A Desert Reckoning

by Deanne Stillman

  The day after the party, or possibly the next week—the exact time frame is not clear—Jello called his friend Dave in Seattle and asked him to wire money for a bus ticket. Dave did so, not realizing how strung out Jello was and hoping to bail him out one more time. Jello took the money and partied, never getting to the depot in LA and missing the bus. Instead he called his old amigo Chris Smallwood and asked for a ride to the station. Chris agreed, and during the two-hour drive, Jello tried to talk him into shooting dope. “You’re going off the reservation,” Chris said, as he had on many other occasions, declining his friend’s offer. At the station, Chris helped Jello get a new ticket. Then they embraced, and Chris kissed him on the forehead. “Bro,” he said, “I love you.”

  Chris Smallwood heard from Jello one more time after their farewell at the bus station. “Dude,” he said, in a phone call the next day. “Come pick me up.” He had missed another bus and was calling from somewhere in downtown Los Angeles. Chris was pissed off and said no. Jello called his sister Sharon and she said no, she was studying for a final exam. A few other calls were made and everyone said the same thing. Finally, he reached his old friend Aaron Blair, another musician who was then living with his parents in Riverside. “Dude, I just got out of jail,” Jello said. “Get your ass back here,” Aaron replied. His home was one of the various sanctuaries for Jello upon occasion, and once again he was extending an invitation. But Jello was pissed off about everything and went on a long rant. “Call me later on the cell,” Aaron told his friend after explaining how to jump the Metro and get back to Riverside. “I gotta leave for work.” Later, Jello called and left a message—on the family’s house phone instead of the cell. Aaron’s mother picked it up, but it was too late, and when Aaron called back the next day, there was no answer.

  No one knows exactly what happened after Jello’s last phone call to his friend. “You’re not supposed to get off the boat,” Chris Smallwood says years later, referring to the scene in Apocalypse Now, in which the soldiers leave their boat, go ashore, and are attacked by a tiger. “He was supposed to get on the bus and go to Seattle.” There were no more calls, not even to his father, whom he had been calling with some regularity in his last few weeks. His father was worried, and in fact long before Jello’s first trip to Seattle, he had confided to Virginia Smallwood that sooner or later, Jello was going to kill himself. He called a few of Jello’s friends, including Angela Asbell, who was also concerned that Jello might have been missing, especially after finding that strange note in her bathroom. “Do you know where he is?” Don asked Angela. She didn’t, and neither did anyone else.

  The answer came on July 4, when Jello’s mother received word from the police that her son had been found dead of an overdose in a warehouse on Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles. Rebecca, Jello’s older stepsister, decided that his friends and father ought to make a pilgrimage to the site and contacted Don and the others to arrange it. A few days later, Mike Cazares, Fritz Aragon, and Fritz’s girlfriend drove to the place where Jello’s body was discovered. Don drove in from the desert and accompanied them on the trip. It was true that Jello had died in a seedy part of town. But it was characteristic of him that in terms of the exact location, he went out with a flourish, in the old Palace Theatre at Broadway and Sixth Street, a once-grand establishment where Fred Astaire and Harry Houdini played to high-ticket audiences in plush red velvet seats. One of Houdini’s famous presentations was the Needle Trick. He’d begin by swallowing several of them, followed by a length of thread. Then, to the audience’s delight, he’d regurgitate a series of threaded needles. Over time, the theatre fell into disrepair and decay, mirroring the story of downtown Los Angeles. A few years ago, a renovation restored its former glory, polishing up the marble entranceway and the gold leaf surrounding the murals flanking the theatre’s stage. But regardless of its condition, drama had always found a home at the Palace. During its lean years, homeless people had burrowed through its crumbling walls and roof, wandering through, some making a home in the warrens that ran above, below, and around the theatre in adjacent buildings. Each of these drifters had a story and a name, and one of them was Jello Kueck. As it turned out, on his way to meeting Kurt Cobain, he had spent his last days with the ghosts of Al Jolson, the Marx Brothers, Will Rogers, and strangely, Harry Houdini, who had survived his own kind of needle trick on the stage of the grand old theatre.

  On a bright summer day, Fritz parked his car in a downtown lot, paid the hefty parking fee, and headed with Don and his friends toward the address they had been given. Not realizing that it was a theatre, he was a bit surprised, and then noticing that it was undergoing renovation, he wondered if they had been given the correct information. His girlfriend carried a bouquet of flowers. As they approached the building, a security guard stopped them, took note of the flowers, and asked where they were going. As they explained their mission—to pay homage to a friend who had recently died and been found at this location—the guard became excited and related a disturbing story. “I’m the person who found his body,” the man said, in broken English laced with a lot of Spanish phrases and words, and physical mannerisms to break the language barrier. For a few days, he continued, he had been hearing a strange sound coming from one of the doors in the back of the theatre. “I thought someone was banging on it,” he said. Superstitious, he was reluctant to find out what or who was there. Maybe the place was haunted, he said. Demons could have been living there. Maybe he should call a priest. But something kept telling him to open the door. Cautiously, he approached and tried to open it. But there was something in the way, on the other side, and he pushed harder. When he peered in, his fear was confirmed—there was a man’s body leaning against the door. He was dead. There was a needle in one of his arms. Later, a guy from forensics told the guard that the noise had been caused by the man’s boot kicking the door as rigor mortis settled in. Strangely, around the same time, someone made a drive-by past Jello’s mother’s place in Riverside, tossing his backpack into the front yard. Inside was a suicide note. It seems to have vanished at some point, but as far as anyone remembers, it echoed the long symphony of farewells.

  As the guard wrapped up his story, Don “went crazy,” Fritz says, and ran to the metal door. It was locked with a bar, which he wrenched off with his bare hands. Then he tore it down and rushed into the abandoned building. The others followed, and the first thing they saw was a large blood stain on the floor. Jello had been found there. “Maybe it’s Jello’s aura,” Mike Cazares thought, and they placed a candle there and lit it. With Don leading the way, they stepped away and began picking their way through the dark surroundings. He had brought a flashlight, and its scant light helped them stake out a path around mounds of trash and wrecked mattresses and deep into an urban wasteland—a strange echo of the scene in the desert, a way station for squatters that was all walls and no sky and had no way out.

  At some point Don found a miner’s hat with a light on it, put it on, and led the way up an old staircase and into the theatre balcony. There were no railings, and with nothing to hold on to, the four mourners walked carefully across the upper reaches of the Palace, unsure the rafters would hold them and trying to maintain their balance on the narrow walkway between the seats and the orchestra section below. Sunrays filtered through the stained-glass windows like dim stage lighting, and all around were odors of decay. The group kept walking, into the nether reaches of the theatre and behind the balcony and up near the roof of the building. The shaft of light from Don’s helmet swept across a hovel where someone had been living. He stopped and so did the others and they surveyed the squat and understood right away that this was the place: there was a comb, a book, a necklace, and bracelets with spikes that everyone recognized. And there amid a pile of junk was the gun Don had given to his son. He picked it up, checked it out—it wasn’t working. He teared up and then held back and then was pissed off, blaming others for the disaster and then retreating and blaming himself. Cazares wondered what Don w
as going to do next, and they stood in silence for a moment or two, waiting for him to take the lead.

  At some point, he sat down and so did the others and they placed the bouquet of flowers on the floor. Looking around the area, someone spotted some writings on the wall. It sounded like stuff Jello would say and then sure enough, there it was—the name Jello scrawled in charcoal. It was time to toast their departed friend. Fritz had some weed and he and Mike were looking for rolling papers; Don saw their dilemma and pitched in, scrounging up cigarette paper from some butts that were lying around. Then, to Fritz’s surprise, he picked up a rat trap and used it as a poker to stuff the joint with pot. “Jeez that’s hard-core,” Fritz thought as Don handed him the joint. He lit it up and took a hit, but he hadn’t met Don prior to that day, and he didn’t know if he smoked and wasn’t sure if he should hand it back, but offered it anyway. Don took a hit and then passed it to the others and they smoked it down and stayed for hours, pondering Jello and his fate and not saying much as the sunlight began to fade. Fritz noticed that Don had checked out once he had smoked the weed. With the sun now setting, he said it was time to go; Fritz had only paid for so many hours of parking and he didn’t want to spend the night amid the squalor. The four of them headed out, and as they turned a corner, they noticed more flowers and candles. Back in the lot, the security guard told them he had placed them there. There was half an hour of parking time left and Don made the most of it, talking to some kids who were hanging around, asking if any of them knew or had seen Jello in the days prior to his death. The answer was no. A month or two later, he went back to Skid Row, staying there for weeks and trying to find out what happened to his son. The answer wouldn’t have mattered. From the moment Don stood at the place where his son’s body was found, Jello’s sisters and friends knew that it was only a matter of time before the old man lost it.

  Back in Seattle, when Dave learned that the money he had sent Jello for the return bus trip had gone up his veins, he berated himself. But as everyone knew in their heart of hearts, Jello would have gotten his hands on the money to score one way or another, and there wasn’t much else they could do for someone who had vowed to check out at twenty-seven. When Elaine and the kids at the community center learned that he had joined the Twenty-Seven Club, they organized a memorial. Several among the seventy-five people who had gathered gave testimony about his friendship and impact on their lives. In the middle of the service, two girls faced off over the lanky ladies’ man from Riverside, nearly taking each other down in a shoving match. Later, Peace for the Streets by Kids from the Streets added a plaque for Jello on its memory wall.

  He left his belongings at his girlfriend Ford’s place. After he left, she opened his suitcase. Inside it was a tape, some clothes, a Greyhound ticket, and a big book on space.

  CLOUD OF DUST

  Happy trails to you, until we meet again.

  —Dale Evans and Roy Rogers, “Happy Trails”

  DEPUTY STEVE SORENSEN’S FUNERAL WAS SCHEDULED FOR THE following day, August 8, at 10 in the morning. It was hoped that Kueck would be captured before Steve was laid to rest. But that outcome was not guaranteed, and among the local cops who were Steve’s friends and colleagues, frustration was mounting, compounded by feelings of anger and humiliation. Thousands of representatives from law enforcement agencies all over the country were on their way to Lancaster for the service. The governor of California, Gray Davis, would be there. Sheriff Baca and all high-ranking members of the LASD would be in attendance, along with countless rank-and-file deputies. Of course family members would be at the memorial. What would it be like to honor and bury a beloved and embattled town sheriff while his killer might be hiding in the brush nearby? Or worse—on his way out of the area, the state, or even the country, permanently slipping through the tentacles of the law?

  As is customary, local cops had been out of the loop since Day One, with LASD Homicide and Major Crimes running the investigation. But they had been asked to help and were proceeding with their own groundwork. One of the units in particular, the Safe Streets Bureau—a team of experienced gang investigators—pitched in. A member of the unit had been keeping a running blog throughout the manhunt called A Fallen Hero. “In the days following Steve’s murder,” he wrote, “gangs had not been one of our priorities. Local gang members were probably quite surprised that we weren’t ‘visiting’ them as much as usual. It was a good time to be a gang member,” the blogger said in bold face, “and a bad time to be a 52 year old white male bearing a passing resemblance to Queck! [sic].” On Wednesday, the fifth day of the pursuit, various members of this unit headed to Lake Los Angeles and met up with deputies who patrolled the area with Steve, and then tried to locate an unnamed associate of Donald Kueck’s whom law enforcement had been seeking for several days. In a caravan of police vehicles, they headed out across the desert, visiting a number of remote locations in temperatures soaring to over 100 degrees, each man weighted down with body armor and some thirty pounds of additional gear.

  When they reached Avenue S, they spotted a run-down farm complex that was boarded up and had a “For Sale” sign posted outside. It appeared to be abandoned, but something was strange: a trailer was parked next to the main building, and it had not been there when one of the deputies had driven by on an earlier reconnaissance mission. The team of cops staked out positions and surrounded the building, approaching slowly and cautiously as they moved in across the open and flat terrain. The structure was empty, they found, but someone was asleep in the trailer. “He turned out to be an unknown acquaintance of Queck,” the blogger wrote. “He had information that we realized Homicide might need to know.” As cops continued speaking with the man in the trailer, a truck slowed and began turning into the driveway that led to the front entrance of the farm. Spotting the black-and-whites, the driver peeled off and sped away, heading west on Avenue S and crossing 170th Street East where it becomes a dirt road. Two units were on its tail, clocking in at over eighty miles per hour, flying across the desert gravel and into clouds of dust kicked up by the accelerating truck. Suddenly the cops were intercepted by another police vehicle. They had stumbled into the Major Crimes Bureau—the people who were running the investigation—and told to break off. They headed back to the farm building, where the other members of the gang team had detained the man in the trailer for trespassing. Soon he was taken in for an interview with Homicide. Several miles away at the Lancaster station, Captain Carl Deeley was preparing remarks for Steve’s funeral.

  That same night SWAT was sweeping a quadrant of the desert near C.T.’s place. Once again, dogs were deployed, bloodhounds now instead of the Malinois. On the side of a dirt road, the men spotted something strange—a fresh bowl of peaches. Perhaps someone had set it out for Kueck. Or maybe it was for them. Or maybe it was just there. You never know in the desert. That was why they didn’t live there—too much strange stuff going on. They kept going, in the dark and under the stars. Under the sage the desert gave up something else. There were several Hefty bags and some other items, all part of a portable meth lab. “It was like it dropped out of the sky,” says Deputy Rick Rector, the scout on SWAT’s Blue Team during the manhunt. On the men trekked, deeper into the nether reaches of the Mojave, and it began to feel that they were getting close to Kueck, and in a moment, the feeling was confirmed. There was a compound with trailers, behind an old western-style gate, like the entrance to a cattle spread. It was illuminated with one floodlight and the place looked spooky and Rector thought about places like Area 51 and how you weren’t supposed to be there. No one else was—or so it seemed. SWAT sent the dogs in and the animals alerted on human scent, drawing the team’s attention to another strange sight inside one of the trailers: a mattress with fresh bed linen and a glass of water that had just been poured. Had cops stumbled on one of Kueck’s hideaways, where he kept clean sheets in case of an emergency? Had someone laid out the linens, knowing that it would have been a comfort to a man on the run? Did they lay them out
specifically for Don, knowing that he had a thing about cleanliness? Or was it just another desert mystery? “I knew he was there,” Rector recalls, as we talk about the manhunt a few years later at a chain restaurant in Orange County. Chances are, he was.

  LOCKED UP WITHOUT A VIEW: A DESCENT INTO THE CALIFORNIA PRISON SYSTEM

  Sometimes I give myself the creeps.

  —Green Day, “Basket Case”