Predator or Prey?

Rodriguez pulls an assignment from a file folder, an “events chain” he had to write, analyzing the events leading up to attacking Randy. All of it is true, he says — getting high with Henry, sleeping with Nancy, getting dumped by his girlfriend and losing his job — all of it, right up to the point where he walks in on Henry in bed with the boy and decides to join in.

The Atascadero staff was impressed with Rodriguez’s sudden eagerness to atone. He was outspoken in group therapy. He fasted for a week for each of his victims. He took a phallometric assessment — a “peter meter,” as patients call the procedure — in which sexual arousal is measured physically while patients are shown photos of children and of violent sex. Rodriguez showed no response at all to images of boys or of rape scenarios, but he was aroused by one photo of what he says was a particularly buxom 17-year-old girl. When doctors asked him about it, he told them, “You guys gotta go look at the picture. That girl did not look like 17.” They reviewed the photo and agreed. Rodriguez passed, convincing his doctors, as he puts it, that “Kids aren’t my bag . . . My sexual preference is chunky white women, or Mexican or Indian. That’s always been my preference.”

None of this was easy. “Emotionally,” Thompson says, “he appeared genuine.” Beginning in November of 2002, Rodriguez fell into a deep depression and began isolating himself in his room. “He was in tears all the time,” Thompson said. To his doctors, Rodriguez’s malaise was evidence of the sincerity of his repentance. “It seemed he was experiencing victim empathy and really taking responsibility. It impressed me, and the staff.”

It wasn’t remorse, Rodriguez says, but the weight of all he had to listen to in group sessions day after day — “the ugliest shit a guy has ever heard” — and, worse still, of all he had to say. “Some of the stuff I had to say was just So. Fucked. Up,” he says, his eyes widening in awe. “I was supposed to be sodomizing them. We were supposed to be gang-raping them. I mean, I was supposed to be holding them down.” After a long pause, Rodriguez shakes his head. “I’ll tell you,” he says, his voice low, “at one point I started thinking, ‘Maybe I did do this.’”

Late last year, Thompson determined that Rodriguez had progressed sufficiently that, though he had not completed even the second phase of Atascadero’s four-phase inpatient treatment plan, there was no longer any reason to keep him locked up. She drove down to San Diego County and learned that his tribe was willing to take him in and could offer him outpatient treatment in a community setting that rivaled anything the state had to offer. She wrote to the district attorney, asking him not to press for recommitment in 2004. Of the approximately 270 men she had treated at ASH, she wrote, “I have never before recommended the unconditional release of a single patient.”

On the afternoon of May 29, coincidentally Thompson’s next to last day at Atascadero (she had earlier resigned, she says, for a combination of personal reasons, burnout and disgust with the hypocrisy of the state mental-health bureaucracy), she opened an e-mail from Sylvia Graber, James Rodriguez’s public defender. The D.A. had sent investigators out to talk to Randy and Eddie, and Graber had just listened to the tapes of the interviews. Randy’s statements were ambiguous, Graber wrote, but Eddie’s were not: “He says that the molests never happened.”

“I flipped out,” Thompson says. “I just flipped my lid. I was angry that he had duped me.” She called Rodriguez into her office. “He said, ‘What else could I do?’ And he was right — what else could he do?” She listened to the tapes of Eddie’s and Randy’s interviews with the D.A. and reviewed all the old transcripts. She reconsidered everything Rodriguez had said and done since 1998. “That’s when it all made sense.”

Confessions, Part II

Graber was right — the taped interview with Randy is ambiguous, but not when it comes to James Rodriguez. An investigator for the Riverside D.A.’s Office named Mary Ortiz spoke with Randy in February at the adult group home in which he was then residing. Randy was scared from the start. When Ortiz asked if he remembered the house on Pepper Court, Randy answered in a frightened, childish voice, “It’s not a good thing to say. It’s making me more scared inside that I’m have that happen again.” He told her that his father had abused him a lot, whipping him with a belt, scarring his head with the buckle. “He hurt me,” Randy said. “He makes me do a lot of things that I can’t say.”

Ortiz asked if he was scared “because of the things James did to you.” Randy answered, “Who’s James? I don’t know James.”

Later, he said that his father “makes me do a lot of stuff on his body.” He also said that he missed his father, and forgave him, and that he badly missed Eddie, whom he had not seen for years. The only person he did not miss was his aunt Naoma. “I don’t want to talk about her,” he said. “I don’t like her.”