Facing long-buried memories of a terrible crime

Standing outside the small Boyes Hot Springs duplex after 20 years, I still could clearly picture the three tricycles parked outside the front door, left by the three little sisters who lived there.

It was a gray Friday morning on April 14, 1989, and I had just come from a murder scene up the road in Glen Ellen. Now, this was another. The young mother inside had been shot to death and the tricycle riders were missing.

Only one other reporter was there. The news -- pre-Internet -- hadn't yet spread. No one could know then how the story would unfold with each gruesome scene and how the loathing toward winery worker Ramon Salcido after his seven murders and two attempted murders would forever mark Sonoma County's residents and its criminal history.

A few hours later, a crush of reporters from around the Bay Area gathered at the next murder scene. This one was at a small subdivision home in Cotati where three people were found butchered. By the next day, when Salcido's own little girls were found at a dump site between Petaluma and Sonoma, the story was international and the world's press descended on Sonoma County.

The publication of a book last week by Salcido's daughter, Carmina, who somehow survived after he slit her throat at age 2 (his two other daughters died), and the filming and research for last Friday's "20/20" ABC News documentary, brought me back to Baines Avenue in Boyes Hot Springs.

The chilling crimes had occurred in The Press Democrat's backyard. It was our story and a large team of reporters and editors worked long, intense days covering every angle.

But as the paper's police reporter at the time, I was the one who went to Friday's three homicide scenes, and then on Saturday to the dump where Salcido had left his three little girls.

Twenty years later, I was back.

I was nervous. After all my years behind the notebook, stepping out in front of a television camera and being the one answering questions was not in my comfort zone.

I also was nervous because it meant confronting those awful memories of how all those people, mostly children, had died. I've done a pretty good job of emotionally burying those, along with the details of many other homicides I'd covered over the years, and I don't pull them out for review very often.

The TV crew wanted to follow the path I'd taken that day, so we met at the former Grand Cru Winery entrance in Glen Ellen, behind Dunbar Elementary School. I worked with Harry Phillips, a veteran reporter and ABC News producer.

On that morning 20 years ago, I'd been at a tile store in Santa Rosa with my fiance, Rick Thomas, trying to make a decision on color. When the police scanner I always kept on in my purse began squawking, I heard there'd been a 187, police code for a homicide. I left Rick with the tiles.

At Grand Cru, I found one detective guarding the body of assistant winemaker Tracy Toovey, who at age 35 had been shot to death while sitting in his car after pulling over on the drive to the winery.

With the TV crew, we left Glen Ellen for Boyes Hot Springs, where Salcido had killed his wife, Angela, and the memory of the tricycles burned. And then on to a subdivision of small, neat homes in Cotati, all looking similar for blocks around. Now, the Lakewood Drive home appeared so benign, with flowers out front and a swing on the lawn.

But it was here, in 1989, that the full horror of the story began to be revealed. Salcido's mother-in-law, Marian "Louise" Richards, 47, and her daughters Ruth, 12, and Maria, 8, lay slaughtered on the floor.

The heaviness of the memories set in. As a cop reporter, I remember thinking it was horrible, but such a big story. Now, 20 years older and with a 12-year-old daughter of my own, it seemed too terrible to contemplate.

The last stop in the filming for me was the dump. On that hot Saturday afternoon 20 years ago, a large group of reporters was kept behind police tape at the top of the dump's entrance, far from the grassy field where the girls were found. That day's reporting gave our readers an extreme mixture of shock that he could have cut his own daughters' throats and joy that one had survived.

But there was much about the murders the public or the press didn't see or know, details too graphic to divulge. Efforts by The Press Democrat and "20/20" to gain access to Salcido trial archives revealed hundreds of pieces of evidence, most of it only seen by the jury, detectives and attorneys.

In a windowless, empty office at the Sonoma County Courthouse, I looked at many of those items along with photographer Kent Porter and reporter Paul Payne, including the weapons Ramon Salcido used that day and his blood-soaked blue jeans.

But it was the crime scene photos that haunt the most, and they've now been added to memories of murders past.

In one aerial shot of the dump, a field and the tiny bodies of two little girls lie far below, looking like large white dolls in the green grass.

The horror of the shot is lessened, I tell myself, because the third girl who might have been with them in that photo had already been whisked away to safety.

She, too, has added to the retelling of a story that no one who was there two decades ago can ever forget.Randi Rossmann has been a Press Democrat reporter for 28 years.