Richard's Attempt to Hire Goad to Kill Mate

Richard’s attempt to hire Quentin Goad to kill Eldon Mate turns Richard Doss’s anger over Mate’s role in Joanne Doss’s death into an actual murder-solicitation plot—and reveals how Richard tries to control the meaning of his own actions even as the evidence closes around him. To Alex Delaware, the attempt is not erased by Richard’s later insistence that nothing happened: Richard has acknowledged paying Quentin Goad, and his prepared alibi and talk of temporary insanity make the denial itself part of the revelation.

The admission and its limits

Richard presents the arrangement as hypothetical folly and denies that he made a second attempt. Yet, in conversation with Alex, he admits that he paid Quentin Goad to murder Eldon Mate. The distinction Richard tries to preserve is between arranging a killing and carrying one out; Alex rejects that narrowing, pointing out that soliciting murder is not nothing. Richard answers by repeating that nothing happened and asserting that the unnamed person learned from the mistake. His phrasing recasts a deliberate approach to murder as a completed lesson, but it cannot undo the payment or the admission.

The intended killing and the murder scene

The violence Richard Doss had sought to set in motion must be distinguished from the killing that Alex Delaware investigates: the evidence here establishes Richard’s payment to Quentin Goad, but does not establish that Goad carried out the murder. Eldon Mate was found butchered in his van near Alex’s home. The scene offered a grimly practical reconstruction of how the killer may have worked, while leaving open who the killer was and how he reached the site.

The forensic account suggested that Mate’s attacker used anesthesia and an exceptionally sharp, single-edged blade, perhaps a scalpel or straight razor, with scissors as a possible backup. The cuts were superficial and thought accidental, consistent with a difficult procedure in a blood-slick, cramped space. Yet there was no blood outside the van. The front seat, especially the passenger seat, was heavily stained; thick cardboard cut to fit the driver’s windows was streaked with arterial blood, indicating that it had blocked the windows during the cutting. Investigators reasoned that the killer may have moved to the passenger side to clean up, stripped to remove the blood, changed into clean clothes, and swept the ground before leaving. These details make the act look planned and controlled, but they do not connect Goad to the scene.

The route and the lack of witnesses sharpen that uncertainty rather than resolve it. Alex drove north along Beverly Glen and then west on Mulholland to reach the murder area; the roadwork and congested traffic elsewhere in Los Angeles offered a contrast to the remote, exposed road near the van. Investigators could not rule out that the killer had parked farther away, arrived with Mate, or left no useful tracks. No one reported seeing another vehicle, although the van itself had remained there for hours without drawing notice. The scene therefore supplies a method and a setting for the death Richard had wanted, not proof that his paid approach to Goad caused it.

The defense of control and its family cost

Richard’s account also became an effort to manage what the attempted solicitation would mean for his family. Alex Delaware read Richard’s manner as preparation for a diminished-capacity defense: Richard had begun discussing temporary insanity, even as he presented the episode as a mistake that could be put behind him. The strategy held two claims in tension. Richard sought to reduce his responsibility by emphasizing his impaired state, while insisting that his actions had produced no consequence that needed to be faced.

The consequences he did acknowledge were domestic. Richard worried that his behavior might have upset his children, though he treated his own peccadilloes as something he could handle. When he cooled down, he placed a hand on the sofa arm and cupped a knee, counting off seconds with an index finger before recasting the help his children needed as well-paid babysitting. The small, deliberate gestures suggest an effort to regain command of himself; the proposed care for the children likewise shifts attention from the person he had paid to kill Eldon Mate to the household Richard wanted to stabilize.

That appeal to family responsibility sits uneasily beside the control and anger Alex had just witnessed. Richard had prepared an alibi and raised temporary insanity, while Alex judged that Milo Sturgis would dismiss the attempted murder as no harmless lapse. The scene thus leaves Richard trying to direct both the legal story and the family aftermath: he wants the solicitation treated as a contained error, but its disclosure has already made his children part of the damage he says he hopes to repair.

The investigation beyond Richard’s account

Richard Doss’s admission did not settle who had killed Eldon Mate. The inquiry continued along a separate trail toward Paul Ulrich, whose address Milo Sturgis obtained through vehicle records: Ulrich had no BMW or other vehicle registered in his name, but Tanya Stratton owned a two-year-old Saturn and was listed at an address on Milbank in Sherman Oaks. The lead took Milo and Alex Delaware back to the road below the murder site before they drove east on Mulholland and north into the Valley.

Their search led to a remote cabin reached by a dirt track. Its mailbox was empty; the entrance lay nearly five miles from the ocean, beyond a mile of state land, and vines, shrubs, and trees screened the cabin from the road. Rather than announce their arrival, Milo proposed watching the place from a distance. As they walked toward it, Alex recognized the twisted sycamores as resembling the tree beside which Alice Zoghbie and Roy Haiselden had been propped. He wondered whether Ulrich, also known as Michael Burke, had noticed the resemblance and valued its symmetry and irony. The discovery sharpened the pattern connecting the murders, but it did not make Richard’s payment to Quentin Goad proof that Goad had killed Mate: Richard’s solicitation and the investigation of the actual killer remained distinct strands of the case.