“That makes me feel better,” he said. “I’m sorry I was so cold to you. I thought you were trying to say I didn’t arrest the right guys.”
We again explained that, assuming the suspects were guilty, we thought that they had to be hitmen, because the bullets in Kait’s head had been too well placed to have been fired by a drunk during a high-speed chase.
“Actually, she wasn’t going all that fast,” Gallegos said. “When her car hit that pole, it didn’t cause much damage. She might even have been stopped completely, and when she was shot and fell forward, her foot bumped into the accelerator and started the car coasting.”
“But didn’t the truck driver say she was driving at top speed?”
“She might have stopped at a light,” Gallegos suggested.
“If Kait was running for her life, she wouldn’t have stopped!”
“You think your daughter would actually have run a red light?” he asked incredulously.
“Considering the circumstances, I think that she might have.”
The interview ended amicably, with Gallegos once again promising to get the Vietnamese letters translated and to send us copies of both the originals and the translations. He also agreed to get copies of the Garcia phone bills for the months of the murder and of the arrest to see if they had made any calls to the L.A. area.
When we got up to leave, he handed Don the huge file.
“This is everything we have on your daughter’s case,” he said. “Every letter we received, every interview we had with anybody, is required by law to be in here.”
When we read the report we discovered it did not contain everything. A number of things were either omitted or incorrect. There was no mention of the evening we had summoned the police to our home to tell them about the car wrecks. My letter to Sergeant Lowe, outlining the reasons we suspected Vietnamese involvement, was not in the report. Nor was Dung’s admission to me that he knew who killed Kait and was “deciding” if he loved her enough to tell. I was misquoted as saying Kait ate dinner at our house on the night she was shot and went to Susan’s house later in the evening, when, in truth, she left for Susan’s at six-fifteen. There were identically worded incorrect statements from Gallegos and Cantwell, attributed to the manager of the Alvarado Apartments, that “the same key opened the apartment door after Kaitlyn was murdered. The Arquette family changed the apartment-door key after that.” The implication was that Kait’s cold-hearted family had evicted her grief-stricken boyfriend from his home. The truth, of course, was that the manager had thrown Dung out and had the locks changed, because Dung and his friends were prone to violence.
It was evident also that, although the Hispanics had been grilled relentlessly, blatantly false statements by the Vietnamese had gone unchallenged.
We copied the file, and Don returned the original to Gallegos with a letter:
* * *
June 24, 1990
Dear Detective Gallegos:
Thank you for allowing us to borrow and copy the report APD has filed on our daughter’s murder. I am returning the original herewith.
You told us to get back to you if we had questions or problems with it. We do have several of these.
For one thing, all the Vietnamese seem to have been lying during their interviews with APD, as though frantically trying to cover up their L.A. connections. This makes us wonder if there is validity to any of their statements.
An example of this is the APD interview with Dung on Thursday, February 15, 1990. Dung’s account of the car wreck in Westminster in March 1989 does not mesh in any way with the accident report. Dung said Kait was in the car at the time; the report shows he was alone in the car. Dung said they were hit from behind; the report shows he rear-ended a car. Dung said no one was hurt; the Snappy Car Rental people say there were large personal injury claims, covered 100% by their liability insurance. When questioned about the calls made from their apartment the night Kait died, Dung stated he was lying on his bed and overheard Khanh Pham make the call to a personal friend named Bao Tran. That call was made at 9:10 P.M., when Dung was at the hospital with us. He then went home with us and spent the night at our house. He could not possibly have heard Pham make the call.
The fact that Dung blurted out this unnecessary lie seems to indicate that the mention of those calls threw him into such a panic, he couldn’t think rationally. It also seems odd that the call lasted only two minutes—just time enough far a quick report that the mission was accomplished. If the call had been made to impart tragic news to a caring friend, you would think that it would have taken longer than two minutes.
Detective Barbara Cantwell said the medical insurance scams are so common in Orange County that nobody could possibly consider them important enough to kill for. Yet Bao Tran … had his phone and beeper numbers changed as soon as he was told Kait was dead. And … he quickly took on a new identity as vice-president of a company called San Diego Dream Life Corporation. That company must have come into existence very suddenly, as it’s not listed in the 1989-90 phone book. It would be interesting to know if it exists as a functioning business. It would also be interesting to know if Bao Tran had any connection with R & J Car Leasing. (Attached is a copy of the R & J listing from the 1987-88 Orange County phone book, which proves that it did at one time exist.)
According to your report, in his phone conversation with Barbara Cantwell on February 23, 1990, Detective Frank, of the Westminster Police Department, said the staged accident scam is a multimillion-dollar business. That sounds to us like a profitable enough operation to make it worth hiring a hitman to wipe out someone who threatens to blow the whistle on it. Detective Frank sounds knowledgeable. Perhaps he could be of help to you in investigating Bao Tran and R & J Car Rental.
Upon a quick first reading there seem to be several things missing from the file on Kait’s murder that ought to be in there. However, the report is so voluminous, we may have missed them. I will be out of town this week, but will reread the report more carefully upon my return.
Sincerely,
Don Arquette
* * *
As an afterthought he attached a stick-on note saying, “We still have not received the promised translations of the Vietamese letters.”
In keeping with my usual practice I mailed a copy of the letter to the FBI in Orange County. In keeping with their usual practice they did not acknowledge receiving it.
The police never spoke to us again.
We did find a couple of interesting things in the report. Dung had produced a business card with Bao Tran’s address and phone number, which were the same as the ones Mike had for “Van Hong Phuc.” There was also a copy of a note, possibly written by the tipster who had phoned me, accusing Miguel Garcia of being a professional killer.
Mike gave me a call after reading his own copy of the police file.
“This case is worse than I expected,” he said. “I’ve been doing some chronology, and the times don’t fit. In fact, they’re so far off that when that truck driver, Lindquist, first went down to the station with his story, an ‘unidentified officer’ told him to go home. Susan said Kait left her place at ten forty-five. Kait was found shot in the car at eleven P.M. That gives us a fifteen-minute time frame for the shooting to take place in. Lindquist said he saw the chase on Lomas between nine-thirty and ten P.M. That’s not possible—Kait was still at Susan’s house! Plus, the Ford Tempo he reported seeing was ‘dark blue,’ the driver had ‘long black ( hair,’ and the car was traveling west, not east the way Kait would have gone.
“But the problems go beyond that, Lois. We’re into something serious here. APD’s representation of the conversation between Miguel and Juve when they were left together in the holding cell could cost them the case. The police planted a recorder in the cell that the suspects didn’t know about. In their report one of the suspects is quoted as saying, ‘We’ll back up each other. Just don’t rat me out, and I won’t rat you out.’ If you go to the transcript of the tape, y
ou get something very different. What the suspect actually said was, ‘If we would have done it, I’d be telling you right now, “Shut it up. Just don’t fuckin’ rat me out and I won’t rat you out.” But … we didn’t do shit!’ Using part of that quote out of context reverses the meaning.”
“So, what are you saying? Do you think the men are innocent?”
“I’m leaning in that direction,” Mike said. “You’re not going to like this, but here’s my theory—Dung and Kait have this big fight on Saturday night, and she threatens to squeal on the car wrecks. She sleeps on the couch and runs out on Dung in the morning. He spends the day with his buddies, complaining about Kait. That night they get drunk and decide to ‘take care of the bitch.’ ”
“Dung wouldn’t do that,” I said.
“I’m not saying Dung pulled the trigger, but my guess is he was there when it happened. Then guilt set in, and he told his buddies he was going to the police. That’s probably the point when one of them stabbed him.”
“You don’t believe he attempted suicide?”
“I think it’s doubtful. Stabbing yourself in the liver is not a nice way to go. Besides, when the ambulance came, that dorm room was a shambles, like there’d been a big fight and Dung had been trying to defend himself. So—on with my theory—the guys told Dung that if he wanted to live he’d have to promise to keep his mouth shut. He agreed, and they called an ambulance. Khanh refused to talk to the cops unless he had a lawyer present. Is that a normal concern when you’ve saved a suicide victim?”
“No,” I admitted. “It isn’t.” I hadn’t known about the lawyer. “Are you going to write your story now?”
“You’ll be seeing it soon,” Mike said.
I hung up the phone and hurried to get the police file to check the statement attributed to the suspects in the holding cell. I compared it with the transcript, and it was just as Mike had told me—the statement had been altered so its meaning was reversed.
That night I turned on the television set and was greeted by a rerun of one of my own stories. Summer of Fear had been made into an NBC Movie of the Week, retitled Stranger in Our House. It had now gone into syndication and kept popping up on the screen at odd times and on odd channels.
I watched for a moment before turning to something more stimulating and heard actress Linda Blair, who was playing the part of my heroine, introduce her boyfriend to a visiting cousin.
I had written sixteen books since Summer of Fear, and I could barely remember the plot. It was like reviewing a story that had been written by a stranger.
A stranger whose mind had been touched by a memory of the future.
The name I had chosen for my heroine’s boyfriend was “Mike Gallagher.”
18
Albuquerque Journal, July 8, 1990:
KAITLYN ARQUETTE’S DEATH SNARLED IN CONTRADICTIONS
by Mike Gallagher—Journal Investigative Reporter
It began to rain shortly after Kaitlyn Arquette was shot on a midsummer night in 1989, but not hard enough to wash away the bloodstains on the street. For days kids from the Martineztown neighborhood walked down to Lomas and Arno NE to look at the stains on the pavement. Adults recalled the sirens and the streets being blocked by police cars that night.
At the Summerfest in Civic Plaza several blocks away, teenagers talked about the killing. Some “bad dudes” bragged about drive-by shootings they had committed. Rumors started to circulate that the killers were kids from the Martineztown neighborhood.
Six months later, when the weather finally had washed the street clean, police returned to the neighborhood and rounded up four suspects. A year after Arquette’s death, one of the suspects is in jail awaiting trial; another is a fugitive. Charges against the other two have been dropped.
The slaying initially was described by police as a random shooting. And it was presumably solved as a random shooting: a few drunken young men in a car firing a pistol on a dare. But police reports reviewed by the Journal indicate the case against the two men now charged with the shooting might be shaky. The reports show witnesses who have given contradictory information, statements since recanted, and little in the way of physical evidence.
The reports also disclose other theories have been offered about Arquette’s killing.
Defense attorneys Michael Davis and Joseph Riggs are critical of police efforts.
“We’ve been on this case for six months, and we’re absolutely astounded at the poor quality of the police investigation,” Riggs said. Davis and Riggs, who represent defendant Miguel Garcia, said it has taken five months to obtain police investigatory reports and that they believe officers still haven’t turned over all the information. …
Mike’s front-page article ran under a banner headline and continued on to fill another full page in Section A of the Sunday paper. He summarized the steps of the investigation, pointed out blunders the police had made, and, in a lengthy side bar, illustrated by a five-by-eight blow-up of the snapshot I had given him of Kait and Dung at Thanksgiving, described their participation in the insurance scam.
The first paragraph of the second story was particularly explosive:
POLICE CLEAR BOYFRIEND, BUT RUMORS PERSIST
The postcard was sent from Albuquerque to the state attorney general’s office on February 9, 1990. It read: “Did it ever occur to you that Kait Arquette was murdered as the result of a ‘hit’ order by the Vietnamese mafia? APD refuses to do anything!”
I now understood why Barbara Cantwell had accused me of contacting the attorney general—she suspected me of having written that postcard.
I hadn’t done so, but now I wished that I had.
In his article Mike also reprinted the text of the affectionate note the police had found in Kait’s apartment the night of the shooting: Hon, where are you? I know you’re still mad. … I’m so sorry, ok! I miss you today. I went to mom’s house to return these books. I’ll see ya. Love. The police report said the note had been found on the dining room table and “Dung Nguyen said the message was written by the victim, who must have come home sometime during the day when he was out.”
The wording of the note didn’t sound like Kait to us, and Don checked to see if there was a copy of it in the police file. There was, and the contents were not precisely as they appeared in the report. The note was written in pidgin English and the word return was misspelled: Hon, Where are you? … I know you still mad. … I’m so sorry OK! I miss you today. I went to Nam house to retune there Books. Ill see ya! Love.
More important, the note was not in Kait’s handwriting.
The flamboyant script was so different from Kait’s meticulously rounded lettering that it seemed impossible that the police had not noticed the difference when they had numerous samples of her handwriting marked as evidence. The note appeared to have been written by Dung. If he had planted it on the table that would seem to imply that he had known the police would be coming.
A specimen of Kait Arquette’s handwriting taken from a school notebook
The note police say Kait left for Dung on the night of her death
Don came up with a more palatable explanation.
“He could have left the note for Kait while she was at our place. It doesn’t say, ‘I went to Mom’s house,’ it says, ‘I went to Nam house.’ Perhaps he went out that night to do something he didn’t want Kait to know about and left the note so she’d think he was over at a friend’s house.”
“But the police report says Dung told them that Kait left the note for him!”
“The report says whatever the police want it to say,” Don said shortly.
He wrote another letter to Steve Gallegos, pointing out the fact that the note was not in Kait’s handwriting and enclosing some copies of her handwriting so comparisons could be made without the inconvenience of going to the evidence room.
When a week went by and Gallegos didn’t respond, we mailed copies of the handwriting samples to Mike.
The day Mike’s story came
out, we were braced for phone calls, but we didn’t get any. Our friends were evidently so horrified, they didn’t know what to say to us. Since the arrest of the Hispanic suspects back in January, the feeling in Albuquerque had been one of relief that the mystery had been solved and justice was being served. The suggestion that APD had blown the investigation—that the wrong men may have been indicted—that the Arquettes’ “golden girl” might have been involved in illegal activities, was not a pleasant thing to read over Sunday morning breakfast. What do you say to parents about such exposure—“I was sorry to learn that your daughter was involved with the Vietnamese mafia”?
After the article came out, I spoke briefly with Mike. He told me he had received phone calls from residents of Martineztown who told him Juve was back and was staying at his girlfriend’s house. Nobody knew where he’d been during the time he had been gone. (“Nobody but me,” I amended silently, picturing Juve in the grease pit.) Juve’s neighbors told Mike they had phoned the police several times to inform them of his whereabouts, but no one had ever arrived to pick him up.
On July 15 Don and I flew to Chautauqua, New York, where I taught for a week at the Highlights for Children writer’s conference. On the anniversary of Kait’s death we sat on a paddlewheel boat in the middle of Lake Chautauqua, eating a picnic supper and sipping New York wine, and promised each other we would try to put our grief behind us.
When we got back we found that Donnie had made some decisions also. He told us he’d had his fill of sleeping on our sofa and was moving out to share an apartment with friends. This seemed like a healthy transition and was actually a relief. Having had one child leave for the evening, never to return, I was continually braced to lose the next one. When Donnie was out at a party, I would lie in bed, hyperventilating, as I waited for another soul-shattering call from the emergency room. The times he slept over at his girlfriend’s were particularly frightening, for dawn would come and I still would not have heard the front door open and close to announce his return. At the same time, how can you force a lusty twenty-two-year-old to check in with his mother every time he does what lusty twenty-two-year-olds are noted for? You can’t—or you shouldn’t—but I tried—and there was a lot of resentment on both sides. It was good for all of us to have that problem disposed of.