The Best American Crime Writing 2006 (41 page)

Patrick asked to see the photo, already creased into the back pocket of my jeans. As he smoothed out the picture, he gagged on his carnitas."Mr. He!" he screamed.

"No, High," I said. "High Doan."

"No. That's Mr. Fucking Hy!"

It turned out that Patrick and all his friends had worked with Doan as dishwashers and busboys in high school. Patrick worked with him not at one, but three different restaurants in a span of four years. He developed an affinity for the short-tempered Vietnamese man who claimed to be a brilliant mathematician. Patrick and his friends knew Doan simply as "Mr. Hy," and, to this day, he remains one of their favorite Akron characters.

Up until that conversation, I'd known Doan only as the formidable sex thief. I'd spent two weeks scouring police reports and interviewing detectives, trying to wrap my mind around a man who'd spent the past twenty-five years cracking the code for raping women without consequence. Now that man was suddenly "Mr. Hy," a goofy old dishwasher who gave my sixteen-year-old friends innocent lunchroom fodder. When I began sharing stories of Doan's sex crimes with Patrick's friends, everyone reacted with total shock. One friend, who'd seen Doan just months earlier at a local bar, actually appeared saddened.

"I can't believe I bought him a drink," he said.

from Rolling Stone magazine

Alone in his small trailer, Donald Charles Kueck had been hearing voices. Daddy, why did you leave us?…Mr. Kueck, put your hands where I can see 'em…okay, shit for brains, it's thirty days in the hole… Don, do you need some help? We're your sisters… Dad, everything's okay now-and it was this last voice that always got him because it was his son, lying in the gutter with a dirty needle jammed into his arm, and he would try to tell his son he was sorry, but the voices would not be quelled, swirling into some vast and formless thing in the desert around him, conjuring finally the one thing that would shut it down-Death herself, who threw him a spade, and he picked it up and began to dig his own grave.

North of L os Angeles-the studios, the beaches, Rodeo Drive -lies a sparsely populated region that comprises fully one half of Los Angeles County. Sprawling across 2,200 square miles, this shadow side of Los Angeles is called the Antelope Valley. It's in the high Mojave Desert, surrounded by mountain ranges, literally walled off from the city. It is a terrain of savage dignity, a vast amphitheater of startling wonders that put on a show as the megalopolis burrows through the San Gabriel Mountains in its northward march. Packs of coyotes range the sands, their eyes refracting the new four-way stoplight at dusk, green snakes with triangle heads slither past Trader Joe's, vast armies of ravens patrol the latest eruption of tract mansions you can buy for nothing down!

Many have taken the Mojave's dare, fleeing the quagmire of Los Angeles and starting over in desert towns like Lake Los Angeles, population 14,000. Nestled against giant rocky buttes studded with Joshua trees and chollas and sage, Lake Los Angeles is a frontier paradise where horses graze in front yards and the neighbors say howdy. For the most part, its many longtime residents-a mix of fighter pilots, ranchers, real-estate developers, winemakers, Hispanics who work the region's onion fields, and blue-collar crews who grease the engine of the Hollywood studio system "down below"-get along just fine. But Lake Los Angeles is also a siphon for fuckups, violent felons, meth chefs, and paroled gang-bangers who live in government-subsidized housing. For years, law-abiding locals felt they were under siege as the city and its problems climbed Highway 14 into the desert, an underpatrolled area where if you called a cop, it might take two hours for a black-and-white to arrive. In 2000, the beleaguered town finally got its own resident deputy-Stephen Sorensen, a ten-year veteran of the sheriff's department. "Resident deputy" meant that you lived where you worked, a gig that was undesirable to some because it involved solitary travel to remote locations on calls involving violent people. "Out there, you're a loner," says Sgt.Vince Burton of the area's Palmdale station. "Whatever happens you have to deal with it yourself."

But Sorensen liked the solitude of the desert and was thriving in Lake Los Angeles. He lived in a sprawling, Bonanza-style ranch surrounded by pine groves. He built a corral for his horse and animal runs for the stray dogs and other critters that he always brought home.With his wife and baby, the forty-six-year-old ex-surfer from Manhattan Beach became a desert Andy of Mayberry, buying groceries for poor people, doing yardwork for seniors, brokering deals between minor scofflaws and offended parties when others might have hauled the small-time crooks off to jail. Some residents thought Sorensen had literally been sent by God to carry the cross of goodness into a parched desert wilderness of evil."Looking back on the whole thing," one resident recalls, "I see why Steve was in such a rush to do so many things. He didn't have much time."

Nobody knows why Sorensen decided to drive onto Donald Kueck's property on Saturday,August 2, 2003. It was Sorensen's day off, but when a neighbor of Kueck's named Wayne Wirt called him that morning with a request, the deputy said no problem, as he always did if someone on his remote desert beat had a need.

Wirt wanted Sorensen to make sure that a squatter who was living between his property and Kueck's had vacated the premises that day, as required by an eviction notice. The guy had been leaving piles of trash everywhere, taking dumps all over the desert, turning the view from Wirt's forty-acre spread into one big toilet. The area-a far-flung outpost called Llano-wasn't really in Sorensen's jurisdiction, but he lived two miles away, and that meant it was in his back yard. So Sorensen checked the site, saw no sign of the squatter, and told the Wirts. Then he got back in his Ford Expedition and started for home. But something changed his mind-maybe the squatter was hiding nearby?-and he decided to visit Kueck.

The two men had faced off nine years earlier, when Sorensen pulled Kueck over for reckless driving on a desert road at high noon. Kueck accused him of being a phony cop, and Sorensen radioed for backup. Furious, Kueck spent months trying to get the deputy fired, writing letters to everyone from Internal Affairs to the FBI.

Now, as Sorensen headed onto Kueck's property, it was almost high noon again, 110 degrees in the shade. Sorensen passed a no trespassing sign and cautiously proceeded down the dirt road toward Kueck's tiny trailer, spotting abandoned cars and mountains of junk everywhere. In a few minutes, his brains would be in a bucket.

Kueck, like all desert creatures in the midday heat, was probably lying low. A hermit who had lived in the Mojave for nearly thirty years, he had a thing about snakes. He kept a Mojave green, one of the most lethal reptiles in North America, at his front door, the rippling embodiment of the great battle cry "Don't Tread on Me."

The Mojave-a desert nearly as large as Pennsylvania -has historically been a haven for people who hate the system, from Charles Manson to Timothy McVeigh, and Kueck was no exception. A psychotic ex-con who fed his anger and self-recrimination on a cocktail of meth and Darvon and Soma, he had moved out here to get away from society's relentless demands for smog checks and food-stamp registration and housing permits. But now that system was closing in on his front door, in the form of a deputy with a gun.

According to the disjointed account that Kueck gave later, he was in bed when Sorensen arrived. "What's up, buddy?" he asked. The deputy told him to step outside, but Kueck, perhaps half-tweaked after a weeklong speed binge, believed Sorensen was there to hurt him, maybe even evict him. Although Kueck wasn't trespassing-he was living on land bought for him by one of his sisters-he knew he was in violation of a myriad of codes, eking out an existence in a ramshackle trailer without the proper permits. Worst of all, he feared going back to jail-"a concentration camp," as he called it. Confronted by Sorensen, he felt like he was down to his last card. "I figured I better dig up the old rifle and shoot him," he admitted later.

What happened next, according to police, is that Kueck kicked open his front door, aimed his Daewoo at Sorensen, and blasted him with.223s.The high-velocity bullets screamed into the deputy's body below his vest, shattering and buckling him like a piece of glass as he spun around and managed to get off three shots before Kueck blasted into Sorensen's right side and arm, tearing the 9mm from his grasp as rivulets of blood quenched the Mojave's hot sand.

But Kueck wasn't finished.We know from witnesses who heard the shots that a second volley of bullets was fired, and we also know from the coroner's report that Kueck put a round directly into Sorensen's face. He kept firing into the deputy's torso, using the rifle like a stiletto to carve up Sorensen's insides.When it was over, Kueck had raked the deputy's body with fourteen shells.

Unbeknownst to Kueck, he was being watched. After hearing the shots from their home a mile away,Wayne Wirt's wife and kids had climbed a tower and now, through a scope, observed Kueck ransacking Sorensen's Ford.They immediately dialed 9ll. Kueck disappeared from their view; he was on his knees, hidden by the SUV, tying a rope around Sorensen's legs, crisscross, crisscross, trussing him like a bagged deer, right ankle over left. He dragged the body toward the back of his yellow Dodge Dart and tied it to the bumper. Then he picked up the deputy's brains and threw them in a bucket.

As sirens wailed across the Mojave, Donald Charles Kueck vanished. A few minutes later the phone rang at his daughter's house. "I'm sorry," he said in tears. "I won't be coming over on Monday." In a land infamous for its outlaws, Kueck was about to become the target of one of the largest manhunts the desert had ever known.

At the report of gunfire, a Code 3-"Deputy needs assistance"-went out. Within minutes, dozens of patrol cars from nearby towns and counties were screaming across Highway 138 toward Kueck's trailer. In Long Beach, a Sikorsky H-3 helicopter took off carrying five deputies, and a three-man SWAT team scrambled aboard a chopper in East Los Angeles and headed for the scene.

The first to arrive was Sgt. Larry Johnston, followed by Officer Victor Ruiz of the California Highway Patrol. Johnston spotted spent shell casings and human tissue all over the blood-soaked sand in front of the trailer. There was Sorensen's SUV, its passenger door flung open, his two-way radio gone. But the Dodge Dart was missing, and Sorensen himself was not in sight.Was he being held hostage? Was he bleeding to death in a nearby desert wash? Did the assailant have them in his sights just waiting to ambush two more cops? Other deputies arrived and helped Johnston set up the first perimeter. Ruiz got in his Crown Victoria, siren shrieking, and followed a set of deep and freshly made tire grooves leading away from the bloody site.

As the SWAT team landed in the brush, Ruiz saw the body. "I went to listen for his carotid, and there was nothing," he says. "It looked like he took a round to the eye because it was pushed in. Then I saw that his head was flat.When I looked inside, there was no brain." The SWAT guys teared up at the sight of a fellow deputy reduced to a pile of mangled flesh. A commander told them to suck it up and someone said a prayer, and then they put a blanket over Sorensen's body lest the news media, now swarming the skies like vultures, broadcast the scene on the evening news.

"This was the most bizarre murder of a sheriff I have ever seen," recalls Detective Joe Purcell, a thirty-year veteran of the department. A vicious cop-killer with an automatic weapon was on the loose, and the search rapidly expanded beyond the sheriff's department. In 1873, the bandito Tiburcio Vasquez eluded a mounted posse in this very region for a year; two centuries later, Kueck was contending with an arsenal developed for modern warfare. A few miles away, air traffic control at Edwards-one of the world's largest Air Force bases-picked up the news and passed it on to the pilots who fly over the desert every eight minutes on maneuvers. The FBI dispatched a super-high-tech signal-tracking plane to pinpoint

Kueck if he used his cell phone, picking up his signal as it bounced off local radio towers. By the end of the afternoon, as backup poured in from other desert towns, Lake Los Angeles had become the Gaza Strip-no one was getting in or out without showing ID; every parolee in every trailer park and tattoo joint in the Antelope Valley was hauled in and questioned. Officers from all over Southern California combed Kueck's property and the surrounding desert, looking under every rock, behind every Joshua tree, deep into animal lairs and wrecked muscle cars and down ancient gullies and washes. Less than two hours after Kueck shot Sorensen, the SWAT team found his yellow Dodge Dart two and a half miles from the deputy's body. A dog from a K-9 unit picked up a scent at the car and led deputies to an abandoned shed about fifty yards away, through a dilapidated doorway, still on the scent, right to Sorensen's notebook, hat, and empty gun belt.

But if the cops thought all their manpower and technology would flush out the killer, they didn't know who they were up against. Inside Kueck's trailer, a team of criminalists found a pack rat's library of books on electronics, telescopes, aeronautics, the geology of the nearby Los Angeles Aqueduct, and time travel. Kueck's family confirmed what the evidence suggested-he was a self-taught scientist who, as one of his sisters put it, could "hook up a tin can to a cactus and power a city," a desert savant who built model rockets and talked physics with engineers at secret military test sites in his back yard, a wilderness expert who could survive in the mine shafts and buttes of the Mojave for a long time with nothing but his gun if he had to. He knew the desert's secrets and now became one himself-burrowing under a rock like one of his beloved snakes, or vanishing into one of the countless tunnels rumored to honeycomb the desert, underground hide-outs used by survivalists and meth cooks and lunatics. At one point, he told his daughter while on the run, he coiled under a piece of cardboard in a desert wash, watching the boots of his hunters as they tramped past. Kueck had studied the desert's creatures like a shaman, fascinated with the idea of shape-shifting into a coyote or bobcat or raven and then fading into the scenery until the light changed or the pact he had sealed with whatever dark force had come to an end. Even if it was only in his mind, it gave him an advantage, a mental edge. Some people know how to blend into a crowd. Kueck knew how to vanish into empty space.