Death in the Desert, Part 1: Who Killed Kerri Abatti?
An Imperial Valley murder mystery, with a helping of climate change.
In spring 2018, after several hours holed up in a sterile county office building poring over campaign finance filings, I stepped out into the blistering sunlight of California’s Imperial Valley. The day was young, and I wanted to drive up a rutted dirt access road along Westside Main, one of several north-south canals carrying Colorado River water through the desert to sprawling fields of vegetables and alfalfa.
In theory, this would be yet more research for my public corruption investigation; there was energy and water infrastructure to look at. In practice, I mostly wanted to enjoy the heat and the scenery.
And I did enjoy it. Until my car got stuck in a patch of sandy dirt, and I realized cell reception was spotty, and I wondered how I was going to get out.
I could have walked to find help. But I wasn’t exactly popular in the Imperial Valley. I’d already written several stories for the Desert Sun newspaper that had shaken up the Imperial Irrigation District, prompting the powerful public utility to cancel tens of millions of dollars in allegedly corrupt energy contracts. I was still investigating a feared farm baron, Mike Abatti, who controlled a vast agricultural empire.
Actually, I was stranded near his lands — possibly right alongside them. Should I be worried?
As Mike Abatti’s distant cousin Wally Leimgruber told me later, it was well known in the Imperial Valley that “there’s a right way, and a wrong way, and the Abattis’ way. If you ever stepped in their way, they would run over you.”
Obviously things turned out fine. I got my car out of the dirt and made it home.
Eventually I finished my investigation. Seven years later, I still write about Imperial on occasion but had mostly stopped paying attention to Abatti.
Until last month, when something shocking and tragic happened.
Mike’s wife, Kerri Ann Abatti, was shot and killed at a home owned by the couple in Pinetop, Arizona. Kerri had filed for divorce after 31 years of marriage. The divorce proceedings were contentious, per this story by my former L.A. Times colleagues Alex Wigglesworth and Ian James. Earlier this year, a court had ordered Mike to increase his spousal support payments, after Kerri accused him of deceiving her over the state of their finances (an accusation he denied).
The sheriff’s office in Arizona’s Navajo County said on December 3 — its most recent public statement — that it had served search warrants on Mike’s home and business in El Centro, California. It didn’t name him as a suspect, describing the investigation as “active and ongoing.”
Naturally, the Imperial rumor mill is rampant with speculation about who might have killed Kerri. Fanning the flames: a history of murder in the Abatti family.
Seventy-five years ago, Mike’s grandfather’s John Studer — a Swiss immigrant who came to the Imperial Valley to farm in the 1920s — shot and killed his wife Gertrude, Mike’s grandmother.
“According to friends, the couple had been having marital difficulties; [Gertrude] and the couple’s six children had moved into town, and she had filed divorce proceedings,” the Calexico Chronicle reported in February 1950. “But on Saturday [Gertrude] had brought five of the children with her, and began to unload clothing from the car into the house as if they were moving back.”
Sadly, one of John’s employees “heard the shots a few minutes after [Gertrude] went into the house.”
“The children who were playing outdoors ran into the house and found the bodies of both their parents,” the newspaper reported.
I’ve been inundated by messages from sources the last few weeks, none of whom want to talk on the record, many of whom have theories about what happened to Kerri.
For the record, I have no idea who’s right.
But the mystery has renewed my interest in the curious characters who populate the Imperial Valley. So, having spent a decent chunk of my life obsessing over this desert farm kingdom, I’ll offer a few observations while I try to learn more.
First off: If you live in the American West, you should study up on Imperial. It’s the most important place most folks know nothing about.
Wedged in California’s far southeastern corner, bordering Mexico and Arizona, the valley is home to several hundred farm families who collectively use more Colorado River water than the rest of California combined (and also more than the whole state of Arizona). As global warming saps the Colorado River — a vital water source for 40 million people from Los Angeles to Denver — our ability to avoid shortages at Lake Mead and Lake Powell will depend in great part on Imperial.
Just this week, negotiators for the seven Colorado River Basin states are gathered in Las Vegas, trying to hammer out new rules for avoiding shortages. Previous rounds of negotiation have gone terribly. This is a devilishly hard problem to solve.
Second: The Imperial Valley is a renewable energy hot spot. Many landowners have struck deals with energy developers to convert their croplands to solar farms — even as they face pushback from their neighbors, who see solar as an industrial intrusion on the valley’s rural way of life. Last week, the Imperial County supervisors approved a one-year moratorium limiting new solar projects on farmland.
Imperial is also home to one of the world’s most powerful geothermal reservoirs — a super-heated pool of briny fluid thousands of feet beneath the Salton Sea. Geothermal plants can produce 24/7 clean electricity. Even better, the brine contains lithium, a key ingredient in electric vehicle batteries and renewable energy storage.
Third, and perhaps most important: The Imperial Valley and surrounding areas grow most of the nation’s winter vegetables. Thanks to the desert climate — 110 degrees in July, 70 in December — it’s possible to grow veggies year-round. If you enjoy lettuce or broccoli or cauliflower over Christmas — ha, I’m actually eating a salad right now! — there’s a good chance they come from Imperial.
So what does any of this have to do with Mike and Kerri Abatti?
For one thing, their business ranks among the valley’s largest water users. During my investigation, I discovered that the roughly 7,000 acres farmed by Mike accounted for nearly 1% of Imperial’s entire water use in 2012. The Desert Sun and ProPublica later determined that five members of the Abatti family consumed more water than the Las Vegas metro area, and far more water than any other Imperial Valley family.
Mike also got into the energy business by partnering with engineering firm ZGlobal — a decision that ultimately led me to the access road along the canal, where Abatti and ZGlobal were developing one of several solar and battery storage projects.
Together, they helped secure Imperial’s status as a Western clean energy hub — even as their projects were ensnared in corruption allegations. For instance, I reported that the Imperial Irrigation District (IID) had agreed to spend $35 million in public money on a battery project pitched by Abatti and ZGlobal. Sounds fine, except that ZGlobal was helping run IID’s energy department at the time — a massive conflict of interest, critics said. Also, IID signed the contract only after rejecting three cheaper bids.
ZGlobal consistently denied it had done anything wrong; Abatti never replied to my requests for comment. Like I said, eventually I moved on with my life.
But seven years later, Mike and his allies remain forces to be reckoned with. ZGlobal keeps developing solar farms and batteries to connect to IID’s power grid — all while a former ZGlobal employee’s mother serves as IID’s general manager. In 2021, Mike and Kerri bought a Wyoming ranch for $12.5 million, she said in court filings. Mike’s brother Jimmy is a past president of the Imperial County Farm Bureau. Jimmy’s wife Deborah Owen is the former assistant district attorney.
“They rule by intimidation,” Wally Leimgruber told me in 2018, referring to the Abatti family. “Nobody’s stood up to them in a significant way.”
Will it all come undone with Kerri’s death?
I’m not sure, but I’m following the investigation closely. If you have any information, email me at sammyroth42@gmail.com. I don’t really think I’m going to solve a murder. But Imperial has once again become too good a story to pass up.
And ultimately it’s a climate story. Because whatever happens next, Kerri’s death and the fallout may be hard to disentangle from other long-simmering tensions: Colorado River cutbacks, solar infighting, rising temperatures. And new tensions keep cropping up. This month, Imperial County was sued over a proposal for California’s largest data center — a project that would use huge amounts of water and power.
But that’s a story for another day. There’s a reason I titled this post “Part 1.”
Who will play Sammy in the climate murder-mystery feature film about the intrepid reporter who seeks out the heat in more ways than one!? Taking names now. I'll toss out Rami Malek...
Who doesn’t like a murder mystery? The intersection with climate and energy is right up my alley!