The Lone Star Love Triangle: True Crime

by Gregg Olsen

  If Patrice was affectionate at home, she became annoyed whenever Cliff acted more than friendly in public. Cliff, in turn, used her reluctance to justify barring her friends from the apartment. “I’ll play that game in public, but not in my house,” he told her. “Our house.”

  Patrice went home for Christmas and lied again about her job in Houston and how well things were going there. She also told her family that she was moving in with “a friend named Cliff. He travels a lot, and I’m going to take care of his dog.”

  Christmas afternoon, Patrice and Steven Grant drove back to Houston and that night she joined Cliff at his parents’ home for dinner. They opened presents, and Etta Mae and Russ Youens were delighted to watch Cliff and Patrice on the couch with their arms around each other. “He was happier than we had ever seen him,” said Russ, a strong, silent man who had never approved of his son’s life and who had refused to ever see him on-stage. It seemed clear that the pretty young girl from Louisiana was changing Cliff.

  Despite that outwardly serene appearance, by January there were small indications that all wasn’t well with Cliff’s and Patrice’s relationship. Kelly Lauren had moved to Chicago the previous fall, and Patrice began spending hours with Kelly’s mother, Sherry Airey, in the house Jimmy had fled to after leaving Cliff. On a shelf above the television was a glamorous black-and-white publicity shot of Kelly. “From the time she was small, Kelly never seemed like a son,” Airey said as she took a long drag off her cigarette. “I’m very proud of my daughter. She’s quite a star.”

  I turned the conversation to Patrice LeBlanc, and Airy added, “She never told any of us she was pregnant. But she seemed a little unhappy; that was unusual for Patrice. She’d talk about leaving Cliff, but then she’d say she didn’t want to hurt him.”

  Meanwhile, in the clubs Cliff had fits of jealousy whenever other men paid attention to Patrice. “Almost everyone was gay,” recalled one friend. “And so they shouldn’t have been a threat, but Cliff became obsessive.”

  One night at The Old Plantation in Dallas, Cliff in drag pulled Patrice off the dance floor. The man she had been dancing with came over and yelled, “Leave her alone.”

  “I told him Patrice was my girlfriend, and he should leave us alone,” says Cliff. “But he wouldn’t stop. So I told him that just because I was dressed as a woman, that didn’t mean I wasn’t a man.”

  There was a scuffle and Cliff ejected the man bodily from the club, but not without receiving a black eye. On the trip back to Houston, Cliff and Patrice stopped at his parents’ lake house for a few days to let the eye heal. “We talked about what I could do besides drag, how else I could make a living. When we got home, we borrowed money from my mother to start a balloon shop. But somehow we never got it together.”

  One night at Steven Grant’s apartment, Newman Braud asked Patrice, “What’s it like doing it with Cliff?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” she replied. “I’ve never done it with him.”

  “It was the weirdest thing,” Braud tells me. “She was saying it wasn’t happening, and he was telling everyone it was.”

  Friends noticed that both Patrice and Cliff were relying heavily on drugs to make things seem right. For Patrice it was mainly ecstasy; for Cliff it was coke. In a sequined gown, on the stage of the Copa one night, he pulled out a chain saw, indicated a new railing the owners had installed around the stage and asked, “Does everybody hate this shit as much as I do?” When the crowd shouted yes, he revved up the saw and cut down the railing.

  “This was a new Brandi,” says Braud. “It was all the power of being on top. Even the old Brandi never would have been assertive enough to do anything like that.”

  There were also indications that Patrice had changed drastically. One night with Randy Rodriguez, they met a drunk and agreed to reconnect with him later at a nearby motel. “Patrice told him she wanted to have a good time,” Rodriguez testified at Cliff’s trial. “In the motel room, Patrice and the stranger sat on the bed, and Patrice removed his pants. “It was a little light in there. I could see there was no sex involved at all. The pants did come off and that was it.” That night, however, Patrice left the motel room with the stranger’s ring.

  The last week in December, to Patrice’s astonishment, Cliff announced his retirement from the stage of The Old Plantation in front of a standing-room-only crowd of nearly a thousand. At the end of the show, he pulled off his wig and said, “I’m in love.” Motioning for Patrice to stand, he said, “I’d like you to meet Patrice LeBlanc. We’re going to get married.”

  From Houston to Manhattan, those who knew Cliff were shocked. “The announcement that Brandi West was marrying a woman was scandalous,” says a friend who heard the news in New York. “It was like, my God. What will she do next?

  When we heard the girl was pregnant, I thought I was in the Twilight Zone.”

  After the show, Cliff and Patrice called Kelly Lauren in Chicago. “Patrice was crying. She seemed ashamed, but she said that she was having a relationship with Cliff and that he was going to quit doing drag,” says Lauren. “Cliff got on the phone and said that they were going to move to Chicago. He said he would rent a big house, and we could all live together. I tried to tell Patrice that it was okay, but I kept thinking about all the things Cliff had done to Jimmy. It just didn’t seem right.”

  Cliff’s last scheduled performance as Brandi West was emceeing a male strip night at The Old Plantation. A friend of Patrice’s from Lafayette remembers walking in to find her talking amiably with one of the hunky straight strippers. “She looked great,” says the man who stopped to give Patrice a kiss on the cheek. As he looked up, Brandi, in a red sequin dress, was barreling down on them. “Take off, quick,” Patrice told the stripper. She then whispered to her friend, “Please don’t leave. I’m afraid Cliff will cause a scene or hit me.”

  “How could you do this to me?” Cliff shouted, grabbing Patrice by the arm. After he stalked off, Patrice told her friend, “If a guy even looks at me, Cliff goes off.”

  “Why did you move in with him?” the man asked. “And what’s all this about the two of you getting married?” But she wouldn’t answer. “Patrice was terrified,” says her friend.

  In late January, Patrice had Cliff take her to an abortion clinic in downtown Houston, where a doctor terminated her three-month pregnancy. “She said she wasn’t ready to settle down,” Cliff said, wincing at the memory. “She said we’d have time in the future to have a child. I couldn’t help it; I was really disappointed.”

  “It just isn’t fun anymore,” Patrice told Jimmy. “Living with Cliff isn’t what I thought it would be like.”

  THE SECOND WEEKEND IN FEBRUARY, Patrice’s parents and grandparents drove to Houston to spend the weekend with Patrice’s aunt. They invited Patrice and her friend to join them for dinner Saturday night. “It was about time,” Cliff said. “Patrice had met my parents, and they truly loved her; it was time I met hers. I was truly in the hot seat. We talked about what we would tell them – about what I did for a living.”

  Dinner was in a Chinese restaurant and everyone seemed relaxed and happy. “You know,” Patrice’s mother told Cliff, “You’re the first person Patrice has acted like she was more than just friends with.”

  “They really seemed to like me,” Cliff said proudly. “Patrice told them that I was a regional manager for Whirlpool, like my father.”

  On Valentine’s Day, Cliff gave Patrice an antique emerald ring she had admired in a pawnshop, and that night Sherry Airey and a friend invited Patrice and Cliff for dinner. Recounting that evening, Airey said: “You could tell Cliff was uncomfortable. That he didn’t know how to act. And Patrice was trying so hard. This was a new Cliff for me, but all night long he kept lapsing into Brandi West – snide remarks and off-color jokes. He had a tough time being anything else.”

  Soon after, Patrice told Airey she wanted to leave Cliff. “Well, why don’t you?” Airey asked her.

  “He’s been good to me,”
Patrice answered. “And since he’s trying to stop doing drag, it’s like he needs even more from me. I don’t want to sneak out like Jimmy. When I go, I want to do it the right way.”

  When Kelly came home for a visit at the end of the month, she stayed with Patrice and Cliff. Kelly and Patrice shared the bed and Cliff slept on the floor. During the night, Patrice rolled off the bed onto the floor and joined him. Kelly and Patrice went shopping during the day and clubbing at night. Usually Cliff stayed home. “I could tell he was trying really hard to accept me,” said Lauren. “I’d tried to hide Jimmy from him once, and Brandi and I weren’t the best of friends. But he was being patient.”

  On February 26, Cliff invited Airey to join the three of them for dinner. He made fried chicken but sat watching a tape of Sweeney Todd while the others ate. “It was kind of eerie,” Lauren remarked, “but Patrice didn’t act like there was anything wrong. She and I got dressed up and went out to the clubs that night. Cliff didn’t go along. He just didn’t seem interested.”

  The clubs closed and Lauren, Patrice, and some friends decided to visit Howard Hughes’s grave in Glenwood Cemetery. They jumped over the white wrought-iron fence that encircles the monument and sat down by the Hughes family plot, a semi-circular wall with six tall trumpets. “Patrice said she wanted to come to Chicago to live with me,” says Lauren. “I was thrilled, but I asked, ‘What about Cliff?’ She just said, ‘Cliff won’t be coming.’ I didn’t ask any questions. In our world, you just don’t pry. You try to give everyone their privacy.”

  After Lauren left, Patrice became more isolated than ever. “It got so that when she wanted to see us she’d have to sneak out,” says Newman Braud. And when Braud ran into Cliff, he complained that Patrice was “demanding and jealous.”

  “It just didn’t make sense,” says Braud. “That was not the Patrice we knew. Patrice wasn’t that domineering. They were really getting on each other’s nerves.”

  At the end of the month, Patrice called home and told her mother that she needed $150. It was the first time Patrice had asked her parents for money since she’d moved, and Sheila LeBlanc put a check in the mail that same afternoon.

  On Saturday night March 1, Randy Rodriguez ran into Patrice at Rich’s, a hot new gay club. “She seemed happy and started talking about leaving Houston,” he says. “She didn’t know if she’d go back home to go to school or try Chicago. The only time Patrice looked upset was when she talked about Cliff. She said she’d told him she wanted to leave, but he was arguing with her.”

  On Tuesday March 4, Patrice called Newman Braud and said she was bored. Braud suggested she meet him that night at a club he was playing as Naomi Sims. Patrice asked their friend Josh Taylor to go along, and before she was supposed to pick him up, she called again to ask if Cliff could join them. Taylor, who didn’t like Cliff, reluctantly agreed.

  That was how Patrice came to spend the night before she disappeared in a club named Heaven. Almost as soon as they arrived, Patrice whispered to Taylor, “Watch Cliff for me. Make sure he’s happy.”

  Then she walked off into the crowd.

  “It was very, very weird. His eyes never left her,” says Taylor. “Cliff didn’t say one word, but his eyes never left her. It was a cold stare.”

  Backstage, Patrice volunteered to Naomi, “Cliff’s being a real bitch tonight.” They left the club about one, and Cliff and Patrice dropped Taylor off at his apartment.

  THAT SAME NIGHT OR THE NEXT DAY, police believe Cliff Youens killed Patrice LeBlanc in a rage, plunging a knife into her thirty-nine times. From wounds on her hands, the coroner later determined that Patrice tried to grab the blade and fight back. One stab wound almost severed her left ear; the deathblow – two and a half inches wide – cut through her right jugular vein.

  What happened inside that apartment? The closest I came to an answer was one afternoon while working on this piece. I’d gone to Greenway Plaza, and I stood looking up at the apartment where the murder took place with one of the neighbors. I’d tracked the man down based on rumors that he’d heard screaming the night Patrice disappeared. That was true, he said, explaining, “I couldn’t hear what was being said, but it wasn’t Cliff, it was her.”

  “You heard Patrice shouting?” I asked.

  “No, her. Brandi,” he said. “She sounded angry.”

  After the murder, Cliff methodically cleaned up the mess. He wrapped Patrice’s body first in his grandmother’s quilt with the Dutch-girl pattern, next in Patrice’s peach comforter, and meticulously sewed the edges together, much as he’d routinely repaired seams on the costumes Brandi wore on stage. Then he tied the bundle with two pairs of panty hose and the sash from his robe. Finally, he slipped a pillowcase over one end and drew a blue nylon duffel bag over the other.

  He drove the body and two cinder blocks, which had been lying next to the Dumpster outside his apartment, to his parents’ lake house, tied them with a blue shirt and a length of cheap gold lamp chain, and loaded the whole thing into his father’s speedboat. “He took her to his parents’ lake house,” says Braud, his eyes wide. “We’d all been out there with him. He knew every inch of that lake, and he took her to the deepest part. He wanted to be sure she was never found.”

  Nineteen days later, however, on March 23, 1986, a Houston couple out fishing discovered the bundle floating on the surface.

  IN THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED, Cliff pawned his jewelry, including the antique emerald ring he had given Patrice, painted and recarpeted the blue room, and began disposing of Patrice’s things. When friends called, he said, “Patrice is at the store,” or “She’s out with a friend.”

  On March 8, three days after Patrice disappeared, Brandi West was onstage again in Beaumont. “Cliff was nervous,” says Braud. “He hadn’t performed in almost a month. All the way there in the car, he fussed and practiced his monologue. I asked about Patrice, but he said she was having dinner at her aunt’s house, that she didn’t want him performing and wouldn’t come to watch. Onstage that night, he had the crowd in the palm of his hand. Watching him, I had the strangest sensation: it was like I was watching someone who had just figured out what he was supposed to do with his life.”

  Later that month, Cliff called Jimmy. “He said Patrice was gone and that he’d taken too much Valium. He asked if I would come. I made him some clam chowder and sat with him. A week later, we resumed our physical relationship. I asked Cliff what would happen when Patrice came back. He said, ‘I don’t think Patrice is coming back.’”

  Thinking about that, Jimmy shuddered slightly. “Cliff seemed to have changed, more mellow, more mature. I thought maybe we could work it out. But I couldn’t figure out why he didn’t cry. He cried when I left him. I walked into the blue room where she’d kept all her things and noticed that the carpet had been changed. I could still smell her perfume.”

  When Patrice didn’t call or arrive home for Easter, her parents filed a missing-person report, and Jeff Guidry, a Lafayette detective, drove to Houston to investigate. He traced Patrice’s footsteps through the darkened nightclubs and back streets of Montrose and learned about her friends, her lifestyle, her unemployment, and her abortion. A week later, Guidry found Patrice’s body in the county morgue.

  When Sherry Airey called Cliff on April 4 to say that Patrice’s body had been found, he whispered. “Oh, my God. What will I do now?”

  That same afternoon Cliff fled, first to New York, where he told friends that his pregnant wife had been murdered, then to California to stay with his friend Wayland Flowers. By the end of May, he was back in Houston at his parents’ home. On Father’s Day police, acting on a tip, entered the house with shotguns. They found Cliff hiding under a sheet in the bathroom clothes hamper.

  At the trial, District Attorney Joe Price offered evidence from the blue room: a single drop of blood found on the edge of the closet door, blood covered with paint discovered under the new carpet, and a smear of type-A blood on one of the gray alligator boots Cliff wore to Heaven on March
4. In this era before DNA, Price couldn’t prove it was Patrice’s. The medical examiner’s office was unable to even have her blood typed, since so little had been left in her body.

  The defense didn’t call a single witness, and Cliff’s attorney, Mike Askins, offered only five pieces of evidence, including a photo of Brandi with her arm around Patrice and a note Patrice had given Cliff shortly after they became lovers: “I know sometimes things get rough, but please be patient with me. I am trying. That is, I love you deeply, Patrice.”

  On September 11, 1986, after just over an hour’s deliberation, the jury found Cliff Youens guilty of murder. His sentence: life in prison.

  IN THE YEARS THAT FOLLOWED, HOUSTON’S GAY SCENE felt the fury of AIDS and irate businessmen and crusading politicians cleaned up Montrose. Much of the Texas gay nightclub scene switched to Dallas and other cities. The Fabulous Four split up, afterward appearing together only for special bookings.

  One Sunday night while working on this piece, I sat at the back bar of J.R.’s in Montrose, drinking a glass of white wine and going over things once more with Newman Braud who was in full drag as Naomi Sims. She was scheduled to emcee the night’s entertainment, a male strip show, but it had been called off due to poor attendance. In a flowing silk shirt, pencil-thin slacks, spike heels and a black-lace bustier, Naomi was glamorous. Occasionally she adjusted her long, dark-brown wig.

  “He gave it all up for her,” Naomi said. “His entire career.”

  “I know,” I answered. “Cliff was a real star, wasn’t he?”

  “Well, we’re all stars,” Naomi said. “I’m a star.”

  It was Brandi the star who first drew me to this case. Someone had passed along a copy of This Week in Texas, a magazine that serves as a directory of coming events for Texas’s gay community. On page fifty-seven I noticed the week’s feature, an update on Brandi West by Clifford Youens: