Predator or Prey?

More than he blames his aunt, though, Eddie blames the Riverside D.A. After they turned off the tape recorder during the February interview, he says, the D.A.’s investigators told him that unless he testified that Rodriguez was guilty, they would ask his San Bernardino parole officer to declare him in violation if he left the county to stay with his father. He refused, and sure enough, he says, his P.O. told him he could not return to Perris. (Neither Carlos Monagas nor a spokesperson for the Riverside District Attorney’s Office responded to repeated calls for comment on this allegation.) But more than that, he says, “Every day I have to look at the fact that my dad did time, James did time, my uncle died with this on his jacket. I have to live with that, and it has fucked with me mentally.”

Henry shakes his head. “We don’t blame you.”

Eddie stares at the carpet and smokes. “I blame myself.”

“We got a good relationship now,” Henry says. Things are always rocky between him and Nancy, who flits about the compound like a ghost, but he speaks with all four of his children, and Randy has been coming out for weekends. “We just want to be a family.” Henry doesn’t know if he can afford to seek to get his conviction expunged, but “It’d be nice to be cleared of it, because I know in my heart and in my mind that I never did do nothing to my kids. That would be a blessing, to go to my grave knowing that things was finally right in life.”

Asked if he has seen Rodriguez since his release from Atascadero, Eddie says Rodriguez came out to Perris once on a Saturday. “I couldn’t even fucking look at him,” he says, pulling off his glasses and wiping away tears with a tattooed wrist, “because the fact is, I feel bad. I feel real bad.”

CertaintiesCarlos Monagas is not budging. Monagas is in his mid-30s but looks younger. He came to the Rodriguez case in 2002, when Rodriguez was up for his last recommitment hearing. Sitting behind a wide, U-shaped desk in his office across the street from the Riverside courthouse in which Eddie and Randy testified almost 20 years ago, Monagas says he does not believe Eddie’s recantation. “I would make an analogy to a domestic-violence case,” he says, “where the police get a 911 call [and they] rush to the scene and there’s the defendant beating on the wife, and you fast-forward to trial a year later and what is she saying? ‘I made that up. I fell down the stairs.’”

As for Rodriguez, he says, “It’s easy 18 years later to claim that you didn’t do things when nobody is likely to contradict you, but in the 1980s, when everything was on the line and when it counted most, instead of demanding his right to a jury trial and confronting the evidence, Mr. Rodriguez instead pled guilty and admitted what he had done. He pled guilty twice, in two separate cases. Not only him, but all his co-defendants pled guilty and admitted responsibility.”

When he first heard the tape of Eddie’s disavowals, Monagas says, he went back to the original transcripts and reviewed the evidence against Rodriguez. He spoke with one of the three original prosecutors and was convinced beyond any reasonable doubt that James Rodriguez “molested those boys. He’s a child molester.”

His decision not to petition for Rodriguez’s recommitment to Atascadero, Monagas says, had nothing to do with Eddie’s recantation. “There just wasn’t sufficient evidence to proceed to trial”: Four of the five doctors who evaluated Rodriguez were ready to testify that he was not likely to offend again and hence no longer fit the criteria to be classified a sexually violent predator. “I pray every day,” Monagas says, “that they’re correct.”

Loose Ends

If anything, James Rodriguez says, “I’m angry at the system for not investigating this further. If I had the money, I probably would’ve been able to beat this. But I never had money.” He still nurses some rage at David Gunn, who originally prosecuted the case against him, “just because he was so arrogant. He didn’t want to hear nothing.” Gunn has long since left the D.A.’s Office to work as a private defense attorney. When Rodriguez was in court in Riverside for his SVP hearings, he says, “Some days he’d stand right next to me and come and talk to his client. The only thing that would come to my mind was Cape Fear,” he laughs. “I used to think, ‘Man, if I wasn’t chained up. I’d just love to jump on him.’ But what was that going to solve?”

Contacted in his office by phone, Gunn says he has a “pretty hazy” recollection of the case against Henry, but “the name Rodriguez doesn’t ring a bell.” Gunn did not respond to several other requests to further discuss the case. Neither of the two other main prosecutors in the case — Paul Gretch, also now a private defense attorney, and Vilia Sherman, now a judge on the Riverside bench — was willing to comment for this story.