Quentin Goad

Quentin Goad is a jailed armed-robbery defendant whose construction work brought him into contact with Richard Doss. Goad’s account of Doss allegedly offering him money to kill Eldon Mate places him at the center of the police case against Doss, while Goad’s own criminal record and opportunism complicate his credibility.

Identity and Background

When Milo Sturgis identifies Goad to Alex Delaware, Goad is being held in county jail awaiting trial for armed robbery. His mug shot shows a heavyset white man with a shaved head and a black goatee. Outside the robbery case, he works in construction, including roofing and sheet-metal jobs, and has completed work for Doss. That work connection gives Goad a practical route into Doss’s orbit, but also leaves room for Doss’s later explanation that any cash passed between them could have been payment for labor.

Alleged Murder-for-Hire Approach and the Robbery

According to Goad, his construction work brought him into contact with Richard Doss on a roofing project at a large shopping center in San Bernardino that Doss had bought cheaply and was refurbishing. Goad said Doss offered him $5,000 to kill Eldon Mate, asking that the killing be made bloody and appear to be the work of a serial killer. The alleged payment was divided into $1,000 up front and $4,000 after the job. Goad claimed he accepted the advance not to carry out the murder but to cheat Doss and leave town with the money; he had already been thinking about moving to Nevada because two California strikes made him nervous.

Goad’s account placed him under pressure from Doss even though, he insisted, he had never planned to act. About three weeks after the approach, Doss contacted him for a progress report. Goad told him he was watching Mate and waiting for the right opportunity, a stall that made the supposed contract sound active while preserving Goad’s claim that the whole arrangement was a scam. The distinction mattered to the investigation: the allegation connected Doss to a proposed killing, but its principal source was a jailed habitual offender describing a bargain he said he had taken money to fake.

A month before the conversation in which Milo Sturgis described the allegation, Goad committed a separate robbery at a hamburger restaurant in San Fernando shortly before closing. Carrying a paper bag and a .22, he had forced the counter boy facedown and gathered about $800 when a security guard appeared and subdued him. The guard shot Goad in the leg; the wound was described as superficial, and Goad spent two weeks at County General receiving treatment before being transferred to the Twin Towers. The gun was not even loaded, but the attempted robbery had put him in custody awaiting trial and supplied the immediate circumstances in which his story about Doss could reach the police.

Testimony, Credibility, and the Case Against Doss

Goad attributed a motive to Richard Doss as well as an alleged payment: he said Doss claimed that Eldon Mate had murdered his wife by helping her die, and argued that Mate, as a doctor, should have recognized she was not truly sick and tried to dissuade her. Doss reportedly cast killing Mate as a public service. The account transformed private grief and anger into a purported justification for murder, but its force depended on Goad’s word. Milo Sturgis regarded the story as credible; Alex Delaware, by contrast, questioned what evidence could establish the purpose of any cash exchanged between a contractor and someone who had hired him for work.

Doss’s attorney, Joe Safer, presented the allegation as fragile: its source was a habitual felon facing a possible life sentence under California’s three-strikes law, while the reported corroboration was an eyewitness account of an envelope changing hands in a poorly lit bar, with neither the people involved nor the purpose of the exchange clearly established. Doss said he had no specific memory of that meeting, but maintained that if it occurred, he had been paying Goad, as he customarily paid workers who needed cash. The competing accounts left Goad in a consequential but compromised position: he was Milo’s principal witness against Doss, while his own explanation—that he had accepted money without intending to kill Mate—made his testimony both central to the case and open to challenge.

Role in the Investigation and Limits of the Evidence

Milo Sturgis’s account also includes a small detail that sharpens the dispute over Goad’s credibility: Goad said the cash he kept was meant to buy Greyhound fare, money to tide him over until the San Fernando robbery. Sturgis treats that explanation as consistent with Goad’s opportunism, not proof that the murder-for-hire story was invented; he rejects the alternative that witnesses in the bar were conspiring to frame Richard Doss. The same facts can therefore be read in opposite ways: Goad’s willingness to take money and flee makes him a practiced schemer, yet does not by itself disprove his claim that Doss proposed the killing.

The alleged arrangement also becomes a failed lead with consequences beyond Goad. Alex Delaware considers whether, once the plan involving Goad petered out, Richard Doss might have turned to his own son, Eric Doss. That is Alex’s suspicion, not an established fact, and it shows how Goad’s account expands the investigation while leaving its central uncertainties intact: whether Doss truly commissioned the murder, what the cash represented, and whether anyone else became involved.

Goad’s importance lies in that unresolved tension. He is neither an independent observer nor a proven participant in Mate’s murder: he admits taking the advance, says he never intended to carry out the job, and is awaiting trial for a separate armed robbery. His story gives Sturgis a direct accusation and a reported motive, but its source and the ordinary contractor-client explanation offered for cash payments prevent accusation from becoming certainty. In the evidence available here, Goad remains a consequential witness whose account redirects suspicion without settling the case.