The Lone Star Love Triangle: True Crime Read online

  From New York Times Bestselling Author

  Gregg Olsen & Kathryn Casey

  PRAISE FOR GREGG OLSEN

  Heart of Ice

  “Gregg Olsen will scare you—and you'll love every moment of it.”

  —Lee Child

  A Wicked Snow

  “Wickedly clever! A finely crafted, genuinely twisted tale of one mother's capacity for murder and one daughter's search for the truth.”

  —Lisa Gardner

  Victim Six

  “A rapid-fire page-turner.”

  —The Seattle Times

  PRAISE FOR KATHRYN CASEY

  “Kathryn Casey has the roots, the guts, and the talent...She takes her place as one of the best.” ”

  —Ann Rule, New York Times Bestselling Author

  Singularity

  “Riveting”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “An impressive fiction debut”

  —Booklist

  Gregg Olsen is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of eighteen books, true crime and fiction, including A Wicked Snow, Fear Collector, A Twisted Faith, Starvation Heights, Abandoned Prayers and If Loving You Is Wrong. His book Envy was the selection of Washington State’s Secretary of State to represent the state at the National Book Festival in 2012. His books have been published in ten countries.

  An award-winning journalist and novelist, Kathryn Casey is the creator of the Sarah Armstrong mystery series and the author of seven highly acclaimed true crime books, all on sensational Texas cases. Ann Rule calls Casey “one of the best in the true crime genre.”

  Casey’s first novel, Singularity, was one of Booklist’s best crime novel debuts of 2009, and Library Journal chose the third, The Killing Storm, as one of the best books of 2010. Casey’s protagonist is a Texas Ranger/profiler headquartered in Company A, Houston. Kathryn Casey has appeared on Oprah, Oprah Winfrey's Oxygen Network, Court TV, Biography, Nancy Grace, E! Network, TruTV, Investigation Discovery, and A&E.

  Rebecca Morris is the New York Times bestselling author (with Gregg Olsen) of Bodies of Evidence, and If I Can’t Have You – Susan Powell, Her Mysterious Disappearance, and the Murder of Her Children, coming in May, 2014. She is also the author of Ted and Ann – The Mystery of a Missing Child and Her Neighbor Ted Bundy.

  THE LONE STAR LOVE TRIANGLE

  Gregg Olsen and Kathryn Casey

  edited by

  Rebecca Morris

  Copyright 2014 by Gregg Olsen and Kathryn Casey

  All Rights Reserved.

  Edited by Rebecca Morris

  Maps by Brad Arnesen

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the authors.

  Published by Notorious USA

  From the Notorious USA Team

  Welcome to the latest installment in the New York Times bestselling series of stories about America’s most notorious criminals.

  That’s right. No matter where you live, you’re in the middle of Notorious USA.

  Here, you’ll find them all…

  Women who poison their husbands. Drag queens who stab their girlfriends. Mothers who love their children to death. Teachers who seduce their underage students. Teenagers who do the unthinkable to get their way. We’re shocked by most crimes, sickened over others, and laugh at a very few. Most are committed in the name of love and greed, but the bottom line is they’re stupid people doing stupid things.

  We’ve written about some of these cases before. As time passes we learn more about the criminal and about what makes them tick, about their crimes, and about their victims.

  Here’s our expert take on several notorious criminals and, incidentally, how they’re spending their time these days.

  Most are locked up, doing time, and paying their debt to society.

  To do otherwise would be a crime.

  Don’t miss Bodies of Evidence, Notorious USA’s first box set and New York Times bestselling collection about the criminals from our neck of the woods (the Pacific Northwest). Like all of our collection, Bodies of Evidence is available as an eBook on most formats, as well as in paperback and as an audio book.

  Your crime scribes,

  Gregg Olsen

  Rebecca Morris

  Table of Contents

  Cliff Youens — Bloody Sequins: The Drag Queen Murder

  Photo Archive I

  Blues & Bad Blood — The Murder of Blues Singer John Vandiver

  Photo Archive II

  Hurley Fontenot — The Lone Star Love Triangle

  Photo Archive III

  Author’s note

  Tanya Reid — The Panhandle Mother Who Loved Her Baby to Death

  Photo Archive IV

  Notorious

  Texas

  Cliff Youens — Bloody Sequins: The Drag Queen Murder

  By Kathryn Casey

  Please note: Some names have been changed in this piece. They include: Jamie Woods, Jimmy Samuels, Josh Taylor, Steven Grant, and Randy Rodriguez.

  IT WAS EARLY IN THE SUMMER OF 1989, WHEN I checked my post office box and found a letter from Ellis II, a prison seventy miles north of Houston. “I will be more than happy to speak with you now. There are many aspects of the case that are not known that I am sure you will find interesting. Cliff Youens.”

  For three years, Youens had steadfastly refused my requests for an interview regarding the strange events that led to his life sentence, but recently he had exhausted the state’s appeal system. In 1986, a jury had ruled that Youens savagely murdered Patrice Ann LeBlanc, a stunning twenty-year-old with whom he had been living. Her body was found floating near his family’s lake house with thirty-nine stab wounds. The case was baffling not only because Youens and LeBlanc were both bright and attractive, from upper-middle-class families, but also because their romantic relationship seemed barely credible. For more than a decade, Cliff Youens had been Texas’s most outrageous, most flamboyant female impersonator, known on the stages of gay bars across the Lone Star State as Brandi West.

  A week later, I drove to Ellis II, where I was escorted to an interview room. I was there for only minutes when Youens arrived in pressed prison whites. He sat facing me behind a thick glass wall. Slender, five feet eleven, thirty-five years of age, with closely cropped dark hair and finely chiseled features, wearing delicate tortoiseshell glasses, he appeared slightly bleached, as if he had been out of the sun too long.

  “I’m glad you came,” he told me.

  In the years since his trial, Youens had become as popular in Ellis II as he once was on the stage. “The guards tell me I get more mail than anybody else in this joint, fan mail,” he said. “I’ve even had a couple of women who wrote saying they’d fallen for me.” His voice was breathy, somewhat throaty, laced with a soft drawl.

  Throughout our time together, Youens was open and talkative, but each time I brought up the night Patrice LeBlanc disappeared, he became evasive. Finally, I asked, “Cliff, did you murder Patrice?”

  He hesitated, and then whispered, “No. I didn’t kill her. She just left one morning. She said she needed a little space and some time to think about things. I wanted to marry her. I loved her.” Staring at me intently, he added, “There are a lot of people who will never believe it, but for some reason we fell in love. I don’t know why. We didn’t ask it to happen. It just happened.”

  I spent four hours with Youens that day in 1989 and then talked with many people close to him and Patrice before returning to Ellis II a
month later for another long interview. The story was stranger by far than I’d imagined.

  JOHN CLIFFORD YOUENS WAS BORN IN Houston on May 22, 1954, the youngest of three children. His family lived in a large house with a pool in an affluent section of the city called Memorial, one of expansive lawns and pricey brick homes shaded by impressive live oaks. His father was a regional director for Whirlpool Corporation.

  During our first interview, Cliff recounted how when he was nine his sister, Etta Lou, dressed him as a girl for Halloween. “I remember her laughing and saying, ‘Oh, what a cute little girl.’ I shouted back, ‘I’m not a girl! I’m a boy!’ I loved my sister. It was horrible when she died.” She was killed that same year, at the age of fifteen, in a car accident. “Mother was devastated,” Cliff said. “She never really recovered.”

  When I asked what Etta Lou looked like, Cliff replied, “A lot like I do, in drag.”

  As an adolescent, Cliff was spindly, gawky, with a large nose, an impish sense of humor and a fascination with Broadway. “I couldn’t wait to get to junior high, where they had a real drama department. Half the guys always seemed to be gay in the drama club. But I still liked girls,” he said, with a laugh. “But I liked boys, too. It never really went all the way until I started doing drag.”

  Soon he began frequenting bars in Montrose, one of Houston’s oldest and most freewheeling districts. At the time, Montrose was a mix of gay bars, massage parlors, biker bars, and trendy restaurants, not unlike San Francisco’s Castro District. When Cliff announced his newfound sexuality to his parents “they were really taken aback.” Then he showed up at home with “a horrifying queen with red frizzy hair. Mom freaked. She yelled, ‘Get that freak out of my house.’ Later it was Mother who accepted things. Father never did.”

  By his junior year, Cliff was helping out in the box office of the Fondren Street Theater and understudying in a production of The Boys in the Band. Unpacking costumes for a show one day, he pulled a few props together and strutted about in an impromptu impersonation of Carol Channing. Everyone laughed, so on a dare he dressed in full Channing regalia to attend opening night. “And from there it just snowballed. It was at a time when I was coming out as gay, and gay rights were emerging. A lot of the bars had drag shows, and it was quick money. I liked hiding behind a mask. As me, I was plain. In drag, I was glamorous.”

  For his stage name, Cliff chose Brandi West – “catchy first name and simple last name” – and four months before he was scheduled to graduate from high school he took his parents’ credit cards and got on a plane to New York. “When I got there, I was one of the 15,000 people who wanted to act.” He worked as a go-go boy in a gay bar and after four months, “It got so bad I came back to Texas.”

  In Houston, Cliff made the rounds of the city’s small theaters, and at night he played Montrose bars in drag, lip-synching Cher singing “Half-breed” on a horse and Barbra Streisand belting out “People.” What distinguished him from the other drag queens were his brash manner and his cutting sense of humor. In a world dominated by look-alikes who are too often limited to mimicry, Cliff was an original.

  Summing up the way he saw his act, Cliff would say that Brandi was a comedian, “a combo of Joan Rivers and Don Rickles.” Many who knew Cliff would say there was something incredibly tough about the way he reacted to an audience. “It was almost as if he had a split personality. He could really be cruel, and somebody always went home hurt,” one performer recalls. Backstage was even worse. While Cliff would contend “practical jokes weren’t my thing,” others remembered him pulling tricks on the other drag queens, including inserting the sound of a flushing toilet in a torch song and loosening the seam in a dress just enough so that it split open onstage.

  One night, Cliff, two drag-queen friends, and their dates drove out to his parents’ lake house in Cape Royale, an affluent development bordering on Lake Livingston. In full drag, he marched the group into the local club. “We ordered champagne all around,” he remembers. Afterward they went down to the marina to take out his parents’ boat. “I was all hormoned up. There were some fishermen in the marina, and we were swearing as we tried to get the boat out. One said, ‘Ma’am, will you please watch your language?’ I looked at him and said, ‘I’m not a ma’am. I’m a sir. I’m the Youens boy, and don’t you forget it!’” The escapade caused such a scandal in Cape Royale that Cliff’s parents banished him from the lake house for two years.

  As the years passed, Cliff went on and off female hormones like a menopausal woman having mood swings. They gave him adolescent breasts, softened his beard, masked angles as curves. He made foam-rubber hips and concealed his genitals between his legs with a device called a gaff. At times he toyed with the idea of having the operation and becoming a woman. “But I liked being a boy – sexually.” In drag, he frequented straight bars. “It was a real thrill to have guys hitting on me. But I knew they wanted something I couldn’t give.”

  Whenever he could afford it, Cliff swore off Houston for another shot at New York, but never with more than minor success. In 1974, he performed in an all-male review, Boys, Boys, Boys, on West Fourteenth Street. Later he was the secondary female lead in an Off Off Broadway production entitled Round the Naked Round. By the time he returned to Houston, he’d had his nose pared down, an implant inserted to make his chin longer, and silicone injected into his cheeks. Now when he made the rounds of the local theater scene, he dressed as the girl next door, tabling Brandi’s glamour, and claimed to be a fictitious New York Equity actress he named K.T. West.

  K.T.’s first role was in a production of Lenny, a play about the late comic Lenny Bruce. “I knew from the start K.T. was going to die a natural death,” Cliff admits with a smirk. “But it was a real test to see if I could pull it off in front of people who knew me as Cliff and Brandi.”

  Looking back, many years later Cliff would admit that at times it would become confusing. “Get up as me, shower, do stuff around the house, put minimal make-up on to pass at rehearsal, [for the performance] put on makeup as [the character in the play], then take off the stage makeup, dress as K.T., then later out of makeup, to just be me.” Yet, he insisted that at his core, he always knew who he was. “It was always me, always Cliff, doing it and enjoying the artistry of pulling it off.”

  During the run, members of the Montrose Players saw K.T.’s performance and invited her to try out for a part in their new show, Women Behind Bars, Tom Eyen’s 1974 spoof of a women’s-prison-B-movie. Long before opening night, K.T.’s fellow actors sensed something odd. An actress named Mary Hooper finally put her finger on what was wrong and confronted her new friend. Cliff claimed to be undergoing a sex change and pleaded with Hooper not to reveal his true identity.

  “I knew someone was going to ask me about K.T. someday,” Hooper said softly, shaking her bright red shoulder-length hair. “I’ve thought a lot about what happened with K.T., or I guess you’d say Cliff. In the end, I decided it all boiled down to the fact that he just didn’t like women.”

  When the production opened in September 1979, one critic raved that K.T. West “fluttered and fanned with such force, the air-conditioning in the Montrose Activity Center could have been turned off.” Behind the scenes, however, K.T.’s performance received mixed reviews.

  “She ad-libbed and tried to steal the scenes,” says Hooper. One night in a staged catfight, K.T. really slapped Hooper instead of using the moves blocked in rehearsal. Hooper complained, and K.T. apologized, but she soon did it again, giving Hooper a split lip and a lump on the back of the head. “I said, ‘K.T., you just can’t keep hurting me. We’re friends.’ She looked at me as if she was going to cry and said, ‘I’m really sorry. It wasn’t me who did that.’” Cliff would contend that he meant he had hit Hooper in character, but Mary Hooper understood it differently: “I had been hearing stories about Brandi West, the bitch drag queen. That’s when I felt like I had met her.”

  After the run of the show, the two stayed in touch. K.T. didn’
t show up for one of their meetings, but Cliff did. “Here was this sour, sulky, butch guy with a chip on his shoulder,” says Hooper. “He had on a big blue black cowboy hat and blue jeans. When I asked what was up, he said, ‘I just couldn’t do it today.’”

  Word spread that K.T. was in fact Cliff Youens/Brandi West, and the masquerade was over. Right up until the murder seven years later, though, K.T. would occasionally call up Hooper, and they would get together for lunch. “K.T. was a great friend, talented, charismatic and fun. But if I ran into Cliff or Brandi, I would just nod and walk on. I never really liked the other two,” says Hooper. “I felt that drag was her downfall. It was a tough way to make a living. A lot of drugs and drinking. The emcee of a wet-jockey contest in a sleazy bar is not all she wanted to be.”

  HOUSTON’S GAY PRIDE WEEK WAS well established in 1979, and by the early eighties there were more than twenty-five gay bars in the Montrose area alone. As the scene spread to Dallas, San Antonio, Beaumont and Galveston, Cliff and his fellow performers began working a statewide circuit.

  “You have to understand who we are,” says Newman Braud, who was Miss Gay America 1985 and whose stage name is Naomi Sims. His voice is a strange mix of Lauren Bacall and Valley girl. “You’re dealing with this kind of pseudo star. On Sunday nights we would average six hundred to seven hundred people at one show. You’re the community’s figurehead. They are taken by you.”

  It’s almost noon and Braud, who emceed a male strip show the night before, has just gotten up. He has a pink baseball cap pulled low on his head and is wearing a loose T-shirt and shorts. His eyebrows have been plucked in two inquisitive half circles, but he has a slight five o-clock shadow. As a male, Braud appears unremarkable, “an ugly little man,” as one of his friends says, but on stage he is glamorous, alluring, a black Linda Evans. He admits that it’s a bit strange having the world see him as two different people. “Cliff thought about it a lot. The differences were important to him. How could he be so terribly outgoing so much of the time onstage and just this little guy at other times? He was not always open with everyone. I think there was a side of him his friends never knew. He would never really let his guard down.”