'Not a violent person'

Brandon Mageli recalls the night last August as he and his fiancée, Brianna Green, sat in a park behind his apartment in Jackson Hole, Wyo., and listened to the sobs of Kenny Richard.

“He looked at both of us. His eyes were just full of tears and he was like, ‘Guys, one day I’m gonna snap … and I’m gonna hurt somebody,’” Mageli said in a recent interview.

Cyril Kenneth Richard, called Kenny by his friends, was having another of many emotional breakdowns, Mageli said. The breakdowns began after a crippling car accident in 2005 which left Richard in constant pain. the 22-year-old man, now accused of deliberate homicide and evidence tampering, said in a Kaimin interview that he does not remember that conversation ever taking place, but Mageli and Green say they both recall it vividly.

Mageli said for days afterward Richard felt hopeless and haunted by this strung-out, waking fear that he might hurt someone.

Richard lived out that nightmare six months later when, on the night of Feb. 20, he allegedly stabbed his friend and roommate, Michael Meadows, 31, to death in their Missoula apartment. He has told police it was self-defense.

Richard also told police that he wrapped the lifeless body in a blanket and packed him in the back of his car before driving almost 30 miles west of town to a bridge spanning the Clark Fork River and shoving the wrapped remains of his friend over the side to the frigid waters below.

Divers combing the river have not recovered the body of the 31-year-old man with whom Richard had spent almost every day of the past year. Whether it was talking, partying or even hiking or floating the river, the two men were nearly inseparable, according to their friends.

Richard stands accused of killing the man whom friends say he commiserated with over many months as they sought to cope with each other’s feelings of despair.
A splash echoing in the night was the last sound heard from the man that friends had come to think of as Kenny Richard’s brother.

• • •

To many who knew him in the outdoorsy town of Jackson Hole, Richard was the last person they would expect could exhibit such violent behavior. His MySpace page depicts a textbook college kid, posing with friends during long nights of drinking, often in rooms plastered with posters of the movie “Animal House” and bikini babes.

He reveals in his bio that “I am a hick at heart and like to shoot guns and ride four wheelers at my ranch in ‘Montayna.’” Richard has family in the Bitterroot Valley. His page also says he wants to meet “a chick who likes to have a good time and enjoy life, and who is kind of huggable.”

The MySpace page, which was last logged on to three days before Meadows was killed, contains a personal survey with a question asking what Richard wanted to be when he grew up.

“A good man,” he answered.

Jessica Laubach, 20, who now resides in San Diego, became friends with Richard in Jackson a year ago after meeting him by chance in a grocery store. She said his smile caught her attention.

“He became one of my good friends,” Laubach said. “He was always happy. He was always smiling.”

Laubach could not help but giggle as she hinted that she might have been smitten with Richard at one point, early in their relationship.

“He’s a good-looking guy. He’s a smooth talker,” Laubach said. “He almost won me over until I saw him doing the same thing to another chick.”

A champion “player” to many of his friends, Richard was seen as a guy who could land any girl he wanted.

“He was a ladies man,” said Mageli, who had lived with Meadows, three doors away from Richard, from March to October 2007.

“That kid’s pulled more girls than I have ever seen. He used some of the most wackest-ass lines you’ve ever heard, too. ‘My mom’s out of town for the weekend. You wanna come over to my house and have fun?’”

Misty Southard, 18, came to know Richard through their mutual friend, Meadows. She said they hung out with him many weekends.

Though she said he could become “intense” at times, his better qualities usually rose to the surface.

“He was a really, really nice guy,” Southard said. “He would always give us rides places.”

To his friends, Richard and Meadows came as a pair. There was never one without the other.

“They were always just cracking jokes and talking about hip-hop all the time,” Southard said.

“When they were together all was right in the world,” Laubach said.

“I think they were like brothers,” Mageli said.

But as the summer of 2007 went on, a terrible unrest grew inside of Richard, they say, and it was fed by addiction.

• • •

That unrest led Richard and Meadows to move in October from Jackson to Missoula. In an interview on Sunday with the Kaimin, Richard said they came to Missoula to start fresh.

“I really wanted to get out of the Jackson scene,” Richard said.

Once in Missoula he liked to walk around town and explore, sometimes with Meadows, he said, but mostly by himself. But because he had sustained severe injuries in a car crash two years earlier, Richard said some activities he would have liked to pursue were off limits.

“I broke my ankle so I couldn’t snowboard,” Richard said.

In 2005 Richard suffered a broken back, neck and ankle and a cracked rib when he rolled his Toyota RAV 4. He was initially charged with a DUI in connection with the wreck, but it was later reduced to reckless driving.

Richard said he was subsequently prescribed the painkiller OxyContin because his injuries severely hindered him, and the medication was necessary to stave off the pain.

“That stuff is pretty addicting, I will say that much,” Richard said.

His friends say the addiction changed him.

“He was a completely different person before he was on pills,” Mageli said.

Mageli said he saw that his friend Richard began to consume more pills to compensate for a tolerance he was building every day.

“He was taking Xanax, Ritalin, Adderall, Lortab, Percocet, Valium,” Mageli said. “You name any kind of pill and that kid was taking it.”

His friends say they watched his personality spiral as he started to chase the pills with alcohol.

Jason Kikta, 24, of Jackson Hole, who lived in the same apartment complex as Richard during that summer, said that Richard wound up an emotional mess.

“He got way out of hand with it,” Kikta said. “The pills really messed him up bad.”

Others echo that sentiment.

“Kenny would cry about his car accident and everything he’d been through,” Southard said. “He’d talk about his past a lot. He would always show us his scars.”

He became melancholy about the course his life was taking, and the drinking increased. He would sit with Laubach and watch the river go by, confiding his fears.

“He was just upset that he wasn’t going to school,” Laubach said.

Meadows tended toward the despondent as well, their friends said, mourning his lack of a job. Though almost 10 years separated the two of them, their mutual disappointment echoed between them.

“It definitely wasn’t a good pair with all of their problems,” Kikta said.

Several friends say Richard then started dabbling in cocaine last summer, and soon he didn’t even look like the same man.

“He’d be a zombie, really. Just dead,” Kikta said.

“He was white as a ghost and his eyes were coming out of his head,” Green said. “You could see the veins coming out his arms.”

Throughout his spiral, however, none of his friends said they ever saw him become physically aggressive with anyone.

“I’m not a violent person,” Richard said in the interview on Sunday.

Mageli was riding shotgun when Richard was pulled over for a DUI in August, and was sent to jail for 10 days. Richard then went through a mandatory detoxification program in Jackson.

By October, friends said it seemed both Richard and Meadows had found a sense of renewal. Meadows was happy. He had found steady work and was making money. Richard looked healthier and resolved to go back to school, this time at the University of Montana, to study business management in the spring 2008 semester.

Meadows went with him.

Richard said Meadows frequently shifted from small-time job to small-time job, and though he told Richard he was “thinking” about going to school with him in the spring, he said he never would have thought he could end up in school.

“He kinda goes with the wind,” Richard said.

When he left in October, Mageli saw Richard off to his car, gave him two cigarettes, and told him, “Do good.”

Richard promised him he would.

• • •

As Kenny Richard sits in the Missoula County Detention Facility awaiting trial on charges of deliberate homicide and evidence tampering, he looks at the possibility of 110 years in prison.

An affidavit released last week by Deputy Missoula County Attorney Andrew Paul shows inconsistencies with Richard’s original testimony, putting pressure on his claim of self-defense.

“We can confirm that he’s lied on several occasions,” Paul said.

Richard claims he and Meadows were drinking and gambling at Westside Lanes until 2 a.m. when they left and bought two 40 oz. bottles of Olde English malt liquor from the Town Pump on North Reserve Street and headed back to the apartment they shared at the Copper Run complex on Mullan Road.

But according to the affidavit, security cameras clearly show the two at the Town Pump at 12:29 a.m.

Richard told police that once back at the apartment he and Meadows got into a scuffle and Meadows came at him with a pocketknife. Richard said he fell backward, sustaining a broken right arm. He said he then wrestled the knife away from Meadows and stabbed him in the abdomen.

But store cameras show Richard returning to the Town Pump at 3:11 a.m., opening the door with his “broken” right arm before he bought two packs of cigarettes and a tank of gas.

According to the affidavit, by this time, Meadows was mortally wounded in their apartment.

The store clerk told police that he saw blood on Richard’s hands, and on his face during this second visit.

According to the affidavit, neighbors told police that around 2 a.m., the time Richard told police he and Meadows were leaving Westside Lanes, they heard Richard yell, “Go ahead and do it!” Meadows then frantically screamed, “No, no! I was just playing!” Richard then yelled, “Leave!”

The last thing neighbors reported hearing that night was a door slam about 2:30 a.m.

While police say that Meadows was likely dead at the time, neighbors, who are listed in the affidavit as possible witnesses, said they heard a man screaming out in pain at about 5 a.m., roughly 50 minutes before Richard was spotted scrubbing blood off the landing of his apartment.

Mageli, who has been interviewed by Missoula police and is also listed as a possible witness on the prosecution’s affidavit, said he too has questions about Richard’s story. Richard told police he was angry that Meadows didn’t have a job, leaving Richard to pay for their expenses.

“If he was so pissed off about having to pay for everything, why would he take Mike to go gamble and drink?” Mageli asked.

His conflicting account of the evening makes prosecutors doubt his credibility.

“I think it’s really telling about his ability to tell the truth,” said Paul, the deputy county attorney.

Mageli said Richard told him things that proved not true, most of them revolving around his promises to give up drugs.

“He told me one time that he wasn’t dealing coke, and I believed him because he came at me with a straight face,” Mageli said. “I hopped in this kid’s car after he told me he wasn’t dealing coke, and out of nowhere he busts out a CD case and probably about an eight ball of blow and was like, ‘Hey, you want a line?’”

Still, his friends’ nagging question is “Why?”

“Can you imagine killing your best friend over the rent?” Laubach asked. “He took one of my best friends. I kind of want to hit him in the face.”

• • •

In Visiting Room A at the detention center, a row of detainees clad in orange sit behind thick panes of glass, clutching telephones to talk to visitors.

Richard, clean cut and with his right arm in a sling, is at the end of the hall on the left. To his right, on the opposite end of a glass window, Thelma Yellow Kidney, 22, talks with him bashfully.

She asks him if he’s sleeping all right. She tells him he has “that sparkle” in his eyes again.

“You look great,” she says.

She explained to a reporter that she met him at the Bodega in downtown Missoula in November.

“He had a lot of problems,” Yellow Kidney said.

She said she can remember only one fight between Richard and Meadows and it took place about two weeks before Meadows was killed. Richard was trying to get Meadows’ attention and Meadows, she recalled, was “freaking out” on him.

She said she did not care much for Meadows, calling him a “freeloader” and a “sketchy” person.

She still thinks highly of Richard.

“This person they were talking about (in the newspapers) wasn’t him,” Yellow Kidney said.

The Kenny Richard she came to know was adept at talking his way out of arguments, instead of fighting.

“He’s talked his way out of a lot of stuff,” she said.

Richard is scheduled to be arraigned in Missoula County Justice Court on March 26.