A Desert Reckoning

by Deanne Stillman

  Other strange sights awaited SWAT as they continued to walk through the dregs of the compound. The power had been turned off several hours ago, and they were searching in the dark, with powerful handheld lights. It had been a long siege, and they were spent. Even Rik the Malinois stopped in his tracks. Joe Williams knew it was time for the dog to go home. He was replaced with another K9 who had been standing by, and the men continued their weary march. Ten minutes after the search began, Bruce Chase spotted two femurs jutting through the ashes. The men moved in for a closer look. Donald Kueck was 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 the Three Sisters Buttes, the formation he looked to at dawn.

  On August 11 at 8:06 PM, the dispatcher announced the traditional end-of-watch roll call for a deputy killed in the line of duty. “Lancaster 110 Charlie,” she called, and from his patrol car he responded, “114Boy, it was an honor to know you and a privilege to work with you, God speed,” and then from all over the desert the messages poured in—from 110 Lincoln and 110 Lincoln Adam and 110 George and 113 Sam—“Steve, you will never be forgotten, my brother. . . . Your family’s in good hands here, and we know you’re in good hands up there. . . . Rest in peace, my brother.”

  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 11)—just waiting for the next hermit with a 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, 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 the dream of building a little place in the desert.”

  To the right of the La-Z Boy sits a pallet stacked with eighty-pound 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 men such as this, 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. Months after he had gone out in the blaze, Jello’s friends drove out to the old man’s trailer, retrieved some mementoes, and scattered the boy’s ashes on top of Don’s grave.

  EPILOGUE

  For Whom the Bell Tolls

  AFTER IT ALL WENT DOWN, DON’S FRIEND C.T. SMITH MOVED into an RV and parked it near Littlerock Dam, his pad now burnt to smithereens. A few days later, detectives arrived with his share of the reward money—one-quarter of $10,000—but he didn’t know how to cash the check. They took him to a check-cashing place and walked him through the process. Around that time, he was listed in the paper as one of the people sharing the reward. Now known as a snitch, he retreated more deeply into the desert. At some point, he moved into a house in Lake Los Angeles. On October 10, 2005, after failing to report to his parole officer and register with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department as a sex offender, he retrieved a gun from under his roommate’s pillow, stood near a bathroom doorway, and shot himself in the head. He had told friends he was never going back to jail, which he knew would happen because of the aforesaid violations and the fact that he had been doing speed and would therefore fail the mandatory drug test. As soon as she heard the shot, his roommate called 911. Paramedics quickly arrived, and within minutes C.T. was pronounced dead.

  On the thirteenth of every month, a devout woman named Maria Paula Acuna leads followers into the desert near California City, where others go to wait for desert tortoises to emerge from their burrows in spring time, a sign of magic and rebirth. Paula and her constituents were awaiting a vision of the Virgin Mary. They make the pilgrimage to the spot in the Mojave on the same date and same time because that’s when the Holy Mother had first appeared as a cloud of white fog years ago, at 10:30 in the morning, and said, “I am the Lady of the Rock, Queen of Peace of Southern California. I come to bring you the peace and love that is so needed.” One week after the manhunt for Donald Kueck had reached its conclusion, thousands sat under the clear blue sky in lawn chairs, on the ground, on rocks, and waited. Someone saw a beam of light and inside it an apparition. “Mary,” called a child, and others rushed toward the beam, crossing themselves and falling to their knees and someone cast off their crutches. “Madre de Dios,” others said, and later, depending on how you looked at it, a Polaroid showed an image of a woman in a cloud. . . .

  Shortly after Steve was killed, the town council of Lake Los Angeles was rearranged, replacing those who had opposed him and his allies Pastor John Wodetzki and reporter Connie Mavrolas with those who supported their work, ushering in a more inclusive policy, and transforming how things were done in the town where Steve had been resident deputy. On October 18, 2006, a portion of State Route 138 was named Deputy Sheriff Stephen Sorensen Memorial Highway. The six-mile stretch that runs through Llano is marked by signs at 135th Street East and 195th Street East, the east-west borders of the sheriff’s beat. Just to the north of the pavement are the ruins of the old commune, faltering every hour and every minute, yet still somehow standing. . . .

  The way of the future, they say, is logistics, a curious endeavor once associated primarily with the military and now a college major at various institutions of higher learning around the country. Logistics, according to Wikipedia, is the management of the flow of goods between the point of origin and the point of destination in order to meet the requirements of customers or corporations. Logistics involves the integration of information, transportation, inventory, warehousing, material handling, packaging, and security. To accommodate logistics, there are plans for a High Desert Corridor in the Mojave, a sixty-three-mile freeway consisting of four, six, or eight lanes, depending on what parts of the desert it traverses, running from Highway 14 in the Antelope Valley eastward to Highway 15 in the Victor Valley, facilitating connection between the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach with rail lines and airports in the Inland Empire. “The corridor uniquely positions the High Desert to distribute goods on a global scale,” as the plans say. “A talented labor force and low land costs make the High Desert a great place to locate your business.” The corridor will be completed by 2020 if all goes according to plan.

  The proposal is not without merit. It will certainly bring jobs to a region where jobs are scarce. It may alleviate problems on the 138, aka Tweaker Highway aka Blood Alley, site of so many fatal accidents, siphoning off fast-moving truck traffic from a roadway that can’t handle it and loosening up bottlenecks that form on the freeways of Southern California when travelers must drive around the western Mojave instead of across it. But the corridor would also pass through the last remaining wide-open space in Los Angeles County—the land that Donald Kueck and Steve Sorensen called home. This would change the nature of the place, alter the quality of living for those who have spent fortunes and time and blood erecting kingdoms great and small, and it would drive the region’s remaining castaways deeper into the desert, rigging their tents, planting their no trespassing signs, scavenging on the far reaches of civilization, desperados displaced one more time. Already, like their brothers and sisters in the animal nations who
detect the approach of a tsunami or earthquake and flee in advance of a cataclysm, they have picked up signals, organized meetings (perhaps a first in the annals), “contacted the media” . . . Yes, the man has come a-knocking, in pursuit of code violations, expired smog checks, other misdeeds, and they suspect that their days in the far reaches of Los Angeles County are numbered. John Wayne once lived in these here parts. One of the things he said about the Antelope Valley is that it taught him how to be a cowboy.

  On a final note, let us recall the mysterious character known in this story as Mr. X. You remember him? The squatter who triggered the chain of deadly events? The last I heard, he was living at El Mirage, the dry lake bed near Barstow where Don and Jello sometimes went to launch rockets. The High Desert Corridor will pass right by the northern edge of this ancient sink, carrying goods consumed elsewhere and destined, sooner or later, for a hermit’s house in the Mojave.

  NOTES ON THE WRITING OF THIS BOOK

  IT’S NOT OFTEN THAT A MAP LEADS TO THE HEART OF A STORY, but in this case it did, and I had it. “Go down V Avenue,” it said. “Just before the pavement ends there is a small fenced-in area with some gas lines in it. Take a right-hand turn. Then go 0.9 miles and take a left where a house used to be. Go 2.3 miles, take a right-hand turn, then go 0.45 miles and turn left—you might notice some Christmas tinsel in the sage brush. In another 3.5 miles take a right at the intersection. At this point, if you look into the mountains, you should be lined up with a road going towards them . . .”

  The map came to me by way of Donald Kueck’s sister Lynne Kueck, whom I began speaking with shortly after his death and continued to do so throughout the time I was working on my Rolling Stone article “The Great Mojave Manhunt,” the one on which this book is based. The directions led me right to the scene of the crime and other things; it was as if I had dropped through some freeway sinkhole in Los Angeles and ended up in its sad and lonely heart—an hour away from the Warner lot, just beyond the San Gabriel Mountains, where Donald Kueck had watched the stars, studied search-and-seizure laws, and talked to animals. And nearby, as I would later learn, Deputy Steve Sorensen watched those selfsame constellations, communed with desert creatures, and was deployed for the laws that so many a desert hermit deliberated over in their solitude and ruminations.

  As the months unfolded, I made several trips to the site where Don had lived, sometimes with his son, Jello—the same site where Steve and Don had faced off for the final time. On these trips, I was accompanied by the photographer Mark Lamonica, an early guide through the Antelope Valley and the person who encouraged me to write this story; a long-time wanderer of the Mojave to the east of Los Angeles, I had not spent much time in the desert to the north of LA until Mark invited me out for a visit after we communed over a mutual affinity for Joshua trees. In addition to having a map and an escort through the nether reaches of the Antelope Valley, I also had a pit bull named Buddha—a loving, loyal, and good-to-go protector whom Mark and I had raised together. Buddha accompanied us on various explorations into these lands where many had animal guardians (and did not always treat them with kindness); his watchfulness was a grace and his presence a comfort—he seemed to have become his name. And his sixth sense was an alert to who knows exactly what, telling us when it was time to leave.

  Months and even years later, artifacts of a hermit’s life remained at the scene, and these objects became vectors for the story. Sometimes I would sit in the lounge chair that was Don’s, read through books that were still there, and ponder the Three Sisters Buttes directly to the east—the formation that rendered solace and protection to him, as well as to Steve Sorensen, the nuns at the convent nearby, and so many others who lived in this region. Many things became apparent in those buttes and in the sands that stretched out in their shadows; it’s easy to walk through time in the desert—in fact, it is a walk through time. The playing field of history is literally level, and after a while the parade is right there: the ancients, the moderns, the attempts of all who tread the path. Look, up there in the rocks, an Indian is making ceremony! And see that conquistador across the plain, on his horse, harquebus at the ready! How soon he vanishes—and now come the tractors and backhoes and the men who man them and then the desert grows silent again and as I sit in the old chair a late afternoon wind blows in and I hear the rattling of the creosote and the banging of a door left unclosed somewhere and then come other signs of civilization—the sound of plastic bags flapping through the air until they are impaled on brush, now windsocks forever. After a while, as the sun sinks westward ho, the skies of the Antelope Valley fade to red—crimson, then deeper, an outpouring of blood, and then ribbons of indigo. It’s time to go, but one more sound draws my attention: the rustle of—what? I’m not sure, but I follow the sound to its source, and there is the pear tree Don had planted when he first moved in—scrawny, its few leaves dry but still there, sending out a call, yes, another silent wail from this patch of earth, ready to revive if enough rain comes along, struggling for a hold, waiting—as is the way of things in the drylands.

  Across the way at Steve’s house there were other messages, and I heard them as its new owner guided me through it. So many times in recent years it was the horse that led me to things I needed to know, and now, once again, they were leading the way. My previous book Mustang: The Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West was an account of the wild horse on this continent, from prehistory through the present, and to learn its story I had followed its tracks across the centuries. One of the places they led to was the Antelope Valley, specifically a sanctuary called Lifesavers, where mustangs that have fallen through the cracks of modern management systems live out their lives amid Joshua trees and the wide open space that is their birthright. One day as I was nearing completion of my book, I attended an event at Lifesavers, a “bomb-proofing” exercise in which untrained horses are taught to become accustomed to loud and unexpected noises, thus becoming prepared for service in the outside world, such as with law enforcement agencies or on the trail carrying boisterous dudes at a ranch. At this event, I began talking with Palmdale resident Kate LaCroix and her son Austin; they had adopted several mustangs, Kate told me, and as we conversed, one thing led to another, and I was soon telling her about this book. “Have you been to Steve Sorensen’s house?” she asked. As it happened, I had been trying to do that for several years; not being the kind of reporter who simply shows up and knocks on doors (except as a last resort—and even then, I think twice), I told her that I had driven past it several times but that was all, and also how important it would be to be able to walk the grounds he had called home. It turned out that she knew its current owner, the woman who had bought it from Christine Sorensen after Steve had been killed. “Steve’s animals are still there,” Kate said. “Maybe you could go for a visit.”

  I was stunned by this turn of events—and then not; sooner or later in the course of things, usually later, people come forth, information emerges, doors open, and I’m on my way down the trail. Soon after meeting Kate, I contacted Kristie Holladay, the current owner, and was touring the house where Steve had lived, meeting the dogs he had rescued, and looking at the world from his vantage point—the very center of his beat. The house itself was saying something, and so were the grounds, the view, and of course the animals Steve had rescued. It’s not often that animals remain with a house once their owner has left, but it seemed fitting—the place was theirs after all, and perhaps they too were waiting, in their case for the man who had taken them in from a hard life in the Mojave. But of course Steve’s spirit was there, because he had poured it into his house and the act of making it better, and then there was that powerful artifact in his office: his coffeemaker. Yes, a cop and his coffee! I thought. What else should remain? And of course it wasn’t just any coffee; here he once was, making it himself, just the way he used to when he lived at the beach and surfed the nice hollow sets of the South Bay, and here too were the mugs he drank from as he looked out across the deser
t, watching it and trying to keep it the way it was—ever the lifeguard, answering calls of distress.

  But it was after a trip to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department Museum in Whittier, California, that I gained a deeper insight into Deputy Sorensen. The museum is a little-known destination—that is, outside of members of law enforcement—an unprepossessing structure far away from the city’s museum row, on an old high school campus that is also home to the Major Crimes, Family, and Narcotics bureaus. Among the exhibits are a 1938 Studebaker patrol car, saddles from early posses, booking ledgers from the 1800s, frontier wanted posters, various weapons, drug paraphernalia, Vegas slot machines, illegal carnival games, a piece of an old hanging tree and the rope that went with it, a Hughes 300 helicopter that was part of the department’s first Sky Knight squadron—a complete mishmash of memorabilia, in that sometimes strange LA way of things whereby the past becomes mixed up with the present in spite of attempts to impose a timeline. But there’s often something unexpected in these museum driftnets, and as I made my second pass through the halls, I found it: up on a wall, not easy to spot—kind of hidden away, since cops play few of their cards—there was a letter, a law enforcement decoder, I realized as I began to read it, another key to the secret universe of those who stand on the thin blue line.