Darrell was focused on himself, keenly aware that he was smaller physically, worried about returning to prison. Now, suddenly, like Proteus, the control issue came up in an ungraspable new form. They entered Brad’s girlfriend’s apartment. She was sitting on the couch. Her kid was playing in the next room.
It happened in a moment, like the chill crawling over his naked scalp. Darrell envisioned Brad yapping to his girlfriend, to his mom, to his sister, to the police, to whomever and whatever Chaos Squad really was, and the ice gave way: he fell into his deepest self. He lived with the chill from this personality but was hardly ever in it. Maybe it was something too deep to call a “self.”
A few thoughts played on the surface far above him: if Brad turned himself in he was going to make a deal, basically snitch. Brad—this mess of a guy he didn’t even know that well—had a plan. He was going to take his general down. Hadn’t he been laying it out over the past few days? Maybe he meant to make a deal and then try to take over Chaos Squad. Darrell shook his gun loose from the holster.
Brad turned. Like an angry, gape-mouthed bear, he looked oddly dainty as if he were going to hop or stamp his feet. Darrell shot him in the shoulder. Darrell’s mind drifted across one of those curious prairies of stopped time. As if there were no rush at all, he calculated: twenty-five years for that shot alone—the other murder comes out, could be life—what the hell? He shot Brad three more times in the chest.
The kid started making noise in the next room. The body dropped like a sandbag on its left side, its head resting against the couch next to the girlfriend. Darrell is certain the girl thought that this was some kind of fake gunplay—that they were trying to freak her out. It took a long moment for a look of dreadful stupidity to cross her face. Blood was everywhere.
People in the area, living with that faint echo of prison society, naturally recognized gunshots. A door opened. A screen door squealed. Darrell picked up his bag containing another clip and two hundred extra rounds and backed out the apartment door. He trotted downstairs but slowed to a fast walk. A black woman in a do-rag saw him with the gun. After steadying herself against the apartment complex’s playground fence, she clutched her head crying, “Oh my God! Oh my God!” Darrell jammed the gun in his shoulder holster. He flinched when he brushed the hot tip of the muzzle across his T-shirt. Once he got down the grassy embankment to Sam Noble Parkway, he headed west into the grid of Ardmore’s residential streets, still at a walk. He avoided the huge Valero oil refinery directly north.
He zigzagged but kept heading west and a little north. It must have felt strange walking through that small-town neighborhood, quarter-acre lots and not-very-old two- and three-bedroom houses. Kids were on the street. Here was a man waxing his car. Since Darrell was trying to get on the road—whether by carjack, home invasion, or robbery—he paused to bum a cigarette off the man. (He doesn’t smoke.) You can almost taste the man’s luck, not smoky, but a flavor as clean and startling as snow. It’s hard to believe thoughts as intense as this weren’t visible: “I changed my mind at the last minute. I was afraid he would resist and I would have to shoot him.” Darrell kept walking.
The sky had begun to darken. But Darrell was only on the north side of town, near the big intersection of North Commerce and Veteran’s Boulevard, where traffic lazed to a stop and yawned back into motion. A low gray Skateland building sprawled on one corner. They’d tried to dress it up with a sad, tidy row of trimmed bushes. Across from a huge vacant lot, aluminum streetlights were coming on with that staticky noise—like a monocular alien clearing its throat. A City of Ardmore police cruiser glided up beside Darrell. Spooked, he took off into the street. The cruiser stopped in the middle of the intersection, lights revolving.
The lines of cars came to a synchronized, rocking-horse stop. Frowning moon faces leaned into side windows. The frowns vanished when Darrell took out his gun. His free hand scrabbled at flush door handles. He couldn’t tell if he was shouting. The cars sped up like frightened cows. They started streaming between Darrell and the cruiser. Everyone was terrified. Out of pure desperation Darrell took a potshot at the trunk of one car. He pointed the gun at a guy in a pickup.
By now, the Ardmore cop, Josh McGee, an African American, was out of his own car. Darrell swung the gun toward him thinking that would keep him at bay. He remembers saying something like, “Go away! Leave me alone and no one will get hurt.” He felt a blow, like a fist, to his upper left arm, and for an instant imagined that the cop, who’d been more than halfway across the street, had somehow punched him, until he realized he’d been shot. He felt the downbeat of pain and dizziness. No longer under his own control, his body crumpled before he was able to run a step.
Meanwhile, Brad’s sister Michelle got a call on her cell phone from a friend at the Huntington Falls Apartments. She remembers hearing, “How come y’all aren’t down here? You know, Brad’s been shot, and I gotta tell you the ambulance was already here and they left without him.” What that meant didn’t register. Michelle hurried over. As soon as she arrived people pointed her out to the cops. “That’s Qualls’s sister.” The cops stopped her and kept demanding, “Where’s Madden? Where’s Darrell Madden?” Who? She had no idea who they wanted. She knew him by a different name and finally got out, “Richie? I don’t know.” When the police wouldn’t let her into the apartment, she put it together. She sank to her knees.
Michelle got on the phone to her mom. Tina Melton and her husband jumped in their car and sped over to the apartments. Along the way, they had to crawl through the intersection of North Commerce and Veteran’s Boulevard, partially blocked by police cruisers. Over the phone Michelle could hear her mother Tina screaming at her father, “Is that that son of a bitch?” Then: “Michelle, they got him in handcuffs and there’s blood all over the place.” Michelle heard her father’s voice rumble. She heard Tina shout again, “Stop the car! Let me out of this car! Is that the motherfucker? There’s blood all over the place!” Michelle’s father didn’t stop.
* * *
The bullet in Darrell’s arm eventually needed seven surgeries to repair, not exactly the easy, debonair wound of old movies. His radial nerve had been severed, so Darrell would lose the ability to raise his wrist or spread his fingers. He now jokes that the limp wrist is “poetic justice, right?” They moved him to a hospital in Oklahoma City where he was surely the least-loved patient.
Thursday he didn’t remember. Friday he wasn’t allowed to eat. Supposedly, you couldn’t have food for twenty-four hours before an operation, but Darrell doubted they were much concerned about him.
Two OKC cops were posted outside his door. With a jailbird’s punctiliousness about the rules, Darrell knew they weren’t allowed to come into the room. Of course, they did, he claims. The black cop smiled at the slip of an ailing skinhead inked all over with racist and Nazi crap. According to Darrell, the two officers switched the channel to Black Entertainment Television and exchanged shit-eating grins. They ragged on him. Darrell kicked at his leg restraints. He threw the remote and caught the white guy on the lip. This is Darrell’s version of events, naturally.
The cops happily grabbed at their belts for Tasers. One tased him on the rib cage, one on the neck. The Tasers work for five seconds. Then you have to press the button and shoot again. Darrell claims it happened at least three times. Fans of tendon and muscle popped out under his jaw. He pissed himself.
The next day, after he came out of the first surgery, they let him eat. They served spaghetti. When Darrell hollered for a fork, a cop came in and told him he couldn’t have any plastic. The cop didn’t say another word but appeared to find Darrell’s bitching the most entertaining thing in the world. He waited until Darrell realized there was no option but to eat the spaghetti with his fingers. Darrell didn’t eat that night, until a black nurse brought him some packages of saltines, a kindness he remembers to this day. For myself, I can’t help wondering what she was thinking when she looked at him. God’s Grace Is the White Race. If onl
y her thoughts had been visible!
It wasn’t something that showed, but Darrell had given up on everything. No hope for the next minute, nor for the rest of his life. He had moods left, anger mostly, but that was all. Because the anger was, in a way, absolute, true, not an act; it felt almost good, powerful at any rate. He seized the plastic piss-pot half full of urine and threw it at the cop. This one, he claims, nearly emptied a can of pepper spray on him. Darrell was charged with assaulting a police officer.
Six days later FBI agents came to interview him. Because they, at least, behaved respectfully, Darrell says, he told them almost everything.
* * *
It’s hard to square the different images I have. Reading newspaper accounts of the murders, I note that reporters haven’t gone much beyond “skinhead” in their characterizations. Like a lazy casting director, I’ve first conjured up a certain Germanic/Slavic physical type, a particular sneering attitude. But the age is off. Thirty-seven is too old. It’s easy to understand the reporters’ heavy sarcasm in calling Darrell a “self-described general.” The title is absurd, more than a little pompous. I’ve found a series of pictures of Darrell, past prison ID photos, front, back, and sides. He ages a little across the series, the shaved hairline recedes, he puts on a few more pounds and many more tattoos, including the notorious teardrop on his cheek, but he doesn’t look scary enough. He wears a slight smirk. His close-set eyes are mild. This skinhead (and, to hear him tell it, multiple murderer already) has an air of irony, an uncertain smart-aleck affect that seems out of place in an inmate you expect to be an indifferent lump or a human jack-o’-lantern along the lines of the pathetically performative Charles Manson.
I’ve also watched extensive film of Darrell at around age twenty. He’s a different person altogether. Mop-haired, he appears preppy, a pretty-boy clothing-store associate in New York or LA. He’s extremely well spoken—no trace of a countrified or Oklahoma accent.
Even now, Darrell’s writing (we’ve exchanged letters for over two years) is what used to be called “girl writing,” plump printing crossed with the Palmer method, little round circles dotting the i’s. (Looking back, I see he made the first few letters appear more “butch.”) If, having grown up on TV and mystery stories, I know that anyone can be the murderer, I find it almost impossible to imagine this person throwing a punch, surviving in prison, flying into rages, or captivating and seducing more stereotypical skinheads. Apparently he did.
I’ve seen footage of him emerging from the courtroom (after weeping at his trial for the first murder). He looks like an embarrassed, if aged-out high school kid as he ignores a reporter shouting, “Is it true you lived with a man? Why did you do it if you’re gay yourself?” On the surface, or at that particular moment, the reporter is the unpleasant one, not the guy in shackles and an orange jumpsuit. So be it. It’s the duty of unreflective local TV news reporters to be the loudmouthed voice of their community. Anyway, morality and pleasantness aren’t identical, which brings me to the final and most challenging detail to be incorporated in the portrait. When I meet Darrell, I like him instantly. He has a subtle but potent charisma that works backward, making you feel like the brilliant or fascinating one. I lie on the bed of my cheap Oklahoma City motel room (smoking, please) and second-guess for hours my sense of comfort and companionability with the killer I’ve just met.
In a tone reminiscent of Elizabethan broadsheets like The Ordinary of Newgate, his account of the behaviour, confession, and dying words, of the malefactors, who were executed at Tyburn, etc. . . . the Daily Ardmoreite reported on Darrell’s first guilty plea:
Darrell Madden’s tough-guy Skinhead persona dissolved into tears and trembling Friday as he pleaded guilty to murdering Bradley Qualls Nov. 7 and his subsequent attempts to carjack a getaway vehicle in northwest Ardmore. Madden’s performance raised the question: was this a single dramatic display or a rehearsal for the additional charges he now faces in Oklahoma County for the torture-murder of an Edmond man? Several times during his court appearance Friday in front of Associate District Judge Lee Card, Madden collapsed on the defendant’s table in a flood of tears and wails.
Is this really an accurate account? I have as hard a time picturing these outbursts as I do picturing some of Darrell’s other exploits: killing six llamas in a rage, coolly impersonating a police officer. Maybe the reporter was right to suspect an act.
Darrell has told me he’s seen psychiatrists most of his life. “I have been on all kinds of mental health drugs for many reasons, but the only real mental problems I have had [were] depression and bulimia as an adult.” In another list of his diagnoses he mentions “psychotic tendencies” as if that had been part of a report of some kind. One of his letters to me explains:
As a child I had ADD, ADHD. But as far as hearing voices and them telling me what to do or anything, I have not. I have lied saying that I had in the past, to get the drugs and to get money from the state and the government . . . I am pretty close to normal, kind of ! As far as suicide . . . Mostly for attention.
Elsewhere he’s mentioned seven suicide attempts.
In truth, the first time he listed his mental problems for me, I reacted with impatience. None of it makes him “innocent,” and neither liking nor compassion is any argument that a killer is less of a killer.
During the day I drive a rented car all over south-central Oklahoma and a bit of north Texas looking at the disappointingly ordinary locations of the “story.” I take a lot of pictures, but I could be anywhere. The drama has beaded up and trickled away like desert rain. Nothing evocative stirs at the An-Son car wash either, back in Oklahoma City, where Brad and Darrell met the man Darrell now calls “Mr. Domer”—strangely, but how do you address someone you’ve murdered? Mr. Domer and Darrell are joined forever, and neither has anything to say about it now. “I’ve done such really awful, awful things,” Darrell says, in a tone too ambiguous to be satisfying. He means to be remorseful, but in the end, it’s just an observation.
The effort of imagination and second-guessing takes more of a toll than I expected. I allow myself one moment of leisure during my visit to Oklahoma City. I go to the Museum of Osteology, a tidy warehouse with a spectacular collection of skeletons. It may seem a strange choice to clear my head when dreaming about two horrible murders day and night, but the illusion of order in the museum is satisfying. Here, death is put to good use. Here, all the animals are white stick figures, mouse to marmot to giraffe. The pristine display cases are a 3-D flipbook of obvious homologies, an eternal unity across changes in form. But a sign in the primate case warning that the museum doesn’t mean to endorse evolution causes a feeling of betrayal. Oklahoma is a foreign country to me.
II. Wild
October 26, 2007 was the last Friday before Halloween, so people came out in all sorts of costumes, and the stretch of NW 39th Street in Oklahoma City, the walkable and hard-drinking “gay neighborhood,” was busy—considering this is a state where “gay” hardly exists, a state where all the porn is soft and go-go girls and boys are required by law to keep their thongs in place. The bars regularly hired security guards to keep an eye out for gay-bashers and religious protesters, though tonight security at Tramps and Angles had its hands full carding everyone to keep out the underage.
On the corner of North Barnes, across from the parking lot for Tramps, the notorious An-Son car wash was busy too, in its dim, surreptitious way. That was the hustlers’ hangout. The quiet hum of commerce and romance on the street kept being interrupted by musical blasts when club doors opened, by distant car alarms, by squalls of acrobatic laughter, and by the occasional ecstatic hoot—half-queen, half-cowboy. Despite the noise, and though you were in the middle of a decent-sized city, a pointed absence of sound was also easy to make out as the encompassing loneliness of the Osage Plains.
Darrell got Brad to wear a tight T-shirt and camo ripped just so to show a little thigh on both sides. He dressed the same way himself. Maybe not quite as showy, becaus
e . . . how would it look if it appeared like he knew what he was doing? (“I told Brad this was how we rolled queers in LA. He had no reason to doubt me. Little did he know.”) Like the next card in blackjack, everything Darrell kept hidden about himself must have felt this close to being revealed. He remembers thinking Brad, the Chaos Squad prospect, was so wired he’d scare people off. Even dressed up, Brad was too intimidating and too straight-seeming to pass.
They started at about nine o’clock. They walked the eighteen miles from Washington to the gay area in downtown Oklahoma City. It took them several footsore hours. Since the route takes almost an hour by car, I thought it possible they were dropped off and that Darrell was telling me he walked the route to protect someone else. When I mentioned that “someone unknown” may have driven them, Darrell answered, “We got one ride that entire trip. Only one . . . I kept forgetting where I was going. It all looked very different on foot and took a very, very long time.” For the purposes of this crime anyway, they were a gang of two. They spent the walk reviewing exactly how the evening would go, what they’d do, how they’d act. The plan itself had been settled the previous night before going to bed. Darrell describes their long conversation as a boastful amalgam of quasimilitary planning and gruesome fantasy.
Once they arrived at that corner of Barnes, they sat on a low, pale brick wall by the An-Son car wash. Darrell knew how to do this: act friendly yet as deliberate as a house cat gazing into a guest’s eyes. The shaved head didn’t feel like the great disguise it actually was. He was afraid of being recognized. Some people gave them a wide berth. Drivers slowed. Gazes snagged on them, slid down their bodies, and were nervously yanked loose.
American Honor Killings Page 9