BY THE time Ricky Rodriguez telephoned his wife, Elixcia, on a cold Arizona evening last month, there was no doubt in his mind that he was going to kill himself. The only question was whether he would die alone.

As he drank warm beer and drove along dusty Highway 10 to California, Rodriguez was thinking of the woman he had just stabbed to death in his apartment. And now he was on the phone, asking his beloved Elixcia to commit suicide with him. “I don’t want to be by myself,” he said. “Please come die with me.”

The night before, shaven-headed Rodriguez had sat in front of a video camera and displayed the weapons he would use to take out the people he considered to be his enemies. He loaded bullets into an automatic pistol. He demonstrated the sharpness of his US Marines combat knife. And for torture, for extracting information about those he wanted to kill, he held up an electric drill, a soldering iron and a 775,000-volt stun gun.

Looking into the camera, he says: “My goal is to bring down my own mother . . . and then all I need is one bullet for myself.”

Fast forward three weeks and you might think there would be universal delight in the US that Rodriguez had, indeed, used that bullet to blow out his brains. But you would be wrong. His actions have been pored over with incredulity, yes. But there is sympathy, too. And in some — perhaps misguided — circles, he is being hailed as a hero for reopening a wound that religious America thought had conveniently healed long ago: the alleged abuse of potentially hundreds of children by The Family, a radical “free love” church founded in the 1960s.

To watch his video is to visit the soul of a tortured young man. For Rodriguez was the heir apparent to The Family. His adoptive father, David Berg, was its founder. His mother, Karen Zerby, is its leader. And Angela Smith, the woman he lured to her death, is among a number of “nannies” accused of sexually abusing him as he grew up — abuse that was, literally, chronicled religiously. In short, he was the reluctant Messiah.

Rodriguez, who would have been 30 last week, was one of dozens of lapsed members of the church, formerly known as The Children of God, who have claimed that they were sexually abused by adults and “shared” sexually with other children in the movement over several decades. Now many of these apparent victims, including some in the UK, say that they owe a debt of gratitude to Rodriguez. For years, they say, they suffered in silence but now all America is talking about them.

The Children of God was founded almost 40 years ago in California. Berg, born in 1919, was a radical thinker who believed that he could spread the Gospel by embracing the Zeitgeist of the 1960s hippy counterculture. The result was a hybrid mix of free love and happy-clappy evangelism that some directionless young people found irresistible. Within ten years his Christian ministry had attracted thousands of followers worldwide. By the late 1970s, by then called The Family, the organisation had set up more than 150 communes and missions from Glasgow to Goa. Today there are about 12,000 members living in more than 100 countries.

Always on the move, Berg, who had renamed himself Moses, ministered to his flock through an endless series of “Mo Letters” that governed every aspect of life within The Family. In particular, they espoused sex, and lots of it — giving and sharing yourself with others as a means of glorifying Christ. That message may have been radical for a church, but had the sex remained between consenting adults, The Family might have been seen as merely eccentric. But in the early days, Berg advocated paedophilia and incest.

On May 20, 1980, in a Mo Letter entitled “The Devil Hates Sex But God Loves It!” he wrote: “The only way to get free of [the Devil] . . . is to get rid of his lies and his anti-sex propaganda, and believe the Lord and his Word and his Creation and God’s love and His freedom — that there is nothing in the world at all wrong with sex as long as it’s practised in love, whatever it is or whoever it’s with, no matter who or what age or what relative or what manner . . . and you don't hardly dare even say these words in private. “When If the law ever got a hold of this, they would try to string me up! They would probably lynch me before I got to the jail! When Paul said ‘All things are lawful unto me, but all things are not expedient’ (II Corinthians vi, 12) he was as good as saying, ‘I can indulge in any kind of sex I want to, but I’ve got to watch out for the system because it’s against the law!’ We are free in privacy, and that’s about all, and we mightn’t be free if they discovered what we do in private! . . . there are no relationship restrictions or age limitations in His law of love . . . If you hate sex you are one of the Devil’s crowd! If you think it’s evil, then God and love are evil, for He created it! Come on, let’s love and enjoy it like God does!”

Such views, and Berg’s invention of “flirty fishing”, whereby young women followers were encouraged to use sex to recruit new members, rang alarm bells. Over the years, law enforcement authorities in Australia, France, Spain and Argentina have seized children from the cult, concerned that they were at risk of abuse. No abuse was proved and there were no prosecutions (in fact, some raids were criticised by judges). Yet today, both The Family and former members agree that instances of abuse did happen in the 1970s and early 1980s.

The church — or cult, depending on your view — says that in 1986 it brought in strict guidelines banning sex with children. But what about those for whom this was too late? Ricky Rodriguez said that his pain was unbearable. As Berg’s son he had been groomed as a future leader of the church, and that weighed heavily on his mind.

“He talked about suicide all the time,” says Elixcia Munumel, his 25-year-old estranged wife. We meet at a secret location in California two weeks after Rodriguez’s death. Elixcia, also a former member of The Family, says that she, too, was sexually abused, but declines to go into detail. She says that she and Rodriguez separated some months ago but were in contact every day until his death. When police found his body in a parked car on January 10, they pressed the redial button on his mobile phone. Elixcia answered.