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But within a few years, he lost his job because of a back injury. Kueck started taking painkillers, got divorced, and moved into an apartment in North Hollywood. For the next thirteen years he had no contact with his family. He worked a series of jobs that led nowhere.When he could no longer pay his rent, he moved into his van, parking it next door in a friend's driveway."He would come in and shower every couple of days," recalls the neighbor, Barb Oberman. "He was like a brother."
The two delivered telephone books together, but Kueck wasn't interested in the money."It was this spiritual thing," says Oberman. "He could make or fix anything. He made some kind of back brace out of rubber bands. He made a telescope from a cardboard tube and lenses that he put into it. He talked a lot about wanting to live in the desert." After Kueck found a place in the Mojave where he could park his van, he moved. But he kept in touch, sending 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, the jackrabbits that gathered every morning for breakfast at the table Kueck had set for them in the greasewood.
In the late 1980s, Kueck's family tracked him down through a friend who was a cop. "My brother and I were teenagers, and both having a lot of problems," says his daughter, Rebecca Welch. "My mom knew we needed him." At the designated reunion time, Welch and her mother sat in a Bob's Big Boy in Riverside, California. "My dad came in, and I was crying," says Welch. "He said he knew I was the one who would be the most hurt by his abandonment, and he had stayed away because he didn't want to deal with my sadness and anger."
From then on, Kueck was back in the lives of his children, trying to make up for lost time. His teenage son, Chuck, who went by the nickname Jello, came to live with him in the desert in what Kueck called his "anarchy van." "My dad was very happy when my brother was out there," Welch recalls. "They were anarchists together, living free, in control, with no government in their lives." But the relationship was volatile. Jello was addicted to heroin, and Kueck would lock him in the van sometimes to get him to sober up. Kueck himself was degenerating, strung out on painkillers and sinking into a deep depression.
Jello finally split for Seattle. In the city, the good-looking teenager defended younger street kids, attended anti-globalization rallies, played in a band called Fuckhole, and spare-changed female tourists with a line so smooth that one, from Romania, took him back home for a month-long affair. Jello managed to kick junk a few times, but in 2001, at the age of twenty-seven, he returned to Southern California. "He was very intelligent, witty, and passionate," says Fritz Aragon, a musician who knew him at the time. "He was an incredible storyteller, like his father. He was also a compulsive liar, the biggest cheat, always in need of attention." Jello fought with skinheads over his anti-KKK tats and did time for assault. Soon after, he died of an overdose in an abandoned Los Angeles warehouse. "He had been trying to kill himself since he was twelve," a friend says."He identified with Kurt Cobain."
Jello's death sent Kueck into a tailspin. He left the desert and made a pilgrimage to the warehouse where Jello died. Shortly afterward, he was busted for slicing a guy's stomach with a box cutter while waiting for his daughter to complete an errand in the Department of Social Services in Riverside. "It was another speed freak," she says. "He asked my dad for a cigarette, but then my dad thought he was making a move for a weapon, so he cut him."
Kueck went to jail for a year and came out a changed man: more paranoid, scarred for life-burrowing deep like a lot of ex-cons into the desert sands outside L.A., waiting for a trigger to strike. He called his daughter every day; when Welch said she wanted to be a cop, her father tried to talk her out of it, saying he would kill any cop-or at least white ones-who tried to pull him over. On his frequent visits to his daughter's home, he always brought toys for her four toddlers, whom he adored, and gave her at least two guns. Once, he threatened to bury Welch's ex-boyfriend in the desert if he continued to abuse his daughter. Another time, he spun a bizarre tale of going to the site of busted meth labs and extracting chemicals from the dirt.
A month before he killed Sorensen, Kueck visited his daughter for the last time. "He almost ran over some guys who were working on the driveway," she says. "I knew he was doing speed. He slept for a couple of days and then he was all right." Before he left, he took a few hits of speed from his nasal inhaler. "He was like Charlie Chaplin," Welch says, recalling her final image of her father. "He was ru
As the fourth day of the manhunt wore on, the killer was still at large and the media were clamoring for answers. Cops from all over the West poured in by the hour. By now, Kueck could have been anywhere-or nowhere. He could have been nailed by a Mojave green-in the summer they were all around, especially the newborns, which were the most lethal. He could have succumbed to hyperthermia, which sets in when you are overheated and you have no water and your temperature spikes to 106 degrees, at which point your brain literally cooks. He could have fallen into a mine shaft. But without his body, there was no way of knowing if the desert had taken Kueck down.
Lake Los Angeles is close to top-secret aeronautical sites such as Plant 42, where the Stealth bomber was developed, and the mysterious Gray Butte, second only to Area 51 in terms of high-tech weirdness, from which Predator drones are launched by night to drag the skies over the Mojave and test the latest surveillance equipment. "We are used to seeing strange things flying above us out here," says Deputy District Attorney David Berger, who had joined the hunt for Kueck. But now, Berger and others noticed a C-130 Hercules flying low over the Antelope Valley, making repeated sweeps, as if probing the desert for the fugitive.
But there was no sign of Kueck until Tuesday afternoon, when a local cop decided to have another look at his trailer. Snakes always return to their lairs, and there it was-a rattlesnake stuck to Kueck's front door, with a knife through its head. Somehow, it seemed, Kueck had survived both the desert and his human hunters, slithering under the crime-scene tape to leave his calling card.
Two days later, Deputy Sorensen was laid to rest at Lancaster Baptist Church. "Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends," said Capt. Carl Deeley, as he eulogized the deputy before Sorensen's family, Gov. Gray Davis, and thousands of spit-shined deputies and cops from all over the country who filled the pews and spilled out onto the somber streets. The grief-stricken cops were uneasy.What if Kueck were hiding somewhere, looking through a rifle scope at the congregation as they laid their fallen deputy to rest? They prayed for their fellow officers who were still out searching for Kueck, wondering why nothing could flush him out, not the bloodhounds, not the two-bit snitches, not the cell-phone signals, not the thermal-imaging helicopters, not even bad luck. They knew that every outlaw in the desert was suddenly living with a proud defiance-one of their own had outsmarted the system. The world was watching, and if Kueck got away, the cops would be nothing.
Then, shortly after the bagpipes sounded and an honor guard placed the deputy's coffin into the hearse for his last ride, they got their break. On Friday, August 8, a signal from Kueck's cell phone was picked up coming from the dilapidated compound where Ron Steres lived. Maybe it was because Kueck's birthday was in two weeks and he couldn't face the idea of another year, or maybe he was just tired of hiding, tired of the whole thing. According to the