Post Mortem | The Love Bombing of Gloria Choi

0:10Natalie Morales:Welcome back to Postmortem. I'm your host, 48 Hours correspondent Anne-Marie Green. And today we are discussing the case of Gloria Choi, who was shot in her car after being forced off the road by another vehicle in Lakewood, Washington. Now, Gloria alleged that her ex-boyfriend, Billy Rickman, was stalking and harassing her. And in a 48-hour period, two days before she was murdered, law enforcement was contacted four separate times about Rickman's escalating behavior. And Gloria's family believes the justice system failed her. So joining me today is 48 Hours correspondent Natalie Morales, who reported on this case.

0:50Natalie Morales:Natalie, it's good to speak with you again. Good to be back with you, Anne-Marie. And, you know, I think Gloria Choi's story is sadly a cautionary tale. I think a lot of people can relate to, you know, falling in love with the wrong person sometimes. But from what we know, Gloria did everything she could once she realized this relationship was not good for her. She tried to end it and she thought that the police and that the law would protect her. Unfortunately, as you know, that was not the case in this tragedy. Yeah, but I think there are a lot of lessons to be learned here. So we will get into this.

1:23Natalie Morales:I want to remind everyone, if you haven't watched or listened to this episode, it's called The Love Bombing of Gloria Choi. Go check it out right now and then come on back for our conversation. So, Natalie, in watching The Hour, I felt I got a real sense of just how hardworking, how beloved Gloria Choi was by her family, by her friends. You know, she had this great career in the family business, running these hotels. She was really devoted to her son. It is hard to be a single parent. And so I'm always impressed when I hear about single parents succeeding. And in May of 2021, she meets Billy Rickman, who is staying at the hotel that she's managing.

2:06Natalie Morales:He has this larger than life personality and immediately introduces himself to her. But what was it about Rickman that she was attracted to? Well, I think it was that lifestyle of hers. As you said, she was a busy, single mom. She worked really hard. She didn't have a lot of time to date. You saw her friend and her co-worker, Brianna, in our hour. And she said that Rickman talked a big game, seemed to say all the things that Gloria wanted to hear. He was also very proud to have her as his girlfriend. He paid a lot of attention to her. And he had formed this bond with her son. You know, we saw some of those texts and those exchanges where Rickman is professing his love.

2:47And they're so over the top. You know, I want you. I can't wait to see what life has in store for us. My heart is yours. The Choi family attorney, Megan Driscoll, says Gloria was basically love bombed, that over the top expression of love.

3:03Natalie Morales:Definitely. I think probably a lot of people have experienced love bombing and, you know, it feels wonderful, but there's always sort of a little bit of an edge where you're like, geez, we just we just met. I mean, but if they do it well, and obviously he did, it's you can get lured in by it within weeks. Right. Gloria and Rickman, they became a couple, but he began staying at the Oyo Hotel because she stays there and works there. Gloria's parents do not approve of this relationship. They want Rickman out. And so they say to her, listen, you know, you can stay at the hotel and be the manager or you can leave.

3:40Natalie Morales:And she chooses to leave with him. In September 2021, Gloria moved to a new apartment with Rickman and her son and took a new job as a manager at the Holiday Inn Express. But it wasn't long after that that Gloria really started to realize that Rickman was not the guy that he was making himself out to be. Right. Yeah. According to Gloria's friend, Brianna, Gloria told her Rickman was often mean. He was showing his angry side. He started to drink in excess and was using drugs. But when it came down to it, you know, how was he making money? It really, according to Brianna, was Gloria that was providing for him.

4:23And Gloria told her that Rickman just refused to get a job. Now, Gloria also, I think, suspected that Rickman was tracking her and she told Brianna she found an Apple AirTag in her truck. She said that she feared he'd hidden more there in order to be able to track her. And, you know, that became more obvious once she moved out and tried to rid herself of him.

4:48Natalie Morales:Hmm. Well, there's a theme here when we talk about living off a woman. You introduce us to a woman named Aja who said that Rickman sex trafficked her when she was a 14 year old runaway in California. Can you share any more details what we learned about Rickman's past? Yeah, it's interesting because according to the prosecutors, Rickman, he did have some convictions for drug and firearms offenses in California. But it was when he was in California and in Oakland in particular that he met Aja Hual. Now, according to Aja, she met Rickman when she was just 14 years old. Rickman was in his 30s, so huge age difference there.

5:30But Aja told us that when she met him, he knew that she was being trafficked. But by somebody else, he seemed as if he wanted to get her away from her trafficker. But he ends up becoming her trafficker. And really, you know, Aja's story is so remarkable in the hour because even though she missed a lot of high school, she managed to go back and get her GED when she was 17 years old. She went on, got her master's degree from UC Berkeley. from the Public Affairs School, the Goldman School, and she's now working as a consultant. That's amazing. She is such a success story.

6:07Natalie Morales:She really is. That is truly inspiring. And to think, like, she had gone through all of this and, you know, transformed her life. Meanwhile, Rickman clearly hasn't changed his ways at all. But, you know, Gloria figures this out. It takes about six months after meeting Rickman, and she ends the relationship. She moves back in with her parents, but Rickman refuses to return her truck, which she had borrowed. So she reports him to the police. In that first incident, the officer responds very quickly. Rickman is arrested. He is thrown in jail for a couple of days before a judge then slaps him with a very strict no contact order.

6:49Natalie Morales:But after his release, Rickman continues to harass her. And it seems like after that, the police response sort of slows. It's much weaker. Why? Well, this is a case of two different police departments at the time. You know, there was the city of Tumwater Police Department and Lakewood. And so Gloria and Rickman, where they were living, was Tumwater. And that's where, you know, Gloria reported that Rickman refused to get back her truck. It was the Tumwater police officer who recognized that Rickman seemed to be a danger to Gloria. And so he asked the judge to issue a domestic violence no contact order.

7:29Gloria then moved. She switched jobs to the Holiday Inn Express. That happened to be in Lakewood, where a lot of those other incidents happened. For example, when she was meeting with her friend Jacob and her car was broken into and the laptops were stolen, she reported that to Lakewood police. And Gloria said that she suspected it was Rickman because when she was meeting with Jacob, she got this email instantly from Rickman that said, wow, you left me for another guy. And, you know, the Lakewood officer said he was going to call Rickman. He said he left a voicemail saying police wanted to speak with him.

8:07Gloria and her friend Jacob Blue, they go back to the Holiday Inn Express and they see, you know, Jacob's car. Now they discover his car tires had been slashed as well. They called Lakewood police again. And because she worked at the hotel, she was able to show the responding officers surveillance footage. And it showed, you know, the shadowy figure of a guy apparently slashing the tires. But because the surveillance footage was a little bit grainy and you couldn't make out his face very clearly, Lakewood police said it was too unclear. They couldn't see him and they couldn't identify, in fact, that it was Rickman.

8:44Now, all of these instances are examples that Megan Driscoll, the Choi family attorney, says were clear violations of the no contact order. In fact, Driscoll says Gloria would eventually give Lakewood police a seven page document that listed all the ways she said Rickman violated the no contact order.

9:04Natalie Morales:Here's the thing about it, too, is experts will always tell domestic violence victims to document everything. And here Gloria is writing it down. She is basically taking the investigation into her own hands. What else did she note in this document? This is an important lesson that we can all take away from this story. I mean, she really did document everything in that seven-page list, including screenshots with text messages, numerous missed calls that she kept getting from his friends from blocked numbers or numbers that were not identifiable. And by the way, according to Megan Driscoll, that seven page document, the prosecutors never even saw it because it was found later in a sealed envelope in a police file.

9:55Prosecutor Greg Greer said he had never even seen it. It wasn't opened or found until after the homicide conviction.

10:02Natalie Morales:So I thought this was really interesting in the hour. 48 Hours spoke to Russ Hicks. He's an expert hired by the prosecution who worked as an instructor at the police academy and taught the three Lakewood officers that were involved in this case. I absolutely thought he was going to defend them. And then he did not. He was surprised to learn that the officers did not seem to follow the training, the very training and guidelines that he gave them. I want to play a clip from that interview. The training specifically states that they should recognize escalating behavior. And this was escalating because there were four incidents in a 48-hour period.

10:42So having that he's armed with a deadly weapon, that he's slashing tires repeatedly in the same location, and that nothing's being done, they should have recognized that this is a pattern of escalating behavior and they should have intervened. intervene. Megan Driscoll told us this was sadly as foreseeable a tragedy as it could possibly be. We should point out the Lakewood Police Department said they couldn't really identify Billy Rickman as the man slashing the tires and walking away. But Russ Hicks said the official training says that in domestic violence cases, you know, they generally do escalate in nature.

11:25And the official response is always protect the victim. So he does not believe, you know, that the procedures were followed. And while one officer said he drove around and he was looking for Rickman's car, there apparently was no record of that. And there didn't seem to be more of an attempt to find him.

11:49Natalie Morales:So then I'm wondering what Hicks recommends that the officers should have done differently. Well, Russ Hicks says the one thing that the police absolutely failed on was that in a situation like this, you put out a bolo alert, be on the lookout. In this case, they knew what kind of vehicle Rickman was driving at the time. And also, Russ Hicks points out, you know, the officer who reportedly said he left a voicemail for Rickman, he said that is the last thing a police officer should be doing because that actually can escalate the situation further in domestic violence cases. And Hicks also pointed out that police didn't even show up in person when Gloria called 911 to report the tire slashing.

12:35He said, again, the number one priority is to show up, secure the scene. You cannot do that by phone. But in its defense, the Lakewood Police Department said nobody witnessed Rickman directly commit these acts. No witness was able to provide a location for Rickman. So they say probable cause was not established.

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14:01Natalie Morales:Welcome back. So on January 2nd, 2022, the evening of Gloria's murder, she calls 911 again after she is forced off the road by a pickup truck while driving home. You played that 911 call in the hour, some of it. And I have to say, from what we heard, it was painful to listen to. She is clearly terrified. And we couldn't even play that much of it because it is way too disturbing and graphic. You're hearing Gloria Choi, her last moments alive, and she was terrified. And it was played in full to a stunned jury. And in the course of that 911 call, you hear the 14 shots fired. You hear her screaming through several of those first shots because we know she didn't die instantly.

14:54And she was suffering. Prosecutor Greg Greer spoke Korean because he served in the Air Force. And he says on that 911 call, her last words are oma, oma or oma. And that is the word for mother, mom in Korean. which just breaks your heart. And one other thing, her young son had just turned eight the day before. She, in fact, was on her way home at the time because, you know, he wanted to eat with his mother and he wouldn't eat without her. And that's where she was going when Rickman pinned her car and then killed her.

15:32Natalie Morales:And it sort of reinforces the connection that we learned that she has with her family, how important family was, that it is her mother that she cries out for. It's her son that she's going home to see. And these are people that Rickman would have known. He would have lived with her and her son. So after Billy Rickman, though, kills Gloria, he seems to just sort of disappear into the night. How was he able to evade police for several days? You know, Rickman had a support system and the people who helped him, they actually testified at the trial. However, they were not charged. Prosecutors believe a friend, in fact, armed him, gave him a gun a couple of days before he then went and killed Gloria.

16:16And prosecutors say Rickman then went to a couple of friends' homes, including one who had been storing his black BMW, which he then used to flee and escape to California. And he was on the run for four days. And then Rickman drives to Northern California, Humboldt County, goes to a relative's house. His relative offered to drive him to a hotel to put him up there. But the FBI had already alerted law enforcement in that area to be on the lookout. They did put a bolo out this time. Tribal police then stopped them saying that they ran a stop sign. And that's when Rickman pushes his relative out of the car, as you saw in the hour, and then takes off and continues for another five hours to evade police until finally he is caught.

17:06How did they eventually track him down? That's an interesting story because, and we didn't have time to really include that in the hour, they did find his abandoned car and they did search with dogs in the area where they believed he went on the run. It's very rural, though, and they went around warning the residents in the area to be careful So when he shows up at one man's door, it happened to be a retired juvenile corrections officer who lived there. So wrong man for Rickman to encounter. Prosecutor Greg Greer tells us more about what happened. He hears his dogs barking outside and he recognizes that's him.

17:48Tells his wife, tells her right away, call 911. It's him. He goes out. He does have a firearm with him. It doesn't display it, but he's got it on his person. And he goes out and he encounters Mr. Rickman, who is soaking wet, freezing cold, hypothermic. And he offers to take him inside and tries to warm him up and talks to him for a few minutes. Police still aren't there, no sign of them. He wants to get him out of his house now. So he takes him and puts him in one of his work vehicles, saying he'll take him into town and get him a hotel room. He keeps telling him, oh, I forgot my keys. Go back to his wife.

18:29Where are they? Back to the truck. Oh, I need my wallet. Back to the house. He is stalling for time. He comes and he sits in the vehicle now with Mr. Rickman. And thankfully, he sees lights approaching law enforcement from the distance and police get there and time's up.

18:48Natalie Morales:Oh, that's an incredible story. That is really incredible, you know, because he didn't have to. He could have just called up and say, I saw the guy in my backyard. Go get him. But to bring him into your house. Well, Billy Rickman is eventually charged with aggravated first degree murder. He pleaded not guilty. And the prosecution argued that Rickman had stalked and harassed Gloria in the days leading up to the murder. So I have to say, I found the map that showed Rickman's GPS coordinates from his cell phone and his pickup truck system really convincing. Right. Right. And the prosecutor, Corrine Schneff, she showed it all to us, her presentation of how she talked to the jury through his movements.

19:31And it was like he was hunting her. He was following her around. He kept going back and forth to her parents' house. Prosecutors also pointed out that Rickman, he turned his phone off just for that time to then kill Gloria. But then when he got back to the motel, he turned it back on. So that tells you a lot about, you know, he was trying to not show where he was by disabling his phone in that time. Officer Casey Bentz from the Lakewood Police Department, she was one of the first responding officers. And at trial, she gave a real emotional testimony because, you know, when she responded, Gloria was wearing her lanyard from the Holiday Inn.

20:19And she realized this is the same woman who had called us on these previous occasions. And Officer Bentz was one of the officers who responded to the previous incident of the tire slashing. And we should point out at trial, the defense didn't call any witnesses. They didn't put Rickman on the stand. According to Prosecutor Greer, the defense really argued that investigators failed to look for any other possible suspects.

20:45Natalie Morales:You know, defense has to work with what they have. It was two hours of deliberation and the jury found Billy Rickman guilty. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Gloria's parents have filed a wrongful death suit on behalf of Gloria's son. And their lawyer says that the family believes Gloria would still be alive if Lakewood police had arrested Rickman when presented with the clear examples of how he had violated the no contact order. Right. And what's really interesting here is that same evidence from the homicide trial that the prosecution used. The family's attorney, Megan Driscoll, said this makes the case.

21:27This was, again, one of the most foreseeable and preventable tragedies. tragedies. You know, the wrongful death lawsuit against Lakewood and its police department is still pending. It's unresolved as of now. The police department in the city has not publicly admitted that they made any mistakes. And John Justice, who is the attorney who's representing the city and the Lakewood PD, said again that he can't comment on pending litigation. So this case is still before them. Of course, of course. How is Gloria Sun doing? Well, we know he is well supported. He is surrounded by his family. He now lives with Gloria's relatives in another state.

22:07Her family did leave Washington.

22:09Natalie Morales:And what about Brianna? She was a really powerful voice in this episode. She kind of brought Gloria to life for us. Clearly, they had a very strong friendship, and this had a huge impact on her. And Brianna told us how much Gloria meant to her, because when they met, Brianna had had some substance abuse issues that she was overcoming. And Gloria saw through all of that. She told us that Gloria literally changed her life. She gave her that promotion at the hotel where they were working because Gloria was leaving her management position to go live with Billy Rickman. And she said she wanted Brianna to take over for her.

22:54And I want to play a little bit more of our interview there with Brianna. And I kind of looked at her and I was like, why? Like, I'm the last person you probably want running your hotel. And she told me that I've shown her grit and determination and that she trusted me 100 % to run her parents' business. Regardless of what I had done in my past, it didn't matter. She knew I was going to go far. And she wanted to give me the opportunity to do it. And I remember looking at her. I said, is your dad okay with this? She goes, I'll talk to him. But she believed in you. She did. And having somebody believe in you is everything.

23:44Absolutely everything. And I believed in her too. I believed that she could find her own path. She was pretty excited to do it on her own. And she knew she could do it. and sadly she was just starting to find her own path when her life was tragically cut short you know brianna said that even with billy rickman gloria was choosing to see the good in everyone to look past their flaws to look past their demons and unfortunately that's ultimately what cost her her life. Absolutely.

24:21Natalie Morales:Natalie, another great hour. Thank you so much. Thank you, Anne-Marie. If you like this episode, please rate and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.