The tragic death of Dave Navarro’s mother explained

It was February 1983, and 15-year-old Dave Navarro was alone in his mother Connie Navarro’s West Los Angeles home – long before he found fame as the guitarist for the alternative rock band Jane’s Addiction. His mother and divorced father shared custody of their son. Connie, a model, had been dating a bodybuilder named John “Dean” Riccardi for several years, but by then they had already broken up and he began stalking her. Dave was sick in bed and his mother was out for a morning jog when he heard what sounded like someone had broken into the apartment.

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Riccardi came in, pointed a gun at Dave, handcuffed him and left him in the bathroom. After confronting Connie at home, Riccardi returned to the bathroom, let Dave go and told him not to tell anyone what had happened. “And I didn’t,” Dave recalls in the book Whores: An Oral Biography Of Perry Farrell And Jane’s Addiction. “A week later he killed my mother.” On the night of March 3, 1983, Riccardi shot both Connie and her best friend Sue Jory.

John Riccardi wasn’t all he seemed. No one was sure how he made his money. It turns out he led a secret life as a burglar. He used these skills to relentlessly terrorize Connie Navarro for several months before finally murdering her. He broke into her house several times and followed her wherever she went. A note that Connie began writing to Riccardi shows how completely he had ruined her life.

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“I’m so sorry that you are still so angry and feel a need for revenge and punishment,” she wrote (via court documents). “You reach your goal. I feel like a dead man walking through the motion of life. Like a small wild animal that knows it’s surrounded by a pack of wolves.” On the night of her murder, Connie had returned to her apartment after Riccardi had promised to leave her alone. Instead, he broke into her house again – most likely through the skylight – and shot her twice in the chest during the argument. He shot Sue Jory once in the head. He dragged Connie’s body away, stuffed it into a linen closet, and left her friend on the floor. Dave was not home at the time but believes he too would have died if he had been there. It was a tragic chapter in the inexplicable truth of his life.

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After murdering the two women, John Riccardi fled Los Angeles and went on the run. The next morning, Dave Navarro’s father, Mike, went to his ex-wife’s apartment after she failed to show up for an appointment and found the bodies. Dave’s cousin Dan was there when police told their son what had happened. “It was a scene I never want to see again,” he recalled. “It’s as devastating as it can be.” The murders haunted the guitarist – exacerbating his addiction problems and becoming an overarching part of his tragic real-life story. He also sought solace in music, which would serve him well in the years to come.

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As Dave Navarro and his Jane’s Addiction bandmates began their rise to fame with a unique sound that combined aspects of hard rock, psychedelia and punk, the man who murdered his mother remained at large. Riccardi continued his career as a burglar and was suspected in more than 100 burglaries from New York to Miami. He also had plastic surgery to change his face.

Then in 1991, nearly eight years after the murders, police arrested John Riccardi in Houston, Texas. The television show “America’s Most Wanted” had aired an episode about the case, and a viewer tipped off police to Riccardi’s whereabouts. “I’ll never forget the day they got him,” Dave Navarro recalled on “America’s Most Wanted” (via the Irish Examiner). “It was an incredible feeling. It was such an incredible feeling of joy and anger and pain and confusion.”

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Four months after his arrest, Riccardi nearly escaped during a meeting with his lawyers in a federal courthouse when he broke a window, climbed onto a balcony and held officers at bay for nearly 12 hours before surrendering. A Los Angeles jury found Riccardi guilty of two counts of first-degree murder and related offenses in 1994 and sentenced him to death. The verdict was later overturned and he is currently serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole. Dave Navarro met with Riccardi in prison for the documentary “Mourning Son.” “I wanted myself to feel contempt, rage and rage, but that just wasn’t happening,” he told The New York Times in 2015. Instead, the musician concluded that “he’s just an old guy in prison dies.” Riccardi, now 89, remains in prison in Chino, California.

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