Richard Doss–Quentin Goad alleged murder-solicitation relationship

The alleged relationship between Richard Doss and Quentin Goad is a suspected murder-for-hire arrangement that brings Doss’s anger at Eldon Mate into the criminal investigation. Its account is not presented as an established confession: the central claims come from Goad, an armed-robbery defendant whose credibility is in question, and are weighed against evidence that the two men met and exchanged an envelope.

The Allegation and Its Setting

Milo Sturgis introduces Goad to Alex Delaware as a man being held at County jail pending trial for armed robbery. Goad was also a construction worker, specializing in roofing and sheet-metal work, and had completed jobs for Doss. According to Milo, Doss routinely hired people with criminal records and paid them under the table to avoid taxes—a business practice that both explains how the men knew each other and adds a concrete, less respectable dimension to Doss’s standing as a successful businessman.

Goad’s account placed the alleged solicitation about two months before the investigation reached him. He said he was roofing a large shopping center in San Bernardino that Doss had bought cheaply and was renovating when Doss offered him $5,000 to kill Mate. The instructions, as Goad described them, were to make the killing nasty and bloody so that it would be attributed to a serial killer. Doss allegedly handed over $1,000 in advance and promised the remaining $4,000 when the job was done. The proposed payment and the demand for a deliberately sensational murder made the supposed arrangement more than a vague expression of hostility: in Goad’s telling, it had a price, a target, and a desired appearance.

Goad’s Claimed Scam and the Evidence of Contact

Goad denied intending to carry out the killing. He said he took the $1,000 as a con, planning to keep it and leave for Nevada, where he hoped to escape the pressure of having two prior strikes under California law. His version recast the alleged contract as a scheme to exploit Doss rather than a genuine plan to murder Mate—but it also depended on accepting the word of a defendant whose own actions gave investigators reason to be wary.

The timeline Milo relayed complicates Goad’s claim that he simply pocketed the advance and disappeared. About three weeks after the alleged offer, Doss contacted him seeking a progress report. Goad said he answered that he was studying Mate and waiting for the right opportunity, although he maintained that he was only keeping the deception alive. The follow-up suggests that Doss expected the job to proceed; whether Goad’s reassurance reflected planning or continued fraud remained a matter of interpretation.

A month before Milo described the arrangement, Goad had tried to rob a hamburger restaurant in San Fernando just before closing. He entered with a .22 and a paper bag, had the counter worker facedown, and had collected $800 when a security guard intervened and shot him in the leg. The gun was not loaded. Goad spent two weeks receiving treatment at County General before being transferred to the Twin Towers jail. The robbery helps explain why he was in custody when Milo raised the murder allegation, while also giving the supposed Nevada departure a more immediate context: Goad had been caught committing another crime before he could leave.

Milo’s case against Doss did not rest on Goad’s account alone. Three patrons and a bartender remembered Doss meeting Goad at an ex-convict bar in San Fernando, one block from the restaurant Goad later tried to rob. The witnesses described a serious face-to-face conversation; Doss stood out in the room in elaborate black clothing, and a waitress said she saw him pass Goad a large envelope. She had not, however, seen money change hands. The meeting and envelope corroborated contact between the men, but did not independently establish what they discussed or what the envelope contained.

The Claimed Motive and the Case Against Doss

Milo Sturgis said Quentin Goad claimed Richard Doss had explained the proposed killing as vengeance for his wife. In Goad’s account, Doss said Eldon Mate had killed her: she had not truly been sick, and Mate, as her doctor, should have tried to dissuade her from ending her life. Doss allegedly presented Mate’s murder as a public service. That justification gave the supposed contract a personal grievance beneath its cash terms, but it reached the investigators through Goad, not through an independently verified statement by Doss.

For Milo, the account fitted what he already knew about Doss’s anger and the physical evidence that the two men had met. He saw the witnesses’ recollection of a serious conversation and the large envelope as more persuasive together than Goad’s story alone, even though no witness could confirm that the envelope contained money. Alex Delaware pressed that distinction: even fingerprints on cash, he argued, would be difficult to interpret when Goad had worked for Doss and Doss paid workers informally. Milo countered that the convergence of witnesses and Goad’s account made a conspiracy to frame Doss implausible; he moved Doss to the top of his suspect list.

The alleged demand for a bloody, conspicuous killing also sits uneasily beside the actual crime scene. Eldon Mate had been butchered inside his van, but investigators found no blood outside it; the killer appeared to have cleaned himself and the surrounding ground before leaving. That contrast does not disprove Goad’s account, nor does the crime scene establish that Doss or Goad arranged the murder. It leaves the relationship unresolved at the point of the allegation: a reported offer, an advance Goad said he meant to steal, a witnessed meeting and envelope, and a motive attributed to Doss by a man whose own credibility was compromised.

Limits of the Evidence

The investigation could not use the murder scene to connect Quentin Goad directly to the killing. Investigators considered whether the killer had arrived with Eldon Mate, parked farther down the road, or left without making detectable tracks; no one reported seeing another vehicle, but the van itself had gone unnoticed for hours. Those gaps left the practical circumstances of the murder uncertain. They neither confirmed Goad’s claim that Richard Doss had hired him nor established that Goad, rather than someone else, carried out the killing.