A Desert Reckoning

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A Desert Reckoning Page 19

by Deanne Stillman


  A BREAK IN THE CASE

  Sleep with one eye open

  Grippin’ your pillow tight.

  —Metallica, “Enter Sandman”

  BY THE MORNING OF TUESDAY, AUGUST 5, THE LOS ANGELES County Sheriff’s Department issued a special bulletin, and Kueck’s face began appearing everywhere. WANTED FOR MURDER OF DEPUTY SHERIFF it said in red lettering, and it showed two booking photos of the fugitive taken at a bust two years earlier. Some cops wondered why the flyer hadn’t been issued earlier, but in any case here it was, up on the “Most Wanted” boards in bus stations and post offices, and broadcast throughout the day on reports of breaking news. For friends of Kueck’s who had never seen the photograph, it was shocking: the handsome hermit with the craggy face and the Fu Manchu now looked like the man law enforcement said he was—a killer. “Suspect Kueck should be considered ARMED AND DANGEROUS,” warned the flyer, and then listed his personal stats and the names and phone numbers of Sergeant Joe Purcell and Detective Phil Guzman, the lead investigators.

  Tips continued to pour in, and it was around that time that Purcell and Guzman got a call from C.T. Confirming their belief that Kueck was in the area and that it was only a matter of time before someone dropped a dime on him, he told them that he was a buddy of Don’s and that he had seen him twice that week. The cops immediately left LASD headquarters in Commerce and headed for Palmdale in an unmarked car, meeting C.T. at a secret location in the desert. The ex-con looked frazzled and scared. He did not appear to be high, although one of his busts had been for narcotics. He told them about Kueck carrying two guns when he had dropped by on the day of Steve’s murder, and also that Kueck had asked for food and water. C.T. was concerned that Kueck would return; since C.T. was wanted on a parole violation, Kueck figured that he would not tell law enforcement he had been there, lest C.T. be busted as an accomplice or for aiding and abetting a fugitive. That would have been a third strike; in the California penal code, it meant game over. But Kueck was desperate now, with his face plastered everywhere; “he might kill me,” C.T. told cops, and take off again. There was also another angle; a $25,000 reward had been posted, and C.T. wouldn’t say no to a piece of it. For law enforcement, things were falling into place, and with C.T.’s help, they started planning how to take down Kueck if and when he returned to the remote desert compound.

  Meanwhile, investigators were working a different aspect of the case. Many of the tips that were pouring in involved tunnels. We do not know if these tips were coming from people who knew about the burrows around Kueck’s property, but we do know that some of them were coming from those who knew the Mojave. The tipsters were convinced that the fugitive hermit had gone to ground, because that’s the only way to survive extreme desert heat during the daytime. Given the fact that Kueck had been surfacing at night and vanished during the day, investigators came to embrace this view as well. The problem was what to do about it. Where were the tunnels? How would they flush him out? On the other hand, the tips about tunnels were coming in so fast that they became a joke among law enforcement. They knew Kueck could have been hiding out in a mine shaft, but come on—a whole system?

  By Day Four of the manhunt, it was becoming clear that Donald Charles Kueck was no match for law enforcement teams trained for street battles. Locals knew that the longtime student of desert survival, buddy to four-legged and winged creatures of the Mojave, could easily have made adaptations that would help him remain underground for a long period of time. Clearly, they reasoned, he had entered the Mojave tunnel system, resting in coolness and shade by day, possibly finding water that was trapped in underground seeps, regaining his diminishing strength, and then emerging at dusk and traveling through darkness like all desert creatures in temperatures that will not destroy them. Where he entered we do not know, but sometime on the fourth day, it appears that he—or someone else wanting to leave a message—ended up back at his trailer. Perhaps he had traversed a labyrinth that ran for miles or, more likely, made his way close to home above ground, in the dark, and then had gone to ground in the tunnels that coursed near his home. Hunkered in a cavern, he might have used his homemade periscope for the very thing he had long expected—that he would be hunted down—extending it carefully and methodically, lest anyone spot movement, surveying the area, deciding that no one was there and proceeding with his plan. In the morning hours of the fourth day, investigators returned to his trailer for another search. There a message awaited them—a rattlesnake nailed to the front door. Once again, the man who was now starring on “America’s Most Wanted” had slipped through a massive dragnet, and on the fourth day of the manhunt, he was telling cops to come and get him.

  At sundown on Day Four, some residents of Lake Los Angeles were gathering in a local park. They remembered all of the times Deputy Sorensen had helped them, on good calls and bad. The American and California state flags were at half-staff, and town officials were standing behind a bank of microphones. In the crowd were about twenty or thirty people of all ages, races, and manner of desert persuasions. They held candles and sang “Amazing Grace” and told stories about their local protector. This was the first of several memorials in Steve’s honor, and in some ways, because it was the first and therefore the most spontaneous, it held a certain kind of raw energy and some of it was about kids. There at the front of the crowd stood Miss Lake Los Angeles and her court, a pretty teenage girl with hair in a flip, solemnly facing . . . what exactly? For sure, it was her first such experience; a cop had not been killed in the line of duty in this area since 1992, despite its reputation as a rough place. Now here she was, representing the town in the aftermath of carnage that surprised even veteran cops. Perhaps it was an obligated public appearance, maybe her first, but in any case, it was a tribute to Steve, who had sunk roots in Lake Los Angeles for its beauty and chance to start over.

  As dusk rolled across the big sky of the Antelope Valley, and prayers were murmured at his memorial, the hunt for Kueck became ever more fevered. Police vehicles from other jurisdictions were still racing to the scene. Hearing reports of sightings on their scanners, some would quickly turn around and try to head in the opposite direction, gunning their engines when their cars became mired in washes or roadside shoulders and running out of gas. In online chat rooms, locals were reporting that some cops were simply abandoning their cars and heading into the desert on foot, trying to help out in any way they could, carrying no water or supplies and not dressed for a desert pursuit. Others spoke of a police Suburban being hauled out of the area by truck, apparently after its driver burnt out the engine in the desert heat. There was chatter about the chaos of the operation, and people wondered how so many vehicles could keep showing up with no one telling them exactly where to go. But no matter what they were saying, the posse had taken on a life of its own, expanding and spreading out along every vector of the sixteen-square-mile search area. Adding to the traffic were news vans, racing across the valley and responding to scanners like anyone else who was listening, and interviewing residents along the way.

  There were a lot of kids who wanted to talk about Steve, not only beauty queens, and not Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts, but kids who were on a different path and outside the mainstream. For example, a thirteen-year-old who had a ring through her lower lip, looking like a lot of kids everywhere. “Steve set you straight if he saw that you were hanging with the wrong crowd,” she said. “A lot of people don’t like cops,” another kid added. “But Steve was one of the good ones.” A couple of parents nodded and their kids teared up, and then someone spoke of Steve’s own son, a two-year-old toddler, and they mentioned that he too would be feeling the loss. Three days later the little boy would be standing next to his mother at Steve’s funeral.

  Earlier that day some news had broken, and a few in the crowd spoke of it after the event. When investigators had searched Kueck’s trailer in the aftermath of Steve’s death, one of the things they found was the letter Don had written to the heads of law enforcement agencies in
which he had recounted what happened on that August day, almost ten years earlier, when he and Steve had their first encounter. That’s how they learned that the two had more in common than just living in close proximity. Within hours, news of the prior run-in began appearing in media coverage of the manhunt, and it raised questions among cops and friends and family members of both men. Was it possible that neither Steve nor Don knew that they lived in each other’s backyard? The answer was yes, but not likely. Steve had made a point of getting to know everyone on his beat, not that such a thing was always possible given how many residents didn’t want anyone, especially cops, to know them.

  As for Don, everyone knew who the local cop was, not because they had necessarily met him, but because sooner or later, if you went anywhere in Lake Los Angeles or surrounding areas, you’d run into him. Don in fact had probably run into Steve several times at the local Frontier Mart on Highway 138, where he went every week in his Dodge Dart to pick up a new supply of propane. When he returned, he would tell friends that there was a cop in town who was always giving him dirty looks, and they got the impression that if the eye contact had a musical score, it would be written by Sergio Leone. Now, to be sure, many a cop might have given Don a dirty look. They had been doing it since the 1970s, when his long hair translated as outlaw, and the situation was especially aggravated in the South, where he grew up. In more recent years, he looked and sometimes acted tweaked, meaning paranoid and agitated and hostile from use of meth and other drugs, and sometimes was. Plus, when he stepped beyond the moat of his desert kingdom, he was a trouble magnet. While it’s one thing to hate the man when you’re a kid and into your twenties and thirties, the edge never softened, and in fact was only amped by jail time, drugs, and personal failures and loss. For Don, especially toward the end, it was a point of pride to stand against those who enforced rules and regulations, a thing that fueled him and qualified him for residence in the remote Mojave. So whenever he saw a member of law enforcement, especially, as he once told his daughter, white ones, his hack went up and he may have said some things, and even if he said nothing, he was a guy whose looks and demeanor said, “Oh yeah, buddy? I don’t think so.”

  Yet in all the times he complained about “this cop who’s hassling me,” he never mentioned the cop’s name, and he never said anything about this particular cop being the guy who had once busted him on the road. Quite simply, time had passed, and in his final months, he was undergoing a loss of mental acuity, perhaps forgetting the name of the sheriff against whom he had nurtured a serious grudge, or never getting close enough to read the name on Steve’s badge when he saw him in the store, or not remembering what he looked like. Also we must consider that sometimes bad memories fade all on their own, perhaps still troubling when they send the last angry tentacles before receding forever. And sometimes they are just gone—or smoldering, waiting for a match.

  As for Steve, he had once told a few friends that there was some tweaker who lived down the road, and he was keeping his eye on him. He never associated this person with a name. Of course, he could have been referring to any number of people, but from the direction Steve was pointing when he would make that remark, friends later theorized that the reference could have been to Kueck, even though he was not a known tweaker, meaning he hadn’t been busted for meth use or cooking it. What’s interesting about this comment is what he didn’t say: “I can’t believe I bought this house. There’s this lawsuit nut living down the road, the same guy who tried to get me fired.” In fact, Steve never spoke of their earlier run-in, as far as anyone remembers, and when it was reported on the news, it was the first time that those in his immediate circle had heard of it.

  Yet an encounter such as the one Kueck and Sorensen had is not likely forgotten. Years before Steve was killed, one of his partners was Sgt. Paul Dino. The pair became close friends, and months after the manhunt for Kueck had wrapped up, I spoke with him on the phone. He remembered the time Steve had saved his life. It was a domestic violence call—other than traffic stops, the most deadly of police tasks. Someone is usually armed when you get there, and they are willing to take you and anyone else down. At the time, 1997, they were working in Altadena, on the south side of the San Gabriel Mountains. When they arrived at the scene, a woman was standing on the front porch. She said that she and the man in her house—whether he was her husband or a boyfriend the cops didn’t know—had been arguing over tacos. Her eyes were swollen shut. “Did he do this to you?” Dino asked, and the woman nodded yes. Steve moved to cuff the guy, but he spun away and punched Dino in the face, breaking his nose. The cops tackled him and fell into the living room. “He’s got my gun,” Steve called out. Dino grabbed the guy’s head and pulled it up, jamming his weapon against it. The man dropped Steve’s gun. “The second we put the cuffs on,” Dino said, “the fight was on. Lesson learned,” he added. “Keep going no matter what, and don’t underestimate a call.” And then we talked about whether or not cops remember all of the busts they have made, who was in what house or car, and what happened to each of those cases. “No,” he said. “You don’t always remember. But you never forget a bad call.”

  The backstory of what happened between Steve and Don was ultimately of little consequence to Steve’s brothers and sisters in the sheriff’s department, and they steered clear of reporters’ questions on the subject. Quite simply, members of law enforcement do not do gray. Which is not to say they weren’t interested in the things that led to the downfall of their colleague, or of anyone for that matter. It is to say that bad things have consequences, and they are there to make sure that the law is brought to bear.

  In the middle of the memorial, the red light on top of a Crown Vic in the parking lot started to flash and the siren screamed and the screech of pedal to metal was heard. The police vehicle turned hard on the Pearblossom Highway and headed west. Kueck had been sighted in Saddleback Butte, and black-and-whites from San Bernardino County were on the way. The last major preserve of Joshua trees in Los Angeles, Saddleback Butte was as good a hiding place as any in the Mojave, rumored to be riddled with mining shafts and the ghosts of frontier hermits. Meanwhile, investigators were trying to track down other associates of Kueck. One of them, believed to be a “close acquaintance,” had not been seen since the murder. Perhaps he was harboring Kueck at his shack on Avenue R. SWAT deployed and surrounded the place. “DONALD CHARLES KUECK, THIS IS THE LOS ANGELES COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT. COME OUT WITH YOUR HANDS UP” came the announcement over SWAT’s speaker system. They repeated it several times and made the same announcement for Kueck’s associate. No one emerged. Finally, the search warrant they had been waiting for arrived. It was a high-risk service, which meant that there was a probability of encountering armed individuals on the premises. With five men remaining in position around the house, two approached the front door on either side, and that night’s team scout, Mark Schlegel, knocked it down and entered, followed by his men. The house was empty and the team left, heading back to the Mount Carmel convent. They took off their gear, laid down on the floor in the main wing, and, with the nuns finishing up their prayers in the chapel, called it a day. For Bruce Chase, hitting the cold cement felt good, a relief from the outdoor furnace. He found himself thinking about the manhunt he was on and, well, his whole life. Yes, he was a fan of Louis L’Amour, but there was more to it. He had a degree in economics from William and Mary and he could have followed the trail to Wall Street. That of course was brutal in its own way, with brokers engaged in blood sport that was far removed from a hands-on engagement with the law and those who broke it. But how did he end up out here in the desert, in temperatures of over 110 degrees, running through the sand lugging sixty pounds of tactical gear toward a deputy’s lifeless body? Would they find the man who killed him? So far, he felt like he was chasing a ghost, and it was hard not to believe he was in the Twilight Zone.

  DAY

  FIVE

  JELLQ’S LAST HURRAH

  Every junkie’s like t
he setting sun.

  —Neil Young, “The Needle and the Damage Done”

  KURT COBAIN DIED IN 1994, ON APRIL 5 ACCORDING TO THE coroner’s report, although his body wasn’t found until April 8. He had shot himself in the head. The rock idol and longtime junkie was twenty-seven years old and joined a list of other rock stars who had checked out at the same age, including Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix. For a lot of kids, and especially musicians, the age had become diabolically magic. According to Cobain’s sister, Kurt had wanted to die at that age, and as he wrote in an anguished suicide note, “It’s better to burn out than fade away.” The rise and fall had happened in Seattle, where all things rad had coalesced in the mid-1980s and early ’90s, a response to the canned chart-topping hair bands that reeked of marketing ploys and the music industry at its corporate worst. Lost boys and girls from across the land were heading to Seattle, and one of them was Jello Kueck.

 

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