Richard Doss and Quentin Goad

Richard Doss and Quentin Goad are connected by a paid attempt to kill Eldon Mate, a plan that fails to produce a murder but exposes Richard’s willingness to turn grievance into action. Their relationship is presented less through a sustained personal association than through money, competing accounts of what was arranged, and the consequences that follow when Richard’s children and investigators become entangled in the story.

The Alleged Arrangement

The connection first takes shape as an investigative inference. Richard’s deal with Goad appears to have petered out, prompting the narrator to consider whether Richard then kept the matter within the family. The possibility is not established as fact: the passage frames it as a troubling question about how far Richard might have gone and whether Eric Doss could have been involved. Eric had abruptly left his dorm, and the narrator considers a scenario in which his father was in another city while Eric came to Los Angeles for a few days with the keys to his father’s car. The circumstantial outline gives the suspected arrangement a domestic dimension, but it does not prove that Eric took part.

The money is a more concrete part of the case. The narrator notes that Richard had been willing to pass cash in a con bar, an act that makes it harder to dismiss his judgment or trust that he would draw a firm line at solicitation. At this stage, Goad represents an attempted route to violence outside the family; the speculation about Eric raises the darker possibility that Richard might have tried to bring the same business closer to home. The distinction matters: the book presents Richard’s payment to Goad as real, while Eric’s possible involvement remains conjecture.

Admission and Retraction

Richard’s account shifts between acknowledgment and minimization. In a conversation about the damage his conduct might do to his children, he is described as insisting that, despite his poor judgment, the person in question had not actually done anything. The exchange treats the distinction between arranging a killing and carrying it out as a defense Richard wants others to accept. The narrator counters that soliciting murder is not nothing, even when discussed hypothetically. Richard then insists that nothing happened and frames the episode as a mistake from which the person learned and did not repeat.

That language makes the relationship with Goad sound, in Richard’s preferred version, like a contained lapse: an arrangement abandoned before it became action, followed by a lesson learned. But the later disclosure is less evasive. Richard admits that he paid Goad to murder Mate. That admission confirms the essential transaction, even as Richard continues to deny making a second attempt. The account therefore holds two claims in tension: Richard acknowledges the original solicitation, while presenting the failure to complete it—and his assertion that he did not try again—as limits on his responsibility.

Motive and the Family’s Exposure

The attempt is situated against Richard’s anger over Mate’s role in Joanne Doss’s death. The narrator reads Richard as feeling aggrieved and as someone whose need for control could turn that grievance into rejection and retribution. In that interpretation, the plan against Mate is not an isolated criminal idea but an effort to answer a family wound by targeting the doctor Richard associated with it. The narrator also considers whether Richard’s guilt about the longer collapse of his family had been displaced onto Mate; this remains an interpretation, not a disclosed explanation from Richard.

Richard’s efforts to keep the matter bounded do not protect his children from it. He is concerned that his own conduct may have upset them and says they need help while circumstances settle. The concern sits uneasily beside his minimization of the solicitation: he recognizes a family consequence even while attempting to describe the act as something that did not go all the way. When Steve Korn and Brad Demetri arrive at the Doss home and take Richard away in front of his children, the private arrangement becomes a visible family crisis. The children are no longer only the people Richard says he wants protected; they witness the consequences of his connection to Goad.

What the Investigation Leaves Unsettled

The relationship remains important after Richard’s admission because the investigation does not treat a failed killing as an exoneration. Milo Sturgis tells Alex Delaware that Richard solicited Goad to kill Mate and argues that Goad’s failure to go through with it does not clear Richard. The distinction is both legal and narrative: the intended victim survives the arrangement, but the decision to seek a killer remains consequential evidence about Richard’s conduct and judgment.

Richard’s denial of a second attempt also meets the investigators’ skepticism. He had already presented the original deal as folly and denied trying again, yet he arrived prepared with an alibi and was discussing temporary insanity. Those preparations deepen suspicion without, by themselves, proving another solicitation. Milo continues to regard Richard as a serious suspect while also turning attention back to Michael Burke, whose case presents a separate investigative problem. Richard and Goad’s connection thus remains a substantial strand of the inquiry, but not its only unresolved one.

Significance of the Connection

Goad functions in Richard’s story as the outside agent through whom resentment becomes an attempted act of violence. Richard’s later admission prevents the arrangement from being dismissed as mere rumor; his repeated insistence that nothing was completed shows how carefully he separates intention from outcome. That separation is especially strained by the domestic consequences: the children are affected, and they see their father taken away, even though Richard presents the failed plan as something that ended before action.

The evidence supports a precise but limited account of the pair’s relationship. Richard paid Goad to kill Mate; the plan did not result in Mate’s murder; Richard denied making a second attempt; and the investigators did not regard the failed outcome as absolving him. The record does not establish a broader partnership or show the full terms of their dealings. Its force lies instead in the contrast between Richard’s effort to contain the episode as a mistake and the durable consequences of having involved Goad at all.