until I get this, this

really depressed. Yeah, well it's also like curb your enthusiasm, anything that Larry David is involved in is very stressful to watch. I just feel like I'm driving too slow, you know, I'm just going 23 miles an hour and you've just got to get there, but you're still in a rush, it's very confusing and difficult. Well the entire video, like I said, it's an hour long. At the end of it, when Ricky is wrapping it up, because when I first started watching this video, you know, all I really knew about Ricky Rodriguez was the story of David Ito's

stuff. Like I saved watching this video until I knew about this guy's life. And when you see clips of it in documentaries and things like that, it really makes Ricky out to be this crazed psychotic killer that couldn't control himself. But really this moment right here, this moment is at the very end of the video. It made me weep with actual empathy for this guy. It's a moment of humanity. I just know this guy.

I know this guy exactly. I know Ricky. I know, I've met these guys before. He's really passionate and he's just also really fucked up. And doesn't know what to do with all of these feelings. To be as embarrassed, the story of David Ito, imagine how deeply, deeply embarrassing that is. Oh, it's so dehumanizing, emasculating.

I mean that's why you had to go so over the top with it to try to reclaim that stuff. That's also a possibility. Now let's listen. Yeah, well, I guess I'm going to go now, I wanted to see that movie White Noise just because I'm sort of interested in the afterlife and I know it's just a fucking movie but it looks cool. So I like movies. I think it's because I wasn't allowed to watch that many, yeah, sure, I watched some of Bergen

all of it, yeah, it's kind of cool to watch movies now. So I guess I'm going to go watch that one, drink some beers, be happy and work what you want, right? Yeah. It's so strange to just, like you guys just said, this is a friend. Yeah, dude, that's what I do to have a good time. Just drink some beers, watch a horror movie. Try to forget your problems, try to forget the fucked up things that are constantly in

your mind. We all grew up with that guy, you know, or, you know, a lot of our listeners, they are that guy. A lot of us are that guy, too. But you look at this stuff, it also reminded me of Richard Dorner writing how he was sad he was going to miss the next roast. Oh yeah, the Jeffrey Rostro, it is interesting that we all consume the same thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, all of us, you know, it's just all of us are just looking for something

to distract us from our bullshit. But some of us, you know, for Ricky Rodriguez, I mean, it's such an extreme example, it was just too much. I'm just glad he wasn't forcing himself to read the Gulf Breeze UFO incident like I am and having fucking alien nightmares all night. He can't sleep. So later that night, after he made the video and after he got drunk, he called up his friend Tiago in New Mexico and said he's going to send over a video that he had just made.

And when Tiago asked if Ricky had found Karen Zerbe, Ricky wasted in just like a happy, great wasted mood, just said, I found the solution. It's all in the video and didn't say anything other than that. So the next day, Susan Counten showed up at Ricky's apartment. We don't know exactly how it transpired. But after Ricky told Susan about the pain and suffering he'd endured at the hands of her and his mother, he picked up his knife and stabbed Counten five times before slitting her throat.

Ricky then got in his car and drove towards Phoenix. He called Alexia at 7.15 p.m. and told her killing somebody so much harder than I thought it would be. And he also said that as Counten was bleeding to death, she still didn't understand what she or Karen Zerbe or the children of God had ever done wrong. But you know what's interesting is I think in that moment too is that he has to then experience a moment of empathy where he looks and it's like you're just as brainwashed as everybody else.

Your life was actually stolen too. Your life was stolen and then again, someone gets the bill. The bill always goes down to the next generation. You got the fucking bill and now it's like you have to pay, the next person's got to pay the fucking bill. I mean at the end of the day, he wanted an apology, right? He wanted them to acknowledge what they've done to him. He wanted to take the power back.

It was too late for an apology. I think for him, he needed revenge, but I think, Henry, I think you make a great point there where he's such an empathetic person that he finally saw that they were also fucked up as well. They're all lost. All of them were lost and can she be blamed if she didn't believe she was doing anything wrong? If she was so brainwashed, I mean, is it almost an insanity defense?

No. At the same time, again, to be honest, I have very little, I mean, I do have empathy, but I have very little sympathy for people that are in cults. It's very difficult where it's just like, because group think is just always bad. As soon as you smell it, you got to get the fuck out of there. I mean, as soon as it starts coming into the molestation territory, it's much different for second generation. That's all they know.

That's a totally different story. But Susan Cowton was not second generation. She was one of David Berg's creatures. So Ricky arrived in Blythe, California at 10 p.m., checked into a holiday in Express, showered, drank a few beers, ate some beef jerky, got back into his car. He drove a few miles away to an industrial area and put his phone on his car's console. And there, Ricky Rodriguez not able to handle the act of murdering another person, no matter how evil they were, took his gun, pointed it at his head, and pulled the trigger.

He was found dead the next morning. To this day, we do not know the whereabouts of Karen Zerbe or Ricky's other nanny, Sarah. All we know is that Zerbe still runs the Children of God rebranded in 2004 as the Family International, an organization that still claims over 10,000 members worldwide in 80 countries across the world. It's the same shit as fucking Scientology, it's a big old goddamn cult and the reason why they rebranded it and they make it so they have a bunch of money and a bunch of members so it looks like everything's legit and they're supposed to be allowed to exist

and it's complete bullshit. Nails and when you turn on that fucking light, those cockroaches go fucking scattering everywhere. That's Karen Zerbe and fucking Sarah going off into hiding, knowing that that action that Ricky did, they're lucky he didn't turn into a gigantic fucking bloodbath because it could have done, it could have turned into five people seeing what he did and the way they then they portrayed it and framed it that he was just some fucking psychopath and being like, if they really saw what the message he was trying to do, they all would have been fucking dead.

The news me that framed it as him being like a crazy psychopath, it was a blip on the actual like national news, the way Karen Zerbe framed it, she opened up RickyRodriguez.com. She opened up a fucking website that has, in his memory, that has pictures of him as a kid, it has a whole chapter on suicide and what suicide means and how Ricky was still going to go to heaven even though he committed suicide and just painting Ricky as a lost soul. She took RickyRodriguez and made him what he hated most, I mean it was, I mean what, that's why Karen Zerbe, among so many other reasons, is just such an evil pox on humanity.

It's alright, she'll be, again, she's gonna be dead soon, yeah. Alright, well that's Children of God. Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas everybody. I want to give huge thanks to both Megan and April for their help on this one. They were invaluable on this episode and I need to thank Megan for spending the time that she did on the story of David Ito. I'm glad you watched that instead of us again.

Yes, and I do want to just really stress this point and clarify this point, although this cult is terrible and they've done some terrible things, let God make the final decision on these people's lives, in no way should you do anything violent or vigilante or anything. Well let the universe handle it. Focus on yourself, get yourself better, that's all you can do. The best you can always do is treat somebody else with empathy, treat somebody else with, like, connect to another human being, move forward, like do something positive for society, make something, do something, never, a destructive act hurts everything.

Because we all have experiences in life and many people have much more violent experiences than we had growing up that would make them relate to Ricky, but you still shouldn't go down that road and that was a mistake that Ricky made. It ain't cool. It's not cool. No, it just ends with extreme depression. All of these action stars aren't real. They don't do anything.

They don't live in trailers. They go back to their fancy trailers. Oh, yeah. Yeah. All right, everyone. Well, thanks so much for listening. What a... I guess this is...

No, we'll have one more before 2017. Yep. All right. So it's not going to do that. We're not going to do the Happy New Year thing, but it has been an interesting year so far. That's a good way to put it. Interesting.

I'm going to say interesting is the right word. Interesting always means bad. No, it means interesting. It says something like, what do you think of this, and you say, it's interesting. It's interesting. That means it's bad. Not all the time. No.

It's going to be interesting. Yeah. I think interesting can be good, but... No. It's better than uninteresting. It's better than uninteresting. I mean, that's nice. It's the Chinese curse.

May you live an interesting time. No. All right, everyone. Yeah. I mean, it's definitely a year that many books are going to be written about, and usually they don't. That's why they're like, try to find a book about like 1997. Aw, man.

Smash mouth. That's the most horrific thing of all time. It's not like, you know, like Kosovo and all of that. Yeah, there's going to be books written about that, but yeah, here in America, no books are written about 1997. All right, everyone. Thanks so much for listening, and let's see, Marcus, what do you want to say? I want to say that if you go to CaveCompanyRadioMerch.com, we've got a new t-shirt.

If you love the hail yourself design, eight white t-shirts, we have a black on white design right now. I like to have the flip. I like having the white t-shirt because I have so many black t-shirts. I cannot have a white t-shirt because it's white for seven seconds before I immediately spit on it or something happens before you spit on it. I just don't know what it is. What colors are spit?

I start chewing. I put a white shirt on. I start chewing tobacco and just spit on it. I don't know what happens. That's noose? Yeah. I don't know what happened. But we've got, yeah, we've got the classic logo shirt.

We've got the white version and the black version of the hail yourself shirt. That's at CaveCompanyRadioMerch.com. We've got an Abe Lincoln's top hat shirt in production that's about to be released, I think here in a couple of weeks. We've got a lot of cool shit coming down the pipeline. If you want to come and see us live, we're coming to Seattle here tomorrow. It'll be, I think that, yeah, it's sold out, so we'll see everybody. I don't know what to do with them Los Angeles Grammar days.

Is Frasier Seattle? Yeah. Yeah, totally. Yeah. We're also going to be in Portland on December 17th. The late show is sold out. The early show is almost sold out. It is going to sell out, so be sure to get your tickets soon.

All of these tickets are available on CaveCompanyRadio.com slash live. In Boston, our late show is sold out too, but early show tickets are on sale. It's also going to sold out Kansas City. We can't wait to come. That is sold out Chicago. We sold out the late show, but there's an early show added. In San Francisco, we're going to be live at the independent on March 25th. That is also sold out as well.

Thank you guys. I cannot believe how many of you guys want to come and see us live. It is really overwhelming. We want to thank you guys so fucking much. Absolutely. Even if it's sold out, come and we'll, you know, we go out afterwards and we have a nice time. We'll make it happen.

We'll see you and say hello. What else is good about San Francisco besides the rice? Oh, I had a really good burrito. The Chinese food is amazing in San Francisco. We're going to get it. There's a burrito stand. It's one of my favorite fucking places in the world. I have, I have, so I'm going there.

I want to go to Alcatraz again. I love Alcatraz. I'm not going to Alcatraz. It's going to be very cold. Yeah. You know that. Alcatraz is dangerous. Alcatraz, you can't get out.

I'm going to go to the Starbucks on Hayton Ashbury to get that traditional experience. Oh wow. I want that nice hippy feel. I made a clay model of Alcatraz when I was like nine. It was awesome. Marcus, this shows signs of he's, he's creative, he's going to have an interesting life. He loves jails. Yes.

Why not? So I guess follow us. Follow me on Twitter at Henry loves you at Dr. Fantasi on Instagram and follow all last podcast and left at LP on the left. Yep. I'm at Ben Kissell on Facebook. Wow. Do we ever plug Facebook?

No. I'm on Facebook. No. Okay. I'm Ben Kissell on Twitter. Ben Kissell on Instagram. I was thumbing through the other day. There's a bunch of videos on there now too.

It's more than pictures. This isn't that fun. Marcus Parks is Marcus Parks for everything. Oh yeah. I don't know. Thanks so much for supporting all the shows here on CCR. We are absolutely crushing it as a networking. Congratulations to Marcus Parks for putting everything together and doing such a great

job. Abling is top half for everything political. Henry, you've got to come on and be a guest soon. We had Anthony Taminick on last episode, got into some chaos magic stuff and we want to hear yourself in that. Well, you know I got some hot takes. It's hot take. Henry Zabrowski will be a period at some point on top at roundtable of gentlemen.

H7, Sex and Other Human Activities, Wizard and the Bruiser is going well. It is. Holden's not horrible. And I think that's a good thing. I think that's a good song. He's great. Everyone says you're too mean to Holden. He's very good.

And I also don't really have time to do the Lucky Bone Show anymore, but what I'm going to start doing is I'm just going to start making weekly playlists over on my Spotify. Those will be under Lucky Bone Show. I'll send stuff out if you follow me and subscribe, but yeah, just go follow me on Spotify. I got a shitload of stuff. Yeah, I do almost yet. And also check out our live streams at 7.30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on AdultsWim.com

slash videos slash streams. But there's nothing standard about it. That's kind of Eastern Standard Time. That is funny. I mean Eastern Unstandard Time. Well, Hail Satan. Hail yourselves. Hail Geen.

Hail me. But I don't want you to be doing anything weird in the name of me unless you're just jerking off or smoking weed. Neither of those things are too weird. That's great. Those are perfectly normal. Finally, here is the new track from the Cowman Special Thanks to Michael Isabella, aka Izzy, for producing this track and recording it for us.

This is I'm Not Coming Home for Christmas this year. It is available at thecowman.bandcamp.com on iTunes, on YouTube, and soon to be on Spotify. So here it is. Everyone enjoy it. And that's the closest we'll ever come to celebrating Christmas. That's it. Merry Christmas. Happy holidays.

Happy holidays. Happy holidays. I'd love to hear your celebration. I'm doing the Saturnalia. All right. My goos to legends. The presents are wrapped, they're ready to ship, this pile is all gone. I've had a little asset.

Ever since singing those Christmas blues, I'm all tangled up, while I'm licking off you. All right, I want to hear your name. I want my Christmas this year We'll see each other again in case of the end Oh, I'm not coming home My Christmas this year No, I don't want it at all

Oh Oh, I want my Christmas this year We'll see each other again in case of the end Oh, I'm not coming home My Christmas this year Christmas is serious Christmas is over Make your case a deal

Oh, I'm not coming home From Christmas this year No, I can't Home, home, home Where I spend the day Home, home, home I never see you again Home, home

The time of year's playing I'll never be there Home, home From Christmas this year Christmas this year Make your case a deal Oh, I'm not coming home From Christmas this year

No, I'm not coming home No, I'm not coming home No, I'm not coming home I'm not coming home No, I'm not coming home No, I'm not coming home No, I'm not coming home No, I'm not coming home

Merry Christmas everybody What is this? I'm writing to everything out Look at that That's the loudest person on my, he's ever done That's a great opportunity