The Lone Star Love Triangle: True Crime (5 page)

The Cliff I met in prison was quite different, serious for the most part and adamant about his innocence. “I loved Patrice,” he told me sternly, leaning forward and bracing his body with both hands on the thick window between us. “It was a deeper love. Love between a man and a woman is different than love between two men. It’s more emotional. With two men, it’s more sexual. But she was very satisfied with me sexually. We talked about that.”

He paused then, and sat back in his chair, insisting, “Patrice did love me. But not as much as I loved her.”

THAT MEETING, MORE THAN TWO DECADES AGO, was the last time I spoke with Cliff in person. That day, as portrayed above, he still vehemently denied that he played any part in Patrice’s brutal death.

Then something remarkable happened. In late spring 2011, a friend of Cliff’s contacted me, saying that Cliff wanted to talk with me again. I wrote, and weeks later received a letter from Cliff. The man who responded was markedly different from the one I’d interviewed decades earlier, less cocky, and repentant.

In the months that followed, we began corresponding.

Over the years, Cliff said, he’d begun admitting to friends that he was, indeed, Patrice’s killer. In his letter to me he wrote: “Yes, I’m guilty. Many facets caused me to deny my guilt at first. Shame, ego... I was also ashamed and didn’t want my parents to have to deal with the truth. After being down about seven years, I started acknowledging my guilt, slowly to people in here then later to my dad after my mom died…

“I acted on my own, no one else was involved, nor knew about what happened. There was no justification for it. I lost control. No drugs to blame (we were high, a little valium, coke, grass…) just an argument gone bad. Totally my fault. I saw where anger can lead… Not a day goes by that I’m not filled with remorse. If I never left this place, I’d understand. I’ll never truly get over what happened, nor should I.”

In a later letter, Cliff discussed the idea that he was Brandi on the night he murdered Patrice. It upset him, and he took exception with the account of the neighbor, the one who told me that he heard Brandi shouting on the night Patrice died. “Totally implausible and fictitious…. I am not a Sybil or Three Faces of Eve,” Cliff insisted, referring to classic movies about what was originally called multiple personality disorder, now labeled DID, Disassociative Identity Disorder. “I was an actor. K.T. or Brandi was no different than any of the roles, male or female, I did on stage. They were well thought out characters I created. I was always Cliff at the heart of it. If no one else knew, I knew. I may have looked different, but I was always Cliff.”

What do I believe? I’m not sure. I’d interviewed so many people who thought the line between Brandi and Cliff had become blurred that I was left wondering if Cliff truly knew who was in charge that terrible night. And I didn’t quite buy his short description, what he said about the actual murder: “It happened very quickly – there was no screaming by either of us.”

The portrayal of a spontaneous act didn’t surprise me – picking up a knife and lunging – but I have a hard time envisioning a death that includes thirty-nine stab wounds not being preceded by or accompanied by an argument that includes raised voices. When I wrote him that the scene he described brought to mind a horrifying picture of quiet rage, he claimed that wasn’t true. “It’s just a statement of fact…. Yes, we argued,” he conceded, but still he insisted, “we didn’t yell.”

It’s not unusual with true crime for a writer not to know precisely what happened at that most important moment at the crux of the story, the instant that a life is taken. In this case as in many, there were only two people present, the victim and the killer. I can’t interview Patrice; she’s not available to give an account of that terrible night. As for Cliff’s portrayal, even after his letters, I found myself not completely believing him. In my opinion, the crime was too bloody to be as calm as he portrayed it. How can one draw any other conclusion than that on the night Patrice died, Cliff erupted in a murderous rage?

Photo Archive I

Brandi West at the Parade in 1985.

Cliff with his parents.

Cliff as actress K.T. West.

Brandi on stage in 1985.

Brandi at Pharaoh’s in Lafayette in 1985.

Patrice in high school.

Patrice LeBlanc.

Cliff and Patrice.

Naomi Sims (a.k.a. Newman Braud) and Patrice.