In this podcast, we're going to talk frankly but sensitively about issues some people might find disturbing, including rape and suicide. If you or someone you know is suicidal in the US Down nine eighty eight, check out this podcast notes page for information on LGBT plus mental health resources in your community.
In a previous episode of Shattering the System, we learned how Jammel Moore, a young black man, was found dead in the apartment of Ed Buck, a white man who knew how to navigate the ins and outs of West Hollywood. At first, Jammel's death was ruled an accidental overdose, and just five days later the case was closed. Then eighteen months later, another gay black man was found dead in the same apartment, Timothy Dean, also died of an overdose.
Timothy was fifty five years old, and his friends say he had a lot of interests and was still very much full of life. He loved the game of basketball, for instance. He was a genuine athlete and basketball was something he loved and was good at. Something I find interesting about the world of West Hollywood is when you have a city full of gay folks, you start noticing them everywhere because in a place like this. Well, they're
just all kinds of people. I remember a friend of mine came to visit and we went to a basketball court, you know, for a casual game of twenty one. Now, when we got to the court, which is kind of in the center of the most important part of West Hollywood, this court is just across the street from the LA Sheriff station than we have, and it's also a few
yards from almost all of we Hoo's nightlife. I'll give you a more detailed tour of West Hollywood in a later episode, But when we got back to my apartment, he was so winded and tired, and he was even surprised that a basketball court in West Hollywood would be every single bit as competitive as one in South Central or the South Bronx or the South side of Chicago and Olid and Jonaman a lot of by Angela Blake Kerty.
Basketball was really important to Timothy Day. He was a part of the National Gay Basketball Association the NNGBA, as well as the Land of the Basketball League.
The Dude was inducted.
Into the Gay Basketball Hall of Fame in two thousand and one, and he won a silver medal at the Paris Gay Games in twenty eighteen.
Gay basketball has been around since the early nineties and a lot of these stories are just lost if they're not captured.
That's Michael Thomas. He's a documentary filmmaker from Belgium. Sports and basketball in particular are a part of his life and work.
So I live in Los Angeles myself since two thousand and eight, and also when I moved here, I also kind of came out as gay, and yeah, I've been involved in the LGBT community ever since, and I also play basketball in the Gay Basketball League.
He's come close enough to Lebron James to get splashed with champagne after one of Lebron's championship wins.
It's over, It's over. Pleave women if a city of.
Champions once again.
Among his documentaries is the film Game Face, about queer athletes and their quest for acceptance. It was through basketball that he learned about the life and death of Timothy Dean.
Tim passed like first Jamel passed in twenty seventeen. Then people kept going over there, drugs kept happening in that apartment. Nothing was ever done. In twenty nineteen, Timothy Dean dies. Still nothing is being done. People keep going in and out.
Michael had long wanted to do a documentary about basketball, He just never thought it would come about the way it did.
He was already gathering interviews.
Among his friends about the world of gay sports and basketball when Timothy Dean was found dead in the home of that Buck. Two different men entered bucks apartment and left in body bags. Michael could feel how much pain their mutual friends were at.
There was a basketball tournament in Los Angeles with teams from all over the country.
That came after the tournament, remember this is in twenty nineteen, there was an after party at a bar on Santa Monica Boulevard. Ironically, that bar was called Rage. Unlike other bars along Santa Monica Boulevard, this bar was decidedly non white and young. Rage, which has been closed and renamed, is literally keaty corner to the LA Shriff's office.
Lots of friends of tim were there at that party, and the after party was at Rage, so not just people from basketball, but everyone was able to come in there. We were just surprised to suddenly see that ed Buck was in front of the entrance and was just coming in.
Michael could not believe it. There at a bar was ed Buck.
Two men died of overdoses in Buck's apartment in an eighteen month period, but he hadn't been charged in the deaths Ja Melmore was dead, Timothy Dean was dead, and walking into a bar full of Timothy Dean's friends is ed Buck.
He had no shame to just stroll the streets of West Hollywood and look for his next victims in his eyes, like he didn't do anything wrong, But it was just incredible to see him there on the street. It's just so furiating, and there's nothing we could do.
To everyone's surprise, ed Buck's coming in to chill at the bar.
Did I say the bar's name was Rage.
We had to hold people back as well because we didn't want them to get into it with ed Buck, because you know, we don't want.
Our friends to end up in jail.
And at Buck being being out, you know.
Michael realized there was something he could do. He could do.
A documentary film, Jammel and tim was released in twenty twenty one. It looks into the lives of ed Buck's victims.
Ed Buck is a predator that masqueraded around just to hunt down the bodies of black men, someone that was hiding in plain sight.
I know that one of the biggest frustrations from friends and family is the difference of how the victims were portrayed and how ed Buck was portrayed. At Buck, his whole resume was being acknowledged in the press, everything that he has achieved, But with Jammel and tim all the worst things that they have done in life that was highlighted.
And then it's very easy too, you know, for people to say like, oh, well, you know, prostitute this or like they deserved it, or drugs or you know, then it's very easy to blame or to like protect at bar.
Yeah, so it's like political donor sex worker. Yeah right, well, you know, not that that's a very.
Correct it's it's yeah, the portrayal was day and night because that human aspect was left out and a lot of the portrayal. And I think if we create a human aspect that creates compassion and a reason why we should care about these.
Stories, that human aspect that gets left out is what this podcast is here to do. Highlight what's been left out, the personal and professional of a man called Timothy Dean through the eyes of those who knew him and loved him. Like his friend Richard Martin.
He was not a drug addict, he was not homeless. He never hurt a single person, and I think that that's sometimes is forgotten. I'll say this specially with white men. As soon as something scandal happens, white men have a tendency going. I don't know him, I don't know him.
I don't know him. Who was Timothy Dean?
Fashionista, baller, benefactor, red carpet afficionado. And why does the media only want to see him as a victim, a drug addict or a sex worker. In the rush to make news, often we don't pause to see the complex people behind the headlines.
Well, that's why we're here.
I'm your host Sinari Glinton, and this is Shattering the System, the true crime podcast that's about more than crime. Just because someone's life ends in tragedy doesn't mean their life is tragic. Today on the program, the life and Legacy of Timothy Dean, Shattering the System gets started after this message, this is Shattering the System, your host, Sinari and Glinton.
Tim Dean was just larger than life. He had this personality that you knew when he entered a room. You knew that you knew how he loved you by the way that he treated you.
That clip we just heard is from the documentary Beyond Ed Buck and in this episode we want to talk about the life and legacy of Timothy Dean. Recently, my producer Jonathan and I took a drive over the Hollywood Hills into the San Fernando Valley to meet with a good friend of Timothy Dean, Richard Martin.
Richard.
Yes, hey, how are you?
I'm good? How about yourself?
So?
Okay?
Sorry?
We met Richard Barden at his home in Ta Luca Lake. He's a Hollywood talent manager, mainly of soap opera actors. You can see heads of actors all around his office, all faces that looks sort of familiar.
Stelle Harris from Seinfeld and Missus potato Head.
She was my first client.
And there is a tour that is I mean that must be where something. There's a Missus potato Head from toy Starter.
She signed the top of it and signed.
Richard is one of Timothy Dean's closest friends. And as he shows me around, you can see there are a lot of photos.
It's right in the right in here so yes, I got to fund all these. You know, my husband takes things away sometimes because I could be a little emotional at times with things.
But he's tim and is this you Yeah, that was me.
That's probably the time when I met Tim.
In this picture, he looks like he's about in his thirties. Richard and Timothy met in the nineties at the Golden Gym in Hollywood. Timothy Dean was tall, had broad shoulders and an even broader smile. He was handsome, and when he wasn't on the basketball court, you just might see him sporting a well tailored suit with a variety of
bow ties. And after they first met at the gym, Timothy and Richard remained friends and they sort of grew up together trying to figure out the workings of West Hollywood in the early aughts.
And it's clear from.
Our conversation that Timothy ding he really celebrated life.
One of the things that I always knew every year is that his birthday wasn't his birthday, It wasn't a birth week, it was a birth month. He loved to celebrate his birthday. My husband and I threw his surprise fiftieth birthday party.
And we pulled it off.
How I don't know what we did. If you never met Jim, he was, you knew he was in the room.
The thing is he could fill a room physically. He was athletic.
You know.
They met at a gym.
Timothy enjoyed all parts of Hollywood, though there was an air of mystery about him. For instance, Richard threw Timothy's fortieth and fiftieth birthday parties. After going through the math, Richard realized that the two parties were actually only seven years apart.
But it wasn't really his fortieth. He it was his forty third. But when I found out, when I added things up to his fifty, I'm like, wait a minute, this can't be fifty since forty three was only seven years ago, and they lived with other girl. I like a party.
Timothy Dean loved the party, and he loved being a part of Hollywood life. He had a daily access to glamour. He worked as a fashion consultant at Satsmith Avenue. Before that, it was Bloomingdale's and Beverly Hills. Those kinds of jobs put Timothy Dean at the very heart of what we might call the Hollywood industrial complex. Designers, stylist, celebrities would have all been among the people that he interacted with.
We'd like to talk about reality television. We would talk about every Real Housewives. He had an opinion about everyone from Orange County to you know, the Real Housewives of New York.
We were all shiny hood ornaments. We were all train wrecks. I know, we were all I've run with a fabulous circle of people, the New York Magazine and the Real Social I thought they were like, what the fuck? I was broken a studio park. We were all flawed.
Tim always felt like he knew them, and he would be like, oh, did you He would miss VICKI did, and all the old girl she'd he would always want to talk to me about. And I fed into it. I love I did love it.
What sense did you have with his family? Well, I had a different sense.
Prior to I had met his sister and they weren't really fully understanding of of him being gay. And I felt that explained that they just didn't couldn't understand why this.
Beautiful, you know.
Man was gay and I don't. I honestly, to this day, I don't really think they fully understand that. I just don't think that they fully accepted him being gay.
How did you see him deal with that?
He came out to LA to become a totally different person, and did he succeed in parts of it?
Yes and parts Now.
I think he had demons in him that came back from honestly, and I don't really care because I've expressed this to his family. I just don't think that he ever felt fully embraced by his family.
Tailor is oldest time. Timothy Dean would do what gay men do. He made his own family. He would help his friends start his management company, doing everything from working the phones to helping him find clients. And like so many imposing tall black men, Timothy Dean cared about his appearances and especially his clothes.
I mean, he talked to those who knew him.
He seemed to be on a constant self improvement streak. Toward the end of his life, He'd be baptized at the Megachurch one LA, and he would decide to get his college degree while in his forties, all signs of a man who was looking very much towards the future.
I think one of the proudest moments of Timothy Dean's life is when he graduated from Senemon College two years He wore that cap and gown all night long, and he was so proud of himself that he finally accomplished that. Because he got no help from anybody. He did that on his own. He had no family to help him. He just decided that that's what he wanted to do. He wanted to actually better himself.
He would get his college degree surrounded by his friends. He'd write about his accomplishment on Facebook that quote, this degree will not change the world, but it will be the first degree earned by anyone in my family. I'm Scenario Glinton. This is shattering the system. The True crime podcast that's about more men crowd, This is shattering the system. I'm Sinnari Glinton.
That's Timothy Dane.
You here happily clapping and talking a bit in a video clip shared by his friend Richard Martin, a video that was not shared with us by anyone. Is a part of Tim's life that the media widely reported on. It was his work as an adult film actor known by the name Whole Hunter, and many of the stories about Timothy Dane, there is a prudish way that his life is written about focusing on his work in porn and his sex work to the exclusion of everything else.
And I think that this is a part of the story of Timothy Dean, the pearl clutching that's happened in relation to his sex work. I can't pretend to clutch my non existent pearls. As a gay man who's lived in multiple cities, I've known queer sex workers in Hollywood or West Hollywood. It's kind of hard not to know them. I have several friends who have done or do sex work, and ed Buck isn't alone having paid for sex. I have,
and so have many other gay men. Now, I didn't want to talk about Timothy Dean's sex work in a vacuum.
Hi. So my name is Alex Garner. I'm the director of Community Engagement and Impact. Global Impact is a global nonprofit working not to advance gay men's health and human rights.
The reason we wanted to talk to someone like Alex Garner about sex work is that it's a reality of the story and how ed Buck was able to lure men to his home. It's one of the systems ed Buck used to target a marginalized group. As I talked to Alex Garner over a Zoom call. We touched on everything from the economics of sex work to the changing nature of gay dating. He could relate to the choices that Timothy being made.
I mean, I think so much of it has to do with your relationship to sex, and your relationship to your body, and your relationship to the idea that someone's going to pay you money to have sex with them. And I would have friends that would ask me, oh, do you think I should do it? And I would say, if you feel psychologically that you can handle any of the issues that can come with it, and I mean issues largely around feeling internally shame and guilt around something
that you're doing that's going to destroy you. Right, if you're doing a job, any job, and doing that job makes you feel makes you hate yourself, then that's not the job for you. And we have everything in our society and culture that reinforces this idea that if you're doing sex work, all these list of bad things about you,
immoral and wrong and dirty and perverted. So if you're able to overcome those things and see it as simply another job, a job that you can enjoy, a job that you can be good at, then you can you can be successful. But if if unfortunately you're you aren't able to do that, you don't have the skills or the support to overcome or navigate that, then it can do harm.
We don't know whether not Timothy Dane found fulfillment and doing sex scenes. We do know that money was tight. That's true of a lot of Angelino's. The average home in Los Angeles goes for a nine hundred and fifty thousand dollars or an eight hundred square foot apartment goes for an average twenty seven hundred dollars a month. And we all play those games. How much money would it
take for you to cross some boundary? The key to what Timothy Dean and Jamel Moore could be manipulated, Gardner says, is they weren't economically vulnerable.
If this person wasn't feeling economically vulnerable, they'd be less likely to say yes to that if they didn't really want to do it. Right, So we say yes to things all the time if we think it's going to make us more money. And we do that because we often are feeling economically vulnerable, right, whether it's in terms of housing or food or whatnot. So I think that's the other larger structural issue, is that if people didn't have to worry about those sorts of things, they would
make very different choices. They would have very different boundaries when it comes to things like sex work, because those boundaries can move depending on how hungry you are.
And that's perfectly reasonable.
When you're worried about eviction or getting food and you see forty two thousand homeless people that's according to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, which are disproportionately black. Man, it's no surprise. Two men struggling to make ends meet, but do what they had to do.
But at some point, you know, an interesting story is that he was contemplating having a child with the lesbian lady.
That's Otavio today.
He was Timothy Dean's last roommate, and the time that he knew Timothy, he saw him contemplating major life changes. Timothy had gotten a college degree in his forties, and Octavio says, when Timothy was in his fifties, he was thinking about having a child.
And that was an interesting thing because I once came home at the time that maybe was not expected, and I sort of opened the door in the middle of a private moment.
Of your gay roommate with a woman.
Yes, yes, yes, And you know clearly might have needed a little bit of additional stimulation because on TV there was a gay porn going on. I'm telling the story because what's interesting to me is that the man was really trying to find purpose in his life.
The two men could not have been more different. There was a twenty year age gap and a difference in their sexualities, but Octavio says Timothy was someone that he genuinely came to care for. Octavio says Timothy's generosity helped him stay in La. Probably the most important gift that Timothy gave him was that he allowed him to live in his apartment off the books.
He lived in this apartment with the rent control, and I was never on the lease. I should have been on the lease, you know, because by doing that they would have had a claim to raise the rent. So in order to allow me to live with you know this very convenient rent, et cetera, you know, we we sort of kept it among us.
Timothy Dan could have charged market rent for Octavio, but instead charged him a ridiculously low amount O Tavio had never seen Timothy on hard drugs, so he had no idea what was in store for him when he got to the apartment that late January night. He had just gotten back from visiting his family in Bologna.
So you know, I had the flight like early, like seven am from Bologna. My mom and my father drove me to the airport.
From Bologna to lax fine economy can take twenty four hours easy.
And then you get to la and they broke my luggage in you know, probably loading it in the plane. One wheel is missing and literally is not even closing well. So you know, I leave the airport, I take an uber. I put all my stuff in, and you know, I approached Hampton Avenue and I see you know, lights and trucks and the I'm like, oh, weird, you know, maybe they're filming something. And the uber driver that was a Los Angeles native, he's like, no, you know, these are
trucks from the news. Something must have happened.
And I'm like okay.
So, you know, I leave the Uber and I'm approaching the building and literally.
There is like a crowd of people.
Seeing me approaching this building, you know, coming closer to me.
There are those moments when your life it's changed and you're just waiting to hear about it.
And I have like these broken legs luggage that I'm drugging, and I have a bunch of clothes in my arms and backpack.
The next thing he knows, he's blinded by lights and staring down the barrel of microphones.
You know, they start pointing lights and microphones like I'm like, what's going on. It's like they asked me, do you live here? And I'm like yeah, And then somebody takes out a phone with a picture and it's a picture of Timothy's like do you know this person?
Like yeah, it's my roommate. And everybody's like.
You know, coming closer more, and I'm like, what's going on?
You know, Otavio has no idea what has happened.
They really got closer to me just to try to gather more information, and the first thing they told me is like we are trying to identify a victim, you know, like we we think that the person that you know passed away is this timusit In and we're gonna, you know, we're gonna show you the picture to pretty much confirm his identity. I was not believing in my ears, you know, like I mean, you know, I certainly was like, oh, you know, you know, I want to know more what's going on here?
You know how you know what happened.
They didn't really have much information at that time. They just said, you know, he was found dead in an apartment not far away from here. And the version that they told me it was like that, you know, I think there were cameras in the building. You know that he was let's say reported to enter the apartment or the building, you know, let's say at midnight, and at
twelve thirty it was declared that by paramedics. So what happened is that once I went through the crowd of journalists, et cetera, you know, I entered the building and I go up to the apartment and literally I'm in the apartment for two men and said I hear knocking at the door, and the gentleman that was the manager of the building is like, you know, like there is a murder investigation. You are not on the lease, you know,
you can't really stay here. So now it's like one a m And I have my stupid broken luggage, et cetera. And I have no time, you know, so I grabbed like a couple of socks and underwear and I leave.
After me in the state away two men dead in one apartment, and yet ed Buck was still allowed to keep luring men there. On the surface, it's a tourist mecca, but West Hollywood has a very deep history of organized crime, corruption and vice. That's on the next episode. Shattering the System is a production of Macro Studios and iHeart Podcasts. I'm your host Snari Glynn. You can follow me on
Instagram at scenari plus the Number one. Our executive producers are Charles D. King, Asha Corpus, Win, Royorecchio, Jonathan Hunger, Lindsay Hoffman, and Snari Linton.
That's Me. Our podcast is.
Co written and produced by Ralph Cooper Third and ben Corey Jones. Erica Rodriguez is our associate producer. Dana Conway is our archival producer. Chris Mann is the audio engineer, and sound design and music provided by Chris Mann with Podshaper and Amy Via Lobos with help from Lisa Pollock. Our assistant editors are Amie Via Lobos and r Protress. Special thanks to Jennifer bon Montoni and the Press s LA Agency. Also special thanks to Porsche, Robertson, Maigas and Karen Grigsby dates.
Stay tuned for what's the next shattering the system. See you next time.