One to the Wolves, On the Trail of a Killer (15 page)

“Your memories could be very helpful,” I told her.

“In 1989, I was twenty-three,” Carolyn responded. “I had driven to Albuquerque from
out-of-state to attend a wedding. We went out to eat around 9:00 p.m. to some steak-type
restaurant and were going back to our motel. I remember a car being up on the sidewalk
and a girl’s bloody head. A cop car was there and a cop. I don’t remember anyone directing
traffic. My Mom remembers me coming home from the wedding and telling her that I had
seen the car and Kait.”

I asked Carolyn if she would be willing to talk with our investigator. She said sure,
but she didn’t think she had anything of value to contribute. All she had seen was
Kait in her car and a police officer standing next to her.

Carolyn told Pat the same story but provided more details.

“She and other people from the wedding party were driving from the restaurant to their
motel,” Pat told me. “Carolyn was in the backseat, looking out the side window, and
noticed a car up on the sidewalk. She says the driver’s door was open and she could
see a blond girl with bloody hair. A police officer was standing next to the driver’s
door. She said it looked like he had just opened it to check on the girl and was glancing
to the West as if expecting someone. Carolyn assumed he was waiting for an ambulance.
She remembers being aware that there was no need to stop because the police were already
there. It wasn’t until the next day when she saw the story on the news that she realized
that what she’d thought was a car accident had been a shooting.”

“The officer might have been Cop Number One,” I suggested.

“Not possible,” Pat said. “He was dressed in street clothes and driving an unmarked
car. Besides, he said he never went to the driver’s side. And when Carolyn passed
the scene, Kait was still upright. Perhaps she toppled over because the uniformed
officer inadvertently pushed her while feeling for a pulse.”

“Did Carolyn come across to you as credible?” I asked.

“She sounded open and unsophisticated, and she didn’t seem to have an agenda,” Pat
said. “I can’t envision a situation that would cause her to make up something like
this. I’ve spoken to the parents of the bride, and they confirm the fact that Carolyn
came to Albuquerque to attend the wedding and was staying at a motel only blocks from
the scene. Carolyn says it was almost eleven when they left the restaurant — the staff
was getting ready to close up — so the timing is right.”

She paused and then continued, “If what Carolyn says is accurate, a police officer
may have been at the scene when Kait was murdered.”

The new police chief, Gerald Galvin, seemed to be doing his best to deal with the
problems Mayor Baca had imported him to rectify, but he was in a difficult position.
The former police chief, Joseph Polisar, had enjoyed the support of the police union,
while Galvin, as an out-of-state replacement, was regarded with suspicion by many
of his officers. That hostility was aggravated by Galvin’s public support for the
concept of a citizen review board.

“I will not tolerate police misconduct,” Galvin stated.

Chief Galvin was also attempting to initiate the formation of a Cold Case Unit to
investigate old unsolved cases. When we asked him if Kait’s case could be one of those,
he assured us that the Cold Case detectives would be very open to reviewing our new
information with an eye toward possibly reactivating the case.

However, when Pat submitted an overview of her investigation, the supervisor of the
Cold Case Unit became hostile.

“My detectives assure me there are no suspects other than the men they arrested,”
she told Pat. She went on to state that, because my book had maligned “an impeccable
department,” APD would not accept any information from us or our representatives.
They wouldn’t even give credence to a statement by the former medic, Bette Clark,
who recently had been named Chief of the Bernalillo County Fire Department.

When we posted that on Kait’s website, the police were incensed.

“I dispute the allegations that we refused to investigate!” an APD spokesperson told
reporters. “If information comes to us, we’ll act on it, because
that’s what we do!”

The Police Oversight Commission that Chief Galvin had supported turned out to be a
disappointment. Though fine in theory, it lacked teeth. The commission was hampered
in their efforts to obtain information about police transgressions by the fact that
APD was not obligated to turn over their reports. Although citizens could appeal to
the commission, the police chief did not have to act on the commission’s recommendations,
and no officer named in a citizen complaint had ever shown up for a hearing.

“We have been stonewalled,” the commission chairman told the media.

Meanwhile, the Tally Keeper’s notebook was rapidly filling:

New Case
– Arry Frank’s sister, Stephane Murphey:

Stephane was sexually assaulted and strangled in Rio Rancho, just outside of Albuquerque.
Her decomposed body was found four days later in her car.

Police processed the scene as a burglary and compromised much of the evidence by allowing
outsiders to walk around in Stephane’s house before they took fingerprints. They also
resisted submitting DNA evidence to the crime lab. T
he lead detective told the family he was “stumped” and had nothing more to investigate.

Update
– Nancy Grice’s daughter, Melanie McCracken:

NBC Dateline took an interest in Melanie’s case and set up a meeting with a magistrate
judge. “When the producer attempted to meet with the judge, two state cop cars blocked
the road and turned their lights in her face,” Nancy said. “She was so scared that
she filed a report with her legal department.”

The producer then set up an interview with the former head of an ambulance service
about numerous 911 calls allegedly made from the McCracken home. That interview didn’t
take place because the witness was found hanged in his garage on the day before the
scheduled interview. (An alleged suicide).

New Case
– Bill Houston’s daughter, Stephanie Houston:

Stephanie died when her boyfriend ran her over with his truck after he saw her dancing
with another man. The Medical Examiner urged that Stephanie’s death be investigated
as a homicide. The scene investigator, Mark McCracken, (the same “Mark McCracken”
who was under investigation for the suspicious death of his wife, Melanie), told the
media that his department had fully investigated and Stephanie had caused her own
death because she was falling-down drunk. In truth, they had questioned no witnesses,
done no reconstruction, and the toxicology test showed Stephanie had very little alcohol
in her system.

It didn’t seem possible that the world could contain so much agony. The cases piling
up in my notebook were featured briefly in local newspapers and within a few days
were replaced by accounts of fresh atrocities. In our own case, at least, I’d been
able to get a book published, but most families in our position weren’t so fortunate.
After the first rush of sympathy, even personal friends turned away from them, made
uncomfortable by what they perceived as obsessive complaints about the way the cases
were being mishandled.

An article in the
Albuquerque Tribune
quoted the new mayor, Martin Chavez, as stating,
“We are on the verge of having one of the best police departments in the country.”
People desperately wanted to believe that.

A mother named Rosemary Sherman didn’t think that applied to the Sheriff’s Department.
Rosemary’s son, John, had been found, slashed and stabbed to death in his van just
outside of Albuquerque.

“In addition to the stab wounds, Johnny’s throat had been cut and his teeth knocked
out,” Rosemary told me. “Sheriff’s deputies did no investigation. They just said,
‘It’s a suicide. Bag the body and let’s go home.’

“John’s van was not processed for prints or DNA evidence. The alleged weapon, a razor,
was not seized as evidence. When I asked the lead detective about that, he said, ‘It
was in a pool of blood, so I left it in the van.’ I requested that the razor be examined
by a forensic expert to determine if it really was the weapon that slashed my son’s
body. The detective didn’t want to do that. I took the autopsy report and the scene
photos to a former head of forensics at the Menninger Clinic. He told me, ‘This wasn’t
just murder, this was over-kill.’

“I also met with an FBI agent, who is a very nice guy. He indicated that in his opinion
something stunk, but he told me errors in handling of an investigation don’t fall
under federal civil rights laws. In other words, the FBI can’t step into the case
unless I can prove
malfeasance
. It’s not enough to show the police didn’t do their job, I have to prove that they
acted out of malice! How can I possibly prove what was in their heads?”

“You’re not alone,” I told her. “We’re in the same position, and so are a lot of others.”

“Perhaps we could unite,” Rosemary said. “If we pooled our information about mishandled
cases it might start forming a pattern. Maybe we could find some way to use that to
bring the attention of the citizens of our state, or maybe even the entire nation,
to the problems with law enforcement in this country.” She paused and then added wistfully,
“I know that’s just a pipe dream. We could never find enough families with the courage
to do that.”

“I don’t know about that,” I said thoughtfully as I glanced across my desk at the
Tally Keeper’s notebook.

We launched our Real Crimes website in 1998. A philanthropic friend, Tom Arriola,
sponsored it, linking it to his own site. I interviewed the families and helped them
word their stories, and Don linked their allegations to documentation such as autopsy
reports, depositions and scene photos.

It didn’t take long for people to discover the site, and people outside of New Mexico
began to submit their own stories. We expanded the site to include those, although
the preponderance of cases was still from New Mexico. Tom created message boards so
visitors could discuss the cases. Among the most vocal were private investigators,
forensic experts, police officers and attorneys, who leapt upon the discrepancies
between information in police reports and the visual evidence in scene photos.

One out-of-state cop’s knee jerk reaction to Kait’s case was, “To assume that any
conspiracy, let alone a police conspiracy, is at hand is pretty much pushing the envelope
of common sense.”

But after viewing the photos from the crime scene, he reversed his opinion:

“Okay, I’m now a believer,” he posted. “Judging from the picture of the bullet hole
in Kait’s car, I would have to say that she was run off the road and the killer exited
his vehicle and fired the shots into her car. This is based on the height of the bullet
hole in the doorframe and the apparent angle of strike.”

Disgruntled ex-wives and ex-girlfriends of witnesses, suspects and police officers
posted information that they’d obtained during pillow talk. There was no way to know
how much of their input was valid, but Pat did her best to try to verify it.

The most heartbreaking message was from
Bill Houston, the father of Stephanie Houston, the woman who was run over by her jealous
boyfriend.

“I hate to bother you again,”
Bill said apologetically.
“But do you have a limit on how many cases you post per family? Our younger daughter,
Crystal, has now been murdered.”

Back in Albuquerque, Pat Caristo was busy. Requests for pro bono services had become
too overwhelming for her small agency to handle. She was even receiving secret requests
from members of law enforcement asking for help with cases that had been mishandled
by their own departments.

To enlarge her workforce, Pat created an internship program in which graduates of
the course in private investigation that she taught at the University of New Mexico
could obtain the
on-the-job experience they needed for certification by working as apprentices. Kait’s
case was the focus of many of their training sessions.

One subject of particular interest to the interns was the body shop on Arno. The fact
that the shop not only was frequented by Vietnamese, but was a location where drugs
were dealt and rogue cops hung out, was intriguing to this group of young crime-solvers.
One of them even wanted to apply for a job there. Pat quickly vetoed that suggestion.

Pat drove past the shop on almost a daily basis, as it was located between her office
and the Post Office. Sometimes she was startled to see a limousine parked there. Then
she started noticing some changes in activity, such as the positioning of cars inside
the fenced area at the back, which made it difficult for her to read their license
plates.

One day, when she drove past, the building was a skeleton. It had been destroyed in
a fire.

Pat called the foundation that leased out the property and obtained permission to
visit the burned out building and recover any unclaimed documents that had survived
the fire. She was told she had better move quickly as the property had been sold and
the new owners soon would be tearing down the remains of the building. 

The maintenance man used his keys to open the iron gate, and Pat and her interns finally
had access to what remained of the hub of illegal activity that all of us had wondered
about for so long. They entered the building from the back, stepping carefully over
fallen beams and the blackened remnants of what once had been furniture. They discovered
the building was divided into three major areas — the south end that had contained
the business offices, which was where the fire had started; the middle working area
for vehicle repair; and the north end, where the manager had apparently run a second
business operation. A kitchen area and a bathroom were located in the middle section
of the building. The second floor had collapsed in the fire, so they were unable to
determine if there had been an upper level living area that might have been used for
parties. 

In the ghostly silence of the building, Pat couldn’t help but recall the reading Betty
Muench had done in response to that particular street address:

“During the time of Kait’s involvement there was attention placed on this address
by many sources. Some of those will be listed, but this also was under the scrutiny
of federal authorities, who were not consulted during the investigation of Kait’s
murder.

“Kait, herself, did not visit this place in person, but both before and after her
death, those in attendance will have on various occasions spoken her name here. Dung’s
energy is felt here because of his anger, both before and after Kait’s death. He was
in a rage in this place. The Hispanic suspect, Juve Escobedo, was here also. This
was after the death of Kait. He enters midst much attention with a sense of expectancy.
He is to receive something.”

Pat forced the psychic images out of her mind and focused her full attention on the
job at hand. She and her interns conducted a walk-through of the building, collecting
papers, checks, forms, and ledger pages that were scattered among the ashes. Then,
they returned to Pat’s office to do an inventory.

The majority of the material they retrieved was dated in the mid-to-late 1980s. That
included a series of checks, signed by the owner’s girlfriend, who also had worked
as his bookkeeper. This was the same woman who had told investigator, Roy Nolan, that
she and the owner had been introduced to Kait at a disco, when Kait was there with
a woman who fit the description of Susan Smith.

One check, dated May 24, 1986, was made out to “Susan Gonzales”* in a handwriting
that was different from the bookkeeper’s handwriting. On the back of that check was
written “Smith Deposit.” The check was stamped for deposit in an out-of-state bank.