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."