Thursday, December 04, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Cover story: Tweaker town

Pahrump fights a never-ending battle against meth cooks and speed freaks

By Doug McMurdo

Beverly Vigil had resignation etched on her gaunt face as she stood in her orange-striped jailhouse jumpsuit, shackled and defeated, before Nye County District Judge Robert Lane earlier this year.

The fortysomething woman knew she had played her final hand and was headed to prison for repeatedly failing to abide by the rules of Pahrump Drug Court. Vigil was one of the first people to join Pahrump's fledgling drug court program in the spring of 2002. She wasn't a criminal per se; she just bought and used meth and myriad other illegal substances to get through the addict's daily grind.

Lane, the founder of the drug court in Pahrump, wanted to give Beverly a break when he sentenced her to jail time instead of a 12- to 36-month stint in the Nevada prison system.

"That's not what I want," Vigil tearfully responded. "I want you to send me to prison so I can get the help I need. I can't get help in the county jail. I haven't had my own life for a long time. This might be my last chance."

Lane obliged. Beverly Vigil should be up for parole soon.

It may come as a surprise that a small town an hour's drive west of Las Vegas has a drug problem so insidious that local authorities had to establish the kind of treatment program normally identified with the big city. But it's true, with no clear relief in sight.

"I don't see the end to the meth problem," said Detective Sgt. Ed Howard of the Nye County sheriff's office. "It won't stop in Pahrump. So long as there is demand, there will be supply. Meth is a money-making proposition, and there are people who will always take that chance."

Granted, Pahrump and her legal brothels have always been known as Las Vegas' whorehouse, but ladies of the night are not the only vice Pahrump supplies to Clark County denizens. Pahrump is the place you come to buy crystal meth straight from the factory. It seems every wannabe alchemist with a beaker and a hot plate has set up shop on one of the thousands of lots in the valley that range in size from 1 1/4 to 10 acres.

The wide-open spaces that bucolic Pahrump offers to decent folks looking for a little elbow room also attract meth cooks. The caustic smell produced when the poison is made is more difficult to detect here than it would be in the tightly packed, cookie-cutter subdivisions of Las Vegas.

Clandestine methamphetamine labs have sprung up in rural towns throughout the West over the past decade, and nowhere is this problem more evident than in Pahrump, where speed freaks have laid siege to cops and courts. In 2002, the sheriff's SCORPION task force, a team of hard-boiled undercover narcs, busted 31 clandestine labs in Pahrump, more than four times the number discovered in all of Clark County that year, according to state statistics. More than 85 percent of criminal prosecutions in Nye County over the past seven years have involved defendants who made, sold or used meth. The crimes the hundreds of defendants have been charged with range from murder and rape to kidnapping and armed robbery, but the root cause of their troubles is a nasty meth habit.

Nye is not the most populated of Nevada's rural counties, but a separate set of state statistics proves that more action occurs in the Fifth District Court than anywhere else outside of Clark and Washoe. The strain on the community's resources has been significant. Ask any cop in Pahrump what concerns him most in his workaday life and the answer is always the same: Running across some crazed meth addict in a paranoia-fueled rage and hellbent for destruction.

And let there be no misunderstanding: Nye County cops are not the bumbling, good old boy rednecks one might associate with small-town law enforcement. These men and women are highly trained and--thanks to a big assist from the Justice Department in the form of a $1 million grant--reasonably well-equipped to fight the drug trade.

SCORPION members Trevor Meade and John Powell work the graveyard shift. Like undercover cops everywhere, the pair goes to great pains to maintain its credibility in Pahrump's drug subculture. While 99 percent of Pahrump's more than 30,000 residents sleep through the night, Trevor and Meade stalk the 1 percent who might do harm.

It's a full-time job:

¥ March 9, 2002: Mikel McPherson, a limousine driver for the Resort at Sheri's Ranch brothel in Pahrump, is found by a passing motorist, beaten and bleeding in a dry lakebed just west of the valley across from the California state line.

The night before, Chris Knapp and Kirk Morrissey sat on Julie Young's couch in the living room of a mobile home in western Pahrump. The pair smoked meth for a couple of hours as they lay in wait for the Henderson man. Young, a former Penthouse model who worked as a prostitute at Sheri's Ranch, wanted the men to scare McPherson into paying her $400 he owed her for crank she fronted him about a week before the kidnapping. Young invited McPherson over to her home, but the scare she wanted put into the man turned into an attempted murder.

Knapp and Morrissey beat McPherson with a metal pipe for about 45 minutes. Young, an attractive 42-year-old woman, provided Knapp and Morrissey with a power cord they used to bind McPherson; duct tape was placed over his mouth.

After the prolonged beating--at one point it included forcing McPherson to drink a mixture of water and crushed over-the-counter sleeping pills to slow his bleeding, a scene right out of I Love You to Death--Morrissey and Knapp threw the victim into the trunk of his rental car, drove out to the desert and ran over him. At trial, Knapp said he and Morrissey discussed going back to make sure McPherson was dead. Instead, Knapp said he convinced Morrissey they had succeeded at murder.

They were wrong. It took 70 stitches to close half a dozen head wounds, but McPherson survived. Knapp earned a 2- to 20-year term; Young and McGraw received short sentences. The jury at Young's trial was sympathetic; she was found guilty only of misdemeanors. McPherson made a wholly unlikable victim. Morrissey wasn't so lucky. He fled to Kansas City, Mo., certain he had committed a cold-blooded killing. An ex-con, Morrissey didn't want to return to prison. He demonstrated as much on the day he died.

The night of St. Patrick's Day, roughly a week after the incident, a man who spotted Morrissey trying to break into a car called police. Morrissey stood in the middle of a crowded downtown street filled with holiday revelers and pointed the gun in his hand at police. The autopsy and toxicology reports revealed two stunning facts: Morrissey had been shot 17 times and he had enough speed in his system to kill an elephant.

¥ June 18, 2002: Oscar Perez-Marquez, a.k.a. Lobo, wanted to be Nye County's Scarface.

A laborer for a farm concern in Pahrump, Lobo was subsidizing his meager income with revenue received from meth sales. But he wasn't getting the respect he felt he deserved, and it was time to make an example of someone, and he had a person picked out to serve that purpose.

One hot summer night, Lobo provided his younger brother Damian and a couple of acquaintances from his native Mexico with meth and 40-ounce bottles of malt liquor. He wanted them fueled up when Alfredo Enrico Reyna came over in a couple of hours. The beating began the moment the 55-year-old former smuggler of illegal aliens stepped out of his Ford pickup after pulling up to the trailer Lobo had parked on the farm. For 90 minutes the four men beat Reyna as he lay prone on the desert floor. At one point Lobo struck the victim in the head with the butt of a shotgun with such force the stock broke. Bloodied, battered, but still breathing, Reyna was placed into the back of his truck, along with a gallon of gasoline, and driven into a desert area west of Pahrump popular with target shooters.

The Pahrump Valley Fire-Rescue Service was notified of a vehicle fire at the shooting range around 1 a.m. Reyna's burned body was discovered slumped over in the cab.

At Lobo's trial this past October a forensic pathologist testified that Reyna was burned alive. The jury found Lobo guilty of murder with the use of a deadly weapon--gasoline--and a week later the same jury determined Lobo would spend the rest of his natural life in a Nevada prison.

Damian Perez-Marquez copped a plea Dec. 8 to a lesser charge of conspiracy to commit murder. The two Mexicans who helped the brothers in Reyna's murder are still at large, and could remain so for the foreseeable future. Kirk Vitto, Nye County's chief deputy district attorney, admits any warrants for the pair's arrest would be meaningless. "We have no names, we have no Social Security numbers and we have physical descriptions of two very normal-looking men who have done a very bad thing. Warrants are useless."

¥ Oct. 30, 2000: Nye County deputies Tom O'Donnell and Chris Puckett knew things could turn ugly early on a Sunday morning when a caller reported a home was being broken into at the extreme south end of Pahrump. The suspect descriptions fit the profiles of Scott Lavel Zieske and Donna Lee Hewitt, who were wanted in a shooting that occurred the day before. O'Donnell and Puckett were going from room to room with their weapons drawn. O'Donnell opened the door to the master bedroom of Joan Lord's home and there stood a screaming Zieske, armed with a .22-caliber rifle that was pointed at the deputy.

O'Donnell fixated on the barrel and the first shot from the Glock .40 struck Zieske in the leg; Puckett pumped two more into the man; O'Donnell's fourth shot hit the middle of the chest, center mass.

Mortally wounded, Zieske writhed on the floor as the cops shouted at him to tell them where the girl was. In interviews held three days after the shooting and again during a coroner's inquest three months later, the deputies said Hewitt was hiding behind Lord's bed when she popped up with Zieske's rifle in her hands. O'Donnell shot her twice. O'Donnell ordered Hewitt away from the rifle. "I can't. You shot me," were the last words Hewitt ever uttered.

At the inquest a panel of private citizens ruled that O'Donnell and Puckett had acted well within the department's lethal force guidelines. Toxicology tests showed both Zieske and Hewitt were wired like a cheap radio, and had been for days.

The impact on society wrought by meth in Pahrump goes far beyond violent lives and deaths. Nye County's hazardous materials team is trained to clean up clandestine labs. Pahrump haz-mat leader Steve Maison has said the dangers faced by his team are a growing concern.

The recipe for meth is an imprecise science, and nobody really knows what he or she is getting when purchasing the drug. Corrosives, acids, iodine, binder, cut and pseudophredine--the active ingredient--go into the mix along with a laundry list of other suspect matter. And labs aren't necessarily confined to remote homes. Maids at local hotels have walked into rooms that had been transformed into a makeshift drug lab the night before. It isn't uncommon for gravel pit workers to arrive on the job Monday morning to discover some mad scientist had used the facility for his or her research center.

It is estimated that six pounds of toxic waste are created for every pound of product, and the impact the poison has on a user, let alone the environment, becomes evident within months. Prolonged abuse can result in unsightly sores that begin on the inside and work their way through the skin. Teeth rot, nerves fry, brains short-circuit.

District Attorney Bob Beckett estimates there are 6,000 drug addicts in Pahrump, and about 5,000 of them use meth as their dope of choice. If Beckett is right, about 17 percent of the town's residents are a ticking time bomb and Pahrump is a town in the throes of an addiction epidemic. The local supermarkets keep allergy medicines such as Sudafed--to extract ephedrine and the like--under lock and key. Bartenders have been known to call police because of unruly customers who aren't drunk but tweaked out of their minds, delusional and paranoid. Property crimes are down from last year, but a meth junkie will rob his own mother and people are taking more proactive measures to secure their property.

"We take a particularly tough stance against meth traffickers and manufacturers," said Beckett, now in his third term as district attorney. "We prosecute all drug cases in accordance with the law, but you just don't see someone high on marijuana doing the crazy, bizarre types of crimes we see from people on a speed binge. That stuff is poison and it makes normally decent people do crazy things. We want to hammer the people who make it and or sell it and take them out of the community for a long period of time."

But the recipe for meth is available just about anywhere, and that leads to another concern: What do you do when anyone can at least try to cook up a batch of crank?

Detective Howard is a big man with long, wild hair. He wears the attire of a hardcore biker and his image absolutely conceals the fact that the guy has carried a badge and a gun for 24 years. Howard is dedicated to his job and loyal to the men and women he sends out on the street each night to hunt for meth cooks. In an interview, Howard said meth use in Pahrump is worse than it is in Las Vegas. The drug subculture is small in number since the vast majority of townspeople, average joes as Howard calls them, aren't involved in meth on any level.

Small in number or not, some members are very active in committing burglaries, robberies and other theft-related crimes to pay for their habit. "I'd guess about 90 percent of crime in Pahrump is committed by maybe five or six guys," said Howard, "and every one of them is a loser piece of shit with no regard for the rest of us."

And even outspoken critics of the so-called war on drugs admit that meth, all by itself, is bad enough to leave off the list of drugs they'd like to see legalized. One local businessman who asked to remain anonymous confided: "I know people who snorted enough coke in the '80s to choke a horse. They spent thousands, lost jobs, families...but they wouldn't use crank if you gave it to them for free. I know a lot of people who think pot should be legal instead of decriminalized, and these are respectable people who have never taken a hit off a joint, but I haven't talked to anyone who would endorse legal methamphetamine. That would be nuts."

There is hope for the future. More than a dozen Pahrump drug court participants have graduated from the one- to three-year program, and are doing well.

Detectives Meade and Powell know every one of them on a first-name basis. "It's a good program," Meade said earlier this fall. "You can tell they're staying clean. Their eyes are clear, their skin is fair and they're fattening up real nice. The transformation is actually kind of remarkable compared to the wastes they were when we busted them."

More cynical than the younger detectives he supervises after spending nearly a quarter-century in law enforcement, Howard believes there are not enough people in drug court. He believes too many chances are given to users before they get to that point in the system. "We'll be dealing with it until society changes and puts its foot down," he said. "There's no light at the end of this tunnel. Chasing meth heads is job security, and that's unfortunate because I'd rather be doing something else."