A Desert Reckoning

by Deanne Stillman

  “Dear Mr./Ms./Mrs. Citizen,” it began.

  Well, I guess you have figured me out. I seem to fit neatly into the category you placed me in. I’m stereotyped, characterized, standardized, classified, grouped, and always typical. I am the lousy cop. . . . Unfortunately, the reverse isn’t true. I can never figure you out. . . . You pride yourself on your polished manners, but think nothing of interrupting my meals at noon with your troubles. . . . You talk to me in a manner and use language that would assure a bloody nose from anyone else. . . . You have no use for me whatsoever, but of course it’s OK for me to change a tire for your wife, or deliver a baby in the back seat of my patrol car en route to the hospital or even forsake time with MY family working long hours overtime trying to find your lost daughter. . . . So, dear citizen, you stand there and rant and rave about the way I do my job, calling me every name in the book, but never stop for a minute to think that your property, your family, and maybe your life might someday depend on one thing . . . ME.

  Respectfully,

  A Lousy Cop

  After reading the letter several times and thinking about it for a while, I came to a realization that should have been obvious but wasn’t, I guess because all tribes have their secrets: behind the weapon and the badge, cops are just like everyone else—misunderstood and not appreciated, or so they feel, and therein lies the tale or part of it. In the end, their secret is ours.

  When I left the museum, I was traveling along Telegraph Road and saw a bus marked “Sorensen Avenue,” as if the day belonged to Steve. It was heading through the adjacent town of Santa Fe Springs, and I found myself following the bus for a while until it turned off and headed for its destination. At that moment, I looked to my right, and there at the intersection of Norwalk Boulevard was one more little-known Los Angeles monument. “Heritage Park” said a wrought iron sign, and past the sign was a beautifully landscaped spring garden in bloom, as well as a Victorian greenhouse and a well-preserved carriage barn—something that harked back to a time of elegance and planning to please the senses. The sight on this industrial side of town was startling, and I decided to stop in and take a look. As soon as I entered the park, the calling was clear: markers pointed past the barn, past the excavated adobe from an earlier settlement, down a trail to what was here first—the prehistoric Tongva/Gabrieleno village, made by the Indians who flourished at the local springs, constructing domes of willow and reed, leaving their myths and their stories. Here their village has been reconstructed in tribute, and just over there, coiled around it, was a giant totem—Snake Fountain, it’s called—a multicolored representation of a rattler commissioned in tribute to the original citizens of Los Angeles.

  And so the story had come full circle. The rattlesnake of the desert had wound its way back into the story, or perhaps it was here all along, connecting the two sides of Los Angeles, the Antelope Valley with its more famous and glamorous twin, the city of LA “down below,” as if it had uncoiled from the Don’t Tread on Me flags that flutter in the Mojave winds and traversed the mythic tunnel system that runs beneath the region, emerging at an ancient site—in stone. I sat in the old Indian village for a while and thought about what message the old serpent might have been carrying. Brother rattler is a sign of transformation and change, old skin for new, an end and a renewal, and when I left the park, I realized that the time had come to finish the story; following the trail for many years had led me right back to the beginning.

  But the experience was a change-up pitch. A few days later I received some additional information about this story, and I began to examine it by way of a new prism. The information came from a friend of Steve’s, someone I had spoken with before. This person did not want to be identified in connection with this piece of information, but the secret could be kept no longer. “Steve called me the day before he was killed,” the friend said. “He was very upset. He had just been diagnosed with a brain tumor, and the doctor told him he didn’t have much time.” The friend was stunned and expressed sadness to Steve and then asked, “Is there anything I can do?” Steve asked for the friend’s confidence, and the secret remained untold—until the day I was contacted, seven years later. There was no way I could verify the information; Stephen’s wife, Christine, was not available for interviews regarding my original magazine piece or this book. And out of deference to her, his close friends would not have corroborated the information, if they knew it, and I had no idea what doctors Steve might have consulted (those records would not be released anyway). Still, after I heard from Steve’s friend, I began to wonder. Over the years I had heard many theories about “what really happened to Steve.” Some people think he was ambushed. Others think he was set up. A few say he was a gung-ho cop and when they heard about what happened, they were not surprised. And then there was the Antelope Valley psychic who told a reporter that two people whacked Steve and one, Donald Kueck, was caught. But the new information went under the surface—in a physical sense and every other way. Don’s sister Lynne, the navy nurse, had suspected that her brother might have had a brain tumor. Was I now telling a story about two men who were afflicted by a terrible invader? Did Steve tell anyone apart from his friend? Or did he not want to burden his family with this sad news? Again, I thought about what had made him turn down that road on his last day and head toward Don’s. Here was a man with everything to live for—his wife, a son, a future—and then there was Don, a man with a tenuous hold on things until his own son died, and then telling those around him that the end was near. But what if the man with a future found out that he didn’t have one? What effect would that have had on his actions on his last day? The question has no answer, only raising more questions, but for sure adding one more strange cast to the deadly encounter at Don’s trailer.

  As Ellen Gilchrist once wrote, “the truth has a biological urge to come out,” and it was around the time I had heard from Steve’s friend that I began receiving other calls, as if other elements of the story now wanted to come forward. These were from Jello’s friends, some of whom I had been trying to reach for years. They were ready to talk about Jello, Don, the last days of both of these men; even as I was I wrapping up the story it seemed to be wrapping up itself—stopping me and telling me more.

  Yet I must also say that there was one more map into this story. This one was an audio map, and it consisted of the tapes of Donald Kueck’s final conversations, the exchanges he had with Mark Lillienfeld, the LA County detective who had spent hours with him on the phone, trying to convince him to surrender before cops closed in. What does a voice carry? Yes, of course, there were the words, so important at a critical moment such as this, when two men are engaging in a life-and-death negotiation. But here was the palpable sound of the song that Donald Kueck had been broadcasting from his trailer for so many months, the timbre of loss, anguish, defiance—amped up because it was the end. Perhaps the most telling moment was when Detective Lillienfeld told Don to talk on a certain channel and say, “Emergency. This is Donald Kueck.” Kueck goes ahead and says it—the exact words—and after I listened to them while sitting in a room at LASD homicide headquarters, I stopped the tape to recover. The statement could sum up Don’s last couple of years, I thought, perhaps his entire life, but beyond that it was the call we are all making at any given time, and who’s listening?

  After the story had completed itself once again, I was walking with SWAT veteran Bruce Chase on Speedway in Venice, parallel to the beach where we had just met at a restaurant, talking about some elements of this tale. As we walked and talked, I thought about the manhunt and what it must have been like to be on it. I wondered what it was like to have gone right from the weeklong manhunt for Donald Kueck and the last siege inside the tank and then having to walk the smoldering ruins of the sheds after the inferno and uncovering bones and ashes to, of all things, a golf tournament in Mesquite, Nevada. Here was a man who had undergone the terror and the beauty of the desert, within days, not as an observer but from deep inside the experience.
Cops are not especially talkative about their lives and the contours of the circumstances they cannot escape; these are things they coexist with, in their own ways, and it’s hard. But Bruce was well aware of the extremes that marked this particular episode; he had in a very physical sense walked through the fires of hell and emerged on a heavenly patch of well-tended desert, and one that was in a town named for the tree that survived the inferno and protected the house and animals that belonged to Steve’s friends. Did God have a hand in any of this? Throughout this story we had talked of right versus wrong and the nature of good and evil; various players in this saga saw the ancient conflict afoot here, and I too felt that angels and demons were upon the land, taking up residence in the desert because, hey, there’s a lot of space out there and why not? Strangely, just as we were discussing whether or not the guy with the pitchfork and cloven hooves had a part in this matter, Bruce noticed something shiny, a silver chain dangling from a pipe on the side of the pavement, just behind an old beach pad. It had caught the sunlight, and he walked over to take a look. I followed. It was a necklace with a pentagram—of all things to find, speaking of the Devil! It was creepy, and Bruce knew it, although certainly it could have been placed there by Wiccans, not Satanists, or anyone, really, for any reason at all, and in any case, it was the kind of thing sold all over the beach at Venice, along with talismans of other persuasions and prophets, from Jesus Christ to Bob Marley. Or so I told myself as our discussion of good and evil finished itself up and we called it a day.

  What are the flashes of the human mind and the storms of the human heart? They are all prayers—the outpouring of boundless longing for God.

  —Micah Joseph Berdichevski

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  THIS BOOK IS BASED ON MY ROLLING STONE ARTICLE, “The Great Mojave Manhunt,” which was published on September 22, 2005. I would like to thank my editors there, Will Dana and Eric Bates, for giving me this assignment when the incident happened in 2003, and Eric, for his thoughtful editing and patience as I worked on the story for two years. i would also like to thank Kathleen Anderson, my agent at the time. The article was reprinted in The Best American Crime Writing 2006, and I am grateful to Otto Penzler and Mark Bowden, editors of that anthology, for including it.

  To write the article, I consulted police and coroner’s reports; a project such as this can’t be written without them, and although they must be prepared when it comes to any crime or murder, I’d like to thank the people who take the time to put together these lengthy and complicated statements. I also turned to the following people for help (job titles for members of law enforcement are generally the ones used at the time of interviews): Lynne Kueck, Peggy Gilmore, and Ann Ghent—Donald Kueck’s sisters; his daughter Rebecca Welch; his neighbor Wayne Wirt; Deputy Stephen Sorensen’s sister Dixie Bear; friends and colleagues from different phases of his life, including Kimberly Brandon-Watson, Julie Franks, Connie Mavrolas, Pastor John Wodetzki, Richard Hedges (founder of the Outlaw Pigs law enforcement motorcycle club), Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department members Sgt. Christopher Keeling, Deputy Vince Burton, Deputy Paul Dino, Deputy Randy Heberle, Deputy Melissa Sullivan, and Captain Carl Deeley; Sgt. Larry Johnston and Officer Victor Ruiz of the California Highway Patrol; Sister Mary Michael of Mount Carmel in the Desert; LA County District Attorney David Berger; LA County Deputy District Attorney David Evans; Norm Hickling, aide to LA County Supervisor Mike Antonovich; Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department Detectives Philip Guzman, Joe Purcell, and especially Mark Lillienfeld; LASD Sgt. Paul Delhauer; former Antelope Valley Press reporters Kim Rawley and Nicole Jacobs; former Fox news reporter Lorena Mendez-Quiroga, and LAPD SWAT officer Rick Massa (now retired).

  To write this book, I turned once again to police and coroner’s reports. Thanks also to my former writing students Mark Takano and Carol Park for help in navigating Riverside and various agencies there. And thank you to Celeste Fremon, reporter and founder of WitnessLA, for background on sheriff and police department enforcement of immigration codes. I owe a debt of gratitude to reporter Connie Mavrolas and Pastor John Wodetzki, who continued to provide important context and facts, and spoke from the heart about their own experiences inside this story. I am grateful to Steve’s friends Steve Kirchner and Dan White, as well as the following members of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department (some of whom now have different titles or are retired): Sheriff Lee Baca; Detective Joe Purcell; Detective Steve Katz, Deputy Steve Propster; Sgt. Richard Valdemar, and SWAT team members Deputy Mark Schlegel, Deputy Rick Rector, Deputy Fred Keelin, Sgt. Joe Williams, Deputy Bernard Schockley, and Deputy George Creamer. In addition, I am most thankful to two veteran cops, LASD Detective Mark Lillienfeld and now-Lieutenant Bruce Chase, without whose help I could not have written this book. Over the eight years I worked on this project, Det. Lillienfeld spent many hours talking with me about his life in law enforcement and his role in the final hours of the manhunt. I met Bruce Chase after my article was published, and throughout the years I worked on this book, he also spent a great deal of time filling me in on his experiences in the sheriff’s department, and guiding me through the manhunt and SWAT’s role in it.

  Along the trail of this project, Antelope Valley residents Kristie Holaday and Kate LaCroix were also helpful, and I’d like to thank Jill Starr of Lifesavers, the wild horse rescue organization in Lancaster, for the introduction to Kate.

  Over the eight years I worked on this book, various friends and relatives of Jello Kueck began to come forward and were generous with their time, providing much insight into their departed friend. They also provided important recollections of both Jello and his father and the nature of their lives—and their own at the time of this story and beyond. Their participation in this project was crucial. They include Fritz Aragon, Angela Asbell, Aaron Blair, Sharon Booth, Mike Cazares, James Finch, Ford, Rande Linville, Dave Oberweber, Elaine Simons, Chris Smallwood, Amanda Smallwood, Virginia Smallwood, and Zoey.

  I would also like to say thanks to John Carver for the fine book trailer, and to pay serious acknowledgement to the fine crew at Nation Books—my wonderful editor Ruth Baldwin, for being simpatico with my work and supplying all manner of help with this project, editor Carl Bromley for his support, Marissa Colón-Margolies for emergency aid and reminders, and publicist Dori Gelb for guiding this book along its public path; my publisher John Sherer at Basic Books; and their colleagues who have done such fine work on production, copyediting, and design, including Collin Tracy, Linda Mark, and Jed DeOrsay at Perseus, and Beth Wright at Trio Bookworks.

  Finally, I am grateful to Mark Lamonica for not only encouraging me to write this story, but also for insight and moral support along the way. I would also like to thank my agent, Liz Darhansoff, and her associate Michele Mortimer for their critical role in this project. And as ever and always, I am so grateful to my mother, Eleanor Stillman, for being in my corner throughout it all—and telling me not to barrel through intersections, advice that has served me well.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  BOOKS, PAMPHLETS, AND ARCHIVES

  Antelope Valley: Early Future Envisioned in Early Days. Van Nuys, CA: Valley Federal Savings and Loan Association, 1965–1966.

  Bach, Richard. Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah. New York: Dell, 1977.

  Banks, L. A. “Buzz.” Policing the Old Mojave Desert. Victorville, CA: the author, 1994.

  Baumgardner, Randy, editor. Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department Annual. Paducah, KY: Turner, 2000.

  Bergon, Frank. Wild Game. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1995.

  Bloom, Howard. The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism. New York: Prometheus Books, 2009.

  Castaneda, Carlos. The Eagle’s Gift. New York: Pocket Books, 1981.

  ———. The Second Ring of Power. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1977.

  Chimbole, Larry. Palmdale: First City of Antelope Valley. Anaheim, CA: Creative Continuum, 2006.

  Comstock, Phyllis
. Indian Uses of Plant Sources Found in the Antelope Valley. Lancaster, CA: Friends of the Antelope Valley Museum, 1991.

  Conley, Cort. Idaho Loners: Hermits, Solitaires, and Individualists. Cambridge, ID: Backeddy Books, 1994.

  County of Los Angeles Department of Regional Planning. “Antelope Valley Areawide General Plan.” A component of the Los Angeles County General Plan. Adopted by the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors, December 4, 1986.

  Darlington, David. The Mojave: Portrait of the Definitive American Desert. New York: Henry Holt, 1996.

  Davis, Mike. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. New York: Verso, 1990.

  Dunaway, David King. Huxley in Hollywood. New York: Harper & Row, 1989.

  Eargle, Dolan H., Jr. The Earth Is Our Mother: A Guide to the Indians of California, Their Locals and Historic Sites. San Francisco: Trees Company, 1986.