One to the Wolves, On the Trail of a Killer (17 page)

“It sounds like that’s going to keep him busy,” Don commented. “Too busy, I guess,
to follow up on any of the other stuff.”

To us it seemed oddly coincidental that this eyewitness would suddenly pop up after
fifteen years. The term “resurfaced” implied she was already known. If her information
was so important and incriminating, why had Bob Schwartz decided not to prosecute?
The whole situation felt suspect, and we couldn’t help wondering if this honest detective
— an obvious threat to a cover-up — had been served up a manufactured witness in a
deliberate attempt to divert his attention from Pat’s information. If so, there had
to be some way to get him re-focused.

“I’ve heard there’s now an excellent ballistics expert at APD,” I said. “Perhaps
the detective would be willing to ask him to compare the partial bullet from the door
frame with the minute bullet fragments from Kait’s head. He did say forensic science
was the key to solving cases.”

“If bullet fragments are incriminating evidence, what makes you think they still exist?”
Don asked doubtfully.

“They
have
to exist,” I insisted. “They were checked into evidence. All the things in the evidence
room are protected.”

The irony of that statement became apparent when we pulled up the on-line edition
of the
Albuquerque Journal
and were faced with a banner headline:

CLEANUP DESTROYED APD EVIDENCE

According to the article, evidence from hundreds of cases, most of them drug related,
had been destroyed at the Albuquerque Police Department during the cleanup of hazardous
chemicals, which had been spilled on evidence bags.

Apparently, nothing in the evidence room was protected.

The chemical spill was the tip of the iceberg.

The Attorney General’s Office received an anonymous letter claiming that for many
years police employees had been stealing huge amounts of cash, drugs, guns and other
valuable items from the evidence room and APD management had covered that up.

The current police chief was quick to deny the accusation. To reinforce that denial,
he invited the media to tour the evidence room. During the tour, Sergeant Cynthia
Orr seemed reluctant to answer questions and asked her supervisor if she had permission
to speak freely. He assured her that the department wanted them to be open and honest,
so Sergeant Orr invited a reporter into her office and agreed to be recorded.

The sergeant told the reporter that the police chief had lied to the public and had
failed to act despite repeated warnings of evidence theft. Orr said that she, personally,
had identified two individuals who were stealing in the evidence room, but the chief
had allowed them to continue to work there.  She went on to describe how officers
under criminal investigation were allowed to work in the evidence room where they
were free to tamper with the evidence in their own cases. Orr said she was told not
to send reports about missing evidence to the records division because the Top Brass
didn’t want it to become public record that items were missing.

“Am I implicating the chief in assisting in this cover-up? Absolutely,” Orr said.
“Do I know this is a dangerous accusation to make? Absolutely. But I know this is
something that needs to be done.”

USA Today
picked up the story and it went viral. “The APD Evidence Room Scandal,” as it came
to be known, continued to accelerate as additional whistle-blowers gained the courage
to come forward.  The list of valuable property that had been sold at auction or “taken
to the dump,” (which we assumed meant employees took it home with them), grew longer
and longer. An example of such items was a $15,000 plasma television set, which was
seized as evidence in a white-collar crime investigation and was supposed to be returned
to the owner after the trial. Evidence room personnel said they “took the TV to the
dump” because it had a crack in it.

There was instant retaliation against the whistleblowers. A captain, who had reported
the damage from the chemical spill, was asked to turn in her badge, gun and squad
car. A different captain, who had ordered an investigation into high-ranking members
of the police department, was punished by having the Internal Affairs division taken
away from his command. At two citywide meetings, attended by hundreds of officers
who were required to be there, deputy chiefs encouraged them to be “angry and repulsed”
by Sergeant Orr for breaking the code of silence.

In a furious tirade, filled with profanity, one deputy chief warned his lieutenants
that if they ever openly criticized the administration he would yank them from their
command. One lieutenant taped that diatribe and filed a complaint with the City’s
Labor Management Relations Board.

“He was trying to intimidate us,” the lieutenant stated. “Others will not come forward
because they are scared.”

Back in 1994, in response to my question, “How is this going to end? “ Betty Muench
had told me:

“There is this group which is not understanding how things operate and they will be
making their own rules. When this will border on anarchy, then they will fall, with
truth coming out all around.”

Was this the beginning of the fall? I certainly hoped so. My father had once remarked
humorously, “Life is like a roll of toilet paper – the closer you get to the end,
the faster it goes.” At the time, I had thought that was funny. It wasn’t funny now. 
When I’d stood at Kait’s gravesite and told her, “Mother is going to get your killers,”
I couldn’t have imagined how long that would take. Now I was feeling threatened by
my own mortality.

The mayor told reporters, “When you have a department where there are accusations,
counter-accusations, lieutenants accusing captains, captains accusing deputy chiefs,
that is a department in disarray.”

In the wake of that statement, the police chief resigned. He was given a hero’s send-off
by the police union, who threw a huge retirement party in his honor.

Experts were imported from California to analyze the evidence room problems. One of
their suggestions was “Stop storing so much stuff!” Although valuable items were missing,
(one woman had already filed a law suit claiming police had “misplaced” $100,000 worth
of her family jewelry), there were over one million pieces of evidence crammed into
the APD storage area.

The evidence room manager began to dispose of the items by selling them on E-Bay.
The threat of a major purge threw us into a panic about the items from Kait’s desk.
Her personal property, including her telephone book, snapshots, and correspondence,
might easily be considered disposable after fifteen years. Don submitted yet another
request for their return, citing our concern for their safety. The new District Attorney
agreed that we could have them. The Vietnamese correspondence was missing from the
materials, but we now had pictures of some of Dung’s friends in California. Not that
they had any value, since the statute of limitations on the car wreck insurance fraud
had long since run out.

The evidence room circus continued to provide entertainment for the nation. According
to one article, three months earlier, a freezer in the evidence room that contained
more than 1,600 samples of blood, urine, saliva and other evidence from rapes and
homicides had been shut down. It was hardworking Sergeant Orr, who, although off duty
that day, responded to a security alarm in the evidence room to find a door standing
open. When she checked out the rest of the building she detected a foul stench and
discovered the freezer had a temperature of sixty-eight degrees. The police and prosecutors
had withheld that information from defense attorneys, who continued to construct their
cases on contaminated evidence.

Although DNA evidence wasn’t a factor in Kait’s case, it was crucial to some of the
other cases on our website. We hoped that those cases were not among the ones affected,
because many of our Real Crimes families were depressed enough already. Several, who
had been optimistic about breakthroughs, had been crushed to discover their cases
could not be prosecuted.

Update
— Nancy Grice’s daughter, Melanie McCracken:

A grand jury indicted Melanie’s husband, now-retired State Police Lieutenant Mark
McCracken, on charges of first-degree murder and tampering with evidence. But the
charges were dismissed on a technicality — an investigator for the prosecution was
in the room during testimony.

Update
– Bill Houston’s daughter, Stephanie Houston:

The boyfriend who ran Stephanie over with his truck was brought to trial, but a jury
found him not guilty of vehicular homicide. Police had not interviewed witnesses at
the time of the incident, and, now that the case was four years old, the prosecutor
would not call them.

Update
— Arry Frank’s sister, Stephane Murphey:

A judge declared the key jailhouse statement that incriminated David Bologh inadmissible
because police had neglected to have him sign a waiver of his rights before taking
his statement.

The district attorney said he would appeal the judge’s ruling.

“We hear the appeal may take two or three years, “said Stephane’s mother, who had
driven 1,000 miles from out of state to attend a trial that did not take place. “It
feels like we’re being tortured. We’re being twisted slowly over a fire.”

On Mother’s Day, 2005, I experienced one of those dreams that left me feeling that
I had received a message. It was the first such dream I’d had in over five years.
But this time it wasn’t Kait who delivered the message. The visitor who appeared at
my bedside was the last person I would have expected, even in a dream.

It was Miguel Garcia.

Although I never had seen him in person, I immediately recognized him from newspaper
photos. In the dream he was not in his thirties, as he would have been now, but was
still the pimply-faced kid he had been when Kait was murdered.

Miguel handed me a Mother’s Day card with a picture of the Virgin Mary on the front.
When I opened the card, the message read, “I DIDN’T DO IT.”

I looked up at the boy, who was standing there, waiting expectantly.

“If you didn’t, who did?” I asked him.

Miguel said, “Juve.” He paused and then added a bit nervously, “She told me to give
you a hug because it’s Mother’s Day.”

I didn’t know if he was referring to the Holy Mother or to Kait, but either one was
acceptable. In my dream state, I got out of bed and let him hug me. He was a strong
but skinny kid, not much taller than I was, and it felt like being hugged by my teenage
grandson.

Then Miguel’s image disappeared, and I was awake.

I got out of bed, went into my home office, and recorded the dream. I had no idea
what the source was— “Mary, Mother of Heartbreak”; Kait, reaching out to me on Mother’s
Day; or Miguel himself, asleep in Albuquerque, dreaming with such ferocity that his
dream crossed the miles between us and merged with my own. I decided I would treat
this information as I would any other tip. I would consider it a possibility until
it was disproved.

Juve Escobedo? The man was an enigma.

APD’s preferential treatment of Juve had always seemed strange. Although the men were
arrested at the same time, police had held only Miguel. Even after both were indicted
and a bench warrant was issued for Juve, police had not picked him up.

Over and over, psychics had described a shooter who sounded like Juve. Robert Petro
had said
,
“He has a very unusual first name, like a nickname. He appears to be around five feet
eight, about 175 pounds, he has a police record, and he has somewhat dark skin, and
he has what look like tattoos.”

Shelly Peck had been even more explicit
: “I’m getting a short name that starts with J. John? Joseph? And a Michael is involved
somehow. And there’s an S name. Or — ‘ES’ — something? Was this person a mechanic?
I get him disassembling cars. I get a vision of gas tanks, which is the symbol for
a garage. Does he work in a garage, taking cars apart?”

There was no way I could have influenced Shelly to make such statements. At the time
of her reading I had not known about the body shop.

If Juve was connected to that, he quite possibly had disassembled cars.  And Betty
Muench had definitely placed him at that shop.
“The Hispan
ic suspect, Juve Escobedo, was there,”
she had written during one of her trance readings.
“This was after the death of Kait. He enters midst much attention and a sense of expectancy.
He is to receive something.”

So how did my current Dream Visitor fit into the picture?

According to Betty,
“Garcia sought this so called ‘honor’ and must now undergo the pressure.”
Was it possible that Miguel had accepted the assignment and hired the others as accomplices?
In one of his drunken confessions, Marty had told police that he was paid one hundred
dollars.

I went to the computer and pulled up information about Miguel. In February 1989, a
warrant had been issued for his arrest for “aggravated assault.” When I looked up
the definition of that charge, it was, “An unlawful attack by one person upon another
which results in severe or aggravated bodily injury and/or is accompanied by the use
of a weapon or by means likely to produce death or great bodily harm.” That was a
very strong charge. What had Miguel done? I went back to the database to read the
report by the officer who had gone to his home to arrest him.

It said a complaint had been made that Miguel had thrown an unknown object at a truck.

That came nowhere near meeting the criterion for “aggravated assault.” However, the
accusation of a felony, even if unfounded, had made it possible for that officer to
obtain a warrant that allowed him to enter Miguel’s home. Surprisingly, though, the
officer hadn’t arrested him. They’d apparently just had a chat and the cop had left.
In his report he had listed an incorrect house number so people who read the report
wouldn’t know where Miguel lived.

Who was the cop who misrepresented the offense and then magnanimously let the fish
off the hook?

I caught my breath as I realized why the name was so familiar.

He was the brother of Paul Apodaca’s drug dealer, Lee.

The implications of such a situation were overwhelming. Roy Nolan had told Pat and
me that narcs kept a stable of snitches who accepted assignments in exchange for money
and protection. Miguel was in debt to this officer for not arresting him for “aggravated
assault.” Four months later, might he have been called to ante up?

But, even if Miguel had agreed to terrorize Kait, that didn’t mean that he killed
her. When police raided his home, they had found only one live cartridge and a single
action revolver loaded with blanks. Blanks suggested intimidation, not murder. No
blanks had been found in Juve’s arsenal. Might Juve have been privately commissioned
to kill Kait, while Miguel and Marty thought they were just going to scare her?