The Tragic Death Of Dave Navarro's Mother Explained

It was February 1983, and 15-year-old Dave Navarro — long before he would find fame as the guitarist for the alternative rock band Jane's Addiction — was alone at his mother Connie Navarro's house in West Los Angeles. His mother and father, who were divorced, shared custody of their son. Connie, a model, had been dating a bodybuilder named John "Dean" Riccardi for a few years, but by then they had broken up and he had begun stalking her. Dave was sick in bed, and his mother was out on her morning jog when he heard what sounded like someone breaking into the condo.

Riccardi came in, pointed a gun at Dave, handcuffed him, and left him in the bathroom. After confronting Connie once she got home, Riccardi returned to the bathroom and let Dave go, telling him not to tell anyone what had happened. "And I didn't," Dave recalled 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 and killed both Connie and her best friend, Sue Jory.

John Riccardi wasn't all he seemed to be. No one was certain how he made his money. As it turned out, he had a secret life as a burglar. He used these skills to relentlessly terrorize Connie Navarro over the course of several months before he eventually murdered her. He broke into her house on numerous occasions and pursued her everywhere she went. A note that Connie began writing to Riccardi illustrates just how completely he had ruined her life. 

"I'm so sorry that you're still so angry and you feel a need for vengeance and punishment," she wrote (via court documents). "You're accomplishing your goal. I feel like a walking dead person going through the motion of life. Like a small wild animal who knows it's surrounded by a pack of wolves." On the night of her murder, Connie had returned to her condo after Riccardi had promised to leave her alone. Instead, he again broke into her home — most likely through the skylight — and shot her twice in the chest as they argued. He shot Sue Jory once in the head. He dragged Connie's body and stuffed it in a linen closet, leaving her friend on the floor. Dave wasn't home at the time but believes if he had been, he too would have died. It was a tragic chapter in the untold truth of his life.

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 condo after she failed to show up at an appointment and found the bodies. Dave's cousin, Dan, was there when the police told her son what had happened. "It was a scene I never want to see again," he recalled. "It's as devastating as anything could be." The murders haunted the guitarist — they exacerbated his addiction issues and became an overarching part of his tragic real-life story. He also turned to music for solace, which would serve him in the years to come.

As Dave Navarro and his bandmates in Jane's Addiction began their rise to fame with a unique sound that combined aspects of hard rock, psychedelia, and punk, the man who had murdered his mother remained at large. Riccardi continued his burglary career and was suspected of more than 100 break-ins from New York to Miami. He also got plastic surgery to alter 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 when they got him," Dave Navarro recalled on "America's Most Wanted" (via the Irish Examiner). "It was an amazing feeling. It was such an amazing sense of joy and anger and hurt and confusion."

Four months after his arrest, Riccardi nearly escaped during a meeting with his lawyers in a federal courthouse when he smashed a window, got onto a balcony, and held officers at bay for nearly 12 hours before giving himself up. A Los Angeles jury found Riccardi guilty of two counts of first-degree murder and related crimes in 1994 and sentenced him to death. The ruling was later reversed, and he is currently serving life without the possibility of parole. Dave Navarro, for the documentary "Mourning Son," met with Riccardi in prison. "I wanted it to make me feel scorn and anger and rage, and it just didn't," he told The New York Times in 2015. Instead, the musician concluded that "he's just some old dude dying in jail." Riccardi, now 89, remains in prison in Chino, California.