Skinner had plans for Green. He told him he’d made a big-money deal to dredge harbors in the Caribbean, and he wanted Brandon to navigate the project. He and Krystle also indoctrinated him into the exciting life of international drug sales, promising to send him to Amsterdam as their envoy in a million-dollar MDMA transaction—a far cry from slinging dough for Mazzio’s Pizza.
But there was something creepy about Skinner. Krystle confirmed it during their more intimate moments. When Brandon wasn’t around, Todd beat her, then consoled her and begged for forgiveness.
“ . . . Todd would cry uncontrollably at the feet of Krystle, expressing his undying love and dedication while Krystle would stand there stone cold and emotionless,” Green recalled.
After secretly filing for his-and-her restraining orders, the couple set out to create a new life together. Brandon convinced Krystle to accompany him to the Tulsa DEA to turn Skinner in. During a recent Missouri road trip, Brandon got caught with meth and marijuana and concluded the best way out was to give the feds a bigger fish. Snitch out his rival for Krystle’s affections, and he killed two birds with one stone.
When he and Krystle showed up on June 12, Green told agents Doug Kidwell and DuWayne Barnett that they were in love and desperate to get away from Skinner. In her written complaint, Krystle accused Todd of dislocating her jaw, throwing her to the ground, smothering, stalking, and threatening to kill her. She claimed they’d been separated since the notorious Acid King trial ended in Topeka three months earlier.
Todd was furious when he learned she’d double-crossed him.
“Skinner found out somehow,” Krystle said. “He drugged me and kept me against my will for a day at the Renaissance Hotel, then he strangled me and almost broke my neck the day before Brandon was kidnapped.”
An older, wiser Green remembered her being a participant, not a victim. “Krystle is the definition of wicked and manipulative,” he said years later.
One memory upon which they could both agree was that Todd Skinner was the definition of jealous rage.
On July 3, Skinner dispatched Brandon to pick up an ex-Gardner Springs truck driver named Bill Hauck and drive him to the DoubleTree Hotel in downtown Tulsa.
Before he began muling marijuana for Skinner, William Hauck lived in New Jersey. He met Todd in the Gloucester County jail in 1989 while Todd was doing time for his Camden marijuana bust. Hauck was there for statutory rape.
Tough break, said Todd, but he liked Hauck. If he ever needed a job, he should come to Tulsa.
And come to Tulsa he did. When Bill Hauck wasn’t legitimately driving a truck for Gardner Springs, he kept Todd Skinner supplied with long-haul sinsemilla he picked up for him regularly in Arizona.
But Hauck outgrew Todd’s dope runs. He quit Gardner Springs for a real job with Trustee Trucking. He married and became a father. He had a different life when Todd sent Brandon Green to pick him up the day before the 4th of July.
They’d never met. All Hauck and Green had in common was Skinner’s promise that they both could be in on the ground floor of his new and lucrative Caribbean dredging venture.
Hauck remained dubious, but Skinner did comp his room on the eighteenth floor. Todd shared a pair of DoubleTree suites on the fourteenth with Brandon and Krystle. Brandon told Hauck he’d joined the couple to make a new batch of communion wafers. Todd planned to celebrate Mass on the 4th of July.
Skinner and Krystle threw an Independence Day blowout in their DoubleTree suite and invited several of their best MDMA customers. They partied long past the public fireworks display they viewed from their hi-rise windows. Todd went through his tran-substantiation routine, getting a half dozen twenty-somethings loaded to the gills. Still relatively sober, Hauck drove one of the more polluted guests home, then crashed himself.
The following day, he left the hotel to visit family for a couple days. When he returned on July 7, it was to a scene straight out of Dante’s Inferno.
Hauck saw Brandon lying on the bathroom floor when he entered Skinner’s suite, his denuded skull wrapped in duct tape and his hands taped to his feet behind his back. A KFC cup covered his genitals. As he watched slack-jawed, Skinner kicked the half-comatose boy in the groin—a maneuver Todd called “harpooning him in the nuts.”
Brandon would pay for sleeping with his wife, Skinner muttered over and over. He next jammed a hypodermic of brown liquid into Green’s penis. Give him gangrene, he explained. His dick would eventually turn black and fall off.
Brandon later recalled his agony only in snatches. Mercifully, he nodded off for hours at a time. At one point, he began convulsing. He remembered Krystle looming over him in a white robe, conducting some sort of séance.
“While I was being tortured, she would chant prayers over my body, offering my soul up as a sacrifice to Satan,” he said.
Krystle described the experience as one of psychedelic detachment, like watching a movie.
“His lips would start to turn blue and his lungs would sound sputtery, wheezy, like he had aspirated,” she said. Then Brandon would sink back into unconsciousness.
Krystle came up with the idea of shaving him clean. She enlisted one of the other party guests in her project. At one point, she covered his face with a towel so he couldn’t see what they were doing.
“Krystle told me that my retinas were burned and if I removed the towel, I’d go blind,” said Brandon.
But Todd dreamed up the cruelty coup d’état. It began by wrapping a telephone cord around his scrotum, then using it to lever the full weight of his unconscious body
