One to the Wolves, On the Trail of a Killer (11 page)

“By the way,” Michael told me as we said our “good nights” at the elevator, “I had
the weirdest call this morning from Roy Nolan. I think that guy must have blown a
batch of brain cells. He kept trying to convince me that Kait was the victim of a
car-jacking.”

John Cooke Fraud Report, April 1995:

A CHILD IS DEAD, A FAMILY STILL MOURNS

WHO KILLED KAITLYN ARQUETTE?

On March 4, 1995, almost six years after losing her youngest child to what the Albuquerque
Police Department terms (to this very day) a random, drive-by shooting, Lois Arquette
spoke before the Texas International Association of Special Investigation Units at
their annual seminar.

Speaking in front of nearly 300 investigators, it was clear that her need for an answer
to this tragedy was paramount to an eventual healing of the wounds. …

Nearly an hour later, she stopped and asked if the audience had any questions.

Silence. Deafening silence.

She looked around the room and saw no hands raised. Later, she confided to me that
she thought that the lack of response was due to disinterest. She could not have been
more mistaken. What Arquette thought was disinterest was instead attributable to the
overwhelming effect she had on that crowd of big, tough investigators.

The front-page article, illustrated by a photo of Kait’s grave, contained a footnote
by the editor:

While we still do not know who killed Kaitlyn Arquette, we do know that her death
was far more than a random drive-by shooting. The answer may be buried beneath the
tens of thousands of suspicious auto accidents that are crammed into our collective
insurance industry files.

At the conclusion of Arquette’s speech, one of the people in the audience made an
incredibly generous offer. This family-owned company that owns a proprietary database
of over 160 million name-search entries has donated as much on-line time as we need
to assist in the solving of this crime. Two weeks ago, claims investigator Jim Ellis,
sat in our office and began the massive task of running the information….

Leslie Kim shipped me a hundred copies of the article, and I sent them to everyone
I could think of including the FBI, the U.S. Attorney, the Attorney General, the INS,
and the claims department of every insurance company in Albuquerque.

Only one person responded— Charlie Parsons, Special Agent in Charge of the L.A. Office
of the FBI. The FBI had recently assumed federal jurisdiction in both automobile accident
fraud schemes and Medicare fraud, as well as Vietnamese organized crime in the United
States. Agent Parsons wrote me that, based upon the information provided by us and
our investigators, their office was opening an official investigation of the subjects
in California who were participants in the fraud ring.

I mailed a copy of Agent Parsons’ letter to the FBI office in Albuquerque.

“I accept that you can’t become officially involved in the investigation of Kait’s
murder unless APD invites you in,” I said. “One would hope, however, that the fact
that the FBI in L.A. has initiated an investigation of this crime ring may bring you
into this situation by the back door.”

They did not respond.

Once again we were at a plateau as far as the case went, but we didn’t feel alone
in our impotence. The flood of mail from readers of my book had accelerated since
the publication of the paperback, and I spent many hours each day responding to letters:

“Our daughter, Natalie, was killed by a shotgun blast to the head in the presence
of her jealous boyfriend, an officer with the local police department. His own department
performed the investigation and labeled the death a suicide. Natalie, who was breaking
up with the boyfriend, had been out that night with another man, and the boyfriend
had been tailing her. After the shooting, the boyfriend pried Natalie’s teeth out
of the bedroom wall and carried them in his mouth during the funeral. To us, this
does not seem like normal behavior. We do not believe Natalie killed herself.”

“Two years ago my best friend and both her daughters were murdered. She was suffocated.
Her twelve-year-old was strangled with a phone cord and raped, and the three-year-old
was drowned in the bathtub in an inch of water. Evidence was destroyed because a sheriff
deputy’s son was accused, (his prints were found on the bathtub). My friend comes
to me in dreams, crying and wanting to know why.”

There also were letters that renewed my faith in humanity:

“I am a 17-year-old girl who lives in San Diego. I am one of the Vietnamese boat people
and proud of my heritage, except I am shameful of the conduct of some of my fellow
refugees. I am afraid for my life when I am in Little Saigon after dark. My mother’s
hairdresser was gunned down by the Vietnamese Mafia. Storekeepers close shop early
for fear of being robbed and killed. The fear this community has is fear of retaliation.
It’s a catch 22 — tell and hope that justice will prevail — don’t tell and keep your
family alive.

“Thank you for writing your book. You have taken one of the first steps in unveiling
organized Vietnamese crime to the general public and in turning the legal wheels that
will one day make Little Saigon and all other Vietnamese communities safe again.”

Then, three days short of Kait’s twenty-fifth birthday, I received a very different
sort of letter with the return address of a federal correction facility:

“Compassionate Lois, peace be upon you,

My name is Lawrence *, I am presently incarcerated at the above stated institution.
Back in 1987 through June 1989, me and your daughter Kait used to correspond. I found
her name and address in a correspondence magazine. She claimed she was 19, when in
reality, as I later found out, she was only 16. She said if I answered her letter
I should address it in care of a girlfriend because her parents wouldn’t approve.
I did respond, and we continued to correspond.”

This scenario struck me as plausible. Over the years, Kait had had many pen pals.
When she was sixteen a sudden surge of mail had alerted us to the fact that she had
listed her address in a singles magazine and lied about her age. We insisted that
she remove the ad, and the letters stopped coming. As far as we knew that was the
end of it. But, as headstrong as Kait had been, it was perfectly in character for
her to have continued a clandestine correspondence.

I continued reading:

“Kait told me about the activities her boyfriend Dung was involved in.  She told me
she was frightened, she felt used and trapped, and Dung’s friends had warned her to
keep quiet or they’d harm her entire family. In the last letter I got from her in
mid-June, 1989, she told me she had reached the end of her rope and was going to report
Dung and his friends to the authorities. I never heard from her again. Her girlfriend
wrote and told me Kait had been killed. There is much we need to discuss. I believe
I can tell you who the trigger man is.”

Then there came the inevitable request for money:

“Before I get into the details of what I know about your daughter’s murder, let me
explain that I am a complete pauper.  I am in dire need of stamps, cigarettes, gym
shoes, etc. I also need to purchase important legal books. If you would immediately
send me funds to help me obtain these necessities I would truly appreciate it. Any
amount, be it a dime or a thousand dollars, would be appreciated.”

Lawrence then baited the hook with the statement that Kait’s girlfriend knew about
all the things Kait had been planning to expose and had shared her information with
him before fleeing Albuquerque because her life had been threatened.

“She told me there were two triggermen and she named them,”
he said.
“She told me she originally planned to be with Kait that night, and she was lucky
she wasn’t.”

I sent him a money order for one hundred dollars.

Back came his thank you note:

“Thank you for the $100. I am truly grateful. But in no way will that cover the cost
of my present needs. I must ask that you send me a money order for $900. If you honor
this request I’ll send you information that can and will get the killers and those
who assisted them convicted.”

He, then, extended a carrot that was irresistible:

“Kait’s girlfriend told me Kait had a fake friend, a white female, who set her up
to be shot by being sure that within a certain time frame she’d drive down Lomas.
Two Spanish guys with the same last name were paid to stalk and kill her.”

How long should I keep on going with this? The man was a cold-blooded opportunist,
but that didn’t mean that his information wasn’t valid. We knew that Susan Smith had
fled the state in fear for her life, and Paul Apodaca had the same last name as his
brother Mark, who had recently been convicted of an unrelated murder.

I sent him another hundred.

“I request your permission to tell you something confidential about Kait,”
Lawrence now wrote me.
“Your daughter was undergoing very serious problems she feared to confess to anybody
except me.  She was coerced to get indirectly involved with something she didn’t desire
to do. I was horrified when I heard about it.

“I appreciate the second $100 money order. You now owe me only $800. This is very
reasonable considering all that I know about Kait’s awful secret which could solve
this case for you.”

I wondered if Kait’s “awful secret” involved the importation of drugs. After all,
she had worked as supervisor of imported clothing at a store where most of the merchandise
came from the Orient.

I decided to get Pat’s advice before proceeding any further. I reached for the phone
and discovered that my left hand wouldn’t close around the receiver.

“Oh, no, not again!” I tried to say, and the words came out as gibberish.

It was forty miles on a two-lane road to the nearest hospital, and Don got me there
in just over half an hour. During that long wild ride I regained my speech, but I
kept losing parts of my anatomy. First my left arm fell limp. Then my left leg. I
was braced for my right side to start kicking in. Was anything going to be left by
the time we reached the hospital?

But once again I was lucky. By the following morning my leg was working. It was several
months before I could raise my left arm above shoulder level and over a year before
I could type with my left hand, but I eventually got most of myself back.

Brain scans revealed no indication of a stroke, and the doctors concluded the paralysis
had been caused by a massive, stress induced seizure that had trashed my nervous system.
They said I must learn to relax, and I promised to try, but Lawrence wasn’t making
that easy. His letters continued to pour in, with intimate revelations about Kait’s
personal idiosyncrasies, some of which were disconcertingly accurate; and with ferocious
demands for money.

Plus the constant titillating offers of important information:

“My sources in Albuquerque have now located Kait’s girlfriend. She has sent me the
diary that Kait kept from 1987 through 1989. You know Kait’s handwriting, so when
I send it to you, you’ll know it’s hers. Where is my $800?”

Pat ran a Federal Correction Department search on Lawrence’s name and prison I.D.
number. It came up negative. She contacted the federal correctional facility to which
I had been addressing my letters. This too came up negative.

Officially, Lawrence didn’t exist.

“But he has to be there!” I protested. “That’s where I write to him!”

“He might be in a witness protection program,” Pat speculated. “One of the methods
the government uses to protect such people is to channel their mail through prison
drop boxes.”

That was not an appealing idea, as it meant Lawrence might not be incarcerated at
all and be out there right now, camping in a pup tent behind one of our bayberry bushes,
watching us through the windows.

“Where’s my money?”
he continued to write in an increasingly hysterical frenzy.
“What kind of mother are you that you don’t want Kait’s diary and you’re not even
interested in her secret!”

At the end of her patience, Pat forwarded that letter to the prison. The warden allowed
that Lawrence was, indeed, an inmate there, whose crimes ranged from kidnapping to
rape to aggravated assault. He described my pen pal as “a very large, violent, clever,
jail-house lawyer,” a problem prisoner who was often in the “hole” because of his
continued violent acts within the prison.

“That’s to our advantage,” Pat said. “Lawrence is currently in solitary, which means
the warden will be able to get at his stuff.  Prisoners have their rights to privacy,
and their possessions are off limits unless they’re in solitary. Since Lawrence is
in the hole, his property is in prison control and can be searched. The warden has
agreed to see if he’s got Kait’s diary.”

Prison officials confiscated Lawrence’s belongings. Although they found no diary,
they did find clippings of articles from Albuquerque papers
that must have been sent to him by an accomplice in New Mexico. There was also a file
of clippings about other unsolved murders and drafts of letters extorting money from
the victims’ families.

“Compassionate Doris, peace be with you,”
one of them said.
“Back in 1993 and 1994, me and your daughter Kippy used to correspond, and she told
me a terrible secret….”