A Desert Reckoning

by Deanne Stillman

  Oddly, or perhaps not so, for how far do we really range from our home turf, the renegade boy from Alabama, brother to sisters in the navy and law enforcement, son of father in the Air Force, grandson of man who served with Kaiser Wilhelm, ended up on the perimeter of Edwards Air Force Base, launching pad for the space shuttle, testing grounds for the Stealth bomber, one of the most heavily armed regions in the world.

  Barb drove north to see him a few times but got lost every time. Don kept in touch, and later when he moved to his own place in the desert, some land where he was not just parking but living, he would send 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—and then, when it was all over, his sisters and friends would try to reconcile the image of the jackrabbits that gathered every morning for breakfast at the table Don had set for them in the sagebrush with the image of Don the cop killer, and it just didn’t make sense.

  Yet there was one thing that rang loud and true: Don knew the desert better than anyone, and the fact that he had been able to outfox a massive display of manpower and technology for an entire week confirmed what he had been telling everyone all along: he had learned the ways of the land and the animals that lived there and one way or another, in the way of all shamans—good or evil—he had shed a skin and disappeared.

  MEN WITH GUNS IN A CONVENT

  A very happy Easter to you and great joy in Our Lord, my daughter. We should never open the doors of our soul to sadness. . . . The spouses of Christ shouldn’t be sad but smiling serenely and without tears.

  —From Letter Number 13, circa 1925, by Mother Luisita, founder of the Carmelite Sisters of the Most Sacred Heart of Los Angeles, refugee, candidate for sainthood

  WITH EVERY HOUR THAT A CRIMINAL IS ON THE LOOSE, THE chances of finding him diminish exponentially. By the morning of Day Two, a thousand cops and deputies had joined the manhunt. Some traversed the desert in quadrants, walking every cubic centimeter of its lonely stretches. LA 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 Palmdale, Sister Mary Michael was taking a sunrise walk among the boulders and Joshua trees just after morning Mass. She gazed eastward, toward the Three Sisters Buttes, a mountain range in which three rounded peaks were the most prominent. The buttes are a well-known landmark to those who appreciate this rugged part of LA County, a marker of comfort and beauty that brings the endless desert expanse to a rolling stop, beckoning the pilgrim to slow down ever more and take stock. Was the formation first named by three sisters? What was it called when the ancestors of the Shoshone roamed its flanks, traveling up and down its trails as they headed westward, into the Mojave, and then crossing another mountain range to trade with their brothers at the edge of the Pacific Ocean? No one knows the answers to these questions, but the members of the order at Mount Carmel sometimes joked that it was fitting that they lived near the Three Sisters Buttes, a range that seemed to invoke their calling.

  Mount Carmel was a convent that served the area’s poor, offering daily mass and comfort, and providing a day care center for children whose parents worked the valley’s orchards and fields. Knowing that there had been a deadly incident nearby and that the fugitive suspected in the killing could be lurking, Sister Mary Michael was somewhat wary as she strolled on the second day of the manhunt. Yet as she listened to the cactus wrens and their dawn exchange, she was struck as always by the land and sky and light, and reduced one more time to a state of sheer humility and awe. She offered up a silent prayer of gratitude for her blessed life amid the Old Testament scenery that looked like the birthplace of the savior, and as she reflected, a figure approached, closing in from across the sands. Something about the gait told her the person was a man. It wasn’t unusual to see someone walking the desert at dawn, but it wasn’t all that common either. She grew more suspicious and wondered whether the advancing figure might be the wanted man. He was big and tall, she noticed, and was heading directly for her. Reversing course, she turned back toward the convent while keeping an eye on the stranger. She now saw that he was wearing a dark suit. How strange, she thought. That’s not what the radio said. He’s supposed to be wearing a T-shirt and maybe some jeans. Does he want to hide in the convent? What about the children? She picked up her pace, but it was too late. “Sgt. Phil Guzman,” said the man, extending a hand and now stopping her in her path. “Los Angeles County Homicide.”

  He was soon joined by Sgt. Joe Purcell, another veteran homicide detective. Both of the men were hoping 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 an edge. In his possession were his cell phone, rifle, Sorensen’s gun—and the deputy’s two-way radio. For some reason, he had not yet left the area, although he probably could have. While on the run, he was flipping through the frequencies and paying close attention to all of 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. Guzman and Purcell believed that they needed to embed men where Kueck was hiding, and the convent was the perfect place.

  The Carmelite order began in the thirteenth century, when a sect of hermits went to live in a grotto at Mount Carmel in tribute to the prophet Elijah. According to the Old Testament, it was atop this peak that Elijah battled with disbelievers in a test of faith, ultimately calling down rain in a time of drought. Decades later, the order dedicated itself to St. Teresa, the fifteenth-century mystic who was torn between the material and spiritual worlds, and battled with demons as she fled inward. During her journey, she underwent a series of miracles that happened after bouts of ecstasy in which she levitated and communicated with angels. Writing about her lifelong journey from adulation and glory to humility and devotion, St. Teresa called many to the life of the spirit, urging selflessness, fraternal love, and detachment from worldly goods. Down through the ages, warriors have represented themselves by way of insignia on their shields. Saints have symbols too, and Teresa’s is a heart, a book, and an arrow. In pursuit of her teachings, the Carmelite order is what they call “discalced”—one whose priests and nuns go unshod or in sandals.

  When Sister Mary Michael greeted Sgt. Guzman, she was dressed in the conventional garb of the sisterhood—robes and sandals. Just as she had wondered why a man would be wearing a dark suit on such a hot day, Guzman thought about what it must feel like to dress in dark robes in 100-degree heat. Although the pair did not discuss such thoughts, they formed a fast connection, rooted in the commonality of acceptance and both belonging to tribes on a mission—a brotherhood and sisterhood that people turned to in time of need, but shunned at other times. As the two cops and the nun walked toward the convent, Sister Mary Michael trod carefully past the cholla, cautioning them about spines that could “jump”—meaning affix themselves immediately to passing skin or fabric and instantly embed, probably the one projectile that could penetrate a bulletproof vest and then damage its protected flesh. Perhaps the sister thought about making a little joke of that but then stopped herself, for that may have been too forward. Learning a bit about LASD’s desert mission, Sister Mary Michael marveled at the mysteries of the world. Here were two strangers who needed help, although not the kind that she or the other residents of the convent generally provided. She was not being asked for prayer, although that would unfold in its own way, and she was not being asked for food or water, although the sisters would soon offer it. As it happened, the strangers needed lodging, but not for themselves; the SWAT team needed a home in the desert, a place to camp while they mounted thei
r search, until the wanted man was caught. When that would happen the detectives did not know. It could be within hours, Guzman explained, or several days. Although he didn’t say it quite like this, LASD did not have any idea where Donald Kueck was at that moment. But they believed he was in the area, and they needed to start living where he was hiding. The convent was ideally situated, on 180th Street East, a main drag in Palmdale where cell phone reception was good and with plenty of wide open space around it, save for the intermittent creosote, Joshua trees, and rocks—not bad as a takeoff and launching pad for helicopters.

  So later that day and in the following days the warriors came in from the battlefield and laid down their arms. Some of the nuns had met Deputy Sorensen when he first arrived in Lake Los Angeles and made a point of introducing himself to those in his jurisdiction. “If you ever need me, call me,” he had said, giving them his cell phone number as he did with pretty much everyone. “I’m available 24/7.” There was never any occasion that had warranted calling the local deputy, but the nuns were grateful for the personal introduction, and when Steve’s compadres arrived to search for their brother’s killer, the nuns may have feared for what was to come—after all, they lived by the credo that says to hate the sin but love the sinner—but they could not turn away and they cooked for the hunters and went about their daily tasks and callings, attending morning and evening Mass, which once or twice some of the men attended as well, divesting themselves of weapons and bulletproof vests, dipping a finger into the holy water at the chapel entrance, making the sign of the cross, genuflecting, praying to the source of all protection, and proclaiming the miracle of the resurrection.

  Later that week, when a camaraderie between the cops and the nuns had developed, some of the cops gave the nuns a ride in a helicopter, the hulking Sikorsky 5, and the cloistered women whose mandate was to pray for the priests—the men in their order—experienced an intense proximity to men in another kind of uniform, in dire circumstances, a moment that was perhaps a latter-day kind of ecstasy that St. Theresa herself may have undergone during her own flights into levitation and visions, filled with whirring blades and swirling air and what were those strange scents—men on the chase? burning fuel? hot metal?—and to have slipped their earthly bonds in such an exciting fashion they were grateful.

  NEW DEPUTY IN TOWN

  Please Don’t Talk to the Lifeguard

  —Song Number 98 on the Hot Singles list for the week ending August 3, 1963, sung by Diane Ray

  MOST COPS HAVE CHOSEN THEIR LINE OF WORK BECAUSE THEY are the kind of person who wants to make a difference. Some perhaps have chosen naïvely, with little understanding of the way it is on the streets, pursuing a dream of wanting to be a police officer or fire fighter when they grew up. Others come right from the streets, a life of petty or sometimes hard crime in fact, heading for a world of trouble. Someone turns them around and they become a cop because they know how to talk to people who are falling through the cracks, especially kids. (Or, in the old days, they were pressed into service by frightened citizens, who sometimes hired outlaws as sheriffs. As the noted cowboy scribe Frank Waters wrote, “With a tin star he stood the chance of also wearing a halo of righteousness; without it, a noose.”) Then there are those who instinctively know that someone has to enforce the rules of society, and they feel hypocritical if they don’t walk the walk of the American credo: “We are a nation of laws, not men.” And yet others join up for the camaraderie, the pension plan, the good salary, or a combination of all of these things, and then some simply fall into the gig because it suits their temperament—they are service-oriented, they feel comfortable in a world of rules—and once inside the club, they know they have come home.

  As far back as his friends can remember, Steve Sorensen wasn’t telling people about wanting to be a policeman when he grew up, but it was clear that he liked to help people. Born in Pasadena, California, in 1957, he was the youngest of three children; in fact he was at least ten years younger than the nearest in age of his two sisters—an accidental or, to use a popular term of the day, “change of life” baby to parents who were much older than the parents of his peers. When he was eleven or twelve, the family moved to Manhattan Beach, California, a then blue-collar community where families settled so they could be near the ocean—it was better for Steve’s asthma, said a doctor. One of the first things his old friends will tell you is that even as a kid, he was the neighborhood handyman, often carrying out tasks for people in the neighborhood with or without being asked—and took pride in that role. These were things he did throughout his life—carrying groceries for the impaired, landscaping for the elderly—the small acts of kindness that often go unnoticed in the world at large, but without them life becomes that much more cruel.

  Steve’s father was in automotives, and his mother was a homemaker; by all accounts and to outsiders, his parents were loving—after all, they had moved for his health—although not expressive of their emotions. His mother, Rosetta, was a bit more attentive—although perhaps because of the number of years between her and her youngest child, the kind of attention she gave was sometimes out of touch. With his blonde hair and blue eyes, Steve was emerging as a typical So Cal kid, classic in fact, and acclimating easily to life at the beach, where he had hooked up with a young surfing crew that was apprenticing to some of the older stars. But for his first Halloween in the neighborhood, his mother dressed him up as Tiny Tim—the strange, ambisexual man who was a regular on the Johnny Carson Show, crooning “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” with his ukulele to the delight of millions of viewers and a plethora of jokes. It was a curious way to treat a boy who was hanging around with the local surf gods, and although he would end up taking care of his mother years later, “Steve never forgave her for that,” a childhood friend recalls. Shortly after that fateful Halloween, he ran away after slamming a pitcher of syrup down on the table and splattering it all over his clothes. “I hope he isn’t going to school like that,” his mother told a neighbor, “completely covered in syrup.” The rebellion was short-lived, although not without impact in a family where drama was generally internal.

  By the time he was a teenager, Steve was a hard-core surfer in this well-known surfing town, part of a crowd that included some of the best wave riders in the area, including figures who later became legendary, though not in time to cash in on the surfing boom that is now worldwide; to this day, some members of this pioneering crew are still living in shacks and pouring drinks to pay the rent, clinging to a reef like hermit crabs.

  At the beach and in the lineup whenever the surf was up, Steve and his buddies were California golden boys, always tan and buff, and resented by other high school cliques for the way they seemed to slide through life. His mother wondered how he was going to make a living when the time came, even though Steve was not the stereotypical hard-core party surfer of Hollywood—“Hey Bud, all I want is some good weed and some tasty sets”—and he always had some sort of job, like working at the local liquor store or, what he really liked, being a lifeguard, where he would sit alone in a tower all day, watch waves, and rush into an emergency when called. “My girlfriends and I all had crushes on him,” his next-door neighbor Julie Franks remembers. “He was the town stud.”

  In 1975, Kimberly Brandon-Watson, a sophomore at Mira Costa High, met the future deputy when he and some friends walked into a Christmas party in Hermosa Beach. “They were so cool they were scary,” Brandon-Watson recalls from her graphic design studio nearby, “especially Mark Bowden,” a surfing superstar who himself was friends with the local surf king, Mike Purpus. Kimberly still lives and works in the town where she grew up. On a fall afternoon, I spent several hours with her as she painted a portrait of her old beau, and through the window, you could see waves breaking offshore and rolling in as the Santa Ana winds carved perfect hollow sets—the kind of surf Steve and his buddies lived for. Although Kimberly did not know any of them before that night at the party, she certainly knew of them; Hermosa Beach was a s
mall town, and pretty much everyone knew everyone else at least by face recognition only, even if they came from the adjacent beach towns along the south bay of Los Angeles. But she did not expect any of them to acknowledge her; in addition to the coolness factor, they were upperclassmen, and she was even a little leery as they made eye contact with her and then moved into the holiday swarm. Lingering inside Kimberly’s orbit as his buddies made the rounds, Steve soon approached and introduced himself. Surprised that he was talking to her, Kimberly was nervous but quickly charmed and then felt that he was very nice. When he asked for her phone number, she gave it. The next day he called, and they were together off and on for the next four years, with Kimberly swept off her feet in a romance filled with adventure, old-fashioned courtliness, and the kind of teenage obsession that takes over your life, with Steve showering her with so many gifts and flower bouquets that Kimberly finally ran in the other direction.

  In the beginning, it wasn’t that they liked all of the same things, but they had enough in common to become a couple. Kimberly didn’t surf, but she liked the beach and being in the ocean. She and Steve would play volleyball together and play on the sand, and it wasn’t long before Steve withdrew from his wave-riding crew and gave himself over to Kimberly; in fact he was at her house almost every day—just twenty-two short blocks away—until an anguishing pattern of breaking up and reuniting was set in motion. An artist and seamstress, Kimberly would often design and make things for Steve, like his trunks and special logos for his shirts. They would go on surf trips to San Diego in his orange and red Datsun. Sometimes they went to Magic Mountain, listening en route to Rod Stewart, or alternating between her favorite, David Bowie, and his, Elton John. Once they went snorkeling at Catalina Island, a short ferry trip from the port of Long Beach but a long way from city life. It was early on in their relationship when the pair had proclaimed their feelings for one another. “I love you with all my heart,” Steve wrote later after one of their separations. “‘This is only the beginning of what I hope to feel forever,’” he continued, giving credit to the band famous for the line—Chicago—and then signing off.