Vulgar Favours

by Maureen Orth

  According to Father Charles Shelton, a Franciscan priest who accompanied Vance to meet the pope on more than one occasion, Vance had once worked for a shadowy underworld intelligence figure in Phoenix with ties to both the CIA and the Chinese; his aim in meeting the pope was to try to pressure the Vatican into opening a consulate in Phoenix, so that the Chinese could use it to negotiate South China Sea oil deals without being spied on by the Russians. “Then Tiananmen Square happened, and it all fell apart,” says Father Charles. “I have photographs of Vance with the pope. But the meetings were always very short and sort of puzzling for the Holy Father.”

  Father Charles, who says he knew nothing of Vance’s behavior toward minors, was also the instigator of a trip to Russia for Vance. The idea was to offer the formula for Chernobyl as a bribe to get Russian help to release missing-in-action (MIA) prisoners—a cause with personal significance to Father Charles, whose father was an MIA, and whose late mother, Marian Shelton, founded the National League of Families of the Missing in Action and Prisoners of War in Southeast Asia. But once in Russia, Vance started flashing money at the hotel bar, got beat up and robbed; while the attack brought Vance in touch with Gorbachev’s personal physician, who treated his injuries (he lost his spleen), Vance thus missed his chance to address the Academy.

  In a place like San Diego, it was inevitable that Vance and Andrew would meet and conspire—they often favored the same quarry. Vance, born in 1951 and openly gay from an early age, dropped even bigger names than Andrew did. Like Andrew, he cultivated pretty boys as well as the promiscuous, very wealthy architect Lincoln Aston. Vance says that on several occasions Andrew proposed to him that they should work together. Andrew enjoyed bringing people over to the dungeon, where, Vance says, Andrew would just walk around and laugh his piercing laugh. “Whenever he got nervous or unsure of things, he laughed.”

  Vance recalls Andrew’s proposal: “He would be more than willing to travel with me, spend time with me, do whatever and just have fun. And if that meant sexualness in between, then fine, but it wasn’t the initial motivation. The motivation was to have someone who had a lot of contacts, who had a lot of fun, who invited people around. I never needed that.”

  Vance regarded Andrew warily and he resented Andrew’s influence with Lincoln Aston, who came from big Texas oil money. Vance had probably hoped that Lincoln would be susceptible to his schemes, so Andrew was an impediment. “All of ninety-four, you could not see Lincoln without Andrew at his side,” says Vance. “It was disgusting. Every time I tried to get Lincoln to talk to me, Andrew wouldn’t let me. He was like a bodyguard.” Through Lincoln, meanwhile, Andrew was solidifying his closeted La Jolla connections.

  Vance claims that Lincoln had grown disillusioned with Andrew and was trying delicately to extricate himself from his clutches by giving him “twenty or thirty thousand dollars to go away.” Suddenly, however, on May 19, 1995, Lincoln Aston was bludgeoned to death with a stone obelisk from his art collection by a mentally disturbed drifter he had picked up in a bar. Because Andrew bragged to people that he had been with Lincoln the night of his death and had found the body, many in Hillcrest still believe that he had something to do with his murder. The San Diego police, however, flatly deny any connection. The drifter pleaded guilty and is now in jail.

  Vance and Andrew’s relationship began to fall apart a few weeks after Lincoln’s death. When Vance went up to Andrew in Rich’s Bar one Saturday night, he was appalled that Andrew expressed no remorse for their friend’s death. “He acted like he felt absolutely nothing.” Vance decided then and there that he truly despised Andrew. Yet despite his animosity, Vance maintains a cool, analytical appraisal of Andrew’s abilities.

  “In the gay world you’re either very good-looking or you’re very wealthy in order to obtain any comment or be invited anywhere,” says Vance. “It’s unfortunate, it’s a very shallow thing.” Andrew stood out, he says, because Andrew wanted so much more than anyone else. “Being both with good-looking people and being surrounded by people with money was unique to Andrew. He was a pro. Most people didn’t work both ends of the rope. Most guys either just hung with all the good-looking guys or they would work all the older men and stay away from the good-looking guys, because the good-looking guys were competition.”

  Not Andrew. “One of his ways of winning people over and making them think, ‘This guy really has money,’ was handing out large amounts of drugs. It was more of a favor, because that impressed people more than anything,” Vance says. “What Andrew did was be a PR man. And that’s a lot more important in the gay society.” Not only did Andrew connect people, but he did so without charging. “How convenient. How nice. It’s unusual to find a person who would do that, so I don’t have to go through a legalized or escort service where I’m tracked. So he found a niche that provided favors, and people are willing to pay for favors.” Vance says that sex didn’t matter with Andrew. “He provided a much greater favor. He provided people whom these people wanted, or drugs or whatever, and a connect like that is very powerful.”

  Mood altering was Vance’s specialty. People in the know in Hillcrest would never accept a drink from Vance. Guests claimed his champagne was sometimes spiked with rohypnol, a date-rape drug that seems to eliminate free will. “People walked away from there doing things they really did not want to do,” says reformed crystal abuser Hank Randolph.

  Joe Sullivan believes he had a mickey slipped into champagne Vance gave him on Christmas night in 1986. “I called him and said, ‘What happened?’ He said, ‘I guess the champagne got to you.’ Well, I guess it did. He had done this to a lot of different people.” Franz vonRichter, Andrew’s close friend at the end of his life, also thinks he was drugged some years later.

  Buzz English, another young Hillcrest resident, recalls something far more sinister, however. Between 1992 and 1994, when Buzz was seventeen and eighteen, he was part of a young, pretty-boy group who were routinely admitted into the bars and clubs of Hillcrest even though they were underage. They would constantly see Andrew in these places. At 2 A.M. they would be asked to join bartenders and bouncers from the various clubs at early-morning parties. “We used to go to these parties as tokens,” says Buzz, who was raised on a Pennsylvania dairy farm. “We’d be partying in the back room, there’d be sex in another room, and people playing games and watching TV, socializing and mingling. We were there to make the old guys look good.”

  Buzz saw Andrew at several of these gatherings. “He would only talk to people with money. We were told he was a little off.” Although Andrew tried to appear “prude and pristine,” he was definitely on crystal, Buzz says. “He was basically a closet user. Crystal meth is dirty, and people don’t have good lives on it. They lose everything. He didn’t want to be a part of that or look like that.”

  Buzz remembers a party at Vance’s when Andrew was not present. “One of us in our little clique was locked and tied up for hours. Vance is crazy, and I guess a couple of guys from the bars gang-banged our friend. It was a big hush-hush thing, and they advised him to leave town, and he did.” Says Joe Sullivan, “He would get people who were seventeen, eighteen, who were just coming out and just beginning to explore their sexuality, and he would invite them to these parties where all of these very attractive young guys would be running around doing drugs, and it was sort of, ‘You want into the gay world? This is it.’”

  Vance denies all of these allegations. He says the dungeon was used only, “out of a sense of humor. I never took it seriously. I would laugh at people who said, ‘This is so disgusting,’ and I would say five hours later, ‘Are you disgusted enough?’ Please! I just love human nature.” As far as drugs are concerned, he says, “I would only invite one person. And if they ended up having a good time, they better have a good explanation if their other half found out about what happened. ‘Oh, I was drugged’ or ‘I passed out.’ Anything to give an excuse for their own personal behavior.” He denies seducing young boys. “I have a lot more moral
ity and class than that. The truth of it is, I had some pretty wild parties, and I wouldn’t invite everybody. And it was the people who weren’t invited who spread the gossip.”

  One of those specifically not invited was Andrew Cunanan, whom Vance had come to dislike so intensely after Lincoln’s death that he personally told him to stay away from his parties. But Andrew usually managed to show up with somebody who was invited. “After the third time it happened,” Vance says, “I wasn’t surprised anymore, and I even had bodyguards looking for him.”

  Andrew simply had to be in the center of the action, even if he was not wanted—even if the circle he was crashing was way beyond his imaginings. Because of his use of crystal meth, Andrew knew a number of users and dealers who came to sad and sordid ends. Lincoln Aston’s death, for example, was preceded by the farcical tragedy of Scott Sloggett, the owner of Another Video Company Ltd., a gay pornographic studio in San Diego.

  Andrew loved to associate with porn stars and tried repeatedly to act in porn movies himself. According to Vance, he would attempt to refer male models to Sloggett for pornographic videos; he also spent time with Sloggett in his house at Pt. Loma, an exclusive San Diego neighborhood. In addition to being a pornography purveyor, Sloggett was also a crystal dealer. He owed Vance a lot of money—supposedly for real-estate deals—and Vance was looking to collect. Sloggett’s onetime video art director and former partner, Glen Offield, had the largest collection of Barbie dolls in the world. The collection of five thousand dolls, along with thousands of Barbie dresses, purses, shoes, houses, and Corvettes, was appraised at more than one million dollars and had appeared on the cover of the Smithsonian magazine. After spending his workday on hard-core porn, Offield would come home to five thousand pristine unviolated Barbies, which he said, “had never been played with.” Apparently, Sloggett saw this valuable collection as a way out of his money woes.

  Vance claims that on October 10, 1992, while Offield was at a doll convention, Sloggett went to Offield’s house and mixed a batch of crystal meth that blew up and started a fire. The police say Sloggett set another fire in Offield’s house the following night in order to provide cover for the theft of thirty-seven cardboard moving boxes filled with dozens upon dozens of Barbies, Kens, and Skippers, which he dumped in a self-storage locker under a freeway over-pass. The locker just happened to be rented in Vance’s name.

  Meanwhile Vance returned from a trip to Europe. The first thing he did was call Sloggett, who must have felt guilty about holding a million dollars’ worth of Barbies hostage, because he cried and told Vance that things weren’t going well.

  Before Vance could get over to see Sloggett and demand his money, he was told that Sloggett had taken a sedative and was sleeping. In fact, Sloggett had committed suicide by swallowing forty morphine pills. Vance felt the suicide might be a trick, but he had no way to check, because the police would not let anyone see the body. Finally the police allowed the body to be blessed by a priest: Vance Coukoulis.

  To make sure Sloggett hadn’t faked a suicide with someone else’s body, Vance says, “I put on my Roman collar. That was the only way the police would allow me in, to bless the body. And so they brought him out and I blessed him. And I made sure it was him! And also I truly, truly blessed him because I was very concerned about his soul and, because I didn’t want him to be buried and not be blessed. And I must tell you,” says Vance from his jail cell, “the expression on his face was the first expression that ever told me there was real evil.”

  The Barbies were later found in the storage locker room rented in Vance’s name while Vance was in Holland where, he says, “I have an office.” The story made headlines around the country, but Vance Coukoulis was never mentioned. Glen Offield, the owner of the Barbies, had a news conference to announce their retrieval. “I’m, like, I’m numb,” the Los Angeles Times quoted Offield as saying. Brandishing a 1961 ponytailed Barbie for the TV cameras, he cried, “I’ve got them back!”

  FOR ANDREW, SCOTT Sloggett was a trifecta: He appeared to have money, he dealt drugs, and his business was pornography. “Crystal and pornography go hand in hand,” says Vance. “It’s a sex drug, and all it does is just heighten your whole sexual feeling about a million times.” Andrew constantly got crushes on porn stars. His friend Erik Greenman, who would become his last roommate, had acted in a few pornographic films as “Josh Connors,” and pornography held a prominent place in the world Andrew inhabited. “It’s a big business,” says Nathan Fry, who plays the piano for many events around town. “Every day I hear about another friend who did one. People think it’s a high compliment to be wanted in one—it means you’re sexy.”

  Andrew became an avid consumer of adult videos, particularly rough and violent S&M videos. As his crystal use continued, pornographic videos were probably his most consistent form of sexual release. Yet an obsession with pornography, says Vance, “wouldn’t make Andrew look out of the usual at all.”

  Though gays are estimated to compromise only about 10 percent of the population, a 1996 Adult Video News Statistics study says gay video rentals and sales account for approximately one-third to one-half of total pornography-industry sales. These sales run to the hundreds of millions of dollars. About three thousand official gay titles are produced a year. It’s anyone’s guess how many more “candid videos” there are and what they bring in.

  In The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture, Daniel Harris decries “the yuppification of gay pornography,” where “the porn star is increasingly the embodiment, not only of the gay man’s sexual desires but of his social and economic desires as well, his aspirations to lead the carefree life of a lounge lizard swimming in disposable income and basking in the sun around his crystalline pool where beautiful boys in bikinis silently skim the leaves from the waters and then succumb wholeheartedly to his sensual whimsies.” For a lazy materialist like Andrew, these fantasies must have taken on a special vibrancy. “Contemporary pornography eroticizes all kinds of extraneous things,” Harris continues, “chandeliers and Persian carpets, Porsches and convertible coupes, jade figurines and silver candelabra, all of the status symbols crop up on the inanimate fringes of the picture, where they are invested with erotic significance as searingly intense as the sexual images in the foreground.”

  Unfortunately, these pleasurable fantasies, coupled with crystal meth, can turn ugly and perverse, and the squalor of this reality is far away from crystalline pools and silver candelabra. Once again, in March 1996, the drug precipitated murder right in Andrew’s backyard.

  On March 16, 1996, Lou Ball, an “audio-video specialist” from an upstanding Philadelphia family, was murdered by ex-con neighbors who stole his safe—which contained cash from his methamphetamine drug deals—and some of his camera equipment. As it turned out, Nathan Fry had been with Ball just before he was murdered. Fry had gone back to Ball’s apartment to get help with some audiocassettes, and he noticed that the position of a closet door had moved from when he first entered the room. “I got a sick feeling in my stomach and told Lou to get out of there,” Fry says. “Then I left.” Ball was found stabbed to death, and Fry became the principal prosecution witness at his murder trial. Two ex-cons living in the apartment next door to Ball were convicted and are now in jail.

  The untold story, according to Fry, is one in which police seemed to display little curiosity: Ball’s role as a child pornographer. “They weren’t really interested in whatever kind of things that Lou was doing with videos—they were mostly just interested in getting these guys who killed him,” says Fry.

  Fry charges, however, that Ball and Vance “were in coproduction.” Vance would recruit young boys, whom Ball would secretly videotape. “Vance and Lou had a thing going where Vance would get the talent and perform various acts while Lou had video or audiovisual.” The equipment was rigged from an apartment below. According to Fry, Ball ran wires up and installed a false wall that concealed a camera and a peephole.

  “They could pick up somebody who was rea
lly too young to even be walking outside at night, and get them on tape, and then sell that to his buddies, who would pay good money for those types of videos,” says Fry. “The person who had rented this apartment [after the murder] showed me where it had been restored back to normal, with the wall being plastered up.”

  At the time of Lou Ball’s death, his apartment was full of kiddie-porn videos, but the police found little evidence. According to Fry, “Those were all missing when the police came around, because Lou’s friends had run through and gotten all the stash of videos.”

  Vance claims, “I was sitting outside his home when he got murdered. And I didn’t know that until a whole month later.” Vance says that Ball “was a pretty heavy drug dealer, that [his murder] was drug-related, and I know that all of his drugs disappeared except for a small quantity after his death.” And what does he have to say about the videos?

  “In the gay culture it’s not uncommon for an individual to have a hundred tapes. It’s just not uncommon,” says Vance, sidestepping the question. (He denies any involvement with Lou Ball and kiddie porn.) “I would say out of fifty thousand people who used crystal, forty-five thousand would watch pornography, because pornography and that drug go together like milk and ice cream,” he continues. “I’m sure it exists in the straight world as well.” Vance blames crystal for “making you think about sex twenty-four hours a day. The whole system’s become so promiscuous it’s frightening. I believed in the devil after I got involved with the gay society and crystal meth, and then I realized evil existed in human nature and that human nature can be of good or of evil, and I really believe in evil now. Period. And I believe an evil spirit can overtake people, and I believe that’s what happened to Andrew. He changed through the use of that drug.”

  10

  Kept Boy