The Best American Crime Writing 2006

Deanne Stillman : The Great Mojave Manhunt

from Rolling Stone magazine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Within hours, the search began to unravel.At 6:14 that evening, the dogs lost Kueck's scent. A half-hour later, the SWAT team received some disturbing information-Kueck's car was dumped a few hundred yards from Sorensen's home.They raced to the house and kicked down the door and did a room-to-room search, but no one was there. A few minutes later, they got a tip that Kueck was hiding out next to his property, on the site of the recently evicted squatter. The SWAT team tore back across the desert in off-road vehicles.When they turned the squatter's trailer upside down, they found an elaborate tunnel system, a demented leprechaun's world of canned food, a piss-stained mattress, Hustler centerfolds taped to the crumbling walls, and a cockatoo at the end of a hallway.

In 1965, after a series of cop killings in Los Angeles, the LAPD developed SWAT, the paramilitary unit quickly adopted by law enforcement everywhere. But now SWAT needed help. It was dark, and as the coroner's office finished examining Sorensen's body and hauled it away in a van, there was still no sign of Kueck. It was time for the FLIRs-forward-looking infrared thermal imaging-used by the military to target the enemy in Operation Desert Storm. Sorensen's commander, Capt. Carl Deeley, called in the U.S. Air Force. A nearby base immediately dispatched a thermal-imaging plane, which flew over the Mojave at 30,000 feet, scanning every inch of the desert floor, looking for the telltale blip of heat that would indicate a human form. A special SWAT team backed up the FLIRs, ripping across the sands on ATVs, joined by deputies on foot and horseback, and by K-9 units from three jurisdictions.

But by midnight, as the refrigeration unit in the county morgue slammed shut on Deputy Sorensen, the FLIRs had picked up nothing but coyotes and kit foxes and all manner of desert predators on the move. The cops were right back where they started-at Kueck's abandoned car in the middle of the desert. "People are creatures of habit," says Detective Paul Delhauer, a profiler with the sheriff's department. "Their personality is their fingerprint."The cops knew there was only one place Kueck would hide-right in his own back yard, the Mojave.

With every hour a criminal is on the loose, the chances of finding him diminish exponentially. By the next morning, a thousand cops and deputies had joined the manhunt. Some traversed the desert in quadrants, walking every cubic centimeter of its lonely stretches. L.A. County was sparing no expense on the search, which had morphed into exactly the kind of hydra-headed, Orwellian monster that Kueck feared-an overwhelming display of manpower, vehicles, food, searchlights, trailers, aircraft, mounted civilians, dogs, Andy Gumps, weapons, ammo, fuel, surveillance equipment, and tracking gear. At the Mount Carmel Retreat Center in Lake Los Angeles, detectives Phil Guzman and Joe Purcell approached the nuns just as morning Mass ended and asked if they could use the retreat as a staging area. The sisters readily agreed-and so followed a surreal marriage of war and peace as the SWAT team moved in with the nuns, praying with them at dawn and sharing their meals before fanning out across the desert to search for a killer.

Guzman and Purcell hoped to catch a break-maybe some desert rat would live up to the name and drop a dime on Kueck; maybe as Kueck got more desperate he'd surface somewhere. But Kueck had another edge. In his possession were his cell phone, rifle, Sorensen's gun-and the deputy's two-way radio.While on the run, he was flipping through the frequencies and paying close attention to all the police chatter.When a call went out for backup at East 200 and Palmdale Boulevard, he knew to head in the opposite direction. On another channel, he learned that Black Butte Basin Road was hot, so he backtracked.

As the heat-seeking tentacles of law enforcement continued to probe every fissure in the Antelope Valley, cops squeezed Kueck the old-fashioned way. An old mug shot had been broadcast and plastered everywhere. Kueck looked like Mephistopheles. It shocked people who knew him in the old days, when he used to look like an Eddie Bauer model, but it proved all too familiar to certain locals, who called in to report sightings of the guy with the demented gaze, the defiant Mojave ponytail and Fu Manchu, the collapsed speed-freak face-someone had seen a man running down the Southern Pacific tracks in Llano; there was a strange guy in the aqueduct at 170 Street and Highway 138; someone just stole someone else's rifle. In a furious attempt to bag the killer, cops in black-and-whites and SUVs raced all over the Mojave, only to find the sad truth of the American desert-another ex-con with no place to go, lying facedown in the sand, blasted on Yukon Jack.

At the Saddleback Market in Palmdale, everyone had a theory. "Maybe he flew out of here in one of those ultralight planes," said one local chick, sucking hard on a Marlboro. "I hear he's in Mexico," said a guy in a T-shirt that read show me your tits. Someone else ascribed the murder to secret Army experiments up in the buttes, while another theorized that Kueck had floated down the aqueduct to Los Angeles.

Actually, Kueck hadn't gone anywhere. He was hiding in plain sight, down the road a piece, about a mile from where he dumped his car. After avoiding the FLIRs that first night, he made a move. He knew that to escape detection, he could travel only at twilight or dawn, when his body temperature was the same as the ambient heat on the ground. As the sun rose and warmed the sand, he went to visit his buddy Ron Steres.

Kueck had been on the run for twenty-four hours, and his first priority was that of any desert creature: water. But Steres, an excon with an extensive arrest record, was known to have possessed controlled substances, and Kueck, jacked from the murder and the target of a massive manhunt, may have been looking for a fix. In the months before he shot Sorensen, Kueck had invested his meager income-a combination of disability checks, cash from selling junk at flea markets, and gifts from his sisters-in gems from the Home Shopping Network. When he showed up at the remote compound of collapsing sheds and trashed cars where Steres lived, the jewels had become his only currency, something he could trade for drugs and supplies.

Kueck didn't stay long before fading back into the desert-he knew he had to keep moving. Although he shunned civilization, he couldn't last indefinitely without it. And for a man who wanted nothing to do with the modern world, he was strangely obsessed with it: In one of the many phone calls he made to his daughter, he worried about how he looked on TV. He even considered cutting his hair for the first time in two decades-with his picture all over the news, maybe it was time for a change.

On Tuesday, after three days on the run, he visited Steres again. This time, Guzman and Purcell caught their break. Steres had been talking to his friends, and one of them called the cops. A SWAT team quickly swarmed the Steres compound. But no one was there. Once again, Kueck had vanished.

At what point do those attracted to the desert yield to its gravitational pull? Donald Charles Kueck was born in 1950 into a Southern family that prided itself on military service and law enforcement. His father's father served in Kaiser Wilhelm's navy, fleeing Germany after World War I as Hitler began to seize power. His father was a rescue-boat pilot at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. His mother's brother was the top cop in Louisiana, the head of the state troopers. Two of his sisters joined the Army and the Navy. A good-looking, charismatic guy who had no trouble attracting women, Kueck could have succeeded at anything he set his mind to. But in 1970, he followed the hippie trail and moved to Southern California, taking a job at a sheet-metal plant. He married early, at eighteen, and became an instant father to the daughter his wife already had, and together they had a son. On the face of it, Kueck was a typical working-class suburban dad.

But within a few years, he lost his job because of a back injury. Kueck started taking painkillers, got divorced, and moved into an apartment in North Hollywood. For the next thirteen years he had no contact with his family. He worked a series of jobs that led nowhere.When he could no longer pay his rent, he moved into his van, parking it next door in a friend's driveway."He would come in and shower every couple of days," recalls the neighbor, Barb Oberman. "He was like a brother."

The two delivered telephone books together, but Kueck wasn't interested in the money."It was this spiritual thing," says Oberman. "He could make or fix anything. He made some kind of back brace out of rubber bands. He made a telescope from a cardboard tube and lenses that he put into it. He talked a lot about wanting to live in the desert." After Kueck found a place in the Mojave where he could park his van, he moved. But he kept in touch, sending photos of the animals who trusted him and became his friends- the ground squirrels that danced on his head, the raven that would alight on his arm, the jackrabbits that gathered every morning for breakfast at the table Kueck had set for them in the greasewood.

In the late 1980s, Kueck's family tracked him down through a friend who was a cop. "My brother and I were teenagers, and both having a lot of problems," says his daughter, Rebecca Welch. "My mom knew we needed him." At the designated reunion time, Welch and her mother sat in a Bob's Big Boy in Riverside, California. "My dad came in, and I was crying," says Welch. "He said he knew I was the one who would be the most hurt by his abandonment, and he had stayed away because he didn't want to deal with my sadness and anger."

From then on, Kueck was back in the lives of his children, trying to make up for lost time. His teenage son, Chuck, who went by the nickname Jello, came to live with him in the desert in what Kueck called his "anarchy van." "My dad was very happy when my brother was out there," Welch recalls. "They were anarchists together, living free, in control, with no government in their lives." But the relationship was volatile. Jello was addicted to heroin, and Kueck would lock him in the van sometimes to get him to sober up. Kueck himself was degenerating, strung out on painkillers and sinking into a deep depression.

Jello finally split for Seattle. In the city, the good-looking teenager defended younger street kids, attended anti-globalization rallies, played in a band called Fuckhole, and spare-changed female tourists with a line so smooth that one, from Romania, took him back home for a month-long affair. Jello managed to kick junk a few times, but in 2001, at the age of twenty-seven, he returned to Southern California. "He was very intelligent, witty, and passionate," says Fritz Aragon, a musician who knew him at the time. "He was an incredible storyteller, like his father. He was also a compulsive liar, the biggest cheat, always in need of attention." Jello fought with skinheads over his anti-KKK tats and did time for assault. Soon after, he died of an overdose in an abandoned Los Angeles warehouse. "He had been trying to kill himself since he was twelve," a friend says."He identified with Kurt Cobain."

Jello's death sent Kueck into a tailspin. He left the desert and made a pilgrimage to the warehouse where Jello died. Shortly afterward, he was busted for slicing a guy's stomach with a box cutter while waiting for his daughter to complete an errand in the Department of Social Services in Riverside. "It was another speed freak," she says. "He asked my dad for a cigarette, but then my dad thought he was making a move for a weapon, so he cut him."

Kueck went to jail for a year and came out a changed man: more paranoid, scarred for life-burrowing deep like a lot of ex-cons into the desert sands outside L.A., waiting for a trigger to strike. He called his daughter every day; when Welch said she wanted to be a cop, her father tried to talk her out of it, saying he would kill any cop-or at least white ones-who tried to pull him over. On his frequent visits to his daughter's home, he always brought toys for her four toddlers, whom he adored, and gave her at least two guns. Once, he threatened to bury Welch's ex-boyfriend in the desert if he continued to abuse his daughter. Another time, he spun a bizarre tale of going to the site of busted meth labs and extracting chemicals from the dirt.

A month before he killed Sorensen, Kueck visited his daughter for the last time. "He almost ran over some guys who were working on the driveway," she says. "I knew he was doing speed. He slept for a couple of days and then he was all right." Before he left, he took a few hits of speed from his nasal inhaler. "He was like Charlie Chaplin," Welch says, recalling her final image of her father. "He was running around and breaking things."

As the fourth day of the manhunt wore on, the killer was still at large and the media were clamoring for answers. Cops from all over the West poured in by the hour. By now, Kueck could have been anywhere-or nowhere. He could have been nailed by a Mojave green-in the summer they were all around, especially the newborns, which were the most lethal. He could have succumbed to hyperthermia, which sets in when you are overheated and you have no water and your temperature spikes to 106 degrees, at which point your brain literally cooks. He could have fallen into a mine shaft. But without his body, there was no way of knowing if the desert had taken Kueck down.

Lake Los Angeles is close to top-secret aeronautical sites such as Plant 42, where the Stealth bomber was developed, and the mysterious Gray Butte, second only to Area 51 in terms of high-tech weirdness, from which Predator drones are launched by night to drag the skies over the Mojave and test the latest surveillance equipment. "We are used to seeing strange things flying above us out here," says Deputy District Attorney David Berger, who had joined the hunt for Kueck. But now, Berger and others noticed a C-130 Hercules flying low over the Antelope Valley, making repeated sweeps, as if probing the desert for the fugitive.

But there was no sign of Kueck until Tuesday afternoon, when a local cop decided to have another look at his trailer. Snakes always return to their lairs, and there it was-a rattlesnake stuck to Kueck's front door, with a knife through its head. Somehow, it seemed, Kueck had survived both the desert and his human hunters, slithering under the crime-scene tape to leave his calling card.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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