The Lone Star Love Triangle: True Crime Read Online Free PDF Page B

looked upset was when she talked about Cliff. She said she’d told him she wanted to leave, but he was arguing with her.”
    On Tuesday March 4, Patrice called Newman Braud and said she was bored. Braud suggested she meet him that night at a club he was playing as Naomi Sims. Patrice asked their friend Josh Taylor to go along, and before she was supposed to pick him up, she called again to ask if Cliff could join them. Taylor, who didn’t like Cliff, reluctantly agreed.
    That was how Patrice came to spend the night before she disappeared in a club named Heaven. Almost as soon as they arrived, Patrice whispered to Taylor, “Watch Cliff for me. Make sure he’s happy.”
    Then she walked off into the crowd.
    “It was very, very weird. His eyes never left her,” says Taylor. “Cliff didn’t say one word, but his eyes never left her. It was a cold stare.”
    Backstage, Patrice volunteered to Naomi, “Cliff’s being a real bitch tonight.” They left the club about one, and Cliff and Patrice dropped Taylor off at his apartment.
    THAT SAME NIGHT OR THE NEXT DAY, police believe Cliff Youens killed Patrice LeBlanc in a rage, plunging a knife into her thirty-nine times. From wounds on her hands, the coroner later determined that Patrice tried to grab the blade and fight back. One stab wound almost severed her left ear; the deathblow – two and a half inches wide – cut through her right jugular vein.
    What happened inside that apartment? The closest I came to an answer was one afternoon while working on this piece. I’d gone to Greenway Plaza, and I stood looking up at the apartment where the murder took place with one of the neighbors. I’d tracked the man down based on rumors that he’d heard screaming the night Patrice disappeared. That was true, he said, explaining, “I couldn’t hear what was being said, but it wasn’t Cliff, it was her.”
    “You heard Patrice shouting?” I asked.
    “No, her . Brandi,” he said. “She sounded angry.”
    After the murder, Cliff methodically cleaned up the mess. He wrapped Patrice’s body first in his grandmother’s quilt with the Dutch-girl pattern, next in Patrice’s peach comforter, and meticulously sewed the edges together, much as he’d routinely repaired seams on the costumes Brandi wore on stage. Then he tied the bundle with two pairs of panty hose and the sash from his robe. Finally, he slipped a pillowcase over one end and drew a blue nylon duffel bag over the other.
    He drove the body and two cinder blocks, which had been lying next to the Dumpster outside his apartment, to his parents’ lake house, tied them with a blue shirt and a length of cheap gold lamp chain, and loaded the whole thing into his father’s speedboat. “He took her to his parents’ lake house,” says Braud, his eyes wide. “We’d all been out there with him. He knew every inch of that lake, and he took her to the deepest part. He wanted to be sure she was never found.”
    Nineteen days later, however, on March 23, 1986, a Houston couple out fishing discovered the bundle floating on the surface.
    IN THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED, Cliff pawned his jewelry, including the antique emerald ring he had given Patrice, painted and recarpeted the blue room, and began disposing of Patrice’s things. When friends called, he said, “Patrice is at the store,” or “She’s out with a friend.”
    On March 8, three days after Patrice disappeared, Brandi West was onstage again in Beaumont. “Cliff was nervous,” says Braud. “He hadn’t performed in almost a month. All the way there in the car, he fussed and practiced his monologue. I asked about Patrice, but he said she was having dinner at her aunt’s house, that she didn’t want him performing and wouldn’t come to watch. Onstage that night, he had the crowd in the palm of his hand. Watching him, I had the strangest sensation: it was like I was watching someone who had just figured out what he was supposed to do with his life.”
    Later that