Maybe it came down to stubbornness. Suicide, too, was a matter of honor. He wasn’t going to fail at this. He couldn’t. How would it look to his father and the world? Far from meaning he was sorry for his life, this was the only way to prove he’d been serious all along. He wasn’t going to fail. He kept cutting. Around the seventy-fifth cut he managed to sever an artery. The blood poured out to the rhythm of his heartbeat, which soon abated and eventually came to a feathery stop.
DA McGregor Scott, who viewed the lacerated, marble-white body after it was discovered at six thirty in the morning, was reminded of what he’d read of the bodies found at Little Bighorn. After battle, Indians mutilated the bodies of their enemies so they couldn’t pursue them, or continue fighting, in the afterlife. Ben’s suicide had everything to do with this life, however—like they all do. He’d ended the ultimate argument by torturing himself to death. Probably not from guilt so much as in a last magniloquent refusal to be proved wrong.
3
BAD-GOOD, NOT GOOD
The idea of “hate crimes” makes me uncomfortable, because admitting “hate crimes” looks like criminalizing motive, and that looks like criminalizing thought. This observation may be too purely logical for the real world, where we’re constantly forced to make messy political adjustments so that society will work a little better than it has in the past. Maybe the idea of “hate crimes” is needed to make hatred and cruelty socially visible. And maybe the concept won’t ever entail punishable thought.
After withering in committee for years beginning in 2001, the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act was finally passed by the House and Senate and signed into law in 2009. A prominent politician told me that the law ought to have been called the Matson and Mowder Act, because the two California men really never did anything to justify what happened to them. I’m certain the politician didn’t mean to imply that Matthew Shepard deserved to be murdered because maybe he tried to pick up some guys or maybe he took meth and the whole thing was a drug deal gone bad. Still, the words came out without a second thought.
A similar problem dogs many of the crimes I’ve looked at. The murdered man is older. He’s gay. He may be paying for sex. He may look like a pervert or a predator or a lowlife. Maybe he is one. Either way, it’s hard to think of him as a victim. We like our victims to be as pure as new-fallen snow, like Matson and Mowder. Indeed, the “gay panic defense” was designed to make killers look like good boys in comparison to their victims, but the truth is, good boys don’t kill. (Usually. Later on it’ll become clear this doesn’t always hold with gangs of boys.)
I used to wonder about the silly Shangri-Las lyric “He’s good-bad, but he’s not evil.” Sung/spoken with dotty sincerity, the phrase seems to encapsulate Americans’ fond indulgence for the bullying and cruelty of boys. We have to do something to domesticate those perfectly ordinary and human traits—comedy, military discipline, sports—but what better, more magical solution than to use the power of love to turn them cute?
I believe Ben Williams thought he was cute. I’m not talking about looks. Unfortunately, if aggression, domination, violence aren’t cute, they can undoubtedly be fun. This gets complicated. I knew a muscle-bound doorman at a famous nightclub who loved nothing better than to gay-bash in his off hours. It didn’t matter that he was secretly gay himself or that his relationship with his boyfriend was a competition to see who could get bigger through steroids and “top” the other. Yet the violence wasn’t merely self-hatred. Gay people prowling for sex at night happened to be available and vulnerable. And violence was exhilarating, even joyful.
It was disconcerting that this friend looked into my eyes once and told me, “You get it,” because I’ve always thought of myself as the least violent person in the world. I didn’t grow up with it. I never had cartoon fantasies about it. If anything, I was afraid of pain and averse to competition. I was masculine enough—in the self-repressed way—to avoid being bullied growing up. Beyond that, nothing special. But where was the violence in me beyond the occasional slammed door?—because, of course, my friend was right in some way, since here I am working on this book. Maybe I was bad-good, not good. Not as deluded as Ben Williams, of course, but maybe a thread of subtle cruelty ran through my decency. In fact, I do recall an instance or two when I bullied someone as a kid, both with a group of other boys and alone. And, though gay, I’m “average” enough to find the foibles of gay people laughable under the right circumstances, just like anyone else.
On the other hand, I see myself in the victims of these murders. Many of them were bad-good in a different way—say, good enough, but dirty. And I? A trashy bar holds no mystery for me. I shrug about sexual behavior some people find shocking. I laugh at things others hold sacred. I have a fondness for lowlife. So I would be what many people consider bad, until I’m murdered by someone worse, which would make me a little good in retrospect. Bad-good. But, really, what am I?
The case I write about next turned out to be more personal than I expected. That’s why I put “I” into it more than before, and why I’ve just tied myself in knots. I knew I’d get mixed up talking about bad and good here and, in fact, I meant to. I wanted to illustrate a habit of thought typical of fretful young men by demonstrating it. This is what happens when paradoxes and simplistic dualities battle it out in our minds. It’s an abstract struggle, a battle between forces like womanly and manly or top and bottom or alpha and omega or winner and loser or, of course, good and bad, even among all of them at once, and the struggle usually plays out with infinitely more intensity than I’ve shown above. Violence comes into it. Young men project this purely personal psychological effort to order their experience of the world onto the real world. With the energy of youth, they take desperate measures to make the simplistic real. Describing their actions as “hate crimes” isn’t sufficient, nor does this term take into account the terrible joy of violence.
4
DOMER, QUALLS, AND MADDEN, 2007
I. Nervous
Afterward people said Bradley Qualls was tweaking, a meth head in a rut. He was overwrought, at any rate, and maybe he was rubbing his shaved head the way an addict will, seven, eight times, using the same tensed-up spiral stroke each time. But people were wrong. He wasn’t on meth. Since joining Chaos Squad he’d gotten straight. Skinhead rules were strict about that. Watching him, Darrell Madden, a so-called “general” in Chaos Squad, couldn’t keep near-hallucinatory suspicion from building inside him: the younger, bigger Qualls looked like he was losing control. (Again! The day after the murder he’d taken Darrell’s gun and threatened to kill himself.) Really, they were both losing control. Three or four visits to the body and it still felt unreal. How the hell hadn’t the body been found yet? The missing man was all over TV. They were losing it, but Darrell was better at faking calm—better at faking anything. Even as a kid Brad was wild, mouthy, uncontrollable, authentic. Darrell was a compulsive actor. Now, years later, in prison, Darrell keeps repeating to me: everything was about control.
They were in Ardmore, Oklahoma, halfway between Oklahoma City and Dallas–Ft. Worth. Darrell’s girlfriend had dropped them off at the Huntington Falls Apartments, a little collection of ecru townhomes and too-empty parking lots off Sam Noble Parkway. Brad’s girlfriend rented here.
In a sham, ’80s way, the two-story townhomes looked tonier than they really were. Under the development’s name was a discreet blue equal-opportunity sign, but black and white underclasses mixed uneasily here. The inflexible racial divide that exists in prison seemed to echo out here. African American residents hated crossing paths with Bradley Qualls or, much worse, his new friend Darrell, a slight, pallid, smirking skinhead whose neck was ringed by thick black tattoos, including SS bolts and some phrase in deutsche Schrift. Their worst fears would’ve been confirmed had Darrell ever removed his shirt to show off the Nazi eagle and God’s Grace Is the White Race across his chest. Or the swastika on his shoulder. Jug-eared, green-eyed, he looked
a lot younger than thirty-seven. He was a genuine skinhead, the bad kind, though the line of stubble on his scalp showed he’d been balding since before he shaved his head. Maybe vanity played a part along with the politics.
Bradley was twenty-six. He couldn’t quite pull off the Aryan skinhead look. His scalp’s stubble was dense and black. His soul patch was too long, a satanic tongue. Plus his skin was dark, less Nordic, more Native American– or Mexican-looking. His eyes drooped at their outer corners. He looked like any snickering pot-smoker, any sleepy Oklahoma loser. Before his stint at Dick Connor Correctional Center in Hominy in 2001, he’d grown up listening to rap music. The friends he had, the few kids who didn’t tease him mercilessly about being in special education, were all black. Now everything was different.
Just yesterday, Brad had had the words skin head tattooed on his face, exactly like Darrell. Brad’s momentous tattoo—wasn’t he trying to become Darrell in a way?—caused a staph infection. One was popping up on Darrell’s arm as well, and Darrell knew how bad they could get. Paranoid about that, he had his girlfriend take them both to the hospital. Brad’s mother Tina Melton came and picked Brad up. The infected spot on his face was still ruddy and swollen now. Maybe the antibiotics were making him hyper.
In truth, Brad was a lot more volatile than Darrell, something Darrell resented. He hated being outdone even in a fault. Darrell was the leader, the general. But Brad, a kid, a raw recruit, had a directionless masculine anger, hair-trigger and intimidating. Once, his sister Michelle recalls wryly, wearing only his underwear, he’d chased her worthless husband down the street brandishing a toilet plunger.
On this day Brad and Darrell were arguing. According to Darrell, Brad kept saying he’d never snitched before. That was why they’d sent him to Dick Connor just for stealing car stereos: he wouldn’t snitch. But trust wasn’t in Darrell’s nature. And right now, the last thing he wanted was to let things get out of hand again the way they had the night of the killing. Even fake calm was fine. A few days ago he’d told Brad it was okay to smoke some weed, not strictly allowed under skinhead rules. Maybe Brad had snuck something again today. Ever since going off Ritalin, Adderall, the works, at fourteen, Brad had used pot like medicine. His whole life he’d needed to be turned down a few notches.
A cop says Chaos Squad was a “gang of two.” Darrell hints at a whole shadowy world of members, rules, and ranks. (“A DISorganization,” he allows.) Certainly Brad, a bare few months ago, excitedly told his sister Michelle that he was going to meet “the leader.” And they were gang enough for the FBI to get involved later. Who exactly came to Darrell’s Chaos Squad tattoo parties—recruits, soldiers, bored Oklahoman riffraff? It depends on who’s talking, but you can picture it. Drawling, half-dressed, embittered kids straggle into the crash pad in Ardmore, the tattoo parlor in Edmond, or Darrell’s own trailer in Washington. The buzzing tattoo gun slowly draws SS bolts or Hitler’s birth date in navy ink flecked with blood. Letters and figures gleam darkly from inflamed halos on pale greenish skin.
Darrell had been sober, no drugs, for over two years. He’d taken only antidepressants since he got out of Jess Dunn Correctional Center after fifteen months, himself freshly tattooed Chaos Squad–style. He’d done stints at Crabtree and back in California, but now he really looked like an ex-con. Eyebrows (Brad’s model; when shaved, they read: skin head), ankle, arms, neck, chest, back. (Maybe he was hoping that labeling his body permanently and on the inside would establish once and for all who he was. After so many years of deception, it didn’t work. He was still continually falling through one self into another. Some days he couldn’t remember which name he was using until someone spoke to him. Billy, Lynn, Richie Rich. Never “Darrell.” Only his family called him that.) Yet he says Chaos rules, oxymoron or not, had been good. They’d kept him sober. You could deal, not use. It was a big change from three years ago: strung out in Mexico, weighing 130 pounds at most.
The word was getting out. People were learning what Darrell and Brad had done. When you overheard two jittery skinheads, half-cocky, half-spooked, talking about how they’d killed some guy, you didn’t go, “Oh, really? Tell me about it.” You said nothing at first. You asked nothing. But people did overhear. Eventually they started talking.
What Brad and Darrell had done was catching up with them. Despite their brutal jokes about a man so passive he wouldn’t fight for his own life, despite their wild plans to kill the people who overheard them talking or who knew too much, they must have felt a demonic weariness. Brad was spinning out of control. Darrell, too, was at the breaking point, though he was unaware of it. Perhaps he could only experience small, locket-sized measures of feeling like the ones an actor draws on when playing a character ostensibly unlike himself. Darrell’s many explosive yet eerily playful “acts” of violence and hatred had always seemed well performed in the sense that their author was drawing on something real but also small and remote within himself. However wild he was, a nonactor like Brad would have now felt he was a killer more intensely than Darrell ever could. A sense of shunned doom would have haunted him.
Though Chaos rules said you could never talk, Darrell himself boasted on the Chaos Squad MySpace page that he’d killed a woman once (he tells me now he’s murdered several times but confides that this claim wasn’t true; the group was simply trying to scare somebody). After the real killing he wrote on MySpace that “the juice in the needle” was likely to get him because of something that had happened. It was hard not to talk. The very day after the murder, Brad’s mother, Tina Melton, all innocence, had come over to Darrell’s trailer for Jack Daniel’s and beer, an impromptu sort of party, incredibly enough. The girlfriends were there too. During the night Brad told his mom what had happened. Later Brad fought with his girlfriend, stole Darrell’s gun, and threatened to kill himself.
Darrell blew up the next day: “You told your mom about what happened?” He says Brad shouted back, “I told you she was cool! I told you she was cool!” Trying to impose Chaos rules, Darrell ordered Brad to send Tina Melton an e-mail telling her to pay no attention to what she’d heard the night before. And Brad had done it. Darrell stood over him and watched as he typed the e-mail. Still, something wild, disobedient, and, of course, genuinely murderous about Brad was already starting to spook Darrell.
At some point that day—the day of the big argument—Brad called his sister Michelle. He pleaded with her, “Can I come over to Grandma’s? I want to see Mom . . . I just need to come over!” For whatever reason Michelle turned him down, and Brad got angry at her. Listening in, Darrell thought that was just as well. He wasn’t going to let Brad out of his sight in the state he was in. The two had stopped by to see Michelle a few days earlier and Darrell could tell she realized something was up. Brad wouldn’t look at her. He’d hung his head. He’d hugged her kids with valedictory, bearlike passion.
Now, at the Huntington Falls Apartments, the argument got worse. A witness later told a reporter, “Brad was kind of tweaking . . . you could tell he was on something. The other guy was saying, You need to calm down.” According to Darrell, Brad had started saying he thought he could lead Chaos Squad if he wanted.
Suspicion was becoming a kind of delirium in Darrell. For a while already he’d felt certain Brad was working up his courage to call the police. Anxiety about his own colossal deceptions was plaguing him. He claims Brad had been hinting about turning himself in for more than a week. Brad, he says, would come out with things like, “You saw the news, man. You think they don’t know it was us already? I’ll take the fall. I can do it. I never snitched.” Released from Dick Connor in 2006 after five years, he thought he knew what to expect. From prison now, Darrell mentions this condescendingly and adds, “You could tell this was the first time he killed somebody.” It doesn’t seem to have occurred to Darrell that Brad’s wanting to turn himself in, or wanting to kill himself, may have represented a kind of moral exhaustion or, even, remorse. When he first tells me the story, Darrell explains that th
e reason Brad wanted to kill himself was because he’d fought with his girlfriend. When I suggest that murdering someone the night before might have had something to do with it, Darrell thinks about that a moment and then agrees, but with a real sense of surprise as if the idea had never dawned on him.
The line about taking over Chaos Squad was new. “I’m not sure if I misunderstood what he was saying,” Darrell tells me now. They crossed the Huntington Falls Apartments parking lot. The breeze or a confused, novel sense of alarm caused a chill to ripple forward across Darrell’s scalp. It was November 7. Though there’d been a bit of a heat wave around Amarillo and up into the panhandle that month, today was cool, midsixties. They wore jackets. Darrell’s was hanging over the lump of the gun in his shoulder holster. They climbed the stairs to the apartment.
At five o’clock in early November the sun is low. A few long cirrus clouds look accidental, as if a painter has fallen off his ladder. A minor rush hour takes place on the main roads, but here the parking lot and streets are dead quiet. More like a Saturday than a Wednesday afternoon. Loosely strung wire on creosoted pine telephone poles cast scalloped shadows on L Street and Sam Noble Parkway.
From the second-story apartment landing the western sky is so immense the town below looks two-dimensional in comparison. Lampposts and flagpoles prick up hopelessly. Ardmore’s inevitable strip-mall-scape is suffused with the childish and intense boredom that is something of an American national characteristic, like quaintness in the Alps or grandeur in Paris.
As if completely blind to the world, forever emitting, never absorbing, Brad blustered on, according to Darrell. Even as they entered the apartment they were arguing. This is when Brad said the words Darrell particularly remembers, the ones he says made him snap: “I am Chaos Squad.”
American Honor Killings Page 8