The Best American Crime Writing 2006

by Mark Bowden

  Kueck had been on the run for twenty-four hours, and his first priority was that of any desert creature: water. But Steres, an excon with an extensive arrest record, was known to have possessed controlled substances, and Kueck, jacked from the murder and the target of a massive manhunt, may have been looking for a fix. In the months before he shot Sorensen, Kueck had invested his meager income—a combination of disability checks, cash from selling junk at flea markets, and gifts from his sisters—in gems from the Home Shopping Network. When he showed up at the remote compound of collapsing sheds and trashed cars where Steres lived, the jewels had become his only currency, something he could trade for drugs and supplies.

  Kueck didn’t stay long before fading back into the desert—he knew he had to keep moving. Although he shunned civilization, he couldn’t last indefinitely without it. And for a man who wanted nothing to do with the modern world, he was strangely obsessed with it: In one of the many phone calls he made to his daughter, he worried about how he looked on TV. He even considered cutting his hair for the first time in two decades—with his picture all over the news, maybe it was time for a change.

  On Tuesday, after three days on the run, he visited Steres again. This time, Guzman and Purcell caught their break. Steres had been talking to his friends, and one of them called the cops. A SWAT team quickly swarmed the Steres compound. But no one was there. Once again, Kueck had vanished.

  AT WHAT POINT do those attracted to the desert yield to its gravitational pull? Donald Charles Kueck was born in 1950 into a Southern family that prided itself on military service and law enforcement. His father’s father served in Kaiser Wilhelm’s navy, fleeing Germany after World War I as Hitler began to seize power. His father was a rescue-boat pilot at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. His mother’s brother was the top cop in Louisiana, the head of the state troopers. Two of his sisters joined the Army and the Navy. A good-looking, charismatic guy who had no trouble attracting women, Kueck could have succeeded at anything he set his mind to. But in 1970, he followed the hippie trail and moved to Southern California, taking a job at a sheet-metal plant. He married early, at eighteen, and became an instant father to the daughter his wife already had, and together they had a son. On the face of it, Kueck was a typical working-class suburban dad.

  But within a few years, he lost his job because of a back injury. Kueck started taking painkillers, got divorced, and moved into an apartment in North Hollywood. For the next thirteen years he had no contact with his family. He worked a series of jobs that led nowhere. When he could no longer pay his rent, he moved into his van, parking it next door in a friend’s driveway. “He would come in and shower every couple of days,” recalls the neighbor, Barb Oberman. “He was like a brother.”

  The two delivered telephone books together, but Kueck wasn’t interested in the money. “It was this spiritual thing,” says Oberman. “He could make or fix anything. He made some kind of back brace out of rubber bands. He made a telescope from a cardboard tube and lenses that he put into it. He talked a lot about wanting to live in the desert.” After Kueck found a place in the Mojave where he could park his van, he moved. But he kept in touch, sending photos of the animals who trusted him and became his friends—the ground squirrels that danced on his head, the raven that would alight on his arm, the jackrabbits that gathered every morning for breakfast at the table Kueck had set for them in the greasewood.

  In the late 1980s, Kueck’s family tracked him down through a friend who was a cop. “My brother and I were teenagers, and both having a lot of problems,” says his daughter, Rebecca Welch. “My mom knew we needed him.” At the designated reunion time, Welch and her mother sat in a Bob’s Big Boy in Riverside, California. “My dad came in, and I was crying,” says Welch. “He said he knew I was the one who would be the most hurt by his abandonment, and he had stayed away because he didn’t want to deal with my sadness and anger.”

  From then on, Kueck was back in the lives of his children, trying to make up for lost time. His teenage son, Chuck, who went by the nickname Jello, came to live with him in the desert in what Kueck called his “anarchy van.” “My dad was very happy when my brother was out there,” Welch recalls. “They were anarchists together, living free, in control, with no government in their lives.” But the relationship was volatile. Jello was addicted to heroin, and Kueck would lock him in the van sometimes to get him to sober up. Kueck himself was degenerating, strung out on painkillers and sinking into a deep depression.

  Jello finally split for Seattle. In the city, the good-looking teenager defended younger street kids, attended anti-globalization rallies, played in a band called Fuckhole, and spare-changed female tourists with a line so smooth that one, from Romania, took him back home for a month-long affair. Jello managed to kick junk a few times, but in 2001, at the age of twenty-seven, he returned to Southern California. “He was very intelligent, witty, and passionate,” says Fritz Aragon, a musician who knew him at the time. “He was an incredible storyteller, like his father. He was also a compulsive liar, the biggest cheat, always in need of attention.” Jello fought with skinheads over his anti-KKK tats and did time for assault. Soon after, he died of an overdose in an abandoned Los Angeles warehouse. “He had been trying to kill himself since he was twelve,” a friend says. “He identified with Kurt Cobain.”

  Jello’s death sent Kueck into a tailspin. He left the desert and made a pilgrimage to the warehouse where Jello died. Shortly afterward, he was busted for slicing a guy’s stomach with a box cutter while waiting for his daughter to complete an errand in the Department of Social Services in Riverside. “It was another speed freak,” she says. “He asked my dad for a cigarette, but then my dad thought he was making a move for a weapon, so he cut him.”

  Kueck went to jail for a year and came out a changed man: more paranoid, scarred for life—burrowing deep like a lot of excons into the desert sands outside L.A., waiting for a trigger to strike. He called his daughter every day; when Welch said she wanted to be a cop, her father tried to talk her out of it, saying he would kill any cop—or at least white ones—who tried to pull him over. On his frequent visits to his daughter’s home, he always brought toys for her four toddlers, whom he adored, and gave her at least two guns. Once, he threatened to bury Welch’s ex-boyfriend in the desert if he continued to abuse his daughter. Another time, he spun a bizarre tale of going to the site of busted meth labs and extracting chemicals from the dirt.

  A month before he killed Sorensen, Kueck visited his daughter for the last time. “He almost ran over some guys who were working on the driveway,” she says. “I knew he was doing speed. He slept for a couple of days and then he was all right.” Before he left, he took a few hits of speed from his nasal inhaler. “He was like Charlie Chaplin,” Welch says, recalling her final image of her father. “He was running around and breaking things.”

  AS THE FOURTH DAY of the manhunt wore on, the killer was still at large and the media were clamoring for answers. Cops from all over the West poured in by the hour. By now, Kueck could have been anywhere—or nowhere. He could have been nailed by a Mojave green—in the summer they were all around, especially the newborns, which were the most lethal. He could have succumbed to hyperthermia, which sets in when you are overheated and you have no water and your temperature spikes to 106 degrees, at which point your brain literally cooks. He could have fallen into a mine shaft. But without his body, there was no way of knowing if the desert had taken Kueck down.

  Lake Los Angeles is close to top-secret aeronautical sites such as Plant 42, where the Stealth bomber was developed, and the mysterious Gray Butte, second only to Area 51 in terms of high-tech weirdness, from which Predator drones are launched by night to drag the skies over the Mojave and test the latest surveillance equipment. “We are used to seeing strange things flying above us out here,” says Deputy District Attorney David Berger, who had joined the hunt for Kueck. But now, Berger and others noticed a C-130 Hercules flying low over the Antelope Valley, makin
g repeated sweeps, as if probing the desert for the fugitive.

  But there was no sign of Kueck until Tuesday afternoon, when a local cop decided to have another look at his trailer. Snakes always return to their lairs, and there it was—a rattlesnake stuck to Kueck’s front door, with a knife through its head. Somehow, it seemed, Kueck had survived both the desert and his human hunters, slithering under the crime-scene tape to leave his calling card.

  Two days later, Deputy Sorensen was laid to rest at Lancaster Baptist Church. “Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends,” said Capt. Carl Deeley, as he eulogized the deputy before Sorensen’s family, Gov. Gray Davis, and thousands of spit-shined deputies and cops from all over the country who filled the pews and spilled out onto the somber streets. The grief-stricken cops were uneasy. What if Kueck were hiding somewhere, looking through a rifle scope at the congregation as they laid their fallen deputy to rest? They prayed for their fellow officers who were still out searching for Kueck, wondering why nothing could flush him out, not the bloodhounds, not the two-bit snitches, not the cell-phone signals, not the thermal-imaging helicopters, not even bad luck. They knew that every outlaw in the desert was suddenly living with a proud defiance—one of their own had outsmarted the system. The world was watching, and if Kueck got away, the cops would be nothing.

  Then, shortly after the bagpipes sounded and an honor guard placed the deputy’s coffin into the hearse for his last ride, they got their break. On Friday, August 8, a signal from Kueck’s cell phone was picked up coming from the dilapidated compound where Ron Steres lived. Maybe it was because Kueck’s birthday was in two weeks and he couldn’t face the idea of another year, or maybe he was just tired of hiding, tired of the whole thing. According to the Annals of Emergency Medicine, at least ten percent of the shootings involving the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department are cases of “suicide by cop.” If that was the goal, Kueck was about to get his wish.

  It was the third time that week that Kueck had shown up to see Steres; a woman who lived in the house next door saw him appear on a bicycle like a desert mirage. This time, though, Steres was gone when Kueck arrived: fearing for his life, he had moved to a local motel. The SWAT team closed in, setting up a perimeter with snipers. It was time for the heavy artillery. A SWAT commander placed a call to L.A. police, requesting the BEAR: the Ballistic Engineered Armored Response, a tactical vehicle that weighs 28,000 pounds and can rapidly deploy up to fifteen cops against urban combatants armed with assault weapons.

  Around noon, Detective Mark Lillienfeld called Kueck’s daughter on a special cell phone that he gave her the day after Kueck killed Sorensen. “Mrs. Welch, get off the phone,” he told her. “Your father is trying to call you.” Detectives had been following every lead, and this one was the strongest—Kueck had been calling her while on the run, strung out and crying and apologizing for never being able to see her again, saying how much he loved her and recounting a bizarre although possible version of the murder in which he had shot the deputy with Sorensen’s own gun, suggesting that there was hand-to-hand combat before he opened up on him. “He kept coming,” Kueck said, “and I said, ‘Stop, man, stop.’” Now, in Kueck’s last hours, Welch was walking an emotional tightrope, trying to help the sheriff’s department and at the same time calm her father down as he threatened to go out like Scarface.

  Meanwhile SWAT was closing in, as the radios went berserk with news that the fugitive was cornered. Deputies from three counties burned down the highway, racing toward the site where they joined other law-enforcement personnel and stood arm to arm at the outer perimeter, a human barrier through which no one could escape. With everybody positioned, an announcement was made—“Donald Kueck, this is the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department. We know you are in there. Come out with your hands up.” There was no response, no movement. Was Kueck really in there? many of the frazzled deputies wondered. Or had he escaped the noose once again?

  At 1:20 P.M., Welch got another call. It was her father. He had been trying to contact police on Sorensen’s radio. They spoke for a couple of minutes and then Detective Lillienfeld arrived. “Dad, the sheriff’s right here,” she said. “You talk to him.” By now, every satellite van in Southern California was racing toward the scene.

  A twenty-five-year veteran of the department, Lillienfeld is a self-effacing guy with a quiet and soothing voice—one that may have provided Kueck with a few moments of grace before he went up in flames. Kueck seemed most concerned about returning to prison. “Once I get in there,” he told Lillienfeld, “those Asian doctors are worse than Mengele.”

  “We got all kinds of doctors in there,” Lillienfeld told him. “Why don’t we let you see some non-Asian doctors?”

  For the next several hours, as Kueck tried to recharge his faltering cell-phone battery with the one in Sorensen’s radio, there were dozens of calls made back and forth from Lillienfeld to the staging area at Mount Carmel to SWAT in the field. At one point Kueck told Lillienfeld to wait while he took a leak; at other times he rambled about dirt bikes, his back pain, suicide, taking cops down with him. At another point, in the middle of it all, he choked up and asked Lillienfeld not to tell his mother, in her late seventies and unaware of her son’s situation.

  At 3:30 P.M., Sheriff Lee Baca stepped out of an Air 5 chopper and was escorted to a bank of microphones to address the news media. He gave an assessment of the situation and the suspect, and ended the press conference with a terse summation: “We’re down to what’s known in this business as dead or alive.”

  As SWAT commanders positioned the BEAR and set up a tactical plan, Lillienfeld tried one last time to get Kueck to surrender. “We’d like to kind of resolve this thing before it gets dark out,” he said. Kueck replied that he did not want to get arrested or killed before sundown. “Nobody wants to kill you,” Lillienfeld said.

  At 5:26, the loudspeaker began blaring—“Donald Kueck, come out with your hands up.” A half-hour later, the first round of tear gas was deployed, quickly followed by a second. As the gas billowed through the main compound, Kueck called Lillienfeld and claimed to be in the bushes, daring him to “send in the dogs.”

  SWAT launched another volley of tear gas and the BEAR moved in for the kill, obliterating sheds as it barreled toward the main compound. Kueck opened up with his automatic, spraying the giant assault vehicle with gunfire. Air 5 and 6 hovered over the sheds as fires broke out in one shed, then two, then a third, as Kueck—perhaps shot himself—darted in and out of the flames, blasting rounds. By 8:45, the entire compound was on fire, and the fire grew and as the moon appeared above the Mojave, it became a conflagration with giant freak-show flames that scorched the heavens, and some wondered if it was the Twilight of the Gods, and the news choppers came to the fire like mechanical moths, relaying the image to millions who watched the flames dance on television, the phony hearth that interrupted regular programming with coverage of the End. Around the perimeter of Kueck’s last stand, hundreds of deputies and law-enforcement personnel watched the grisly bonfire burn and wondered if they had finally got him. A few miles away at Mount Carmel, the nuns watched the flames in the distance and prayed.

  AT MIDNIGHT—MORE THAN three hours after the fire began raging—SWAT was ordered to search the area. Ten minutes later they found Donald Kueck on his back, nearly cremated, clutching his rifle. When they went to move the body, it crumbled. A few days later, his family scattered his ashes off one of his favorite buttes.

  Months after it all went down, the crime-scene tape at Kueck’s trailer still fluttered in the wind. There were some old jars of peanut butter and a pair of Nikes (size eleven)—just waiting for the next hermit with a useless dream. The land remained a scavenger’s paradise of busted bicycles and generators, engines and furniture, lawn mowers and tables and chairs. There was a broken-down La-Z-Boy facing the buttes—Kueck’s chair, according to his family, the one he sat in when he watched the sun rise over the Mojave. From here he could
survey his strange desert kingdom. He had come out here to escape civilization, but he knew he could be evicted at any point. The desert was shrinking, and civilization didn’t like people who violated its codes.

  “Lynne,” he said in one of his last letters to his sister, “I’m writing this down because I get choked up when trying to talk about personal issues…. I know the next life is waiting for me…. I don’t want you to blame yourself if the inevitable comes to pass. This feeling has been growing for the last one to two years.” Then, in a burst of optimism, he added, “Of course the future can be changed and it would be fun trying. Since I was twenty years old, I’ve had a dream of building a little place in the desert.”

  To the right of the La-Z-Boy sits a pallet stacked with eighty-pounds sacks of lime—construction material for the house that Kueck never built. One of these days, he was going to make a course correction. But as always happens with fuckups, he never got there—and never would. Instead, he had picked up a spade and dug his own grave at the edge of his property. It’s the first thing you see on the way in and the last on the way out, a project he made sure to finish, now filled in by wind and erosion.

  DEANNE STILLMAN’s latest book is Twentynine Palms: A True Story of Murder, Marines, and Mojave (William Morrow). It was named as a “Best Book 2001” by the Los Angeles Times Book Review, and Hunter Thompson called it “a strange and brilliant story by an important American writer.” She is writing Horse Latitudes: Last Stand for the Wild Horse in the American West (Houghton Mifflin). Thanks to Mark Lamonica for help on this piece.