Who Killed My Daughter? by Lois Duncan
Photo of newspaper stand featuring arrests
10
ON JANUARY 18 BERNALILLO County District Attorney Robert Schwartz held an afternoon press conference and distributed copies of the affidavit for the arrest warrant to the press.
It resulted in banner headlines and front-page news stories:
Albuquerque Journal, January 19, 1990:
TEEN SHOT AT YOUNG WOMAN ON A DARE, OFFICERS SAY
Kaitlyn Arquette was killed at random, the apparent victim of a dare, Albuquerque police said Thursday.
The dare allegedly was accepted by 18-year-old Miguel Garcia of 318 Rosemont NE, police said. Officers arrested him Wednesday night along with two other men in connection with the July 16 slaying. The others arrested were Dennis (Marty) Martinez, 18, and Juvenal Escobedo, 21, also known as Jose Hernandez.
All three were being held without bond after being arraigned on open charges of murder Thursday. …
The arrests were made after a fourth man turned them in, according to an arrest warrant affidavit. The informant, Robert Garcia (no relation to Miguel Garcia), was questioned by police based on a Crime Stoppers tip that he knew the individuals involved.
Robert Garcia told police he was with the three suspects on a joyride when Arquette was shot. He has not been charged.
Bernalillo County District Attorney Robert Schwartz said investigators will review the circumstances and decide whether to bring charges against Robert Garcia. [Schwartz] said his office probably won’t seek the death penalty, because the facts of the case don’t appear to meet the criteria for a capital crime under New Mexico law.
The death penalty can be imposed in New Mexico for the murder of an on-duty law officer; for murders committed during a kidnapping or rape; or during an escape attempt from a jail or prison; in murder-for-hire cases, or for the murder of a witness to a crime.
Police found two .22-caliber pistols and a .22-caliber rifle along with ammunition at Miguel Garcia’s home. A Chevrolet Camaro believed to have been used in the shooting also was seized.
Robert Garcia told police investigators the carload of armed men … spotted Arquette traveling east on Lomas … and pulled up alongside her at a red light. … Escobedo, who was driving, dared Miguel Garcia “to shoot at the female driver.” Miguel Garcia “then pointed a dark-colored revolver at the blond female driver through his passenger side window and fired several shots.” [They] sped away without knowing the shots had struck Arquette, and Miguel Garcia allegedly told everyone in the car “to keep quiet and not tell anyone what occurred.”
The Arquette family distributed about 10,000 flyers asking anyone with information on the case to call Crime Stoppers.
Our initial reaction was overwhelming relief that Kait’s killers had been apprehended. Later, however, when Don and I read the arrest affidavit, we found it confusing. There appeared to be inconsistencies in the stories of the witnesses. The truck driver, Eugene Linquist, had reported seeing. Kait’s westbound car chased by men in a Camaro, while Robert Garcia made no mention of a chase and said when they first spotted Kait she was driving east. He also said they shot Kait while she was stopped at a red light. Not only was this inconsistent with Linquist’s story, it was inconsistent with the fact that the Ford Tempo had reportedly been traveling at a high rate of speed.
“And none of this meshes with Betty’s reading,” I said. “She told me there were three men in the car, not four.”
“She seems to have been wrong,” Don said.
“But she’s been right about other things! She said Kait was crying that night, and Susan confirmed that. She said the car was a low rider, and it was. And Sergeant Lowe told me the Crime Stopper tips came from women. Betty predicted the informants would be ‘the feminine aspect.’ ”
“So, she was right about certain things and not others,” Don said. “What I’m concerned about is all the newspaper coverage. I don’t like our being named as the source of the flyers.”
“Nobody is going to pick up on that,” I said.
That statement fell into the category of “famous last words.” The story that mentioned the flyers was published on Thursday, and we got the death threats on Saturday.
I received the first one. I was using my office computer when the phone rang, and when I picked up the receiver, although I could tell the caller was a woman, she was drowned out by the clatter of my printer.
“I can’t hear you,” I said. “Can you wait just a minute, please?”
The caller continued to talk, but I couldn’t understand her.
Finally the page was filled, and the printer fell silent.
“—die,” the voice was saying. “You’re going to die. We hate you—you’re going to die—we’re coming to kill you.”
“Who are you?” I asked unsteadily. “Why do you hate us?”
“You got my brother in trouble,” the woman said. “That girl was a bitch and deserved to die, and so do the rest of you. You’re going to die! You’re going to die! You’re going to—”
I hung up the phone and went to find Don.
“We just had a death threat,” I told him. “It was from a woman with a Mexican accent who says she’s the sister of one of the men who were arrested.”
“What exactly—” Don started to ask, when the phone rang again. He picked up the extension and listened in silence. Then he grimaced and set the receiver back on the hook.
“Who was it?” I asked, knowing the answer.
“It was her—that same woman.”
“What did she say?”
“The same thing she said to you. She must be some kind of nut.”
“A murderous nut,” I said. “It probably runs in the family. She said they’re coming to kill us, and she sounded like she meant it.”
Donnie was over at a friend’s house, and I called and told him to spend the night there. Don tried to call Gallegos, but he couldn’t be reached, and two young patrolmen came over to fill out a report. They were sympathetic, but it was obvious they didn’t take the threats seriously, and one suggested that we have our number changed to avoid further harassment.
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I wasn’t worried about being harassed, I was worried about being killed!
We finally convinced them to have the telephone company put a tracer on our line, but they told us there would have to be three additional death threats before they could take action.
“What sort of action can you take at that point?” Don asked them.
“We can tell them to stop harassing you,” they said. After the police officers left I found I couldn’t stop shaking. We had planned to have dinner with friends, but the thought of coming home after dark and being shot when we got out of the car was terrifying to me. Almost as frightening was the prospect of staying at home. The windows of our corner house faced out onto two different streets and made us ideal targets for a drive-by shooting.
After weighing our options we did go to dinner at our friends’ house, but by the end of the evening I had worked myself into a state of such irrational panic that I refused to go home. We ended up sleeping on the fold-down sofa in their living room, and the following day I insisted on renting an efficiency in an apartment complex with a security system. Sergeant Lowe told us that the only one of the suspects who had a sister was Miguel Garcia, so I dialed the Garcias’ number to verify her identity. When what sounded like the same woman answered the phone, I quickly hung up. Sergeant Lowe suggested we start recording all our calls, so we hooked a recorder to the phone. We didn’t get my more threats, but someone continued to phone us, sighing and moaning and occasionally muttering obscenities. The background noises never varied; there was always the sound of television and the high-pitched jabber of a very young child.
I went over to our house every day to feed the pets and to pick up our mail, but even in the daytime I felt uncomfortable there. One Sunday I stayed later than usual to run a load of laundry, and when I left around six P.M., I noticed a car
Would it be safer to race back to the house or make a dash for the car? The fact that I’d double-locked the front door decided me. I lunged for the car, yanked open the door, and hurled myself into the driver’s seat. As I twisted the key in the ignition, I could hear the engine of the other car starting up also. I floored the accelerator and sped down the street toward Lomas where, without pausing to signal, I plunged out into traffic. Brakes shrieked and horns blared as furious drivers swerved to avoid a collision. A glance in the rearview window revealed nobody behind me, but I took a roundabout route back to the apartment, in case I was being followed and was too dumb to know it.
It was evident, even to me, that I was becoming a basket case. Paranoia was not the only symptom I was exhibiting; I was also experiencing depression. APD’s “airtight” case had been rapidly disintegrating. First Marty Martinez, the eighteen-year-old in the backseat, was released from the Juvenile Detention Center for lack of evidence. Then it was disclosed that the state’s “eyewitness” had been lying and Betty Muench had been right about the number of men in the low rider. Robert Garcia had not been with his friend on the night of the shooting, he had been incarcerated at the Youth Diagnostic Development Center. And the finger print on the empty Budweiser can found in the gutter next to Kait’s car did not match up with those of any of the Hispanic suspects.
Day-by-day changes in the scenario were chronicled by headlines:
Albuquerque Tribune, January 22, 1990: ARQUETTE INFORMER’S STORY IS PROBED
Albuquerque Journal, January 23, 1990: WHEREABOUTS OF SHOOTING WITNESS STIRS QUESTIONS
Albuquerque Journal, January 24, 1990: WITNESS SNAFU CASTS DOUBT ON CASE, ATTORNEYS SAY
Albuquerque Tribune, January 24, 1990: ARQUETTE SLAYING WILL GO TO OPEN HEARING
Albuquerque Journal, January 25, 1990: MURDER CHARGES FILED IN ARQUETTE SLAYING
Albuquerque Journal, January 28, 1990: ARQUETTE SLAYING HEARING POSTPONED
Albuquerque Tribune, January 29, 1990: ALL CHARGES DROPPED IN ARQUETTE DEATH
Albuquerque Journal, January 30, 1990: DA DROPS MURDER CHARGES AGAINST 2 ARQUETTE SUSPECTS
The most disturbing article appeared in the Albuquerque Journal and was based on Mike Gallagher’s interview with “the witness-who-wasn’t-there.” In it Robert Garcia said the police bullied him into making the false statement that he had been an eyewitness to the shooting, despite the fact that they knew he hadn’t been.
TEEN SAYS HE LIED TO POLICE ABOUT SEEING ARQUETTE SHOOTING
Robert Garcia admits he lied to Albuquerque police when he told them he witnessed the shooting death of Kaitlyn Arquette, but he says the police pressured him to tell the story.
Garcia, 16, said in interviews with the Journal … that he was interviewed by police for more than nine hours. … [He] said he initially told officers the truth [that he was in the Diagnostic Center] … but then changed his story.
He said he lied to satisfy investigators, who he claims threatened him with arrest and prison.
“They started scaring me and stuff,” Garcia said. “They just told me that I was there. … They said, ‘We’ve been watching you, you can’t lie to us.’ ”
Violent Crimes Unit supervisor Lt. Pat Dunworth and Sgt. Ruth Lowe, also of the unit, refused to comment.
In a desperate attempt to salvage what was left of their case, the police went through a complicated series of legal maneuvers. With their “eyewitness” now discredited, District Attorney Schwartz felt there was not sufficient evidence to take the case to the grand jury. Other informants were proving hard to find, because, according to Sergeant Lowe, one of Juve Escobedo’s relatives was walking around Martineztown with a gun, threatening to kill anyone who talked to the police.
Because there was a limitation to the length of time the men could be held without being indicted, the police withdrew the murder charges, with the intention of reissuing them later when they had obtained more evidence. Then they filed unrelated charges of burglary against Miguel Garcia to keep him in jail. They released Juve Escobedo, a Mexican national, on his own recognizance, after securing an agreement from the Immigration and Naturalization Service that they would hold him as an illegal alien. It turned out they were mistaken about Juve’s status. He was held for ninety minutes and then released, because he was an applicant for an alien amnesty program. Several days later he was arrested for vandalizing a high school and sentenced to eighteen months probation.
Were the Hispanic men guilty or weren’t they? Despite his erroneous confession Robert Garcia had been able to direct the police to Juve’s gold Camaro, which had been painted and sold, and Marty Martinez had made a confession that he had later recanted.
Yet, everything in me kept screaming, “Dung’s friends are responsible!”
“You can’t have it both ways,” said Don, who by now was thoroughly fed up with me.
Then, something happened that made me believe I could.
The voice on the phone was a woman’s.
“Your daughter’s not the first person those guys have killed,” she said. “Garcia’s shot people before. He does it for pay.”
Suddenly, there it was, the answer I’d been looking for! If the Hispanic suspects were the triggermen, as the police seemed certain they were, wasn’t it possible that somebody else had hired them to shoot Kait?
I phoned Sergeant Lowe and repeated what the tipster had told me.
“It was a random shooting,” she insisted.
“Won’t you even consider—”
“There is no other possibility.”
Her voice was kind but firm and allowed for no argument.
When I hung up the phone I was ready to weep with frustration. It seemed to me that this tip was worth following up on. Murder-for-hire was a serious enough crime to warrant the death penalty, and there were so many reasons to think that Kait’s death had been premeditated!
To be fair, Sergeant Lowe was undoubtedly inundated with murder cases and could not be expected to keep track of every aspect of every one of them. I decided to write a letter that would put things into perspective for her and explain why murder-for-hire was a legitimate possibility. In the letter I told her all the things we had learned about the insurance scam and about An Le’s constant one-day trips back and forth to L.A., which seemed to indicate the possibility of drug running. I reminded her of the phone calls made from Kait’s apartment, and suggested again that the police identify the numbers. I told her about Dung’s statement that he was “deciding” whether to divulge the identity of Kait’s killer, and about his insisting to Brett, “This is all my fault.”
I ended by listing the phone numbers in Kait’s directory, including those for Tuan, the only Vietnamese man listed, and for Dung’s Hispanic friend, Ray, and I gave her updated numbers for Susan and Laura, both of whom had moved since the start of the investigation.
I hand-delivered the letter to the police station and mailed a copy to the FBI in Orange County.
When a week went by and I hadn’t heard from Sergeant Lowe, I phoned to make sure my letter had reached her.
“Steve says there’s nothing in it he hasn’t checked out,” she said. “Mrs. Arquette, I know this is hard for you to accept, but you’re simply going to have to face up to the fact that your daughter died because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
11
FEBRUARY 1990:
It snowed last night,
So this morning I went to the cemetery
To sweep the snow from her grave marker.
Ice had formed in the letters that spelled her name.
When I sat on the ice to melt it, she was mortified.
I heard her voice shriek with the sleek black crows—
“Nobody else’s mother squats in a graveyard!”
LD
SUN
In February I had the grounds to myself. I spent a lot of time there, walking and thinking, trying to make some sense out of the botched investigation.
I stood at Kait’s grave in the silent, winter-white cemetery, and asked her, “What do you want me to do now, baby?”
I got no answer. We evidently still needed our intermediary.
Betty was out when I called, but I left a message on her answering machine telling her I wanted to make another appointment. Since the case was falling through because of a lack of witnesses, we needed advice about what we could do to help revitalize it.
Betty returned my call in a couple of hours.
“You don’t need to come in,” she said. “We’ve already opened the channel to Kait. I had some extra time this afternoon, so I went ahead and got a reading for you.”
She proceeded to read me the transcript over the telephone:
QUESTION: THE CASE AGAINST THE TWO SUSPECTS IN THE MURDER OF KAITLYN SEEMS TO BE DETERIORATING. WHAT MAY WE KNOW AT THIS TIME TO BRING THIS CASE TO A SATISFACTORY CONCLUSION, AND WHAT CAN BE DONE IN LIEU OF WITNESSES?
ANSWER: There is a sense of Kaitlyn impressing with the letters R & J. These seem to be repeated and repeated. There will be this that will seem to be written and it will be as if she will have this very much in her own mind.
“This is like a capital R and a capital J, and the curlicue symbol for and, whatever that’s called,” Betty said. “Kait presents this R & J visually, as if it’s printed on the door of a white vehicle.”
ANSWER: There will be this that will show that she will have had some kind of connection to these two suspects and that they know her. There is something about them which will cause her to recoil as if there will have been some kind of other encounter at another time. They will seem to have some way to fear that something is known about them by her and thus now by others. This will seem to put a fear into them and they will still be under the containment and control of the questioners and can be asked questions even if there is not fully known the meaning of the questions even by the questioner.