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‘I wanted to kill them all’: Inmate admits to targeting child sex offenders in prison killings [1]
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Date: 2025-04-28
Photo via Getty Images
Ricky Wassenaar killed three men at an Arizona State Prison near Tucson on April 4. Two were serving life sentences for sexual conduct with a minor. The third had raped and killed a 15-year-old girl.
Wassenaar’s only regret was that he didn’t kill more.
“Child molesters: I wanted to kill them all. That’s all I can say,” he told the Arizona Mirror in a recent phone call.
But he did say more.
“The taxpayers no longer have to pay for them,” he continued. “I’m paying my debt to society.”
The Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Re-entry is investigating what happened that day. No charges have been filed yet, and a spokesperson for the Pima County Attorney’s Office said that Corrections has not yet referred its investigation to their office. The Corrections Department has not commented on the matter, other than to condemn the violence and note that it was quickly curtailed.
Wassenaar, who is known in prison as “Rooster,” is already serving 16 life sentences for his part in a 2004 jail-break attempt that ended in a 15-day hostage stand-off at the Lewis Prison in Buckeye. He has spent 38 of his 62 years in Arizona prisons, with just a four-month stint on the outside. And the Pima County Attorney, Laura Conover, has written newspaper op-eds declaring her aversion to the death penalty.
Wassenaar also claims he killed a fourth prisoner last November because he didn’t want to share a cell. He says he strangled the man with his bare hands, but Corrections didn’t believe him and the autopsy conducted by the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner could not definitively determine that the man — also a sex offender — was murdered.
Nonetheless, he insisted that he killed the man, telling an investigator from his last trial and a prison advocate who relayed the information to Corrections that he would kill anyone else they assign to his cell.
“You’ve got to give him an ‘A’ for effort,” said Carlos Garcia, the president of the Arizona Correctional Peace Officers Association.
The Corrections Department was playing chicken with Wassenaar, Garcia said: “He told them he was going to kill someone. They didn’t listen, and he did it.”
‘I’m a killer now’
I last spoke to Wassenaar 20 years ago, while he was defending himself in trial for the attempted escape and prison takeover. I distinctly recall the sheriff’s detention officer escorting me to a holding cell, locking me in with Wassenaar and then leaving.
Like many accused and convicted criminals I have interviewed, Wassenaar was a paradox: a grab-bag of hatreds and loyalties, with a strict code of honor despite his lawlessness.
On the day I interviewed him, he fretted over the fact that it was my wife’s birthday; shouldn’t I be home with her? He talked about his own mother, how he wanted to be imprisoned close enough to his native Michigan so that she could visit him. And when she died, he told me, he wasn’t sure he still wanted to stay alive. He is still close to his sister, Rhonda, who talks to him regularly, and who was herself convicted of a conspiracy to spring him from custody when he was to be transferred to Ohio to serve his sentence.
What I remember most vividly is his account of why he was sent to Lewis Prison in the first place.
In 1986, Wassenaar was arrested for armed robbery and aggravated assault. I know nothing about those crimes, but after 10 years, he was released on home arrest and was staying with a family in Tucson.
He had a whole list of people he was angry at when he got out, and he told me the anger buzzed in his head like a hive of bees.
He had been out more than four months when he walked into a Tucson video shop with the intent of renting a pornographic video. The shop clerk asked him for a phone number and Wassenaar didn’t want to give the only number he had, which belonged to the people he was staying with.
The clerk ridiculed him. So, the next night, Wassenaar came back with a gun and held up the shop. Then he took off in a car and led police on a high-speed chase that ended in a crash.
Wassenaar said he woke up on a hospital gurney. There was a TV set right above him showing the evening news and flashing his photograph. Suddenly, the buzzing had stopped, he told me, and he realized he was going back to prison.
Last week, during our phone call, I reminded him of our earlier conversations.
“I was a whole different person then,” he said. And when I asked him how so, he answered, “I’m a killer now. I was never a killer before.”
The 15-day siege
In January 2004, Wassenaar almost escaped from prison. But instead of making it outside the prison walls, he and his prison mate ended up starting the longest ever hostage situation at a prison.
He had worked in the prison legal library and felt he was discriminated against by prison management in ways he was punished, a belief that has been a running theme throughout his prison life.
He now worked in the kitchen as a cook, and he put together a plan with another inmate in the kitchen, Steven Coy. On a January morning, when they knew the mess hall would be understaffed, they sprung the plan. Wassenaar overpowered a correctional officer, handcuffed him and took his uniform. He shaved off his own beard to more closely resemble a correctional officer. He asked the other prisoners in the cafeteria if they wanted to join him, but they refused. So, he headed out the door to a nearby guard tower. The guard tower was a short stop on the way to the prison administration building and a door outside of the prison to freedom.
One of the guards on duty in the tower, Jason Auch, mistook Wassenaar for the officer he had overpowered and buzzed him in. Wassenaar pulled his cap down until Auch reached him, then pulled a metal paddle from one of the kitchen’s industrial mixers out of the pocket of his cargo pants and smacked Auch across the side of the head, knocking him nearly senseless. The second guard in the tower, Lois Fraley, charged him, but he subdued her and handcuffed her. Then, taking an automatic rifle from the tower, he went to see what was holding up Coy.
Wassenaar later said he knew little about why Coy had been in prison. Coy was a convicted rapist, and while Wassenaar was taking the tower, Coy was raping a female civilian worker in the kitchen. Otherwise, they might have pulled off an escape.
When Wassenaar stepped out of the tower, other correctional officers had Coy spread-eagled on the ground. Wassenaar sprayed bullets over their heads. One of them asked who he was shooting at, to which Wassenaar answered, “You!” The officers retreated and Wassenaar pulled Coy into the tower.
The next 15 days were high drama as Wassenaar negotiated with prison officials and other law-enforcement agencies. At one point, during a whispered phone call, Wassenaar told negotiators that he had sent Coy to the tower where they could get a shot at him. Sharpshooters drew a bead on a person in the tower they thought was Coy, then held fire when they realized it could be Auch. Wassenaar made demands for Philly cheesesteaks, Coke, cigarettes and meatball subs, and raged if he didn’t get them. He screamed at the hostage negotiators, once while he held a shotgun to Auch’s head and another time when he threatened to cut off one of Fraley’s fingers.
Coy raped Fraley. Wassenaar was also charged and convicted of sexual assault for an incident that took place during the early hours of the siege. They were on the floor of the tower, below the windows to avoid the snipers, and Wassenaar was pulling off Fraley’s pants to give them to Coy to wear as a disguise. Her underwear came off with her pants, and Wassenaar allegedly put his finger in her vagina at that moment and made remarks. He denied it happened, but the jury concluded that it did.
Eventually, Coy and Wassenaar surrendered after getting assurances that they would be transferred to prisons out of Arizona. They had a last meal with a couple of beers before they left the tower.
Courtroom drama
The trial began a year and a day after the start of the siege. It was a circus. Wassenaar chose to defend himself, and he was well matched by the prosecutor, Deputy Maricopa County Attorney Jeanette Gallagher, a tough-talking Chicagoan with a glare and a growl that was just as intimidating as Wassenaar’s.
Coy had already pleaded guilty and was sentenced to seven consecutive life sentences, to start after the 185 years he was already serving. He was whisked off to a prison in Maine.
Wassenaar had attended the pretrial proceedings in shackles and jail stripes. But during the trial, he was dressed out in civilian clothes with a stun belt under his shirt and nylon bands binding his legs to his chair.
At times it was amusing, and admittedly, the media who attended the overflow courtroom was at times charmed by Wassenaar. Once, when he took the witness stand before the jury came in, Wassenaar grabbed the microphone and pretended he was a club DJ, asking for song suggestions and then saying he was going to play the Lynyrd Skynyrd song “Free Bird.” On multiple occasions, Gallagher would storm out of the courtroom and utter angry epithets that journalists could not report.
When Judge Warren Granville asked Wassenaar how far he had gone in school. Wassenaar answered, “DOC documents will tell you I have a GED. Others will tell you I have a Master’s Degree in being a dumbass.”
Auch, the male correctional officer taken hostage, withered on the stand under Wassenaar’s questioning. Fraley, however, was confident and unyielding. She told the jury how Wassenaar would make her mop blood and urine off the floor. She fantasized about dumping the buckets over his head and jumping from the tower.
“A couple of broken legs, I would have been satisfied with,” she said.
On another day, Wassenaar’s withering gaze was countered by Maricopa County Sheriff’s Sgt. Kip Rustenburg, who had been one of the hostage negotiators during the siege. When Wassenaar said something offensive, she flashed her eyes and smiled at him slyly, without saying a word. He had to turn away, half laughing, but clearly intimidated.
And though he denied the sex assault charges and attempted murder charges for shooting at correctional officers, the jury found him guilty of 19 counts. He was sentenced to 16 life sentences, a harsh enhancement for committing the crimes while he was already in prison.
Wassenaar was sent to a prison in Ohio. He was later transferred to New Mexico, out of sight and out of mind, before coming back to a prison in Tucson in 2016, and housed in a sex-offender unit. In Wassenaar’s mind, he was sent back because Charles Ryan, then the Corrections director, “Wanted his pound of flesh.” Wassenaar had embarrassed the department. Ryan, he said, “wanted revenge before he died.”
‘I wanted to kill them all’
Much of the following account comes from my recent conversation with Wassenaar. He was calling from prison, limited in time. The phone cut off in mid-sentence. Other information comes from court records and from conversations with Donna Hamm, of the prison advocacy organization Middle Ground. Hamm has spoken to various people with knowledge of the events. None of it, other than the victims’ names, has been confirmed by the corrections department or the Pima County Attorney’s Office.
Wassenaar told Hamm that he didn’t want to share a cell with another prisoner. When they moved Joseph Desisto into the cell, Wassenaar told Hamm he tried to block the door to keep him out.
Desisto, 81, had been convicted of multiple counts of child sex abuse and sexual conduct with a minor.
Desisto was found dead in the cell on Nov. 5, 2024, which Wassenaar made a point of reminding me was Election Day. Wassenaar said he strangled Desisto.
“I choked him with an arm bar, and then with my hands,” he told me. And he said that he was dripping sweat all over Desisto from the effort, something he told Hamm as well, and said he left DNA evidence on Desisto’s body.
Desisto’s autopsy noted Wassenaar’s allegation, but the medical examiner found no signs of strangulation: there were no marks on Desisto’s neck and his hyoid bone — an indicator of strangulation if broken — was intact. He had broken ribs, according to the report, a common injury that occurs during CPR, and Wassenaar volunteered that prison EMTs had in fact broken Desisto’s ribs.
The cause of death was inconclusive.
Wassenaar told Hamm and me that he got the equivalent of a 30-day time-out even though he confessed to killing the cell mate.
He called his former trial investigator. He called Hamm. He wanted to be implicated in Desisto’s death. He thought Desisto’s family would want to know what happened to him.
Hamm asked him, “Why would you kill someone if you’re so concerned about their family?”
He said he just wanted to be alone. But he insisted on his guilt. “I gave a detailed account,” he told me.
He told Hamm he had made it clear to his keepers that, if they put anyone else in his cell, he would kill them, too.
“He wants to do his time the way he wants to do it,” she said.
In the meantime, in December, on the anniversary of his mother’s death, he said, he picked out a good-sized rock from the prison yard and saved it in his cell.
By the morning of April 4, prison authorities had put an inmate named Saul Alvarez in Wassenaar’s cell. Alvarez had kidnapped a 15-year-old girl in 1998, raped her and killed her. Hamm had been told that Wassenaar suffocated him and stabbed him to death with a shank and arranged Alvarez’s body on his bed to make it look like he was asleep. He took the rock he had saved and put it in his fishnet laundry bag and headed out to the prison yard.
In the yard, other prisoners were starting to assemble in line for breakfast. Outside the mess hall door was a long passageway enclosed in chain-link fence that the prisoners call “the cage.” Wassenaar came in and started swinging his rock.
He felt he had jumped the gun.
“If I had waited until they were all locked in that cage, I would have killed ten or twelve,” he said.
Instead, he killed two, Thorne Harnage and Donald Lashley, both of whom were serving life sentences for sexual conduct with a minor. Another prisoner tried to stop him, and Wassenaar said he stabbed him.
He was overpowered before he had finished, he told me.
“I wanted to kill them all.”
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Last updated 2:03 p.m., Apr. 28, 2025
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