It’s impossible to get a cell signal from inside the ranch in San Francisquito Canyon. The house on the property sits about 25 minutes off the main road, which isn’t much of a “main road” to begin with. It’s remote and secluded, set against the Angeles National Forest, with miles and miles of woods behind it.
The 911 call came from the landline. It was the afternoon of January 31, 2015. The caller was Ricardo Medina, an actor best known for his roles in the long-running Power Rangers TV series. He told the operator he had feared for his life. He claimed his roommate—Joshua Sutter—had attacked him, and in defense, he stabbed Sutter with a nearly three-foot sword that he kept by his bedroom door for protection, he later told police. But, in the background of the 911 call, Sutter was screaming to be heard. Bloodied on the floor, in his final moments of life, he cried out, “You came at me first!!”
Only three people know what happened in the canyon that day. Medina, Sutter and Medina’s girlfriend, who saw the whole thing. One is in prison. One is dead. One may be lying.
Medina is square-jawed, with dark hair and searing green eyes. He’s athletic, with the physique of someone who spends a lot of time in the gym. Beyond his two stints on the Power Rangers—starring as the Red Lion Wild Force Ranger in the 2002 series and then returning to play a villain in another iteration of the show 10 years later—he made guest appearances on CSI: Miami and ER. But things had slowed down career-wise, and he was looking to take some time off.
It’s part of the reason he told Rachel Kennedy he wanted to move to the ranch—to get away from Hollywood. Kennedy ran a dog rescue in L.A., about an hour away, and leased the ranch property with the idea that she could expand her nonprofit operation there. Back in the 1970s, the land was a breeding ranch for Arabian horses. Dozens of her dogs were already living there. Her brother, Joshua Sutter, would later move up there to care for the animals, too. The two men were the same age—36—and according to Kennedy, both appreciated nature and loved solitude.
Kennedy had met Medina months earlier on an online dating site. Both were in the entertainment industry—Kennedy, a former model, Medina, an actor—and they both loved dogs. “The first meeting was great,” Kennedy remembers. “We just talked about dogs—dogs, dogs, dogs, dogs. He couldn’t have been more perfect for me.”
But halfway through their second date, she changed her mind. She says he made a comment about dating younger women—something she found inappropriate since she’s older than Medina—and she decided they weren’t a romantic match.
Not too long after, though, she thought of him when she was looking for help with the ranch. She needed someone on-site to take care of the dogs and fix up the place. It made sense. On their date, he’d told her he was a dog trainer. “I thought to myself, ‘This guy loves dogs as much as I do’—or so I thought,” she says. The agreement was that he would live there rent-free in exchange for taking care of the animals and providing handyman services. She put his name on the lease.
Kennedy is tall, with long, dark hair that cascades past her shoulders. She favors bright, cheery ensembles, high heels and flawless makeup. Her body is adorned with tattoos (on her forearm, shoulder and back), all of which are tributes to her late brother. “Always on my mind, forever in my heart,” reads one. “Wish you were here,” reads another. She has a warm, full smile, which brightens when she’s talking about her dogs or her brother—at least when she’s talking about the past, or “happier times” as she calls them.
The ranch was her lifelong dream. After working as a model since the age of 16, Kennedy, now in her early 40s, was at a place financially where she could finally make it a reality. For years, she owned the Lucky Puppy Rescue and retail shop, where she rescued and found homes for hundreds of dogs. The ranch would be a haven for what she calls the “unadoptables,” dogs with terminal illnesses or behavior problems that diminished their chances of finding a home. She was excited to surround herself with people like Medina, who shared her passion.
But from the moment Medina got to the ranch, she says, he was a problem. “There was a lot of work to be done and Rick did nothing; he wouldn’t lift a finger,” she says. Days when she drove up from L.A. to check on things, she says he’d be burrowed in his bedroom, either alone or with his girlfriend of a few months, Judith Chung, who came to the house frequently.
“He’s the kind of person you know not to cross the line with,” Kennedy says. “Even though he [seemed] super-sweet and kind, I knew better than to even knock on his door because I got this sense from him that he would just lose his mind.”
She says he butted heads with the landlord and different workers she hired to fix things around the ranch that Medina wasn’t fixing (despite their agreement). A couple months in, she says, she asked him to move out, but he refused. According to Kennedy, he became angry and threatened to release the dogs into the woods and let them be eaten by coyotes.
Concerned over the dogs’ welfare, Kennedy asked Sutter if he’d be willing to move to the ranch to keep an eye on things while she ran the day-to-day operations of her L.A. store. The two were close. Kennedy had actually encouraged him to move to L.A. a few years prior. Before that, Sutter had lived in Arizona and Minnesota and done odd jobs for a living—he’d just returned from working on a friend’s farm in Puerto Rico. Kennedy describes her brother as a “nature boy” and says that moving to the ranch to take care of the dogs was a dream job for him.
Medina, however, wasn’t going anywhere. “Rick told me on the phone the day before Josh moved in that I’ll never get rid of him,” she remembers. She started planning with the landlord to evict Medina. She shared emails with me from December 2014 in which the landlord offered to issue a 30-day notice to terminate the lease that lists Medina as a tenant. If he didn’t leave, they could take legal action. They planned to kick him out February 1, 2015.
It would turn out to be one day too late.
The afternoon of January 31, 2015, Sutter was on the phone with his dad in Minnesota. Donald Sutter tells me they were talking about organic gardening and Josh’s plans to plant vegetables to feed the dogs. They were just wrapping up when Chung arrived. Josh said hi to her at the door, according to her testimony in court. Medina went outside to help her get stuff out of her car and came back into the house with her.
Next, Donald Sutter heard raised voices through his end of the call—Medina and Chung. “They were arguing,” he tells me. “I asked Josh about it and he said, ‘They’re always fighting.’”
Donald Sutter says the call lasted 47 minutes and ended at 2:54 p.m Pacific time, according to his phone records.
Shortly after Joshua Sutter hung up the phone with his dad, court documents say, he and Medina got into an argument in the kitchen. Medina’s story, according to police, was that Sutter was upset that Chung had come over and that when Medina went to get some utensils for takeout Chung had brought over, there was an altercation that turned physical. At some point, Medina went back into his bedroom—where he kept the 30-inch steel blade he described to police as his “Conan the Barbarian” sword—and locked the door.
Medina told police that Sutter stormed his way in. “He says the door is forced open, and then he stabbed the victim [with the sword],” explains Sergeant Troy Ewing, who led the investigation for the L.A. County Sheriff’s Homicide Bureau. “He admitted to doing it and basically was saying it was self-defense.”
That’s when Medina called 911.
“Why did you do this, man? Why did you make me do this?” Medina says on the call.
Paramedics were dispatched to the ranch at 3:50 p.m., according to the coroner’s report. Sutter was still alive when they arrived, lying on the floor of the hallway. He was drifting in and out of “an altered level of consciousness … [with] stab wounds to his abdomen, right flank and back,” according to the coroner investigator’s initial report. There was blood everywhere. He’d lost more than a half gallon after being stabbed a total of 10 times, according to the autopsy. The ambulance took him to the emergency room, where he went into cardiac arrest and soon after, died.
Police arrested Medina when they arrived to the scene.
Detectives interviewed Medina and his girlfriend separately. “Her story was somewhat consistent with Medina’s, but there were some differences,” says Ewing. “That raised some red flags in our minds.”
According to Ewing, Medina told police that his back was to the door when it came open. Chung said Medina was facing the door. In other words: Was Medina taken by surprise with his back to the door? Or was he standing, sword in hand, facing the door, at the ready?
“There wasn’t much damage to the door either,” says Ewing. “There was some damage, but not a lot. If the door had been kicked open, we would think there’d be more damage.”
Still, Medina was steadfast: It was self-defense.
“He kept on pushing that,” says Ewing. “He didn’t want to tell us at the beginning that he was a Power Ranger either, because I think he felt that if we knew he was a Power Ranger, he should know defensive tactics.”
When Ewing presented the case to the L.A. District Attorney’s office, he says, they informed him there wasn’t enough evidence to file murder charges. In particular, the DA thought Medina’s self-defense argument might hold up. They asked Ewing and his partner to investigate further. Medina was released. (The DA declined multiple requests to be interviewed for this story.)
Medina spoke briefly to reporters outside the courthouse after he was released, saying he was “very, very sorry for what occurred,” and that he was happy to be out of jail. “My heart goes out to the Sutter family,” he said.
“That’s when I lost my shit,” Kennedy tells me. “I’ve never been the same since that day. I couldn’t believe it.”
She and her family had a lot of questions: Why was Medina released in the first place? Why wasn’t Chung arrested as an accessory? Why didn’t police take more evidence from the scene?
“I stayed away from the media for the first three days,” Kennedy says. “And then when I heard they were releasing Rick, I was like, ‘You know what? I’m going to talk to anybody and everybody that will listen to me.’”
Kennedy had photos of Medina’s bedroom door, which was intact, which she released to the media. She appeared on Good Morning America and the local news in L.A. Her goal was to put pressure on the police and to call into doubt Medina’s self-defense claim.
While investigators were waiting for results from the crime lab and the full coroner’s report, which can take months, Kennedy started pulling pieces together on her own. The crime scene cleanup company she hired took before-and-after photos. She shows me photos of the hallway where her brother was stabbed. But the blood isn’t contained to one area of the home—it’s everywhere, smeared on the floor of nearly every room. (Ewing points out that some of this is probably due to the fact that when the paramedics arrived, they moved him, bleeding, from the hallway to to a more open space in the home where they could work on him.) Kennedy also provides me with a photo of a bottle of some kind—a cleaning fluid—as if someone attempted to clean the floor. There was way too much blood, however, to even come close to making it disappear.
There’s another photo of the hall outside of her brother’s bedroom door, showing a hammer and cordless drill charger. Kennedy believes that in addition to the stabbing, Sutter was hit with the hammer—that’s why there was blood on it. When she talked to the police about it, however, she says they brushed her off.
Kennedy was developing a theory. She tells me that Medina’s stepfather is a retired law enforcement officer, and she believes he coached Medina after the killing. In fact, she says the stepfather is the one who called her the afternoon of the crime, telling her there had been an incident, that someone was hurt (not saying who) and asking for the address to the ranch.
She says the stepfather then told her to meet him at the hospital, so she headed there, still not knowing what happened. “It was just a big clusterfuck,” she says. “There’s no cell phone service [at the ranch]; communication that night was impossible for everybody.”
Medina did call his stepfather that day, but Ewing says police records show Medina called 911 first. “We were trying to prove that he did, but it didn’t look like he did. The call [to the stepfather] never went through.” Police tried to interview the stepfather the night of the killing when he came to the station for Medina, but he didn’t want to talk. Since he hadn’t witnessed the crime, Ewing tells me, “I didn’t think he was that important.”
Kennedy still believes Medina’s stepfather was involved, but Ewing says that to his knowledge, he wasn’t even at the ranch the day of the killing. If he had been, he explains, the deputies who first arrived to the scene wouldn’t have let him leave.
Instead, two key reports would give investigators a clearer picture of what happened that afternoon, and ultimately, enough evidence to re-arrest Medina. First, results from crime lab’s blood experts suggested the pattern of a struggle. “You try to re-create what happened,” Ewing says. “Anytime there’s a stabbing, they bleed a lot. So there was blood throughout the house.” Medina told police that he stabbed Sutter once in the abdomen. But the blood pattern suggested otherwise. “It appeared to be more of a struggle,” says Ewing. “Medina said it was one ‘poke’ with a sword. The expert said it was more than one.”
The coroner’s report supported the blood expert’s conclusion: 10 sharp force injuries. There were slices to Sutter’s hands and fingers, too—some so deep that a few of his fingers were almost cut off. The path of the sword’s fatal cut went left to right, front to back and upward, puncturing the liver, diaphragm, right lung lobe, fracturing a rib and exiting Sutter’s back.
The position of Medina’s attorney, Stanley L. Friedman, who spoke to me on Medina’s behalf, is that the cuts to Sutter’s hands were the result of his trying to pull the sword out of his body after he was stabbed. In other words, the wounds were from grabbing the sword. As for the irregular cut into Sutter’s abdomen: “We believe the evidence would’ve shown that, at the time, there were basically three things that were moving: Mr. Sutter, Mr. Medina and then the sword. Just the fact that these three things were moving would account for an irregular wound in Mr. Sutter’s body,” Friedman says.
Given the evidence, Ewing didn’t dismiss Medina’s self-defense argument entirely. “I thought there was some type of struggle,” he says, “but I don’t think to the extent where he had to stab the guy to death.”
Ewing also notes there were three exits from Medina’s bedroom: the door to the hallway, another door to a bathroom and a sliding glass door to the backyard. “He had several escape routes where he could have exited if he felt threatened by the victim,” says Ewing.
Plus: “Medina’s a fit guy,” he says. “You can go on the internet and see pictures of him without his shirt—he’s a physical guy. He trains hard, and he mentions in a YouTube video that he had practiced martial arts since he was a young kid. So we knew he could defend himself.”
In January 2016, just under a year after Medina was arrested the first time, police arrested him again and the district attorney charged him with murder. If convicted, he faced 26 years to life in state prison.
At the preliminary hearing, Chung, now Medina’s ex-girlfriend, took the stand. Her testimony, which should have been valuable since she was the only other witness that afternoon, was instead a combination of “I don’t remember”’s and answers inconsistent with her initial statements to police.
According to court papers, Chung said that on the afternoon Sutter was killed, she arrived at the house and honked her car horn for Medina to come out. When he didn’t, she went to the door.
“I knocked on the door and Josh answered,” Chung explained. “I said ‘Is Ricky here?,’ and he said, ‘Maybe.’” She said she went back to her car to get food she’d brought and some of her belongings. Medina met her at her car, and the two walked back to the house. After which, according to her testimony, they went straight to Medina’s room and closed the door.
“Then Ricky went to go get plates and utensils for our food,” she said. She heard arguing. The prosecutor interrupted—Chung had told police that the first time Medina left the room, she didn’t hear anything. “That’s more correct, yeah,” she responded.
Medina returned to the bedroom and then left again, Chung said. This time, she heard noises. “Thundering,” she claimed, and court papers describe her taking both hands and slamming them on the desk in front of her. “It sounded like something was hitting something,” she relayed.
She testified that she went out into the kitchen. Medina had Sutter in a bear hug; Sutter’s hands were at his sides, and he was facing away from Medina. “They were both yelling,” she said in court. “I was telling them to stop.”
Chung said at one point Medina just let go, “and Josh started hitting him.” When the prosecutor pressed, Chung conceded it was one punch, which Medina blocked before it landed. According to court documents, when Chung initially talked to police, she told them that when Medina had Sutter in the bear hug, he repeatedly said, “Don’t you dare disrespect my girl.” In court, Chung couldn’t recall that bit of dialogue. “Like I said, I don’t remember,” she said. “It was over a year ago.”
Once back in the bedroom, Chung told that court that Medina locked the door, “and then he just stayed at the knob.”
“I remember walking towards the other side of the bed. I was pacing around, and I told Ricky maybe we should get out of there,” she testified. She said Medina agreed, and she grabbed her purse.
Then, she said, she heard footsteps.
“Ricky went towards the door, and he grabbed the sword,” she claimed. “Josh kicked the locked door open with both his fists to his side. Ricky had the knife in one hand.” She demonstrated for the court, extending her hand forward.
“It felt like a dream,” Chung continued. “It didn’t seem real. … It looked like he poked [the sword]. Like, from where I was standing, it looked like a poke.”
That “poke,” of course, was the fatal wound that punctured organs, fractured a rib, and ultimately killed Sutter.
According to court papers, Chung told police that when Medina stabbed him, Sutter said, “What the fuck? Why the fuck did you do that to me?” Medina allegedly responded, “I don’t know. I’m sorry,” though Chung added that he said it “really angry.” (Testifying in court, Chung, at first, didn’t remember saying this to officers.)
“He started crawling down to his all fours after,” Chung said of Sutter. Medina, according to her testimony, pulled the sword out, and then dropped it. “He grabbed a towel from the bathroom. He put it on his (Sutter’s) wound,” she continued. Next, he called 911.
After the paramedics arrived, Medina stood outside the house in shock. “He kept saying, ‘Oh my God. My life is just changing before my eyes,’” Chung said in court.
Kennedy, who was in court that day, believes there’s a lot Chung left out, notably the bloody hammer at the scene. She points out the page in the coroner’s report documenting an abrasion on Sutter’s head. During the 911 call, “Josh was speaking very clearly,” she reminds me. “You can hear him in the background fighting for his life. I believe [someone] hit Josh with the hammer to either knock him out or shut him up.”
When I mention this hypothesis to Ewing, he stops me before I can finish the question—he’s heard this premise from Kennedy many times before. “[Kennedy] made this case more difficult for us than she realizes,” he tells me.
“I’m sure we don’t know exactly how everything transpired, but we have a pretty close idea,” Ewing says of that night in the canyon. “I’m thinking Medina minimizes what happens and probably the girlfriend too. I don’t think we’re 100 percent accurate. Ninety percent of our cases are like that.”
Ewing says Medina told police he’d borrowed the tools and left them outside Sutter’s door to return them. He adds there’s no evidence the hammer was involved in the altercation. As to the head abrasion in the coroner’s report, “That injury on his head could’ve happened [when] they were fighting outside by the kitchen,” Ewing explains. “They fell to the ground, so that could’ve been from hitting the ground. There was no evidence that the hammer was used as a weapon. The weapon used was the sword.” (According to the coroner’s report, the head injury did not contribute to Sutter’s death, and there was no skull fracture.)
In the ensuing months, Kennedy went back to the ranch to collect the dogs. “I didn’t know what to do so I took them home to Studio City [where she lived], which isn’t kosher, I guess. Maybe I had a special, weird attachment to them because I know they saw Josh be killed.” She begins to tear up. “I just wanted to take care of them.” She stops and wipes her eyes with a tissue. “I did the wrong thing.”
Last May, someone reported Kennedy to animal control. She was cited for hoarding and 60 dogs were taken from her home and the small shelter she ran. She now faces animal abuse charges, which she plans to fight. “Could things get any worse?” she asks. “And I’ll never say that again because they did get worse. Right away, the social media thing started.”
It was mainly Medina’s fans and supporters. In their opinion, the roles were reversed—Sutter was an attempted murderer and Medina was the hero. They started fund-raising campaigns to send him money in jail. Further, they lashed out at Kennedy, creating fake social media pages for her, calling her an animal abuser and a porn star. (She tells me she posed for Playboy back in the day, but has never done porn.) Consequently, she pulled down her personal social media accounts and retreated from the world.
In March, Medina pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and agreed to a six-year sentence. He’ll likely serve about four years in state prison with time already served and good behavior.
Friedman, Medina’s attorney, tells me that Medina was prepared to go to trial, and that he likely would’ve testified. “In his view, it was a matter of self-defense,” Friedman explains. “He’s a very positive individual and [was] actually looking forward to going to trial and proving his side of what happened.”
The guaranteed six-year sentence, however, was too good to pass up. “It was the numbers that drove his thinking,” says Friedman. “In California, if it’s 26 to life, it’s almost always life. If you’re lucky, perhaps you get out a little bit before you die. So the decision was, ‘Do I take this and be in custody for probably only another four years? Or [do I] risk spending the rest of my life in prison?’”
“I thought it was fair,” Ewing says. “He had no criminal record,” and the killing “wasn’t planned. It just happened.”
Also complicating matters: Sutter had a record which, Kennedy notes, could incline a jury against him. He had a DUI arrest from years before, and a battery charge that Kennedy herself brought against him. “It’s the biggest mistake I’ve ever made in my life,” she says. She tells me the story: She and her brother had an argument. He left the house and had her credit card in his wallet; she ran after him asking for it, and he threw the wallet at her. “Hits me in the face,” she says. “I’m bloody; my lip’s bleeding. He flung it. I’m like, ‘You know what? I’m going to teach him a lesson.’”
She called the police, and they arrested him, so he had a record for domestic violence against his own sister. “That was a big mistake. The DA said, ‘This doesn’t look good for Josh.’”
She shakes her head and looks down: “There’s no justice. There never would be.”
At the sentencing, I meet Kennedy outside the courthouse. It’s early morning, about 8 a.m., and she remarks how she thought it would be warmer since we’re in the desert. The courthouse is in Lancaster, about an hour northeast of L.A. She’s with her best friend and her father, who flew in from Minnesota to be here. They wrote victim impact statements to present in court. As we walk in, Kennedy laments that she’s forgotten to bring the crystal heart she had made from her brother’s ashes. “Maybe he didn’t want to be here,” she resolves. “Maybe he wanted to stay home.”
After a quick stop in the bathroom, Kennedy rushes out with a little shiver. “I just saw his mom in the bathroom,” she tells me, referring to Medina’s mother.
In the hallway, Kennedy greets her niece, Sutter’s 16-year-old daughter from a previous relationship, a delicate girl with a ballerina’s frame. She has come up from Arizona with her mother. “You’re so big!” Kennedy greets her with a hug. They haven’t seen each other in a while. “Dad, she’s almost as tall as you!”
Donald Sutter is quiet. (His wife, Josh’s mother, died of cancer in 2012.) He’s tall and lean, like his son, with thick, white hair. He looks tired. Kennedy tells me that no one really slept last night.
Sitting in the front row of the small courtroom, Donald wipes his eyes under his wire-rimmed glasses. Kennedy, her own eyes wet with tears, puts her arm around him. On the other side of the room are Medina’s friends and family. His mother is in the front row, weeping.
Medina enters from a side door, escorted by an officer. He’s bulked up in the year or so he’s been in custody. His hair is short, he has a dark goatee and wears a yellow prison uniform. He doesn’t look out into the gallery or make eye contact with anyone. He sits next to his lawyers, staring straight ahead.
Kennedy has brought childhood photos of her brother to court, and she and her father each give emotional victim impact statements through tears.
“He chose to kill, to take a life,” Kennedy says of Medina. She expressed empathy for Medina’s family, adding, “We have all lost so much.”
“We hope that everyone that looks at Ricardo from now on will never see him as a celebrity but as nothing more than a cold-blooded killer,” Sutter’s father told the court. Medina, seated, continues to stare straight ahead facing the judge, his back to Sutter.
Medina declines to make any statement.
Afterward, the family talks to the small group of reporters and local news cameras gathered outside the courthouse. “He deserves the rest of his life in general population, that’s where he deserves to be,” Sutter tells them. But his statement is brief. They’re eager to get home. To begin to put this behind them.
Kennedy now lives on a quiet street in suburban L.A. She welcomes me inside when I come to see her about a week after the sentencing. Her home is bright and airy and smells like candy. “Mandarin orange,” she says, indicating the diffuser that scents the air. Impeccably neat with matching furniture sets, the rooms are meticulously appointed, as though they’ve been staged by a realtor for an open house.
The one room that does look lived-in is Kennedy’s office. There are photos of her brother all over the walls, stacks of papers and a thick black briefcase where she keeps everything connected to her brother’s killing. Crime scene photos, phone records, the coroner’s report, printouts of emails. She has literature from police forums and the Department of Justice, research on how detectives conduct murder investigations. She and her family are convinced there were flaws in the investigation. “I don’t think Rick would be in jail if we hadn’t done what we had done,” she says.
Though she takes some comfort in that, it’s difficult to move forward, or even grieve. Kennedy has many regrets. She regrets moving Medina to the ranch. She regrets moving her brother to the ranch. She regrets ever having met Medina in the first place.
She walks me into the living room and shows me the crystal heart made from Josh’s ashes that she’d forgotten to bring to the sentencing. It’s three-dimensional, yellowish-gray, and about the size of a plum. “I bring him to every court thing,” she tells me.
“Last time I saw him, in the mortuary, I looked at him and I didn’t realize his eyelashes were so long.” She begins to weep. “Why didn’t I see that before?”
Sutter’s daughter may file a civil suit against Medina. If she does, Kennedy will help. For now, she wants people to know the man her brother was—that he’s more than a victim. He was quiet, loyal and protective. He loved nature and animals and was happiest at the ranch with the dogs.
“When he was born, he was a bubble baby,” she tells me. “He had to have open-heart surgery two or three times. He lived in an incubator for the first year of his life. That’s why he had a scar here.” With her finger, she draws a line over her own heart. “He was such a sick, sick baby,” she begins to weep again, having trouble speaking. “I think that people don’t think that he’s real.”
“People ask me, ‘Is this closure for you?’ and I feel like maybe something’s wrong with me because this is absolutely no closure whatsoever,” Kennedy continues. “What am I going to do when [Medina] is out [in four years]? I have to prevent him from having a life. He stole a life. Joshua suffered greatly. I have to make sure that he’s not going to be able to walk down the street without everyone knowing that he’s a killer. That’s my job. And that’s what I’ll keep doing.”
