ONE TO THE WOLVES-Lois Duncan

in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Police closed the unsolved case as a random shooting, refusing to accept information that indicated otherwise, although it had all the earmarks of a professional hit. That first book, Who Killed My Daughter was Duncan's desperate attempt to motivate informants and prevent the facts of Kate's story from becoming buried. It turned out to accomplish much more than that. Duncan's new book, One to the Wolves on the Trail of a Killer, is even more horrifying

than its predecessor. As new information poured in, the family ran for their lives, and their original suspicions turned out to be the tip of an iceberg so immense that Kate herself could not have known how dangerous the information was that she had been sitting on in order to protect and now estranged boyfriend. The book that we're featuring this evening is One to the Wolves on the Trail of a Killer, with my special guest, journalist and author,

Lois Duncan. Welcome to the program, and thank you for agreeing to this interview. Lois Duncan, Thank.

fifty seven and it's just recently been republished. And so I started with these gentle teenage stories, and then at some point I started writing suspense novels for teenagers, and that turned out to be the niche that I was placed into and became popular in with books like I Know what You Did Last Summer and Killing Mister Griffin. And by this time I've written over fifty books, so

I've had a very long career. But never ever did I think that I would be writing a book about the murder of my own child.

And so we had five children, were raising five children. We were living in Albuquerque, New Mexico. All our children were interesting in their own way, and Kate, being the baby of the family, was doted on of course by all of us. And she was very bright, and she was she wanted to become a doctor so she could help people save lives. She was a humanitarian early on. She became an organ donor as soon as she could get her driver's license. And she was also very strong

willed and rebellious and funny and delightful and beautiful. And that is a dangerous combination of things to have. And that was our youngest child. And Kate is the one who was chased on in her car and shot to death. And all of those traits that she had probably contributed to the murder because it made her someone who went

out and did things that we didn't know about. And it also contributed to what she donated from her life because being an organ downer, she never got to become the doctor she had always wanted to be, but five of her organs were transplanted, and so five lives were saved because Kate died.

a troubled youth or anything. But was there you know, if we talk about, you know, the period of time when she has this boyfriend Dung, tell us about this relationship, how long it had occurred, and the meeting of you with the boyfriend or the contact or any information you have about that. What was your initial impression hearing about or meeting tell us about the relationship with this Vietnamese person Dung and your reaction tell us, well.

make us think this could happen. Kate also was a person that was a humanitarian, and she was always bringing home straight animals that were hurt and nursing them back to health, and stray people who had problems, and Kate wanted to help them deal with their problems. And in this case, this was a young Vietnamese man. He was one of the boat kids. He came over. He was struggling with the language, She was homesick his family back in Vietnam. He and Kate met at a coffee house.

She more or less adopted him, and I think it started like that. She brought him home all the time, and he called me mom and would stand over me in the kitchen as I cooked and be so excited about being in a real home, and so it was like she was first it was like she was taking care of him, and then it went on and it turned into a romantic relationship. And we really didn't know much about him because he was he was around all the time because she had him there taking care of him.

But his language is English, was not good, so it's hard to have a conversation with him. And Kate I would say nothing about him that wasn't good, and we had no idea that anything was wrong. And when Kate graduated, she already had a job, she was self supporting. She graduated, she immediately got her own apartment. She wanted to be independent and she could pay for it out of what she was earning with her work. And she took him

in to live with her there. And I think that once that happened, she learned about things that she didn't know before that, because before that she had a curfew. He would be at our house, he'd go home, as far as we knew, I'd go to bed. Maybe she slipped out, I don't know. But once she had her own place and he moved in, and then all his friends came swarming in and she realized that his friends

were part of a criminal group. I think she, in the last couple of months of her life, learned about a lot of things she was not supposed to know, and then she broke up with him. And the night she broke up with him, she was chased down in her car and shot to death. So I'm not thinking that he did it, but I'm thinking that she knew too much and she was now angry and was in a position to expose it and she was taken out. Yeah, that's speculation, Dan, No.

involved there too. So let us go back to unfortunately, tell us what happened in terms of Again, it's important for people to understand this case because of the implausibility of the Again, we talk about a random shooting and it looks like an assassination, and you just mentioned that there was good reason for someone to have her assassinated.

So tell us just about if whatever you can handle in terms of again, it's very interesting that the car travels seven hundred and twenty feet and then it's put in park. So tell us about what actually happened that night, take us back to the faithful event prior to that, and then lead us up to what at first was known about and what you knew initially about what had happened.

and that it was over something very serious. That she had told him he had to move out of her apartment, she didn't want him or his friends around anymore. And she said she was going to the home of a new girlfriend for dinner, and that she was going to then come back and spend the night at our house.

She was not going to go back into the apartment until he was gone, And so she went to the home of the girlfriend, and when she left the home, she was chased down in her car and shot to death driving in the direction of our house.

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of the car on the doorframe is quite large. If you go to our website you can see a picture of it, or if you read under the Wolves, we've got a good sized picture of it there showing the size of that hole. And that hole is certainly not a twenty two. That is a large sized bullet, which would suggest to us that two guns were shoes used. And if that's the case, that was not random.

She's gone to her girlfriend's house. She never came back here to go to sleep like she said she would. She's been in a car wreck. And I got out. My husband took the car around to park it, and I got out and ran in the emergency room door, and a nurse came out and put her arms around me. And right then I thought, oh god, this is worse than I ever imagined. And I said, it's a car wreck, is that? And she said, your daughter's been shot in the head. And then she said you've got to prepare

yourself for the fact that you may lose her. And she was in a coma and her brains were shattered. And I leader asked the doctor, what you know, what shoul would we pray for? What would you pray for if this was your child? He said, I don't know what to tell you. He said, if she lives, she'll never be Kate and is he implied, she'll be a vegetable. And she continued to live for twenty hours on life support, and then she went frain dead and I had to be the one to say take her off life support.

And I figured I had to be the one because I was the one who brought her into the world, so I should be the one that takes her out. And the young man who was waiting for her heart and lungs was already prepped on the next floor waiting to get them, and I knew she wanted to donate them. I knew she no longer had a brain, so I said, I'm plugger. Yeah, that was the worst thing I've ever had to do in my life.

telling them that Kate had been shot. But Steve Kaaliegis didn't know that, and so Detective Gaia Goos was doing everything that he could during those first days and trying hard. And then it was almost like something came down and blocked him, like somebody said, stop it. You're not to go on this track. This was a random drive by shooting, and you are not to look at anymore. And he was just a young detective and he obeyed his superiors.

And this is I am again speculating why he did this, but I saw him doing all the right things, and then I saw it blocked. And then suddenly the police said, random drive by shooting, and we will not accept any information that indicates otherwise. And that was.

out or or you know, consider an interesting suspect. How did you find out that he had contacted his friends? How certain are you with this in terms of he contacted his friends saying that Kate had been shot? And then the police report tell us about how certain you are about that information?

babbling hysterically. Kate's dead. They shot Kate. Kate's dead. And she knew exactly what time he called because the late news had just gone off and she and her husband were getting ready for bed, and so her husband could support her statement. And this was hours before the police went to the apartment and woke up you. And so there's no reason to disbelieve this young woman who would

contact us. And she also told us she called the police within weeks of the shooting and told them this, and they said that they would not take her information because it was a random shooting, and this suggested something else. Yeah, she was very frustrated. She has actually allowed us to take a video of her making this statement about the shooting.

She was very angry that she was shrugged off with important information, and we owe her a lot for her honesty and her her courage to come to us and tell us that.

at some point too. So maybe we're jumping ahead there, but again, tell us a little bit more about how dedicated and serious you people were about getting information about your daughter's murder and certainly being very active. Tell us about all the things that you.

And that's why I went to the police and said, something's wrong. You need to check this. Check out these phone numbers, and they said, well, we can't check them out because they're unlisted. Because and I said, well, surely the police have a way to get those and they said, oh no, no, that would be illegal. Well, I thought writing at the University of New Mexico, thought magazine writing for the journalism department, and a lot of my students

had gone on to become reporters. So I called one of them, who was an investigative reporter, Mike Gallagher is his name, at the Albuquerque Journal, and I said, do you know how to get find out whose number this is and he said, yeah, I can find it out

and he found out. He called me and we discovered that this was a criminal group of Vietnamese people in California that were involved in a car recinsurance fraud scam, and that Kate's boyfriend and his friends were involved in that, that Kate had gone out and witnessed one of the wrecks. Right then we started thinking, now, wait, something is very very wrong here. If the police don't even want to look at this, and here my kid from my class was able to go find out whose number, it was like,

couldn't the police do it? And that's when we started turning onto the fact that something was very wrong, and we started getting more and more information. Everything we tried to give to the police, they said, no, we don't want it because it's a random shooting. And finally they dropped off the case, said we're done with it and we're never going to do any further investigation. And only then did I write a book because I didn't want

to get in the way of a police investigation. But when they said that they were not going to do anymore, I wrote, who killed my daughter? And that made that book went wild. It sold extremely Well, it's still in print and you can get it on Amazon or anywhere else. It's in paperback, and it's also an ebook. And who

killed My door? Opened the door because it threw me into all these talk shows all over the country like Larry King in Good Morning America and Unsolved Mysteries and Sally Jesse Resciale and Kate's story suddenly was big news. And the police had never expected that this is a little teenager in Albuquerque being shot to death. Why would

anyone ever noticed that? Well, suddenly everybody in the United States was noticing the Caitlin Arquent murder, and that police, of course hated us, especially I mean hated me, and we started getting death threats to the rest of our family. So we left Albuquerque, and I'm glad we did because I think those death threats were serious. And that sparked a lot of people, tipsters, people who had information about

the case to start contacting us. And it also brought in outside investigators who were interested in the case, wanted to help US, forensic experts, crime scene analysts, and in particular the private investigator Pat Carristo that you referred to, who had information about a man who was standing next to Kate's car when the first officers arrived. That man, Paul Appadaka, had a long record of violent assaults upon women, and he was allowed to leave the scene without ever

being questioned as either a witness or suspect. And if you find a man with that background standing next to a car where there's a young woman who's been shot in the head, you'd think that you would at least

get some information from him. So she became our mother, Teresa figure, and these people were all helping as pro bono, and they got more and more involved, and we've come to call them Kate's army, because it's like this whole army from outside of us has expanded with so many people invested in in our daughter that she's become almost like a poster child for somebody who's case has been corruptly investigated.

a tip line to gather tips. And then when you said, okay, can we have those tips, they go no, no, we can only give these to police. And you figure, well, there'll at least be a couple tips out of those. And then this woman Christo bypassed that after I think Sally Jesse Rafael and said, listen, did you know this?

of them. I don't know, Yeah it was the boyfriend didn't mention this to Kate, I think, but uh, stealing microchips from places like Intel, where some of them had jobs, and smuggling them and selling them, and then importation of drugs from the from Asia. And we're beginning to get into all kinds of criminal activities that we never suspected

when I wrote the first book. Because we got more and more information made it more and more complicated, because no longer did I think, well, it's just a simple shooting because the boyfriend was man at her. Now I have to think there's something really huge going on that this boyfriend and his little group were on the fringe of and knew about it and were participating in in

some fringe level. But whatever that level was, it was enough so that if people had followed up on it, it would have opened a huge can of worms that would have reflected on all the people that were protecting these various criminal activity. This was this was the tip of the iceberg. What I stumbled on when I wrote that first book. I thought, oh, how smart I am I've discovered it all and then we've discovered now how

much more there was to it. And if you read One to the Wolves, you will see where I'm heading with this. But I don't you don't really want to get into the whole thing here. But I think anyone who reads that can put the pieces together and form their decision about who was the bottom line person involved in covering up all these activities.

against these Hispanic men. They were little creeps who had been in trouble with the law, but there was nothing to tie inticate's case. Once the eyewitness, who was a fifteen year old who later told the media that he was bullied into saying that these bullied by police into saying that these guys had done it, was discovered to have been in the detention center at the time of the shooting. He couldn't have been an eyewitness, and the

charges were dropped against the Hispanic man. Yet because they've been arrested, all the police have to do is make an arrest to say that the case is closed. There doesn't have to be a t a conviction, a trial, a conviction, anything. All there has to be is an arrest. They can go out and arrest anybody on the street corner and then say, well, we've made our arrest, so we've done our job. And if the case hasn't, if they weren't found guilty, that's up to the prosecutor. They

didn't do their job right. And so where the case stands now is it's open. If you ask the police, it's open, which means that since it's open, no other agency can investigate it. And yet it's in active, which means the police don't have to investigate it. So there you're stuck in this bind where nobody else can investigate

it because it belongs to the Albuquerque Police Department. They own Kate's case, and yet they're not gonna investigate and no further cause they've they've closed it because then they made their arrest, and they jump back and forth, Queen saying it's open case in the closed case, depending upon

who wants to look at it. And for the average person like us trying to get information, trying to get another agency involved helping us, FBI wanted to become involved that since murder is not a federal crime, they can only become involved if the investigating police department invites them, in which they refused to do.

then you were sort of defended against the allegation that you were a grieving mother who didn't know any better and just blame the police for because you have to blame somebody. But it did resonate with a lot of people.

Is there Is it such a wild thought to think that the police, despite having to do their job, having to do the right thing, that they were very, very angered, embarrassed and humiliated by your actions and thought that you were out of your league or went beyond your rights to be able to try to investigate this murder of your own daughter.

a writer of suspense novels. And by now I've written fifty books, and I had built a reputation and I had a readership. And so I was able to write and have published a book that had no ending, and most people don't have a way to do that. And so I was very fortunate in being that physician. I was in not that anyone's fortunate in losing their child, but I was fortunate in having the ability and the access to getting a book published by a traditional publisher

and promoted. And so yes, I'm the police, of course, got more and more and more angry the more attention this case got. Uh, the more shows I appeared on, the angrier they became. And that's of course a very reasonable thing. Uh. And I think the good cops really got brainwashed by the others to the point where they believed it too. Today's young generation of police officers if they if you would talk to them, they would say, well, this case got solved, and this mother just just wrecked

their case by writing a book. They don't even know themselves that the book wasn't published until after the police was tone with the case. They're not the bad guys. I think whoever was there at the time was controlling the case, was being controlled by somebody else, and that every all the all the officers since simply believed the party line. So I'm definitely not saying the whole department's rotten.

But but whatever happened at some point poisoned the case and made it impossible for the other officers to do anything other than just say, well, it's a cold case. Let's forget it. But it's not cool to us now.

girlfriend's murder. Tell us some of Noon's behavior, especially proceeding or just after the murder.

down and shot to death. And either he was at the scene at the time of shooting or one of his friends was who called him and told him about it, because how else would he have known about it.

said it was a suicide attempt. Even himself later said it was a suicide attempt. I went to the hospital to talk to he survived. I went to the hospital to ask him about how he was. At that point, I had no no problem with him. I didn't suspect him. I was worried about him, sincerely, and he first he put his arms around my nick and said, mom, thank you for coming. And he said I didn't kill her. And I said, I know you didn't kill her, and then I paused, and then I said, but you know

who did. And I said you have to decide if you love her enough to tell. And he paused, and then he said, I know I am deciding.

in the head. That's an assassination of I'm not an expert, but I have recently found discovered apparently that that sometimes they will shoot a person in the top of the head so that the bullet fragments break up in the head, since that part of the body is probably the hardest part of the body. I'm not an expert, but when I look at your case, it does look like an assassination.

left and swerve and run across. That damage was not there prior to that night, and that suggests strongly that she was knocked off the road and then someone on foot came up and shot her through the window. It was everyone says. Everybody said it was a close shooting, a close up shooting. It does not sound like something that you could do from two cars racing along the road and you take some wild shots and so it sounds like it was carefully orchestrated, and well, we're just dan.

We're doing the best we can to keep it going, to keep finding things out. Every time we do a show like this, every time people contact us, there are people who have information who maybe they didn't know that information was important at the time. Little things like how would her hairdresser know it was important? What time the boyfriend called and told her about the shooting, How would she know? How would most people know that something was important unless they can see it in context with the

whole picture. And that's what I hope the book One to the Wolves on the Trail of a Killer will do that. People who read it will put pieces into context and say, wait a minute, I know something. I heard somebody talking in a bar who said such and such, and that would fill in this little piece of the jigsaw puzzle that's missing. People hear things during pillow Talk. We've gotten some of our best information from wives, estranged wives and girlfriends of cops involved in the cover up

who told them things during pillow Talk. And these wives and girlfriends are now angry and they've contacted us told us things, and we never accept any information as valid unless our private investigator follows up on it and can verify it, because too many people come up with too much guff. But in this case a lot of these

wives and girlfriends were right on the button. People, especially as time goes by, people talk, They talk too much, if they have a few drinks, they talk too much, and so we hear it and we learn it through our website. My email address is all over the internet. It's my real email address, Lois Duncan, and I have it there so that people can contact me and I read everything it comes in, even if if they're death threats, I read them. And people we have a website for

Kate with a message board. People can post anonymously on that. What is the website, It's katearcat at arcats dot com. Kate is spelling A A I T and our cat is a r q U E T T E great

and we're we're looking always for new information. But we also would like people to know about the book and to spread the word to others about it because it's come out as an e book first, and you can get an ebook reviewed very well, very easily, and the only way people know about it is through word of mouth, so it's it's certainly available on Amazon or Barnes and Noble or any place for nooks and kindles or anything

you can download. We're hoping that later it'll come out as a hard copy, but for right now, it's an ebook.

her first subject was Ted Bundy. But tell us about the Planet n Rule. And because this is a major endorsement of this importance of this book, and also how great a read it is. It really is a great book. It's you can't put this thing down. And of course, the credibility of Anne rules. She's not going to put her name in her review to anything that isn't of the really the best quality. So tell us about your involvement with Planet and Rule.

can do it, I can do it. Well said. Some years later, I was on the panel of another writer's conference or librarian's conference or something, and the person we were all being introduced in order. A person introduced ahead of me was Anne Ruhl, who had and he said, when she's just received two million dollar advance on her next book or something like that. I thought, oh my god, I've got to follow that. What kind of actors I

have to follow? How can possibly? But so they said, here's Lois Duncan, who writes the teenage suspense novels and Anne Ruel jumped up and ran across the stage, threw her arms around me and said, Lois duncan my mentor well, I just melted. That was the beginning of a friendship. And from then on, of course, we followed each other, and we've met fairly as frequently as we could, considering

you live in different sides of the country. Our children became friends, and Anne got better and better known and became so wonderful. And when I wrote this book, Anne Rule had just started her own ebook publishing company, Planet Ann Rule, and she said, normally they're just publishing her own books as electronic books, but in this case, she

wanted to publish one of the Wolves. She felt so strongly, she was so emotionally invested in Keith's case right from the beginning, that she wanted to be the one to publish it. And she wrote a wonderful endorsement for it. And so minus the first book other than Ann Rule's own books that Planet and Rule has published, and they haven't yet started publishing hard copies, but they're get ready to start doing that. They're a fledgling company, but I

think they're taking off. Well. A company is being run by Leslie Rule, who is AM's daughter, right and so also an author. Yeah, she's also an author, and I endorse some of her books which are quite good, and so it's almost like an all in the family thing. But Anne would never endorse a book she didn't believe in, and she believes so totally. In Kate's case, she's been our strongest supporter right from the beginning.

how everything happened in that person's life. The unfortunate incidence is sometimes there is little bits of sort of happy endings, somewhat true crime isn't really known for that. And then there's the heart wrenching, very very heart wrenching, like your case, your personal involvement, and then the questions unanswered and the justice undone.

So again, it's just to me, it's fascinating all of these aspects, the different types of books that are now categorized as true crime. And I'm glad that it's your book is considered true crime, so that we've had this opportunity to share the story with an international audience and just hopefully that there will be an audience that listens in and has that, like you say, one little bit tidbit of information that adds when it's put into all

the context of hearing all the other information. So I wish you the very very best with that, and hopefully some federal authorities will maybe reopen this case because you've certainly done your due diligence and done an incredible amount of evidence gathering and it's very clear and coherent and sensible and reasonable. And the way you've done it is to exhaust all attempts to contact the police and give them the evidence and present the case and analysis of

the case by private investigators that are credible. So I just hopefully somebody that has more authority will look at this case because certainly there is a lot of evidence that you've presented and it makes an incredible amount of sense to me. So I wish you the very very best with this and congratulate you on this incredible effort.