One to the Wolves, On the Trail of a Killer (16 page)

“We have something here that we need to look into,” Pat said.

When her students regarded her blankly, she continued, “‘Susan Smith’ is the name
of the friend Kait visited on the night of the murder. Susan’s maiden name was ‘Gonzales.’
Several months after this check was written, Susan married a man named ‘Smith.’ The
bank where this check was deposited is in the town where the couple lived at that
time. It’s possible this is a coincidence. But if it isn’t, that would mean that Kait’s
new friend, who routed her down Lomas that night, received a check from people linked
to this business three years before she moved to Albuquerque. I’ve no idea what the
significance of this may be, but we need to find out whether the person who received
this check is
our
‘Susan Gonzales Smith’.”

“How do we do that?” one of the interns asked.

“We need to locate the employee who wrote the check,” Pat said. “The owner of the
shop is now deceased. Your assignment is to track down his employee-girlfriend.”

The interns set out eagerly on their mission, but the challenge was more than they
could handle. The bookkeeper had married, divorced, remarried, and divorced again,
and was listed in public records under four different names. Following her court history
of fraud, forgery, and embezzlement, the interns tracked her progress as she racked
up residences in ten towns in two different states. Then the trail ran out.

One more lead down the drain.

However, Pat was able to locate and interview Susan Smith’s best friend, the woman
Susan had trusted to forward her tax statements. That friend told Pat that she hadn’t
met Kait in person, but Susan had talked a lot about her. The friend said, according
to Susan, a few days prior to the murder, Kait had overheard Dung screaming on the
phone. She heard enough to get the gist of the conversation and had told Dung, “I
know what you guys are up to, and I don’t want to get involved.”

Dung had responded, “Too late. You’re already involved.”

“Involved in what?” Pat asked.

Susan’s friend became nervous and refused to say anything more.

In 2003, the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Department formed its own Cold Case Unit.
The officers who came out of retirement to man the unit had impressive track records
and were actively solving old cases.

One detective, a former FBI agent, had spent forty-seven years in law enforcement.
In a newspaper interview, Bernalillo County Sheriff Darren White described him as
“no frills — 100 percent cop — a legend.”

Although the Sheriff’s Department didn’t have jurisdiction over Kait’s case, Pat,
who had met the detective socially, decided there was nothing to lose by requesting
his unofficial take on the physical evidence. He agreed to review the scene materials,
so Pat sent him the APD field and forensic reports and the scene photos.

The detective responded with his written opinion:

1) This was not a random drive-by shooting.

2) The shooting occurred
after
Kaitlyn’s vehicle struck the utility pole.

3) The accuracy of the shots suggests they were fired at a very close range at a
non-moving
target.

4) Had the shooting taken place while the victim’s car was in motion, it would have
veered to the right of the roadway due to the left-to-right camber of the pavement.
Also, the victim’s falling to the right would have turned the steering wheel in that
direction if she was grasping the steering wheel at the time of shooting.

5) Damage to the left end of the rear bumper suggests the rear of her vehicle was
struck and pushed to the right by a second vehicle
which veered her car across the median and into the utility pole.

6) This shooting was intentional and Ms. Arquette was the specific target.

From an Internet search I learned that the method of tactical ramming described in
Point # Five is called the “PIT Technique” and is widely used by police to force a
car off the road. I was able to find a diagram that depicted the process. It meshed
precisely with the damage to Kait’s rear bumper.

This report from a highly respected member of law enforcement supported our suspicions,
but what could we do with it? The APD Cold Case Unit had disbanded, and no other agency
had the authority to follow up on this.

But one thing I did now have was an interpretation of the odd postscript that Kait
had tacked onto one of Betty’s early readings
: “Mom, I love you. Look out for the walker, the innocent walker, who does more than
walk.”

Apparently Kait had been shot by someone on foot.

By now, the families who posted their stories on our website had begun to network
among themselves, sharing information and occasionally establishing links between
what initially appeared to be unrelated cases. The families of twenty-four New Mexico
murder victims became so closely united that they held their own press conference
in Albuquerque to demand the c
reation of a New Mexico Bureau of Investigation with jurisdiction to investigate cold
cases throughout the state and to investigate any case in which there was a conflict
of interest involving the investigating agency and the victim or the suspect. The
families’ stories cited instances of alleged malfeasance involving nine New Mexico
law enforcement agencies.

Despite the fact that she’d broken a leg and was in a wheelchair, Rosemary Sherman
flew to Albuquerque from her home in California to keynote the conference. Rosemary
described her meeting with the new Sandoval County sheriff, who had promised to reopen
her son’s case. “When the sheriff pulled John’s case file to prepare for our meeting
yesterday, he discovered that the previous sheriff had shredded its contents,” she
said. “There is nothing left but a partial autopsy report.”

The press conference received extensive coverage by the media, followed by a flurry
of horrified letters to local newspapers. O
ne week later, it was as if the event never happened. It was yesterday’s news.

However, the website continued to elicit new information in regard to the top echelon
of the New Mexico drug scene:

One person wrote
: “This is in response to the psychic’s description of the house in the mountains
where Kait Arquette saw a VIP buy drugs. I know all about those homes and what they
are used for. A man I used to do business with in New Mexico got involved with a drug
cartel. He purchased a number of homes, some with airstrips. That’s how the cartel
laundered money. Some of those homes were mansions worth millions of dollars. Rarely
did anyone live in them. Occasionally they would be used for visitors of the cartel
or other drug transactions.”

So many people seemed to have first hand knowledge about VIPs who controlled the New
Mexico drug scene, yet no one was willing to speak out. And with good reason. There
was no way to know whom to trust.

Although the Real Crimes site had not yet produced any miracles, it was serving the
purpose for which it was created – bringing allegations of  mishandled cases to the
attention of the public. A number of reporters and TV producers were using the site
as a resource, and an investigative Internet newspaper was running a series of articles
titled “Corruption in New Mexico.” S
everal of our cases were also subjects of books.

From the Tally Keeper’s notebook:

Update
– Nancy Grice’s daughter, Melanie McCracken:

Melanie’s case was featured on NBC Dateline, earning them the
Edward R. Murrow Award for investigative reporting.

Update
— Arry Frank’s sister, Stephane Murphey:

Thanks to on-going pressure from a reporter, the Rio Rancho Department of Public Safety
finally agreed to submit DNA evidence from under Stephane’s fingernails to
CODIS (Combined DNA Index System Program)
.
The DNA matched that of a prison inmate, David Bologh, who had been a neighbor of
Stephane’s. Bologh was arraigned on charges of murder, kidnapping, aggravated burglary,
auto theft and tampering with evidence.

Update
— Bill Houston’s daughter, Stephanie Houston:

After nearly four years, Bill and his private investigator were finally able to convince
the district attorney to reopen Stephanie’s case. A grand jury indicted her boyfriend,
Patrick Murillo, on a vehicular homicide charge.

No, the Red Sea, (or, more aptly, “The Blue Sea”), had not parted, but some waves
had been created. The voices of the twenty-four families who spoke out at the Albuquerque
press conference had been twenty-four times louder than the voice of one family alone.

In June 2004, I was invited to speak at a convention of the New Mexico Survivors of
Homicide. It was a moving experience to finally meet in person some of the families
that I had come to feel so close to through e-mail and phone conversations.

Following my opening talk, a panel of judges entertained questions from the audience.
As I studied the names in the program, I realized there had been a substitution. The
Chief Judge of the judicial district that covered all of Bernalillo County was missing
from the line-up.

“Where’s the star of the panel?” I whispered to the woman seated next to me.

She turned to regard me with surprise. “You mean you haven’t heard?”

“Heard what?” I asked.

“He’s been arrested. He and a lady friend were stopped when they tried to avoid a
DWI checkpoint. They’d apparently come from a party. The judge had cocaine on the
crotch of his pants and a bindle of it in his lap. He’s been charged with drug possession
and tampering with evidence.”

“Where was the party?” I asked.

“Who cares?” the woman said. “He was out with his friends snorting coke. Isn’t that
enough?”

No, it’s not enough,
I thought, although I didn’t say it aloud. If this renowned judge was doing drugs
at a party, there must have been other well-connected people in attendance.

I leaned forward and tapped the shoulder of a reporter in the row in front of me.

“Who does the judge who got arrested hang out with?” I asked her.

“There’s a clique,” she told me. “It’s tight and goes back a long way. Politicians
and well known business people.” She paused and, then, as she realized where our conversation
was headed, added hastily, “Of course, he has other friends too. He’s a popular man.”

There were immediate calls for the judge’s removal from the bench. After issuing a
statement of apology to his family and the public, he was whisked away to the Betty
Ford Clinic in California. Protesters lined up outside the courthouse, furious that
the judge remained eligible for retirement benefits because he’d submitted his resignation
before he could be suspended. One outraged woman stood sweltering in the 95 degree
heat, waving a sign that read, “Who’s your dealer, Judge?”

Legislators expressed their concern that “one sad, isolated incident” might undermine
the integrity of the System in the eyes of the public.

But, as it turned out, it was not one isolated incident.

Several days after the judge’s arrest, an investigative reporter exploded a TV news
story that revealed that the judge had a lengthy history of using illegal drugs. The
story was based upon information in a long-buried narcotics report that alleged that
the judge’s cocaine use had been known to law enforcement for at least eight years,
along with the names of other socially prominent drug users.

The judge’s name appeared four times in the forty-eight-page report, which documented
a Department of Public Safety investigation to pinpoint participants in New Mexico’s
multi-million dollar drug trafficking business.

Bernalillo County Sheriff Darren White, who had been the DPS secretary at the time
the report was written, denied knowing anything about it.

The TV station stood by their story.

As the conflict continued, more information surfaced. The report had, indeed, been
prepared by a DPS agent, who was assigned as the state’s representative to an Organized
Crime and Drug Enforcement Task Force. The document detailed drug smuggling and money
laundering in New Mexico that spanned twenty years, along with a list of participants
that — according to the privileged few who had seen the report—read like a “Who’s
Who” of the New Mexico drug underworld, with judges, lawyers, politicians, sports
celebrities and prominent businessmen listed right alongside the state’s narcotics
kingpins.

Because no charges had been brought against any of those people, their names could
not be released.

The Judicial Standards Commission obtained a copy of the report, and David Iglesias,
US Attorney for New Mexico, was interviewed on television.

Reporter:
Important document?

Iglesias: 
Absolutely!

Reporter:
Eye opener?

Iglesias: 
A page-turner. I couldn’t put it down.

Governor Bill Richardson asked the state Judicial Standards Commission to initiate
an investigation.

The judge’s attorney was adamantly against such a probe.

“That’s the kind of crap that can ruin people’s lives,” he said.

People’s lives have already been ruined!
I longed to scream at him. The drug activities of the people on that VIP list dated
back to before Kait’s murder. A limousine driver told investigators that, in the 1980s,
he transported the judge and two prominent attorneys to Santa Fe to meet with legislators
at a bar, and the judge and his associates used cocaine throughout the trip. It stood
to reason that the legislators they were planning to spend the evening with would
have been involved in the same activity.
Who were they?

Three psychics, from different areas of the country, had given almost identical responses
to our question, “Who was the VIP Kait saw involved in a drug transaction?” Those
descriptions formed a thumbnail sketch that I thought I might recognize if I could
compare it to names of the people in the narcotics report.
10

I did everything I could to get a list of the names, but even my reporter friends
couldn’t get access to them. Unless the VIPs were careless enough to be caught with
cocaine in their crotches their identities would forever be protected.

When the (now former) judge returned from rehab, he pleaded guilty to DWI and possession
of cocaine. He was sentenced to a year’s probation and two days of house arrest and
given a conditional discharge on the drug charge, so the felony conviction would eventually
be removed from his record. His lady friend also pleaded guilty and received the same
“punishment.” By entering guilty pleas, they avoided trial, which meant they never
would be forced to disclose where they had been that night or identify their drug
suppliers.

Years were passing, and Don and I were growing old. We kept ourselves busy adding
cases to the ever-expanding Real Crimes site and doing volunteer work. We had developed
a casual social life on the Outer Banks, but we missed the longtime friendships we’d
enjoyed in New Mexico. Most of all, we missed our children. With the loss of Kait,
the family unit had fragmented, and our surviving children were scattered all over
the country. We visited them, of course, and they visited each other, but the solid
structure of “Family” no longer existed and our lives felt empty without it.

Then, one day, when I was feeling particularly downhearted, Pat called with some up-lifting
news.

“Remember the detective with the Bernalillo County Cold Case Squad, who was convinced
Kait was forced off the road and then shot?” she said. “Well, I ran into him and his
wife last night at a barbecue, and he told me he’s submitted his findings to the APD
Cold Case Unit.”

“I thought that unit had folded!” I exclaimed in surprise.

“It had, but it’s now been resurrected,” Pat told me. “The new lead detective is said
to be honest and dedicated. This could be the break we’ve been praying for!”

The
Albuquerque Tribune
ran a lengthy article about the new APD Cold Case Unit, stating that the lead detective
was “the first Albuquerque Police Department agent to take seriously the reams of
information acquired by the family in the Kaitlyn Arquette case.”

“I believe the evidence is strong, very strong,” the detective was quoted as saying.
“The family’s private investigator and I have agreed to sit down together. There’s
so much more we can do now that we couldn’t years ago. That’s what’s really going
to solve these cases— forensic science.”

When Pat met with the detective she was favorably impressed. She described him as
friendly and accessible and interested in reviewing her information as long as it
didn’t implicate the Vietnamese.

“The homicide detectives have assured him they thoroughly investigated the Vietnamese
angle and there’s nothing to it,” Pat said. “They’ve told him your book is fiction,
so he won’t even read it. I assured him I’m not convinced that the Vietnamese killed
Kait. They’re a bunch of crooks and I feel sure they were somehow connected, but I’m
thinking now that somebody else did the shooting.”

“Maybe so,” I conceded. “But Dung or his friends must have been there. How else could
he have known about it three hours before he was told?”

“The detective said the case can’t be prosecuted, no matter how strong the evidence,
because the statute of limitations has run out,” Pat said. “I told him the most important
thing is to uncover the truth so the family can have closure.”

“I thought there was no statute of limitations on murder!”

“That’s true today, but not in 1989,” Pat said. “Back then, the statute of limitations
on murder in New Mexico was fifteen years. That law has since been changed, but the
detective tells me it’s not retroactive.”

“You mean, if somebody came forward tomorrow and confessed to the murder, he wouldn’t
be charged?” I asked incredulously.

“Probably not,” Pat said.

When the story about the detective’s willingness to work on Kait’s case appeared
in the paper, we received an anonymous e-mail that contained a veiled threat to other
members of our family. Then we began to be told things that seemed deliberately designed
to send us off on tangents. Members of law enforcement seemed suddenly to be confiding
inside information about Kait’s case to everybody they met, and those people were
helpfully passing those statements on to us: (1) Kait had been having an affair with
Cop Number One and he killed her because she was becoming too possessive; (2) Kait
was an APD snitch and was killed in a drug sting; (3) Kait was shot as a message to
me that people didn’t like my books; (4) and, of course, the old standby— Kait was
the victim of a car-jacking.

We didn’t believe any of those statements, yet we couldn’t arbitrarily dismiss them
on the very slim chance that one might actually be accurate. So hours of our time
and Pat’s were spent checking out leads, all of which proved to be dead ends.

Pat continued to meet with the detective, but their conferences were turning out to
be less productive than we’d hoped.

“He has total faith in the homicide department,” Pat told us. “He acknowledges there
were some problems with the investigation, but he’s certain those weren’t intentional.”

“What does he have to say about the fact that no one was there when the ambulance
arrived?”

“Police reports don’t support that, so he doesn’t believe it.”

“But the police reports are filled with misinformation!”

“He doesn’t think that way, and that’s understandable. His launching pad is the information
in the case file. If he questions that, he’ll have no foundation to build on. He’s
not out to reinvent the wheel, just to keep it rolling. Homicide detectives have assured
him the Hispanic suspects killed Kait, so his goal is to get information to support
that scenario.”

The detective then received a startling new lead. An alleged eyewitness had resurfaced
with information that could nail Miguel Garcia. The detective would not tell Pat the
identity of this witness, but he did reveal that she was female and said he was working
hard to gain her confidence.