Arquette Kaitlyn Clare - Who Killed My Daughter?

For Kaitlyn Clare Arquette

September 18, 1970July 17, 1989

with love

This is a true story. The facts are documented. Newspaper articles and psychic readings have been slightly condensed in the interest of space and to avoid repetition. Several names have been changed to protect sources of information whose identities are not part of the public record.

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

Krishnamurti

Listed by Page Number for Easy Reference

OUR TEENAGE DAUGHTER KAITLYN was chased down and shot to death while driving home from a girlfriends house on a peaceful Sunday evening.

Police dubbed the shooting random.

Youre going to have to accept the fact that the reason Kait died was because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time, they told us.

But to our family the circumstances didnt add up to random, especially after we made the shocking discovery that Kait had been keeping some very dangerous secrets from us.

Some of those secrets were exposed by psychics.

Others by private investigators.

Others by an aggressive newspaper reporter who followed up on leads the police refused to look into.

After spending two years investigating Kaits death our family has managed to accumulate enough information to form a fragmented picture of what may have happened to her, but the jigsaw puzzle still lacks the few key pieces that could nail the identity of her killers.

It is my hope that reading Kaits story will motivate potential informants to supply us with those pieces.

Tipsters can address their letters to:

Lois Duncan, Author of Who Killed My Daughter?

c/o Dell Publishing

Dept. LD

1540 Broadway

New York, NY 10036

ONCE UPON A TIME, in a faraway land, there dwelt a man who was a teacher of things strange and wonderful.

He taught that the soul could leave the body and fly, and that people could foretell the future, and that healing could be accomplished by love and by touch, and that the spirits of those who moved on to other dimensions could communicate with the living through visions and dreams.

Such teachings were considered heresy in that time, so the teacher was forced to conduct his classes in secret. He met with a small group of students in a garden by a fountain and continually cautioned them never to reveal what he taught them.

Among those students there were three strong-willed young men who were very excited about the things they were learning and desperately wanted to share this knowledge with others.

The first went off to teach in a foreign country so as not to endanger his teacher and fellow students.

The second absorbed, not only the lessons of the teacher, but his fears and paranoia as well. Cautious and conservative, he monitored the safety of the group and struggled to keep the others under control.

But the third young man was a rebel who would not be intimidated. He considered himself invincible, but his judgment was poor, and he trusted all the wrong people. His actions brought disaster to himself and his teacher.

This took place long ago in a faraway land.

Centuries later it happened again.

OUR DAUGHTER, KAITLYN ARQUETTE, was murdered in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on Sunday, July 16, 1989.

They got her at night.

I have lived that evening over so often in dreams that by now it has become an extension of myself. When I go to bed it runs through my head like a videotape, the images sharp and precise, the dialogue unchanging, except that with each repetition there are new things I notice.

The setting is always the same, of course; its our family room. Although we no longer live in that house, I can picture it perfectly. The rug, a rich rust color, muted by pet hair, as our cat and cocker spaniel shed in the summertime. The brown-and-white couch and love seat with cushions molded into irreversible slopes and hollows by years of accommodating the bodies of sprawling teenagers. Bookshelves, lined with albums that are filled with photographs chronicling ski trips, camp-outs, Christmases, graduations, and birthday parties. A television set across from the sofa. A Navajo rug on one wall. On another, a painting by my stepmother that depicts my late fatherwhite haired, bearded, shirtlesson the porch of a beach cottage, baiting a fishing hook for a grandson.

I am a writer by trade and am practiced in recreating scenes. It is easy for me to place myself back in that room again. Beyond the bay window there lies a tree-shaded yard, and, beyond that, an unkempt rose garden. When I peer out through the glass, I can see that its raining, and the soft gray drizzle produces a premature twilight.

Now that I have set the stage, I will bring on the players.

Kaitlyn, eighteen, comes into the house. I hear the slam of the front door and the sound of her footsteps in the hallway and immediately know this is Kait and not one of her brothers. Her tread is solid and purposeful and distinctly her own.

My husband Don and I have just settled ourselves on the sofa to watch 60 Minutes. I raise my eyes from the television screen and call, Is that you, honey?

Who else? Kait answers, and materializes in the doorway. I thought Id stop by and say hi on my way to Susans.

The bad penny returns! says her father. You were here all morning. We see more of you now than we did before you moved out!

The rains depressing, and Dungs out with his friends, Kait says. The apartment feels weird tonight and I dont like being there.

She comes into the room and perches on the arm of the sofa. She is dressed in a short black skirt and a black-and-white striped blouse, and around her neck there hangs a chain with a tiny gold cross. She is wearing the sand-dollar earrings I brought her from Florida the last time I visited her sister, Robin. The earrings are rimmed with gold, the same burnished shade as her hair, which she is still determinedly trying to grow back to one length after last summers disastrous asymmetrical cut.

Each time I rerun the scene, new details leap out at me. For instance, how perfect her teeth are, straight, white, and even. Her complexion is perfect also, unmarred by the adolescent acne that torments her friends, totally unblemished except for an odd little hollow on the ridge of her left cheekbone. When I caught my first sight of her in the delivery room, I gasped, My baby has a hole in her face! but the obstetrician assured me that the dent wasnt permanent. As it turned out, it was, but we came to regard it as a misplaced dimple and jokingly referred to it as Gods fingerprint.

Kait flashes her mischievous smile, but something doesnt feel right to me, and I regard her suspiciously. Her eyes are red, and the lids are abnormally puffy.

Youve been crying. I make it a statement rather than a question.

Like I told you, the rain depresses me, she says defensively. Besides, Im pissed at Dung, and I always cry when Im mad.

Have you two had another fight?

Not another one since last night, if thats what you mean, Kait says. The reason I hung around here so long this morning was because I didnt want to have to go home and talk to him. This living-together business is a crock. Things were a whole lot better when we were just dating.