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Speaker 8: You are now listening to True Murder, the most shocking
Speaker 8: killers in true crime history and the authors that have
Speaker 8: written about them. Gasey, Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker VTK Every
Speaker 8: week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and
Speaker 8: infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your
Speaker 8: host journalist and author Dan Zupanski.
Speaker 3: Good evening. When the body of a young, gay black man,
Speaker 3: Jammel Moore was pulled out of the West Hollywood apartment
Speaker 3: of Ed Buck, a white millionaire donor to the Democratic Party,
Speaker 3: the coroner called it an accidental overdose. The police didn't
Speaker 3: arrest Buck, and the media refused to report on it.
Speaker 3: But just eighteen months later, when a second black man,
Speaker 3: Timothy Dean, was found dead in the same apartment from
Speaker 3: the same drug, the police still didn't arrest Buck, sparking
Speaker 3: a series of terrifying questions. Why was Buck still free
Speaker 3: when two men had died in his home surrounded by drugs,
Speaker 3: How much were his wealth and political connections protecting him,
Speaker 3: and how many more men might have been harmed in
Speaker 3: that apartment. In White Smoke, America's chem sex Killer, investigative
Speaker 3: journalist Patrick Strudwick uncovers the secret world behind this explosive
Speaker 3: Hollywood scandal. Through original reporting, we discover how a cocktail
Speaker 3: of power, racism, sexual exploitation, and drug abuse had been
Speaker 3: detonating in Buck's apartment for years, and how it's connected
Speaker 3: to a wider chem sex scene playing out in queer
Speaker 3: communities all around the world, one that provides the perfect
Speaker 3: hunting ground for predators, but those communities are fighting back.
Speaker 3: In this series, we meet the men who lived a
Speaker 3: nightmare inside Buck's apartment, the friends of the men who died,
Speaker 3: and the activist who triggered a movement to get Buck
Speaker 3: off the streets.
Speaker 1: The book that.
Speaker 3: We're featuring this evening is White Smoke, America's Chem Sex Killer,
Speaker 3: an Audible original, with my special guest, investigative journalist and
Speaker 3: documentary filmmaker Patrick Strudwick. Welcome to the program, and thank
Speaker 3: you very much for this interview.
Speaker 7: Patrick Strudwick, Thank you so much for having me town.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much, and congratulations on this extraordinary bout
Speaker 3: of storytelling this audible original.
Speaker 7: I appreciate that it's been a huge task over several
Speaker 7: years to bring this story to listeners, to piece together
Speaker 7: all the information that we needed to fully understand what
Speaker 7: really happened.
Speaker 3: Tell us a little bit about your investigative journalism background
Speaker 3: and before we talk about exactly when and why you
Speaker 3: decided to do this investigation and wound up with this
Speaker 3: audible original series.
Speaker 7: So I've been a journalist here in the UK for
Speaker 7: the last twenty years and my background in terms of
Speaker 7: investigative journalism was an unusual one in that it began
Speaker 7: thirteen years ago when I decided to go under cover
Speaker 7: to investigate so called therapists who tried to make gay
Speaker 7: people straight, conversion therapists as they know. So I subjected
Speaker 7: myself to conversion therapy in order to expose therapists in
Speaker 7: the UK who were doing that. At the time, we
Speaker 7: knew that this was happening in the US pretty broadly,
Speaker 7: but not in the UK. That was where my investigative
Speaker 7: work began. After that, I became the first LGBT specialist
Speaker 7: reporter in Britain in a British news room, and it
Speaker 7: was really during that period that I began looking into
Speaker 7: the issues behind this case. So in Europe, principally, we
Speaker 7: call it chem sex KEM for chemicals drugs.
Speaker 1: Sex for sex.
Speaker 7: In America, principally it's called p and p party and play.
Speaker 7: And there was a major case in the UK surrounding
Speaker 7: the serial killer Stephen Port. I'm sure will be familiar
Speaker 7: to you and some of your listeners. Stephen Port was
Speaker 7: convicted in late twenty sixteen of the murder of four
Speaker 7: young men and his weapon was the drug GHB, which
Speaker 7: is very powerful sedative and formally anesthetic, and he would
Speaker 7: use HB to sedate his victims, rape them and kill them.
Speaker 7: And while that trial was underwe I began talking to
Speaker 7: principally gay men in London who had been involved in
Speaker 7: the chem sex scene in London to find out what
Speaker 7: was going on beyond this famous serial killer. And what
Speaker 7: I discovered was a hidden epidemic of drugging, sexual and
Speaker 7: physical violence or taking place within this scene that was
Speaker 7: very much behind closed doors because principally men are meeting
Speaker 7: each other for sex, often through dating apps, hook up
Speaker 7: hats and meeting in private homes, so you're behind closed
Speaker 7: doors literally and taking mostly two different drugs, GHB and
Speaker 7: crystal math. The problem with these drugs is that GHB
Speaker 7: is very dangerous because it's very easy to overdose and
Speaker 7: just flippant into a coma stop breathing and die. Meth
Speaker 7: is very dangerous because, as a very powerful stimulant, it
Speaker 7: can radically alter your behavior. It's pretty addictive, and it
Speaker 7: is so disinhibiting and so kind of supercharging that it
Speaker 7: can really bring out.
Speaker 1: The worst in people.
Speaker 7: If you put those two drugs together in a situation
Speaker 7: where few people are meeting for anonymous sex, you can
Speaker 7: see how if one of those parties is vulnerable and
Speaker 7: the other person has abusive or exploitative impulses, it's a
Speaker 7: recipe for disaster. And so I began to uncover what
Speaker 7: was happening within this scene. First of all, so that's
Speaker 7: twenty sixteen. Now. The following year, my first love, my
Speaker 7: first boyfriend from the nineteen nine nineties, ended up in
Speaker 7: a coma from an accidental g HB incident with his
Speaker 7: drink was spiked, and later that year started dating someone
Speaker 7: else who'd also been in a coma for several days
Speaker 7: because of PHB. And so what was happening is what
Speaker 7: I was reporting on in a professional capacity, was seeping
Speaker 7: into my private life, and people around me, friends, acquaintances,
Speaker 7: started dying from this same drug, and I just had
Speaker 7: this sudden, horrible, chilling vision of really A what was happening,
Speaker 7: what was already happening, and B where this could be heading,
Speaker 7: even though at that point I didn't know that there
Speaker 7: was about to be another case which threw in a
Speaker 7: whole different.
Speaker 1: Other ingredient, and that ingredient was racism.
Speaker 7: So in twenty seventeen, a year after the Stephen Port trial,
Speaker 7: the first body is a moved from ed Buck's apartment
Speaker 7: in West Hollywood, the body of Jamal Moore, twenty six
Speaker 7: years old, and the two of them together, if you
Speaker 7: look at them, absolutely fit that format that I just
Speaker 7: referred to. One who is vulnerable in this case Jane
Speaker 7: Now he was young, black gay with no residence and
Speaker 7: was doing some escorting on the side. On the other hand,
Speaker 7: you have ed Buck, an older in his sixties, very rich,
Speaker 7: white gay man who had connections. He had connections in
Speaker 7: high places within the Democratic Party because for years he'd
Speaker 7: both been donating hundreds.
Speaker 1: Of thousands of dollars.
Speaker 7: To key people both in local politics within the Democratic
Speaker 7: Party in Los Angeles and national political figures. So there's
Speaker 7: a huge power difference there. In twenty seventeen, I heard
Speaker 7: about the Jamal Moore case, but at that point I
Speaker 7: didn't know very much. I just thought it could be
Speaker 7: an accident. It could be one isolated incident. I don't know,
Speaker 7: but I quickly started worrying because a movement of activists
Speaker 7: started to spring up. Friends and family of Jamal Moore,
Speaker 7: along with local activists from black communities and LGBT communities,
Speaker 7: started demanding that the police really pay attention because ed
Speaker 7: Bark had not been arrested. And I think one of
Speaker 7: the most stunning initial facts in this case is if
Speaker 7: you imagine police are called to a house an apartment
Speaker 7: building in West Hollywood with a dead body there, with
Speaker 7: drug paraphernalia and meth strewn around, and another guy perfectly
Speaker 7: fine standing over the body, the idea that he would
Speaker 7: not even be arrested for possession of drugs. It's pretty
Speaker 7: astonishing as an outsider, in other words, a British person who, yes,
Speaker 7: I've lived in California, I've spent a lot of time there,
Speaker 7: but even so, I'm not an American, I'm not an
Speaker 7: American citizen. And to an outsider, it's always been very
Speaker 7: clear to me how odd the police are in America
Speaker 7: on compared to many European countries. If you're found with
Speaker 7: a few grands of cannabis, you can be arrested. So
Speaker 7: the idea that anyone could be found in possessions of
Speaker 7: large amounts of meth and a dead body on their
Speaker 7: living room carpet and would not be arrested. This set
Speaker 7: all my internal alarm bells off. So those kept ringing
Speaker 7: over the next year, and that group of activists kept protesting,
Speaker 7: kept speaking out, kept giving interviews to the media. They
Speaker 7: were protesting outside bugs and they were protesting outside the
Speaker 7: Sheriff's department, outside West Hollywood City Council and still nothing.
Speaker 7: And meanwhile, the district Attorney, Jackie Lacy was being personally
Speaker 7: singled out, personally blamed, which is very embarrassing. And what's
Speaker 7: striking also as an outsider, is that das are directly
Speaker 7: elected and so of course their personal popularity really matters
Speaker 7: to them. Yet she did nothing. So again I thought,
Speaker 7: this is this is a really astonishing situation, and I
Speaker 7: just kept monitoring it. What's going on here? I don't know,
Speaker 7: I'm thousands of miles away. What can I do? And then,
Speaker 7: eighteen months after Jameel Wore was found dead in Bucks apartment,
Speaker 7: a second gay man, Timothy Dean, aged fifty five was
Speaker 7: then found dead in the same circumstances, a meth overdose,
Speaker 7: and his body was pulled out early one morning in
Speaker 7: January twenty nineteen, and there was a further flurry of
Speaker 7: media attention. There were further protests. This is now a pattern.
Speaker 7: Two black men pulled out of one apartment, the same
Speaker 7: man standing over him, the same drugs involved, and still
Speaker 7: no arrest. It was then that I realized this is
Speaker 7: something much bigger. This isn't a one off accident. This
Speaker 7: is a pattern, and if two men have died there,
Speaker 7: how many more men might have been harmed there? At
Speaker 7: that time, I just started making a documentary in London
Speaker 7: about the drug GHB and how it was being used
Speaker 7: to rape and kill principally gay men. So for the
Speaker 7: next nine months I was busy doing that while still
Speaker 7: monitoring the situation in West Hollywood. But as soon as
Speaker 7: that was over in the September, I got on a
Speaker 7: plane to Los Angeles and started investigating them. I started
Speaker 7: interviewing as many people as I could, both directly connected
Speaker 7: to the case, but also people with more tangential connections
Speaker 7: but were able to explain what was happening to black
Speaker 7: men in these P and P situations where there's meth
Speaker 7: and GHB involved. And I sort of thought i'd heard
Speaker 7: it all down. I thought I'd heard everything there was
Speaker 7: to know about camp sex or P and P, and
Speaker 7: I thought I'd heard a firm amount about racism in America.
Speaker 7: But what I hadn't heard was what happens when those
Speaker 7: two things meet. And what I began to realize was
Speaker 7: that there are sides to people's fetishes which can be
Speaker 7: informed by racism, and when you add certain drugs to that,
Speaker 7: you're really creating an extremely dangerous situation. And many of
Speaker 7: the black men that were interviewed on my first reporting
Speaker 7: trip invoked the same thing, which was plantation slavery dynamics.
Speaker 7: So there were a lot of well off white men
Speaker 7: in West Hollywood who would entice young men of color,
Speaker 7: Black and Latino to their homes with the promise of
Speaker 7: money or drugs or both, or the promise of having
Speaker 7: sex with other attractive young men when they got there.
Speaker 7: Because if you host a chem sex party a P
Speaker 7: and P party, you can invite ten twenty people, and
Speaker 7: if you're an old, unattractive man that owns the house
Speaker 7: and owns the drugs, and owns them and has the money.
Speaker 7: Then you can get whoever you want there, and they
Speaker 7: may not particularly want to have sex with you, that
Speaker 7: they might want to have sex with all these other people,
Speaker 7: and when there's enough drugs involved, who knows the problem
Speaker 7: being that if you're an older white man who has
Speaker 7: a particular fetish for black men, I think that we
Speaker 7: get into problems when that fetish is dehumanizing, when it
Speaker 7: reduces people to a stereotype, a particular image of a
Speaker 7: black man, or even particular body parts. And the disinhibition
Speaker 7: involved with meth and with GHB means that all those
Speaker 7: dark fantasies that someone might have that normally might remain
Speaker 7: in their head are just ripped open in those situations.
Speaker 7: So you have people who might be in need of
Speaker 7: somewhere to stay, who might be in need of money,
Speaker 7: or might be needed in need of some drugs, either
Speaker 7: because they're addicted or because they just need some escape
Speaker 7: because their life is quite difficult. Entering into these homes,
Speaker 7: and before they know it, they're being encouraged or forced
Speaker 7: to do things they don't want to do, either taking
Speaker 7: more drugs than they want to or having sex with
Speaker 7: people they don't want to or a combination of both
Speaker 7: of those things. So that was my first reporting chip
Speaker 7: to Los Angeles in twenty nineteen, and I published a
Speaker 7: series of articles in early twenty twenty about my experience.
Speaker 7: It is there, But even then I knew that I
Speaker 7: was only just scratching surface, and so later that year
Speaker 7: I then began to pull together a team to bring
Speaker 7: this story to audio, to really go into it in
Speaker 7: extraordinary debt. And so I spoke to Michael Rice, who
Speaker 7: is a black gay filmmaker in New York who'd made
Speaker 7: a film in twenty seventeen about how NEF was being
Speaker 7: weaponized against black gay men by white gay men. And
Speaker 7: this documentary really opened my eyes to the potential for harm.
Speaker 7: So we got together with a production company in London,
Speaker 7: approached Audible, and we then spent the next two years
Speaker 7: making making this ten part series.
Speaker 3: You talk to many friends and people in the community,
Speaker 3: in the queer community that knew Jamel and new Tim
Speaker 3: and also knew of ed Buck. But the thing that
Speaker 3: really revealed the information that is contained in this book
Speaker 3: was Dane Brown and what happened to him and the
Speaker 3: resulting diary that he kept and the circumstances in which
Speaker 3: ed Buck came to the attention of police again, but
Speaker 3: with far more powerful testimony from Dane Brown. Tell us
Speaker 3: what happens with Dane Brown and ed Buck that one
Speaker 3: faithful evening in his apartment.
Speaker 7: Yes, well, Dane Brown is the key person in this case.
Speaker 7: He was the pivot upon which it alas did because
Speaker 7: in early summer of twenty nineteen, Dane Brown had become homeless.
Speaker 7: He was living in skid Row, which everyone has heard
Speaker 7: of and is notorious around the world, and perhaps deservedly so.
Speaker 7: I've just spent time there. He needed an escape, literally
Speaker 7: escapes from skid Row and also a psychological escape. As
Speaker 7: he said to me, he was trying to escape hopelessness
Speaker 7: as well as homelessness, and so he started chatting to
Speaker 7: ed Buck on a gay dating website and they met
Speaker 7: in person. He didn't know anything about who he was.
Speaker 7: He'd not heard about Jammel Moore and Timothy Dean. He
Speaker 7: just thought that this guy was a kind of intelligent
Speaker 7: and perfectly nice man. The problem was his own need
Speaker 7: for escape was so great that really he didn't He
Speaker 7: didn't probably see the warning signs, and before long he
Speaker 7: was living in Buck's apart with him, he had nowhere
Speaker 7: asked to go, And at that point, initially Dane was
Speaker 7: not addicted to math. He would do it occasionally as
Speaker 7: I'd escape, as I say so. Living with Buck, whose
Speaker 7: fetishes were black men, white underwear, crystal math all mixed
Speaker 7: together meant that Buck was pushing meth literally into him
Speaker 7: and constantly pressuring him to take it, and so effectively
Speaker 7: the deal was, you can live here for free as
Speaker 7: long as you take math whenever I say so, and
Speaker 7: do whatever I say. Really, so, Dane was living there
Speaker 7: doing more and more myth, smoking and injecting over the
Speaker 7: summer of twenty nineteen. He became addicted while.
Speaker 1: He was there.
Speaker 7: Addiction to meth, as most people will know, is an
Speaker 7: extremely powerful situation to be in because if you stop
Speaker 7: doing theth that can be very difficult coming off it.
Speaker 7: But you know, at that point he was becoming addicted
Speaker 7: while also gradually learning about Jamal Moore and Timothy Timothy
Speaker 7: Dean what had happened there. So those two things were
Speaker 7: kind of escalating at the same time, and it came
Speaker 7: to a head. He overdose the first time at the
Speaker 7: very beginning of September twenty nineteen, ended up in hospital,
Speaker 7: but again had nowhere else to go, so went back
Speaker 7: and then overdosed again. And it was the second overdose
Speaker 7: which would change everything, but had given him both GHB
Speaker 7: and meth. And if you can imagine that, GHB is
Speaker 7: a huge sedative effectively, and meth is a very substantial stimulant,
Speaker 7: So the two things together are a very odd combination
Speaker 7: and very dangerous physically because your heart doesn't know what
Speaker 7: on earth it should be doing, so it's easy to
Speaker 7: have heart attack.
Speaker 1: In that situation.
Speaker 7: He found himself lying on bucks floor in the very
Speaker 7: spot that Jamal Moore and Timothy Dean had both died in.
Speaker 7: Overwhelmed by math and GHB, Buck had already slammed the
Speaker 7: bottom door into his back when he went for a
Speaker 7: shower because he was feeling awful. Now he's slumped on
Speaker 7: the floor and he's really effectively starting to fade away
Speaker 7: until he began to hear his late mother's voice just
Speaker 7: ringing in his head telling him to get up, saying, Dane,
Speaker 7: get up, get up.
Speaker 5: Day.
Speaker 7: And it was that the sound of his late mother's
Speaker 7: voice ringing in his ears that gave him the impetus
Speaker 7: to somehow get up onto his feet and get out
Speaker 7: of that apartment once and for all. So you can
Speaker 7: see him on CCTV footage walking down the exterior staircase
Speaker 7: of Ed Buck's apartment building, bringing on because he is
Speaker 7: overdosing in that moment and trying to stay alive and
Speaker 7: trying to escape. He then makes it down North Lowell Avenue,
Speaker 7: where Buck's apartment was situated, onto the intersection, and across
Speaker 7: the intersection there's a gas station with a kiosk out front.
Speaker 7: He goes to the kiosk and asks the guy in
Speaker 7: the kiosk to phone nine one one. He's taken to
Speaker 7: the hospital and they look after him. And even that
Speaker 7: would not be the pivotal moment. Really, Buck has only
Speaker 7: himself to blame for everything turning against him at this
Speaker 7: point in terms of the police, because what he did
Speaker 7: was one final act of cruelty to Dan Brown, which is,
Speaker 7: when Dane got out of hospital, he went back to
Speaker 7: get his things and Buck didn't want to give him
Speaker 7: his things. Now, given that Dane was otherwise homeless, unemployed,
Speaker 7: had very few belongings, but the belongings he did have,
Speaker 7: such as you know, a laptop and a phone, were
Speaker 7: absolutely critical for him to be able to get another job.
Speaker 7: This is someone with a degree in computer science. You know,
Speaker 7: he's you know, very employable in the white circumstances. Buck
Speaker 7: refused to give him his staff. So that was when
Speaker 7: Dame said, well, I'm going to go to the police.
Speaker 7: Day went to West Hollywood Police station to report his
Speaker 7: belongings being withheld from him, not to report Buck for
Speaker 7: you know, forcibly injecting him with meth or bringing him
Speaker 7: to the point of death. He started speaking to officers there.
Speaker 7: They went back to Buck's apartments to speak to Bark.
Speaker 7: They told Dane to go and wait for them. They
Speaker 7: went to a local library. Sat in the local library.
Speaker 7: Some point within that the officers spoke to their colleagues
Speaker 7: in the FBI. The FBI had been investigating Buck for months,
Speaker 7: and finally they have a victim who is ready to talk,
Speaker 7: who is completely credible, who can give them extraordinary detail,
Speaker 7: and who, unlike everyone else, had actually lived there for
Speaker 7: several weeks and so it could give them an extraordinary
Speaker 7: insight into what was really going on. Yes, so before
Speaker 7: you know it, the FBI is talking to Dane Brown,
Speaker 7: and when they have his testimony, they suddenly swoop and
Speaker 7: days later they finally arrest ed buck.
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Speaker 3: we just talked about the authority swooping in on ed
Speaker 3: Buck's apartment. What is one of the most profound things
Speaker 3: that they find or important things that they find at
Speaker 3: his apartment at that time.
Speaker 7: Well, it's a good question because they had already been
Speaker 7: there several times, and on each of those occasions there
Speaker 7: was crucial evidence available to them. There was also ed
Speaker 7: Buck himself who would act in a way to protect himself.
Speaker 7: So we later learned from the testimony of one of
Speaker 7: the officers on the scene that when police would arrive
Speaker 7: to visit the scene of a dead body, and then
Speaker 7: another dead body and then you know, an overdose, picked
Speaker 7: him but would show them around the apartment and show
Speaker 7: them pictures of himself with powerful and influential people, people
Speaker 7: in politics. He was donating money too, and so the
Speaker 7: message was don't mess with me. I've got friends and
Speaker 7: high places and you do not want.
Speaker 1: To be arresting me.
Speaker 7: And what was extraordinary is that they are not arresting
Speaker 7: him but by the time Dane Brown's testimony was with
Speaker 7: the FBI and officers and they go to arrest him,
Speaker 7: the weight of evidence by that point was so overwhelming
Speaker 7: that there was nothing he could do say to get
Speaker 7: out of it. So really, on that final swoop, it
Speaker 7: wasn't that they found anything new because they'd already seen
Speaker 7: them aft, they'd already seen the paraphernalia. They'd already even
Speaker 7: after the death of Timothy Dean, discovered a bag containing
Speaker 7: a box which in itself had lots of drugs and
Speaker 7: paraphernalia that Buck had tossed out of the window after
Speaker 7: Timothy Dean died to avoid that being detected by police,
Speaker 7: right and they found it, gave it to the police,
Speaker 7: So they even knew he was discarding evidence, and they
Speaker 7: still weren't arresting him. So by the time they have
Speaker 7: that Dane, they make the arrest and that's that's it.
Speaker 3: I'm talking. I'm referring to the photos, the cash of photos,
Speaker 3: the incredible gash of photos, and then everything that they
Speaker 3: found that supported their case when they did go to
Speaker 3: trial in terms of text messages, and I said photos, video,
Speaker 3: text messages, emails explained some of the evidence that Dane
Speaker 3: Brown was able to provide.
Speaker 7: Well, that evidence that you're referring to was not so
Speaker 7: much provided by Dane Brown nor immediately discovered upon Buck's arrest,
Speaker 7: but rather discovered by police investigators and data retrieval experts
Speaker 7: over the following eighteen months for the trial. So they
Speaker 7: found one hundreds thousands of photos and videos principally, and
Speaker 7: they were taken by Buck himself over many years and
Speaker 7: documented his daily obsession with having PMP sessions with mostly
Speaker 7: black men. So he took pictures of people usually naked
Speaker 7: except for wearing white underwear, usually black men in white underwear,
Speaker 7: and he would take endless photos of them smoking meth
Speaker 7: and you would see white smoke billowing around their faces.
Speaker 7: That's one of the reasons why we called this series
Speaker 7: White Smoke. You would see them injecting meth. And in
Speaker 7: the videos, it was like watching a film director with
Speaker 7: control freakery issues directing an actor, because what he would
Speaker 7: do is direct his victims to the most minute degree,
Speaker 7: how to tilt their head in such a way that
Speaker 7: the smoke came out of their mouth in a particular formation,
Speaker 7: exactly how to stand, how to hold themselves, and this
Speaker 7: was the most palatable of the evidence that was later
Speaker 7: shown in court. What we also saw was videos of
Speaker 7: him abusing people while they were unconscious. He was sexually
Speaker 7: assaulting them while they were unconscious, and in several cases
Speaker 7: it would seem that they were unconscious because of an overdose,
Speaker 7: and that in itself raised a real moral ethical question
Speaker 7: about the trial itself, which I put to federal prosecutors,
Speaker 7: which is this, at the trial, he was not facing
Speaker 7: any charges of sexual assault, sexual violence of any kind
Speaker 7: because all those laws do not come under federal jurisdiction.
Speaker 7: This was a federal trial, so they couldn't prosecute him
Speaker 7: for those. Yet they showed several videos of people unconscious
Speaker 7: being sexually played with by him, people who were not
Speaker 7: even witnesses in the trial, some of whom they were
Speaker 7: never able to identify. There are many victims of red
Speaker 7: Buck who we will never know, who may not even
Speaker 7: know what happened to them, because if this, if they
Speaker 7: were interfered with while they were unconscious because they've been
Speaker 7: given drugs, they may well still not know what happened
Speaker 7: to them. Yet that evidence, those images were being played
Speaker 7: in a federal courthouse in downtown Los Angeles to whomever
Speaker 7: wanted to walk into that building and view the trial.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 7: So this is an extraordinary situation where people are, you know,
Speaker 7: in unbelievably terrible states, being interfered with, and this footage
Speaker 7: being seen by complete strangers. But that isn't even the
Speaker 7: charges that he was up on, and those people may
Speaker 7: not have even known what happened to them, nor that that.
Speaker 1: Footage was being used in a trial.
Speaker 7: But what was astonishing in the trial itself was the
Speaker 7: sheer scale of this, the sheer numbers of photographs and
Speaker 7: videos that were taken, and the number of men that
Speaker 7: this might have related to, because the police still don't
Speaker 7: know for sure exactly the numbers, but over many years,
Speaker 7: we're talking about at least dozens of men, very likely hundreds.
Speaker 7: And as you say, also, there was streams and streams
Speaker 7: of text messages and messages on social media and on
Speaker 7: the dating apps, and you know, in some cases those
Speaker 7: messages were more upsetting and disturbing than even the images,
Speaker 7: because what you could see beyond the scenes of him
Speaker 7: assaulting someone or injecting someone or whatever, what you could
Speaker 7: see was how he toyed with them psychologically. So you
Speaker 7: had examples of people contacting him, saying to him, what
Speaker 7: happened to me, What happened to me when I was
Speaker 7: tied up? What happened to me when I was unconscious?
Speaker 7: Please tell me what happened? And he would tease them,
Speaker 7: he would refuse to tell them. He would say things
Speaker 7: like the picture tells a thousand words, and that called
Speaker 7: he came through again and again. We saw the text
Speaker 7: exchanges between him and Jamel Moore, who knew each other
Speaker 7: for about a year before Jamel died. Jammel was going
Speaker 7: over there regularly over the course of about a year,
Speaker 7: and at first Jamel knew nothing about math, and there
Speaker 7: were these desperate, desperate messages from this twenty five, twenty
Speaker 7: six year old man saying, Oh, before I come out
Speaker 7: again and do more math, I want to, you know,
Speaker 7: find out a bit more about it, or he would
Speaker 7: Jamel would say that he didn't want to do it again,
Speaker 7: or would to have an excuse for not coming over,
Speaker 7: and Buck would break him, would mock him, would just
Speaker 7: believe him, and all the time luring him back again
Speaker 7: and again and again, until Jamel Moore himself was addicted.
Speaker 7: He was not an addict when he met Buck, but
Speaker 7: Buckward begin by giving him lots of money, like six
Speaker 7: hundred dollars on their first meeting, which is a lot
Speaker 7: of money. And he wouldn't necessarily have to engage in
Speaker 7: anything sexual some of the time, but he would have
Speaker 7: to take math. It's an extraordinary case to be paid
Speaker 7: to take Bristol math until it starts to destroy you,
Speaker 7: and in such a way that the other person at
Speaker 7: Buck has complete control over you in a way that
Speaker 7: he gets off on that. He fetishizes that, and as
Speaker 7: a black man, he already has an existing fetish when
Speaker 7: you show up. He would do the same thing to
Speaker 7: so many people. So there would be a kind of ritual.
Speaker 7: You'd come in, you'd have to take your clothes off
Speaker 7: and you'd have to put on the white underwear. Either
Speaker 7: wife hunts or long jobs. Those were his two things.
Speaker 7: Then there was a kind of ritual involved in the
Speaker 7: smoking of the math, the fetishization of the small billowing
Speaker 7: around the face. There'd be mirrors everywhere so he could
Speaker 7: see it for different angles. There'd be cameras taking footage
Speaker 7: off air all why while he's directing.
Speaker 1: This took over his entire life.
Speaker 3: You talk about slamming, and so I just want the
Speaker 3: audience to understand that this wasn't just allowing someone doing drugs,
Speaker 3: encouraging someone to do drugs, but they're actually injecting huge
Speaker 3: amounts of crystal meth and GHB into the arm of
Speaker 3: these people continually, constantly, over and over again.
Speaker 7: So slamming is the kind of slang word used among
Speaker 7: mostly gay men for the injection of math. Typically people
Speaker 7: don't inject JHB, but they do inject math, and that's
Speaker 7: referred to as slamming. And as you say, we're not
Speaker 7: talking about situations of a lot all the time. We're
Speaker 7: not talking about situations where people injecting themselves that someone
Speaker 7: injecting the other person. Now, in Buck's case, there was.
Speaker 1: A range of behavior.
Speaker 7: So sometimes he would kind of bully them into injecting themselves,
Speaker 7: not taking over for an answer, but rate them for
Speaker 7: not doing it. If they refuse to do it, he
Speaker 7: would find a cab and send them back to their
Speaker 7: homeless encambment or whatever. So he would persuade ver believe
Speaker 7: them to do it themselves. He'd also try to persuade
Speaker 7: them to let him inject them, so he would you know,
Speaker 7: bash their vein with a needle and then there'd be
Speaker 7: also occasions where someone would come round out of unconsciousness
Speaker 7: to find him injecting them, which is, as you can imagine,
Speaker 7: an extraordinarily terrifying situation to be in to then throw
Speaker 7: in GHB, which kind of uphends the nervous system, the
Speaker 7: entire body, and your entire psychology. At the same time,
Speaker 7: it denotes some who wanted to have the utmost control
Speaker 7: over another person and in such a way that they
Speaker 7: were really teetering on the edge.
Speaker 3: Yes, let's Jesus as an opportunity to stop for these messages.
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Speaker 3: Now let's get to this trial and due to deep
Speaker 3: pandemic and the restrictions therein. There is a two courtroom
Speaker 3: set up in this trial. First off, explain that and
Speaker 3: who was in what room before we talk about some
Speaker 3: of the dynamics and some of the particulars of what
Speaker 3: happened at this trial.
Speaker 7: Yeah, it was extraordinary taking place during the pandemic because
Speaker 7: of course social distancing had to be adhered to. Everyone's
Speaker 7: in masks and they had to be two court room.
Speaker 7: So we had one room where you had the witnesses,
Speaker 7: the attorneys, the judge, the jury, and then another room
Speaker 7: on the floor aboff with the public gallery at the journalists,
Speaker 7: the activists, and so we were that in this separate
Speaker 7: room on the floor above with two large TV screens
Speaker 7: beaming live what was happening in the room below, which
Speaker 7: was you know, the trial itself. And there's real problems
Speaker 7: with this, particularly for i'd say friends and family, for
Speaker 7: the prosecution, and to a certainly even the jury in
Speaker 7: the in a normal trial situation. I've sat through many
Speaker 7: criminal trials. To have everyone together in one room where
Speaker 7: you can see and hear everyone informs you quite a
Speaker 7: lot about all sorts of elements of the case. So,
Speaker 7: for example, if you can sit in the public gallery
Speaker 7: and see the faces of the jury members clearly you
Speaker 7: can in some ways read their reactions to people testifying,
Speaker 7: you have some hope of seeing if they believe them.
Speaker 7: And also jurors can hear and see the reaction in
Speaker 7: a public gallery when a witness says something outrageous. So
Speaker 7: and then of course you also have the attorneys, the
Speaker 7: lawyers who can better detect if the way that they're
Speaker 7: pursuing a line in questioning and the way that someone's
Speaker 7: testimony is unfolding, whether it's landing right, whether this is
Speaker 7: having the effect they wanted to have. But there was
Speaker 7: a very sterile environment in every sense of the word,
Speaker 7: and a very disconnected one. So a succession of witnesses
Speaker 7: would come to the stand, they would describe terrible.
Speaker 1: Things happening to them.
Speaker 7: In many cases, people in the public gallery would be
Speaker 7: extreme predibly moved, people would be crying, and typically also
Speaker 7: you would have other witnesses saying completely opposite things. But
Speaker 7: the jury had no sense of what anyone else was thinking,
Speaker 7: what the general public might make of this, So it
Speaker 7: was extremely anxiety inducing for everyone concerned to not have
Speaker 7: any instinct about where this was heading. So we were
Speaker 7: all sat there hearing all this incredible testimony, but we
Speaker 7: couldn't see the jurors, we couldn't feel the atmosphere in
Speaker 7: the room. We had no way of knowing if this
Speaker 7: was all heading in the right direction.
Speaker 3: Now, Dane Brown prepares himself for this testimony. He believes
Speaker 3: that his testimony is going to be important. The police
Speaker 3: believed him, and he wants to do something for the community,
Speaker 3: the community that he thinks he's representing with this, and
Speaker 3: he cleans himself up and gets prepared for this trial.
Speaker 3: As you're right, he's an effective witness at this trial,
Speaker 3: isn't he?
Speaker 7: He absolutely is. What's really moving with Dane, among many things,
Speaker 7: is the of course, Buck had got him addicted to math,
Speaker 7: and meth is very difficult to come off. And the
Speaker 7: thing that finally got him off math was the forthcoming trial.
Speaker 7: He wanted to be completely level headed, He wanted to
Speaker 7: be utterly credible. He wanted to be calm and clear
Speaker 7: and direct and to tell the truth. So not that
Speaker 7: long before the trial, which took place in July twenty one,
Speaker 7: he finally came off math, got sober, and over two
Speaker 7: days stood up in that courtroom, facing cross examination and
Speaker 7: told the truth, and his testimony really was a cornerstone
Speaker 7: in the trial because it was so clear that he
Speaker 7: had more experience than anyone else there of what Buck
Speaker 7: was like over a long period, over six weeks living
Speaker 7: in that apartment building, and that coupled with his manner
Speaker 7: which is remarkably poised and gentle actually, as someone who
Speaker 7: had been through real trauma, real horror, were cruelty to
Speaker 7: be able to stand up and be just sticking to
Speaker 7: the facts, not getting overly emotional, not getting particularly angry,
Speaker 7: but just telling it like it was with real dignity.
Speaker 7: That landed, that really landed. And I think that Dane
Speaker 7: really was the turning point in a trial that was
Speaker 7: already an onslaught. I'd say all the trials I've ever
Speaker 7: sat in, it was the most horrifying. There was a
Speaker 7: moment in the series which was so difficult in terms
Speaker 7: of how we approached it, when during the trial we
Speaker 7: were all due to go back into the court room
Speaker 7: one afternoon and we were suddenly told no, it's been
Speaker 7: a journed until tomorrow because one of the jurors had
Speaker 7: an accident. We don't know the details about why but
Speaker 7: she needed to go home because she had effectively soiled herself,
Speaker 7: and the concern was that the details of the trial
Speaker 7: were so awful that that it had that effect. We
Speaker 7: didn't speak to us. We don't know the ins and outs.
Speaker 7: That gives you some idea as to what the jurors
Speaker 7: were facing, what all of us were hearing, and what
Speaker 7: this case really stretches to, which is an extraordinarily call
Speaker 7: the basement and exploitation of human beings.
Speaker 3: We didn't mention a group that arose from this tragedy,
Speaker 3: justice for Jamel, and we did talk about the activist
Speaker 3: protesting outside of ed Buck's apartment. This was a powerful
Speaker 3: vindication for this group and for activists in the community,
Speaker 3: wasn't it.
Speaker 7: It really was. I mean, they went to a herculean
Speaker 7: effort to get this man arrested, to begin protesting in
Speaker 7: summer of twenty seventeen, and to keep going for over
Speaker 7: two years, despite what appeared to be the complete indifference
Speaker 7: of the police and the DA and to a certain extent,
Speaker 7: the media, and if I'm honest, the indifference of the
Speaker 7: white gay community in Los Angeles. This was a group
Speaker 7: of black and LGBT and black queer people along with
Speaker 7: friends and family, and they just kept going. They wouldn't
Speaker 7: shut up, they wouldn't be silenced, they wouldn't go away,
Speaker 7: even in the face of institutional indifference. Best and four
Speaker 7: years to the day since Jamal Wall's body was pulled
Speaker 7: out of their bocks apartment, we had the verdict. And
Speaker 7: to be in that courtroom and to see the judge
Speaker 7: deliver the verdict on nine charges, to find Buck guilty
Speaker 7: of all nine charges, and to see the people in
Speaker 7: that courtroom just rupt with relief, with tears, with sobbing,
Speaker 7: with shouting and crying, you know, right from inside that
Speaker 7: public gallery out onto the street, was just astonishing. And
Speaker 7: again as an alien to the US, as a British person,
Speaker 7: what came so sharply into focus was on that day,
Speaker 7: July twenty seven, twenty one, the day.
Speaker 1: Of the verdict.
Speaker 7: On that day, we witnessed something frankly, almost unheard of
Speaker 7: in the American justice system, which is justice being served
Speaker 7: for black people. For once black people were believed and
Speaker 7: a white man who had harmed them had been found guilty.
Speaker 7: That was such a momentous, just monumental event, and the
Speaker 7: weights of that landed so heavily it felt like a
Speaker 7: really historical moment. You know, this is only a year
Speaker 7: after the death of George Floyd, the murder of George Floyd,
Speaker 7: when you know, the lives of black people and the
Speaker 7: deaths of black people were only just beginning to really
Speaker 7: be taken seriously. And to see justice being served was
Speaker 7: so powerful and so moving. And four years of hard
Speaker 7: work from all those activists, and hard work over a
Speaker 7: long period from the prosecuting attorneys too, one of whom
Speaker 7: Chelsea nowel and we talk about this in the series.
Speaker 7: When I left the public gallery, I looked down the
Speaker 7: stairwell the main trial room in the room on the
Speaker 7: floor below. I looked down the stairwell and there was
Speaker 7: Chelsea Noral having delivered this guilty verdict, you know, thanks
Speaker 7: to her incredible legal skills, and she collapsed to the floor.
Speaker 7: I've never seen that in any criminal trial, right, that
Speaker 7: lead attorney just fall to their knees out of us
Speaker 7: a relief, out of exhaustion, out of just being overwhelmed,
Speaker 7: because you know, just just for us and everyone involved
Speaker 7: in the trial, she'd spent months and months and months
Speaker 7: wading through the most terrific material imaginable, working with dozens
Speaker 7: of victims, some of whom you know didn't want to
Speaker 7: take part, or couldn't see it through or went missing.
Speaker 7: This huge weight of responsibility on her shoulders to finally
Speaker 7: secure justice in a case that had just avoided.
Speaker 1: Justice for so long was enormous.
Speaker 7: So that moment seeing her fall to her knees I'll
Speaker 7: never forget because you could see how much it really
Speaker 7: meant to have People I think don't expect lawyers, particularly
Speaker 7: federal prosecutors sure to be that involved. I think, yeah,
Speaker 7: we see courtroom dramas, and yet we see kind of
Speaker 7: dramatizations of trials where you get attorneys who are a
Speaker 7: bit too emotionally involved, and I think we sort of
Speaker 7: think of that as a sort of a bit of
Speaker 7: poetic license. I'm a part of the screenwriters really think
Speaker 7: in actual daily life that lawyers are so involved invested
Speaker 7: that it really means that much to them. But at
Speaker 7: times it does, and that was one of those times.
Speaker 3: Yes, and powerful testimony from Dane Brown that you chronicle
Speaker 3: in this book and incredible. I want to thank you
Speaker 3: very much for coming on and talking about this Audible
Speaker 3: original series White Smoke, America's chem Sex Killer. For those
Speaker 3: people that might want to check out more information about you.
Speaker 3: Do you have a website and you do any social media?
Speaker 4: I do?
Speaker 7: Yes. You can certainly find me on www dot Patrickstroudwick
Speaker 7: dot com. My handle on Twitter is Patrick strutt also
Speaker 7: on Instagram as Patrick Strudwick and I'm a special correspondent
Speaker 7: for ipaper in Britain, so you can find me at
Speaker 7: bynews dot co dot UK.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much, Patrick Strudwick for coming on and
Speaker 3: talking about your original Audible series White Smoke, America's Chemsexkiller
Speaker 3: My Pleasure. Thank you so much for this interview.
Speaker 7: Thank you so much for having me down.
Speaker 8: Good Night,