Attacker of Gay in Laguna Talks About ‘Skinhead’ Motives, Beliefs

The jury’s verdict is in. Three reputed “skinheads” who were convicted of felony assault Thursday in Orange County Superior Court sit in jail, awaiting their Jan. 13 sentencing.

Yet those involved in the trial are left wrestling with a troubling question that a jury never had to answer: Why?

Why would three young men, unprovoked, go to a Laguna Beach park that is frequented by gay people and beat a stranger senseless, screaming “Kill the faggot!” as they pounded him over and over with their fists and a metal pipe?

Why would they shave their heads, don intimidating steel-toed boots, carve Nazi swastikas into their bodies and pledge allegiance to an antisocial and apparently growing movement that, at its roots, denounces all that is not white and Aryan?

Why, in short, do they hate?

Stephen Walther says of gay people: “I don’t much care for ‘em. I don’t like diseases and stuff like that they’ve got going around.”

Still, the 18-year-old Walther says he can’t explain why he and two fellow skinheads from Huntington Beach beat 48-year-old Robert T. Joyce unconscious in a Laguna Beach park last summer.

‘I Don’t Know Why’

“I don’t know why we did it really, to tell you the truth,” Walther said in an interview at the Orange County Jail last week, one day after he, John M. Moore, 23, and Aaron F. Compean, 18, were convicted of assaulting Joyce.

Speaking in an unemotional monotone, staring straight ahead through the thick jail window, Walther said he was sorry about beating Joyce.

“It was wrong. The guy didn’t do nothing to us,” he said.

Walther, who didn’t finish high school and has worked for the last four years as a commercial fisherman, claimed he doesn’t even remember how or why they decided to go beat up a gay man one night last July in Laguna Beach. Maybe it was alcohol, he suggested. Walther said he personally had 12 cans of beer and some liquor that night.

They certainly didn’t mean to kill the man, Walter said--they didn’t even really mean to hurt him.

“I didn’t think we did that much damage to him, you know? I guess we did a lot more,” he said with a laugh. Joyce, pummeled to the ground and left unconscious as his attackers fled, needed 70 stitches to close numerous gashes in his head and body.

Mostly, Walther seemed relieved after the verdict, relieved that he had been found not guilty of attempted murder charges that could have netted him nine years in prison. “That scared the hell out of us,” he said.

But Walther said he also is angry--angry that prosecutors, the media, police and government officials have painted him and his fellow “skinheads” nationwide as a gang of violent, neo-Nazi racists.

Asked to describe what being a skinhead means to him, Walther said: “It’s just a bunch of guys to hang out with. We shave our heads. It’s a clique off punk music is all it is.”

Walther said he knows hundreds of skinheads in the Southland. That contention is borne out by a recent special report by the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai Brith that identified an alarming rise in skinhead activity and pinpointed Orange County, Riverside, San Diego and Ventura counties as trouble spots.

Mostly, Walther said, he and other skinheads from the Huntington Beach, Long Beach, Los Angeles and San Diego areas used to hit the punk clubs, drink heavily and listen to their music.

Among the favorites of the skinheads is a British band called Skrewdriver. Led by a National Front organizer named Ian Stuart, the group’s popular songs include “White Power” and “Prisoner of Peace (Rudolph Hess).”

A one-time surfing enthusiast, Walther said he became attracted to the skinheads at about the age of 13 largely as a way to stand out from the crowd--”so I didn’t have to be a stereotype jock like every (expletive) that goes to high school.”

While he denied the stereotypes tagged to skinheads, Walther acknowledged that he adheres to some of the group’s beliefs.

He would like to see a state segregated between blacks and whites. “I think a lot of trouble would be out of the way,” he said.

Walther said he sees two types of blacks. The first kind he finds tolerable, Walther said. He used a racial epithet to describe blacks in the second group and said they are loathsome because they have a “bad attitude” and like to gang up on white people.

Walther said he has been beaten by black people and doesn’t know why. Maybe it was the spiked haircut that he once had, he suggested, or perhaps the skinhead dress.

Walther also finds some appeal in Hitler’s Nazi Germany and has tattooed a small swastika on his leg. He said he likes some of the Nazi’s ideas on a white Aryan state. And he especially likes the SS uniforms.

Asked what message he wants his swastika to send to people, Walther shrugged in silence. Then he said: “I just like it to offend people and that’s what it does.” And why does he want to offend people? “They bug me a lot.”

Stephen Walther says he is going to change when he gets out of prison in a few years. His girlfriend of two years is expecting their child any day now, he said, and Walther would like someday to settle down, keep working hard as a commercial fisherman and quit drinking.

But he still considers himself a skinhead--”independent” in his views, but a skinhead nevertheless. The beliefs--about gays, about blacks, about Nazism and a white Aryan state--will remain with him, he said. But when he gets out of prison, Walther added, “I’m not going to enforce them all 100%.”

Almost three months after he agreed to defend one of the skinheads accused of attempted murder, James S. Odriozola says he is no closer to understanding the skinheads’ way of life than the day he took the case.

And given the repugnance of their beliefs and norms, Odriozola said, he is not sure he ever wants to get close enough to find out.

“Something has got to drive a person that far out of the mainstream, against society, but I have no idea what it is,” Odriozola said in a recent interview.

Still, he was able to successfully defend his client, John Moore, convincing the jury that the skinheads did indeed beat Robert Joyce of Los Angeles in a gay-bashing attack but were not trying to kill him.

When Joyce testified last month against his brutal attackers in court, Odriozola was there to grill the victim on the undisputed attack, poking holes in his story wherever he could.

It was one of the least pleasant tasks of his career, Odriozola said.

“This is pretty much an indefensible crime,” said Odriozola, who was appointed by the court to represent John Moore in the case. “And it’s a particularly difficult one to defend. I don’t subscribe to their views and obviously can’t identify with their behavior.

“This isn’t a case you love to take. You wait for the hate mail to come and the crank calls.”

But he continued: “I’ll fight for (Moore) because he deserves that. He’s going to pay for what he did that night, but he doesn’t deserve to be abandoned.”

It was his job, Odriozola said, to block out in his mind--and in the jurors’ minds--all the abhorrent philosophies involved and focus instead entirely on the crime at hand. “I had to get that jury to look at what he did, not who he was.”

It started with the music, Barbara Walther recalls.

About the age of 13 or so, her son, Stephen, began moving from the beach scene to the punk-rock scene, adopting as his own its loud, raucous music and distinctive, defiant style of dress.

She was always bothered by the music, with its offensive lyrics that often centered on violence and hatred.

Skinhead flyers and drawings lined his room, and there were arguments at home. At one point Stephen moved out of the family’s Huntington Beach house, although he said that decision was not related to his skinhead connections.

Barbara Walther said she was frustrated in trying to stop--or even understand--her son’s attraction to the skinhead movement.

She tried talking to Stephen. She even went to a few punk clubs to find out for herself what it was all about.

She has tried to reason out her son’s transition 1,000 times, without luck, she said. The family was always close and supportive, she said. Mother, father and sister attended much of Stephen Walther’s attempted-murder trial in Santa Ana.

Stephen, a quiet child who liked to play the “class clown,” grew up with family friends who were black and Jewish, she said, and he never showed signs of problems in dealing with them.

Even when he began hanging out with skinheads, Barbara Walther said, she did not notice any signs of the intense rage or prejudice that might manifest itself in conduct such as last July’s gay-bashing incident.

“It wasn’t an angry, violent, ‘I’m out to get someone’ attitude. It was mostly just the music,” she said.

“I think it was more a way of getting attention than anything else,” she said. “This skinhead stuff means so many different things to all these kids. I try and try to understand but I’m not sure I ever will.”

Joyce could not be reached for comment. But Laguna Beach Councilman Robert F. Gentry, who testified during the trial that the site of the attack is frequented by gays, said he believes there is a “pervasive sickness in society today that is permitting people to act on their feelings of hatred and prejudice because we haven’t talked about our differences” since the debate over the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Added Gentry, who is the county’s first openly gay elected official: “We thought as a nation that we fixed everything in 1964, when in fact these are ongoing concerns.”