Michelle puts the most dramatic change in Brad’s personality at around fourteen. He resolved to fight back. It’s when he decided to go off medication, but it’s also the moment when adolescent hormones really do change the brain. Depression and mental illness often first show up around that age. Brad was big, he’d learned how to fight through being beaten, and now he started running wild. He started protecting his sister instead of the other way around. Michelle says he was always ripe to join, to be a part of something. After being released from prison that first time, he was proud of getting a driver’s license, a car, a girlfriend, proud of getting off drugs with the encouragement of Chaos Squad. Michelle still remembers how excited he was the day he told her he was finally going to get to meet the leader.
Darrell’s background was different. You want to believe there is and always was something wrong with him, something psychopathic. Things start to fall into place when you learn his uncle and father both suffered serious mental illness. His father, diagnosed a paranoid schizophrenic, was in and out of mental hospitals. And yet . . . the man wasn’t Darrell’s real father. Darrell doesn’t know who his real father was. The simple genetic theory has to be scratched.
As a kid Darrell was brutalized like Brad, but for a different reason. In Darrell’s case he was treated with contempt as a faggot. School got so insufferable for the pretty, vaguely effeminate boy that he habitually skipped out. A school bus driver who Darrell now believes had a bit of a crush on him connived in his absences, suggesting, “Here might be a good spot to slip off the bus, boy.” Darrell would run back home and hide in a chicken coop where he’d spend the day listening to the radio and reading magazines. He couldn’t let his mom find out. He doted on her, and between her work as a butcher at IGA and a husband too ill to work himself, she had a wearying life. She didn’t need more worries.
After his uncle was divorced, Darrell and his father used to stop by his house to check on him. The man took the breakup badly, and sure enough, one day they walked in and found him dead, blood everywhere. Darrell’s father made him and his sister clean up the mess, and Darrell still remembers vividly the thick, jellied quality of the half-set blood. He was about fourteen. A year and a half later, sneaking into his henhouse refuge, Darrell came upon his father hanging from a beam, blue. Though he says he doesn’t remember it, he cut his father down and saved his life. Only briefly. His father died soon afterward. A new stepfather brought the school violence and dislike home to Darrell.
By this time Darrell had learned that his appearance brought unlooked-for power with a certain type of man—for example, the “real estate agent” who showed him around an empty house and casually turned and dropped his pants.
Darrell probably went to the gay neighborhood in Oklahoma City a few times even at this age. Some people there remember him as a kid. But soon he left town for Houston with an African American drag queen and a few other friends. In Houston he saw his first skinhead and fell in love—not with the person but with the type, the idea. His friends warned him he couldn’t have anything to do with guys like that, because they’d just as soon kill him. Darrell took that as a challenge.
There are skinheads all over the country and the world. Neo-Nazi groups in Eastern Europe, Pinoy gangs in LA and Manila, the LA Death Squad (LADS). Often they’re surprisingly casual about the Aryan issue. There’s even one nonracist group, SHARP, Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice. It’s a young man’s game. It isn’t unusual to start at thirteen. The majority are seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds. Still in it at thirty-seven at the time of the murders, Darrell was an anomaly.
Like most gangs, skinhead culture thrives on naïve passions and loyalties. A streak of nerdiness is reflected in endless rules and ranks and taboos and secret emblems. The solidarity the group engenders is, basically, love. Thinking about this solidarity can make an intellectual, a grown-up, even a gay person or a Jew, feel, besides scorn or anger, a slight, inarticulate embarrassment, a superannuated yearning for the simple emotion of youth. This is the dangerous, illusory moral feeling that Fascism has always played to.
Unlike overtly political or religious organizations of the kind that fascinated Ben Williams—the Aryan Nations, Christian Identity, etc.—skinheads often don’t have much of a program. They’re kids, strays, squatters, runaways, members of the angry white underclass, disposable boys who band together out of fury and for protection. Their rebellious anger is often mistaken for real rebellion. More commonly, the shock of growing up, of glimpsing all the different and conflicting mores out there in the world, prompts a kind of nauseated conservatism. Whether they mean to or not, they become the crazed enforcers of the values of their fathers and mothers.
But for Darrell, more clearly than for most, the skinheads meant love. An alloy emotion “love-fear” describes it better, because for Darrell the love was steeped in deceit, mistrust, lies, the possibility of treachery. He was forever on the alert. He had to will himself to appear as steady as the dealer’s hand the moment before the fatal card is turned over.
The skinhead’s tribal racism and anti-Semitism and loathing for homosexuals was easy enough to pick up. Darrell’s parents had been prosaic, unimpassioned racists. Blacks were “niggers.” OKC was “Niggertown.” It wasn’t harmless, but it wasn’t intensely felt either—more backward-looking, unimaginative, and lazy. It was easy for Darrell to dial up the hatred so that the brotherly love would become, by contrast, even sweeter.
For example, a perfect sublimation of this love might have come at one of those Chaos Squad tattoo parties less than a year before the murders. Darrell was with the Ardmore Chaos brother who later refused to join him and Brad on their spree. Darrell talks about this person repeatedly with desire in his voice. “He was little, perfect body, always running around showing off his little dick.” Perhaps it was outside, a summer afternoon. A “skinbyrd” girlfriend watched, yawned, batted a bee away. The boys straddled a bench. Slouching as far as his spine permitted, the brother offered his pallid back to Darrell, who meticulously pricked a swastika into the skin over the guy’s shoulder blade with the whining ink gun. Darrell would have felt his brother’s wincing as he steadied his fingers and forearm on the infinitely soft skin. As he says, he’d always get hard.
Oklahoma seems tough on its children, like a badly educated parent. Time and again before interviews, I found myself holding hands around the table in prayer. Our bowed heads, our extravagant humility, felt propitiatory. Then the interviews would turn to the kind of seedy, raucous lives glimpsed on certain TV shows, where the country’s underclass likes to make a spectacle of itself as we watch and call it pop culture. Here, since the point wasn’t ratings or harsh amusement, the stories were suffused with sadness and incomprehension.
After I visited a women’s shelter in Ardmore, word got around that I was looking into Bradley Qualls’s background. Rumors swirled about the Fite case, the other murder Brad had been questioned about before he was killed. When I got back to New York I received a pleading call from Chasse Stevens’s mother. Her son had gone to prison swearing he didn’t kill Fite. Was there anything I could do? “Sir, you have to understand, this is a very corrupt place.” I couldn’t say the case was only a small detail, a footnote in my story, because it was her son’s life. She had such a misplaced notion of my power as a writer. The grimness of the Osage Plains seemed to blow through the phone.
* * *
During his time away in Southern California, Darrell may have acquired a little Los Angeles glamour with which to impress the locals when he returned to spend the seven years before Steve Domer’s murder back in Oklahoma. This part of his story reads almost like an outlaw saga, something I don’t like. He was in misery and spreading it. It’s difficult to convey the sometimes desperate energy of self-repression. “Gay” was such a monkey on his back that Darrell was in constant existential contortion. The contrast between California and Oklahoma may only have heightened things.
In 1999, Darrell was paroled f
rom a California prison. He’d been in on a narcotics charge. The highlife in LA had spiraled to its inevitable end. In a common arrangement called an “interstate compact,” California handed him off to the Oklahoma Department of Corrections, which supervised his parole. He was monitored by an officer in the town of Purcell, Oklahoma. Darrell went to live with his mother in McClain County (a couple of years later she moved out and left the rickety yellow trailer to him). Through a brother-in-law he got a job operating heavy equipment at Huddleston Construction in Oklahoma City. The workaday world wasn’t easy for someone used to the life he’d lived. After about ten months, he got into a bad fight with his brother-in-law and quit Huddleston. He worked as a motel clerk for a year.
When money was tight he’d slip into Oklahoma City to spend a weekend night dancing naked at Tramps. He stood on a big black plywood box right by the entrance. (I tell him the box is still there, though they don’t have dancers anymore.) Even here, even dancing, even around people who knew him, he could still sometimes play “not gay” to himself. Buoyed by a cloud of contempt, he danced like he wasn’t feeling anything—like he was actually untouchable—even when some idiot was reaching into his underwear to wrap a dollar bill around his cock. Occasionally he trolled for clients at the An-Son car wash across the street. That was why he later feared recognition at the spot.
But he was getting long in the tooth for that kind of work and wanted to leave it behind. He got his real estate license and started selling for Coldwell Banker in northwest Oklahoma City. He did pretty well.
Then he met a boy. This was always much harder to accept than dancing or hustling. Darrell wanted to be straight more than anything. The masculinity that obsessed him was the adolescent kind defined as much by a studied repulsion for the boys you’re at ease with as it is by desire for the girls who make you uncomfortable. At the same time he was, almost reflexively, an expert seducer. He might have looked a touch dumb with his close-set eyes, but when he got talking, you realized how smart he was. He had a gentle, insinuating voice without a trace of a yokel Sooner accent. When he and the new kid started talking the language of dating and love, however, Darrell’s articulateness abandoned him. His head ached as if he had an allergy to awareness of this kind of thing—love between men. He’d go silent and brood. The wrongness of it was more than he could take. His own ingrained opinions seemed to echo from the minds of people on the streets or in stores. It wasn’t him thinking—it was the entire world. In his body he felt a constant, deep, maddening buzz of moral disgust and dishonor.
The boy he dated, from a broken home in Norman, was his usual: slim, hairless, a lot younger—nineteen when they met. He wasn’t particularly beautiful, which made Darrell feel more in control. In fact, the kid’s homeliness was arousing. Darrell held all the cards. But the boy swished and minced and bitched and whined and lisped! Darrell couldn’t order the sissified airs out of his lover. In public, he fumed. Everyone assumed they were gay, of course. It was grotesque. Darrell knew he wasn’t the most masculine-seeming guy in the world himself.
On top of the gayness, the kid had had way too much sexual experience. He admitted bottoming several times for a thirteen-year-old Norman neighbor. As a sometime hustler, Darrell had never come at a relationship from the patriarchal, possessive side. It felt a little ludicrous. He started getting jealous. Apparently he didn’t hold all the cards. His feelings became intense, obsessive.
Their set-to of desire and rancor passed for love. When the boy couldn’t stay off AOL chat, Darrell started worrying he was setting up dates, or as he says brutally now, “plotting to get more dick up his ass.” They fought, they broke up, they tried to get back together. The love, or whatever it was, turned into unrelieved pain. Revenge fantasies turned into tawdry revenge. The boy called the Real Estate Commission and told them Darrell had lied about his prison background when applying for his license. The license was revoked. Darrell told the cops about that thirteen-year-old neighbor, and his ex-lover was convicted of lewd molestation. Even now, from prison, Darrell crows, “I won!”
For Darrell, the experience proved yet again that “gay” was just morbid impermanence. It couldn’t be his life. He was already working part time for 5 Star Limousine of Oklahoma City. With no more real estate money coming in, he started working full time driving party limos and six-door Cadillac Fleetwood funeral cars. His easy friendliness with strangers served him well. But the breakup was surprisingly hard to get over. He started shooting up cocaine—cocaine because the meth in Oklahoma just wasn’t as good as he’d been used to in California. He’d binge for a few days, then stay off it for a while. Even so, things started going downhill the way they do with drugs.
During this time, Darrell may have been working with the police as a confidential informant in narcotics investigations. After the murders, an anonymous poster on a local website claimed that Darrell used to set up acquaintances for busts. The anonymous poster’s gossip is incredibly important—it might say volumes about Darrell’s double nature—but I haven’t verified it. If the confidential informant story is true, it could help explain the odd transformation Darrell went through next.
When “gay” didn’t work out, Darrell gave up on that and started impersonating a cop. He lied about his criminal background to the Oklahoma Council on Law Enforcement Education and Training (CLEET) and took a job as a security guard. (In the four months he was employed, he was promoted to “lieutenant.”) Given the new job, no one asked questions when he started outfitting himself with police paraphernalia. Cuffs, a vest, a holster. He got a T-shirt emblazoned with OCPD. He bought a used 1998 Crown Victoria, an ex–police cruiser, freshened the paint, added new strobes and a siren. He was set.
He started prowling the Will Rogers Courts area of Oklahoma City, a mostly poor African American part of town. He felt the racist imperative to prey on a tribe apart, and he may have thought rightly that poor African Americans were more likely to be cowed by or not question a corrupt cop. Like the gay crowds he’d danced for at Tramps, an audience he found contemptible would concentrate his performance. The scheme went amazingly well. He “confiscated” drugs, cash, and guns, and the men he pulled over—only African American men, he specifies—were all but grateful to get off scot-free.
I find these performances almost as hard to imagine as I do Darrell’s rages or his tearful outbursts. He must have performed with insane concentration to make the impersonation plausible. But you get the sense around this time that his life and “acts” are already getting out of hand.
Darrell was having a feud with a neighbor in Washington. The man ran one of the small llama farms which had become faddish during the past decade. One of Darrell’s German shepherds, wolfishly frisky at four months, kept escaping her pen and running the animals down. Threats had been exchanged. Darrell returned to the trailer one day and found his dog shot dead. Though sheep, and presumably llama, farmers have a widely recognized right to shoot dogs that harass their livestock, Darrell thought his neighbor killed his “puppy” because he was personally frightened. Darrell became enraged and called the police, the real police. No one called back. No one came to the trailer. No one seemed to know about the complaint when Darrell followed up days later.
The next time Darrell was out by Will Rogers Courts, he pulled over a young black man who turned out to be an off-duty cop. It was a quick exchange. Darrell jumped away from the driver’s-side window and ran for his car. He left the strobes on, and they throbbed red, white, and blue as he sped off. The off-duty cop clapped his own siren and LED to his dashboard and set off after the police cruiser. Because he had no radio to call for backup, Darrell got away.
But now the trailer in Washington didn’t feel safe. A day or two later, overcome by rage and stress, Darrell marched out and shot seven of his neighbor’s llamas. Six died. If he did have secret police contacts, they may have recognized his name when officers looked into the llama case. Darrell now says only that he was reached a month or two after the car ch
ase and told to present himself at police headquarters along with his Crown Victoria and that he told them, “Go fuck yourself and try and come get me.” They got him. He was arraigned. Animal cruelty and impersonating a police officer. He posted bail.
Darrell decided to run. On eBay he sold the Crown Victoria to a man in Oregon. He had to wait a few weeks for the $4,100 money order to arrive. He never sent the title. Darrell looked up a hustler friend from the An-Son car wash, another hairless, slim youngster. He’d always had a thing for this kid. He held out the thrill of being on the run, his ten thousand or so dollars in cash, all told, and his very real passion, and the kid bit.
The two boys drove to Mexico in the Crown Victoria. The story rated a couple of mentions in the Oklahoman. “Purcell Police are searching for a Washington man wanted in connection with an Internet scam.” “A Washington man wanted on several warrants may have fled the country, investigators say.”
Darrell and the kid made it all the way to Acapulco and drifted into a private end-times of sex and dope. They lost weight. In Mexico Darrell dropped to a spooky 130 pounds or so. They lost their passports. From twilight to twilight the same Baudelairean day kept repeating itself. It was the kind of life that’s debilitating to live but eerily lovely to remember. And Darrell does now remember the episode as the sexually ecstatic center of his life. Passports gone, the boys made love and sniggered at how they were white wetbacks. The joke suited Darrell; he was born the reverse of everything.
The interlude didn’t last long. After a telephone tip from back home, Mexican police picked the lovers up and sent them to a hellish facility in Mexico City where they languished until a flight to Houston was arranged. The hustler-boyfriend was greeted by his agonized mother. The police greeted Darrell.
American Honor Killings Page 12