4
DOMER, QUALLS, AND MADDEN, 2007
I. Nervous
Afterward people said Bradley Qualls was tweaking, a meth head in a rut. He was overwrought, at any rate, and maybe he was rubbing his shaved head the way an addict will, seven, eight times, using the same tensed-up spiral stroke each time. But people were wrong. He wasn’t on meth. Since joining Chaos Squad he’d gotten straight. Skinhead rules were strict about that. Watching him, Darrell Madden, a so-called “general” in Chaos Squad, couldn’t keep near-hallucinatory suspicion from building inside him: the younger, bigger Qualls looked like he was losing control. (Again! The day after the murder he’d taken Darrell’s gun and threatened to kill himself.) Really, they were both losing control. Three or four visits to the body and it still felt unreal. How the hell hadn’t the body been found yet? The missing man was all over TV. They were losing it, but Darrell was better at faking calm—better at faking anything. Even as a kid Brad was wild, mouthy, uncontrollable, authentic. Darrell was a compulsive actor. Now, years later, in prison, Darrell keeps repeating to me: everything was about control.
They were in Ardmore, Oklahoma, halfway between Oklahoma City and Dallas–Ft. Worth. Darrell’s girlfriend had dropped them off at the Huntington Falls Apartments, a little collection of ecru townhomes and too-empty parking lots off Sam Noble Parkway. Brad’s girlfriend rented here.
In a sham, ’80s way, the two-story townhomes looked tonier than they really were. Under the development’s name was a discreet blue equal-opportunity sign, but black and white underclasses mixed uneasily here. The inflexible racial divide that exists in prison seemed to echo out here. African American residents hated crossing paths with Bradley Qualls or, much worse, his new friend Darrell, a slight, pallid, smirking skinhead whose neck was ringed by thick black tattoos, including SS bolts and some phrase in deutsche Schrift. Their worst fears would’ve been confirmed had Darrell ever removed his shirt to show off the Nazi eagle and God’s Grace Is the White Race across his chest. Or the swastika on his shoulder. Jug-eared, green-eyed, he looked a lot younger than thirty-seven. He was a genuine skinhead, the bad kind, though the line of stubble on his scalp showed he’d been balding since before he shaved his head. Maybe vanity played a part along with the politics.
Bradley was twenty-six. He couldn’t quite pull off the Aryan skinhead look. His scalp’s stubble was dense and black. His soul patch was too long, a satanic tongue. Plus his skin was dark, less Nordic, more Native American– or Mexican-looking. His eyes drooped at their outer corners. He looked like any snickering pot-smoker, any sleepy Oklahoma loser. Before his stint at Dick Connor Correctional Center in Hominy in 2001, he’d grown up listening to rap music. The friends he had, the few kids who didn’t tease him mercilessly about being in special education, were all black. Now everything was different.
Just yesterday, Brad had had the words skin head tattooed on his face, exactly like Darrell. Brad’s momentous tattoo—wasn’t he trying to become Darrell in a way?—caused a staph infection. One was popping up on Darrell’s arm as well, and Darrell knew how bad they could get. Paranoid about that, he had his girlfriend take them both to the hospital. Brad’s mother Tina Melton came and picked Brad up. The infected spot on his face was still ruddy and swollen now. Maybe the antibiotics were making him hyper.
In truth, Brad was a lot more volatile than Darrell, something Darrell resented. He hated being outdone even in a fault. Darrell was the leader, the general. But Brad, a kid, a raw recruit, had a directionless masculine anger, hair-trigger and intimidating. Once, his sister Michelle recalls wryly, wearing only his underwear, he’d chased her worthless husband down the street brandishing a toilet plunger.
On this day Brad and Darrell were arguing. According to Darrell, Brad kept saying he’d never snitched before. That was why they’d sent him to Dick Connor just for stealing car stereos: he wouldn’t snitch. But trust wasn’t in Darrell’s nature. And right now, the last thing he wanted was to let things get out of hand again the way they had the night of the killing. Even fake calm was fine. A few days ago he’d told Brad it was okay to smoke some weed, not strictly allowed under skinhead rules. Maybe Brad had snuck something again today. Ever since going off Ritalin, Adderall, the works, at fourteen, Brad had used pot like medicine. His whole life he’d needed to be turned down a few notches.
A cop says Chaos Squad was a “gang of two.” Darrell hints at a whole shadowy world of members, rules, and ranks. (“A DISorganization,” he allows.) Certainly Brad, a bare few months ago, excitedly told his sister Michelle that he was going to meet “the leader.” And they were gang enough for the FBI to get involved later. Who exactly came to Darrell’s Chaos Squad tattoo parties—recruits, soldiers, bored Oklahoman riffraff? It depends on who’s talking, but you can picture it. Drawling, half-dressed, embittered kids straggle into the crash pad in Ardmore, the tattoo parlor in Edmond, or Darrell’s own trailer in Washington. The buzzing tattoo gun slowly draws SS bolts or Hitler’s birth date in navy ink flecked with blood. Letters and figures gleam darkly from inflamed halos on pale greenish skin.
Darrell had been sober, no drugs, for over two years. He’d taken only antidepressants since he got out of Jess Dunn Correctional Center after fifteen months, himself freshly tattooed Chaos Squad–style. He’d done stints at Crabtree and back in California, but now he really looked like an ex-con. Eyebrows (Brad’s model; when shaved, they read: skin head), ankle, arms, neck, chest, back. (Maybe he was hoping that labeling his body permanently and on the inside would establish once and for all who he was. After so many years of deception, it didn’t work. He was still continually falling through one self into another. Some days he couldn’t remember which name he was using until someone spoke to him. Billy, Lynn, Richie Rich. Never “Darrell.” Only his family called him that.) Yet he says Chaos rules, oxymoron or not, had been good. They’d kept him sober. You could deal, not use. It was a big change from three years ago: strung out in Mexico, weighing 130 pounds at most.
The word was getting out. People were learning what Darrell and Brad had done. When you overheard two jittery skinheads, half-cocky, half-spooked, talking about how they’d killed some guy, you didn’t go, “Oh, really? Tell me about it.” You said nothing at first. You asked nothing. But people did overhear. Eventually they started talking.
What Brad and Darrell had done was catching up with them. Despite their brutal jokes about a man so passive he wouldn’t fight for his own life, despite their wild plans to kill the people who overheard them talking or who knew too much, they must have felt a demonic weariness. Brad was spinning out of control. Darrell, too, was at the breaking point, though he was unaware of it. Perhaps he could only experience small, locket-sized measures of feeling like the ones an actor draws on when playing a character ostensibly unlike himself. Darrell’s many explosive yet eerily playful “acts” of violence and hatred had always seemed well performed in the sense that their author was drawing on something real but also small and remote within himself. However wild he was, a nonactor like Brad would have now felt he was a killer more intensely than Darrell ever could. A sense of shunned doom would have haunted him.
Though Chaos rules said you could never talk, Darrell himself boasted on the Chaos Squad MySpace page that he’d killed a woman once (he tells me now he’s murdered several times but confides that this claim wasn’t true; the group was simply trying to scare somebody). After the real killing he wrote on MySpace that “the juice in the needle” was likely to get him because of something that had happened. It was hard not to talk. The very day after the murder, Brad’s mother, Tina Melton, all innocence, had come over to Darrell’s trailer for Jack Daniel’s and beer, an impromptu sort of party, incredibly enough. The girlfriends were there too. During the night Brad told his mom what had happened. Later Brad fought with his girlfriend, stole Darrell’s gun, and threatened to kill himself.
Darrell blew up the next day: “You told your mom about what happened?” He says Brad shouted back, “I told you she was cool! I told you she was cool!” Trying to impose Chaos rules, Darrell ordered Brad to send Tina Melton an e-mail telling her to pay no attention to what she’d heard the night before. And Brad had done it. Darrell stood over him and watched as he typed the e-mail. Still, something wild, disobedient, and, of course, genuinely murderous about Brad was already starting to spook Darrell.
At some point that day—the day of the big argument—Brad called his sister Michelle. He pleaded with her, “Can I come over to Grandma’s? I want to see Mom . . . I just need to come over!” For whatever reason Michelle turned him down, and Brad got angry at her. Listening in, Darrell thought that was just as well. He wasn’t going to let Brad out of his sight in the state he was in. The two had stopped by to see Michelle a few days earlier and Darrell could tell she realized something was up. Brad wouldn’t look at her. He’d hung his head. He’d hugged her kids with valedictory, bearlike passion.
Now, at the Huntington Falls Apartments, the argument got worse. A witness later told a reporter, “Brad was kind of tweaking . . . you could tell he was on something. The other guy was saying, You need to calm down.” According to Darrell, Brad had started saying he thought he could lead Chaos Squad if he wanted.
Suspicion was becoming a kind of delirium in Darrell. For a while already he’d felt certain Brad was working up his courage to call the police. Anxiety about his own colossal deceptions was plaguing him. He claims Brad had been hinting about turning himself in for more than a week. Brad, he says, would come out with things like, “You saw the news, man. You think they don’t know it was us already? I’ll take the fall. I can do it. I never snitched.” Released from Dick Connor in 2006 after five years, he thought he knew what to expect. From prison now, Darrell mentions this condescendingly and adds, “You could tell this was the first time he killed somebody.” It doesn’t seem to have occurred to Darrell that Brad’s wanting to turn himself in, or wanting to kill himself, may have represented a kind of moral exhaustion or, even, remorse. When he first tells me the story, Darrell explains that the reason Brad wanted to kill himself was because he’d fought with his girlfriend. When I suggest that murdering someone the night before might have had something to do with it, Darrell thinks about that a moment and then agrees, but with a real sense of surprise as if the idea had never dawned on him.
The line about taking over Chaos Squad was new. “I’m not sure if I misunderstood what he was saying,” Darrell tells me now. They crossed the Huntington Falls Apartments parking lot. The breeze or a confused, novel sense of alarm caused a chill to ripple forward across Darrell’s scalp. It was November 7. Though there’d been a bit of a heat wave around Amarillo and up into the panhandle that month, today was cool, midsixties. They wore jackets. Darrell’s was hanging over the lump of the gun in his shoulder holster. They climbed the stairs to the apartment.
At five o’clock in early November the sun is low. A few long cirrus clouds look accidental, as if a painter has fallen off his ladder. A minor rush hour takes place on the main roads, but here the parking lot and streets are dead quiet. More like a Saturday than a Wednesday afternoon. Loosely strung wire on creosoted pine telephone poles cast scalloped shadows on L Street and Sam Noble Parkway.
From the second-story apartment landing the western sky is so immense the town below looks two-dimensional in comparison. Lampposts and flagpoles prick up hopelessly. Ardmore’s inevitable strip-mall-scape is suffused with the childish and intense boredom that is something of an American national characteristic, like quaintness in the Alps or grandeur in Paris.
As if completely blind to the world, forever emitting, never absorbing, Brad blustered on, according to Darrell. Even as they entered the apartment they were arguing. This is when Brad said the words Darrell particularly remembers, the ones he says made him snap: “I am Chaos Squad.”
Darrell was focused on himself, keenly aware that he was smaller physically, worried about returning to prison. Now, suddenly, like Proteus, the control issue came up in an ungraspable new form. They entered Brad’s girlfriend’s apartment. She was sitting on the couch. Her kid was playing in the next room.
It happened in a moment, like the chill crawling over his naked scalp. Darrell envisioned Brad yapping to his girlfriend, to his mom, to his sister, to the police, to whomever and whatever Chaos Squad really was, and the ice gave way: he fell into his deepest self. He lived with the chill from this personality but was hardly ever in it. Maybe it was something too deep to call a “self.”
A few thoughts played on the surface far above him: if Brad turned himself in he was going to make a deal, basically snitch. Brad—this mess of a guy he didn’t even know that well—had a plan. He was going to take his general down. Hadn’t he been laying it out over the past few days? Maybe he meant to make a deal and then try to take over Chaos Squad. Darrell shook his gun loose from the holster.
Brad turned. Like an angry, gape-mouthed bear, he looked oddly dainty as if he were going to hop or stamp his feet. Darrell shot him in the shoulder. Darrell’s mind drifted across one of those curious prairies of stopped time. As if there were no rush at all, he calculated: twenty-five years for that shot alone—the other murder comes out, could be life—what the hell? He shot Brad three more times in the chest.
The kid started making noise in the next room. The body dropped like a sandbag on its left side, its head resting against the couch next to the girlfriend. Darrell is certain the girl thought that this was some kind of fake gunplay—that they were trying to freak her out. It took a long moment for a look of dreadful stupidity to cross her face. Blood was everywhere.
People in the area, living with that faint echo of prison society, naturally recognized gunshots. A door opened. A screen door squealed. Darrell picked up his bag containing another clip and two hundred extra rounds and backed out the apartment door. He trotted downstairs but slowed to a fast walk. A black woman in a do-rag saw him with the gun. After steadying herself against the apartment complex’s playground fence, she clutched her head crying, “Oh my God! Oh my God!” Darrell jammed the gun in his shoulder holster. He flinched when he brushed the hot tip of the muzzle across his T-shirt. Once he got down the grassy embankment to Sam Noble Parkway, he headed west into the grid of Ardmore’s residential streets, still at a walk. He avoided the huge Valero oil refinery directly north.
He zigzagged but kept heading west and a little north. It must have felt strange walking through that small-town neighborhood, quarter-acre lots and not-very-old two- and three-bedroom houses. Kids were on the street. Here was a man waxing his car. Since Darrell was trying to get on the road—whether by carjack, home invasion, or robbery—he paused to bum a cigarette off the man. (He doesn’t smoke.) You can almost taste the man’s luck, not smoky, but a flavor as clean and startling as snow. It’s hard to believe thoughts as intense as this weren’t visible: “I changed my mind at the last minute. I was afraid he would resist and I would have to shoot him.” Darrell kept walking.
The sky had begun to darken. But Darrell was only on the north side of town, near the big intersection of North Commerce and Veteran’s Boulevard, where traffic lazed to a stop and yawned back into motion. A low gray Skateland building sprawled on one corner. They’d tried to dress it up with a sad, tidy row of trimmed bushes. Across from a huge vacant lot, aluminum streetlights were coming on with that staticky noise—like a monocular alien clearing its throat. A City of Ardmore police cruiser glided up beside Darrell. Spooked, he took off into the street. The cruiser stopped in the middle of the intersection, lights revolving.
The lines of cars came to a synchronized, rocking-horse stop. Frowning moon faces leaned into side windows. The frowns vanished when Darrell took out his gun. His free hand scrabbled at flush door handles. He couldn’t tell if he was shouting. The cars sped up like frightened cows. They started streaming between Darrell and the cruiser. Everyone was terrified. Out of pure desperation Darrell took a potshot at the trunk of one car. He pointed the gun at a guy in a pickup.
By now, the Ardmore cop, Josh McGee, an African American, was out of his own car. Darrell swung the gun toward him thinking that would keep him at bay. He remembers saying something like, “Go away! Leave me alone and no one will get hurt.” He felt a blow, like a fist, to his upper left arm, and for an instant imagined that the cop, who’d been more than halfway across the street, had somehow punched him, until he realized he’d been shot. He felt the downbeat of pain and dizziness. No longer under his own control, his body crumpled before he was able to run a step.
Meanwhile, Brad’s sister Michelle got a call on her cell phone from a friend at the Huntington Falls Apartments. She remembers hearing, “How come y’all aren’t down here? You know, Brad’s been shot, and I gotta tell you the ambulance was already here and they left without him.” What that meant didn’t register. Michelle hurried over. As soon as she arrived people pointed her out to the cops. “That’s Qualls’s sister.” The cops stopped her and kept demanding, “Where’s Madden? Where’s Darrell Madden?” Who? She had no idea who they wanted. She knew him by a different name and finally got out, “Richie? I don’t know.” When the police wouldn’t let her into the apartment, she put it together. She sank to her knees.
Michelle got on the phone to her mom. Tina Melton and her husband jumped in their car and sped over to the apartments. Along the way, they had to crawl through the intersection of North Commerce and Veteran’s Boulevard, partially blocked by police cruisers. Over the phone Michelle could hear her mother Tina screaming at her father, “Is that that son of a bitch?” Then: “Michelle, they got him in handcuffs and there’s blood all over the place.” Michelle heard her father’s voice rumble. She heard Tina shout again, “Stop the car! Let me out of this car! Is that the motherfucker? There’s blood all over the place!” Michelle’s father didn’t stop.
* * *
The bullet in Darrell’s arm eventually needed seven surgeries to repair, not exactly the easy, debonair wound of old movies. His radial nerve had been severed, so Darrell would lose the ability to raise his wrist or spread his fingers. He now jokes that the limp wrist is “poetic justice, right?” They moved him to a hospital in Oklahoma City where he was surely the least-loved patient.
Thursday he didn’t remember. Friday he wasn’t allowed to eat. Supposedly, you couldn’t have food for twenty-four hours before an operation, but Darrell doubted they were much concerned about him.
Two OKC cops were posted outside his door. With a jailbird’s punctiliousness about the rules, Darrell knew they weren’t allowed to come into the room. Of course, they did, he claims. The black cop smiled at the slip of an ailing skinhead inked all over with racist and Nazi crap. According to Darrell, the two officers switched the channel to Black Entertainment Television and exchanged shit-eating grins. They ragged on him. Darrell kicked at his leg restraints. He threw the remote and caught the white guy on the lip. This is Darrell’s version of events, naturally.
The cops happily grabbed at their belts for Tasers. One tased him on the rib cage, one on the neck. The Tasers work for five seconds. Then you have to press the button and shoot again. Darrell claims it happened at least three times. Fans of tendon and muscle popped out under his jaw. He pissed himself.
The next day, after he came out of the first surgery, they let him eat. They served spaghetti. When Darrell hollered for a fork, a cop came in and told him he couldn’t have any plastic. The cop didn’t say another word but appeared to find Darrell’s bitching the most entertaining thing in the world. He waited until Darrell realized there was no option but to eat the spaghetti with his fingers. Darrell didn’t eat that night, until a black nurse brought him some packages of saltines, a kindness he remembers to this day. For myself, I can’t help wondering what she was thinking when she looked at him. God’s Grace Is the White Race. If only her thoughts had been visible!
It wasn’t something that showed, but Darrell had given up on everything. No hope for the next minute, nor for the rest of his life. He had moods left, anger mostly, but that was all. Because the anger was, in a way, absolute, true, not an act; it felt almost good, powerful at any rate. He seized the plastic piss-pot half full of urine and threw it at the cop. This one, he claims, nearly emptied a can of pepper spray on him. Darrell was charged with assaulting a police officer.
Six days later FBI agents came to interview him. Because they, at least, behaved respectfully, Darrell says, he told them almost everything.
* * *
It’s hard to square the different images I have. Reading newspaper accounts of the murders, I note that reporters haven’t gone much beyond “skinhead” in their characterizations. Like a lazy casting director, I’ve first conjured up a certain Germanic/Slavic physical type, a particular sneering attitude. But the age is off. Thirty-seven is too old. It’s easy to understand the reporters’ heavy sarcasm in calling Darrell a “self-described general.” The title is absurd, more than a little pompous. I’ve found a series of pictures of Darrell, past prison ID photos, front, back, and sides. He ages a little across the series, the shaved hairline recedes, he puts on a few more pounds and many more tattoos, including the notorious teardrop on his cheek, but he doesn’t look scary enough. He wears a slight smirk. His close-set eyes are mild. This skinhead (and, to hear him tell it, multiple murderer already) has an air of irony, an uncertain smart-aleck affect that seems out of place in an inmate you expect to be an indifferent lump or a human jack-o’-lantern along the lines of the pathetically performative Charles Manson.
I’ve also watched extensive film of Darrell at around age twenty. He’s a different person altogether. Mop-haired, he appears preppy, a pretty-boy clothing-store associate in New York or LA. He’s extremely well spoken—no trace of a countrified or Oklahoma accent.
Even now, Darrell’s writing (we’ve exchanged letters for over two years) is what used to be called “girl writing,” plump printing crossed with the Palmer method, little round circles dotting the i’s. (Looking back, I see he made the first few letters appear more “butch.”) If, having grown up on TV and mystery stories, I know that anyone can be the murderer, I find it almost impossible to imagine this person throwing a punch, surviving in prison, flying into rages, or captivating and seducing more stereotypical skinheads. Apparently he did.
I’ve seen footage of him emerging from the courtroom (after weeping at his trial for the first murder). He looks like an embarrassed, if aged-out high school kid as he ignores a reporter shouting, “Is it true you lived with a man? Why did you do it if you’re gay yourself?” On the surface, or at that particular moment, the reporter is the unpleasant one, not the guy in shackles and an orange jumpsuit. So be it. It’s the duty of unreflective local TV news reporters to be the loudmouthed voice of their community. Anyway, morality and pleasantness aren’t identical, which brings me to the final and most challenging detail to be incorporated in the portrait. When I meet Darrell, I like him instantly. He has a subtle but potent charisma that works backward, making you feel like the brilliant or fascinating one. I lie on the bed of my cheap Oklahoma City motel room (smoking, please) and second-guess for hours my sense of comfort and companionability with the killer I’ve just met.
In a tone reminiscent of Elizabethan broadsheets like The Ordinary of Newgate, his account of the behaviour, confession, and dying words, of the malefactors, who were executed at Tyburn, etc. . . . the Daily Ardmoreite reported on Darrell’s first guilty plea:
Darrell Madden’s tough-guy Skinhead persona dissolved into tears and trembling Friday as he pleaded guilty to murdering Bradley Qualls Nov. 7 and his subsequent attempts to carjack a getaway vehicle in northwest Ardmore. Madden’s performance raised the question: was this a single dramatic display or a rehearsal for the additional charges he now faces in Oklahoma County for the torture-murder of an Edmond man? Several times during his court appearance Friday in front of Associate District Judge Lee Card, Madden collapsed on the defendant’s table in a flood of tears and wails.
Is this really an accurate account? I have as hard a time picturing these outbursts as I do picturing some of Darrell’s other exploits: killing six llamas in a rage, coolly impersonating a police officer. Maybe the reporter was right to suspect an act.
Darrell has told me he’s seen psychiatrists most of his life. “I have been on all kinds of mental health drugs for many reasons, but the only real mental problems I have had [were] depression and bulimia as an adult.” In another list of his diagnoses he mentions “psychotic tendencies” as if that had been part of a report of some kind. One of his letters to me explains:
As a child I had ADD, ADHD. But as far as hearing voices and them telling me what to do or anything, I have not. I have lied saying that I had in the past, to get the drugs and to get money from the state and the government . . . I am pretty close to normal, kind of ! As far as suicide . . . Mostly for attention.
Elsewhere he’s mentioned seven suicide attempts.
In truth, the first time he listed his mental problems for me, I reacted with impatience. None of it makes him “innocent,” and neither liking nor compassion is any argument that a killer is less of a killer.
During the day I drive a rented car all over south-central Oklahoma and a bit of north Texas looking at the disappointingly ordinary locations of the “story.” I take a lot of pictures, but I could be anywhere. The drama has beaded up and trickled away like desert rain. Nothing evocative stirs at the An-Son car wash either, back in Oklahoma City, where Brad and Darrell met the man Darrell now calls “Mr. Domer”—strangely, but how do you address someone you’ve murdered? Mr. Domer and Darrell are joined forever, and neither has anything to say about it now. “I’ve done such really awful, awful things,” Darrell says, in a tone too ambiguous to be satisfying. He means to be remorseful, but in the end, it’s just an observation.
The effort of imagination and second-guessing takes more of a toll than I expected. I allow myself one moment of leisure during my visit to Oklahoma City. I go to the Museum of Osteology, a tidy warehouse with a spectacular collection of skeletons. It may seem a strange choice to clear my head when dreaming about two horrible murders day and night, but the illusion of order in the museum is satisfying. Here, death is put to good use. Here, all the animals are white stick figures, mouse to marmot to giraffe. The pristine display cases are a 3-D flipbook of obvious homologies, an eternal unity across changes in form. But a sign in the primate case warning that the museum doesn’t mean to endorse evolution causes a feeling of betrayal. Oklahoma is a foreign country to me.
II. Wild
October 26, 2007 was the last Friday before Halloween, so people came out in all sorts of costumes, and the stretch of NW 39th Street in Oklahoma City, the walkable and hard-drinking “gay neighborhood,” was busy—considering this is a state where “gay” hardly exists, a state where all the porn is soft and go-go girls and boys are required by law to keep their thongs in place. The bars regularly hired security guards to keep an eye out for gay-bashers and religious protesters, though tonight security at Tramps and Angles had its hands full carding everyone to keep out the underage.
On the corner of North Barnes, across from the parking lot for Tramps, the notorious An-Son car wash was busy too, in its dim, surreptitious way. That was the hustlers’ hangout. The quiet hum of commerce and romance on the street kept being interrupted by musical blasts when club doors opened, by distant car alarms, by squalls of acrobatic laughter, and by the occasional ecstatic hoot—half-queen, half-cowboy. Despite the noise, and though you were in the middle of a decent-sized city, a pointed absence of sound was also easy to make out as the encompassing loneliness of the Osage Plains.
Darrell got Brad to wear a tight T-shirt and camo ripped just so to show a little thigh on both sides. He dressed the same way himself. Maybe not quite as showy, because . . . how would it look if it appeared like he knew what he was doing? (“I told Brad this was how we rolled queers in LA. He had no reason to doubt me. Little did he know.”) Like the next card in blackjack, everything Darrell kept hidden about himself must have felt this close to being revealed. He remembers thinking Brad, the Chaos Squad prospect, was so wired he’d scare people off. Even dressed up, Brad was too intimidating and too straight-seeming to pass.
They started at about nine o’clock. They walked the eighteen miles from Washington to the gay area in downtown Oklahoma City. It took them several footsore hours. Since the route takes almost an hour by car, I thought it possible they were dropped off and that Darrell was telling me he walked the route to protect someone else. When I mentioned that “someone unknown” may have driven them, Darrell answered, “We got one ride that entire trip. Only one . . . I kept forgetting where I was going. It all looked very different on foot and took a very, very long time.” For the purposes of this crime anyway, they were a gang of two. They spent the walk reviewing exactly how the evening would go, what they’d do, how they’d act. The plan itself had been settled the previous night before going to bed. Darrell describes their long conversation as a boastful amalgam of quasimilitary planning and gruesome fantasy.
Once they arrived at that corner of Barnes, they sat on a low, pale brick wall by the An-Son car wash. Darrell knew how to do this: act friendly yet as deliberate as a house cat gazing into a guest’s eyes. The shaved head didn’t feel like the great disguise it actually was. He was afraid of being recognized. Some people gave them a wide berth. Drivers slowed. Gazes snagged on them, slid down their bodies, and were nervously yanked loose.
Two older men passed slowly in a new Lexus. They circled the block a few times. Darrell watched them murmuring in the dashboard light. The driver shook his head at his bald friend. Later, the driver, a closeted man who had to be subpoenaed to testify (social pressure in Oklahoma makes the plains air feel as thick as a jungle’s), said that he’d gotten a bad vibe from the two skinheads. He didn’t like the tattoos. Consider how well known it is that the teardrop stands for a murder. 4 But the bald man, for whatever reason, was interested. Maybe a few drinks or Halloween giddiness made him more daring than usual, or maybe he was unconcerned because he wasn’t carrying enough cash to matter if he were robbed. Besides, Darrell is slight. I find him unintimidating myself. Also, Darrell had finally decided Brad should wait around a corner because he just didn’t look right, so the scarier of the skinheads was gone later. The two older men, Quentin and Steve, had eaten dinner together and drove back to Quentin’s place. Quentin says Steve stopped just long enough to run to the bathroom and was off. Now, driving his own new (preowned) Mercury, Steve made a beeline to the An-Son car wash and cruised past Darrell once more. He gave the familiar nod.
Steven Domer was a sixty-two-year-old bachelor who lived in Edmond with his divorced older brother. Bald as a cue ball, he wore a bushy walrus mustache and had the still-in-good-shape bearing of a Romanian Olympic coach. Blink your eyes and you could see a different person through the masculine image, a man with a gentle, brown-eyed enthusiasm, hungry for company, generous to a fault. He wore a white T-shirt and a small trickle of gold around his neck.
Steve Domer came from a background of violence. According to Mort, Steve’s brother, their father was quick to anger, brutal, and often scornful of his younger son. Steve never reconciled with him. Reputedly, the father had had a taste for boys, and after he died in an automobile accident in ’74, the family minister refused to conduct his funeral. A stranger preached a eulogy whose bland untruth nearly caused Steve to fall out of the pew. That was in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, the family’s original home. Mort recounts all this with the simple honesty he promised me at the beginning of our conversation.
Steve had left home by the time his father died. Bearded and long-haired, he and that year’s boyfriend (the boyfriends never lasted) headed for San Francisco. The car made it as far as Oklahoma City where it broke down. Steve chose to make his life here. He ran through much younger boyfriends like clockwork, probably only half-aware that his paying for beauty school, for one example, figured into it as much as love. He liked to play the helpful swain to elderly neighbors. He was a near-obsessive collector of stuff. Never-worn shoes and T-shirts piled up in his Edmond house along with ceramic objets d’art and ornaments from his years working at United Design, a “giftware/collectibles” manufacturer. He had his vanities. He liked to hint that he came from money and kept Mort in the background when necessary. He attended First Presbyterian, the church of local grandees like the Braums. He hated getting older and wasn’t above using a bit of cover-up on the dark circles under his eyes. Even if his boyfriends were lowlifes, even if he’d dabbled in dealing marijuana when he first moved to town, he had a nice house and had made it a long way from his father’s violent anger. (Though knowing how to survive violence could have made him a little bolder about taking risks later.)
Violence requires a certain education. Macho folklore advises you to get into at least one fistfight when young to avoid turning into a physical coward. Supposedly a ninth-century knight would plunge his little son’s hands into the gore of a slain enemy to inoculate the kid against the horror of violent death. Disproportionate numbers of butchers, inured to slaughter, become murderers, according to anecdote. But nowadays many, if not most, men are practically illiterate when it comes to violence. (It doesn’t seem to be required to get and wield real power in the modern world. Just the opposite, perhaps.) But like Steve Domer’s father, Darrell Madden and Brad Qualls had each made a lifelong study of the thrilling but degrading knowledge.
After Steve’s nod, the car stopped a bit farther down the street, its brake lights brightening inquiringly. Darrell sauntered after it and got in on the passenger side. Steve had used his very first Social Security check to pay for this car. After a long hiatus, he was spending again. Having run through his savings, his inheritance from Aunt Marilyn, and his older brother’s patience, he’d finally taken a job as a vehicle porter (and bought the “like new” Mercury) at Reynolds Ford a mere week before. He’d used his first paycheck to pay for dinner with Quentin that night.
For Darrell, once he was in the car, the tats were just a costume. He loved performance. People’s attention to his lies made him feel paradoxically safe, remote, invulnerable in a suit of invisible armor. Darrell told the bald guy that he and his big friend had just come from California. As he spun the story his hands rested casually on his thighs. He was a little nervous. The bald man eyed the ripped camo. Kindly enough, he noted that it was freezing out tonight and offered to show Darrell around town. Darrell reached forward and, for luck or out of superstition, surreptitiously touched the knife through the cloth on his calf. Both he and Brad had knives on their belts, in their pockets, and strapped to their legs commando-style.
I kept trying to imagine Darrell’s conversation with Steve Domer. Darrell told me about the California lie, about the cold, about Steve’s offer to show him around town, about the knives. I wanted to know exactly what had been said, but naturally, no one’s memory is as precise as I needed, so I made up a hypothetical exchange—hustler and john—just a few remarks, which I showed Darrell. Darrell told me the object had been to get Steve to pick up Brad as well, so I wrote his “character” asking Steve to pick up Brad because it was so cold out. After reading the exchange, the real Darrell underlined a bit of dialogue I’d given his character: “My friend is harmless, I promise.” From this an arrow in black ink led to the annotation, “I also told Mr. Domer that Brad had a huge cock and loved to fuck guys. I felt I really had to do some extra convincing. Brad was really out of place.”
Whatever was actually said, Steve decided to go for it. He pulled the car around to where Brad was stationed. As Darrell keeps saying, Brad would have looked too big and straight to be a hustler-drifter from California. But the door was open now. He jumped into the backseat with a little bag which he pressed down between his feet. He mumbled a greeting but didn’t even look at the bald guy. Nor did he answer when asked where he was from in California. Darrell answered for him, “He’s from LA, like me.” Or so I wrote in my dialogue. Darrell underlined that made-up quote too, and added, “I was so afraid that somehow my actions or mannerisms would give me away.”
At a stop sign on an ill-lit street, Darrell reached over and switched the engine off. He ratcheted the gearshift to park. He did it so quickly and easily the act felt more teasing than aggressive. (“I did this very calmly so he would not get too freaked out and have everything get out of control.”) Brad’s arm snaked around Steve’s neck from behind. Considering their positions, the one-handed pummeling that began at once may have felt inept to Steve. Brad’s grunting abuse (Darrell thinks he remembers the usual “You fucking faggot”) may have sounded oddly forced, like porn movie dialogue, because it was Brad’s first time in this role—the whole point of this “mission” was “patching Brad out” as a foot soldier for Chaos Squad (to use their own Boy Scout–like terminology). This was the night Brad had to “show heart.” 5 Darrell got out of the car and ran to the driver’s side exactly the way he used to run in the opposite direction in his old limo-driving days.
According to Darrell, Brad growled, “Scoot over now!” The words stick in my mind as authentic, just because I would never write the absurd mommy word “scoot” in a scene like this. Steve scrambled and was dragged to the passenger-side bucket seat. Slipping into the driver’s seat, Darrell kicked one of Steve’s lagging feet out of the way. The engine fired with an out-of-gear screech before the car faltered up to speed.
Brad’s little bag was packed with zip ties, a plastic tarp, rope, the gun, a folding shovel, changes of clothes in case they got too bloody, and two rolls of duct tape. Brad fished the metallic tape out of the bag and started binding Steve. First he pulled Steve’s wrists behind his back and taped them together. With 180-foot rolls of tape, there was enough to wrap Steve almost entirely.
Steve was blindfolded next. Brad ran the tape around the man’s head seven or eight times. Lengths of tape came off the roll with a furious squawking as the car lurched over potholes. When that was done, Steve’s head was all but mummified. A gap was left for his nostrils and a tiny slit for his mouth, Darrell recalls.
All this time Darrell was telling Steve to follow instructions and everything would be okay. He says he ordered the bald man to bring his ankles together and lift them up. Steve did the best he could. Brad crawled forward and taped them together and elbowed Steve sharply in the balls when he was done. “I told Brad to recline Mr. Domer’s seat and duct tape him to the seat [so] no one could see him from the outside.” Great loops of tape started screaming off the roll again.
From that point on Steve was beaten repeatedly.
I’m not at all sure Darrell and Brad would have sounded like killers. They would have sounded more like rowdy kids. Or like braggarts—stupid, overwrought, clumsy, imprudent. Maybe (as his killers crowed later) Steve was well-behaved in spite of everything. But any survival strategies were moot: Steve had no idea what he looked like, and it was especially dangerous how little he looked like a man now, armless and bundled in metallic tape.
I asked Darrell about Steve overhearing any exchanges between him and Brad. “We had metal music playing in the car,” he told me. “When we wanted to talk to each other I turned the music up even louder. The tape was over Mr. Domer’s entire face as well as his ears. I’m sure he couldn’t hear much anyway.”
Darrell already felt he was losing control of the situation. Brad had risen to an adrenaline-fueled pitch of excitement his general had never seen before. The younger guy was quick to disagree and argue. He whaled at their prisoner and kept an eye on Darrell in the rearview mirror like a lion guarding its kill.
Darrell told Brad to look for a cell phone and wallet. Brad fished them from Steve’s pockets and picked at the phone till he got the battery and SIM card out. He threw them, along with Steve’s credit cards, out the window where they made a leaflike clattering on the pavement, barely audible over the radio’s heavy metal. The fifty-one dollars in the wallet was such a disappointment that Brad beat Steve with extra energy to burn off the frustration.
Darrell knew the mission was getting away from him. He always counted on being the crazy one, willing to go further than anyone else. It was his special act. Without it he risked being too aware, perhaps. But Brad kept getting wilder and more self-assured. Darrell wasn’t going to be able to one-up him. The thought made him uncomfortable. If the younger guy’s predatory intensity wasn’t exactly scaring him, it was definitely making him feel self-conscious, uncertain, maybe a little bit feminized. (“I couldn’t say anything about him hitting [Mr. Domer] because of how it would have made me look.”)
They kept only Steve’s bank card. Darrell started interrogating Steve about his bank account and PIN number. How much money was in the account? It was a way of taking the reins from Brad. Darrell wasn’t really planning on using the information. (“I knew how risky it would be to expose myself to any cameras at an ATM and gave up [asking about the PIN] after I fractured my hand on his face.”) Did Steve live alone? In a whisper, the man claimed he lived with a straight older brother in Edmond, but Darrell didn’t believe him. He figured Domer understood they were looking for a quiet place and didn’t want them using his house. (“Our idea was we would get him somewhere we could torture him in private.”) Darrell had been driving more or less blindly. He’d reached the city’s far west side, the Yukon area.
“Dahmer! Fucking Dahmer!” Darrell says things got a lot worse as soon as Brad learned Steve’s last name. He says Brad roared taunts like, “Dahmer is the fucking asshole who kills kids! He’s your brother? This guy’s related to fucking Jeffrey Dahmer. That’s his faggot serial killer brother, man! You like eating boys?” With insane energy, Brad beat Steve for the similarity in names. Brad had meaty, big-boned fists that didn’t injure easily. With an air of being impressed even now, Darrell says Brad “really had quite an evil streak. One that I could not control or one-up.” Whether or not the following threat was actually made while they terrorized Steve, Darrell remembers it was part of the plan, something they’d chortled grimly about the previous night or on the long walk earlier: cut the faggot’s dick off and stick it in his mouth or in his asshole.
Despite the knives, the shovel, the gruesome planning, Darrell also claims that at this point they were in vague accord that they were only going to beat Steve up and dump him. (“At that time [Brad] was in agreement [not to kill him].” And again, “I told Brad that he only had to rob him and beat him up . . . I told him I would still patch him out.”) An hour or two had passed already. Darrell told Brad they needed to find a place in the woods somewhere and asked the other skinhead if he wanted to drive now. They switched places in Yukon.
Darrell didn’t make the change because he wanted to give Steve a break. He was trying to settle Brad down for his own sake. He notes that switching places may have saved the old guy from having a rib puncture his lung or from totally racked balls—for the time being.
Volatile as Brad was, Darrell felt the need to preserve his uncertain sense of authority. He says he told Steve that they’d have to mess him up, but that they wouldn’t necessarily kill him as long as he wasn’t thinking about talking to the cops. Brad blew up. It was supposed to be his night. Pettishly he changed his mind; he decided he wanted to kill Steve after all. (“We get to talking some more and [Brad] changes his mind and now he wants to kill him, because [Mr. Domer] briefly saw what we look like.” Another time, Darrell puts it, “He insisted that he kill him because he saw our faces and we would get about the same amount of time in jail if we were ever caught. He never let up about killing him.”) For his own part, Darrell claims he was still thinking, or letting himself think, that the savage talk was intended mostly to terrify Steve. (“At this time I really think he’s just saying all this to scare Mr. Domer, so I go along.”)
Brad got on I-35 heading south. He drove for half an hour or so through the exurban sprawl of Norman, Oklahoma. As he approached the town of Goldsby, the plains lapped at the sides of the highway. They’d left the city behind. The world became invisible beyond the dim, phosphorescent haze of headlights and streetlights. This was the way home, not a good idea. But they were tired and not thinking straight. Exit 101, right after the first Washington/Goldsby exit, was coming up. Did Brad mean to take the old guy to Darrell’s trailer? They got off the highway and passed the trailer several times. A third housemate was at home.
As Brad drove, Darrell searched the car. He pulled the backseat cushion forward and reached into the trunk, polymer-scented, well-carpeted. It was empty except for a few dry-cleaners’ coat hangers.
The two skinheads argued off and on. The boastful, huffy way Brad insisted on killing Steve made Darrell doubt him still. It sounded too much like a child’s exhausted petulance. Nevertheless, they stopped on a country road and switched places again. Darrell headed east on Ladd Road, still too close to Washington and the trailer, but they’d been driving for four hours. Drained, Darrell found it hard to argue, even to speak. Ladd Road made a big dip. Two large gas wells on the right-hand side nodded tediously the way they do all over Oklahoma. Then the road flattened out between fields. Somewhere along here, Steve was killed.
Darrell describes the sequence of events: “We ask him if he wants to suck our dongs before we kill him. He says yes that he did. I think he thought we were kidding too. We got near my house and Brad asks me how he should kill him and I tell him about the hangers in the backseat. I told him to untwist the hanger to make it a straight piece of metal wire and put it around his neck with his foot on his back, pull real hard, and twist it like a bread tie. I’m saying this real loud to scare Mr. Domer.”
Brad pulled the rear seat cushion forward and reached for one of the coat hangers. He shook it loose, ripped the paper and plastic off, and laboriously unwound it. From behind, Brad slipped the hanger wire around Steve’s neck and pulled it tight. Steve’s taped head nodded upward over Brad’s fists. The wire disappeared into laps of skin and a loop of Steve’s gold chain slipped from a gap in the tape. Darrell glanced from the road to the mummy beside him. The chain glimmered, sidling across the silver tape. After a moment or two, Brad kicked his foot up onto the car seat and planted it against the back of Steve’s neck. He pulled harder. He flapped one hand loosely in the air and regripped the wire.
It became clear to Darrell that Brad wasn’t just terrifying the old man. This was a killing. He says he felt badly about it in a far-off way, but that he immediately started worrying about dumping the body. He fancied himself an orderly criminal. Practicalities took over. A deeper, chaotic part of him understood they wouldn’t get away with this. That fate hung in the air from the beginning. (Darrell mentions an early “realization that I was going to get caught.” He adds, “To be completely honest with you, I had no feelings whatsoever after the fact. Only that I let this dumb-ass take control from me . . . I was surely going to get caught. It was only a matter of time. I did want to get caught eventually, but I had a lot of things I wanted to do before I did.”)
Up ahead, a flat concrete bridge ran over the gully on the left side of the road. Built for farm machinery, it led to a fence and a vast plowed field abutting Hat Ranch beyond. Without thinking Darrell turned, and the car bucked onto the bridge over streaks of red earth. The gully, with a dribble of a creek in it, ran in front of a hedgerow of scrub, twisted old cottonwood trees and Osage oranges, already dropping flaming rust leaves. The glimpse of color—red earth, rust leaves—vanished when Darrell killed the headlights. They tipped the body over the low railing of the bridge. Darrell explains: “I get out of the car and pick up Mr. Domer. I bump his head on the concrete wall. Brad winces. I throw him over and we hear a little splash as his feet hit the edge of the water.” The body landed on a patch of earth near the opening of the bridge culvert. To Darrell the mission felt messy.
They returned to I-35 and drove on. Southbound still, with Brad at the wheel. They got a second wind. Now Brad became giddy. He seemed to find himself too powerful just to sit there in the car. He continually shifted and bounced in his seat and howled and bragged that this wasn’t his first. He said he’d killed Jimmy Fite in Ardmore, though Darrell didn’t believe him. (Chasse Stevens would later go to prison for that murder.6)
Darrell tried to relax. He tried to relish the mission. But Brad’s domineering excitement irritated him. He kept hearing himself make out that he was an old hand at all of this. For some reason the control problem ruined it for him.
Brad took I-35 all the way down to Ardmore—an hour, two hours. They stopped at a gas station, spent some of Steve’s money on a can of gas and Copenhagen, and switched drivers again. They went to the house of another Chaos Squad friend. At three or four a.m. Darrell and Brad roused him. He was wearing dingy underwear, and, when he turned, inviting them in, a swastika glistened on his shoulder as if wet. He refused their proposal outright. He was terrified but tried to hide the fact with a pantomime of grogginess. Darrell’s idea was to take him to see the body. Then, the very next night, he and the guy would go out and kill another one.
The point was that Brad hadn’t been a good match. He was too straight, too big, oafish, unattractive, too overwhelming when he started going wild. Darrell needed to replay the whole episode. Something he couldn’t identify had been missing. Perhaps the missing element was desire, even love. And this guy, this Ardmore brother, was one he loved, a proper skinhead. (Darrell tells me now, “This guy was real cute. I did lots of tattoos on him. Every time I got hard. He always liked showing off his dick too. I really liked this guy.”)
Since it felt like their lives were now hurtling toward an end, Brad and Darrell wanted to start killing again soon. The Chaos Squad brother’s refusal was infuriating. The conversation was tense, inarticulate, unfriendly. Chaos Squad rules were being flouted, but no one had the alertness to figure out what needed to be done about it. The prim confusion when Darrell and Brad left—tattooed thugs acting like disappointed parents—made it clear a threat would be coming later. Brad talked about killing the Ardmore brother almost immediately.
This visit was strange. Darrell explains, “We wanted to make the other member a part of it. Kind of like a three-pact deal even though it was against the rules. The rules say if you are not part of the deal you don’t get details and you don’t need to know. Afterward, Brad wants to kill more, anyone. Especially the member who did not do as asked.”
The rest of that predawn passed in an exhausted back-and-forth. Darrell and Brad bickered. They needed to get rid of the car. But Brad was tired and stubborn. In Ardmore he’d stopped in briefly at another friend’s house and cadged a joint. Darrell says that after smoking the joint Brad became paranoid.
I’ve pressed Darrell many times about what happened next, a visit to a porn store. Frankly, I wanted to know whether the murder was arousing. Or did Brad, after a night of hypermasculinity and violence, simply want some form of feminine solace, even if it was pornographic and on glossy paper? Darrell says he doesn’t know. (“I’m not sure what was on Brad’s mind when we went to the porn store. All I know is that he really wanted to go. Of course, what was on my mind was what if we see me on a box cover or poster in the store? Yikes! Of course, I do look a little different, but in my mind . . .”) They got back on I-35 and continued south about forty minutes beyond Ardmore.
Oklahoma bans hard-core pornography, so they had to go to the porn store conveniently located just across the Texas state line, exactly the way a big casino, banned in Texas, is located on this side of the border. Once over the nondescript Red River bridge separating the two states, Brad and Darrell would have seen the big sign for DW’s Adult Video on the right even before they noticed the little one: Welcome to Texas, Proud Home of President George W. Bush. When Darrell got out of the car, the glue of duct tape plucked at his T-shirt.
The thing Darrell was worried about—surges of sleep-deprived and irrational alarm—was that they’d walk in and see a big poster for By Private Invitation of Billy Houston or pass the tiny male section in the far corner of the barnlike space and see the cover of Headbangers. He knew of a skinhead who’d done a jack-off video; it didn’t go well for him when his brothers found out. To the right as you entered DW’s was a wall of dildos and sex toys, then endless Walmart-like aisles of DVDs. They wandered. They looked. (“There was no peepshow. We didn’t buy any magazines.”) There was no point to it.
Darrell’s eyes hurt after a few minutes under glaring fluorescent light. Coming out of DW’s, the darkness was welcome. He rubbed his eyes with his good hand. The edges of his field of vision warped and glimmered as if someone were dangling Steve’s gold chain just out of sight.
Brad had patched out from “prospect” to “foot soldier.” But the mission wasn’t over yet. Originally Darrell meant to take the car back to Oklahoma City and ditch it there. They’d have to walk the eighteen miles to Washington again. Brad complained that his feet were hurting. He was too tired. Darrell suggested they swing by the trailer in Washington where he had two dirt bikes. They could load them in the trunk and ride home after dumping the car. But Brad was too tired even for that. Darrell didn’t have the energy to insist. He’d begun to nurse a sense of fatality. He knew how to get rid of evidence so it stays gone—he says he’s had plenty of experience—but it seemed to matter less this time. The end of everything was within sight.
During the early stages of the beating, Darrell had refractured an old boxer’s break in his hand. It was starting to swell, and holding the steering wheel hurt. He continued to let Brad drive. Despite the excuse of the injured hand, his own passivity felt unforgivable.
Lengths of tape still stuck to the passenger seat. (Darrell adds, “There was also some blood on the seat from Mr. Domer’s nose and face. I put one of the floor mats over it in order to sit down without getting blood on my BDUs [Battle Dress Uniforms].”) But the murder already seemed unreal. Maybe for that reason, Brad and Darrell drove back up to Ladd Road to look at the body as if they were showing it to their Ardmore brother, after all. (“Still there. What did we think, it was going to get up and walk away?”) The body was near the culvert. The feet just touched the water in the creek. A gigantic pupa in dully gleaming tape. A dapper bend at the waist was the most human thing about it.
Using the can of gasoline they’d bought with Steve Domer’s fifty-one dollars, they torched the car at SE 12th Avenue and Cottonwood Road, a bare five- or ten-minute walk from home. The burned car would be found right away. After the body was discovered more than a week after that, police started canvassing the area. When asked if anybody gay lived thereabouts, neighbors recalled that Darrell Madden had been living with another man in his trailer—and had even been arrested for domestic abuse one time. It must have been obvious where to look, though. In an area of tidy, expensive-looking horse farms, the single yellowish, run-down, white-trash trailer with its kennel of German shepherds sticks out like a sore thumb. By that time Brad was dead and Darrell was lashed to a hospital bed in Oklahoma City.
For now the two skinheads talked about murder, the next murder. Footsore, they walked from the burning car. The car alarm started screaming. They hurried. Brad had quieted now. Darrell held his swollen hand at chest level to keep it from throbbing. They decided they were going to have to kill that Ardmore Chaos brother who’d refused them. He knew too much; he hadn’t come through. For Darrell, self-immolating desire also cast its glow on this fantasy or plan. Of all of them, that perfect skinhead brother aroused him most. Climbing the grayed and warped board steps to the trailer, Darrell and Brad were already going over details of the planned murder.
Darrell later summarizes: “Brad argues about walking back, biking back, or anything else. Too tired. I guess I was too. I felt I had lost control. Gave in and set the car on fire without disconnecting the battery about one mile from home. Very loud alarm. Oops! Get home. Look out back bedroom at fire. It’s a wonder you could not hear the alarm or see the lights flashing pointed right at the trailer. [The other housemate] wakes up. Was sleeping in my bedroom. Brad says, ‘Let’s kill him too.’” Though he was tired beyond conceiving, Darrell had to take three Seroquel to fall asleep.
* * *
Seroquel is an antipsychotic used off-label for sleep and often abused (especially in California prisons) because it isn’t a controlled substance. Darrell got his first prescription for it in prison.
Darrell awoke in a fog. At some point during the day, the third housemate (he’d just been asked to move out despite the fact that he and Darrell were close—they knew each other’s secrets) overheard Darrell and Brad talking about a man who wouldn’t fight back. Though the housemate didn’t realize he was ever a target himself, he later went to the police.
When Darrell and Brad checked up on the Ardmore brother they planned to kill, they learned he’d left town hours after seeing them. He’d gone to take a job on an oil rig. They tried his cell phone. He spoke to them briefly but refused to say where he was.
The night after the murder, Darrell and Brad invited some people over to the trailer. This was when Brad told his mother, Tina Melton, that he’d killed someone, the confession Darrell made him take back by e-mail. Perhaps it was now, not earlier, when the housemate overheard them going on about the man who didn’t fight back. Even discounting the specter of recent murder, it wasn’t much of a party: TV on in the background (no reports about a missing Steve Domer yet, but soon), Jack Daniel’s, beer, Coke, chips, smokes. Darrell tells me, “During this party my girlfriend made ‘the eye’ at me, so I took her, and my gun, in my room and fucked her. I faked getting off once she came.” Brad got a little drunk. He fought with his own girlfriend. At one point—it must have been later—he took the gun out of the black bag and left the trailer. Darrell soon discovered him alone outside. When Brad threatened to kill himself, Darrell says he had to wrestle the gun from him. He remembers being surprised that his hulking comurderer couldn’t put up more of a fight. Darrell says he fired once at the ground at Brad’s feet and said, “I’ll help you [kill yourself].” As he did twenty nights later.
After the tussle, Darrell’s body throbbed, the insects chirred, Brad panted. Life seemed about to dissolve. In his heart Darrell blamed Brad for everything sloppy about the mission, for everything that had turned bad.
They visited the body at least four times over the next week. In daylight the skin of the bald head was visible, waxen blue-gray, unreal-looking, flecked with dirt. They wondered if it had been moved slightly by an animal. They kept going back.
III. Oklahoma
When I walked into the Oklahoma City motel’s ordinary glass vestibule I found a four-foot-tall model of the World Trade Center complete with Never Forget regalia. I happened to have been living a couple of blocks from the World Trade Center when it was destroyed. My experience that day was personal and local. But I’d long ago gotten used to ceding “my” disaster to the rest of the country as a political whatnot, so I just snorted to myself and checked in, and it took me several days before I realized the big model wasn’t the usual display of patriotic schmaltz. It was also personal and local. Oklahoma City and New York are dissimilar in every way except that both have been the victims of terror. A quick trip to the Murrah memorial in downtown Oklahoma City makes the close parallel between the cities’ experiences obvious. The sense of cousinship is more deeply felt here in Oklahoma. New Yorkers are too ready to be disliked and too wrapped up in themselves to notice a little friendly feeling way out here.
Though friendliness is a point of pride here, I sense underneath it a stubborn mistrust. Maybe it’s a distant Dust Bowl memory, but the state’s personality, despite the oil boom that ended around 1981, is still basically rural and poor, self-consciously backward, suspicious. The Daily Oklahoman is wearily mocked as the Daily Disappointment. Religion feels urgent here, a land of inarticulate big-sky angst, yet it can also become the tool of a small-town mean-spiritedness which is older than Christianity, older than religion itself. This is death penalty country. If Darrell Madden’s background hadn’t been outstandingly awful, the goal of prosecutors would have been execution.
When I visit Mort Domer, Steve’s brother, at the Edmond house he and Steve used to share, where he now lives with a woman he’s married since the trial, he announces how he warned family members that he planned to tell it to me like it was. He does. We sit at a kitchen counter drinking iced tea. Mort’s wife sits a little distance away in the adjoining living room, politely only half-participating in the conversation. Mort is tired, not from the cancer he recently beat back but from the effort to understand his brother and what happened to him. He asks for Darrell’s address, because he’s considering a ministry about forgiveness for his church.
From where we sit, the Domers can illustrate the story by pointing. Down the hall was Steve’s room packed high with ornaments, T-shirts, junk. Right here off the living room is the sunroom Steve built onto the modest house. Its high ceiling and tile floor and expensive windows illustrate Steve’s slightly grand tastes. Here under the sink is where they found bottles and bottles of wine. Not Steve’s—he wasn’t a big drinker—they must have belonged to one of the boyfriends. Mort says this with characteristic gravelly wryness. The boyfriends didn’t like Mort much. Mort saw what was going on with them.
There are many crosses on the walls now, and family photographs. Everyday talk of Jesus is close to the surface, restrained a bit out of politeness or uncertainty about me. None of us insists too much on the looming “gay” issue. Clearly it’s a religious conundrum for them. The notion is mentioned in passing—full of discomfort, but as something hard not to think—that Steve’s lifestyle and end were somehow, on some level, connected.
For lunch we go to an ex–Long John Silver’s tricked out as a Mexican restaurant with a ceramic Aztec calendar, a donkey planter, and the odd sombrero on the walls. We join hands and pray. Mort’s wife mentions how the murder flickers on in their lives in the most preposterous ways. Just yesterday they finally received a check from the state reimbursing them thirty-eight dollars for Steve’s toll pass, which burned in his car. She shakes her head at the strangeness of it.
Initially, they did talk of the death penalty for Steve Domer’s murder. Mort spoke to the Oklahoma County DA, David Prater, who told him a death penalty conviction would be tricky given Darrell’s background. In any case, Mort, an eye on his own mortality, wanted the case resolved. With Prater acting as go-between, Darrell agreed to plead guilty in return for life without parole.
Before the plea, Mort and Darrell sat alone together at a table in the courtroom and talked about what happened for thirty minutes. Mort first gave Darrell a Bible, then asked him, “If you were the leader of this thing, how could you let it happen the way it did?” And Darrell talked honestly about the murder, spoke a little of his past, admitted he was gay, and cried. Afterward, the judge himself came down from the bench to hug Mort.
Television reports claimed Mort asked for the meeting, yet Mort to this day believes it was Darrell’s idea. It was arranged by DA Prater, who impressed on Darrell that had his own brother been murdered he’d want to know what happened.
On reflection Mort himself doesn’t know whether Darrell’s tears came more from relief or remorse, but his forgiveness stands. At the time he felt the tears were real. He describes how Darrell had transformed before his eyes from the smirking and remote figure of the trial’s first days into the vulnerable, badly damaged man who sat across that table talking to him.
* * *
I have a hard time locating the exact place Darrell and Brad dumped Steve’s body. I drive back and forth past Darrell’s old yellow trailer (leaving a long note for the occupant, who never contacts me). I’m looking for a little bridge but there are a number of them around. Following the road in one direction I pass a tiny grass airstrip and soon get turned around among eroded dirt roads that peter out in a gas field near the Goldsby water tower. Somebody would have mentioned the water tower. I go the other way. Once I think I’ve found the place, but the bridge is too close to Hat Ranch. All the while I’m taking notes with my right hand, driving with my left: gravel—cow grate after airfield—sort of paved—horses everywhere—equine hospital—gully and tree row—cottonwood—red, red earth. The car is a mess of papers, maps, pens, soda cans, and empty potato chip bags.
Eventually, I find the bridge. Not what I expected, but it fits. The car bounces up onto the concrete bed of the span and I park. I take a lot of pictures; I’m insatiable for detail. The nagging question of whether I’m more Steve or more Darrell evaporates in a sunny sense of discovery and satisfaction. The murder has become everyday work for me. Like the famously “heartless” artist, I’m frankly pleased to recall how Darrell described the body’s head hitting this very railing and Brad’s, the killer’s, sympathetic wince for a corpse. It’s a strange and telling detail. Once more, self-conscious worry chills my skin and vanishes.
* * *
The wonder is how such a violent, charming, false character as Darrell’s is formed. Can it be beaten into any kid? What about Brad? At the same time, the early ’90s, that Darrell was getting into porn in LA, Bradley Qualls was still a boy in Ardmore. Virtually friendless, he was often beaten up. His sister Michelle had to fight on his behalf sometimes. Brad was irritating, overactive, and just couldn’t learn. He was tormented for this by other kids. Of course, he was diagnosed with ADHD and served up a slew of medications.
Michelle puts the most dramatic change in Brad’s personality at around fourteen. He resolved to fight back. It’s when he decided to go off medication, but it’s also the moment when adolescent hormones really do change the brain. Depression and mental illness often first show up around that age. Brad was big, he’d learned how to fight through being beaten, and now he started running wild. He started protecting his sister instead of the other way around. Michelle says he was always ripe to join, to be a part of something. After being released from prison that first time, he was proud of getting a driver’s license, a car, a girlfriend, proud of getting off drugs with the encouragement of Chaos Squad. Michelle still remembers how excited he was the day he told her he was finally going to get to meet the leader.
Darrell’s background was different. You want to believe there is and always was something wrong with him, something psychopathic. Things start to fall into place when you learn his uncle and father both suffered serious mental illness. His father, diagnosed a paranoid schizophrenic, was in and out of mental hospitals. And yet . . . the man wasn’t Darrell’s real father. Darrell doesn’t know who his real father was. The simple genetic theory has to be scratched.
As a kid Darrell was brutalized like Brad, but for a different reason. In Darrell’s case he was treated with contempt as a faggot. School got so insufferable for the pretty, vaguely effeminate boy that he habitually skipped out. A school bus driver who Darrell now believes had a bit of a crush on him connived in his absences, suggesting, “Here might be a good spot to slip off the bus, boy.” Darrell would run back home and hide in a chicken coop where he’d spend the day listening to the radio and reading magazines. He couldn’t let his mom find out. He doted on her, and between her work as a butcher at IGA and a husband too ill to work himself, she had a wearying life. She didn’t need more worries.
After his uncle was divorced, Darrell and his father used to stop by his house to check on him. The man took the breakup badly, and sure enough, one day they walked in and found him dead, blood everywhere. Darrell’s father made him and his sister clean up the mess, and Darrell still remembers vividly the thick, jellied quality of the half-set blood. He was about fourteen. A year and a half later, sneaking into his henhouse refuge, Darrell came upon his father hanging from a beam, blue. Though he says he doesn’t remember it, he cut his father down and saved his life. Only briefly. His father died soon afterward. A new stepfather brought the school violence and dislike home to Darrell.
By this time Darrell had learned that his appearance brought unlooked-for power with a certain type of man—for example, the “real estate agent” who showed him around an empty house and casually turned and dropped his pants.
Darrell probably went to the gay neighborhood in Oklahoma City a few times even at this age. Some people there remember him as a kid. But soon he left town for Houston with an African American drag queen and a few other friends. In Houston he saw his first skinhead and fell in love—not with the person but with the type, the idea. His friends warned him he couldn’t have anything to do with guys like that, because they’d just as soon kill him. Darrell took that as a challenge.
There are skinheads all over the country and the world. Neo-Nazi groups in Eastern Europe, Pinoy gangs in LA and Manila, the LA Death Squad (LADS). Often they’re surprisingly casual about the Aryan issue. There’s even one nonracist group, SHARP, Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice. It’s a young man’s game. It isn’t unusual to start at thirteen. The majority are seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds. Still in it at thirty-seven at the time of the murders, Darrell was an anomaly.
Like most gangs, skinhead culture thrives on naïve passions and loyalties. A streak of nerdiness is reflected in endless rules and ranks and taboos and secret emblems. The solidarity the group engenders is, basically, love. Thinking about this solidarity can make an intellectual, a grown-up, even a gay person or a Jew, feel, besides scorn or anger, a slight, inarticulate embarrassment, a superannuated yearning for the simple emotion of youth. This is the dangerous, illusory moral feeling that Fascism has always played to.
Unlike overtly political or religious organizations of the kind that fascinated Ben Williams—the Aryan Nations, Christian Identity, etc.—skinheads often don’t have much of a program. They’re kids, strays, squatters, runaways, members of the angry white underclass, disposable boys who band together out of fury and for protection. Their rebellious anger is often mistaken for real rebellion. More commonly, the shock of growing up, of glimpsing all the different and conflicting mores out there in the world, prompts a kind of nauseated conservatism. Whether they mean to or not, they become the crazed enforcers of the values of their fathers and mothers.
But for Darrell, more clearly than for most, the skinheads meant love. An alloy emotion “love-fear” describes it better, because for Darrell the love was steeped in deceit, mistrust, lies, the possibility of treachery. He was forever on the alert. He had to will himself to appear as steady as the dealer’s hand the moment before the fatal card is turned over.
The skinhead’s tribal racism and anti-Semitism and loathing for homosexuals was easy enough to pick up. Darrell’s parents had been prosaic, unimpassioned racists. Blacks were “niggers.” OKC was “Niggertown.” It wasn’t harmless, but it wasn’t intensely felt either—more backward-looking, unimaginative, and lazy. It was easy for Darrell to dial up the hatred so that the brotherly love would become, by contrast, even sweeter.
For example, a perfect sublimation of this love might have come at one of those Chaos Squad tattoo parties less than a year before the murders. Darrell was with the Ardmore Chaos brother who later refused to join him and Brad on their spree. Darrell talks about this person repeatedly with desire in his voice. “He was little, perfect body, always running around showing off his little dick.” Perhaps it was outside, a summer afternoon. A “skinbyrd” girlfriend watched, yawned, batted a bee away. The boys straddled a bench. Slouching as far as his spine permitted, the brother offered his pallid back to Darrell, who meticulously pricked a swastika into the skin over the guy’s shoulder blade with the whining ink gun. Darrell would have felt his brother’s wincing as he steadied his fingers and forearm on the infinitely soft skin. As he says, he’d always get hard.
Oklahoma seems tough on its children, like a badly educated parent. Time and again before interviews, I found myself holding hands around the table in prayer. Our bowed heads, our extravagant humility, felt propitiatory. Then the interviews would turn to the kind of seedy, raucous lives glimpsed on certain TV shows, where the country’s underclass likes to make a spectacle of itself as we watch and call it pop culture. Here, since the point wasn’t ratings or harsh amusement, the stories were suffused with sadness and incomprehension.
After I visited a women’s shelter in Ardmore, word got around that I was looking into Bradley Qualls’s background. Rumors swirled about the Fite case, the other murder Brad had been questioned about before he was killed. When I got back to New York I received a pleading call from Chasse Stevens’s mother. Her son had gone to prison swearing he didn’t kill Fite. Was there anything I could do? “Sir, you have to understand, this is a very corrupt place.” I couldn’t say the case was only a small detail, a footnote in my story, because it was her son’s life. She had such a misplaced notion of my power as a writer. The grimness of the Osage Plains seemed to blow through the phone.
* * *
During his time away in Southern California, Darrell may have acquired a little Los Angeles glamour with which to impress the locals when he returned to spend the seven years before Steve Domer’s murder back in Oklahoma. This part of his story reads almost like an outlaw saga, something I don’t like. He was in misery and spreading it. It’s difficult to convey the sometimes desperate energy of self-repression. “Gay” was such a monkey on his back that Darrell was in constant existential contortion. The contrast between California and Oklahoma may only have heightened things.
In 1999, Darrell was paroled from a California prison. He’d been in on a narcotics charge. The highlife in LA had spiraled to its inevitable end. In a common arrangement called an “interstate compact,” California handed him off to the Oklahoma Department of Corrections, which supervised his parole. He was monitored by an officer in the town of Purcell, Oklahoma. Darrell went to live with his mother in McClain County (a couple of years later she moved out and left the rickety yellow trailer to him). Through a brother-in-law he got a job operating heavy equipment at Huddleston Construction in Oklahoma City. The workaday world wasn’t easy for someone used to the life he’d lived. After about ten months, he got into a bad fight with his brother-in-law and quit Huddleston. He worked as a motel clerk for a year.
When money was tight he’d slip into Oklahoma City to spend a weekend night dancing naked at Tramps. He stood on a big black plywood box right by the entrance. (I tell him the box is still there, though they don’t have dancers anymore.) Even here, even dancing, even around people who knew him, he could still sometimes play “not gay” to himself. Buoyed by a cloud of contempt, he danced like he wasn’t feeling anything—like he was actually untouchable—even when some idiot was reaching into his underwear to wrap a dollar bill around his cock. Occasionally he trolled for clients at the An-Son car wash across the street. That was why he later feared recognition at the spot.
But he was getting long in the tooth for that kind of work and wanted to leave it behind. He got his real estate license and started selling for Coldwell Banker in northwest Oklahoma City. He did pretty well.
Then he met a boy. This was always much harder to accept than dancing or hustling. Darrell wanted to be straight more than anything. The masculinity that obsessed him was the adolescent kind defined as much by a studied repulsion for the boys you’re at ease with as it is by desire for the girls who make you uncomfortable. At the same time he was, almost reflexively, an expert seducer. He might have looked a touch dumb with his close-set eyes, but when he got talking, you realized how smart he was. He had a gentle, insinuating voice without a trace of a yokel Sooner accent. When he and the new kid started talking the language of dating and love, however, Darrell’s articulateness abandoned him. His head ached as if he had an allergy to awareness of this kind of thing—love between men. He’d go silent and brood. The wrongness of it was more than he could take. His own ingrained opinions seemed to echo from the minds of people on the streets or in stores. It wasn’t him thinking—it was the entire world. In his body he felt a constant, deep, maddening buzz of moral disgust and dishonor.
The boy he dated, from a broken home in Norman, was his usual: slim, hairless, a lot younger—nineteen when they met. He wasn’t particularly beautiful, which made Darrell feel more in control. In fact, the kid’s homeliness was arousing. Darrell held all the cards. But the boy swished and minced and bitched and whined and lisped! Darrell couldn’t order the sissified airs out of his lover. In public, he fumed. Everyone assumed they were gay, of course. It was grotesque. Darrell knew he wasn’t the most masculine-seeming guy in the world himself.
On top of the gayness, the kid had had way too much sexual experience. He admitted bottoming several times for a thirteen-year-old Norman neighbor. As a sometime hustler, Darrell had never come at a relationship from the patriarchal, possessive side. It felt a little ludicrous. He started getting jealous. Apparently he didn’t hold all the cards. His feelings became intense, obsessive.
Their set-to of desire and rancor passed for love. When the boy couldn’t stay off AOL chat, Darrell started worrying he was setting up dates, or as he says brutally now, “plotting to get more dick up his ass.” They fought, they broke up, they tried to get back together. The love, or whatever it was, turned into unrelieved pain. Revenge fantasies turned into tawdry revenge. The boy called the Real Estate Commission and told them Darrell had lied about his prison background when applying for his license. The license was revoked. Darrell told the cops about that thirteen-year-old neighbor, and his ex-lover was convicted of lewd molestation. Even now, from prison, Darrell crows, “I won!”
For Darrell, the experience proved yet again that “gay” was just morbid impermanence. It couldn’t be his life. He was already working part time for 5 Star Limousine of Oklahoma City. With no more real estate money coming in, he started working full time driving party limos and six-door Cadillac Fleetwood funeral cars. His easy friendliness with strangers served him well. But the breakup was surprisingly hard to get over. He started shooting up cocaine—cocaine because the meth in Oklahoma just wasn’t as good as he’d been used to in California. He’d binge for a few days, then stay off it for a while. Even so, things started going downhill the way they do with drugs.
During this time, Darrell may have been working with the police as a confidential informant in narcotics investigations. After the murders, an anonymous poster on a local website claimed that Darrell used to set up acquaintances for busts. The anonymous poster’s gossip is incredibly important—it might say volumes about Darrell’s double nature—but I haven’t verified it. If the confidential informant story is true, it could help explain the odd transformation Darrell went through next.
When “gay” didn’t work out, Darrell gave up on that and started impersonating a cop. He lied about his criminal background to the Oklahoma Council on Law Enforcement Education and Training (CLEET) and took a job as a security guard. (In the four months he was employed, he was promoted to “lieutenant.”) Given the new job, no one asked questions when he started outfitting himself with police paraphernalia. Cuffs, a vest, a holster. He got a T-shirt emblazoned with OCPD. He bought a used 1998 Crown Victoria, an ex–police cruiser, freshened the paint, added new strobes and a siren. He was set.
He started prowling the Will Rogers Courts area of Oklahoma City, a mostly poor African American part of town. He felt the racist imperative to prey on a tribe apart, and he may have thought rightly that poor African Americans were more likely to be cowed by or not question a corrupt cop. Like the gay crowds he’d danced for at Tramps, an audience he found contemptible would concentrate his performance. The scheme went amazingly well. He “confiscated” drugs, cash, and guns, and the men he pulled over—only African American men, he specifies—were all but grateful to get off scot-free.
I find these performances almost as hard to imagine as I do Darrell’s rages or his tearful outbursts. He must have performed with insane concentration to make the impersonation plausible. But you get the sense around this time that his life and “acts” are already getting out of hand.
Darrell was having a feud with a neighbor in Washington. The man ran one of the small llama farms which had become faddish during the past decade. One of Darrell’s German shepherds, wolfishly frisky at four months, kept escaping her pen and running the animals down. Threats had been exchanged. Darrell returned to the trailer one day and found his dog shot dead. Though sheep, and presumably llama, farmers have a widely recognized right to shoot dogs that harass their livestock, Darrell thought his neighbor killed his “puppy” because he was personally frightened. Darrell became enraged and called the police, the real police. No one called back. No one came to the trailer. No one seemed to know about the complaint when Darrell followed up days later.
The next time Darrell was out by Will Rogers Courts, he pulled over a young black man who turned out to be an off-duty cop. It was a quick exchange. Darrell jumped away from the driver’s-side window and ran for his car. He left the strobes on, and they throbbed red, white, and blue as he sped off. The off-duty cop clapped his own siren and LED to his dashboard and set off after the police cruiser. Because he had no radio to call for backup, Darrell got away.
But now the trailer in Washington didn’t feel safe. A day or two later, overcome by rage and stress, Darrell marched out and shot seven of his neighbor’s llamas. Six died. If he did have secret police contacts, they may have recognized his name when officers looked into the llama case. Darrell now says only that he was reached a month or two after the car chase and told to present himself at police headquarters along with his Crown Victoria and that he told them, “Go fuck yourself and try and come get me.” They got him. He was arraigned. Animal cruelty and impersonating a police officer. He posted bail.
Darrell decided to run. On eBay he sold the Crown Victoria to a man in Oregon. He had to wait a few weeks for the $4,100 money order to arrive. He never sent the title. Darrell looked up a hustler friend from the An-Son car wash, another hairless, slim youngster. He’d always had a thing for this kid. He held out the thrill of being on the run, his ten thousand or so dollars in cash, all told, and his very real passion, and the kid bit.
The two boys drove to Mexico in the Crown Victoria. The story rated a couple of mentions in the Oklahoman. “Purcell Police are searching for a Washington man wanted in connection with an Internet scam.” “A Washington man wanted on several warrants may have fled the country, investigators say.”
Darrell and the kid made it all the way to Acapulco and drifted into a private end-times of sex and dope. They lost weight. In Mexico Darrell dropped to a spooky 130 pounds or so. They lost their passports. From twilight to twilight the same Baudelairean day kept repeating itself. It was the kind of life that’s debilitating to live but eerily lovely to remember. And Darrell does now remember the episode as the sexually ecstatic center of his life. Passports gone, the boys made love and sniggered at how they were white wetbacks. The joke suited Darrell; he was born the reverse of everything.
The interlude didn’t last long. After a telephone tip from back home, Mexican police picked the lovers up and sent them to a hellish facility in Mexico City where they languished until a flight to Houston was arranged. The hustler-boyfriend was greeted by his agonized mother. The police greeted Darrell.
Even before his plea deal, Darrell realized that, once again, “gay” had to evaporate like a dream. He spent the next fifteen months in the Jess Dunn Correctional Center. Predictably, he gravitated to the skinheads. Attraction and identification were more or less the same thing. He had to prove himself, method act, insinuate himself among guys he believed hated him. Here, apparently, he found Chaos Squad.
Darrell’s specialty, perfected in California, was to play the Tasmanian devil, the little guy who makes up for what he lacks in stature with sheer craziness. He could never be the lumbering giant whose prison poker face and ropey muscles projected unassailable masculinity without effort. Instead, Darrell kept fellow prisoners awed and off-balance with his violence and ruthlessness. Words alone, joking about some insane cruelty, were often enough to startle much bigger, quieter men.
The constant irony was that daily life among the skinheads in prison was strikingly similar to scenes from the gay porn movies Darrell had appeared in not long before in California. He was aware of it even at the time, though he could twist himself into half-believing in his straightness. Sometimes a group of guys would all raucously pull out their dicks for comparison. The rough camaraderie sounds pretty gay but wasn’t. Darrell suppressed any desires with a healthy fear of death. Likewise, prison banter was both true and untrue. Buddies threatened, “Better not be looking at my dick.” Now Darrell admits, “Of course, I always did look.” You could beat off with your buddy, but if you were somehow “gay,” the same buddy might beat the life out of you. The difference amounted to the thickness of a playing card, facedown.
This experience hammered into Darrell something he’d always known: “gay” was a global form of betrayal. It’s why in California he could hustle and gay-bash in the same day, perhaps why he could set up busts as a confidential informant for the police, why he was able to kill Brad, his own pledge and partner, why he now must fear for his life as a Chaos Squad “traitor,” and why he says his greatest worry is how gays “will treat me when they find out I have killed some of my own people. Yes, I said some.”
IV. Los Angeles and Truth
I sent Darrell an old photograph of himself and he tells me he remembers the occasion well. Billy Houston, as he was known, had taken off his clothes. Behind him a few shaggy trees filtered golden light. He and the photographer and a guy holding a bendable circular diffuser were in Griffith Park in Los Angeles. It was a photo shoot for a small gay magazine called In Touch. But the pictures would eventually be used as stills for one of Billy’s first XXX performances for the director Richard Lawrence. (The original Richard Lawrence. Something of a humorist among porn directors, his name was later appropriated by a more prolific, unfunny director.) This was 1991. Darrell had just turned twenty-one.
As Billy, Darrell had just one tattoo: Jamie in italics on his left shoulder. (Darrell explains, “He was the love of my life for a while. He was a very young dancer I met at a coffee shop in West Hollywood . . . He was really OPENLY gay . . . He would try to hold hands and I would push him away forcibly.”) For the photograph Darrell wore underwear and a blue jean jacket. The cuffs of the jacket were rolled back two turns. He hooked his thumbs in the waistband of his Calvin Kleins and tugged down a few inches. At a distance two passersby—some gay hookup probably, Darrell says—slowed down to watch and grinned. Looking right through them, Billy smiled. Unlike many porn actors, he had a dazzling smile.
His light brown hair fell in a silky mop over his forehead and the tops of his ears. Hanging open, the jean jacket showed that otherwise he didn’t have a hair on him. His eyes, which appeared cutely crossed, were a little close-set for perfect beauty. They squinted and drooped when the dimpled smile crept across his face like syrup. He looked like a young Jan-Michael Vincent. He had the same endearing dopiness. But unlike the old Disney star, Billy’s appeal was highlighted by a touch of harmless wickedness.
* * *
Though they’re hard to find, I tracked down and watched some of Darrell’s pornographic movies and was baffled and disturbed. He’s very young-looking and has a distinct hint of “gay” in his voice. His acting is a little more developed than the average, his sex a lot less so. He stars in an early one, The Devil and Danny Webster, without doing much. He plays an unpopular, supposedly unattractive, glasses-wearing geek who makes a trial pact with the devil to become the most popular guy in West Hollywood. As the film opens, the character walks by the very shopping plaza Darrell later tells me was his favorite hustling spot. For the big “transformation” from geek to god, he takes off his glasses and drops the blanket he’s wrapped in, appearing naked. “I’m beautiful!” he says. And he is. He starts rubbing his shoulders and chest, full of joy in the new body. Several sex scenes later, including an indistinct, creepy one he watches in “hell,” Danny rejects the pact with the devil and is told by the cute neighbor that he’s great just the way he is. The neighbor says he loves natural bodies and can’t stand the vain West Hollywood jerks. Danny turns his studious wire rims to the camera for a close-up. The smile spills out, and he says, “Well, I’ll be damned!” According to Darrell, the moderately awkward boy starring in that film was already a murderer.
Billy Houston “plays” bottom only once, a single scene in Hip Hop Hunks, which he tells me was the only time he was ever paid to bottom (the datum is important to him). He adds that he only did it because he was so attracted to the guy, a self-absorbed, bouncy, vacuous-looking, knit-cap-wearing “Tony Young,” boyish but seemingly more Italian than Aryan. Darrell looks uncomfortable in the scene. When I ask whether it was particularly upsetting, given his feelings about “gay,” he says that he was only self-conscious about that part of his body (his asshole). Something in his offhanded tone, though . . . an airy pleasantness completely stripped of feeling.
Like most careers in porn, Billy Houston’s was short. He made six movies in two years and that was it. Despite the drugs, it was the high-water mark of his fortunes in California.
He’d arrived there from Houston around 1985, aged sixteen, as the guest of a Texas businessman at a West Hollywood hotel. Off hours he drifted down to Santa Monica Boulevard or to a hustler bar called Hunter’s. For one admirer he spun the story that he was staying with his rich dad and was excruciatingly bored at the hotel. He was well-spoken enough, his looks angelic enough, to pull this off. He was taken home, photographed naked, paid nicely, sixty dollars for minimal sex. He says he had only two bad habits at the time: Diet Coke and Marlboro Lights. (But he’d killed in Houston, supposedly.) Soon he was living in West Hollywood and fell out of touch with his new friend.
Next time the Los Angeles friend saw him, four or five years later, Darrell was parked in front of a 7-Eleven on a new Honda Gold Wing (thirteen thousand dollars) dressed in leather with a leather cap, necklaces, diamonds on every finger, looking as gay as the day is long. “Looks like you found yourself a sugar daddy.” Darrell just smiled. It was his first year in porn, 1990.
But in LA Darrell was also Richie Rich, a different person, not Lynn his hustler self, or Billy his porn self. Richie Rich hung out with skinheads who would have beaten or killed the other two. With the skinheads, he was always in a state of repressed ecstasy, thrilled by the crime, longing, brutality, and by the big falsehood itself. As usual, he distracted the others with shocking craziness. He out-hated the haters.
As he describes it now, each member of the skinhead gang had his lick. One taught them how to steal the empty video boxes from Blockbuster stores. A Chinese counterfeiter would buy them to dress up his own products. The boys (they really were boys, ranging from thirteen to twenty-one at most) stole mail and sold it to identity thieves or washed the ink off checks with methyl ethyl ketone and rewrote and cashed them using fake identities. Another lick was stealing concrete statues and huge urn planters. You had to lift the heavy planters, tree, soil, and all, straight up off the rebar that kept them in place. You dumped the prize in a stolen car, a puddle jumper good for one night, and took it to a very nice Mexican lady who’d buy every one and didn’t mind being woken at four a.m. as long as you always came to her first. A dangerous but favorite lick was robbing the crack dealers on Crenshaw Boulevard, not a skinhead-friendly part of town. Gang members would pretend to be buyers (though crack was considered a “black drug,” and they never touched it). When a dealer unwarily leaned in through the car window, his hand full of rocks, they’d knock it empty and peel out firing a shot over the man’s head in parting. Afterward they combed the car for every last piece of crack and traded it for heroin, speed, pot, or cash. It didn’t always work. Once they were crazy enough to try it with the gas gauge reading E and simply lucked out. Like the barbarous raiding parties in Tacitus’s Germania, they robbed partly for the thrill, the story, for bragging rights in front of the youngest recruits.
On Saturdays they headed over to LA’s largely Jewish Fairfax neighborhood. The swastikas they’d spray-painted on the synagogues the night before were disappointingly already cleaned up, but they’d walk four or five abreast on the sidewalk, tattoos on display, talking racist trash and forcing Sabbath-goers to walk around them. Often they got violent. It was—perverse as it sounds—a joyous time. Joyous from within the gang, obviously. They were spreading terror. From my insular, nonviolent America, I rebelled at believing Darrell’s stories for a long time.
Tentative as a mating black widow, Darrell now and then managed the seduction of a brother. After which, profound silence. Or he’d inveigle one to come with him to Santa Monica Boulevard to get a blow job for cash. After which, silence. Darrell himself had to be careful he wasn’t flush with cash in too obvious a pattern. But money vanished like steam. Sometimes he was reduced to squatting with the gang.
That old client of his saw him again after a long break. It was near the notorious Okie Dog, a hustler and lowlife hangout. Lovely as ever, Darrell was in a wheelchair now. He explained that he’d developed diabetes. The client remembers taking him home, lifting him—a pornographic deposition of Christ—from wheelchair to bed, and having unforgettably tender sex (for money) with the angelic, wicked, damaged, diabetic boy.
Years later, after Steve Domer’s and Bradley Qualls’s murders, the same client nerved himself to visit Darrell in prison and worriedly asked whether the inmate was getting his insulin. Darrell chuckled and explained that he’d lied. He’d only needed the wheelchair after ruining his legs with drugs. He’d been hunting obscure veins to use for shooting meth.
When I visited a few months later and asked him again, Darrell smiled and told me, no, he’d lied again. The wheelchair was a scam from start to finish. No diabetes, no drugs either. One day he just decided he didn’t want to walk anymore.
He liked the sympathy. He loved getting people to wheel him around. It lasted the better part of sixteen months. “Some of it,” he admits, “was I thought they wouldn’t be as likely to arrest a poor guy in a wheelchair for dealing drugs.” That theory didn’t pan out. He spent six months in the LA County jail, all the while pretending he was unable to walk. After the big-money years in porn and running a phony “agency” that had “Billy Houston” as its principal whore, Darrell was sliding into unglamorous drugs and crime, and soon he’d be tossed back to the plains of Oklahoma for good.
* * *
The truth, as you can see, becomes uncertain. There are old lies. Why did he need the wheelchair? There are self-confessed problems with memory, because he did take so many drugs. There may be a natural boastfulness now as he looks back from the monotony of prison, even a twisted pride in how awful he was. To hear him tell it, he was already a killer as a boy in LA and he killed again once he was there. I find it hard to believe. But I wouldn’t peg him for a killer now, either. I’ve had to examine the truth ceaselessly while speaking with Darrell and writing about him.
There was talk about making a movie of his life. An interested filmmaker visited Darrell in prison. When I interviewed the filmmaker later about their meeting he described a Darrell I don’t recognize. He says Darrell was incredibly scary, boasted about a fight with his cellmate (“I wiped the floor with him”), and claimed he’d committed his first murder as a kid in Houston. Asked to prove himself to the skinheads there, he was handed a gun and casually shot the next black guy to drive past.
The episodes of prison violence appear to be true. Darrell has told me about three bloody fights with three different cellmates. (About one he says, “I swear I wasn’t leading him on.”) After each fight, he’s left happily alone in the cell until the next cellie (they’re usually older, around fifty) is brought in and, to use Darrell’s word, “trained.” Darrell describes himself as autocratic and obsessive. He struggles to control his bulimia, a lifelong problem. A screwup with his laundry is completely unsettling to him. He rises at five and likes to keep to a rigid schedule of TV shows (Ellen, The Price Is Right, and, above all, Nascar), which keep anxiety at bay.
I have a slightly girly/tyrannical vision of Darrell, so the filmmaker’s description is confusing. Most alarming, the filmmaker says Darrell has lied to everyone about something crucial. After hearing my version of this story, the filmmaker says in a low, disturbed tone of voice that Darrell told him that he (Darrell) had killed Steve Domer, not Brad. That would change everything. I immediately have a suspicion, though. The filmmaker is straight.
The first chance I get, I ask Darrell whether he got his back up when he met the filmmaker because the man was straight. Did he try impress him even to the point of appearing scary or unbalanced? Darrell says, “You are probably right about me being a little defensive where [he] is concerned. I can be ME with you.” This is important. His behavior during that visit must have been convincing. Someone familiar with actors and performances bought it (considering he really is a killer, there’s probably madness in Darrell’s method). Here was a hint of Charles Manson, after all. More to the point, it was the blurry reflection of the “crazy, raging” Darrell that I have such a hard time visualizing. Darrell doesn’t try to scare me. With a consistent love of regalia he asks me to send him the rainbow flag and pink triangle of his new “gang.”
I do sometimes get the feeling that Darrell’s holding back or even lying. He told me he didn’t remember discovering his father’s body in the chicken coop. “I know they say that, but I don’t remember it,” he once said to me with a strange, light finality. His tone made me think the story was either true and he didn’t want to talk about it or an old lie still floating around, and he believed I might catch him in it. It would seem a difficult thing to forget.
Despite Darrell’s steady and convincing frankness, doubts come up. Lies or reticences blur into the possibility that he simply doesn’t remember things or understand himself. He can’t possibly be as chipper about life without parole as he appears. In prison, Darrell sounds personable and upbeat, like a limo driver or a hustler trying to make a cheery first impression. He smiles readily. He flicks very long dark hair from his cheek with his good hand. He shows me the floppy left hand: “Poetic justice.” When he pins the telephone handset between his ear and shoulder, his head is fixed at an endearing angle. He clearly wants to be liked and boasts, “They love me in here!” He stands and lifts his shirt to show the old tattoos he’d like to cover up. Since he isn’t allowed the privilege of “contact visits” (his security level and the fights), you can only see him through a very blurry CCTV. The camera is slightly askew. The tattoos don’t show up well. Making light of the prison indignity of protective custody (his life really is in danger from skinheads, and he’s been afraid to go into the yard for a long time), he says happily, “In California it was considered bad, but everyone seems to do it here. It’s like the thing to do.”
With the usual hitches—my shirt snaps set off the metal detector—I’m let into the large visiting room through an entryway they keep at an elevated air pressure so the doors will always slam closed. The locks at either end open with a wheezy thud. Prisoners who are allowed contact visits are released into this room. Their families or girlfriends are already milling around or fussing with babies or reserving the too few chairs with a deft high school lunchroom sense of purpose. They stock up on junk food for the visit from the wall of snack machines. Everything but a roll of quarters has to be left in visitors’ lockers outside. (This is a for-profit prison!) At the center of all the commotion a few corrections officers lounge at a desk.
The CCTVs, about six or eight of them, not all working, hang along the back wall opposite the snack machines. Voices are hard to make out through the balky phone system. The hubbub behind my back is distracting. Darrell now and then twiddles his fingers to wave over my shoulder at a wide-eyed three-year-old black girl in beaded braids. I smile, but if it’s for my benefit it’s wasted effort. I know that friendliness, even intimacy, is not the opposite of racism. In the lives of certain people, racism is like the morning fog, here and gone, always possible under the right conditions. Even if they wish it weren’t so, it’s become a phenomenon of their natures.
Almost too readily he says, “I’ve done such really awful, awful things.” He seems more or less earnest. But he won’t talk about the other possible murders (except to claim they happened both in Houston and California), because the CCTV records everything. “I really don’t want the death penalty . . . Oh there now! I shouldn’t be thinking of me. I should be thinking about those other people.”
When I press him about how events escalated the night of Steve Domer’s murder, he’s quick to agree to my understanding of things. “Right, Brad and me were like always trying to outdo each other. It was a constant competition.”
“But you came out on top in the end.”
He bows his head at my irony, and the long hair screens the faintest of smiles, and he gently scolds me, “Oh, that’s terrible. You’re terrible.”