Early one Sunday morning in January, an employee of the Palo Verde Irrigation District in Blythe arrived at his office building to a gruesome sight: a bloody body behind the wheel of a Chevy Cavalier parked in the driveway.
The driver, a young man, had a gunshot wound to his head. A Glock .40-caliber pistol lay at his side.
To the police detective who responded, it looked like a straightforward suicide.
Then a cellphone rang on the passenger seat.
On the line was the dead man's wife.
She said her husband had called the night before to say he'd committed a murder.
She directed police to an apartment more than 200 miles away in Tucson, Ariz., where they found the body of a middle-aged woman. Her throat was slashed. She had half a dozen stab wounds.
Soon, authorities released a bare-bones story: Before driving across the desert and killing himself, Ricky Rodriguez, 29, had killed Angela Smith, 51. The two had known each other. Smith may have helped to raise Rodriguez.
The names didn't mean much to most people. But the news was cataclysmic within the secretive religious society to which both had once belonged.
For more than three decades, the Children of God, now called The Family, had been a world unto itself. In that world, Rodriguez had been royalty.
He was the son of the group's self-proclaimed prophet and prophetess, who led a fervent flock scattered in communes around the globe. When he was 2, they declared him a prophet too, announcing to followers that the boy would one day "deliver them out of great sorrow and bondage."
That was not to be.
Childhood Indoctrination
More than four years before his death, Rodriguez left the group's tight confines, venturing out into the world with little knowledge of how it worked. Almost all he'd learned in life had come from one man, David Berg, who founded the group and kept its members isolated, indoctrinated with his views.
Born in 1919 in Oakland to evangelist parents, Berg had bounced around before finding his calling. He briefly ran an Arizona church, taught school and promoted "Church in the Home," the show of the late Los Angeles radio and TV evangelist Fred Jordan.
He was nearly 50 when he landed in Huntington Beach and began ministering to hippies, with help from his own teenage children.
