Arizona journalist Michael Kiefer on how — and why — to tell the stories of violent criminals

Ricky Wassenaar has been confounding law enforcement — and journalists — for decades.

Most recently, Wassenaar claims to have killed several fellow inmates in a Tucson prison. He was already in the midst of serving 16 consecutive life sentences for various crimes including armed robbery and sexual assault.

Not long before the murders he claims to have committed, Wassenaar had been moved out of maximum security. The deaths were one of several recent incidents that prompted a legislative inquiry into detention policies at the Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Reentry.

Michael Kiefer, a longtime investigative journalist in Arizona, has been covering Wassenaar since the early 2000s. Kiefer published a lengthy profile of Wassenaar earlier this year, and joined The Show to discuss why he considers Wassenaar such a compelling subject.

Full conversation

MICHAEL KIEFER: In 2004, Ricky Wassenaar and another prisoner that took over the Lewis prison down in Buckeye for 15 days. They were holed up. They were trying to escape, but they wound up trapped in a tower. A year later, it went to trial, so I covered that trial and I interviewed Wassenaar. And in ways it was very entertaining.

He defended himself and, you know, it was a very dramatic trial with him cross-examining his own victims. And I think we all had a little bit of — the journalists covering it — we all had a bit of Stockholm syndrome. Not that we supported what he had done, but he was charismatic and at times funny.

SAM DINGMAN: Talk a little bit about the things that stayed with you.

KIEFER: Yes, yes. So, at one point, I requested an interview with him in the jail. Now, it, you know, it's not unusual over 40-some years of being a reporter that people charged with very serious things are trying to convince you that they're the nicest person in the world. ... But he worried about the fact that it was my wife's birthday and ... "Here you are talking to me when you, you should be home with your wife."

And so, you know, and yet he had held hostages. He had beaten the the male correctional officer, Jason Auch. And he had allegedly sexually assaulted the the female correctional officer, Lois Fraley.

And I have to say this, that I think Ricky Wassenaar is a lot of things — he's violent, he's a criminal, he's assaulted people. Now he's killed people. But I don't think he's a liar. And I bring that up because it plays into what he did in April of this year.

Arizona Mirror

DINGMAN: Let's talk about what he did. Because the violence of it is brutal and his avowed morality behind it is just as stark.

KIEFER: And again, when you get into this sort of, you know, prison code of honor, sex offenders are at the lowest rings of the prison hierarchy. Child sex offenders are the lowest of the low. And now, here's Ricky Wassenaar, who denies that he's a sex offender housed on a sex offender unit. He told them, if they put someone else in in my cell, "I will kill them."

Well, that happened sometime early in April. And they put in a man named Saul Alvarez, in 2016 or something had kidnapped, raped, and killed a 15-year-old girl in Maricopa County.

And Wassenaar allegedly — and now this has not been confirmed by either the Pima County Attorney's Office or by the prison — but the word out is that Wassenaar suffocated him with some sort of plastic, and then made it look as if he was asleep in the cell.

Then he went out onto the yard and he had a stone, that he had like fishnet laundry bag that he put the stone in. The prisoners were starting to line up for for breakfast, and to get into the mess hall, they have to go through what they call the cage. It's sort of like a chain-linked tunnel. And he went in and started swinging that rock. And killed two more people.

And among the things that were really sort of, you know, telling was that he said that — let me get the exact quote, "The taxpayers no longer have to pay for them and paying my debt to society."

Politics

Arizona lawmakers grill state corrections director after Tucson prison murders

There’s nothing wrong with the system used to classify the security risk of Arizona prison inmates, even if it did result in one prisoner being able to kill three fellow inmates at the Tucson facility in April, the head of the state’s prison system told lawmakers Tuesday.

DINGMAN: ... This gets to what is so confounding about Wassenaar as a subject in in my mind — and I'm curious to get your take on this — is clearly he's expressing to you that he had the explicit intention of killing these people. One of the things you point out in the piece is that, and that you've been talking about today, is that Wassenaar charmed a lot of people. And I'm curious, what has it been like for you to try to navigate that when you cover somebody like him? How do you navigate moments where you worry he might be trying to charm you?

KIEFER: It's not that he's trying to charm me. I mean, he was, he was pretty, you know, straight out, you know, angry and offensive. It something else that, that you realize after — and I've written this and I've said this many times — that the scariest thing about murderers is that sometimes they aren't scary.

Many times they aren't scary. And you know, as my friend Dale Baich will say, who is a longtime federal public defender, you know, you still find humanity in these people. And sometimes the scariest part is that you will talk to someone and there are so many parts of them that seem normal, and you know that there are some very bad circuits.

You talk about Ricky Wassenaar's thought that he's ridding the world of child molesters. It's like, well, you just can't do that. There are all these different personality facets that you start to see, so that it doesn't really surprise me.

Arizona Department of Corrections

DINGMAN: But there seems to be, if I'm not mistaken, some importance in your mind of presenting somebody like this in their full humanity — even in spite of the fact that he's now confessing to these incredibly brutal murders. That there is some import to that.

KIEFER: Yeah, there is, and that's why they talked to me. Because I will listen. ... Another thing that was said to me once, I think it was a police officer who said, you know, to answer the question: Why would people do this, things like this? And the answer is, you have to be like them to understand it. ... It's not explainable.

DINGMAN: So would you say that's part of the goal here, is not to explain it, but to answer that question by saying like, well, here is the person who is like this?

KIEFER: Right, and we're not going to pretend it's not horrible.

DINGMAN: It strikes me as we're talking about this that question that gets asked in situations like this — how could somebody do this? — assumes that there is a well calibrated mind making these calculations.

And if I'm hearing you right, you're saying the counter to that is not that there is a logic to it that any of us would understand, it's that there is a logic in the mind of somebody like Ricky Wassenaar. And that there is some value to having his logic, as broken as it may be, laid bare, so that we can realize how little sense it makes.

KIEFER: I think that's exactly it. It's beyond the pale that this is what he thinks he's doing.

DINGMAN: Well, Michael Kiefer is a longtime reporter around Phoenix and the state, most recently a writer for AZ Mirror. Michael, thank you for this conversation.

KIEFER: Thank you, Sam.