Murder Suspect Salcido Is Arrested in Mexico : Immediately ‘Began to Confess What He Had Done in California,’ Police Spokesman Says

Ramon Salcido, the California winery worker wanted in last week’s slayings of six family members and his supervisor, was arrested peacefully at a roadblock near his hometown in northern Mexico and quickly confessed, a spokesman for the Mexican attorney general’s office said Wednesday.

Salcido, 28, was taken into custody late Tuesday night near Guasave by Federal Judicial Police “by chance . . . in a police anti-narcotics operation,” said the spokesman, Fernando Arias.

‘Extremely Nervous’

“He arrived without identification and he became extremely nervous,” Arias said. “When they took him out of the vehicle to interrogate him, he began to confess what he had done in California.”

Salcido offered no resistance, Arias said.

A different version of the arrest was given Wednesday afternoon by Sonoma County Sheriff Richard Michaelsen and FBI agents. They said at a press conference in Santa Rosa, the Sonoma County seat, that Salcido was arrested at the Los Mochis train depot about 1:30 a.m. Wednesday by officers who were waiting there for him. They said he was attempting to flee from the station. Los Mochis, Salcido’s hometown, is about 50 miles north of Guasave.

‘Substantial Leads’

Michaelsen said that on Tuesday, authorities began receiving “substantial leads” that Salcido was in Mexico.

Salcido had been the target of a massive manhunt since Friday when his wife, boss and a co-worker were shot, his three daughters had their throats cut and his mother-in-law and two sisters-in-law were bludgeoned or knifed. Only one daughter and the co-worker survived the Sonoma County attacks.

The six victims who were relatives of Salcido were buried Wednesday in Petaluma, only a few hours after his arrest.

U.S. officials in Mexico City declined to say Wednesday whether they were involved in the arrest. They referred all questions to the attorney general’s office in Mexico, which oversees the Federal Judicial Police.

Rene Hernandez, a spokesman for the Mexican attorney general’s office, said Salcido’s murderous rampage was “all a matter of jealousy.”

“He believed that his wife, Angela, was cheating on him with his colleague at work, Tracy Tovar (presumably Tracey Toovey),” Hernandez said. “. . . He opted for assassinating them and the other members of his wife’s family and his daughters.”

Hernandez said Salcido told police that he fled from San Rafael by bus to Calexico.

“In all his craziness, he says he can’t remember exactly what happened, but he said he believes he left San Rafael with two girls and when he got to Calexico, they weren’t with him any more. He doesn’t know if he killed them or abandoned them or what. He’s crazy.”

Hernandez said Salcido crossed the border around dawn Saturday.

“He was running like the devil,” he said.

He told police he hid in the town of Orbabamoa, Sinaloa, near Guasave, “for a couple of days.”

Reacting to the suggestion that Toovey and Angela Salcido had an affair, Michaelsen said, “It’s very unfair to point a finger at Mr. Toovey. You’ve got to remember that he (Salcido) is in a position where he can say anything he wants. He’s alive.”

Investigators have found no evidence of an affair involving Angela Salcido, Michaelsen said. Authorities and people who knew the couple said Ramon Salcido was very suspicious of his wife, without cause.

Salcido was to be flown to Mexico City in a commercial plane late Wednesday night, Mexican authorities said. Arias said a psychologist would “examine his head” and police would further interrogate him to make sure that he has committed no crimes in Mexico.

Hernandez said he did not know whether Salcido was a U.S. citizen but believed the suspect would be returned to the United States.

David Ilchert, district director for the Immigration and Naturalization Service in San Francisco, said Salcido’s file shows that he is not a U.S. citizen but was admitted to the United States as a lawful permanent resident on Jan. 25, 1986, after marriage to an American woman whom he would not identify.

Arias said U.S. officials have already asked for Salcido’s extradition. He said the issue will be put into the hands of the Foreign Ministry, but he predicted that extradition would be no problem.

Returning Salcido would be “voluntary” on the part of the Mexican government, a Foreign Ministry source said, because Mexico is under “no legal obligation” to extradite a Mexican national to the United States.

Bill Graves, spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City, said: “I am assuming he will be turned over to the U.S. . . . He will surely be turned over to the U.S.”

Salcido so far faces four murder charges in Sonoma County involving the deaths of his wife, Angela, 24; daughters, Sofia, 4, and Teresa, 1, and his boss at Grand Cru Vineyards, Toovey, 35. He was also charged with two counts of attempted murder involving the attacks on his daughter Carmina, 3, and a co-worker, Kenneth Butti, 33.

The charges were filed Monday. Authorities in Santa Rosa say Salcido will also face charges in the slayings of his mother-in-law, Marian Louise Richards, 42, and Angela’s two sisters, Ruth, 12, and Maria, 8.

Sonoma County Dist. Atty. Gene Tunney said he will seek the death penalty.

“If there’s a prime candidate for the death sentence, he certainly qualifies at the top of the list,” Tunney said.

An airplane owned by Charles Schulz, the cartoonist who draws the “Peanuts” comic strip, left Santa Rosa Wednesday for Mexico with Sonoma County authorities aboard. It was not clear if the jet, piloted by Schulz’s son, Craig, would be used to return Salcido to California.

The killing spree began Friday morning after Salcido spent the night drinking and snorting cocaine, a few days after his wife was told that Salcido had a previous wife and daughter in Fresno. The daughter in Fresno was born only a few months before Ramon and Angela Salcido had their first child, Sofia.

Official records in Los Mochis, Salcido’s hometown in Sinaloa, showed Wednesday that Salcido also has a son, Jesus Ramon Salcido Torres, born Sept. 21, 1980, to a woman identified as Maria de Jesus Torres.

The birth was recorded in the state registry five months later. Police said they did not know where the mother and boy now live and speculated that they may be in the United States.

Salcido’s mother and other relatives still live in Los Mochis. His mother, Valentina Bojorquez Armendariz, said Tuesday that she received a tearful telephone call from her son on Friday morning bidding her goodby.

“Mama, this is the last time you will hear my voice. . . . I have problems,” she recalled him saying.

She said she tried in vain to reach her son by phone for several days. On Tuesday, she consulted a Tarot card reader, and after paying the equivalent of $2.25 in pesos, was told that Ramon would be found, according to a family member.

In Sonoma County, rosary was recited privately in front of about 50 people for the six slain members of the Salcido and Richards families.

The victims were then interred side by side at Calvary Catholic Cemetery in Petaluma, a suburban city on U.S. 101 north of San Francisco. About 20 Petaluma police officers and Sonoma County sheriff’s deputies stood watch, unaware that Salcido had been arrested in Mexico.

Carried Coffins

Robert L. Richards, father of Angela and her sisters, and husband of Mrs. Richards, helped carry each of the six plain coffins, including the two smaller caskets for the little girls, outside to a grassy hill.

He watched grimly, hands crossed, as each coffin was lowered into a single large grave donated to the family by the Catholic Diocese of Santa Rosa. His three surviving children, all sons, stood by his side.

Afterward, Judith Kelly, a family friend designated to speak with the media, said of Richards, who had left the family home in Cotati moments before the attacks: “He is an incredible example of dignity.”

Kelly said the family hopes to raise the surviving Salcido daughter, Carmina.

Asked how the family was accepting the tragedy, Kelly said, “We are all in shock. There is a reason for everything,” she said, adding that everyone questioned why this would happen.

“How could God have allowed it? We are wondering why,” Kelly said.

Kelly said Ramon Salcido did not seem like the monster described by authorities. But, she added, “I defy anyone to know the face of a murderer. I hope that he is apprehended and justice is done . . . whatever God would do in the circumstances.”

In Salcido’s neighborhood in Boyes Hot Springs, where people had been locking their doors and arming themselves out of fear that Salcido might still be around, the news of his capture spread quickly.

“I haven’t taken the kids out since Friday,” said Patricia Crossland, 26, a mother of three. “If you heard a car drive by, you’d jump. You’d always wonder if it was him. But we’re glad it’s over.”

Salcido’s next-door neighbor, Carol Settles, was more cautious.

“If it is true, I am relieved,” she said, adding that she had been carrying a screwdriver in her pocket when she left home to pick up her daughter from school. “We had this place locked up tighter than Ft. Knox.”

Down at the Valley of the Moon Saloon where Salcido used to drink, the mood was similar.

“I think someone ought to shoot him,” said Mike Ebbert, a house painter. “Why should it cost taxpayers millions.”

“If he had any self-respect left he should have saved a bullet for himself,” said another patron who wouldn’t give his name.

At McNeilly’s bar, which Salcido frequented and where he spent several hours the night before the killings, customers had a similar reaction.

‘Scariest Part’

“I think they should bring him here and let us have him,” said customer Charles Marino, adding that the scariest part of the whole story had been that Salcido had acted like “a normal person like everyone else.”

At the Glen Ellen Grocery store, in the town where the Grand Cru Winery is located, a sign on the front door read: “Salcido has been captured in Mexico by his hometown. Hurray!!”

“We’ve got guns in our house and we had them loaded,” shopkeeper Dorothy McCann said. “So now we can unload them and put them away.”

Roderick reported from Los Angeles, Miller and Times staff writers Patrick McDonnell and Armando Acuna and photographers Don Bartletti and Vince Compagnone from Mexico. Also contributing were staff writers Dan Morain, Richard C. Paddock, Ronald B. Taylor and Robert Chow in Northern California and Tracy Wilkinson in Los Angeles.