Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [141]
But West also says that men like Doan aren’t uncommon. They hit the clubs, attempting to make dancers offers they can’t refuse. West says that only the “stupid” dancers take the bait. “The dancers I’ve worked with in Akron are the most naive I’ve ever met,” he says. “They don’t want to acknowledge that this line of work can be dangerous.”
Even Sinn doesn’t believe that the women plan to have sex with Doan. “They probably really hope they’re going to get thousands of dollars for talking,” Sinn says. “But then they end up in the hotel room, clothes come off, and then they just hope they’re still going to get paid.”
The consensus among lawyers and cops is that Doan has a talent for profiling victims whom juries won’t believe. Moreover, his appearance—the meek mathematician with superb Asian etiquette—seems to pose no threat.
Even Renee had credibility problems. She was a poor girl who left home before graduating from high school, so she could get away from her abusive stepfather. Though she worked two jobs to support herself, her background fit the profile of a girl primed for trouble. “I thought they were supposed to protect the victim,” Renee says. “Instead, they protected him. If my parents had been rich, I would have won my case.”
Police share her frustration.
“I think he’s already proved that he’s a predator,” Detective Coghenour says. “And he’ll keep doing as he’s been doing until we can find a way to put him away.”
DENISE GROLLMUS is a staff writer for Cleveland Scene. She is a graduate of Oberlin College and a former fellow of the Academy of Alternative Journalism, Medill. Her work has also appeared in Wax Poetics and the Akron Beacon Journal. She lives in Akron, Ohio.
Coda
My boyfriend, Patrick, and I were gorging ourselves on ten-pound burritos a few days after I picked up Hy Doan’s mug shot from the Akron Police Department.
I’d been working on the story for two weeks already, and I still couldn’t pronounce Doan’s first name correctly, always saying “high,” instead of “he.”
Patrick asked to see the photo, already creased into the back pocket of my jeans. As he smoothed out the picture, he gagged on his carnitas. “Mr. He!” he screamed.
“No, High,” I said. “High Doan.”
“No. That’s Mr. Fucking Hy!”
It turned out that Patrick and all his friends had worked with Doan as dishwashers and busboys in high school. Patrick worked with him not at one, but three different restaurants in a span of four years. He developed an affinity for the short-tempered Vietnamese man who claimed to be a brilliant mathematician. Patrick and his friends knew Doan simply as “Mr. Hy,” and, to this day, he remains one of their favorite Akron characters.
Up until that conversation, I’d known Doan only as the formidable sex thief. I’d spent two weeks scouring police reports and interviewing detectives, trying to wrap my mind around a man who’d spent the past twenty-five years cracking the code for raping women without consequence. Now that man was suddenly “Mr. Hy,” a goofy old dishwasher who gave my sixteen-year-old friends innocent lunchroom fodder. When I began sharing stories of Doan’s sex crimes with Patrick’s friends, everyone reacted with total shock. One friend, who’d seen Doan just months earlier at a local bar, actually appeared saddened.
“I can’t believe I bought him a drink,” he said.
Deanne Stillman
THE GREAT MOJAVE MANHUNT
FROM Rolling Stone MAGAZINE
ALONE IN HIS SMALL TRAILER, Donald Charles Kueck had been hearing voices. Daddy, why did you leave us?…Mr. Kueck, put your hands where I can see ’em…. okay, shit for brains, it’s thirty days in the hole…. Don, do you need some help? We’re your sisters…. Dad, everything’s okay now—and it was this last voice that always got him because it was his son, lying in the gutter with a dirty needle jammed into his arm, and he would try to tell his son he was sorry,