http://www.mydesert.com/article/2009101 ... break-case
October 18, 2009
Daughter's work helps break triple homicide case
Once classified as a cold case, arrest made in 1981 death of her dad, 2 others
Monica Torline and Kate McGinty
The Desert Sun
It was a daughter's perseverance that broke open a mysterious Rancho Mirage triple homicide case that has stumped investigators for 28 years.
Rachel Begley was 13 when her father, Ralph Boger, was shot dead alongside his friends, Pat Castro and Fred Alvarez, a former vice chairman with the Cabazon Band of Mission Indians. Their bodies were discovered in the backyard of a home on Bob Hope Drive the morning of July 1, 1981.
The case captured the attention of the Coachella Valley and the nation. National magazines like “Spy” and “Vanity Fair” even examined the case, which became known as the “Octopus Murders” because of the tribe's complex connections to government agencies and the lengthy list of people who have been rumored to be involved.
For nearly three decades, though, the killer or killers have eluded detectives.
So Begley decided to try to find the killer herself.
She scoured the Internet for hints in the cold case, tracked down a dozen new informants and recorded conversations with them. She created a Web site with case documents, posted YouTube videos about her pursuit and sneaked into a convention with a video camera to record her confrontation with a man she suspected in the deaths.
“I think a lot of people need answers, not just me,” Begley said in a telephone interview with The Desert Sun last week. “And when I started getting the answers I needed, I pretty much just determined that I'm not going to stop. They're going to have to listen to me.”
She managed to find documents and people tied to the case that no one else ever uncovered, said Riverside County sheriff's Det. John Powers, lead investigator on the case.
“Rachel uncovered a lot more that we didn't know about,” Powers said, declining to elaborate further on what new evidence surfaced. “She's very tenacious.”
It was Begley — the daughter who lost a father too soon — who turned up the evidence police needed for their first big break in the case, leading to the first arrest 28 years after the shootings.
“It's very unusual seeing breaks in a case that's very old,” Sheriff Stanley Sniff Jr. said, adding that the case moving forward is a tribute to those who have delved into it in the past.
Begley, now 41, declines to even hint at what she found — “I don't want to mess it up” — but says her approach was different from detectives and prosecutors who previously worked the case.
“It was personal to me,” she said.
Police make first big break in case
The first arrest in the triple homicide case came Sept. 26. That's when customs officials at Miami International Airport walked James “Jimmy” Hughes off a Honduras-bound airplane in handcuffs.
“Jimmy realized I was the reason he was in handcuffs. He started to put it together,” Powers said of their meeting on the jetway. “He didn't ask why he was under arrest.”
After the arrest, Hughes invoked his Miranda Rights, asked for an attorney and refused to let Powers interview him. He is fighting his extradition to California and has a hearing set for Oct. 28.
The 52-year-old is accused of conspiring with others, including the late John Philip Nichols, his son John Paul Nichols and Glen Heggstad, to prevent Alvarez from revealing illegal activities at the Cabazon Indian Reservation in 1981, according to the extradition complaint.
Alvarez was a former vice chairman and security chief for the tribe.
The Cabazon tribal administration has not returned phone calls from The Desert Sun about the case.
Attorneys for Hughes and the younger Nichols also have not returned calls.
“We're kind of in the dark,” Rod Soda, a Palm Desert attorney representing Heggstad, said on Tuesday. “We don't know what evidence they have or why this thing is surfacing after so many years.”
Police may seek more charges
While Nichols and Heggstad are listed as co-conspirators on the extradition complaint for Hughes, neither has been charged.
More charges could come in the case, though, Powers said.
“I'm not done yet,” he said.
Powers' full-time job is gathering and organizing evidence for prosecution in the Hughes case. He is also collecting evidence that could prove who else might have been involved in the 1981 slayings.
Investigators in 1981 suggested there might have been more than one weapon, more than one gunman. After all, there was no sign the victims struggled or tried to flee.
Powers declined to speculate on the theories and possible motives, but said the investigation is far from over.
“We're still trying to figure out if there's enough to charge (Nichols and Heggstad) with any crime,” he said.
Hughes, a former security chief for the tribe, started off as a witness in the case.
He told authorities in 1984 he once received instructions to go to Idyllwild with a partial payment for the killer in the 1981 triple homicide.
But Hughes' position within the investigation shifted in 1986, and he became a suspect. Powers wouldn't disclose why.
About that time, Hughes left for Central America.
He eventually founded Jimmy Hughes Ministries, a Honduras mission that provides help to those struggling with addictions to drugs, alcohol and gambling.
He has frequently returned to the U.S. to give speeches on the religious circuit about how he changed his life. He was a Mafia hit man, according to an autobiography recently posted on the Full Gospel Businessmen's Fellowship International Web site.
Though he was a suspect in the 1981 homicide case, there had never been enough evidence to arrest Hughes, Powers said.
'Did he really die?'
So the case, in the public eye at least, appeared to go cold — until Begley came forward.
The question of what happened to her father had always nagged at her.
Police offered few answers, and Begley has never even seen her father's body.
“My dad was the kind of guy that you just wondered, ‘Did he really die?' because he was just kind of sneaky like that,” Begley said.
“We always thought that maybe whoever went up to (kill) him, that my dad took him from behind.”
Then about three years ago, Begley began researching her family heritage online.
“As I started digging through the names, I came to my dad's name. I saw something and it mentioned Fred. I started looking up Fred, and I saw all this conspiracy theory stuff online,” she said.
That her father's death fascinated the rest of the world, too, was a surprise: “When I stepped into this, I didn't know what was going on at all.”
Begley called the police the next morning.
“I said, ‘Aren't you going to do something about this?' He said, ‘No, this case is too old.' That's when I got it in my head that I'm going to investigate,” she said.
The self-proclaimed computer geek already knew how to start.
She worked full-time in technical support and management for a computer manufacturer and Internet service provider. She has also held jobs in skip tracing, or tracking people down for collection agencies.
Begley eventually gave up her job and threw herself into full-time investigator mode.
'Make sure something comes from it'
Begley, a self-described workaholic, said she has logged as many as 16 hours in one day following up on leads or tracking down people who have posted on message boards.
“If they don't find me, I usually find them,” she said.
The progress in the case came faster than she expected — probably because she found she had a talent for investigating.
“When I was little, I read Nancy Drew but I wasn't all into it,” she said. “It's really weird. I had no idea that I had these investigating-type skills when I started doing it, and apparently I have a knack for it.”
Begley's independent investigation has been critical to today's case, Powers said.
People across the country have found her blog and personal videos online and reached out to her. Even relatives of Alvarez and Castro have contacted her through her site.
Begley became an information broker of sorts, getting some people to trust her enough to introduce them to Powers. He's met about a dozen of Begley's sources from across the nation who have ties to or a deeper knowledge of the case.
Powers considers her a partner in their ongoing work.
And their partnership isn't over yet, said Begley, who lives with her husband and four children outside Louisville, Ky.
“I've got the answers I was looking for, but it's more than that now. It's more of a moral issue,” she said.
“I think it comes down to my dad and friend (Fred) always telling me to do the right thing. I've got all this information, so I want to make sure something comes of it, something meaningful.”
