BREACHING A HERMIT KINGDOM
You talkin’ to me?
—Travis Bickle, Taxi Driver
NOBODY KNOWS WHY DEPUTY SHERIFF STEVE SORENSEN decided to drive onto Donald Kueck’s property on Saturday, August 2, 2003. It was Sorensen’s day off, but when a neighbor of Kueck’s called him that morning, the deputy said no problem, he’d come right over, as he always did if someone on his remote desert beat had a need. The neighbor—let’s call him Frank Baker —was a master carpenter in the studio system “down below,” then working on the set of the new Jodie Foster movie. He was concerned about a man we shall refer to as Mr. X, a particularly tenacious squatter whose trail of raw sewage was approaching Baker’s well-traveled airfield, where members of the local ultralight community gathered and kept their planes.
A hardworking guy with a wife and kids, Frank had lived in Llano for twenty years, accumulating forty acres of desert land on a breathtaking plain just to the east of a series of buttes where westerns are shot and Predator drones—the kind used in the war in Iraq—take off from a secret test site and cruise the glittering night skies. The only person who had lived in this area longer than Frank Baker was Donald Kueck. For years, Kueck’s home had been a tent a few miles away and then, more recently, a trailer on property his sisters had bought for him after he was kicked off his old site because of trouble with a landlord. But unlike Baker, Kueck had checked out of society a long time ago. In fact, both he and Mr. X, who was squatting on land adjacent to both men, were really living in Frank’s world. According to Baker, Sorensen had visited Mr. X at least twenty times, trying to monitor the situation until the eviction papers had moved through the system. To make sure Mr. X got the point, two weeks before the vacate date of August 2, Sorensen visited the property along with a couple of tow trucks and had Mr. X’s cars removed, leaving one of the squatter’s vehicles so he could take his belongings when he left. Concerned for his family, Frank wanted Sorensen to make sure that Mr. X had vacated the premises that day.
The Mojave is known for its legions of squatters—people who have moved into the many abandoned sheds that mark the desert, some of which date from the homesteading era and were photographed by Dorothea Lange. Although ramshackle, they retain a certain rustic quality; of course, others are barely standing, but they still serve as dwellings for all manner of pilgrims, outcasts, ne’er-do-wells, eccentrics, ex-felons, fugitives, lost and tweaked-out kids, stray animals—a large off-the-grid population that either is stranded or wants to be left alone. Years ago, I met a Vietnam vet who had found refuge at the edge of Randsburg, a California town once the site of a gold strike; treasure hunters still find the precious metal while combing through its hills. The soldier I met had been living in a mine shaft pretty much since his return from the war, emerging occasionally for provisions or to visit with a few compadres, other vets who were living in a little community of tents nearby. They were never coming in, they told me; unwelcomed when the war was over, they had found a home in the womb of the desert. Although the squatter who lived in the mine shaft had known some of these men for a long time, his best friend was a rattlesnake who lived in the shaft with him. She had been there since he moved in, he told me, and there the pair had formed some sort of arrangement or alliance whereby he anticipated her moves and understood her ways and she left him alone. He liked that she was always there, although he did not say why; it was understood that he had found comfort with a companion who was a silent presence, a creature who was misunderstood if not reviled by most people, an emissary from another world that no one wished to see.
Deep inside this world of squatters is another one, comprised of solitary people who have chosen to participate in nothing other than their own lives and a deep communion with the desert; they are not unlike the Christian hermits of 2,000 years ago, who would wander into the wastes seeking enlightenment or something other than what was found among more concentrated populations. Across American deserts, they form a kind of hermit kingdom, some living in sheds or shacks, others in makeshift lean-tos, others in abandoned vehicles or storage units or caves. Many a notorious latter-day hermit has gone out in a blaze of glory, whacked those who crossed the borders of their world, or been found in all manner of states of preservation or decay. They have names like Cougar Dave and Buckskin Bill, Wheelbarrow Annie and Beaver Dick. In his book Wild Game, the writer Frank Bergon tells the story of a notorious hermit named Bristlewolf, who lived for many years in a dugout at Pinto Hot Springs in the Virginia Range of Nevada. An old Basque shepherd would attend to his needs from time to time; as the years passed, he would stop by and bathe the hermit’s arthritic legs in the healing waters of the springs. One day, two college hikers stumbled into Bristlewolf’s camp. Fearing eviction, he shot them. Several days later, his old friend showed up. Unhinged, he shot and killed him too.
Some squatters are fastidious, arranging their possessions just so and obsessively wiping away the dirt that accumulates in their lean-tos and tunnels. The squatter who had drawn the attention of Antelope Valley locals was not a tidy one; he had been leaving piles of trash everywhere, taking dumps all over the desert, turning the view from Frank’s forty-acre spread into one big toilet. Nor was he popular with other squatters and hermits who were his neighbors. Every scene has its own class system and in general hermits don’t like squatters because hermits are often living legally—in their own place, someone else’s who doesn’t mind their occupancy, or somewhere no one cares about or ever visits. Squatters are pretty much doing what the term says—squatting—wherever they can, sometimes inside a hermit’s domain, until forced to move on. The area of concern—a far-flung outpost called Llano—wasn’t in Sorensen’s immediate jurisdiction, but he lived two miles away, and that meant it was in his backyard, and he regularly patrolled its maze of dirt roads. The unassuming berg was once home to a utopian community Aldous Huxley wrote about when he lived in nearby Pearblossom years later, fleeing there after World War II, convinced that man’s only sanctuary was the desert. The commune was a spawning ground for ideas considered subversive at the time, such as feminism and the minimum wage. Like most utopian communities, Llano vanished, and today all that’s left are the stark crumbling stone walls of its visionaries and the remnants of a hearth. Often, packs of desert dogs gather at the fire that burns no more, playful but quick to expose fangs to a stranger who approaches too quickly, sentinels of the new kind of utopia that now flourishes at Llano—a strange brew of loners, outlaws, ultralight pilots, people hunkered in compounds behind KKK signs, meth cookers and asthmatics, those who crave quiet, and serious desert freaks who work hard at blue-collar jobs and out here where land is cheap live like kings.
Yet even for longtime residents who love this region and know its nooks and crannies, it demands certain precautions. For instance, you don’t often see people walking alone in the middle of the Antelope Valley—and if you do, they are probably homeless or tweaked. The experience causes extreme discomfort and is dangerous—or at least feels that way. The valley is flat, surrounded on all sides by mountains and buttes; across its floor, vegetation is sparse, dotted with creosote and the occasional Joshua tree. In the relentless white daylight of the summer sun, there is no place to hide, except tunnels and mine shafts, or under or behind a rock. From any direction, you are completely exposed and vulnerable. If you are wearing a uniform, you are broadcasting a message that is generally not welcome in this part of the desert—and as you traverse the sands, someone may be watching you through a rifle scope from hundreds of yards away. Or someone may simply be firing rounds—a not uncommon act in American deserts, especially the Mojave, which is, apart from law enforcement and military, the most heavily armed region in the country.
The August morning heated up, heading past 100 degrees. It was even too hot for rattlesnakes, and to escape the furnace they retreated to pockets of shade—under the greasewood or into the sand. Attuned to human and animal sounds, Deputy Sorensen walked the site where he had recently serv
ed eviction papers to the squatter, saw no sign of him, and told the Bakers. Then he got back in his Ford Expedition and started for home. But something changed his mind. To this day, what that was is not known. When he arrived, Mr. X was gone. He drove to Frank’s place to tell the family and then headed north, toward home. But something— what? Some ancient siren call? A strange dirge being broadcast on a frequency only the most attuned could hear?—made Sorensen turn left, back toward the squatter’s site, east on Avenue T-8 (many streets of the Antelope Valley are named for the alphabet, and their remote tributaries are numbered), for about fifty yards and then he paused, just past the old tires that marked Kueck’s driveway.
The ex-surfer from the South Bay knew his desert and knew who lived on his beat. So it is safe to say that on his many previous trips to Mr. X’s, he had stopped at the same juncture for a quick recon; it is safe to say he knew that the man who lived down this driveway was once a friend of Mr. X; it is safe to say he had heard the man was named Don (no last names in the desert; the desert doesn’t care who you are and generally neither does anyone else); it is safe to say that as Sorensen looked down this driveway, perhaps with binoculars, he saw things that looked suspicious: the trashed cars common to many a desert pack rat, giant drums of what could have contained chemicals for manufacturing meth, stacks of pipes that could have been used to make bombs, classic desert junk piles that suggested everything from scavenging to chop shop. Clearly and at the very least, whoever lived here was in violation of various codes, and perhaps the place was even a hazmat site. But until August 2, as far as anyone knows, he had not approached the occupant of the property. On that blazing day on the edge of fall, something must have looked slightly different; there must have been a shift—more junk, more cars—or maybe one of the area’s ultralight pilots had flown over the site and told local officials that he had spotted a meth lab—“I’m sick and tired of all the trash—human and otherwise—and I want it out of this desert now.”
So Sorensen turned down the driveway and headed south in his SUV, perhaps looking to his right and down toward the ground where the grave awaited the land’s occupant. Perhaps he saw the planks that covered it, and their six-foot-by-three-foot configuration fueled his suspicion, or perhaps he even stopped, got out of his car, lifted the planks, saw the grave, and then continued, unholstering his 9 mm Beretta and wondering what he was getting himself into.
But the death song had trapped him, and on he went, for another twenty feet or so, at which point he saw the wretched little trailer from which only silence emanated. In a few minutes, his brains would be in a bucket.
Kueck, a longtime heavy user of Darvon and Soma, may have been basking, semi-asleep, like the rattlesnake in the bucket at his front door, the living embodiment of the great American battle cry, “Don’t tread on me!” As Sorensen sat in his car, there were subtle atmospheric changes, and Kueck—like the snake—may have tasted the movement on the inhale, and Sorensen, the seasoned desert cop, perhaps suspected but did not know for a fact that he was now being watched by a pair of bloodshot eyes that squinted from a sill, suspected but did not know for a fact that a paranoid man who had eked out a life in the Mojave and was now permanently baked had reached for his automatic rifle with the high-velocity rounds, suspected but did not know for a fact that he was a dead man walking into the land of no return.
He spotted an old Dodge Dart and ran the plates. It is not known if Sorensen received the information from the DMV database, and if he did, if it meant anything to him, because the dispatcher garbled the name of the man who owned the car, and therefore Sorensen may not have known that the owner was Donald Charles Kueck, a man who had spent months trying to get him fired, writing letters to everyone from the FBI to then LA County sheriff Sherman Block, after Sorensen had pulled him over on a remote desert road next to an alfalfa field for reckless driving on a hot summer day in 1994 at about noon. “I live alone in a rural location,” Kueck wrote in a lengthy and detailed statement that accompanied his complaint against Sorensen at that time, “and now I fear for my safety.”
Seven years later the sun beat down and once again, it was almost high noon. The two men were about to finish the dance. “Excuse me, anybody home?” Sorensen might have called out as he approached the lonesome pad. “What’s up?” came the reply. Although Kueck was living on land bought for him by one of his sisters, he knew he was in violation of a myriad of codes, living in a ramshackle trailer without the proper permits. Worst of all, he feared going back to jail—“a concentration camp,” as he later told police. “Sir, I’m checking on a call about some squatters. Can I see some ID?” “Hold it right there,” a voice came from the trailer. “I know my rights.” It was the 24/7 refrain of the Mojave—indeed, the Mojave was one big rights fest, where every pack rat, every meth freak, every hermit in every desert bunker knew the Bill of Rights as well as his Buddy Weiser, quoting the Second Amendment and search-and-seizure law like scripture, but in the end always destroyed by that American urge to go out like Custer. “Dude, did you see my sign? It says no trespassing. Do you have a warrant?”
By now Sorensen was halfway between his car and the trailer with no cover in sight, approaching a troubled ex-con who had moved out here to get away from society’s relentless demands for smog checks and housing permits. And now that system was closing in on his front door, in the form of a deputy with a gun. “Sir, come out with your hands up,” Sorensen might have said, hearing the rattle of the snake in the bucket.
What happened next, according to police, is that Kueck kicked open his front door, aimed his Daewoo at Sorensen and blasted him with .223s. The high-velocity bullets screamed into the deputy’s body below his vest, shattering and buckling him like a piece of glass as he spun around and managed to get off three shots before Kueck blasted into Sorensen’s right side and arm, tearing the 9 mm from his grasp as rivulets of blood quenched the Mojave’s hot sand.
But Kueck wasn’t finished. We know from witnesses who heard the shots that a second volley of bullets was fired, two more to the side of Sorensen’s chest, and then as he lay mortally wounded, Kueck pumped him with eight more rounds, including one that blasted through an eye and blew his brains out. When it was over, Kueck had raked the deputy’s body with fourteen shells.
Unbeknownst to Kueck, he was being watched. After hearing the shots from their home a mile away, Frank Baker’s wife and kids had climbed their lookout tower and now, through a scope, observed Kueck ransacking Sorensen’s Ford. They immediately dialed 911. Kueck disappeared from their view; he was on his knees, hidden by the SUV, tying a rope around Sorensen’s legs, trussing him like a bagged deer, right ankle over left. He dragged the body toward the back of his yellow Dodge Dart and tied it to the bumper. Then he picked up the deputy’s brains and threw them in a bucket. As sirens wailed across the Mojave, Donald Charles Kueck vanished. A few minutes later the phone rang at his daughter’s house. “I’m sorry,” he said, in tears. “I know I’ve been a terrible father. I won’t be coming over on Monday.”
In a land infamous for its outlaws, Kueck was about to become the target of one of the largest manhunts the desert had ever known.
THE FEVER DREAM OF LLANO: A CASTLE FOR EVERY MAN
Can You Build?
After Every Whirlwind of Revolution
Comes the Task of the Builders!
Today: Ahead of the Revolution,
Integral Co-operation is
Building, NOW, the Impregnable
Breastwork, the Llano co-operative
Colonies!
Before Your Very Eyes, Individualism
Disintegrates! The Palaces of the
Profiteers Crumble and Fall Apart!
Be one of the Master Builders!
Spread the Cement of
Co-operation!
—Billboard for Llano, 1913
We’ve partnered with lifestyle expert Martha Stewart to create high-quality homes inspired by her very own homes in New York, Connecticut, and
Maine.
—Press release for KB homes, 2003
ON MARCH 11, 2006, ABOUT THIRTY MEMBERS OF THE SAN Fernando Band of Mission Indians gathered near the site of a new development in Palmdale, one of the two cities in the Antelope Valley. Representing the Tataviam and Fernandeno tribes in the Antelope, Santa Clarita, and Victor valleys, they had come to rebury six of their Vanyume ancestors who had been unearthed two years earlier as land was being bulldozed to make way for the 5,000-home Anaverde community just off the Avenue S exit ramp. The six individuals—men, women, and a baby—were about 800 to 1,000 years old. They were found in separate graves, with a crumbling stone hearth nearby—perhaps a remnant of a burial ritual. One of the ancients, most likely a shaman, was buried with 1,500 shell beads. As late-winter snowflakes fell to the earth, some members of the gaily bedecked group placed offerings of tobacco, sage, and knives in the graves, gifts for the eternal journey, and there was traditional singing and drumming and the shaking of rattles. A backhoe covered the graves, and within a few weeks, a steamroller had finished the job. There was a new paved road over the old burial site, and the latest wave of suitors began to arrive in the Antelope Valley.
A Desert Reckoning Page 3