One to the Wolves, On the Trail of a Killer (6 page)

“Gallegos says he doesn’t have a record of any snapshots,” Schwartz said. “I’m having
difficulty being in the middle on this. You’re indicating you gave APD certain items,
and they’re saying, ‘We don’t have them.’”

“Bob, why are they behaving like this?” I asked helplessly. “Why are they covering
up for the Vietnamese?”

“I have absolutely no idea,” Schwartz said. “I don’t know. I mean, I don’t think they
are. The worst case scenario in my mind would be sloppy — unskilled — but certainly
nothing intentional in covering for something else. Going beyond the point of negligence
for me is— well, it’s sort of my worst nightmare.”

“You don’t still think Kait’s death was a random shooting, do you?” I asked him.

“That is still the scenario that has the most basis,” Schwartz said. “A prosecutor’s
reality is defined not by truth but by evidence. Look, I’m sorry, but I’ve got a call
on my other line.”

Concerned that my grief-besotted memory might be playing tricks on me, I phoned Robin,
who had helped me clear out Kait’s apartment.

“Do you remember a bunch of photographs?” I asked her.

“Of course,” Robin said immediately. “There were dozens of snapshots. A lot of them
were of Kait and Dung, but others were of Dung’s friends out in California.”

“The insurance investigators need to have those pictures!” I exclaimed.

I wrote Bob Schwartz, telling him about the photographs and urging him to continue
to try to get Steve Gallegos to release them. I also suggested that the DA’s office
seize Kait’s apartment file.

“That file contains entries about Kait running to the manager in the night, asking
for protection from the Vietnamese,” I told him. “Wouldn’t it be a good idea to confiscate
that file before something happens to it?”

Schwartz didn’t respond to my letter, but we later found out that he did belatedly
have the police seize the apartment file and place it in evidence.

Soon after that we received letters from FBI agents in both Los Angeles and Albuquerque,
politely acknowledging receipt of the information we had sent them. They said they
had discussed our allegations with the Albuquerque Police Department, who did not
feel that they warranted following up on.

The
Sightings
episode aired on the first of September 1992. The reenactment of the shooting was
painful to watch, as it contained photographs that showed Kait’s car with the driver’s
window shot out and a bullet hole in the door frame.

Although we didn’t know it at the time, those photographs would turn out to be extremely
meaningful.

When the cottonwoods along the banks of the Rio Grande burst into gold, and patches
of shimmering aspen dotted the mountains we realized that if we wanted to settle someplace
before winter arrived we needed to get a move on.

Our younger son, Donnie, was the only one of our four surviving children still in
Albuquerque. We tried to persuade him to come with us, but he refused to evacuate.

“This is my home,” he said with characteristic stubbornness. “I’m not about to be
forced out of it because my mom wrote a book that’s got people pissed off.”

The day before Don and I left we received a call from
Unsolved Mysteries
saying they were interested in doing a segment on Kait’s murder but APD was not cooperating.

“We’ve tried everybody from the case detective to the chief of police,” the researcher
told me. “Nobody’s willing to talk to us. We don’t understand it. Police departments
are usually eager to get their cases on our show because so many get solved that way.
We need their assistance in getting background information and lining up people to
interview.”

I gave her contact information for Miguel Garcia’s defense attorneys; for Mike Gallagher,
the investigative reporter who had covered the case for the
Albuquerque Journal
; and for a number of Kait’s co-workers at the import store where Kait had been manager
of imported clothing. I also suggested that, since Bob Schwartz had enjoyed his appearance
on
Larry King Live,
he might be equally pleased to be on
Unsolved Mysteries.

Our exodus from Albuquerque was stressful because we had no set destination. As we
drove across beautiful countryside at the height of its autumn glory, one of us would
occasionally comment, “This seems like a nice town. Do you want to live here?” and
the other would say, “Let’s keep going and see what’s ahead.” We continued to drive
until the road ran out on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. The smell of salt air
brought back memories of my childhood in Florida, and my heart lifted. Don, too, was
caught by the magic of windswept beaches and endless stretches of ocean, so different
from his own background as a Michigan farm boy. With little discussion we rented a
house in the dunes.

Meanwhile the
Unsolved Mysteries
show was solidifying even without the help of law enforcement. The producer requested
pictures of our family to aid them in selecting actors for the reenactment. With the
thought that a video would be more helpful to them than still pictures, Don unpacked
the box of home videos that we had carted with us across the country. We were stunned
to discover that all the tapes with Kait on them were missing. The commercial videos
were there, and the tapes of our grandchildren, but every one of our family videos
of Christmases, birthdays, campouts and ski vacations had vanished.

We phoned our children to see if one of them might have borrowed them, perhaps when
they were home for the funeral. All said they hadn’t.

“They were there that first Christmas after the shooting,” Robin told us. “I know
because I started to watch one. It was the one with Kait at the lake showing off her
new swimsuit, and Dung and his friends were cavorting on an inflatable raft. I looked
at Kait, so young and dumb and unsuspecting, and I wanted to scream at her, ‘Run!
Get away from those people!’ I couldn’t stand to watch it all the way through. I rewound
it and put it back on the shelf with the others.”

“Then they must have disappeared at some point between Christmas of 1989 and March
1990,” Don said. “March is when we boxed up our stuff and put the house up for sale.”

“But that’s not when we moved out,” I reminded him. “The Hispanics were arrested in
January. That’s when we got death threats and I panicked. We lived in a studio apartment
for a month before we rented the town house and put our things in storage. So there
was a period of time when our house was unoccupied with all our possessions still
in it.”

“There weren’t any signs of a break-in.”

“If somebody had a key—”

“Nobody had a key to our home except our kids.”

We finally decided that some of the videos must have been packed in a box that was
lost during our move. How ironic and heartbreaking that those were the videos that
showed Kait!

We provided
Unsolved Mysteries
with snapshots from our photo albums, and I made a trip back to Albuquerque to be
interviewed for the show along with reporter, Mike Gallagher, and case detective,
Steve Gallegos. The producer told me Bob Schwartz and the APD captain who had appeared
on
Good Morning, America
initially had agreed to be interviewed, but both canceled out at the last minute,
and Detective Gallegos was reluctantly thrust into that slot.

Casting the part of Dung had turned out to be a problem. There had been no difficulty
finding Albuquerque actors to portray members of our family but no one wanted to play
the part of Kait’s boyfriend.

“It’s crazy,” the producer told me. “There are lots of Vietnamese registered with
Albuquerque talent agencies and when we posted an announcement that we needed Asian
actors they were beating down the doors to get parts. That was before word got out
that it was the Kait Arquette story. After that, not one Vietnamese actor would audition.”

They ended up importing an actor from Hollywood.

Donnie went with me to watch the filming of the death scene. In a bizarre trip back
through time, actors and actresses who bore an eerie resemblance to our family gathered
around a hospital bed where a young actress who looked a lot like Kait lay with her
head encased in bandages. The line on the monitor blipped up and down erratically
as it had on the night when the girl on the bed had been our own. 

Donnie’s hand tightened around mine until I thought my fingers would snap.

“It wasn’t the car-wrecks,” he muttered. “It was something much bigger.”

“I think so too,” I responded.

When I got back to North Carolina, Don told me we’d had a phone call from an insurance
claims investigator in California named Jim Ellis.

“He asked that you call him as soon as you got back,” Don said.

Jim came onto the line with a burst of such high level energy that the receiver seemed
to vibrate in my hand.

“When I saw you on
Sightings,
I rushed out to buy your book,” he said. “Then I went straight to my computer and
started pulling up the claims that have come out of Albuquerque involving accidents
in Southern California. The number was staggering, and the same addresses and phone
numbers kept coming up over and over. A couple of the addresses are on a bunch of
different policies — one on Texas Street and the other on Kathryn Street.” He told
me the street numbers. “Does either of those sound familiar?”

“Both Dung Nguyen and An Quoc Le once lived at the Kathryn Street address,” I said.

“Well, it looks like they’ve got a bunch of friends living there too, who are playing
the same game they are,” Jim said. “And that Texas Street address appears on even
more claims. The most recent loss from that address occurred in July of this year.
A guy named Vu Nguyen was killed.”

“Have you found any cases involving Dung and his friends?” I asked him.

“Possibly,” Jim said. “That dead guy’s roommate, Ngoc Nguyen, was involved in a wreck
in Santa Ana on March 24, 1989.  That’s the same week Dung and Kait were out there.
In Ngoc’s wreck, an auto body shop with a questionable reputation declared his car
a total loss. All occupants of the other car were represented by the law firm of Minh
Nguyen Duy, the attorney whose law firm’s name was on Bao Tran’s business card.”

“Dung had a friend named Ngoc Nguyen,” I said. “His name was on Kait’s speed dial.
Is there any way to determine if he was that person?”

“Only by Social Security number,” Jim said. “These people often have identical names,
and the crooks mix and match their addresses. Today, for example, I brought up a case
on the computer where a person bought a policy in Albuquerque, rushed to California,
had an accident, and gave a home address in Garden Grove.”

“Why haven’t those people been arrested?” I asked.

“Insurance companies aren’t interested in the little fish,” Jim said. “They want the
people at the top. Very soon now there’s going to be a bust that will bring down a
bunch of attorneys and clinics and doctors. In the process maybe somebody will know
something about this New Mexico ring and we can work off of that. Where’s Bao Tran
right now?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I have his address in Santa Ana, but it’s possible he’s moved,
because his phone and beeper numbers have been disconnected.”

“I’ll keep on pulling up cases and maybe Tran’s name will pop out,” Jim said. “For
whatever reason, APD seems to have stonewalled this whole thing. The good news is
that the DA in Albuquerque has reopened the investigation.”

“We’re afraid that may be a token gesture,” I said.

“I’m not going to allow that,” Jim assured me. “That’s why I’m trying to get together
as much evidence as I can. I want to get the National Insurance Crime Bureau, the
Fraud Division of the California State Insurance Agencies, and representatives from
all the insurance carriers all working together so the list we compile will be so
overwhelming that DA Schwartz will be forced to take it seriously.”

The kindness in his voice was almost more than I could handle.

“Thank you,” I said, fighting back tears of gratitude.

“I know this is hard for you to believe, Lois, but in the long run the Universe is
perfect,” Jim said gently. “It was no accident that I happened to see that
Sightings
show. You and I are both part of a plan that’s unfolding as it’s meant to. We’re going
to put a bunch of crooks behind bars, and we’re going to find out what happened to
your daughter.”

Jim’s first move was to start weaving together an extensive network of interrelated
car wrecks stemming from names in my book. When I mailed him a copy of the accident
report on Dung’s wreck in August 1988, he discovered that the second vehicle in the
wreck was registered to Bao Tran’s girlfriend.
He then ran the names of the claimants through his computer and discovered that one
of them, a man from Garden Grove, had been a driver in a similar wreck in October
1991.

“This looks like a hit!” he announced with satisfaction. “I’ve had my eye on this
guy. I already had him under investigation by a private investigator.”

A second party who claimed injuries in Dung’s 1988 wreck was convicted arsonist, Hong
Phuc Duy Van, in whose name Bao Tran’s home phone had been registered.

Jim sent me manila envelopes crammed with reports of suspicious accidents, and I entered
the names and addresses into my own database. Eventually I reached a point where certain
addresses and phone numbers became red flags that allowed me to pinpoint possible
fraudulent claims before even reading the reports.

The
Unsolved Mysteries
segment on Kait’s case aired early in 1993. In light of our strained relationship
with APD, the producer sent us our own copies of the tips that were called in to their
800 number. Most were about insurance scams in California, and those I forwarded to
Jim.

But one that
Unsolved Mysteries
classified as a “Hot Tip” was from Susan Smith, who told the hot line operator that
she wanted to correct an inaccuracy in my book.

She said she was living in fear and wanted her phone number given only to me.

When I dialed the number a woman’s voice answered.

“Hello, Susan?” I said.

There was no response, so after a moment I tried again.

“Am I talking to Susan? This is Lois Arquette, Kait’s mother.”

“Oh, it’s you!” the woman said shakily. “You took me by surprise. I don’t go by Susan
anymore.”

“The people at
Unsolved Mysteries
said you wanted me to call you.”

“Yes, that’s right,” Susan said. “I wanted to correct something. In your book you
said Kait got to my house at nine-thirty. That’s not right. She got there much earlier
than that.”