The Lone Star Love Triangle: True Crime

From New York Times Bestselling Author

Gregg Olsen & Kathryn Casey

PRAISE FOR GREGG OLSEN

Heart of Ice

“Gregg Olsen will scare you—and you'll love every moment of it.”
—Lee Child

A Wicked Snow

“Wickedly clever! A finely crafted, genuinely twisted tale of one mother's capacity for murder and one daughter's search for the truth.”
—Lisa Gardner

Victim Six

“A rapid-fire page-turner.”
—
The Seattle Times

PRAISE FOR KATHRYN CASEY

“Kathryn Casey has the roots, the guts, and the talent...She takes her place as one of the best.” ”
—Ann Rule,
New York Times
Bestselling Author

Singularity

“Riveting”
—
Publishers Weekly

“An impressive fiction debut”
—
Booklist

Gregg Olsen is the
New York Times
and
USA Today
bestselling author of eighteen books, true crime and fiction, including
A Wicked Snow, Fear Collector, A Twisted Faith, Starvation Heights, Abandoned Prayers
and
If Loving You Is Wrong.
His book
Envy
was the selection of Washington State’s Secretary of State to represent the state at the National Book Festival in 2012. His books have been published in ten countries.

An award-winning journalist and novelist, Kathryn Casey is the creator of the Sarah Armstrong mystery series and the author of seven highly acclaimed true crime books, all on sensational Texas cases. Ann Rule calls Casey “one of the best in the true crime genre.”

Casey’s first novel,
Singularity
, was one of
Booklist
’s best crime novel debuts of 2009, and
Library Journal
chose the third,
The Killing Storm
, as one of the best books of 2010. Casey’s protagonist is a Texas Ranger/profiler headquartered in Company A, Houston. Kathryn Casey has appeared on
Oprah, Oprah Winfrey's Oxygen Network, Court TV, Biography, Nancy Grace, E! Network, TruTV, Investigation Discovery
, and
A&E.

Rebecca Morris is the New York Times bestselling author (with Gregg Olsen) of
Bodies of Evidence,
and
If I Can’t Have You – Susan Powell, Her Mysterious Disappearance, and the Murder of Her Children,
coming in May, 2014. She is also the author of
Ted and Ann – The Mystery of a Missing Child and Her Neighbor Ted Bundy.

THE LONE STAR LOVE TRIANGLE

Gregg Olsen and Kathryn Casey

edited by
Rebecca Morris

Copyright 2014 by Gregg Olsen and Kathryn Casey

All Rights Reserved.

Edited by Rebecca Morris

Maps by Brad Arnesen

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the authors.

Published by Notorious USA

From the Notorious USA Team

Welcome to the latest installment in the New York Times bestselling series of stories about America’s most notorious criminals.

That’s right. No matter where you live, you’re in the middle of Notorious USA.

Here, you’ll find them all…

Women who poison their husbands. Drag queens who stab their girlfriends. Mothers who love their children to death. Teachers who seduce their underage students. Teenagers who do the unthinkable to get their way. We’re shocked by most crimes, sickened over others, and laugh at a very few. Most are committed in the name of love and greed, but the bottom line is they’re stupid people doing stupid things.

We’ve written about some of these cases before. As time passes we learn more about the criminal and about what makes them tick, about their crimes, and about their victims.

Here’s our expert take on several notorious criminals and, incidentally, how they’re spending their time these days.

Most are locked up, doing time, and paying their debt to society.

To do otherwise would be a crime.

Don’t miss
Bodies of Evidence
, Notorious USA’s first box set and
New York Times
bestselling collection about the criminals from our neck of the woods (the Pacific Northwest). Like all of our collection,
Bodies of Evidence
is available as an eBook on most formats, as well as in paperback and as an audio book.

Your crime scribes,

Gregg Olsen
Rebecca Morris

Table of Contents

Cliff Youens — Bloody Sequins: The Drag Queen Murder

Photo Archive I

Blues & Bad Blood — The Murder of Blues Singer John Vandiver

Photo Archive II

Hurley Fontenot — The Lone Star Love Triangle

Photo Archive III

Author’s note

Tanya Reid — The Panhandle Mother Who Loved Her Baby to Death

Photo Archive IV

Notorious
Texas

Cliff Youens — Bloody Sequins: The Drag Queen Murder
By Kathryn Casey

Please note: Some names have been changed in this piece. They include: Jamie Woods, Jimmy Samuels, Josh Taylor, Steven Grant, and Randy Rodriguez.

IT WAS EARLY IN THE SUMMER OF 1989, WHEN I checked my post office box and found a letter from Ellis II, a prison seventy miles north of Houston. “I will be more than happy to speak with you now. There are many aspects of the case that are not known that I am sure you will find interesting. Cliff Youens.”

For three years, Youens had steadfastly refused my requests for an interview regarding the strange events that led to his life sentence, but recently he had exhausted the state’s appeal system. In 1986, a jury had ruled that Youens savagely murdered Patrice Ann LeBlanc, a stunning twenty-year-old with whom he had been living. Her body was found floating near his family’s lake house with thirty-nine stab wounds. The case was baffling not only because Youens and LeBlanc were both bright and attractive, from upper-middle-class families, but also because their romantic relationship seemed barely credible. For more than a decade, Cliff Youens had been Texas’s most outrageous, most flamboyant female impersonator, known on the stages of gay bars across the Lone Star State as Brandi West.

A week later, I drove to Ellis II, where I was escorted to an interview room. I was there for only minutes when Youens arrived in pressed prison whites. He sat facing me behind a thick glass wall. Slender, five feet eleven, thirty-five years of age, with closely cropped dark hair and finely chiseled features, wearing delicate tortoiseshell glasses, he appeared slightly bleached, as if he had been out of the sun too long.

“I’m glad you came,” he told me.

In the years since his trial, Youens had become as popular in Ellis II as he once was on the stage. “The guards tell me I get more mail than anybody else in this joint, fan mail,” he said. “I’ve even had a couple of women who wrote saying they’d fallen for me.” His voice was breathy, somewhat throaty, laced with a soft drawl.

Throughout our time together, Youens was open and talkative, but each time I brought up the night Patrice LeBlanc disappeared, he became evasive. Finally, I asked, “Cliff, did you murder Patrice?”

He hesitated, and then whispered, “No. I didn’t kill her. She just left one morning. She said she needed a little space and some time to think about things. I wanted to marry her. I loved her.” Staring at me intently, he added, “There are a lot of people who will never believe it, but for some reason we fell in love. I don’t know why. We didn’t ask it to happen. It just happened.”

I spent four hours with Youens that day in 1989 and then talked with many people close to him and Patrice before returning to Ellis II a month later for another long interview. The story was stranger by far than I’d imagined.

JOHN CLIFFORD YOUENS WAS BORN IN Houston on May 22, 1954, the youngest of three children. His family lived in a large house with a pool in an affluent section of the city called Memorial, one of expansive lawns and pricey brick homes shaded by impressive live oaks. His father was a regional director for Whirlpool Corporation.

During our first interview, Cliff recounted how when he was nine his sister, Etta Lou, dressed him as a girl for Halloween. “I remember her laughing and saying, ‘Oh, what a cute little girl.’ I shouted back, ‘I’m not a girl! I’m a boy!’ I loved my sister. It was horrible when she died.” She was killed that same year, at the age of fifteen, in a car accident. “Mother was devastated,” Cliff said. “She never really recovered.”

When I asked what Etta Lou looked like, Cliff replied, “A lot like I do, in drag.”

As an adolescent, Cliff was spindly, gawky, with a large nose, an impish sense of humor and a fascination with Broadway. “I couldn’t wait to get to junior high, where they had a real drama department. Half the guys always seemed to be gay in the drama club. But I still liked girls,” he said, with a laugh. “But I liked boys, too. It never really went all the way until I started doing drag.”

Soon he began frequenting bars in Montrose, one of Houston’s oldest and most freewheeling districts. At the time, Montrose was a mix of gay bars, massage parlors, biker bars, and trendy restaurants, not unlike San Francisco’s Castro District. When Cliff announced his newfound sexuality to his parents “they were really taken aback.” Then he showed up at home with “a horrifying queen with red frizzy hair. Mom freaked. She yelled, ‘Get that freak out of my house.’ Later it was Mother who accepted things. Father never did.”

By his junior year, Cliff was helping out in the box office of the Fondren Street Theater and understudying in a production of
The Boys in the Band
. Unpacking costumes for a show one day, he pulled a few props together and strutted about in an impromptu impersonation of Carol Channing. Everyone laughed, so on a dare he dressed in full Channing regalia to attend opening night. “And from there it just snowballed. It was at a time when I was coming out as gay, and gay rights were emerging. A lot of the bars had drag shows, and it was quick money. I liked hiding behind a mask. As me, I was plain. In drag, I was glamorous.”

For his stage name, Cliff chose Brandi West – “catchy first name and simple last name” – and four months before he was scheduled to graduate from high school he took his parents’ credit cards and got on a plane to New York. “When I got there, I was one of the 15,000 people who wanted to act.” He worked as a go-go boy in a gay bar and after four months, “It got so bad I came back to Texas.”

In Houston, Cliff made the rounds of the city’s small theaters, and at night he played Montrose bars in drag, lip-synching Cher singing “Half-breed” on a horse and Barbra Streisand belting out “People.” What distinguished him from the other drag queens were his brash manner and his cutting sense of humor. In a world dominated by look-alikes who are too often limited to mimicry, Cliff was an original.

Summing up the way he saw his act, Cliff would say that Brandi was a comedian, “a combo of Joan Rivers and Don Rickles.” Many who knew Cliff would say there was something incredibly tough about the way he reacted to an audience. “It was almost as if he had a split personality. He could really be cruel, and somebody always went home hurt,” one performer recalls. Backstage was even worse. While Cliff would contend “practical jokes weren’t my thing,” others remembered him pulling tricks on the other drag queens, including inserting the sound of a flushing toilet in a torch song and loosening the seam in a dress just enough so that it split open onstage.