Richard Doss Allegedly Hires Goad to Kill Mate

The alleged murder-for-hire plot turns Richard Doss, a businessman already entangled in the dispute over Eldon Mate’s role in his wife’s death, into a suspect in Mate’s killing. The account comes through Quentin Goad, a convicted robber whose credibility is doubtful; investigators also cite witnesses who place Doss and Goad together and saw Doss pass him an envelope. The distinction between allegation and proof remains central: Goad said he never intended to kill Mate, and the witnesses did not actually see cash change hands.

The Alleged Offer and Goad’s Account

According to Goad, Doss approached him about two months before the investigation while Goad was roofing a large shopping center in San Bernardino. Doss had bought the property cheaply and was refurbishing it, and Goad had done construction work for him before. Goad said Doss offered him $5,000 to kill Mate, specifying that the murder should be nasty and bloody so that it would be attributed to a serial killer. The proposed payment was divided into $1,000 up front and another $4,000 after the killing.

Goad told investigators that he accepted the initial money without intending to carry out the murder. He described the arrangement as a way to con Doss, take the $1,000, and leave town. He had wanted to move to Nevada because he already had two strikes against him in California and feared the consequences of another conviction. His later robbery undermined any picture of him as a dependable witness: a month before the account was discussed, he tried to rob a hamburger restaurant in San Fernando with an unloaded .22 and a paper bag, but a security guard shot him in the leg and stopped the robbery. After two weeks receiving treatment at County General, he was transferred to Twin Towers. The failed robbery explains why Goad was in custody, but it does not by itself establish whether Doss made the offer he described.

Corroboration, Motive, and the Limits of the Case

Goad’s story acquired a separate, circumstantial support when investigators traced a meeting between him and Richard Doss to an ex-convict bar in San Fernando. Three drinkers and the bartender recalled the pair in a serious face-to-face conversation; a waitress said she saw Doss pass Goad a large envelope. Doss stood out in the room in fancy black clothes, and the witnesses had no apparent reason to lie. But the waitress had not seen money itself change hands, leaving the envelope suggestive rather than conclusive evidence of payment.

The timing also raised questions. About three weeks after the alleged offer, Doss contacted Goad for a progress report. Goad claimed he answered that he was watching Eldon Mate and waiting for the right opportunity, although he said he had never actually intended to act. The follow-up made the arrangement harder to dismiss as a single, misunderstood encounter, but its account still came from Goad, a man who admitted taking money as part of a deception.

As Milo Sturgis explained the alleged motive to Alex Delaware, Goad said Doss had described Mate as responsible for his wife’s death: in Doss’s telling, she had not truly been ill, and Mate, as a doctor, should have recognized that and tried to dissuade her. Doss had allegedly presented killing Mate as a public service. The charge connected the proposed murder to Doss’s anger over the doctor’s role, but it remained Goad’s report of what Doss had said, not an independently established account of Doss’s words or intentions.

The investigators’ suspicion was strengthened by Doss’s business dealings with Goad. Goad had worked construction for him, and Doss reportedly hired formerly incarcerated workers and paid them off the books to avoid taxes. That history complicated the value of any fingerprints found on money: contact between the two men could have arisen from ordinary work as well as an alleged criminal payment. The witnesses’ account of the envelope and the history of their employment therefore pointed toward a possible arrangement without resolving what the envelope contained or proving that Doss commissioned the killing.

The Murder Scene and the Limits of Attribution

The physical circumstances of Eldon Mate’s killing made the question of who arranged it harder to answer, not easier. Alex Delaware went to the site at seven-thirty, driving north on Beverly Glen before turning west onto Mulholland Drive. The road wound past isolated homes and empty lots, then climbed through brush onto packed earth. At the scene, investigators could not establish that another vehicle had accompanied Mate’s van: no one had reported seeing one, and the van itself had remained there for hours without attracting notice. The only shoeprints found were those of the people who discovered it. Those absences left room for a killer who had approached separately, parked beyond the area searched, or left no discernible tracks, but they did not identify that person as Richard Doss or connect him to Goad’s account.

The van showed evidence of deliberate, close-quarters violence and unusually careful cleanup. The coroner considered Mate’s superficial cuts probably accidental slips during the attack; the weapon was very sharp and single-edged, perhaps a scalpel or straight razor, with scissors possibly used as backup. Blood was concentrated inside the van, especially on the passenger seat, while not a speck was found outside. Milo Sturgis reasoned that the killer may have worked in the van, moved to the passenger side to clean up, stripped and wiped away blood, changed clothes, and swept the ground before leaving. That reconstruction was an investigative hypothesis, not an identification of the killer; it also left open how someone managed a bloody procedure in darkness without being seen.

The improvised materials in the van suggested planning around the work itself. Sheets of thick cardboard, cut to fit the windows and streaked with arterial blood, had been used to block the view inside; a mattress lay beneath Mate. Sturgis suspected Mate had brought these items because they suited his practice of helping people die, and proposed that the intended roles had been reversed: Mate arrived prepared to act as the Angel of Death but became the victim instead. The scene therefore established a calculated murder with signs of preparation, while supplying no direct evidence that Doss had commissioned it. Against Goad’s claim, the distinction mattered: a bloody, carefully concealed killing could fit the requested manner of murder, but resemblance to the alleged plan could not by itself prove who had proposed or carried it out.

The Investigation’s Expanding Suspect Field

The inquiry into Mate’s killing did not remain confined to the accusation against Richard Doss. After Alex Delaware returned to the murder site, Milo Sturgis drove east along Mulholland and then north into the Valley; he had used DMV records to trace an address connected to Tanya Stratton, whose Saturn was registered at a Sherman Oaks address. This line of inquiry led the investigators away from the immediate scene and toward another possible suspect, Paul Ulrich, later identified as Michael Burke.

The address led them to a weathered, secluded property reached by a narrow dirt track. Its mailbox stood amid vines, and the cabin was barely visible through pine, gum, and sycamore trees. One sycamore recalled the tree where Alice Zoghbie and Roy Haiselden had been propped, a resemblance that made Delaware suspect Ulrich or Burke might have noticed the same symmetry. This developing trail widened the murder investigation beyond Goad’s allegation against Doss: the evidence catalogued here records the accusation and its limits, not a final determination of who killed Mate.