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Darling, Wendy Moira Angela Interview version 05/09
Detective James: Uh, just want to make sure it’s on the record, that you’ve been informed of your rights. You do know that you have the right to speak to an attorney before we proceed.
Darling: It doesn’t, doesn’t matter. Nothing matters anymore.
Detective Matthews: When you were taken into custody, you had blood on your hands. We’re fairly certain it’s going to come back as the blood of a dead police, fairly certain it’s going to be your prints on the knife in his chest.
Det. James: We just want to know what happened, Wendy.
Darling: You’re both gang task force. I assume I don’t have to explain who the Lost Boyz are, but maybe I can help you lay hands on their enigmatic leader.
Det. Matthews: Shit.
Det. James: Uh, for the, for the recording, Ms. Darling removed a long, brown wig, and underneath her hair is red, short, spiked with gel- matching the only description we have for Peter
Det. Matthews: You? I don’t think I buy it. Don’t get me wrong- I’m as girl power as the next cop, and I’ve worked with some fine female officers, but you?
Darling: I never thought things would go this far. I want to tell you something, not as an excuse, but because it makes things make sense. Our father was mean, and I don’t just mean angry, yelling dad with control issues, but the when I got my first period and accidentally bled on the couch he made sure it wasn’t the only bleeding I did. But what really ended it was he caught my brother John with fooling around,
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sexually, with one of the neighbor boys, and he beat him up real bad. And I knew, then, that it was really only a matter of time before he killed him. But I also knew my brothers well enough to know they wouldn’t just leave with me, so I cut my hair and had it made into a wig, and dyed what was left to look like a boy. As Peter, they left with me almost instantly, and being Peter was, like flying. All the things I’d wanted to do that I couldn’t, because they were too mannish or too dangerous or too whatever, I could.
Det. Matthews: I don’t care about any of this- skip to the part where you become a criminal.
Darling: Yeah. Well, I was only fifteen at the time. I could have forged a note from my dad to get a job, but I wouldn’t have been able to work more than sixteen hours a week- not enough to make rent. So we started to take stuff. We mostly stayed in the nicer neighborhoods, taking crap out of cars that were nice enough and new enough that they’d be insured. We got into a bad apartment in a worse neighborhood, but we had enough to eat, even if we didn’t have enough for heat. And then one day John brought home the neighbor boy. I made a mean, strict face, and I asked him why he thought he deserved to join the Lost Boyz, and he started to cry, and I just said okay.
Det. James: I’m having trouble, here. I get that you were Peter, but where were you?
Darling: Around. I made a show of it, pretending Peter and I were in love or nearly just, and John and Michael and eventually Cubby were all young enough that people mine and Peter’s ages in love was something for adults, so they didn’t ask too much why we were never together except in the bedroom we shared. It was a side of us I don’t think they were comfortable knowing.
Det. Matthews: But you graduated from simple petty theft, didn’t you. So knock
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off the fairy tale and howsabout you start telling us something useful.
Darling: Fine. With Cubby, we couldn’t just keep taking things out of people’s cars. We talked about taking cars, but we didn’t know anything about selling a stolen car. We talked about a lot of things, actually, before Cubby mentioned that his mom was a meth head. The thing was, nobody would deal to her, because nobody but nobody likes tweakers- so she would always send him out to score for her. So we started doing that, just delivery with the occasional mule job. But then these Norteño cocksuckers got the idea that since we were just kids, we could get pushed around. So one night they snatch me up off the street, and they had me in the back of this van, and were talking all kinds of shit about how they were going to cut the location of our stash out of me. John found a CI who’d seen enough and wanted his high enough to dime on them, and he and Mike and Cubby, and we’d gotten a couple more by then, but they came down on that van with bats. Prick was already cutting into me, and when they pulled open the van and yanked him out, he left his cheap little plastic-handled knife still sticking out of my leg. Michael wanted to curb stomp him, but I said that was too good for a punk who preys on kids. So I took away his ability to have any. Just the balls, figured he wasn’t using them for anything. But I cried myself to sleep that night. It wasn’t what happened to me, but that I put my brothers in a place where they could have been taking bats to people with guns.
Det. James: How much damage did he do to you?
Darling: I was bedridden for days. I had to tell them that I, that is Wendy, was still being held captive, that they needed to keep looking for me. After a few days, when I’d regained enough strength to stand, I dressed and went out the window, and walked through the front door. I told them I’d managed to escape, and said I could take care of Peter from now on. I barely made it to the bed before I passed out. I woke up a few hours later still wearing the dress, blood seeping through the bandages into it, and tore it all off. Once I got better, I figured the best way to
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make sure that shit didn’t happen again was to send that guy’s balls to the Norteños with a note said if they were going to send any more guys at me, to make sure they had some balls.
Det. James: Wait. I thought you worked with the Norteños.
Darling: Fucked up, right? I guess nobody liked the guy whose balls I lopped off. So that night was just the last in a long line of fucking awful things he tried to do. I’m pretty sure they only let him stick around after that because they liked the new nickname it gave him, the prick with no balls. But yeah, most of the Norteños weren’t so bad. We were useful, mostly cause we were young enough and white enough that cops didn’t even think twice about who we were or where we were going. So once we were affiliated loosely with them, a whole lot of other opportunities presented, and we started making decent money. And we started attracting more members, too, until we were a force in our own right.
Det. Matthews: And then the gang task force formed.
Darling: Right. Suddenly, a police captain had the mandate to stomp all over us. But it took us a while to realize we were being targeted by police. You know, at first, you get hit, lose a shipment or two, even if you see officers that doesn’t mean the tips aren’t coming from a rival, or that the cops there aren’t somebody’s pit bulls, but once we figured out we were being targeted, we started spreading some money around. Everything we knew, even everything the Norteños knew, said the task force was too good out the gate. They had someone inside, inside ours or inside someone close. And what we found out was your captain was in with the Sureños. I don’t think he was any kind of member, but he definitely was cashing the checks they sent him.
Det. James: You’re saying our captain was dirty?
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Darling: For an answer to that question, just look at your partner.
Det. Matthews: IA had a file. And there were some rumors. I don’t really know too much in specific, but they didn’t paint a flattering portrait.
Darling: Fool me, I didn’t want to run afoul of a big bad police captain, so I thought I’d just bundle up everything I knew, and yeah, I knew way more than enough, and send it to him, just a little message to say that he might be looking into us, but we’d already looked into him. We’d done that before, when we needed something through customs or passed a beat cop who wouldn’t take a kickback. That’s when things got bad. I don’t know what he had to tell the Sureños, but they flooded into the city. The Norteños we knew packed it in when they realized they were outnumbered 5 to 1. The Sureños started hitting us hard. They probably would have massacred us, but Michael had the idea to make like we were preparing one last big push, lured them out to this warehouse. We set it up to get as many of them as close to
Det. Matthews: That explosion on Fitzgerald.
Darling: Yeah. And that about leveled things, so I thought we were probably okay. Only your captain hadn’t been idle. Peter and I were sharing an apartment by that point, and John and Michael and some of the others had apartments in the same complex, but when I got back from the warehouse on Fitzgerald, your captain was waiting there. He took me at gunpoint back to his home. John was restless, because he didn’t like the violence, so the warehouse really got to him, and he was walking around outside, and saw me leave. John ran into my apartment, the door was still open, and didn’t find Peter. And I think that confirmed for him what I think he knew a long time. But he called Michael, and told Michael where I was. John was pissed, so it was Michael who got some of the guys together to come and get me. Your captain had convinced the Sureños to use his place as a war room, so it was crawling with guys.
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Det. Matthews: That much we know. We’ve seen the bodies.
Det. James: But what happened to you? From what we can piece together, you were in the back, in the captain’s bedroom, when the shooting started. None of the shooting happens in the back room. The captain doesn’t ever get to his gun on the nightstand. What happened in that room, Wendy?
Det. Matthews: We found that crappy little plastic-handled knife of yours in the captain.
Darling: You find his balls yet?
Det. Matthews: (inaudible)
Det. James: That is beyond the fucking pale, George. You do not, you can’t put a hand on someone in an interrogation. Get the fuck out. Fuck. Shit. I’m, I’m sorry. He’s known Captain Hooker for a while, long enough he doesn’t just look past the shit, he doesn’t even smell it anymore. From the sounds of it, the captain was into some shit. My instinct is usually to side with the blue, whatever shade of shit might be hiding underneath it, but, I want to talk to the DA. You’re still a minor, might be able to keep him from charging as an adult. You talk to him about your father, might be able to cop a plea. But there’s something, back when we started, you said it didn’t matter anymore, that nothing mattered.
Darling: John knows I’m Peter. Michael knows by now, too. I’ve lost, lost the only part of me I ever really liked. I can’t be Peter anymore. So I don’t care if they charge me as a grown up.
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