Tenerife sex cult messiah turns killer

from moon beam - Tuesday, February 15, 2005
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by Jacqui Yuile-Flight

The recent suicide of a former religious cult member in a Californian border town has sent shock waves throughout Tenerife because victim Ricky Rodriguez was born here in the south of the Island back in the mid 1970s.

It was 1975 when an evangelical group accompanied their leader to Tenerife. They were called the Children of God. Their leader, Moses Berg or Moses David, instructed his followers in a controversial method of evangelising that he called ‘flirty fishing.’

Thus his wife, Maria, began using sex to evangelise. She met a waiter in a well-known hotel here in the south, fell pregnant and Ricky was born.

Ricky grew up being hailed as a messiah. He was raised amid a bizarre blend of free love and apocalyptic Christianity. Founder Berg prophesied that one day Rodriguez would lead it.

Yet now he is dead. Rodriguez brutally murdered a cult member, and then shot himself in the head on a lonely stretch of desert road in Arizona. The deaths have highlighted the dark history of the cult, which has branches in Britain and across the world.

The cult was one of the strangest to emerge from the 1960s. Its founder and leader was a former preacher who had been sexually abused as a child. He started the sect with a potent blend of free love and prophecies of the end of the world.

Women members became ‘hookers for Jesus’ to raise money and went ‘flirty fishing’ to draw in potential converts by having sex with them.



The group attracted a few celebrities, notably the parents of the late actor River Phoenix and former Fleetwood Mac guitarist Jeremy Spencer. However, underage sex, incest and paedophilia occurred, and were even encouraged, by the cult leadership and their literature.

This latest scandal to hit has revealed graphic allegations of sexual abuse, surreal beliefs and countless shattered lives and it is also a tale of 29-year-old Rodriguez’s doomed struggle to come to terms with his past after leaving the cult and the terrible revenge he plotted against members he claimed had sexually abused him as a child.

Gradually a picture of his last days is being pieced together. Friends of Rodriguez said he had struggled to cope with entering the world outside after his exit from the Children of God in 2000. For Sarah Martin, another former member, the first sign something had finally gone dreadfully wrong was when Rodriguez phoned her in the middle of the night just before the murder.

“He just said he had been up late doing a lot of thinking,” Martin said. Rodriguez told her he had sent her a video. Martin was pleased, as she had often urged him to record his experiences of abuse. But by the time it arrived in the post Rodriguez was already dead.

Martin watched the tape in horror to see the usually well-mannered Rodriguez swearing frequently as he displays an array of guns.

“I was shocked. When I lived with him this man never swore. He was a very gentle person, very caring,” Martin said.

Exactly what happened is not clear. What is known is that Rodriguez met cult member Angela Smith, his former nanny, whom he had accused of sexually assaulting him as a child. Smith, 51, was later found dead with her throat cut in Rodriguez’s apartment in the city of Tucson, Arizona.

Rodriguez then drove his Chevrolet Cavalier into the desert, rang his former wife to confess to the killing and fired a bullet into his own brain.

When Berg married Rodriguez’s mother the young child, hailed as ‘The Prince,’ found himself proclaimed as the future leader of the cult. Dubbed ‘Davidito,’ as a result of his half-Canarian roots, he was held up as an icon of the group.

However, the group was eventually hit by a series of scandals and underwent a radical image change. It apologised for any former abuse in 1994 and abandoned many of its previous sexual tenets, especially those involving children. It renamed itself The Family International, and now has about 4,000 adult and 4,000 child members, spread over about 100 countries.

When Berg died in 1994, Mama Maria was elevated to leader. Her whereabouts is now kept a close secret. Rodriguez was heir apparent, but he shocked the cult by leaving. “Davidito was central to our lives,” said former member Jonathan Thompson “He was a Christ-like figure.”

Rodriguez befriended a network of disillusioned former members. Many, like him, saddled with the legacy of sexual abuse, were not equipped for a world outside the cult. They had little education and few relatives or friends.

Many unhappy former followers of the Children of God have committed suicide.

Eventually Rodriguez’s obsession with tracking down Mama Maria began to take over his life. He began posting threats on Internet websites set up by former members of the cult.

“Something has to be done about these child molesters,” he once wrote.

The cult’s spokeswoman, Claire Borowik, said claims of sexual abuse by Rodriguez and other former members had been exaggerated, and the murder of Smith was being used to unfairly tarnish the organisation. “This has been the pattern in the past,” Borowik said.

She denied that Smith had abused Rodriguez. “The blatant lack of respect for the loss of Angela’s life is appalling. One would think she had committed the crime rather then been the victim.”

Internal memos sent by Mama Maria after her son’s death have urged members not to believe what they read about it in the press. They say bitter ex-followers are waging a campaign against the cult.

But the now former members hope something will be done to reinvestigate their claims. It will not be easy. Many of the alleged incidents happened abroad many years ago and involved cult members who were not using their real names.

“An entire generation of adults who left the family have been trying to get justice for years, but they have been frustrated in their efforts,” said Dr Stephen Kent, an expert on the cult, at the University of Alberta in Canada.

Former members now hope the deaths of Rodriguez and Smith will finally lead to a full investigation of the cult’s activities in the 1970s and 1980s.

“This is a tremendous tragedy for Ricky and Angela,” said ex-member Daniel Roselle. “But we need justice now. Something good has to come out of all this.”

The group survived child abuse investigations here in Spain, in the 1990s, and while some members were briefly jailed, there were no convictions of top leaders.