Predator or Prey?

Drugs were easy to get at ASH, and Rodriguez kept using until April of 1999, when his niece refused to send cash to a drug connection outside the hospital (the usual method for buying inside). At first he was furious, he says. “It took a few days, and the light finally went on: Is this going to be my life? I’m always going to be this ugly person?” He enrolled in the hospital’s substance-abuse program, asking to be tested at random intervals to keep him honest. Hospital staff noticed immediate and dramatic improvements. “Mr. Rodriguez seems to be less disrespectful of staff than he was initially and appears to be making an effort to follow unit procedures,” wrote one doctor in the fall of 1999.

The change was short-lived. In the first six months of 2000, Rodriguez was written up repeatedly by Atascadero staff for what one doctor called “significant behavior problems.” Despite his pledge to sobriety, Rodriguez had “a severe anger problem,” Thompson wrote in June of 2000. “He consistently interferes with staff during interventions with other patients . . . He goads other patients to aggravate them during crises . . . He does not want help. He is a difficult patient.” That month, at the first of Rodriguez’s biennial recommitment hearings, Thompson explained Rodriguez’s anger to the court. “He is experiencing life sober,” she said, “and he just can’t cope.”

But something else was going on during those months, something so tentative and incomplete that Rodriguez’s psychologists did not at the time find it impressive, and certainly didn’t see it as a significant factor in explaining the precipitous changes in his behavior. He had dropped his avowals of innocence. “Nobody wanted to hear me,” Rodriguez says, so “I had to tell them what they needed to hear.”

A hospital document dated December 1999, just before his conduct began to shift for the worse, noted a “dramatic change” in Rodriguez’s “ability to accept responsibility for his sex offending.” Six months later, hospital records reported that Rodriguez “accepts partial responsibility for his past illicit sexual behavior. [He] acknowledges that his behaviors were somehow harmful to the victims, but his understanding is superficial and vague.” One of his evaluators wrote that Rodriguez “could give very little in the way of details about the events of the molestations . . . He insisted that he could not recall any specific events, although he admitted to being involved.”

Despite this early attempt at confession, Rodriguez lost his recommitment hearing in 2000. When he got back to the hospital, he says, “I thought I was through.” He relapsed once by smoking a single joint, then threw himself back into AA meetings. He enrolled in the hospital’s anger-management class and, though he still refused to take part in the sex-offender treatment program, began individual therapy. He continued to tell his doctors he was repentant, but he couldn’t quite convince them — or, apparently, himself. “He is still having difficulty accepting some of his crimes — almost a disbelief that he could do some of the things he did,” noted one doctor in early 2002. Three months later, an intern noted, he “continues to be on defense about looking deeper into his crimes.”

At the same time, Rodriguez says, he had begun sitting down with a pedophile in his unit, milking him for information and advice about what to tell the court, preparing for his next recommitment hearing, scheduled for April 2002. He was not yet a good enough student. His testimony that April was bizarre and contradictory. Rodriguez could not bring himself to admit that he was attracted to children, but at the same time promised to avoid putting himself in “a high-risk situation” such as “maybe having magazines of kids or kids’ programs on the TV or being around a school or arcade.” He confessed to having joined Henry in sodomizing Randy, but would only say that he felt “horror, straight sickness” and, initially at least, stubbornly denied having been aroused at the time, or having enjoyed himself at all. He would not describe the act, because, he said, “It’s disgusting.” The best explanation he could offer for his actions was, “I got caught up in the situation.”

Rodriguez’s performance was so flawed that prosecutor Carlos Monagas accused him of “parroting the words of the doctor.” (Monagas now points to that 2002 hearing as one of the main pieces of evidence pointing to Rodriguez’s guilt: Confessing in court that day was, Monagas says, “the worst thing that he could have done, but it was the truth. The truth has a way of slipping out in court.” In fact, though, nothing slipped out — Rodriguez had been telling that particular “truth” to his doctors for over two years.) The jury didn’t buy it either, and handed Rodriguez another two-year stint at ASH.

When he got back to the hospital, Rodriguez says, “I was defeated.” He surrendered his last bit of resistance and entered the treatment program. “It was the only way.”

Confessions, Part I

Sitting in the cramped kitchen of his mobile home, Rodriguez pulls paper after paper from a tower of files that dwarfs the small foldout table: evaluations, polygraph results, physicians’ notes, group-therapy “homework” assignments. Once in treatment at ASH, he says, he began to study the old police reports and court transcripts. He grilled the pedophile in his unit. “He helped me do the homework,” Rodriguez says. “He’d basically tell me what to say and what not to say.”