They returned to I-35 and drove on. Southbound still, with Brad at the wheel. They got a second wind. Now Brad became giddy. He seemed to find himself too powerful just to sit there in the car. He continually shifted and bounced in his seat and howled and bragged that this wasn’t his first. He said he’d killed Jimmy Fite in Ardmore, though Darrell didn’t believe him. (Chasse Stevens would later go to prison for that murder.6)
Darrell tried to relax. He tried to relish the mission. But Brad’s domineering excitement irritated him. He kept hearing himself make out that he was an old hand at all of this. For some reason the control problem ruined it for him.
Brad took I-35 all the way down to Ardmore—an hour, two hours. They stopped at a gas station, spent some of Steve’s money on a can of gas and Copenhagen, and switched drivers again. They went to the house of another Chaos Squad friend. At three or four a.m. Darrell and Brad roused him. He was wearing dingy underwear, and, when he turned, inviting them in, a swastika glistened on his shoulder as if wet. He refused their proposal outright. He was terrified but tried to hide the fact with a pantomime of grogginess. Darrell’s idea was to take him to see the body. Then, the very next night, he and the guy would go out and kill another one.
The point was that Brad hadn’t been a good match. He was too straight, too big, oafish, unattractive, too overwhelming when he started going wild. Darrell needed to replay the whole episode. Something he couldn’t identify had been missing. Perhaps the missing element was desire, even love. And this guy, this Ardmore brother, was one he loved, a proper skinhead. (Darrell tells me now, “This guy was real cute. I did lots of tattoos on him. Every time I got hard. He always liked showing off his dick too. I really liked this guy.”)
Since it felt like their lives were now hurtling toward an end, Brad and Darrell wanted to start killing again soon. The Chaos Squad brother’s refusal was infuriating. The conversation was tense, inarticulate, unfriendly. Chaos Squad rules were being flouted, but no one had the alertness to figure out what needed to be done about it. The prim confusion when Darrell and Brad left—tattooed thugs acting like disappointed parents—made it clear a threat would be coming later. Brad talked about killing the Ardmore brother almost immediately.
This visit was strange. Darrell explains, “We wanted to make the other member a part of it. Kind of like a three-pact deal even though it was against the rules. The rules say if you are not part of the deal you don’t get details and you don’t need to know. Afterward, Brad wants to kill more, anyone. Especially the member who did not do as asked.”
The rest of that predawn passed in an exhausted back-and-forth. Darrell and Brad bickered. They needed to get rid of the car. But Brad was tired and stubborn. In Ardmore he’d stopped in briefly at another friend’s house and cadged a joint. Darrell says that after smoking the joint Brad became paranoid.
I’ve pressed Darrell many times about what happened next, a visit to a porn store. Frankly, I wanted to know whether the murder was arousing. Or did Brad, after a night of hypermasculinity and violence, simply want some form of feminine solace, even if it was pornographic and on glossy paper? Darrell says he doesn’t know. (“I’m not sure what was on Brad’s mind when we went to the porn store. All I know is that he really wanted to go. Of course, what was on my mind was what if we see me on a box cover or poster in the store? Yikes! Of course, I do look a little different, but in my mind . . .”) They got back on I-35 and continued south about forty minutes beyond Ardmore.
Oklahoma bans hard-core pornography, so they had to go to the porn store conveniently located just across the Texas state line, exactly the way a big casino, banned in Texas, is located on this side of the border. Once over the nondescript Red River bridge separating the two states, Brad and Darrell would have seen the big sign for DW’s Adult Video on the right even before they noticed the little one: Welcome to Texas, Proud Home of President George W. Bush. When Darrell got out of the car, the glue of duct tape plucked at his T-shirt.
The thing Darrell was worried about—surges of sleep-deprived and irrational alarm—was that they’d walk in and see a big poster for By Private Invitation of Billy Houston or pass the tiny male section in the far corner of the barnlike space and see the cover of Headbangers. He knew of a skinhead who’d done a jack-off video; it didn’t go well for him when his brothers found out. To the right as you entered DW’s was a wall of dildos and sex toys, then endless Walmart-like aisles of DVDs. They wandered. They looked. (“There was no peepshow. We didn’t buy any magazines.”) There was no point to it.
Darrell’s eyes hurt after a few minutes under glaring fluorescent light. Coming out of DW’s, the darkness was welcome. He rubbed his eyes with his good hand. The edges of his field of vision warped and glimmered as if someone were dangling Steve’s gold chain just out of sight.
Brad had patched out from “prospect” to “foot soldier.” But the mission wasn’t over yet. Originally Darrell meant to take the car back to Oklahoma City and ditch it there. They’d have to walk the eighteen miles to Washington again. Brad complained that his feet were hurting. He was too tired. Darrell suggested they swing by the trailer in Washington where he had two dirt bikes. They could load them in the trunk and ride home after dumping the car. But Brad was too tired even for that. Darrell didn’t have the energy to insist. He’d begun to nurse a sense of fatality. He knew how to get rid of evidence so it stays gone—he says he’s had plenty of experience—but it seemed to matter less this time. The end of everything was within sight.
During the early stages of the beating, Darrell had refractured an old boxer’s break in his hand. It was starting to swell, and holding the steering wheel hurt. He continued to let Brad drive. Despite the excuse of the injured hand, his own passivity felt unforgivable.
Lengths of tape still stuck to the passenger seat. (Darrell adds, “There was also some blood on the seat from Mr. Domer’s nose and face. I put one of the floor mats over it in order to sit down without getting blood on my BDUs [Battle Dress Uniforms].”) But the murder already seemed unreal. Maybe for that reason, Brad and Darrell drove back up to Ladd Road to look at the body as if they were showing it to their Ardmore brother, after all. (“Still there. What did we think, it was going to get up and walk away?”) The body was near the culvert. The feet just touched the water in the creek. A gigantic pupa in dully gleaming tape. A dapper bend at the waist was the most human thing about it.
Using the can of gasoline they’d bought with Steve Domer’s fifty-one dollars, they torched the car at SE 12th Avenue and Cottonwood Road, a bare five- or ten-minute walk from home. The burned car would be found right away. After the body was discovered more than a week after that, police started canvassing the area. When asked if anybody gay lived thereabouts, neighbors recalled that Darrell Madden had been living with another man in his trailer—and had even been arrested for domestic abuse one time. It must have been obvious where to look, though. In an area of tidy, expensive-looking horse farms, the single yellowish, run-down, white-trash trailer with its kennel of German shepherds sticks out like a sore thumb. By that time Brad was dead and Darrell was lashed to a hospital bed in Oklahoma City.
For now the two skinheads talked about murder, the next murder. Footsore, they walked from the burning car. The car alarm started screaming. They hurried. Brad had quieted now. Darrell held his swollen hand at chest level to keep it from throbbing. They decided they were going to have to kill that Ardmore Chaos brother who’d refused them. He knew too much; he hadn’t come through. For Darrell, self-immolating desire also cast its glow on this fantasy or plan. Of all of them, that perfect skinhead brother aroused him most. Climbing the grayed and warped board steps to the trailer, Darrell and Brad were already going over details of the planned murder.
Darrell later summarizes: “Brad argues about walking back, biking back, or anything else. Too tired. I guess I was too. I felt I had lost control. Gave in and set the car on fire without disconnecting the battery about one mile from home. Ve
ry loud alarm. Oops! Get home. Look out back bedroom at fire. It’s a wonder you could not hear the alarm or see the lights flashing pointed right at the trailer. [The other housemate] wakes up. Was sleeping in my bedroom. Brad says, ‘Let’s kill him too.’” Though he was tired beyond conceiving, Darrell had to take three Seroquel to fall asleep.
* * *
Seroquel is an antipsychotic used off-label for sleep and often abused (especially in California prisons) because it isn’t a controlled substance. Darrell got his first prescription for it in prison.
Darrell awoke in a fog. At some point during the day, the third housemate (he’d just been asked to move out despite the fact that he and Darrell were close—they knew each other’s secrets) overheard Darrell and Brad talking about a man who wouldn’t fight back. Though the housemate didn’t realize he was ever a target himself, he later went to the police.
When Darrell and Brad checked up on the Ardmore brother they planned to kill, they learned he’d left town hours after seeing them. He’d gone to take a job on an oil rig. They tried his cell phone. He spoke to them briefly but refused to say where he was.
The night after the murder, Darrell and Brad invited some people over to the trailer. This was when Brad told his mother, Tina Melton, that he’d killed someone, the confession Darrell made him take back by e-mail. Perhaps it was now, not earlier, when the housemate overheard them going on about the man who didn’t fight back. Even discounting the specter of recent murder, it wasn’t much of a party: TV on in the background (no reports about a missing Steve Domer yet, but soon), Jack Daniel’s, beer, Coke, chips, smokes. Darrell tells me, “During this party my girlfriend made ‘the eye’ at me, so I took her, and my gun, in my room and fucked her. I faked getting off once she came.” Brad got a little drunk. He fought with his own girlfriend. At one point—it must have been later—he took the gun out of the black bag and left the trailer. Darrell soon discovered him alone outside. When Brad threatened to kill himself, Darrell says he had to wrestle the gun from him. He remembers being surprised that his hulking comurderer couldn’t put up more of a fight. Darrell says he fired once at the ground at Brad’s feet and said, “I’ll help you [kill yourself].” As he did twenty nights later.
After the tussle, Darrell’s body throbbed, the insects chirred, Brad panted. Life seemed about to dissolve. In his heart Darrell blamed Brad for everything sloppy about the mission, for everything that had turned bad.
They visited the body at least four times over the next week. In daylight the skin of the bald head was visible, waxen blue-gray, unreal-looking, flecked with dirt. They wondered if it had been moved slightly by an animal. They kept going back.
III. Oklahoma
When I walked into the Oklahoma City motel’s ordinary glass vestibule I found a four-foot-tall model of the World Trade Center complete with Never Forget regalia. I happened to have been living a couple of blocks from the World Trade Center when it was destroyed. My experience that day was personal and local. But I’d long ago gotten used to ceding “my” disaster to the rest of the country as a political whatnot, so I just snorted to myself and checked in, and it took me several days before I realized the big model wasn’t the usual display of patriotic schmaltz. It was also personal and local. Oklahoma City and New York are dissimilar in every way except that both have been the victims of terror. A quick trip to the Murrah memorial in downtown Oklahoma City makes the close parallel between the cities’ experiences obvious. The sense of cousinship is more deeply felt here in Oklahoma. New Yorkers are too ready to be disliked and too wrapped up in themselves to notice a little friendly feeling way out here.
Though friendliness is a point of pride here, I sense underneath it a stubborn mistrust. Maybe it’s a distant Dust Bowl memory, but the state’s personality, despite the oil boom that ended around 1981, is still basically rural and poor, self-consciously backward, suspicious. The Daily Oklahoman is wearily mocked as the Daily Disappointment. Religion feels urgent here, a land of inarticulate big-sky angst, yet it can also become the tool of a small-town mean-spiritedness which is older than Christianity, older than religion itself. This is death penalty country. If Darrell Madden’s background hadn’t been outstandingly awful, the goal of prosecutors would have been execution.
When I visit Mort Domer, Steve’s brother, at the Edmond house he and Steve used to share, where he now lives with a woman he’s married since the trial, he announces how he warned family members that he planned to tell it to me like it was. He does. We sit at a kitchen counter drinking iced tea. Mort’s wife sits a little distance away in the adjoining living room, politely only half-participating in the conversation. Mort is tired, not from the cancer he recently beat back but from the effort to understand his brother and what happened to him. He asks for Darrell’s address, because he’s considering a ministry about forgiveness for his church.
From where we sit, the Domers can illustrate the story by pointing. Down the hall was Steve’s room packed high with ornaments, T-shirts, junk. Right here off the living room is the sunroom Steve built onto the modest house. Its high ceiling and tile floor and expensive windows illustrate Steve’s slightly grand tastes. Here under the sink is where they found bottles and bottles of wine. Not Steve’s—he wasn’t a big drinker—they must have belonged to one of the boyfriends. Mort says this with characteristic gravelly wryness. The boyfriends didn’t like Mort much. Mort saw what was going on with them.
There are many crosses on the walls now, and family photographs. Everyday talk of Jesus is close to the surface, restrained a bit out of politeness or uncertainty about me. None of us insists too much on the looming “gay” issue. Clearly it’s a religious conundrum for them. The notion is mentioned in passing—full of discomfort, but as something hard not to think—that Steve’s lifestyle and end were somehow, on some level, connected.
For lunch we go to an ex–Long John Silver’s tricked out as a Mexican restaurant with a ceramic Aztec calendar, a donkey planter, and the odd sombrero on the walls. We join hands and pray. Mort’s wife mentions how the murder flickers on in their lives in the most preposterous ways. Just yesterday they finally received a check from the state reimbursing them thirty-eight dollars for Steve’s toll pass, which burned in his car. She shakes her head at the strangeness of it.
Initially, they did talk of the death penalty for Steve Domer’s murder. Mort spoke to the Oklahoma County DA, David Prater, who told him a death penalty conviction would be tricky given Darrell’s background. In any case, Mort, an eye on his own mortality, wanted the case resolved. With Prater acting as go-between, Darrell agreed to plead guilty in return for life without parole.
Before the plea, Mort and Darrell sat alone together at a table in the courtroom and talked about what happened for thirty minutes. Mort first gave Darrell a Bible, then asked him, “If you were the leader of this thing, how could you let it happen the way it did?” And Darrell talked honestly about the murder, spoke a little of his past, admitted he was gay, and cried. Afterward, the judge himself came down from the bench to hug Mort.
Television reports claimed Mort asked for the meeting, yet Mort to this day believes it was Darrell’s idea. It was arranged by DA Prater, who impressed on Darrell that had his own brother been murdered he’d want to know what happened.
On reflection Mort himself doesn’t know whether Darrell’s tears came more from relief or remorse, but his forgiveness stands. At the time he felt the tears were real. He describes how Darrell had transformed before his eyes from the smirking and remote figure of the trial’s first days into the vulnerable, badly damaged man who sat across that table talking to him.
* * *
I have a hard time locating the exact place Darrell and Brad dumped Steve’s body. I drive back and forth past Darrell’s old yellow trailer (leaving a long note for the occupant, who never contacts me). I’m looking for a little bridge but there are a number of them around. Following the road in one direction I pass a tiny grass airstrip and soon get
turned around among eroded dirt roads that peter out in a gas field near the Goldsby water tower. Somebody would have mentioned the water tower. I go the other way. Once I think I’ve found the place, but the bridge is too close to Hat Ranch. All the while I’m taking notes with my right hand, driving with my left: gravel—cow grate after airfield—sort of paved—horses everywhere—equine hospital—gully and tree row—cottonwood—red, red earth. The car is a mess of papers, maps, pens, soda cans, and empty potato chip bags.
Eventually, I find the bridge. Not what I expected, but it fits. The car bounces up onto the concrete bed of the span and I park. I take a lot of pictures; I’m insatiable for detail. The nagging question of whether I’m more Steve or more Darrell evaporates in a sunny sense of discovery and satisfaction. The murder has become everyday work for me. Like the famously “heartless” artist, I’m frankly pleased to recall how Darrell described the body’s head hitting this very railing and Brad’s, the killer’s, sympathetic wince for a corpse. It’s a strange and telling detail. Once more, self-conscious worry chills my skin and vanishes.
* * *
The wonder is how such a violent, charming, false character as Darrell’s is formed. Can it be beaten into any kid? What about Brad? At the same time, the early ’90s, that Darrell was getting into porn in LA, Bradley Qualls was still a boy in Ardmore. Virtually friendless, he was often beaten up. His sister Michelle had to fight on his behalf sometimes. Brad was irritating, overactive, and just couldn’t learn. He was tormented for this by other kids. Of course, he was diagnosed with ADHD and served up a slew of medications.
American Honor Killings Page 11