Who Killed My Daughter?

by Lois Duncan

  GALLEGOS: Did he describe the vehicle that Michael shot at?

  MARES: He said it was a smaller vehicle but didn’t have much power … I’m trying to remember if he said red, but I’m not sure … but he did say it was a small vehicle and was trying to accelerate away from the Camaro, but the Camaro had more power and overtook it.

  GALLEGOS: At the time of the shooting, did he indicate whether the vehicles were at a stop or moving?

  MARES: I got the impression they were moving.

  GALLEGOS: Any words exchanged between anybody in the vehicles?

  MARES: Not that I can remember. It was more like she sort of ignored them and all of a sudden, it was in Michael’s hands, [Marty] felt he was gonna shoot this girl.

  GALLEGOS: Did he describe the girl at all?

  MARES: He mentioned that … she was a pretty girl, or, you know, she was a cute girl.

  GALLEGOS: Did he say anything about Michael carrying the weapon on a usual basis?

  MARES: No. The thing I remember asking was if they felt any sort of remorse, and he says that Michael didn’t seem to feel any remorse in this matter. And I got the impression that [Marty] may in fact feel some degree of remorse and maybe fear.

  GALLEGOS: Did [Marty] say anything about what happened after the shooting?

  MARES: At one point during the stories, the variations of stories he gave me, he indicated that Ms. Arquette apparently had gone to the side of the road, hit the curb-side, jumped the curbside, hit a pole or struck some sort of an obstacle or something.

  LOWE: Did he seem to have a bond with Michael Garcia and Juve Escobedo? I mean, did he say he always hung around with them?

  MARES: I assumed that he must have had a bond, or else he had some sort of a fearical reaction toward them, because he definitely said he wouldn’t snitch them off. I remember asking him why he didn’t go to the authorities, and he said, “I’m not a snitch.”

  GALLEGOS: During your conversation with Martinez, did he ever indicate to you that Michael Garcia was familiar with weapons?

  MARES: Yes, he did. I remember asking the question, “Did Michael have trouble shooting from a moving vehicle?” And he indicated that Michael had expertise with guns, because his dad had had guns, and he had been around guns since he was a little kid, and so he had no difficulty in shooting that weapon.

  GALLEGOS: Did Martinez at any time sound like he was bragging about this?

  MARES: No, never. He sounded concerned about the situation legally. I got the impression from him that he also had some degree of remorse.

  LOWE: Is there anything else you can remember that he said to you?

  MARES: What I remember most about him is he’s a very good kid, a very cooperative kid, and I have a feeling if he were approached by the right people he would give a lot more information. I’m sure he knows a lot more than what he’s talking about.

  A statement from a neighbor of Marty’s supported this image of a good but weak-willed young man who had a “fearical” relationship with Garcia and Escobedo.

  According to this witness, the two men “always carried a gun … they both used it. … [Marty’s] a good kid. He really is. He’s not bad. It’s just that he’s afraid of Juve, and he’s afraid of Michael. … He’s always been scared of them.”

  How scared? I wondered. Scared enough to allow himself to be pressured into riding with them to carry a back-up gun that he didn’t fire? Or perhaps he did fire but deliberately aimed to miss, which would account for the misplaced bullet in the side of Kait’s car.

  The calls that Don and I had received from Miguel Garcia’s sister were also damning to his case. Her announcement that she and her relatives were planning to kill us seemed proof that the Garcia family was capable of murder, and her statement “The girl was a bitch and deserved to die” implied that she was aware of a motive behind Kait’s murder.

  And for anyone who accepted the concept of precognition, there was an additional, soul-chilling indication that Miguel Garcia was the triggerman. It appeared in an interview held by Detective A. V. Romero with Robert Garcia, the “witness-who-wasn’t-there.”

  The question Romero asked concerned Garcia’s name:

  ROMERO: Do you know if Mike Garcia was his last name … ?

  ROBERT: Mike Garcia?

  ROMERO: Yeah.

  ROBERT: I don’t know. Well, his nickname was vampires or something. They always called him “Vamp.”

  In Don’t Look Behind You my hitman was named “Mike Vamp.”

  “Mike Vamp” as described in Don’t Look Behind You

  20

  I WAS HOPEFUL THAT I would hear from my old high-school friend Marcello Truzzi, but was taken by surprise when, in early October, I received a phone call from Dr. Roll, the director of the Psychical Research Foundation.

  “I found your letter about your precognitive experiences very interesting,” he told me in a gentle voice with a rich Scandinavian accent. “The tragedy you have experienced in the loss of your daughter has created openings for you on a number of levels. You’ve started to realize the potential of the human mind and to recognize and accept your ability to see into the future.”

  “That’s something you can accept?”

  “Of course,” Dr. Roll said easily. “Precognition is quite well established and creative individuals seem to have more of this ability than others. There are some notable instances in literature involving precognition. One, for example, involved the sinking of the Titanic. Several years before that event took place, a story was published about a Titan ship hitting an iceberg. Most of the details, including the tonnage, the lack of lifeboats, the number of people on board, and the number of fatalities were duplicated in the actual sinking.”

  “I never realized I had this ability,” I said.

  “We all do to some degree, particularly when it involves violence to people we’re close to,” Dr. Roll told me. “It seems that our family and close friends become tightly united with us, as though we are parts of a single organism, and we sense the pain that will affect other members of that body. ESP impressions about those we are close to often relate to injury or death. Your antenna was extended toward Kait from the time of her birth, and this sensitivity got woven into your creativity. Creative individuals seem to have the capability to tap into the same universal source that people tap into when they experience ESP. A colleague of mine did a series of ESP experiments with music students from Juilliard, and they did much better than the ordinary run of subjects. Of course, to people whose minds are closed to these possibilities, it all seems like nonsense, the way it undoubtedly did to you before you opened up to it.”

  “Why would I suddenly become aware of this now?” I wondered.

  “You’ve been jolted into it,” Dr. Roll said. “There aren’t many times in our lives when someone we’re close to dies violently, and when this happens to a mother, it’s a shattering experience. A mother has a multiple identity, because her Self includes her children. In losing your child, you have, in effect, lost a part of your Self, and a shock of that magnitude can have a strong effect on the psyche.”

  “Do you believe in life after death?” I asked.

  “As a possibility?”

  “As a fact.”

  “The image of a mind attached for a time to a body has been the guiding hypothesis for research into that question,” Dr. Roll said. “Being of a different substance from the body, the mind would not be subject to the mechanical laws governing that body, so when the bodily machine winds down, the mind would still continue. It’s my own belief that the psychical detaches from the physical, and in that way, the soul transcends death.”

  “I don’t understand—”

  “To put it simply, there are several different levels of the soul. First there is the small soul, an ‘everyday’ soul, if you will. This is the soul that emerges from the body in times of stress. Have you ever had an out-of-body experience?”

  “No, but I wrote about it in Stranger with My Face.�
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  “Such experiences aren’t all that unusual. I’ve had a number of them; in fact, that’s what led me into this type of research. They most often occur at times of physical or psychological distress, when the body image becomes momentarily detached from the body. As an example, in a near-death experience, a woman may be projected out of her body on the operating table. She moves up toward the ceiling and then down the hallway to the waiting area, where she sees her family, and notices her daughter is wearing mismatched clothes, because the maid, in a hurry, picked up whatever was on top of the laundry pile. That will upset the mother, who is reacting with her little soul with the same sort of orientation she would have in daily life. Why isn’t her daughter dressed right? She’ll try to communicate with her daughter—why are you dressed like this? She’ll get angry with her husband for not overseeing things. She still has the small concerns about everyday matters.

  “At the other extreme is the soul at its most advanced level. That’s when the ego merges with something that is experienced as a universal being of light and love. That doesn’t happen to people during near-death experiences. Those who progress to that level don’t return to earthly circumstances.”

  “But what about Kait? Do you feel she is really communicating with us?”

  “That’s very interesting, the specifics about R & J and all. The way such communication takes place is through the ‘family soul’ or ‘tribal soul.’ People throughout the centuries have had varying names for it. The Iroquois Indians refer to it as ‘the Long Body,’ while Christians call it ‘the Body of Christ.’ It’s at that level that the soul has the ability to identify with people, places, and physical objects that it’s close to. There are several references to it in the New Testament.”

  A passage leapt to my mind.

  “ ‘Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me’?”

  “There’s a more specific reference in Corinthians: ‘For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body: so also is Christ. … And whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it; or one member be honored, all the members rejoice with it.’ ”

  “Kait, in her current situation, is still an individual? She hasn’t become a part of that universal light yet?”

  “In the space in which she now resides, Kait does still seem to be Kait, as she was in her relationship to you. The closest way I can explain this is to compare it to my body. My kidneys are quite different from my lungs, my heart from my liver, my right hand from my left hand, so each has a separate identity; at the same time, all are a part of my body. Your soul and Kait’s, and perhaps the souls of certain other members of your family, are a part of one ‘tribal body.’ Kait still retains that relationship, and that’s how she reaches you. You have interiorized Kait, she is an abiding presence within you. She can transmit the energy of her intelligence, because she’s still a part of you.”

  “You also referred to ‘places and physical objects’—”

  “The Long Body is characterized by features that are simultaneously mental and material. Any embodied existence takes place in a place, and the places experienced by the soul in physical form may also be a part of the Long Body. When you take a look at reports of apparitions or ‘ghosts,’ they nearly always appear in areas the deceased person occupied when alive. These are most frequently seen at the time of death and then decrease rapidly during the following days and weeks, although images of persons who died suddenly or violently may persist longer. It is this tendency of the dead to be seen in their physical or social environment that has led to the legend of hauntings.”

  “What about objects?”

  “The same principle applies. That’s what makes the practice of psychometry possible.”

  “I’m not familiar with that term,” I said.

  “Psychometry is the means by which a person with psychic abilities may connect with others through contact with objects they have touched. The majority of mediums work this way. The concept is that a person’s memories may persist after death in the objects with which the person was connected when living.”

  “A psychic here in Albuquerque did that,” I said. “When she held Kait’s lipstick, she told me Kait had been crying, and when she held Kait’s watch, she said Kait had kept checking the time on the evening she was shot. The girl who was with her that night verified both things.”

  “She sounds like a talented psychic, but there are some who are charlatans. When you start consulting psychics, you need to be cautious.”

  “Do you know of a person named Marcello Truzzi?” I asked him.

  “Yes, he’s quite well known.”

  “How do you feel about him?”

  “The man has a role to play, and he does a good job of it. There is a group of people who are highly skeptical about things of this nature and are trying to get rid of all types of parapsychology. They’re almost religiously fanatical about destroying the field. Truzzi is an open-minded man who acts as a mediator between such people and those who do research in this field.”

  “It’s a lot to take in,” I said.

  “Indeed it is. But I want to do everything I can to encourage you to persevere in your efforts to continue learning and growing in this area.”

  “In the area of the paranormal?”

  “This is not ‘paranormal,’ ” Dr. Roll said emphatically. “Our psychic relationships are very normal and natural. The only thing that makes them supernormal is that they don’t fit with the most plebeian concept of reality. But if you accept the concept that your mind is connected to others—that all of us are placed on this earth to relate to each other—then ‘psychic phenomena’ no longer seems phenomenal. We then see these things, not as spooky and supernatural, but simply as manifestations of the way we are.”

  Before he rang off, Dr. Roll asked me to write a paper about my precognitive experiences for Theta, the journal published by the Psychical Research Foundation.

  Several days later I had a phone call from Marcello Truzzi. I was pleased to discover that he remembered me from high-school days and was willing to give me the names of some psychic detectives.

  “Noreen Renier, in Maitland, Florida, has had some remarkable hits,” Marcello said. “She’s been featured in a couple of criminology textbooks, and she lectures to law-enforcement agencies. In fact, it was during a lecture at the FBI Academy that she predicted the shooting of President Reagan two months before it took place.

  “Nancy Czetli, in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, has an impressive track record also. She gets most of her information through telepathy, by viewing photographs of crime scenes.

  “Then there’s Greta Alexander in Delavan, Illinois. She’s had some striking successes. One of her big hits was when she found a body where the police had already looked—she made them look again—and she gave twenty-two accurate predictions about the situation, including the fact that the person who would find the body would have a deformed hand. That woman’s sort of neat in some other ways too. She runs a kind of Ronald McDonald House for sick children, and most of the money from her fees goes to support that charity.”

  “Have you ever had any psychic experiences yourself?” I asked.

  “Nothing in any way conclusive,” Marcello said. “Certainly, I’ve had lots of experiences that might be interpreted that way, just like everyone else, but I’m basically a skeptic.”

  “Then what led you into this line of work?”

  “I’m intrigued by anything strange and unusual,” Marcello said. “Always was, if you remember, even as a teenager. People report all kinds of fantastic things, and I find them interesting. I keep thinking there must be some fire behind so much smoke. There certainly are things I’ve explored that I don’t understand, and I’ve been very impressed by the qualitative character of some evidence presented by psychics. When somebody describes something at a distance, and you look at the photograph, and it looks ex
actly like what they described, it’s very impressive. At the same time, I have enough sense to know, it could be coincidence.”

  I wrote letters to Noreen Renier, Greta Alexander, and Nancy Czetli, telling them I was a contributing editor for Woman’s Day and asking for bios and tear sheets about cases they’d worked on. I ended each letter with the statement that I was personally interested in the subject because my youngest daughter had been murdered.

  The first to respond to my letter was Noreen Renier, who seemed more interested in our personal tragedy than in being featured in a magazine.

  “My speciality is homicide work,” she told me. “I’ve worked with police from all over the United States and as far away as Japan. If I’m sent an object that was on the body of the victim, I can usually describe the victim and recreate the murder scene. Once that’s confirmed, I switch the channel to the killer. I go into a trance and describe the killer to a police artist, who draws the face. Some faces are better than others, but they’re usually pretty close. So far, I’ve never had anyone come back and say, ‘We arrested a black man, and you described a white man,’ or anything like that.”

  “That’s unbelievable!” I exclaimed.

  “It’s my craft,” she said. “There’s no hocus-pocus, I come at it from a scientific background. Do you have any of the things from your daughter’s body?”

  “Her earrings and a watch.”

  “If you’d like to send them to me, I’ll see what I can get. I charge the police for my work, but I’ll do this for you for free. The artist who does the composite will expect to be paid, though.”

  “Does the artist have psychic abilities?”

  “No, he just does what I tell him. He’s a policeman. He’s used to victims saying, ‘This is who raped me—this is who mugged me—’ and drawing a picture from their description. Do you want to take a shot at it?”

  “Yes,” I said immediately.

  “Okay. No guarantees, but we’ll give it a try.”

  “How long does a person’s energy stay in the object? Kait’s been dead over a year now.”