In the end, eyewitness accounts backed up Steve. Kueck had been obstructing Sorensen’s vehicle, nearly causing a collision and forcing the deputy off the road and onto the shoulder. His strange story about fiber optics might have entertained people at a party but not members of law enforcement.
But Kueck viewed himself as the victim. In the days following the incident, he had been calling and visiting the sheriff’s station and the district attorney’s office, seeking assault charges against the deputy. Finally, several months later, he himself was charged with assault with a deadly weapon—his car. At that point, he embarked on a letter-writing campaign, sending a statement about what happened to Sheriff Sherman Block (then head of the LASD), the Internal Affairs Bureau, his Congressional representatives, and the FBI. “I most definitely will not resist arrest under any circumstances,” he wrote, probably alluding to his behavior during the encounter with Sorensen. “All my life I have had respect for our countries [sic] enforcement personel [sic]. I find it difficult to believe what these investigators are doing. I cling to my hopes that the system will correct these perversions of justice.” When the incident was finally adjudicated, he pled guilty to a reduced charge and was told to report regularly to a probation officer. What recipients of his letter made of it we do not know. It reflected an ongoing aspect of life for many solitaires in the Mojave, some of whom had probably waged their own similar campaigns against law enforcement. Yet evidence of such battles rarely remains. Years later, when a copy of the letter was found in Kueck’s trailer after the deadly encounter with Sorensen, it cast the episode in one more mysterious light.
PERSON OF INTEREST
I got myself into a situation here.
—Marlon Brando, The Fugitive Kind
AS THE SECOND DAY OF THE MANHUNT WAS COMING TO A close, Donald Kueck had still not been officially named as the suspect in Steve Sorensen’s murder. He was a “person of interest”—a vague though widely used designation for someone who can’t be named as anything more because there’s not enough evidence. The tag angered some of Steve’s fellow officers, especially local cops, who knew him personally. After all, witnesses had actually heard the murder—the shots being fired at Kueck’s place—and then had seen Kueck pacing around Sorensen’s vehicle and retrieving items from it shortly after the deputy had been asked to make sure the squatter was gone. In addition, law enforcement had located and identified Kueck’s car, the one he had used to drag Sorensen’s body away from the scene of the crime. What was everyone waiting for?
“This was the most bizarre murder of a sheriff I have ever seen,” recalls Detective Joe Purcell in a phone call shortly after the incident. A vicious cop killer with an automatic weapon was still on the loose, and the search rapidly expanded beyond the sheriff’s department. In 1873, the bandito Tiburcio Vasquez eluded a mounted posse in this very region for a year; nearly a hundred years later, another desert thief killed a cop in a traffic stop near Victorville and then outran military and police hunters for weeks. Now, two centuries later, Donald Charles Kueck was contending with an arsenal developed for modern warfare. A few miles from the crime scene, air traffic control at Edwards—one of the world’s largest Air Force bases—picked up the news and passed it on to the pilots who fly over the desert every eight minutes on maneuvers. In the hours following the murder, deputies had learned that Kueck had a cell phone. Now, on Day Two, the FBI dispatched a C-130, a super high-tech signal-tracking plane that would pinpoint Kueck if he used it, picking up the signal as it bounced off local radio towers. By the end of the afternoon, as backup poured in from other desert towns, Lake Los Angeles had become the Gaza strip—no one was getting in or out without showing ID; every parolee in every trailer park and tattoo joint in the Antelope Valley was hauled in and questioned. Officers from all over Southern California combed Kueck’s property and the surrounding desert, looking under every rock, behind every Joshua tree, deep into animal lairs and wrecked muscle cars and down ancient gullies and washes. But there were no signs of the man with the Fu Manchu; Donald Charles Kueck had vanished.
At 5:15 that afternoon, from somewhere in the desert, he placed another call to his daughter. All day long, television reports had been carrying the news of Sorensen’s death, linking her father to it, and broadcasting his mug shot. It had been taken two years earlier when he was arrested for assault; the guy who once looked like an Eddie Bauer model now looked like Mephistopheles. In the phone call with Rebecca, Don sounded calm, almost nonchalant. She now knew why he would not be “coming over on Monday,” and confronted him about being linked to the murder of the deputy. “Oh that,” Kueck said. “Yeah, I know.” He then asked how he looked on the news. It was a strange remark coming from a hermit, yet everyone wants to go out pretty. But beyond that, cops theorized later, it was evidence that Kueck wondered how much he’d have to change his appearance in order to fade away. Would he finally cut his hair, the one physical thing that represented being wild and free? As she hung up the phone, Rebecca pondered this and other related matters, and longed to see her father again. And she also hoped that no one else would be killed.
DAY
THREE
HERE COMES THE CAVALRY
No man in the wrong can stand up against a fellow that’s in the right and keeps on a-comin’.
—Texas Ranger creed
IN 1965, AFTER A SERIES OF COP KILLINGS IN LOS ANGELES, THE Los Angeles Police Department developed SWAT, which stands for Special Weapons and Tactics, the paramilitary unit quickly adopted by law enforcement everywhere. It was first deployed in 1969 against the Black Panthers, in a raid at their South Central headquarters at Forty-First and Central. The raid led to a street battle before a gathering crowd, and it was broadcast on the evening news. Along with two other simultaneous raids, the assault led to the arrests of three high-ranking members of the Panthers, as Matthew Fleischer reported years later in the Los Angeles Times Magazine. But SWAT had been tactically unprepared for urban warfare with highly trained soldiers in their own army, and the team headed down to Camp Pendleton for further training with the Marines. Six years later, the situation would repeat itself on the streets of Los Angeles. This time, SWAT was up against a strange crew of California prison veterans and middle-class radicals, deployed to rescue a kidnapped heiress who seemingly had gone over to the other side. Although the deployment happened by necessity, the location was right: the city where glamour and power meet and then reign supreme was the right frame for an elite group of fast and fit men in uniform at the height of their powers, a paramilitary outfit that could muster quickly and flush out increasingly sophisticated snipers, bank robbers, and hostage takers, a team with a sonorous name that rolled off the tongue—why, it could have been dreamed up by Hollywood, and in a way it was.
Its original proponent was controversial LAPD chief Daryl Gates, who ran the department from 1978 to 1992, overseeing investigations of such notorious criminals as Charles Manson and the Hillside strangler. He became infamous for his extreme positions on drug use (casual users should be “taken out and shot”) and choke holds (suggesting that they were not really an excessive use of force, but that cardiovascular conditions predisposed black people to succumbing quickly to the tactic). His career ended with the Rodney King riots in 1992, after LA erupted in violence when a jury acquitted four white cops accused in the videotaped beating of King a year earlier. But by then his enduring legacy as “the father of SWAT” was established, and units modeled after his pioneering teams in Los Angeles were being deployed by law enforcement agencies across the land, locked in the endless and oldest battle there is—good guys versus bad guys, with one side or the other always seeking and gaining an edge and a few guys in a uniform standing between them.
Gates himself was an LA creature through and through, a man who grew up on its streets, under the false shade of its palms, those palms with their froufrou fronds that everyone thought were so pretty, lulled into a sense of safety by the graces of Los Angeles—the soft
quality and tone of the light during certain hours and seasons, the perfume of the night-blooming jasmine, perfect and hollow sets rolling in at the beaches. With his rough upbringing in the form of a violent father, Gates never bought it. He knew about the rest of the postcard, the rats that lived just beyond view, and where he came from, it was him or them, and as the place got weirder, so did he, and then one day, he ordered up a new piece of equipment, an urban tank with a battering ram, a sexy new piece of armament that could take on the baddest of the bad, better than any unmarked Crown Vic or fully loaded chopper. In 1975, he rolled it out to take down the Symbionese Liberation Army, a bizarre, self-trained paramilitary unit that outfoxed law enforcement for over a year as the nation watched and wondered how the taunts and violence and killings would come to an end.
The SLA was a small, radical group of upper-middle-class white kids led by an escaped black convict named Donald De-Freeze, who had been meeting with Berkeley-based prison reform advocates while he was in prison for armed robbery at Vacaville. Hiding out with some of these advocates in Berkeley, DeFreeze began calling himself General Field Marshal Cinque and, with the others, cooked up plans to foment a revolution by ending racism, monogamy, and the prison system, among other features of a capitalist society. DeFreeze—or Cinque—was not the first graduate of the notorious California prison system to have been made over into a hyperviolent man, nor would he be the last.
The SLA’s first act was murdering Marcus Foster, the Oakland, California, school superintendent who was targeted because he was in favor of an identification system for students. Although he had backed off of it by the time of his murder, the SLA had apparently not gotten the message. Its members went on to kidnap newspaper heiress Patty Hearst, issuing an “arrest warrant” for the young socialite shortly after the abduction and demanding that Hearst’s parents set up a program for distribution of food to poor people in the area. When that was done, ransom demands for millions of dollars followed; as the negotiations unfolded, Patty, who was being held in a closet, was transformed into a person called Tanya—in an echo of DeFreeze’s own journey to Cinque while he himself was in prison. Two months later, she surfaced in a San Francisco bank robbery with SLA members, wielding a rifle as the others snagged $10,000 from a teller and within hours issuing a statement referring to her parents as “pigs.” Law enforcement lost track of the group until two members were caught shoplifting in Los Angeles; from outside in the getaway car, Hearst fired shots, and the trio fled. On the following day Chief Gates deployed his new tank for the first time. It carried an LAPD SWAT team to a house where the group was hiding. In a fierce gun battle that raged for hours, the SLA deployed its own arsenal until finally the LAPD fired gas canisters into the house and then rammed the bungalow where Hearst’s kidnappers were making their last stand. The house exploded, and across America citizens sat before the television hearth and watched the oldest show in the world—flames—and the fire raged for hours, consuming the hideout until it finally caved in on the notorious renegades, killing them all.
At first it was thought that Hearst was inside the house, but within days cops received a communiqué from surviving members; along with the rest of the country, they too had been watching the bonfire—from a motel room near Disneyland. Patty Hearst was with them, still a captive. Several months later, the group was back in San Francisco, staging another bank robbery in a nearby town and killing a bystander in the process. Shortly after that, the two surviving members of the SLA were arrested, along with Hearst and a recent recruit. Hearst described herself as an “urban guerrilla” and was charged with armed robbery. Her family hired F. Lee Bailey to defend her in a trial that was the media circus of its day, with the noted attorney laying out the story of her confinement in a closet for two months, with little food and water, and how that experience stripped away the layers of Patty and turned her into Tanya. She was sentenced to seven years, and after serving twenty-two months, her sentence was commuted by President Jimmy Carter. From then on she was always with a bodyguard; months later, she married him, had children, and faded back behind the drapes of San Francisco society.
With the stanching of this prison-fueled rebellion, SWAT teams quickly became part of the repertoire of municipal police departments across the land—and calls for reform of the California prison system continued to go unheeded. By 2003, Los Angeles County’s own SWAT team—different from the team that was part of the city’s police department—was regularly deployed in high-risk situations, such as serving arrest and search warrants to individuals who might be heavily armed, carrying out hostage rescues, and subduing people who are barricaded. The hunt for Donald Kueck involved two of these three mandates, in addition to a range of other tasks.
A standard view of SWAT teams is that they are a kind of beef council, comprised of muscle-bound men who receive orders and hit the ground running and that is all. But as always, the conventional wisdom fails, with much more to be added to this profile. For instance, take Gold Team member Bruce Chase. A wiry and agile man in his forties who favors dark, wraparound shades and Hawaiian shirts during his downtime, he generally steers clear of the sun because of his fair skin. You might not take him for a cop, let alone a member of SWAT, because in Southern California, if someone is fit and minus a tan, somehow little else matters. You also might not take him for a man whose code has been deeply shaped by books, simply because of the above-mentioned beef-related assumptions. Yet he is one more character in our story with a serious involvement in literature. In particular, during his formative years and beyond, it was the books of the well-known western scribe Louis L’Amour. Although the author died in 1988, his celebrated novels of the West live on—Hondo and Flint and Down the Long Hills among the nearly one hundred reprinted many times for his endless parade of fans, his life’s work never appearing on “best of the century lists” or any part of the literary canon but to this day a signpost on the path for who knows how many, the thing that says, “Turn here.”
When Bruce Chase was a young boy, more than anything, he dreamed of the Wild West. He played cowboys and Indians in the Virginia woods, where he spent his childhood years, and then one day he started to read the works of L’Amour, and that’s when his dreaming began to get serious. L’Amour took him into the great American dreamtime, a world of red rock and mesas and pretty horses, a world where a man does what’s right simply because in his heart of hearts he knows what needs to be done. And one day, after his family moved from Virginia to California, the boy would follow in his older brother’s footsteps, in the footsteps of his beloved Sackett brothers, the L’Amour characters who headed west and became lawmen, signing up for the thin blue line via an agency whose very name—which included the word “sheriff”—recalled another time. Over the years, he would advance through the ranks and become part of the Los Angeles County SWAT team.
Strangely, there was a L’Amour book called The Lonesome Gods that took place in the California desert and happened to be one of Chase’s favorites. It told a story of good and evil in the drylands, and months later, when the hunt was over and we talked about his role in a similar and epic battle in the latter-day desert, he went to his garage and retrieved the book from a collection he had stored away years earlier. Then he sat down and read the book again, and it became part of our conversations about this story, for I happened to know it myself. You see, I too had a L’Amour phase, not to disparage this master, and rereading it, I could see how this particular novel had pointed the way to Chase’s life’s work and continued to inform it over the years.
In particular, there was a passage about a team of men riding to right a wrong, five against twelve, heading into the desert at night under skies lit by stars. There was cool air, there were hooves that clicked on stone, and as the men galloped up a hill, there came the creaking of saddles. These men had all endured trouble in their lives, but beyond that there was no comparison. Now they headed into battle under a flag of courage, L’Amour wrote, “loyal to the last fib
er of their being, and strong with the knowledge that if men are to survive upon the earth there must be law, and there must be justice, and all men must stand together against those who would strike at the roots of what men have so carefully built.”
THIS PRESENT DARKNESS
All shadows whisper of the sun.
—Emanuel Carnevali
IF STEVE SORENSEN COULD HAVE WAITED, HE MIGHT HAVE HAD a career as a lifeguard. “When he got back from the army,” recalls his old roommate in Manhattan Beach, “he wanted to go full time. But there were cutbacks, and he was impatient.” In January 1991, after he had been married for about a year, Steve entered the LA County Sheriff’s Academy, a member of class 271. At the age of thirty-three, he was older than the other recruits, and during the four-month training period, he became a role model of sorts for some of the other guys. One in particular was Deputy Bernard Shockley, whom I met during a visit to headquarters for the Special Enforcement Bureau in East Los Angeles, where the SWAT team is based. As I was talking with Sergeant Joe Williams, the canine handler for SWAT during the manhunt for Kueck, Shockley overheard our conversation and joined in. Ten years younger than Steve, he choked up at the memory of his classmate and said that he had looked up to the ex-surfer for his quiet and helpful ways. “I knew him at the beginning of his career, and I was there at the end.” With their names close alphabetically, Shockley sat next to Sorensen in the academy. “Steve was a mature guy,” Shockley says, recalling someone who was beyond the antics that are typical of a bunch of guys in their twenties who are supposed to take orders from someone else in a classroom.
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