Two older men passed slowly in a new Lexus. They circled the block a few times. Darrell watched them murmuring in the dashboard light. The driver shook his head at his bald friend. Later, the driver, a closeted man who had to be subpoenaed to testify (social pressure in Oklahoma makes the plains air feel as thick as a jungle’s), said that he’d gotten a bad vibe from the two skinheads. He didn’t like the tattoos. Consider how well known it is that the teardrop stands for a murder. 4 But the bald man, for whatever reason, was interested. Maybe a few drinks or Halloween giddiness made him more daring than usual, or maybe he was unconcerned because he wasn’t carrying enough cash to matter if he were robbed. Besides, Darrell is slight. I find him unintimidating myself. Also, Darrell had finally decided Brad should wait around a corner because he just didn’t look right, so the scarier of the skinheads was gone later. The two older men, Quentin and Steve, had eaten dinner together and drove back to Quentin’s place. Quentin says Steve stopped just long enough to run to the bathroom and was off. Now, driving his own new (preowned) Mercury, Steve made a beeline to the An-Son car wash and cruised past Darrell once more. He gave the familiar nod.
Steven Domer was a sixty-two-year-old bachelor who lived in Edmond with his divorced older brother. Bald as a cue ball, he wore a bushy walrus mustache and had the still-in-good-shape bearing of a Romanian Olympic coach. Blink your eyes and you could see a different person through the masculine image, a man with a gentle, brown-eyed enthusiasm, hungry for company, generous to a fault. He wore a white T-shirt and a small trickle of gold around his neck.
Steve Domer came from a background of violence. According to Mort, Steve’s brother, their father was quick to anger, brutal, and often scornful of his younger son. Steve never reconciled with him. Reputedly, the father had had a taste for boys, and after he died in an automobile accident in ’74, the family minister refused to conduct his funeral. A stranger preached a eulogy whose bland untruth nearly caused Steve to fall out of the pew. That was in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, the family’s original home. Mort recounts all this with the simple honesty he promised me at the beginning of our conversation.
Steve had left home by the time his father died. Bearded and long-haired, he and that year’s boyfriend (the boyfriends never lasted) headed for San Francisco. The car made it as far as Oklahoma City where it broke down. Steve chose to make his life here. He ran through much younger boyfriends like clockwork, probably only half-aware that his paying for beauty school, for one example, figured into it as much as love. He liked to play the helpful swain to elderly neighbors. He was a near-obsessive collector of stuff. Never-worn shoes and T-shirts piled up in his Edmond house along with ceramic objets d’art and ornaments from his years working at United Design, a “giftware/collectibles” manufacturer. He had his vanities. He liked to hint that he came from money and kept Mort in the background when necessary. He attended First Presbyterian, the church of local grandees like the Braums. He hated getting older and wasn’t above using a bit of cover-up on the dark circles under his eyes. Even if his boyfriends were lowlifes, even if he’d dabbled in dealing marijuana when he first moved to town, he had a nice house and had made it a long way from his father’s violent anger. (Though knowing how to survive violence could have made him a little bolder about taking risks later.)
Violence requires a certain education. Macho folklore advises you to get into at least one fistfight when young to avoid turning into a physical coward. Supposedly a ninth-century knight would plunge his little son’s hands into the gore of a slain enemy to inoculate the kid against the horror of violent death. Disproportionate numbers of butchers, inured to slaughter, become murderers, according to anecdote. But nowadays many, if not most, men are practically illiterate when it comes to violence. (It doesn’t seem to be required to get and wield real power in the modern world. Just the opposite, perhaps.) But like Steve Domer’s father, Darrell Madden and Brad Qualls had each made a lifelong study of the thrilling but degrading knowledge.
After Steve’s nod, the car stopped a bit farther down the street, its brake lights brightening inquiringly. Darrell sauntered after it and got in on the passenger side. Steve had used his very first Social Security check to pay for this car. After a long hiatus, he was spending again. Having run through his savings, his inheritance from Aunt Marilyn, and his older brother’s patience, he’d finally taken a job as a vehicle porter (and bought the “like new” Mercury) at Reynolds Ford a mere week before. He’d used his first paycheck to pay for dinner with Quentin that night.
For Darrell, once he was in the car, the tats were just a costume. He loved performance. People’s attention to his lies made him feel paradoxically safe, remote, invulnerable in a suit of invisible armor. Darrell told the bald guy that he and his big friend had just come from California. As he spun the story his hands rested casually on his thighs. He was a little nervous. The bald man eyed the ripped camo. Kindly enough, he noted that it was freezing out tonight and offered to show Darrell around town. Darrell reached forward and, for luck or out of superstition, surreptitiously touched the knife through the cloth on his calf. Both he and Brad had knives on their belts, in their pockets, and strapped to their legs commando-style.
I kept trying to imagine Darrell’s conversation with Steve Domer. Darrell told me about the California lie, about the cold, about Steve’s offer to show him around town, about the knives. I wanted to know exactly what had been said, but naturally, no one’s memory is as precise as I needed, so I made up a hypothetical exchange—hustler and john—just a few remarks, which I showed Darrell. Darrell told me the object had been to get Steve to pick up Brad as well, so I wrote his “character” asking Steve to pick up Brad because it was so cold out. After reading the exchange, the real Darrell underlined a bit of dialogue I’d given his character: “My friend is harmless, I promise.” From this an arrow in black ink led to the annotation, “I also told Mr. Domer that Brad had a huge cock and loved to fuck guys. I felt I really had to do some extra convincing. Brad was really out of place.”
Whatever was actually said, Steve decided to go for it. He pulled the car around to where Brad was stationed. As Darrell keeps saying, Brad would have looked too big and straight to be a hustler-drifter from California. But the door was open now. He jumped into the backseat with a little bag which he pressed down between his feet. He mumbled a greeting but didn’t even look at the bald guy. Nor did he answer when asked where he was from in California. Darrell answered for him, “He’s from LA, like me.” Or so I wrote in my dialogue. Darrell underlined that made-up quote too, and added, “I was so afraid that somehow my actions or mannerisms would give me away.”
At a stop sign on an ill-lit street, Darrell reached over and switched the engine off. He ratcheted the gearshift to park. He did it so quickly and easily the act felt more teasing than aggressive. (“I did this very calmly so he would not get too freaked out and have everything get out of control.”) Brad’s arm snaked around Steve’s neck from behind. Considering their positions, the one-handed pummeling that began at once may have felt inept to Steve. Brad’s grunting abuse (Darrell thinks he remembers the usual “You fucking faggot”) may have sounded oddly forced, like porn movie dialogue, because it was Brad’s first time in this role—the whole point of this “mission” was “patching Brad out” as a foot soldier for Chaos Squad (to use their own Boy Scout–like terminology). This was the night Brad had to “show heart.” 5 Darrell got out of the car and ran to the driver’s side exactly the way he used to run in the opposite direction in his old limo-driving days.
According to Darrell, Brad growled, “Scoot over now!” The words stick in my mind as authentic, just because I would never write the absurd mommy word “scoot” in a scene like this. Steve scrambled and was dragged to the passenger-side bucket seat. Slipping into the driver’s seat, Darrell kicked one of Steve’s lagging feet out of the way. The engine fired with an out-of-gear screech before the car faltered up to speed.
Brad’s little bag was packed with zip ties,
a plastic tarp, rope, the gun, a folding shovel, changes of clothes in case they got too bloody, and two rolls of duct tape. Brad fished the metallic tape out of the bag and started binding Steve. First he pulled Steve’s wrists behind his back and taped them together. With 180-foot rolls of tape, there was enough to wrap Steve almost entirely.
Steve was blindfolded next. Brad ran the tape around the man’s head seven or eight times. Lengths of tape came off the roll with a furious squawking as the car lurched over potholes. When that was done, Steve’s head was all but mummified. A gap was left for his nostrils and a tiny slit for his mouth, Darrell recalls.
All this time Darrell was telling Steve to follow instructions and everything would be okay. He says he ordered the bald man to bring his ankles together and lift them up. Steve did the best he could. Brad crawled forward and taped them together and elbowed Steve sharply in the balls when he was done. “I told Brad to recline Mr. Domer’s seat and duct tape him to the seat [so] no one could see him from the outside.” Great loops of tape started screaming off the roll again.
From that point on Steve was beaten repeatedly.
I’m not at all sure Darrell and Brad would have sounded like killers. They would have sounded more like rowdy kids. Or like braggarts—stupid, overwrought, clumsy, imprudent. Maybe (as his killers crowed later) Steve was well-behaved in spite of everything. But any survival strategies were moot: Steve had no idea what he looked like, and it was especially dangerous how little he looked like a man now, armless and bundled in metallic tape.
I asked Darrell about Steve overhearing any exchanges between him and Brad. “We had metal music playing in the car,” he told me. “When we wanted to talk to each other I turned the music up even louder. The tape was over Mr. Domer’s entire face as well as his ears. I’m sure he couldn’t hear much anyway.”
Darrell already felt he was losing control of the situation. Brad had risen to an adrenaline-fueled pitch of excitement his general had never seen before. The younger guy was quick to disagree and argue. He whaled at their prisoner and kept an eye on Darrell in the rearview mirror like a lion guarding its kill.
Darrell told Brad to look for a cell phone and wallet. Brad fished them from Steve’s pockets and picked at the phone till he got the battery and SIM card out. He threw them, along with Steve’s credit cards, out the window where they made a leaflike clattering on the pavement, barely audible over the radio’s heavy metal. The fifty-one dollars in the wallet was such a disappointment that Brad beat Steve with extra energy to burn off the frustration.
Darrell knew the mission was getting away from him. He always counted on being the crazy one, willing to go further than anyone else. It was his special act. Without it he risked being too aware, perhaps. But Brad kept getting wilder and more self-assured. Darrell wasn’t going to be able to one-up him. The thought made him uncomfortable. If the younger guy’s predatory intensity wasn’t exactly scaring him, it was definitely making him feel self-conscious, uncertain, maybe a little bit feminized. (“I couldn’t say anything about him hitting [Mr. Domer] because of how it would have made me look.”)
They kept only Steve’s bank card. Darrell started interrogating Steve about his bank account and PIN number. How much money was in the account? It was a way of taking the reins from Brad. Darrell wasn’t really planning on using the information. (“I knew how risky it would be to expose myself to any cameras at an ATM and gave up [asking about the PIN] after I fractured my hand on his face.”) Did Steve live alone? In a whisper, the man claimed he lived with a straight older brother in Edmond, but Darrell didn’t believe him. He figured Domer understood they were looking for a quiet place and didn’t want them using his house. (“Our idea was we would get him somewhere we could torture him in private.”) Darrell had been driving more or less blindly. He’d reached the city’s far west side, the Yukon area.
“Dahmer! Fucking Dahmer!” Darrell says things got a lot worse as soon as Brad learned Steve’s last name. He says Brad roared taunts like, “Dahmer is the fucking asshole who kills kids! He’s your brother? This guy’s related to fucking Jeffrey Dahmer. That’s his faggot serial killer brother, man! You like eating boys?” With insane energy, Brad beat Steve for the similarity in names. Brad had meaty, big-boned fists that didn’t injure easily. With an air of being impressed even now, Darrell says Brad “really had quite an evil streak. One that I could not control or one-up.” Whether or not the following threat was actually made while they terrorized Steve, Darrell remembers it was part of the plan, something they’d chortled grimly about the previous night or on the long walk earlier: cut the faggot’s dick off and stick it in his mouth or in his asshole.
Despite the knives, the shovel, the gruesome planning, Darrell also claims that at this point they were in vague accord that they were only going to beat Steve up and dump him. (“At that time [Brad] was in agreement [not to kill him].” And again, “I told Brad that he only had to rob him and beat him up . . . I told him I would still patch him out.”) An hour or two had passed already. Darrell told Brad they needed to find a place in the woods somewhere and asked the other skinhead if he wanted to drive now. They switched places in Yukon.
Darrell didn’t make the change because he wanted to give Steve a break. He was trying to settle Brad down for his own sake. He notes that switching places may have saved the old guy from having a rib puncture his lung or from totally racked balls—for the time being.
Volatile as Brad was, Darrell felt the need to preserve his uncertain sense of authority. He says he told Steve that they’d have to mess him up, but that they wouldn’t necessarily kill him as long as he wasn’t thinking about talking to the cops. Brad blew up. It was supposed to be his night. Pettishly he changed his mind; he decided he wanted to kill Steve after all. (“We get to talking some more and [Brad] changes his mind and now he wants to kill him, because [Mr. Domer] briefly saw what we look like.” Another time, Darrell puts it, “He insisted that he kill him because he saw our faces and we would get about the same amount of time in jail if we were ever caught. He never let up about killing him.”) For his own part, Darrell claims he was still thinking, or letting himself think, that the savage talk was intended mostly to terrify Steve. (“At this time I really think he’s just saying all this to scare Mr. Domer, so I go along.”)
Brad got on I-35 heading south. He drove for half an hour or so through the exurban sprawl of Norman, Oklahoma. As he approached the town of Goldsby, the plains lapped at the sides of the highway. They’d left the city behind. The world became invisible beyond the dim, phosphorescent haze of headlights and streetlights. This was the way home, not a good idea. But they were tired and not thinking straight. Exit 101, right after the first Washington/Goldsby exit, was coming up. Did Brad mean to take the old guy to Darrell’s trailer? They got off the highway and passed the trailer several times. A third housemate was at home.
As Brad drove, Darrell searched the car. He pulled the backseat cushion forward and reached into the trunk, polymer-scented, well-carpeted. It was empty except for a few dry-cleaners’ coat hangers.
The two skinheads argued off and on. The boastful, huffy way Brad insisted on killing Steve made Darrell doubt him still. It sounded too much like a child’s exhausted petulance. Nevertheless, they stopped on a country road and switched places again. Darrell headed east on Ladd Road, still too close to Washington and the trailer, but they’d been driving for four hours. Drained, Darrell found it hard to argue, even to speak. Ladd Road made a big dip. Two large gas wells on the right-hand side nodded tediously the way they do all over Oklahoma. Then the road flattened out between fields. Somewhere along here, Steve was killed.
Darrell describes the sequence of events: “We ask him if he wants to suck our dongs before we kill him. He says yes that he did. I think he thought we were kidding too. We got near my house and Brad asks me how he should kill him and I tell him about the hangers in the backseat. I told him to untwist the hanger to make it a straight piece of metal
wire and put it around his neck with his foot on his back, pull real hard, and twist it like a bread tie. I’m saying this real loud to scare Mr. Domer.”
Brad pulled the rear seat cushion forward and reached for one of the coat hangers. He shook it loose, ripped the paper and plastic off, and laboriously unwound it. From behind, Brad slipped the hanger wire around Steve’s neck and pulled it tight. Steve’s taped head nodded upward over Brad’s fists. The wire disappeared into laps of skin and a loop of Steve’s gold chain slipped from a gap in the tape. Darrell glanced from the road to the mummy beside him. The chain glimmered, sidling across the silver tape. After a moment or two, Brad kicked his foot up onto the car seat and planted it against the back of Steve’s neck. He pulled harder. He flapped one hand loosely in the air and regripped the wire.
It became clear to Darrell that Brad wasn’t just terrifying the old man. This was a killing. He says he felt badly about it in a far-off way, but that he immediately started worrying about dumping the body. He fancied himself an orderly criminal. Practicalities took over. A deeper, chaotic part of him understood they wouldn’t get away with this. That fate hung in the air from the beginning. (Darrell mentions an early “realization that I was going to get caught.” He adds, “To be completely honest with you, I had no feelings whatsoever after the fact. Only that I let this dumb-ass take control from me . . . I was surely going to get caught. It was only a matter of time. I did want to get caught eventually, but I had a lot of things I wanted to do before I did.”)
Up ahead, a flat concrete bridge ran over the gully on the left side of the road. Built for farm machinery, it led to a fence and a vast plowed field abutting Hat Ranch beyond. Without thinking Darrell turned, and the car bucked onto the bridge over streaks of red earth. The gully, with a dribble of a creek in it, ran in front of a hedgerow of scrub, twisted old cottonwood trees and Osage oranges, already dropping flaming rust leaves. The glimpse of color—red earth, rust leaves—vanished when Darrell killed the headlights. They tipped the body over the low railing of the bridge. Darrell explains: “I get out of the car and pick up Mr. Domer. I bump his head on the concrete wall. Brad winces. I throw him over and we hear a little splash as his feet hit the edge of the water.” The body landed on a patch of earth near the opening of the bridge culvert. To Darrell the mission felt messy.
American Honor Killings Page 10