Salcido Tape Tells How Murder Rampage Began

Ramon Salcido told authorities in a taped confession that he started a grisly wine country murder rampage by slitting the throat of daughter Sofia, 4, after he had learned she was “not my own,” after a night of drugs and drinks.

In the tape played at his preliminary hearing Friday, Salcido said he drove his three young daughters to a county dump and one by one took the girls from his truck, slashed their throats and threw them down an embankment.

“I was drunk. I was out. I took my knife and I cut her throat,” he said of Sofia. He said he then slashed the throat of Teresa, 1, killing her, and cut the throat of Carmina, 2, who survived.

“I was out, I was crying also,” Salcido said.

Salcido said his wife Angela had told him that Sofia, their first daughter, had not been fathered by him.

“She married me when she was pregnant and then . . . later on, when we was married and pregnant, she told me about the little kid that was not my own,” he said.

Salcido said he then went to the home of his mother-in-law, Marian Richards, in Cotati, killing her and her two daughters, Ruth, 12, and Marie, 8. He then returned to his Boyes Hot Springs home and shot his wife before going to the Grand Cru winery and killing co-worker Tracey Toovey, which was easy “because I’ve also killed so many.”

Salcido sat tensely at the defense table in Municipal Court as the taped confession, taken on the April 20 airplane flight from his native Mexico where he was captured, was played before a jammed courtroom of about 65 people.

On tape, Salcido said the April 14 rampage was triggered after he had an argument with his wife the previous night over child support papers he had been served with from a previous marriage. She left him alone with the children, he said, and he started drinking beer and taking drugs before putting the girls in his car and driving around Sonoma County searching for his wife.

After he slit the throats of the girls, he said he planned to kill himself but then decided to murder his mother-in-law because she knew about Sofia not being his natural child. Later, returning to his home, he shot his wife point-blank in the head when she threatened to call the police. He then called his mother in Mexico, told her what happened and that he was going to commit suicide.

“I said I was going to kill myself and she begged me not to but to come and see her one last time,” Salcido said, adding that he then went and shot Toovey, who recently threatened to fire him. “I was scared. I had another shot of champagne and I take off. I pick up the phone and I tell my mother I was going to go there.”