The Lone Star Love Triangle: True Crime

by Gregg Olsen

  As Cliff and Newman, the two were friends. But onstage as Brandi, Cliff was something else. “He would make me cry. He did terrible things to me. My whole schtick is the image. As Naomi, I’m this beautiful woman. Brandi would play practical jokes. Sometimes on stage, she would pull my wig off, and I’d be standing there exposed. When I would yell at him later, it was like – it’s all a part of the show.”

  “I was never asked at the trial if I believed Cliff killed Patrice.” The room grew silent as Braud seemed to consider the pros and cons of going further. “I’ve never told anyone this, but everything violent Cliff ever did was as Brandi. I never thought that it was Cliff who killed Patrice; I always figured it must have been Brandi.”

  ONE NIGHT IN FEBRUARY 1980, Cliff met twenty-year-old Jimmy Samuels in a bar called the Midnight Sun. “I don’t know if he was Brandi or K.T. at that point,” says Samuels, who is boyish with a slightly stocky build. “He was in the audience in drag. I thought: this is someone who could keep me laughing forever.”

  Jimmy, who lives on the West Coast, asks me not to use his real name. “My parents don’t even know I’m gay, much less what happened with Cliff.” His hands shake as he speaks, and there is fear as well as denial in his voice, the kind often associated with battered wives. “Cliff still sends me letters and says he wants to resume our relationship. My single biggest nightmare is that someday he’ll get out.”

  Within a week, Cliff invited Jimmy to move into his apartment. Then he systematically began to isolate him. He rebuffed Jimmy’s friends and convinced him to quit his job in a sandwich shop. When Jimmy complained, Cliff got violent. “Cliff would slap me. I hated it, but I wouldn’t do anything. I was always passive.”

  Four times Jimmy tried to leave Cliff, but Cliff always tracked him down. “They had colossal fights,” says Mary Hooper. “Jimmy wasn’t strong enough to defend himself. He was like a child running away. Brandi once kicked down the door at an apartment complex to get to him.”

  “I loved Jimmy more than he loved me. When he would leave me, I would go insane,” Cliff tells me. “I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep. I would hound everybody until I found him. And once I got to him – and he knew it – his things would be back in our apartment before the night was over.”

  Shortly after their relationship began, Jimmy attempted suicide by slashing his wrists, the first of two tries in their five years together. To placate Jimmy, who had always wanted to live in New York, Cliff sold all his belongings just eight months after they met and moved them from Houston into a hotel on Forty-third Street and Broadway. Cliff found work on the stage at the Grapevine, a pickup bar for male hustlers, and Jimmy became fascinated with the transsexuals who frequented the place. “In New York I always felt more feminine,” he says. “I did hormones for three months, and I lived as a woman.”

  Cliff eventually had to find other means to support them – turning tricks in drag.

  “Straight guys would come in and want to wear your brassiere and dress in drag. Usually there wasn’t really any sex,” Cliff tells me. “I guess I should feel bad about it, but I don’t. I could handle it. I was really street smart.”

  Christmas of 1980 was miserable for them, and shortly after that Jimmy asked to go back to Texas. From then on, according to one friend, “when Brandi and Jimmy argued, she would cry about all she had done for Jimmy, sold everything, moved him to New York.”

  They spent the summers of 1982 and 83 at the Pilgrim House Hotel in Provincetown Massachusetts. While Brandi played the cocktail lounge, Jimmy worked in the laundry. During their second summer there, Cliff opened for the late puppeteer Wayland Flowers and his puppet Madame, at a small lounge called Joe’s Place. The two became friends, and Cliff was soon introduced to cocaine. “I liked the high. It made me very creative.”

  Back in Texas, Cliff’s career flourished. He and Jimmy had a two-bedroom, second-story apartment in the Greenway Plaza section, which they decorated with antiques. In the closet was a quilt made by Cliff’s grandmother, appliquéd with sunbonneted Dutch girls. Brandi’s costumes hung like pieces of art against the blue walls of the extra bedroom. Neighbors got used to seeing both Brandi, dressed to the nines, and Cliff, sloppy and androgynous, with noticeable breasts and shoulder-length stringy hair dyed a bright carrot red.

  As emcee for the Fabulous Four, considered the top Texas drag queens, and for various pageants and contests, Cliff made top dollar in the clubs of Houston, Dallas, San Antonio and Beaumont. “It was his ball and he was going to play it. Brandi created all this,” says Newman Braud, one of the Fabulous Four and, after Cliff’s arrest, the group’s emcee. “It was all hers. He worked fifteen years and suddenly it happens. And it was all based on being a cynic, for lashing out at people.”

  “I had all these people screaming for me,” says Cliff. “You’re the star of the show, and backstage there’s cocaine, champagne, and fifteen gorgeous guys in the dressing room. It’s hard to say no. And I picked up more women while I was doing drag! I don’t know if it was because they thought they would turn me around, but to me it was, the joke’s on you. You’re another notch on my belt.”

  As Brandi’s success mushroomed, she got more outrageous, throwing potted plants at hecklers or ejecting them bodily. One night, she dumped a fellow queen in a wheelchair off the stage, mimicking Bette Davis in the classic movie Baby Jane, shouting, “But you are in a wheelchair, Blanche!” Off the stage, Brandi also became increasingly abusive toward Jimmy. “Jimmy was full of fun when he was with the rest of us,” says Braud. “But with Brandi, he cowered like a whipped child.”

  “It got to the point where Cliff seemed like Brandi all the time,” says Natalie Roberts, an actress who appeared with Cliff when he was K.T. “She was doing a lot of cocaine, and everything became more extreme.”

  In March 1985, Cliff and Jimmy had a particularly violent fight, and Roberts moved Jimmy into her apartment while Cliff was away performing in Dallas. Despite Cliff’s pleas, Roberts kept Jimmy hidden for several months. “I couldn’t sit by and see something happen.”

  “Cliff was doing Valiums and pot and too much cocaine,” Jimmy says. “That was the only time – at the end – when I thought something could really happen to me – because of the rage. Before I had always left angry. This time I left resolved.”

  When Jimmy left Roberts, he moved in with Kelly Lauren, a tall, blond transsexual, and her mother, Sherry Airey, in their Montrose bungalow. “Jimmy needed help,” says Lauren, who later left Texas for Chicago. “His hands trembled all the time. He was barely a shadow of the boy I’d met five years earlier.”

  Through Kelly, Jimmy became close friends with a tight group that included Newman Braud, a Montrose bartender named Josh Taylor, and two newcomers, Steven Grant and Patrice LeBlanc, from Braud’s hometown, Lafayette, Louisiana. A vivacious, olive-skinned beauty with a broad smile, large brown eyes, and curly brown hair, Patrice was the only straight member of the clique, but Braud recalls, “She fit right in. She was just as crazy as the rest of us, and she loved the club scene.”

  Jimmy and Patrice became especially close, and in August he moved into the Montrose apartment Patrice shared with Grant. Jimmy cleaned people’s houses during the daytime and partied every night. “Patrice and I would dance in the bars until closing. Then we’d go to the park, lie on cement benches, and talk until the sun came up.” Many of their conversations, Jimmy says, concerned Jimmy’s former life with Cliff.

  PATRICE LEBLANC GREW UP IN A LARGE Spanish-style ranch house in an affluent section of Lafayette, the so-called capital of French Louisiana. Her parents were both from small towns near the coast, an area settled during the 1700s by French Canadians known as Acadians. Her father, George LeBlanc, was part owner of an insurance agency. Patrice, her two younger sisters, and their parents were a close-knit family, solid members of the local Catholic church, where Patrice taught catechism.

  “The day Patrice got her driver’s license, at fifteen, her parents bought her a two-
year-old Audi and then replaced it a year later with a brand-new Cutlass Supreme,” says Jamie Woods, Patrice’s best friend. “Patrice had about anything she wanted.”

  Yet, life wasn’t going smoothly for LeBlanc. She dropped out of Lafayette’s University of Southwestern Louisiana after two semesters, and to celebrate her nineteenth birthday, she and Jamie and a group of friends went to Destin, Florida. While there, Patrice had a bittersweet fling with a boy she’d had a crush on since high school. Afterward, he showed no interest in her.

  Back in Lafayette, she got a job collecting the cover charge at a club near the campus. Also manning the door was Grant, a friend from U.S.L. “Patrice was so much fun. She knew everyone in town, and they’d all stop to talk with her on the way in,” Grant said. “There wasn’t a night that passed when some guy wouldn’t try to get her to go out. But Patrice never seemed very interested in anything that looked as if it could become a serious relationship.”

  At the club, Patrice became friends with the owner and his girlfriend, and on nights off they made the rounds of all three of his clubs, including Pharaoh’s, a gay bar in downtown Lafayette. To many, the Wednesday night drag shows were an outrageous embarrassment in a small conservative place like Lafayette – but not to Patrice.

  As soon as she saw the drag queens, Patrice was mesmerized. “After the show, she pulled Naomi Sims over to the bar,” Jamie Woods recounted. “She spent hours interviewing him. She asked anything she could think of: Did he really want to be a woman? Where did they put their sex organs? Absolutely anything.”

  “Patrice was really one of us,” said Braud, speaking out of drag. “She was open to everything, completely nonjudgmental, and as wild and funny as we were.” Patrice had experimented with pot in high school; she now became more adventurous: cocaine, acid, and ecstasy, her favorite. She also began begging Jamie and Steven Grant to move to Houston with her. “I wanted to go,” says Jamie, “but not that way. Not moving into Montrose and going to all the gay bars.”

  Undaunted, Patrice zeroed in on Steven Grant. Sitting at a table at Chez Pastor, a Cajun restaurant in Lafayette, Grant is a tall, elegant man with a lean face and a ponytail the color of corn silk. He moved back to Lafayette, he tells me, soon after the murder. “For a long time, I felt responsible for Patrice’s death. I kept thinking that if I hadn’t agreed to go to Houston with her, she might still be alive, even though friends kept trying to reassure me that one way or another Patrice would have gone.”

  On June 7, 1985, Patrice and Steven packed their possessions into the back of his red Thunderbird and headed for Houston. Patrice had saved $4,200 and Steven had almost $6,000, and Patrice knew she could always count on her parents for help. One month after she moved to Houston, they gave her a brand-new gray Mazda.

  By the time Patrice arrived in Houston, Jimmy and Cliff were on cordial if not friendly terms. “A while after the breakup we ran into each other,” Cliff told me. “I had kind of cooled off. I didn’t try to get him back.” Although Cliff had played Pharaoh’s in Lafayette that spring, he didn’t meet Patrice until Jimmy introduced them in the Copa, at the time Houston’s top gay show bar.

  “Jimmy had told me about this girl he was hanging around with,” says Cliff. “It was obvious that he was taken with her.” Brandi bought a round of drinks and they sat and talked. Cliff was thirty-one, and Patrice was twenty, the age Jimmy had been when Cliff met him. People often remarked that Patrice and Jimmy even looked alike. The next time Cliff saw Patrice at the club, she was alone. “She said Jimmy couldn’t make it, but he’d asked her to say hi,” Cliff says. “All I said was, ‘That’s nice,’ but I couldn’t take my eyes off her. I kept thinking: This girl is absolutely beautiful.”

  THROUGH JIMMY, PATRICE MET Kelly Lauren, who had sheltered Jimmy when he left Cliff. “When I was with Patrice, I never felt like a misfit,” Kelly tells me. “Patrice was so alive.”

  “People were always coming up to touch Patrice in the gay bars,” Jimmy says. “She didn’t like it, but they seemed attracted to her.”

  “We’d point out some great-looking guy sitting at the bar and say, ‘What do you think?’” Braud remembers with a laugh. “Patrice would always say, ‘Come on. He’s a fag. I’d never go to bed with a fag.’”

  Late that summer, Cliff as Brandi was mistress of ceremonies at the Miss Gay Arkansas pageant in Little Rock, and Patrice showed up with some mutual friends. “Come paint my nails for me,” he said. Patrice did, and he invited her and the others back to his hotel room for cocaine. They all stayed for the night, and Cliff and Patrice paired off into one of the double beds. “She cuddled right over me and fell asleep,” he tells me. “I laid awake for about an hour looking at her and marveling at how pretty she was. It was the first time I felt something for her.”

  Meanwhile, Steven Grant and Patrice were finding that living together was not easy. He insisted on order, something for which there was no time in Patrice’s world. In September, Steven reviewed their expenses, especially Patrice’s long-distance phone bill, and told her, “We can’t continue to live like this. We’re running out of money.” They had words, and she called Cliff and asked if she could spend the night at his place.

  “Sure,” he said.

  Again she spent the night in Cliff’s arms, but it was nothing more than two friends embracing. Soon after, Patrice invited Cliff to stay at her apartment for a night. Steven and Jimmy had both moved out; all that was left was her king-size mattress. “When we laid down to go to sleep, we were wrapped around each other like two spoons,” Cliff said, his voice wistful. “I pressed my hand against her stomach and she turned toward me. We kissed, and everything started. Patrice was the first one to teach me that sex wasn’t about control, that it could be pleasurable.”

  After they made love that first night, he invited her to move in with him and his dachshund. “You can take care of Vienna when I go away to perform. No strings attached.” Patrice threw her arms around him and accepted.

  When Patrice told her friends she was moving in with Cliff, they were startled. “But we just assumed it was like Patrice was with the rest of us – sisters,” says Kelly Lauren. “It wasn’t until much later when we began wondering if there was anything more.”

  “I figured that it was a weird kick kind of thing for Patrice,” says Jimmy. “I knew she would get bored or it wouldn’t be fun anymore. Cliff was very relationship-minded. I told her, ‘You’re going to be sorry.’”

  It was four months before Patrice admitted to anyone that she and Cliff had become lovers. Meanwhile, she took care of Vienna while he traveled and went about her life much as before, spending days and nights with her circle of friends. Cliff gave her a weekly allowance, and Patrice told a friend in Louisiana that she had found “a sugar daddy” in Houston. In the clubs, Patrice circulated and talked with friends while Brandi performed; afterward they laughed and gossiped like girlfriends.

  More and more people remarked on how similar Jimmy and Patrice were with their dark hair, large eyes, and toothy white smiles. Others noticed the differences. Where Jimmy was pliable, Patrice had a mind of her own. “Patrice was nothing like me,” Jimmy says. “She wasn’t weak-willed. I always wished I was more like her.”

  IN NOVEMBER, CLIFF AND PATRICE went for a long weekend to Cancun, a trip Cliff had always promised Jimmy. Before leaving Houston, Patrice cut Cliff’s hair and dyed it dark brown, his natural color. Then she took him shopping for jeans, shirts, sweaters, men’s clothing. “Patrice had started saying that she hated seeing me off-stage in drag,” says Cliff. “My nails used to bug her. She would knock on my dressing room door after the show and start taking my nails off. I guess she thought, I’m sleeping with this?”

  Although Cliff hadn’t taken hormones in almost three years, there was still a visible effect that he could not easily shed – heavy, fleshy breasts. So he bought a set of weights, “to build up my pecs.” He said of those five days in Cancun: “No one knew us. No one knew I did drag. We were just tw
o people in love on the beach. It was one of the happiest times of my life.”

  That Thanksgiving, Patrice bragged to her family about how exciting her life was in the big city. Although she had worked only two days for an oil company during her five and a half months in Houston, Patrice made up a story about a job at a travel agency. She then gave them a phone number answered by a friend who’d agreed to relay their calls. Before the weekend was over, her mother took her on a shopping spree and bought her $600 worth of new clothes. “She was really up,” says Jamie, who met her for a drink. “I remember looking at her and thinking how much she had changed. She used to wear tennis shoes and big shirts; now she had on a dress, high heels, and fishnet stockings.”

  In early December, Patrice began suffering from morning sickness. She was torn: Should she have Cliff’s child or an abortion. “I wanted it,” Cliff says. “But Patrice said she just didn’t know if she was ready to settle down.”

  Patrice’s friends noticed changes in her. “She started acting nervous about what Cliff would think about everything,” remembers one. “If we went out, she would call and check in with him. It seemed strange. Anxiety was something totally new for Patrice.”

  Cliff made attempts to sever Patrice’s ties with her friends, especially her friendship with his ex-lover. “When she first moved in, she was still spending time with Jimmy, and I was trying to get her away from him,” Cliff boasted. “If she saw him, I wouldn’t kiss her for two days. I was being cold, standoffish. She made up by giving me a music box with a little note inside saying she loved me.”