Carmina's next chapter
By RANDI ROSSMANN
The photo, locked away for 20 years in court archives, reveals a tiny girl caked in blood and dirt, staring through the eyes of a 3-year-old as the only family survivor of her father’s murderous rampage.
Carmina Salcido, now 23, still offers a direct gaze through those large blue eyes as she talks candidly about surviving one of Sonoma County’s most notorious attacks.
“I’m told I’m so strong. I do have my breaking points. The very heroic part of this is to try to move through this looking, feeling and acting as a normal person,” she said as she sipped on juice at a downtown Santa Rosa coffee house.
The toddler Carmina was discovered in a county dump with her throat slit. Yet she was the lucky one.
Her two sisters, her mother, two child-aged aunts, her grandmother and a winery worker were butchered by Ramon Salcido on April 14, 1989.
He is on Death Row, seeking reconciliation with his daughter and speaking of God. She’s back in Sonoma County, having survived not only the attack, but what she says were abusive years growing up in the Midwest.
The elements of a best-seller?
She’s hoping so with the release this week of her autobiography, “Not Lost Forever,” co-written by Steve Jackson. The story also comes to the nation Friday in an hourlong ABC documentary on the TV news magazine “20/20.”
She said the book and the show are key pieces of her efforts to heal and move away from her troubled past and toward a brighter future, prompting a measure of optimism from the young adult: “I’m excited.”
Salcido appears older than her 23 years and bears a striking resemblance to her mother, Angela, who was 24 when she was shot and killed at the family’s Boyes Hot Springs home.
Her scar is tucked under her jawline and not always apparent as she talks. But it’s a reminder of the headline-grabbing words she spoke to police and doctors at Petaluma Valley Hospital in 1989: “Daddy cut me.”
Today, she has far more to say, but the message is equally simple: “I want to go out and give people hope.”
Her nearly 300-page book tells the story of that horrendous April 14 and of her life since, blending photos, family details, news reports and memories of those who rescued and cared for her.
Although not quite 3 years old at the time, Salcido said she remembers clearly her father’s actions at the dump. He took her two sisters, one at a time, placed them over his legs and quietly cut their throats before dropping them over an embankment. He then did the same to her.
Much of her story is devoted to her years away from Sonoma County. Her grief-stricken grandfather, Bob Richards, found a couple in the Midwest to adopt her, believing it would give her a fresh start.
They were members of Tradition, Family and Property, a conservative Catholic group that the Richards family had joined.
But Salcido said it was like going “from the frying pan into the fire,” citing a cloistered life filled with loneliness and abuses.
She wore only skirts or dresses, no makeup was allowed, and she was kept away from boys. Her new parents, twice the age of her biological parents, spanked her with a wooden spoon, slapped her face and poured Tabasco sauce on her tongue if she acted out, she writes in her book.
“You’re going to end up like your mother,” she said she was told, if she acted willfully.
She refers to her adoptive parents by using pseudonyms, noting, “They’re in their 70s now. Let it be. God will take care of it, or a higher power.”
Escape from her life came at age 17, when she moved into a Carmelite convent, planning to become a nun as part of her strict Catholic upbringing. But she said a combination of health problems and growing depression ended that effort.
At 18, she finally moved from the rigidity of her earlier life to one without boundaries. She stayed briefly with her grandfather, who’d moved to Montana, and then came to California, near Sacramento, to stay with two of her mother’s older brothers.
That was the time “to live out all my rambunctiousness,” she said. “That was my Goth period.”
It also began an exploration into what had occurred in April 1989, and she gave her first interviews about those events.
“I started getting phone calls, ‘I remember you and your family, ’” she said she was told in warm greetings from strangers.
Mike Brown, a former Sonoma County sheriff’s sergeant who led the investigation into the Salcido murders and helped bring the killer back from Mexico for trial, contacted her to offer his support.
It’s a relationship she’s relied on heavily, she said, calling him a father figure who has helped her navigate the past few years. Brown figures prominently in her book; much of the story is told through his eyes as the supervising detective.
“I feel protective of her, and I’m here for her,” said Brown. “I think she’s finally getting the attention she believes she is due. I wholeheartedly support her efforts.”
At 19, Carmina Salcido also decided she was ready to move back to Sonoma County and has spent most of the past four years in Sonoma Valley living not far from the home of her early childhood.
“The atmosphere, the people, it feels like home to me,” she said.
In her quest for a book, she contacted high-powered lawyer Gloria Allred and found a publisher. The publisher hired Steve Jackson, known for his true crime books, and the two began collaborating.
With the book’s release, she’s taking a break from her job as a dog groomer to promote her story.
Two advances helped pay the rent, and she said whatever money she’ll make from sales will be a “little bonus,” admitting she struggles each month financially.
But money is not the only reason to tell her story, she said.
“Emotionally, I’ve matured very quickly over the past three years.” Much of that has come from facing the horrors of her past. For the book and “20/20” TV crew, she’s returned to the places where her family was killed, including where she was found on Stage Gulch Road near Petaluma.
“I felt all kinds of emotions all at once,” she said of her return to the site. “It was the last place I saw or was with my sisters ... It will always be hard for me to be there,” she said.
Her future, she hopes, will include a movie deal — “I’d love to play my mom’s role” — and then next year she wants to take her dream shot at “American Idol.”
She has the backstory to impress: The knife that slit her throat just missed her vocal chords, and her voice wins praise from friends.
“She sang for (my wife) Arlyn and I in our living room. I tell you, it made me cry,” Brown said.
“My last recollection of her (as a child) was watching the surgeon probe her throat, his gloved hand examining the wound to her throat,” said Brown, who retired as a sheriff’s captain. “To go from that image to hear her lovely singing voice was just amazing to me. It was nothing short of a miracle.”
She has given up on one dream — the dream of ever hearing a genuine apology from her father, whom she refers to as “Ramon.”
“I had a lot of high hopes,” she said about repeated trips to San Quentin State Prison starting when she was 19. “There’s no sincerity about anything in him at all.”
“It’s just words,” she said. “I’m not trying to put him down as a soul or a human being, but he’s sick.”
While Ramon Salcido remains on Death Row, the photo of the bloodied little girl on the Petaluma hospital bed remains protected in court archives, one of thousands of pieces of evidence from his trial being saved, should it be needed again.
The photo is there along with the bloodied, serrated knife he used on his victims and the gun he used to kill his wife and winemaker Tracy Toovey and to wound his winery supervisor, Ken Butti. There also are Salcido family photo albums depicting the start of a family life wiped away.
Ramon Salcido’s latest appeal was denied in June. He does not yet have an execution date. But if that day ever comes, Carmina Salcido said she’s ready to be there to witness it.
“I’ve gone back and forth and back and forth. Lately I’m leaning toward the fact I’d probably be there,” she said.
But whether it would be to support him or in support of herself and her slain family, she doesn’t know.
“I know one thing. I will feel justice has been served. I will be sighing a ... breath of relief when he’s gone.”
You can reach Staff Writer Randi Rossmann at 521-5412 or randi.rossmann@pressdemocrat.com.