One to the Wolves, On the Trail of a Killer (5 page)

“What happened in July of 1989?”

I gave a short account of the shooting, wording my statements with care so as not
to appear to be criticizing anyone in law enforcement.

There was another commercial break, during which Schwartz was hustled onto the set
to take a seat next to me.

“What do you make of all this, Bob?” King asked him.

“The police investigation is almost a mirror image of what’s in Lois Duncan’s book,”
Bob Schwartz admitted. “The police investigation tells us who did it, what happened,
how it happened, what it doesn’t tell us is why it happened. And as a prosecutor you
learn to quit trying to understand
why
people get killed and just accept it.”

“What do you mean it tells us who did it?”

“It tells us who most likely did it.”

“But you can’t prove it?”

“No, we can’t prove it.”

“Who, in your opinion, most likely did it?”

“The two young men who were arrested for the crime.”

“And it may have been murder-for-hire?”

“No, we don’t believe that,” Schwartz said. “Quite frankly, I wouldn’t hire these
guys to mow my lawn, much less mow down a young woman in Albuquerque.”

“So it’s termed what now?”

“It is an open investigation. It is dormant at the moment. We are hoping another lead
will pop up. That’s what ultimately led me to drop the charges, because if we took
a shot at this I was convinced we would have lost. There were two major problems.
One was that the witnesses who originally put the case together for us started back
pedaling and became unusable. The other was that the defense attorneys had gotten
onto this Vietnamese connection, which was a much better motive for the killing than
random shooting. It’s a good motive. You dangle a good motive in front of a jury,
and we thought that would foreclose the case.”

King turned to me. “What do you want him to do, Lois?”

I choked back the obvious response and determinedly took the high road.

“
Well, I think Bob will be very open to any new information that comes in,” I said
demurely. “What I’m hoping the book will do — what Bob and I are both hoping will
be accomplished here tonight — is that people who hear this story will be motivated
to come forward with some concrete information that the police can use.”

“You’re not angry at Bob and the police?”

“No, I’m not angry at Bob,” I said. I could not bring myself to go further than that.

“You feel Bob was right in not going ahead with the trial?”

“He had no choice,” I said. “And I think the police did a very good job as far as
making the arrests. I think where the police may have fallen down—”

I described how the police had refused to check out the calls made from Kait’s apartment
to California on the night Kait died, when that apartment should have been unoccupied.

Schwartz sidestepped that issue as if it never had been raised, asserting with conviction
that the police had “followed every leaf in the wind.”

King seemed irritated that he was not getting a rise out of either of us.

“What do you think about that book she wrote?” he demanded of Schwartz.

“It’s a good book,” Schwartz conceded.

After that we took phone calls, mostly from people in Albuquerque who posed a variety
of questions, including whether Schwartz was using publicity surrounding the case
to aid his reelection campaign. Schwartz said he was not.

It was the final call of the evening that took us by surprise.

“What about the drugs?” a male voice demanded. “Why aren’t you talking about
that
?”

Schwartz quickly assured the caller that the shooting could not have been anything
but “random.”

At the end of the show King thanked us politely for participating, although I suspected
that he was disappointed in our performance. As we left the set, Schwartz asked me
to autograph his copy of my book. Then, before I could suggest that the two of us
go somewhere for a drink or coffee, we were dragged off in opposite directions to
be whisked away in his-and-hers limos to separate hotels. My chance for a private
chat with the district attorney, to fill him in on all the facts he wasn’t aware of,
had been snatched away from me before I could reach out and grab for it.

Back in my room, I lay awake for hours, rerunning the evening’s dialogue in my mind,
disgusted with myself for having allowed Don to convince me to give such a tepid presentation.
When I realized that Larry King was not going to serve as our champion, why hadn’t
I swung back to Plan One? Schwartz obviously had not been given the true facts. What
would have happened, I now asked myself, if I had challenged him with those?  What
if I had responded to Larry King’s question, “What do you want Bob to do, Lois!” with
the shriek of fury and frustration that had been threatening to strangle me—
“If, as Bob says, the Vietnamese connection is a much better motive for the killing
than random shooting, I want him to force the police to
investigate
that probability!”

I wallowed in that thought for a moment and then had to acknowledge the possibility
that it could have finished off what was left of my credibility. If Schwartz was sincerely
convinced that the police investigation was a thorough one, he would have labeled
my accusations ridiculous, and because of his official position his statements would
have carried more weight than those of a distraught mother driven crazy by bereavement.

As I finally drifted off, serenaded by flushing toilets and gushing showers as my
next-room neighbors prepared to go down to breakfast, I consoled myself with the thought
that Bob Schwartz did have a copy of the book, and, unlike Larry King, he apparently
had read it. I wanted to believe that I had seen a glimmer of respect in his eyes
as we maintained our dignity under the most stressful of circumstances.

Maybe, I thought hopefully, after taking a careful look at the flaws in the police
investigation, the district attorney would become an ally.

Yet one question continued to nag at me even as I slid into sleep. Why had Bob Schwartz,
an astute and aggressive prosecutor, so quickly dismissed the idea that Kait’s murder
might be drug related? Why hadn’t he asked some questions and invited a discussion?
That caller had sounded as if he might have had crucial information.

If only I’d taken the initiative and asked questions of my own! Hindsight was always
20-20.

If the mere suggestion of a possible link between an Asian criminal group and political
VIPs involved in the New Mexico drug scene had been enough to cause the district attorney
to shy away from it, could that have been what had blocked the police investigation?

Albuquerque Journal, July 11, 1992

MY 15 MINUTES OF FAME PAID WELL, DA SCHWARTZ SAYS

Bernalillo County District Attorney Bob Schwartz gets the “Working Smarter” award
of the year.

“I’ve never been paid so well for 15 minutes of work,” Schwartz joked of his appearance
on CNN’s “Larry King Live” show.

King invited Schwartz and Albuquerque author Lois Duncan to discuss the 1989 murder
of Duncan’s 18-year-old daughter, Kaitlyn Arquette.

“Ordinarily I work real cheap,” Schwartz said, laughing. His salary is $67,500 a year,
which he says breaks down to an hourly salary in the upper $30s or low $40s. Of course,
Schwartz said, he didn’t actually get paid to be on the show. But all his expenses
were covered, including his plane ticket, cab fare, and two nights in the Bellevue
Hotel on Capitol Hill….

As a bonus, publicity-savvy Schwartz gained international exposure.

In an impromptu phone interview last week, Schwartz reiterated that he didn’t do the
show for political or campaign reasons.

“But did I mind the exposure? Of course not. I hope it comes in handy. You never know.”

Already he has received lots of back-pats from Albuquerqueans.

******

While Bob was being congratulated back in Albuquerque, I proceeded on to Chicago where
the FAX of Betty’s new reading was waiting for me. I now understood why Don had reacted
so strongly, for it predicted a time when those around Dung would
“show how dangerous they truly are, and they will turn on one another. At that time
Dung will be in great danger, and before he will depart to parts unknown he will tell
the whole story and it will be accepted. The mysteries will be cleared up in such
a professional manner as to surprise those who will complete them about themselves…
There will come a kind of crackdown on certain activities, and this will lead to the
capture of all those who will seem to have missed the loop in all this. The stage
is set!”

However, I noted that the reading did not specify that the investigators would be
local law enforcement. They might be DEA or FBI agents.

When Don phoned me that night he had something new to tell me.

“I had a call from a man who said Susan Smith was desperate to talk to me,” he said.
“He gave me an out-of-state phone number and told me to call her. When I did, she
had only one topic on her mind – the time Kait got to her house. In
Who Killed My Daughter?
you quoted her as saying Kait got there at nine-thirty. Susan seemed frantic to convince
me she got there at seven-thirty.”

“Who was the man who called you?” I asked.

“He wouldn’t identify himself. And another odd thing— he didn’t call our home number
and leave a message on our voice mail. He phoned the office here at the campground.”

“But nobody knows where we parked the trailer!” I exclaimed. “How did he find you?”

“I can only imagine that he was a cop,” Don said. “They have ways of tracking people
down. Yet, why would Susan relay her message through a cop in order to refute the
police reports?”

The promo tour was a magnificently orchestrated road show that whisked me in and out
of one location after another. Eventually a day came when I woke up in the morning
and had to call down to the desk to find out where I was. I did not use the deadbolts
on the doors of my hotel rooms in case I had another stroke and needed medical attention.
I also obeyed Kait’s instructions, via Betty’s reading, to keep a vigilant eye out
for “the walker, the innocent walker who does more than walk.” I interpreted that
as a warning that I might be mugged.

Newspaper headlines chronicled my route across the country:

LOIS DUNCAN WANTS TO GIVE HER DAUGHTER ONE FINAL GIFT— JUSTICE

New York Times

NON-FICTION MYSTERY IS RIVETING —

Connecticut Press

A MOTHER SEEKS HER CHILD’S KILLER —

Boston Globe

GRITTY SEARCH LEADS TO BOOK —

Bellingham Herald

The tour terminated in Los Angeles where I participated in a segment of
Sightings,
a Fox Network production that focused on paranormal happenings. Noreen Renier was
filmed in her apartment in Florida, describing her psychic impressions of Kait’s killer
to a police artist, and Betty Muench was shown in her home in Albuquerque, taking
dictation from her spirit guides. The major part of the reenactment was filmed in
Albuquerque with the chase scene staged on Lomas Boulevard. Another scene was filmed
at the cemetery with a photograph of Kait’s face superimposed upon her grave stone.

At the LAX airport on my way back to Albuquerque, I picked up a paperback to read
on the plane. Coincidentally the novel,
H Is for Homicide
by Sue Grafton, turned out to be about car wreck scams in Los Angeles. Among the resources
listed on her acknowledgements page were Michael Fawcett, special agent for the National
Insurance Crime Bureau, and Ron Wharthen, head of the fraud division of the California
State Insurance Agencies.

The minute I got home, I contacted Sue, whom I once had met at a writers’ conference,
to get mailing addresses for Fawcett and Wharthen, and I sent them copies of my book.

Both men called to thank me.

“Your book lays out the case very well,” Fawcett said. “We believe that some of the
particular people you identify have been doing this type of crime for years.”

Wharthen was equally supportive and went so far as to contact Bob Schwartz and request
that he assign a researcher to the case. He also asked Schwartz to put pressure on
the police to give us back the materials from Kait’s desk, which they had been holding
as evidence since August of 1989. Those items included a letter to Kait from the girlfriend
of the capper, Bao Tran, and snapshots of other people in California, who we suspected
might be participants in the insurance scam.

Prompted by Robin, I consulted two additional psychics. Robert Petro, a medium in
Arizona, told me Kait’s car had been stationery when she was shot and her killer looked
familiar to her.
Shelly Peck, a blind psychic in New York, described that killer, but her description
didn’t match that of either a Vietnamese man or Miguel Garcia, the Hispanic suspect
charged with Kait’s murder. She also made some confusing references to gas tanks.

In the time that I had been away, summer had crept from the Rio Grande Valley to the
slopes of the Sandia Mountains, scattering wild flowers in its wake. I joined Don
in our temporary trailer home and we tried to decide what to do next. Most people
taking early retirement have already planned their next chapter of life, but for us
that wasn’t the case. We were running
away
from something, not running
to
something. So we procrastinated, clinging to the moment and allowing the beauty that
surrounded us to become part of the storehouse of memories that we would carry with
us.

In the evenings we sat outside on aluminum chairs, listening to the rhythmic chant
of the cicadas and gazing up into the clearest skies in the world. At such times we
reminisced about other summer evenings when we camped with our children at Elephant
Butte Lake and, after gorging on hamburgers and toasted marshmallows, lay on blankets
to watch for satellites passing overhead.

“What do you think will happen when we die?” Kait once asked me as she lay with her
head on my shoulder, staring up into the depths of those enchanted purple skies. Not
yet a prickly teenager, she was still ripe for cuddling. “Does our thinking part really
go on in some other place?”

“Of course,” I responded quickly. I wasn’t all that sure about that, but I didn’t
want her to be afraid.

“I don’t want my body to go to waste,” Kait said. “I’m going to leave parts of it
to people who aren’t perfect like I am. Kerry can have my teeth. I bet she’ll be happy
to have a bunch of teeth with no fillings.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard of transplanting teeth,” I told her, “but they do have
a lot of success with things like kidneys. When the time comes for you to get your
driver’s license you can have them print on the back of it that you want to be an
organ donor.”

“I’ll do that,” Kait said solemnly. And then, with a shriek of excitement— “There’s
a falling star! Mother, quick, make a wish!”

What did I wish for on that long ago night of innocence and dreaming? I couldn’t begin
to remember. I wondered what Kait had wished for. I hoped it had not been a long term
wish, but one that might actually have had a chance to come true in the limited time
that was left to her before her heart and lungs went into the chest of a young optician
from Santa Fe and her kidneys and liver were distributed to unidentified recipients.

Her set of perfect white teeth went into the grave with her.

So the long strange summer drifted past while Don and I remained cocooned in our artificial
world of self-imposed tranquility, leaving camp only for occasional trips into town
to buy groceries, pick up a newspaper, or check our voice mail.

On one such trip we opened the paper to learn that, two weeks earlier, Marty Martinez,
the third of the men who were arrested, had phoned 911 to confess that he and his
friends had been hired by the Vietnamese. He said that he personally had been paid
one hundred dollars. Police had declined to interview him, and Marty’s confession
might have remained buried indefinitely if a reporter hadn’t stumbled upon the 911
report. APD Lieutenant Chris Padilla then explained to reporters that police hadn’t
taken a statement because Marty had been drinking, and besides, they couldn’t be sure
that he really was one of the suspects who were arrested in 1990. He assured reporters
that Marty would now be interviewed. Instead, the case was marked “Closed, Investigation
Complete.”

One newspaper article noted that “a connection to Asian crime gangs was a key element
of Duncan’s book,
Who Killed My Daughter?,
but investigators, including DA Bob Schwartz, have discounted it.” That same night,
the CBS Evening News ran a story about a crackdown on California car wreck scams.
The California Insurance Commissioner told news anchor Connie Chung, “We have pierced
the top echelon of a staged auto accident ring that has cost insurance companies tens
of millions of dollars.” A field reporter then stated, “Two books, including a best
seller, have recently been written on the subject.”

The camera panned to the jackets of
H Is for Homicide
and of my own book, holding steady on a close-up of Kait’s smiling face.

We purchased a video of the show and sent it to Bob Schwartz. We also sent copies
to the FBI in both Albuquerque and Los Angeles and to the producers of
Unsolved Mysteries.

When Schwartz received his tape, he left a message on our voice mail.

“I’ve assigned an investigator to take another look at your daughter’s case,” he told
me when I returned his call. “My problem is that I have limited resources. I have
only four investigators and their primary responsibility is to work on cases after
the police have dropped them. It’s very difficult to get a police officer to go back
to a case after he’s lost interest in it.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “I thought the DA had jurisdiction over the police.”

“Only in the most theoretical of senses,” Schwartz said. “According to the state constitution,
the DA is the chief law enforcement officer for the district. I guarantee to you,
however, that the day I start telling the police how to do things there are contracts
that come in — the union comes in — the practical effect is they do not agree that
I can do that.”

“Kait’s boyfriend told me he knew who killed Kait,” I said. “As far as I know, no
one has ever given him a high pressure interrogation.”

“I agree with you, I think he should be interviewed hard,” Schwartz said.

“Detective Gallegos could do it!” I suggested eagerly. “Dung seems to relate to him.
Couldn’t you use the good-cop-bad-cop thing they do on television and have Gallegos
play the part of the good cop?”

“In order to do that you have to have a bad cop,” Schwartz said. “That’s where California
comes into this. They do seem to have information about Dung’s involvement in one
car wreck—”

“In
two
car wrecks.”

“All right, two car wrecks. But if the people in California choose not to prosecute,
then he’s not in trouble because it’s a California crime. On the subject of Gallegos,
I’ve asked him about the items you say were in Kait’s desk.”

“Why is APD keeping them?” I asked. “They’ve had them marked as evidence for over
two years. How can they consider Kait’s correspondence evidence of a ‘random drive-by
shooting’?”

“Gallegos says he doesn’t have a record of those things,” Schwartz said.

“He’s told you he no longer has them?”

“No, he’s not saying that exactly. He says he has no record of having seized them.”

“There were a lot of snapshots in the sack we gave him!” I insisted. “Kait shot up
two rolls of film on people in California.”