"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.
Deanne Stillman : The Great Mojave Manhunt
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.