The All American KILLER Next Door - Rick Church

In 1986, a man named Scott Maclum was killed in broad daylight. Police quickly found their suspect, prosecutors convicted him. But now, almost 40 years later, I'm re-examining this case. I really didn't believe any of it was real. And I was like, well, they're going to figure out this is not me. They're going to do their police job. Has the wrong man been in prison this whole time? Listen to examined, the backfire effect, wherever you get your podcasts. On Carta Roy, the host of Murder True Crime Stories, if you listen to true crime because you want more than just what happened, this show is for you. Each episode takes a deep dive into history's most notorious murders, looking beyond the crime scene to focus on the people and communities impacted the most. Their case is solved or unsolved. The goal is simple, to understand why these stories still matter. New episodes drop every Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. Follow Murder True Crime Stories on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you listen. Every town has a dark side. Think about all the people you let inside your home without a second thought. Most of your relatives are welcome with open arms, parents, the in-laws, cousins, aunts, your kids' friends, of course, who you've known since they were little. Every single day, all over this country, people open their doors to somebody exactly like that. And 99 out of 100 times, nothing ever comes of it, because that's just what it means to trust the people around you. But this is a story about the one time out of 100, because in Illinois, in the summer of 1988, a one family opened their door to a boy they had trusted for years, and what he did once inside is the kind of thing that makes you look a little differently, yet everyone you think you know. Hey guys, it's Andrew, and welcome to another episode of Every Town, What a Night. We're checking out an all-American male built in the heartland who was headed in the right direction until he decided to brutally kill some people on a warm summer evening. So that's head over to Woodstock, Illinois now, and find out why he did it. This is the story of Rick Church, the all-American killer next door. Ray and Ruth Ann Ritter had both grown up in Woodstock, town that sits about 50 miles northwest to Chicago. It's close enough to feel connected to the city, but really it's a place that moves at a totally different speed. They were high school sweet arts who got married in 1969, and Ray's career had him working for Commonwealth Edison, the electric company that kept half in Northern Illinois running. And Ruth Ann was a secretary for a local law firm. By 1988, they were raising three kids together, Colleen, Steve, and Matthew, right there in their hometown, and this was a solid family unit by any measurement. Now, when Ray's closest friends over at ComEd was a man named Gene Church, and Gene had a son Rick, who was right around the same age as the Ritter Kids. The two families have been friendly for years, and so when Rick and Colleen started dating during the 1986-87 school year, Rick a senior at Marion Central Catholic High School, and Colleen a sophomore, while everybody was thrilled. Here was a boy the Ritter is already new and already trusted, practically considered one of their own. And Rick, he gave them every reason to keep trusting him. He was a great football player, a pretty good student, easy going and well liked by adults. And never once in any kind of trouble with the police or at school. If you asked anyone in Woodstock back in 1987 to describe the kind of boy you'd want your daughter to bring home, a lot of them would have basically described Rick to a T without even realizing it. Then he graduated and left from Northern Illinois University in Decombe about 40 miles away. When at first, that distance didn't seem to change much in the relationship, Rick came home most weekends that first year, even made the drive back just to take Colleen to prom. But people do change, slowly but surely, especially at that age, and things were beginning to shift away from what had been a picture of perfect first love. It showed up in little ways that are painfully easy to see now, but we're almost invisible back then. Colleen was 16 when they started dating, and just a normal teenage girl with a normal teenage life. It friends activities, family she was close with, and then slowly bit by bit, that whole life started shrinking down to fit whatever Rick wanted it to look like. Her friends noticed she wasn't around as much anymore. Her family noticed she'd check in with Rick before making plans that didn't even have anything to do with them. As she wanted to get her hair done or something along those lines, for example, she'd better check with him before she made that appointment. And then a bit looked like a crisis at all, or just a girl who was maybe a little too into her first real boyfriend. At college, he'd call her from his dorm room most evenings, and if she told him she was busy with homework or going out with friends, he wouldn't just be a little disappointed. He'd get pretty upset. I'm talking genuinely angry. It was this constant neediness, showed up every single time she tried to have a life that didn't revolve entirely around him, and it was starting to wear her down. So, by the summer of '88, the cracks in the relationship had turned into full-blown potholes, so to speak, and got to the point that Colleen had started talking to a few close friends about wanting out for good. It wasn't happy anymore, but like she couldn't breathe in the relationship, even though they were separated by 40 miles in, she was seriously starting to think about ending it. But of course, I hadn't told Rick anything about it yet, she was working up to it, trying to figure out the timing, wondering how to take it, hoping it was some way to have this conversation that didn't explode. Because remember, she and Rick had been family friends long before any of this, and she wanted it to stay that way. But, as it turns out, all that was an impossibility. Rick came home from to Cobb in June of '88 for the summer, and he was not exactly in the best of moods. At first, it had nothing to do with Colleen and everything to do with how college was going for him. It wasn't exactly focused on his studies, and as it turns out, it hadn't taken enough courses to become a sophomore the following year. As parents, then sat him down and told him they were separating and selling the house. Man, on top of all of it, Colleen officially ended things. She told him he was too possessive, and she didn't want to be in a relationship like that anymore, but that she still wanted to stay friends. As devastation about it all was obvious to everyone, what nobody saw though was how much rage was actually sitting right underneath it. And for two months after the break up, Rick, he kept on calling. He fell in the house constantly, asked what she was doing and get annoyed whenever she said she didn't want to see him, and he was essentially begging her to take him back, and he was desperate. In July, Rick and two of his friends, Sean and Jim, they took a trip up to Lake Geneva in Wisconsin. Sean later described Rick as a nice enough guy, but somebody who could just never seemed to loosen up. He said that on this trip, Rick was boozing a lot, and once he got drunk, he started ranting about how much he hated women across the board, and Colleen, especially for breaking things off. He got so loud and obnoxious that a random girl nearby told him to quiet down and Rick just went off on her. Sean said he and Jim actually had to hold him back from going after, and then the whole ride home, Rick sat there mumbling about Colleen. How could she do this to me? And friend said, "This wasn't the first time he acted like this either. It seemed to be a drinking sort of thing." A sober, Rick was the guy everybody knew and liked, but drunk, he turned angry and do things he never otherwise would. The truth was, Rick had some anger issues, and was a young man who couldn't handle rejection. simply could not accept the Colleen didn't want him anymore, which meant that in order for him to feel in control of his life once again, well, he needed to hurt her a whole lot worse than she'd ever heard him. So then, things continued to bubble over the summer. On Saturday, August 20th, Rick finally confronted Colleen directly and told her he'd do something drastic if she wouldn't get back together with him. As she told him, she wasn't interested, but she was still happy to be his friend. Later that same night at 11.30, Rick called her one last time, begging for a single final date. A bit of closure, perhaps, he felt he deserved at least that much. She said no, again, trying to keep things civil. She didn't want to go on the date. Then for the first time, she told him something new, but she'd started seeing somebody else, man, it was a classmate. And Rick, like he had done more than once before, freaked out and hung up. That night, Colleen had a friend sleep in over, and sold her a younger brother Matthew. Their parents were out with friends of their own, and her brother Steve was staying over at a friend's place across town. And nobody in that house had any reason to think that that phone call was anything more than the same tired argument they've been having for two months. Everybody was aware of the tantrums he'd throw, and this seemed like another one. In summer, I was coming to a close, and he'd eventually go back to school and move on with life. If anything, since now she was seeing somebody else. Part of her hope that maybe finally, this would be the last time he'd call. And it was, but not because he moved on in the slightest. At around five in the morning, on August 21st, while the whole house was still asleep, Rick let himself in to the ritter home. It was easy to get in because he knew that house like the back of his hand. Inside were all six people, Ray and Ruth, Matthew and Matthew's friend, and Colleen and her friend. Arm with a knife, Rick went straight for Ray and Ruth's bedroom on the ground floor first. He figured they were the biggest threat, and so he wanted them out of the way. He stabbed them both multiple times in their bed. Upstairs Matthew woke up to the sound of the commotion, and stepped out in the hallway to see what was happening. And there he ran right into Rick, who stabbed him twice without hesitation. And Colleen then woke up, grabbed the phone next to her bed, but before she could even finish dialing 911, Rick burst into her bedroom, grabbed her, and started in on her. He stabbed her a few times, but she managed to break free and run. He caught up to her, and gotten some more blows and slashed at her, but somehow she kept fighting. She broke loose a second time, and made it out of the house, screaming at the top of her lungs. And Rick went right after her, chasing her down the street. A neighbor nearby, 37-year-old Chris Gurk, who heard the commotion, he ran out to his door. And there he saw Rick, out there stabbing Colleen, driving the knife into her chest, and then, when she rolled over, right into the back of her head. And Chris grabbed a bayonet, was the closest weapon he could find and bolted out the door. The second Rick saw him coming while he took off. Minutes later helped finally arrive, and Medics went to work on Colleen while police moved into the house carefully, not knowing if Rick was in there, or how many more victims they were about to find. Inside, they discovered Matthew, trying to nurse his wounds next to his friend who was unharmed. And Colleen's friend was also unharmed. However, in the downstairs bedroom, they found Ray and Ruth Ann, and they hadn't survived the attack. Now, this was a kid who used to walk into that house without even knocking, and this is what he'd just done to the people who let him in. Rick, the boy half the town would have vouched for a month earlier. The same kid, who was welcomed into the Ritter's house's entire life, was nowhere to be found. And he had run all the way back to his house, packed a bag quickly while his mother slept upstairs. And he grabbed her keys to her 81 Dodge pick-up, and he drove off all by a quarter to six in the morning. Matthew, having only suffered minor injuries, was able to get out of the hospital the next day, but Colleen, she was another story. She'd been stabbed 22 times in total, many of them to the back of her head. Rick had clearly fully intended to kill her, and it was her neighbor who saved her. She was rushed into surgery, and her first doctor was feared she might lose her side or come out of it with permanent brain damage. Again, every possible odd, Colleen, she pulled through. She would go on to make a full recovery, and she'd even be able to tell police exactly what happened that morning. In two months after the attack, she walked out of that hospital. The cruelest part of the timing of everything was that a few days after the attack, while Colleen was still in intensive care and couldn't even be there, well Ray and Ruth and were laid to rest, the same church they had been married at 19 years earlier. The very same priest in fact who had performed their wedding was now standing over their caskets. And as for Rick at church, he was still nowhere to be found. Up to this point, Woodstock had never seen a double murder before in a history. With Rick still at large, the whole town was on edge, and everybody did their part to try to bring order back to their town. A tips came pouring in, more than 60 phone calls of people swearing they'd spotted Rick or the blue dodge pickup he'd taken off in and everyone had to be run down. Most of them unfortunately led nowhere, and people had him in different cars and different towns and different clothes, but one got taken pretty seriously. The day after the murder as a motel clerk up in Wisconsin Dells, about 130 miles northwest of Woodstock, reported that Rick had checked in. It was credible enough that within days the police had a federal warrant out from, and it pushed the search up into Wisconsin. And then two days after the Dells sighting, he popped up again. This time, though, back in Illinois, just a few miles from his own hometown, and then, just like that, he was gone. He always seemed to be one step ahead of the law. About a month later, the trail picked back up, and this time nearly 2,000 miles away out in California. Church went directly to Venice Beach, California. He was staying here at the Cal Mar Hotel just two blocks from the ocean, registered under the alias Randy Hunt. But it looked like he only had the money for a single night because after that, he was sleeping in his mother's truck, parked in a nearby public garage. Their next lead came when church cashed $300 worth of savings bonds at a bank just a few miles from Venice Beach. And he ditched the truck for good. Investigators found it abandoned outside a convenient store in West Hollywood. By the time they pieced all of this together and searched the area, he was already gone once again, and so the trail went cold. A two-year is after the murders, the case landed on solved mysteries. When we returned, the chilling tale of a teenager who apparently embarked on a murderous rampage when his girlfriend broke up with him. And that meant, his high school yearbook photo, that same easy, all-American smile that had made him the boy every parent and woodstock trusted, was suddenly beaming out into millions of living rooms across the country, right next to the description of a knife attack that killed two people and nearly killed two more. The show would end up profiling him a second time in '91. His face made it onto America's most wanted two in front of an even bigger audience of people actively hunting for fugitives exactly like him. The case of Richard Church has received an incredible amount of publicity. It's been the subject of daytime talk shows like Phil Donahue and Aral de Rivera. Several states have even put up wanted posters of church. Still though, nothing came from that, at least at first. A rick, it appeared, it actually managed to get away. And all the while, Colleen, she was living with it. A dating go-by where she didn't wonder if today might be the one where he comes back to finish her off for good. As she was scared coming home at night or pulling the car into the garage, and [BLANK_AUDIO] Certainly, he wasn't getting the justice they deserved. Colleen was never not looking over her shoulder. He was the man who had murdered her parents and tried to murder her, but still out there somewhere. Behind the scenes, the case had already picked up an ugly legal wrinkle, mad at nothing to do with catching Rick at all. Pay and Ruth Ann had a joint life insurance policy worth about $360,000. And because they had been murdered together in the same attack, the insurers and lawyers ended up locked in an argument over a genuinely grim little technicality. Which one of them had died first? Because under Illinois law at the time, the order they died in could actually change how that money got split between their three kids. And so on top of everything else, that's what the Ritter Children were dealing with. And three years went by and Rick sure, to a start to look like, might just stay a fugitive for good. But all that time, he hadn't been running it turns out. The majority of it, while he'd been hiding in plain sight, clear across the country in Salt Lake City, Utah, living as a guy named Danny Carson, who was low key working the counter to fast food barbecued joint called Bennett's Pit. And he had built himself a whole life out there, as coworkers liked him and they had no idea the easygoing guy they worked next to every single day had murdered two people back in Illinois, and here's the wild part. A couple of them later admit that they had actually seen the case on America's most wanted and thought their Danny Carson looked an awful lot like the fugitive on their screens. But, they just liked him too much to ever pick up the phone. Bigger the guy they knew could never really be a killer. So in the end, it wasn't a co-worker who brought him down, it was an off-duty Salt Lake City police officer named Craig Park, and Parked walked in to Bennett's Pit one day, just looking to grab a bite. He got served right across the counter by the man calling himself Danny Carson and felt something click in the back of his head. It was a face he was sure he had seen somewhere before, into a bulletin board or flashed across a fugitive alert, but it didn't say a word in the moment. He just went back, dug up the wanted poster, and confirmed exactly what his gut was telling him. A Rick Church, he was arrested the very next day of November 14, 1991. Three years and three months after he walked down to that house and drove off into the dark. Finally, some breaking news on one of our toughest cases. Late yesterday, Richard Church was captured. He's the man accused of killing his girlfriend's parents. He profiled Church five times and gotten. After his capture, Rick told investigators that at some point in '89, while he was still deep into his life on the run, he found his way to a religious compound in Alma, Arkansas, run by a self-styled evangelist named Tony Alamo. And if that name rings a bell, well, there's a reason for it, because by then, Alamo was already one of the most notorious cult leaders in the entire country. He was a federal fugitive himself at the exact same time, wanted in connection with the beating of a young boy in his own compound. It's kind of funny how bad people tend to gravitate towards those kinds of groups. The year's letter Alamo would be convicted of hauling underage girls across state lines. And so, you've got one fugitive here hiding out with another. A Rick told authorities, Alamo's people sheltered him for months, and he only barely slipped away when federal agents had raided the place looking for Alamo. Back in the present, Rick fought his extradition to Illinois for a little while, and at one point he refused to talk to anybody at all and insisted he was going to represent himself. That didn't last too long, though, because in June of '92, staring down the very real possibility of a death sentence, Alamo predicted guilty to the murders of Ray and Ruth Ann and to the attempted murders of Colleen and Matthew. In exchange for that, he was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole. By the time he was finally caught, Colleen Rader was 22 years old and engaged to be married and when reporters, masked how it felt to know that Rick was in custody at last, she said that maybe now she could finally start living something of a normal life again. She married her fiancee that spring in May '92, but it was a wedding her parents never got to see. As for Rick, he's still alive today, still serving out that life sentence at Dixon Correctional Center in Illinois. In more than 30 years behind bars, well, he's never once given any real indication that he feels a shred of remorse for what he did that morning. The house on West Greenwood Avenue, and one people around town quietly started calling the house of death, it changed hands a few times over the decades that followed before it eventually fell into foreclosure. And then in 2019 Habitat for Humanity took it on as a restoration project. They got it it, rebuilt it and turned it back into a home for a new family, a single mother and her two daughters. According to the folks who worked on that renovation, the family heard every bit of the house's history before they moved in, but it didn't seem to bother them all that much. That's the thing about a place like Woodstock in really most towns in the States. Life, it inevitably goes on. The house gets a new coat of paint, and the new family moves in with a fresh start. One chapter closes and the next one opens. For the people who were there that August morning in '88, ones who loved Ray and Ruth Ann Ritter, the ones who watched Colleen farther away back from 22 stab wounds, and childhood stolen in a single night, well, some things don't ever really fade away. One of the people involved, and just learned to live with the pain. So that's going to do it for this week's episode of Every Town, I hope you enjoyed it. If you guys are interested, we have some really good quality clothes over at our Scary Mysteries Dashery Shop. We have some nice Every Town gear, so pick up a tee or a hoodie if you want to look cool out there this fall, those links are down in the description for that. And if you want more true crime, well, remember to come right back here next week for another episode filled with scary, strange, and mysterious stories, because you never know, and your town will be next. [BLANK_AUDIO]