American Honor Killings
Page 22
When Weber’s relative finished reading the victim impact statement, Judge Firetog dispensed with any stagey ruminations of his own and imposed the maximum sentence, saying “Twenty-five to life” so abruptly that a grin like a pulsing vein appeared on John’s face.
In the elevator I asked two photographers who’d been sitting in the jury box and had a better view, “Was that some kind of nervous, uncontrolled laughing?”
One of the photographers shook his head and said, “That kid is always smiling. He always smiles except when the jury’s around.”
The sentencing smile was bigger than the “guilty” smile, but both were like catnip to morally minded reporters. After the “guilty” smile, one asked Katehis’s father about “that big toothy grin” (not really what it was), and Spiro pleaded, “He was just nervous. That’s the way he is.” Both smiles looked like nerves to me too, the nerves of someone who, like many young men, has traded away emotion for dignity.
Katehis’s smiles were, in a sense, smiles at his own destruction. As a kid I learned to smile ironically too, when I was in trouble in public or when someone pressed me to feel something I refused to feel. The scale of Katehis’s trouble and irony boggle the mind, however, and his remoteness from what he did must be just as vast.
It went far beyond a hate crime. Perhaps Katehis had been abused, as a friend furiously claimed (shouting further, “Weber’s the real criminal, and I’ll tell you, he’s fucking burning in hell!”). Or Katehis had particular spite for gay men. Or, paradoxically, he felt a scornful confidence, or even a sense of comfort, around them. The point seems to have been to find a disposable human being who was willing to “be weak,” to be the ultimate “bottom,” someone whom people wouldn’t trouble about later. The point was the act of violence itself.
If this is true, then Katehis may represent what I’ve been looking for in this book at its most radical or uninflected: pure masculinity enraged. It isn’t an inconsequential thing that he stared me down halfway through the first trial. He must have been sick of my gaze, of being watched constantly by a stranger, of being “mugged.” Overpowering me with black-eyed menace must have been satisfying. He’s obviously profoundly troubled, but I see a twisted manliness in him rather than insanity, which is ultimately as guiltless as a storm or a landslide.
In this case, there was a particular if incomprehensible choice to kill. The story shrinks to its synopsis, a brute exhibition of youth and strength and domination and power. At this point my work—this book—becomes something like staring into John’s eyes: either I’ve arrived at a dimensionless point of darkness at the heart of violence, or the labor of looking so intently has become a sort of faintness.
I’m aware that calling John Katehis’s crime an “Honor Hilling” is wrong. Not just because I believe that true honor—whatever else it is—can never be associated with a murder, but also because the case appears to fall into another well-known category, the thrill killing, perhaps the most disturbing type of crime. Strangely, it’s also the most natural murder, in the sense that it’s the most animal. It is motiveless murder for its own sake, murder as play or as experience. Someone who spoke extensively with John after the crime was asked by a reporter what the motive could have been and answered, “Some people are just evil.” Given the outcome, it’s a moot point (for everyone except John and anybody who loves him or wants to help him) whether this was a case of real evil or its youthful imitation. Whether John is a soulless tough guy or was merely acting like one doesn’t matter.
Earlier, I wrote about the joy of violence. Though by itself thrill or pleasure rarely suffices as a motive for murder, it can be glimpsed often in this book. A wild physical pleasure of release—the sense of not being present that Steve Mullins and Juan Flythe described—may account for the barbarity of some of the crimes. Parrish’s fifty wounds, Weber’s fifty. Billy Jack’s crushed head and burned body. Darrell Madden, however studied his craziness may have been in the beginning, eventually developed a taste for violence, a connoisseurship even. I heard admiration in his description of Bradley Qualls’s frenzy. Even Ben Williams appears to have gloried in his naked attack on Timothy Renault. These look like experiences of an (ironically) sexlike transcendence. Even if self-consciousness at the animal moment of attack is impossible, it’s likely that anticipation of or satisfaction in the act felt, for a few seconds at least, like brute and happy manliness to the killers.
I haven’t been trying prove a thesis by recounting these stories. If anything, I’ve wanted to make thinking about them more complex, more tentative. It’s been my special concern to point out differences. Still, something fundamental about John Katehis’s crime leads me back to the beginning to reconsider how the acte gratuit, the simple, pointless murder, was elaborated in the minds of other murderers by ideas like honor and purity or by emotions like hatred and pride.
I began by looking at murders by young men where a sexual element, either real or metaphorical, entered the equation. The typical victim has been a gay man, but as I’ve said repeatedly, “hate crimes” and “gay panic murders”—indeed all limiting labels, including “honor killings”—strike me as insufficient. Certain types of murderers seem to gravitate toward certain types of victims. Men who kill women or female prostitutes, though hatred is often involved, aren’t usually called hate criminals. Men who kill their wives aren’t motivated by ideology, though sexuality is probably a factor. The men who kill gay men are equally diverse, and their motives also have layers of complexity.
A complication of the basic, Katehis-like act of murder is clear in Jonathan Schmitz’s confession to the 911 operator in Michigan. “He picked on me on national TV. He fucked me.” Jon used an explicit sexual metaphor without thinking. It isn’t by chance that the verb “dishonor” was once used euphemistically to describe a woman’s rape. However misguided, Schmitz was feeling an explosive agony of dishonor at the time of the killing. The other key words he used were “national TV.” Honor is a public phenomenon.
In one way or another, almost all these killings involved supersensitivity to public appearance. Steven Parrish was murdered for that reason alone. The decision was made in such frankly foolish haste that it’s obvious how urgent—burning—an issue image must have been for the members of his gang. But even Steve Mullins now says he turned a purely personal “affront” into a public issue by telling “a lot” of people that he planned to kill Billy Jack Gaither. Since he mentions friends suggesting that he merely beat Gaither up, the way he told people must have resembled a consultation. This is how honor is dealt with. It’s a community matter. In the old days of duels, there were seconds, days of advice and consideration, accepted routines, even handbooks. Darrell Madden was so adept at deception and performance that he probably had little sense where to draw the line between private and public in his own life. Yet he says he allowed violence to escalate since “I couldn’t say anything about him hitting [Mr. Domer] because of how it would have made me look.” It doesn’t sound like he was worried specifically about being found out to be homosexual. Some broader concern about appearance was involved.
A high level of rationalization shows up in many of the cases. Madden spoke of murder as a “mission” and, however dishonestly, he participated in a gang with ranks and rules. His murderous mission was to oversee a ritual display of loyalty. This was a kind of coming out ceremony for Bradley Qualls. Benjamin Matthew Williams refers in passing to a similar ritual of “showing heart,” but when it came to murder, his own rationalizations went far beyond gang loyalty. He built or inherited an entire ideology, albeit incoherent, which offered an intellectual (as opposed to an emotional) foundation for assassination and fire-bombing. All cool dutifulness, Steven Parrish’s killers rigidly insisted they did what had to be done. Even Steve Mullins reached for a higher rationalization after avenging his personal honor. Granting that what he did had been wrong, he told Connie Chung that God had forgiven him, but Billy Jack was in hell, because that’s what the Bib
le says. (And it does.) I doubt he truly holds to that article of faith. Even at the time, his claim may have been a defensive, public show of religiosity stiffened by Chung’s aggression. The point is, thinking is involved far more than panic.
Hatred was a critical factor in these murders. It would be poisonous to pretend otherwise. If Schmitz or the 92 Family Swans thought it was so great a dishonor to be perceived as “gay,” they must have accepted as truth that being gay is contemptible. Darrell Madden’s entire life was deformed by that conviction. But even hatred is more complex than we like to think. Perhaps Steve Mullins wouldn’t have felt affronted if a woman asked to give him a blow job, but he still may have scorned her. And even if he’d accepted, he may have felt contempt. The murder he first dreamed of had “a minority” as a victim. Though he used that word to mean a black man, it’s still illuminating. In a sense, “a minority,” any minority, is what he was looking for. As a young man with a certain charisma, it’s no surprise that he eventually came upon a gay man. Similarly, Ben Williams’s hatred had a broad spectrum. He had plenty to spare for Jews, black people, Mormons. People concerned about “hate crimes” sometimes dream that universal education about our differences will make intolerance vanish. Certainly, familiarity helps a lot. But in these cases, hatred often seems to exist prior to its having a clear object. Not only that, but Steve Mullins’s exclusive sexual experiences with African Americans remind us that racist revulsion may differ by a hair’s breadth from desire. Sex as fascination can trump both love and hatred. Violence is apparently similar.
If hatred can come before hating, murder can come before killing. Here I want to go beyond honor, hatred, thrill, to touch on psychopathy and derangement. The passenger who just misses an airplane that later crashes often claims to have had a weird feeling about the flight beforehand. A premonition like that is based on fallacy. Air travel is infrequent and dramatic enough that nearly every flier before nearly every flight thinks at least in passing about the possibility of disaster. The idea that any of these murders could have been predicted should be treated with caution. Still, every twelve-year-old doesn’t say, When I grow up I want to be a killer. It doesn’t lessen their guilt to say there’s something wrong with many murderers. Troubling hints of violence were common during the childhood of John Katehis. Mullins’s murder was, as he described it to me, secretly preexistent. Darrell Madden had a long history of violence and perhaps murder. Even the mild-mannered time bomb Jonathan Schmitz, someone who hadn’t had the brutalizing experience of prison like Mullins and Madden, had toyed with self-murder. A disaffected Benjamin Matthew Williams proposed assassinating the leaders of the Living Faith Fellowship long before he committed any known crime.
Though I think all the killers I’ve written about have been disturbed to some extent, and though murders are, in fact, rare, these crimes are exemplary (in a purely negative sense) social acts, so they speak to us about the everyday world, or they at least make us reflect. My own slant hasn’t been sociological. I don’t offer a proposal to do anything about it all. This isn’t a political work. My purpose has been descriptive—compiling a sort of list—and since my descriptions are pitched at the level of the individual, I haven’t been able to avoid communicating a tragic sense of life. That doesn’t always sit well with the proud or the confident or the optimistic or the cheerful: Americans. The “book of life” is by tradition a list, not so different from a catalog of ships or the index of a natural history field guide or the sequence of nucleotides in a genome. Gigantic lists have a gorgeous abundance often rejected for the sake of a summary or a concise position. But lists, by their very listness, actually do make a quiet argument—inclusive, accepting, weary, a little sad like the farmer plowing furrows or the writer writing lines—about their contents, an argument against the destruction or loss of a single detail.
Endnotes
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1. Of course, in truth, it’s Satan who, historically and quite deliberately, looks a little like a Jew. Return to Reading
2. There’ve been a lot of racist bands, part of a fertile white supremacist youth culture. Matthew probably knew RaHoWa, the band. He quotes a Nine Inch Nails song and Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand in a letter sent from prison. On the same page he writes, “RaHowA [sic]/its [sic] a battle cry/RaHowA/its do or die/RaHowA/our spirit shall never die/RaHowA/its a saintly cry!” That sounds like the misremembered lyrics of RaHoWa’s song “RaHoWa” from their 1995 album Cult of the Holy War: “Rahowa!/It’s our battle cry. You’re trembling in fear/cause of this look in my eyes, Rahowa!/It’s the white man’s call,/ You can chase me to the end of the earth,/but I shall never fall, never fall . . .” Return to Reading
3. It seems the Columbine massacre was meant to take place on April 19th, not on the 20th, either to spare a student who was supposed be absent that day or to commemorate or rival the burning of the Branch Davidian compound on that day in 1993 and the Oklahoma City bombing, also on the 19th, in 1995. The idea of wearing trench coats may have come from a fantasy scene in The Basketball Diaries (1995) in which Leonardo DiCaprio wears a trench coat and shoots classmates. The point is that widespread speculation about Columbine could have had eerie resonance for Matthew, who’d begun his “war” on the day of the massacre, who was commemorating Hitler’s birthday, and who had likely been impressed by The Matrix. Return to Reading
4. According to Darrell, it’s more complicated than I realize. “It all depends on which side it is on and even on the color. On the left side it means ‘in memory’ of someone who has died and is always done in black ink either lined or filled in. On the right side it means that you have killed someone. It can be lined or filled in black. When it is red and black-lined it means that it is ‘wet’ and that you have killed in the name [of], or for, your gang.” Darrell’s teardrop is on the right side, red, black-lined—wet. Return to Reading
5. Benjamin Matthew Williams used similar terminology when spinning the yarn about the racist cell he’d supposedly hooked up with at Cal Expo. They demanded he “prove himself” through violent action. Return to Reading
6. The Ardmore Sheriff Department’s chief investigator in the case, Rick Batt, says Qualls wasn’t involved and knew neither Fite nor Stevens. A juvenile whom Brad did know boasted about taking a video of Fite’s body and may have helped dump it in a stream. Supposedly, Brad destroyed the video to protect the juvenile whom he called “a dumb kid.” That was how Brad found out about this little-publicized murder and ended up being questioned about it. Return to Reading
7. Of major US cities, Baltimore has a higher percentage of African Americans than any but Detroit and New Orleans. Return to Reading
8. The name was borrowed from Mondamin, the Indian corn god in Longfellow’s “Song of Hiawatha,” whom Hiawatha wrestles to death in a strange foreshadowing of Scooby’s own death: “And before him breathless, lifeless,/Lay the youth, with hair disheveled,/Plumage torn, and garments tattered,/Dead he lay there in the sunset.” Return to Reading
9. I owe those quotations and much of Vitale’s story to John Dickie’s history, Cosa Nostra (Palgrave McMillan, 2004). The translations are mine. Return to Reading
10. An important detail: though it’s not widely known, a sixteen-year-old in New York is a minor sexually but not criminally. Katehis was treated as an adult from start to finish. Return to Reading
11. Katehis’s XTube account was set up on December 16, 2006, and he hadn’t signed in for a year before the murder, so he was actually only fifteen in the video. Return to Reading
Acknowledgments
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People from every part of the country and every imaginable walk of life have generously offered their time, their memories, and their reflections to help with this book. They’ve talked, written, thought hard, shown me places, shown me photographs. In no particular order I want to thank those I relied on most: Detective Gary Childs, Detective Joseph Caskey, Mort and Linda Domer, Spiro Katehis, Michelle Hens
ley, Jeff and Ann Monroe, McGregor Scott, an important informant who asked to remain anonymous, Joshua Lyon, Floyd Martin, John Maringouin, Steve Mullins, Darrell Lynn Madden, and Paul Gordon Smith Jr.
An even greater number of people took the time to offer or clear up details, correct my confusions—explain how a certain gun works, for example, or describe a legal strategy. Again in no particular order, I express my appreciation to: Mark McLaurin, Eric Rubio, Karney Hatch, Nathan McConnell, Randy O’Quinn, criminal investigator Rick Batt, Jay Cohen, Susan Domer, Assistant DA Anna-Sigga Nicolazzi, Daniel Goldin, Hamilton Nolan, Frank Morano, “Damian Hospital,” and Jonah Bruno of the Brooklyn DA’s press office.
Journalists were particularly open and helpful to someone who isn’t really a fellow journalist at all. Thanks to Sam Stanton of the Sacramento Bee, Marcus Franklin of the Associated Press, William Gorta of the New York Post, William Sherman of the New York Daily News, Joseph Fenity, Simon Garron-Caine, and, most important of all, Duncan Osborne of Gay City News.
In addition to volumes of court records, the news outlets and websites I relied on are far too numerous to mention. Key information, however, came from the Sacramento Bee, ABC News 20/20, PBS Frontline, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Advocate, the Oklahoman, the Daily Ardmoreite, Slate, Gawker, unfinishedlivesblog.com, lgbthatecrimes.org, georgeweberthenewsguy.blogspot.com, adl.org, mansonfamilypicnic.com, sallywilliams.org (defunct), whitereference.blogspot.com, YouTube.com, Wikipedia.org, findadeath.com, newsok.com, and maps.google.com. I’m responsible for any factual errors in the book.