The Best American Crime Writing 2006 (43 page)

Two days later, Deputy Sorensen was laid to rest at Lancaster Baptist Church. "Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends," said Capt. Carl Deeley, as he eulogized the deputy before Sorensen's family, Gov. Gray Davis, and thousands of spit-shined deputies and cops from all over the country who filled the pews and spilled out onto the somber streets. The grief-stricken cops were uneasy.What if Kueck were hiding somewhere, looking through a rifle scope at the congregation as they laid their fallen deputy to rest? They prayed for their fellow officers who were still out searching for Kueck, wondering why nothing could flush him out, not the bloodhounds, not the two-bit snitches, not the cell-phone signals, not the thermal-imaging helicopters, not even bad luck. They knew that every outlaw in the desert was suddenly living with a proud defiance-one of their own had outsmarted the system. The world was watching, and if Kueck got away, the cops would be nothing.

Then, shortly after the bagpipes sounded and an honor guard placed the deputy's coffin into the hearse for his last ride, they got their break. On Friday, August 8, a signal from Kueck's cell phone was picked up coming from the dilapidated compound where Ron Steres lived. Maybe it was because Kueck's birthday was in two weeks and he couldn't face the idea of another year, or maybe he was just tired of hiding, tired of the whole thing. According to the

Annals of Emergency Medicine, at least ten percent of the shootings involving the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department are cases of "suicide by cop." If that was the goal, Kueck was about to get his wish.

It was the third time that week that Kueck had shown up to see Steres; a woman who lived in the house next door saw him appear on a bicycle like a desert mirage.This time, though, Steres was gone when Kueck arrived: fearing for his life, he had moved to a local motel. The SWAT team closed in, setting up a perimeter with snipers. It was time for the heavy artillery. A SWAT commander placed a call to L.A. police, requesting the BEAR: the Ballistic Engineered Armored Response, a tactical vehicle that weighs 28,000 pounds and can rapidly deploy up to fifteen cops against urban combatants armed with assault weapons.

Around noon, Detective Mark Lillienfeld called Kueck's daughter on a special cell phone that he gave her the day after Kueck killed Sorensen."Mrs.Welch, get off the phone," he told her."Your father is trying to call you." Detectives had been following every lead, and this one was the strongest-Kueck had been calling her while on the run, strung out and crying and apologizing for never being able to see her again, saying how much he loved her and recounting a bizarre although possible version of the murder in which he had shot the deputy with Sorensen's own gun, suggesting that there was hand-to-hand combat before he opened up on him. "He kept coming," Kueck said,"and I said,'Stop, man, stop.' " Now, in Kueck's last hours,Welch was walking an emotional tightrope, trying to help the sheriff's department and at the same time calm her father down as he threatened to go out like Scarface.

Meanwhile SWAT was closing in, as the radios went berserk with news that the fugitive was cornered. Deputies from three counties burned down the highway, racing toward the site where they joined other law-enforcement personnel and stood arm to arm at the outer perimeter, a human barrier through which no one could escape. With everybody positioned, an announcement was made-"Donald Kueck, this is the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department.We know you are in there. Come out with your hands up."There was no response, no movement. Was Kueck really in there? many of the frazzled deputies wondered. Or had he escaped the noose once again?

At l:20 p.m., Welch got another call. It was her father. He had been trying to contact police on Sorensen's radio. They spoke for a couple of minutes and then Detective Lillienfeld arrived."Dad, the sheriff 's right here," she said. "You talk to him." By now, every satellite van in Southern California was racing toward the scene.

A twenty-five-year veteran of the department, Lillienfeld is a self-effacing guy with a quiet and soothing voice-one that may have provided Kueck with a few moments of grace before he went up in flames. Kueck seemed most concerned about returning to prison. "Once I get in there," he told Lillienfeld, "those Asian doctors are worse than Mengele."

"We got all kinds of doctors in there," Lillienfeld told him. "Why don't we let you see some non-Asian doctors?"

For the next several hours, as Kueck tried to recharge his faltering cell-phone battery with the one in Sorensen's radio, there were dozens of calls made back and forth from Lillienfeld to the staging area at Mount Carmel to SWAT in the field. At one point Kueck told Lillienfeld to wait while he took a leak; at other times he rambled about dirt bikes, his back pain, suicide, taking cops down with him. At another point, in the middle of it all, he choked up and asked Lillienfeld not to tell his mother, in her late seventies and unaware of her son's situation.

At 3:30 p.m., Sheriff Lee Baca stepped out of an Air 5 chopper and was escorted to a bank of microphones to address the news media. He gave an assessment of the situation and the suspect, and ended the press conference with a terse summation: "We're down to what's known in this business as dead or alive."

As SWAT commanders positioned the BEAR and set up a tactical plan, Lillienfeld tried one last time to get Kueck to surrender.

"We'd like to kind of resolve this thing before it gets dark out," he said. Kueck replied that he did not want to get arrested or killed before sundown. "Nobody wants to kill you," Lillienfeld said.

At 5:26, the loudspeaker began blaring-"Donald Kueck, come out with your hands up." A half-hour later, the first round of tear gas was deployed, quickly followed by a second. As the gas billowed through the main compound, Kueck called Lillienfeld and claimed to be in the bushes, daring him to "send in the dogs."

SWAT launched another volley of tear gas and the BEAR moved in for the kill, obliterating sheds as it barreled toward the main compound. Kueck opened up with his automatic, spraying the giant assault vehicle with gunfire. Air 5 and 6 hovered over the sheds as fires broke out in one shed, then two, then a third, as Kueck-perhaps shot himself-darted in and out of the flames, blasting rounds. By 8:45, the entire compound was on fire, and the fire grew and as the moon appeared above the Mojave, it became a conflagration with giant freak-show flames that scorched the heavens, and some wondered if it was the Twilight of the Gods, and the news choppers came to the fire like mechanical moths, relaying the image to millions who watched the flames dance on television, the phony hearth that interrupted regular programming with coverage of the End. Around the perimeter of Kueck's last stand, hundreds of deputies and law-enforcement personnel watched the grisly bonfire burn and wondered if they had finally got him.A few miles away at Mount Carmel, the nuns watched the flames in the distance and prayed.

At midnight-more than three hours after the fire began raging-SWAT was ordered to search the area.Ten minutes later they found Donald Kueck on his back, nearly cremated, clutching his rifle. When they went to move the body, it crumbled. A few days later, his family scattered his ashes off one of his favorite buttes.

Months after it all went down, the crime-scene tape at Kueck's trailer still fluttered in the wind.There were some old jars of peanut butter and a pair of Nikes (size eleven)-just waiting for the next hermit with a useless dream. The land remained a scavenger's paradise of busted bicycles and generators, engines and furniture, lawn mowers and tables and chairs. There was a broken-down La-Z-Boy facing the buttes-Kueck's chair, according to his family, the one he sat in when he watched the sun rise over the Mojave. From here he could survey his strange desert kingdom. He had come out here to escape civilization, but he knew he could be evicted at any point. The desert was shrinking, and civilization didn't like people who violated its codes.

"Lynne," he said in one of his last letters to his sister,"I'm writing this down because I get choked up when trying to talk about personal issues… I know the next life is waiting for me. I don't want you to blame yourself if the inevitable comes to pass. This feeling has been growing for the last one to two years." Then, in a burst of optimism, he added, "Of course the future can be changed and it would be fun trying. Since I was twenty years old, I've had a dream of building a little place in the desert."

To the right of the La-Z-Boy sits a pallet stacked with eighty-pounds sacks of lime-construction material for the house that Kueck never built. One of these days, he was going to make a course correction. But as always happens with fuckups, he never got there-and never would. Instead, he had picked up a spade and dug his own grave at the edge of his property. It's the first thing you see on the way in and the last on the way out, a project he made sure to finish, now filled in by wind and erosion.

Deanne Stillman's latest book is Twentynine Palms: A True Story of Murder, Marines, and Mojave (William Morrow). It was named as a "Best Book 2001" by the Los Angeles Times Book Review, and Hunter Thompson called it "a strange and brilliant story by an important American writer." She is writing Horse Latitudes: Last Stand for the Wild Horse in the American West (Houghton Mifflin). Thanks to Mark Lamonica for help on this piece.

This story was originally much longer, taking me down another strange trail on my desert beat and into one big empty scream. But this time I had a map, an escort, and a pit bull. "Go down V Avenue," said the map. "Just before the pavement ends there is a small fenced in area with some gas lines in it. Take a right-hand turn.Then go 0.9 miles and take a left where a house used to be. Go 2.3 miles, take a right hand turn, then go 0.45 miles and turn left-you might notice some Christmas tinsel in the sage brush. In another 3.5 miles take a right at the intersection. At this point if you look into the mountains, you should be lined up with a road going towards them…"

It was as if I had dropped through some freeway sinkhole in Los Angeles and ended up in its sad and lonely heart-an hour from the Warner lot, just beyond the San Gabriel Mountains, where Donald Kueck had watched the stars, studied search-and-seizure law, and talked to animals. This was a berg called Llano, once home to a utopian community where Aldous Huxley lived. Like most utopian communities, Llano vanished.Today, packs of stray dogs are drawn to its crumbling stone ruins and hard-core desert eccentrics eke out a living in its shadows. Llano was part of Steve Sorensen's turf and he knew it well. In fact, in the year prior to his murder, he had driven past Donald Kueck's property at least twenty times, on his way to the squatter's to try to evict him. Considering their violent confrontation nine years earlier, I have often wondered what each man was thinking as they came into each other's orbit. Perhaps Sorensen thought he should finish the job. Or perhaps he was on a personal tactical alert, knowing he was within range of someone who had tried to get him fired. And what about Kueck, increasingly paranoid in his last months? He would have heard the big SUV rumbling across the desert dirt, might have even had the deputy in his rifle sight. Or perhaps it was nothing like that at all; perhaps Kueck was too baked to hear anything but the voices in his head and maybe, when Sorensen turned down Kueck's driveway on that August day, he had no idea that he was about to confront a guy he had subdued at gunpoint a long time ago.When he saw the Dart and ran the plates and the dispatcher identified the owner of the car, did he then recognize the name? If he did, he wasn't saying, and anyway, the dispatcher garbled "Kueck" (it's pronounced "cook"). But the stage was set: two men who loved the desert, one with a future, and one with memories only, were about to finish their dance. Maybe that's when it all came back-just before Kueck opened up with the assault rifle-"Oh Christ," Sorensen might have thought as his knees buckled,"it's that lawsuit nut!" Or maybe he said it out loud; his mic was keyed and the dispatcher heard the gunshots-although my sources tell me no words were broadcast.

Three years after it happened, there are some images I can't forget. One is a photo sent to me by Don's sister Lynne. It's a breakfast table for jackrabbits, outside Don's trailer. Long ago and a few miles away, jackrabbits were nearly clubbed to extinction, lest they raid settlers' crops. In this picture, each is eating out of its own dish. I've seen other photos of Don with animals, and although he's not in this one, I'm sure he's smiling. The other image is something a childhood friend of Sorensen's described to me. "I remember how happy he was the day he went off to the army," she said."He sat on the lawn and polished his boots."

Some say that LASD should have waited Kueck out instead of going in for the kill. As it turned out, the tear gas was blown away by the high winds and what started the fire was road flares, dropped into the hideout as a last-ditch effort to flush Kueck. But it was his script, his ending, and he went up in flames. In an investigation, the D.A. called the tactic unusual, but LASD was cleared. If you kill a sheriff and throw his brains in a bucket, you can't expect much more than that-and I'm sure Kueck didn't. Ironically, the squatter who triggered this sad chain of events survived. Last I heard, he was living on a dry lake bed near Barstow.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

"Blood Feud," by Mary Battiata (Washington Post Magazine,May 22, 2005). Copyright © 2005 by Mary Battiata. Reprinted by permission of the author.

"Hit Men in Blue?" by Howard Blum and John Connolly (Vanity Fair,August 2005). Copyright © 2005 by Vanity Fair. Reprinted by permission of the authors.

"The End of the Mob," by Jimmy Breslin, originally appeared in Playboy magazine, August 2005. Copyright © 2005 by Jimmy Breslin. Reprinted by permission of the David Black Literary Agency.