London Times: Viewing Guide - Cutting Edge: Cult Killer

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Viewing Guide;Terrestrial;Television

The London Times/2006-08-21

By David Chater

CUTTING EDGE:CULT KILLER. Channel 4, 9pm

Tonight's mind-blowing Cutting Edge begins with a videotaped suicide note, in which a young man called Rick Rodriguez proposes to murder his mother and end his own life. He was brought up in a cult that was known as the Children of God, and is now known simply as "The Family". Their practice of free love allegedly extended to institutionalised paedophilia, and the children were brainwashed into believing that this was an expression of love and pleasing to God. Rodriguez's mother runs the cult. "I've tried so many things," he says in his suicide tape. "Trying to somehow fit in, somehow to find a normal life. Anger does not begin to describe how I feel about these people and what they have done." And so he went in pursuit of justice.