http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/w ... 869486.ece
From The Sunday Times
October 11, 2009
Avenging daughter Rachel Begley traps 'killer' James Hughes
The police gave up but Rachel Begley spent 28 years hunting clues to who shot her father
Rachel Begley stayed within the law to hunt James Hughes, who had moved to Honduras
Sitting in a shopping centre in California at the age of 13, Rachel Begley was more interested in her pistachio ice cream than in the sombre story her father was trying to tell her about some “bad people” at work.
She recalls the intensity of his gaze and a brief frisson of fear but did not see the significance until a week later when he was shot dead.
The shock of the mafia-style murder not only turned a quiet teenager into a rebel who went on to become pregnant at 15 and marry at 18; it transformed her into an avenger. She continued to investigate long after the police had turned their backs on the case.
Last weekend, 28 years after the killing, police arrested a self-confessed former mafia hitman as he prepared to fly from Miami to his home in Honduras. Police say the arrest was prompted by the evidence that Begley had been painstakingly accumulating for years.
James Hughes, a former US Army Ranger and motorbike gang member, had been questioned by police shortly after the shooting in 1981. Then he had left for Honduras, where he carved out a new existence in stark contrast to his old life. He set up a refuge for abused women and called himself “the Rev Hughes”.
Hughes now stands accused of murdering Begley’s father, Ralph Boger, and two friends, Fred Alvarez and Patricia Castro. He has yet to enter a plea.
The victims had been talking on the patio of Alvarez’s home, east of Los Angeles, one hot summer’s night when an intruder pumped a single .38 bullet into the back of each head.
Alvarez was the vice-chairman of the “Cabazon Indians”, 25 people with native American ancestry who had set themselves up as a tribe in order to run a casino near Palm Springs. Castro was his girlfriend. Boger worked as a casino manager.
The head of security at the casino was Hughes, who was interviewed by the police in 1983 over an alleged confession that he had paid $25,000 to the hitman who carried out the murders. According to local newspapers, the policeman who took the statement was a cousin of Hughes. It was never followed up.
Twenty years later, however, Hughes admitted on a California church’s website that he had been a mafia hitman, with at least six kills to his name that he now regretted.
For Begley, this was the breakthrough she had been waiting for. “I track people down who owe money for a living, so I knew how to find Hughes and his associates,” she said. “Over the years through my website I gathered information and learnt how big and dangerous this all is.”
Her persistence — combined with the support of a network of contacts in central America, including police, diplomats and academics — paid off. She followed Hughes’s every move and prepared a convincing case against him.
Begley explained that she “went to war, like someone in a Hollywood movie”. She did not go quite as far as Sharon Stone in The Specialist, who hired Sylvester Stallone to blow up the mafia dons behind the murder of her family, but she admitted she had dreamt of vengeance for three decades.
“Until recently my four kids called me a crazy lady, but now they realise that there is a conspiracy here,” she said.
Last year she and Fred Alvarez’s son, Michael, confronted Hughes at a religious conference in California, where she secretly filmed him.
Hughes told them: “Your parents got killed in a mafia hit. But I don’t care who died. I was trained in the military, I killed people all over the world.”
He then warned them: “You have children. You don’t want to put your children in danger. Those children need a mother.”
Begley, 41, said she had since stepped up security at her home and had bought a gun.
She said that for years the police had shown no interest, leaving her to build up the case against Hughes on her own. Then she began working with a California sheriff, John Powers, who went to Florida to serve the arrest warrant.
“I am confident we shall expose a lot more,” she said. “My father was a tough man who did not bend when he saw injustice. He served time for shooting my grandfather when he was beating my grandmother, but he would not bend. I’ve got that too, my family says.
“My father tried to tell me, when we were sitting eating ice cream in that mall, what he was facing. But I was too young to appreciate it. Now I cannot stop because over my shoulder I can hear my father, and he’s saying, ‘You go, girl, you go’.”