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Within hours, the search began to unravel.At 6:14 that evening, the dogs lost Kueck's scent. A half-hour later, the SWAT team received some disturbing information-Kueck's car was dumped a few hundred yards from Sorensen's home.They raced to the house and kicked down the door and did a room-to-room search, but no one was there. A few minutes later, they got a tip that Kueck was hiding out next to his property, on the site of the recently evicted squatter. The SWAT team tore back across the desert in off-road vehicles.When they turned the squatter's trailer upside down, they found an elaborate tu
In 1965, after a series of cop killings in Los Angeles, the LAPD developed SWAT, the paramilitary unit quickly adopted by law enforcement everywhere. But now SWAT needed help. It was dark, and as the coroner's office finished examining Sorensen's body and hauled it away in a van, there was still no sign of Kueck. It was time for the FLIRs-forward-looking infrared thermal imaging-used by the military to target the enemy in Operation Desert Storm. Sorensen's commander, Capt. Carl Deeley, called in the U.S. Air Force. A nearby base immediately dispatched a thermal-imaging plane, which flew over the Mojave at 30,000 feet, sca
But by midnight, as the refrigeration unit in the county morgue slammed shut on Deputy Sorensen, the FLIRs had picked up nothing but coyotes and kit foxes and all ma
With every hour a criminal is on the loose, the chances of finding him diminish exponentially. By the next morning, a thousand cops and deputies had joined the manhunt. Some traversed the desert in quadrants, walking every cubic centimeter of its lonely stretches. L.A. 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 Lake Los Angeles, detectives Phil Guzman and Joe Purcell approached the nuns just as morning Mass ended and asked if they could use the retreat as a staging area. The sisters readily agreed-and so followed a surreal marriage of war and peace as the SWAT team moved in with the nuns, praying with them at dawn and sharing their meals before fa
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 cha
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 ru
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 shu
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.