Who Killed My Daughter?

by Lois Duncan

  “I don’t much like that idea myself,” I assured her.

  “Then send her a photograph of your daughter, showing the eyes,” Barbara said. “Send the video of the crime scene, a map with the spot marked where your daughter was killed, the exact date of the shooting, an article of clothing or an intimate possession that belonged to your daughter, and a sample of her handwriting. Then I’ll set up a telephone appointment for you.”

  I sent a box with the video, one of the flyers that showed Kait and Dung together, a city map with the murder site marked with an X, a page from one of Kait’s school composition books, and the teddy bear that she had continued to sleep with even after Dung moved in with her.

  Barbara called to tell me when the box arrived, and we set up my interview with Nancy for December 4.

  Nancy’s approach was very different from Noreen’s. Crisp and businesslike, she clicked off her reactions in an objective, no-nonsense manner:

  NANCY: The videotape was real helpful. I feel that money changed hands. I get that from the scene in the courtroom. I sense it was about a thousand dollars.

  I don’t know how it all fits together, but I got one brief glimpse on the videotape of the Vietnamese boyfriend leaving the funeral home, and along with a sense of grief, he gave off anger and satisfaction. I feel there was some connection between him and these others. I cannot tell how—there was just a brief flash there, before he realized he was being filmed—but there was a sense of having gotten even with her. It’s not enough to go on in terms of accusing him of having hired somebody, but somebody did. I feel very certain that the people who did this were paid, but they’re not about to admit that, because a conviction for murder-for-hire could bring them the death penalty.

  LOIS: So you feel the Hispanics did do it?

  NANCY: Yes, I do. I detect the feeling of their presence on that street. I also don’t buy it as random at all, because it comes across very strong to me that somebody was checking her license plate against a number that was written on a piece of paper. They also seem to have known about where she was supposed to be and approximately the time she was going to be there.

  Besides, if this were a random shooting, they would just have been joy-riding around, firing, but I feel sure she was followed and chased. Had she had a more powerful car, she might actually have gotten away from them, because I sense they were having problems with their car. From seeing her car on the video I got a feeling of her fear and desperation. She was being followed, and she guessed she was going to be killed, and she seemed to know very much that it had to do with information she had about this boyfriend or his cronies. It’s some kind of illegal activity that she had recently become aware of and which she had threatened to expose. She didn’t want to go through with that, because unfortunately she was more in love with him than she could afford to be.

  LOIS: What else do you get about the boyfriend?

  NANCY: It’s distinct from the teddy bear and from the residue around the car on the videotape that she’s angry and she’s seriously considering turning this Vietnamese fellow in. Had she done it, he might have been charged with a felony-level crime and probably deported. He also seems to have been having a great deal of trouble emotionally. I detect it even in the photograph you sent of the two of them together, and it is certainly in his photograph on the TV, that he’s having a lot of trouble handling her independence and the fact that she was more intelligent than he was. There was a crisis reaction in terms of the way she was threatening his manhood and there’s a feeling in him of “I’m going to teach her a lesson—I’m going to teach her who’s boss.” He didn’t want to lose control of her.

  LOIS: Barbara Adams said you think this is drug related.

  NANCY: I think your daughter was a very nice person, she was just naive. She did not realize that from the moment she caught on to what was going on, her life was in danger. She should have gone to the federal authorities immediately. She shouldn’t even have bothered with local law enforcement, it would have been too risky. Unfortunately, she sat on it. If she had not sat on it, she would have had a chance, but they would probably have had to put her in the Witness Protection Program. Whatever she stumbled onto involved drug dealings involving a lot of money.

  The likelihood of a conviction in this case is very poor, because the prosecution doesn’t have anything to link these Hispanic guys with the Vietnamese, and their witnesses are not very strong.

  Now, there is another person out there still, someone who overheard a detailed discussion of how this was set up and he’s been very uneasy about that. He’s not into killing and has a reverence for women that the killers do not have, and he was quite disturbed from the outset. I also get the impression that this person called Crime Stoppers but never identified himself.

  If this person would come forward, they could nail the killers, because this man is credible and doesn’t have the erratic patterns of the other witnesses. He is afraid to come forward, because of the nature of what he overheard. The fact that your daughter observed evidence of such magnitude of criminal activity that people would take a contract out on her is frightening to this man. It’s not that he would not care to help, he would very much care to help, and he feels a certain civic obligation to do so. The problem is that he’s afraid he also will be killed, and he has a family. He’s done a lot of wrestling with his conscience. His testimony would be really, really good, because he was around a series of times when the killers discussed the money they had been paid and gave some information about the man who hired them. With this man’s testimony it would be clear it was not a random shooting.

  LOIS: It’s hard to think that this group who are running drugs interstate would hire stupid, bumbling kids to do the hit for them.

  NANCY: Actually, it would be a pretty good setup, because these guys are known for odd violence, so it could be believed to be a more wanton killing, which is how they wanted it to appear. They would have absolutely no concern about these gentlemen talking, because if you trade the rate of the sentences around, the sentence for a random shooting is going to be a lot lighter than sentences for interstate drug transportation or murder-for-hire.

  LOIS: Barbara said you thought Kait was witness to a drug deal.

  NANCY: I think she had knowledge of drug exchanges that had been going on for a while, and that may have been what she was trying to collect more information about the night she was killed.

  LOIS: Do you see the threat of a knife involved in any of this?

  NANCY: I associate that with the Vietnamese. I see periodic violence in Kait’s experience. I get the feeling from that teddy bear that she had experienced violence on a number of occasions.

  LOIS: Do you have anything else for me?

  NANCY: I think that things are going to happen around this Vietnamese man that will shed a more realistic light upon his possible involvement in her death. So I don’t think it’s necessarily over with, but it may be some time before that happens. I also don’t have much hope about the trial of Garcia.

  It’s my feeling that this was set up with Hispanic hitmen, because if any Oriental person had been seen around her with a gun, the whole mess would have come out immediately. So they used a completely different racial setup to distract.

  But they did have some kind of connection. And I don’t know if it was the boyfriend himself or through his network, but I feel that they had a connection to Hispanic hitmen. Within a drug network you can ask people to do things.

  LOIS: Do you feel these Hispanics have killed before?

  NANCY: I feel they may have been involved in some kind of incident in which a federal officer was either killed or badly hurt. That would have been down near the Mexican border.

  LOIS: How in the world do you get such precise information?

  NANCY: By far the most helpful tool in this instance was the video. I work best from the crime scene itself. When people become frightened, they leak a lot of information mentally, and somehow it gets stuck in the c
ells of the environment. I don’t understand exactly how it works, except that I know that cells can, in fact, store information. I’m sure of that. They reflect scars from the scenery that stay a long time. Old battlefields do it. Really brutal murder scenes. There’s a memory almost of what happened.

  The other thing was Garcia’s eyes. Once I saw those, I recognized the thought pattern from the murder scene. Each time I looked at the murder scene on the video, I was getting the feel of the killer. Then, when I saw the men in court, there was a very good shot of Garcia where I could see his eyes real clearly, and I recognized the pattern—it was the same thought pattern I’d picked up from the crime scene. From the time I locked eyes with Garcia, I was sure they had the right person.

  LOIS: Thank you very much for doing this for us.

  NANCY: There’s one other thing I would like to say to you as a mother myself and as someone who has had these odd abilities all her life. I hope you know that your daughter has an existence now. It’s not at all the same as what it was, but her soul has an awareness of how much you care and how much you’re hurting, and when you think loudly about her she is very much aware of what you’re thinking. I get the distinct impression that she is trying very hard to communicate with you through dreams and even directly. She’s trying to make you feel and realize that her soul has continued.

  She really seemed frustrated, when I felt her, about the fact that there are occasions when you doubt this. She’s determined that you know that this isn’t your imagination—it isn’t just your wishful thinking—she really has been trying to communicate with you and other members of the family. She’s trying to get through friends too. And she’s been real concerned about her father’s reaction. She’s worried that he’s going to hate because of this, and she doesn’t want either one of you damaged in that way. She’s concerned that his anger isn’t resolved. You’ve turned yours into action, as women often do, but he hasn’t. It’s harder for a man to do that.

  I have the feeling that her father may have sensed a lot of danger from this Vietnamese man and now feels guilty that he didn’t say more to his daughter to try to protect her. He must understand that this wasn’t his responsibility. As independent as she was, even if he had said more, she would not have listened. She believed in the basic goodness of human beings, and that naiveté is the wrong thing to carry around with you when you’re dealing with people like this, because they use it against you.

  Nancy opened new doors in our collective thought processes. Don admitted that he had never felt good about Dung, but had concealed his dislike because he didn’t want to be regarded as racist.

  Robin reacted to the suggestion that the suspects might have been involved somehow in some incident where a federal officer was injured and asked me to check the police file to see if either man had an FBI identification number. I consulted the file and found that both of them did, but it didn’t say what they were for. Marty Martinez, the boy in the backseat, had no FBI number.

  For me, Nancy had answered the question of why the truck driver, Eugene Lindquist, who had nothing to gain by deception, had reported seeing Hispanics in a Camaro that matched the description of Juve’s chasing a girl in a Ford Tempo west on Lomas, long before Kait left Susan’s house.

  If their assignment had been to kill a girl in a Tempo, Lindquist might have seen the killers checking the license-plate numbers of all girls driving Tempos on that area of Lomas. And the cars they would have been checking at that time would have been headed west, because at nine-thirty Kait had been driving to Susan’s house, not leaving it. Betty’s statement that Kait had kept consulting her watch with the time nine P.M. in mind had made no sense to us when we thought Kait had gone to Susan’s at six-thirty. But our discovery about Kait’s three stolen hours changed everything. She might well have been running late for a nine P.M. appointment.

  And the tipster who had phoned us about the drug transaction and might also have sent the postcard to the attorney general? From then on, whenever we spoke of him, we referred to him with sympathy and affection as “the Good Man Who Is Afraid.”

  24

  OUR SECOND CHRISTMAS WITHOUT Kait was fast approaching and none of our children wanted to come back to Albuquerque. Don and I had accumulated enough frequent-flyer miles on our respective business trips to give us three bonus plane tickets, so we decided to spend the holidays with my stepmother in Florida, and give Donnie one of the tickets so he could join us there.

  The week before we left, I phoned Betty Muench. The information we’d gotten from Noreen and Nancy had been so similar in content that I couldn’t resist getting input from our “resident psychic” to see if her reading supported those of the others.

  It had been six months since I’d spoken with Betty. Now I asked her if she could get answers to three more questions for me, and she said she would take a shot at it, despite the fact that the questions themselves made no sense to her.

  She typed out the reading and read it to me over the telephone:

  QUESTION: WHAT MAY WE KNOW ABOUT KAIT’S EXPERIENCES ON THE NIGHT SHE DIED BETWEEN THE TIME SHE LEFT HER PARENTS’ HOME AND ARRIVED AT SUSAN’S HOUSE?

  ANSWER: Kait comes across very strong. She comes across up close and there’s a burning heat to her presence. She senses this and backs off, so as not to come across as overwhelmingly intense.

  “Usually when I get people it’s on the left side and it’s at least an arm’s length out,” Betty said. “Kait was pressing in real close. This connection was powerful.”

  ANSWER: There is an intense pressure on the top of the left side of the head, and this will show that there will have been some deep thinking going on in her on the day in question. There will be this that she will have come to realize, and she will have made several attempts to find the tangible manifested proof to support her thoughts.

  “She was thinking about something, and she was going a couple of places to find out if she was thinking correctly,” Betty said.

  ANSWER: On the night in question there will be a time frame which will have allowed her to be in the presence of several people. She will have known the visit with her parents, and then there will have been two other stops before she will have arrived at the house of Susan. There will have been a stop which will seem to have had her sitting alone in her car, and this will have been in view of something that she will have been thinking about. It is as if she will have backtracked to where she had been before she went to her parents’ house, and she will have seen something which will have caused her alarm, and yet she will have thought at that time that there was surely an explanation.

  “I had the idea she went back to her apartment and watched something,” Betty said.

  ANSWER: There will have been what she will have perceived at that time as a kind of double-cross, someone will have said something and then changed, will have promised something and was obviously not in the process of keeping this promise. She will have been noticed, and there will have been her moving from this situation, and then she will have made another stop, a stop which will have shown that she was tentative about claiming what she had seen. There will be this left-side energy which will have been her intuition working very strongly in this time frame in question. She was in the process of making a decision that would put not only herself in jeopardy but all who knew her. This was the point of her dilemma at the time of her death. The places will be places in which she will have often been—her own home place, and another place of high authority.

  “So, she went back to her apartment,” Betty said thoughtfully. “There she saw somebody—her boyfriend, maybe?—doing something he’d promised he wouldn’t do. She didn’t want to believe it unless she had to, so she went someplace else to check out what she’d seen. Do you suppose she was considering turning him in to the police?”

  “Let’s wait to discuss it until after you’re finished,” I said.

  QUESTION: WHAT MAY WE KNOW ABOUT THE DESERT CASTLE, THE OWNERS OR OCCUPANTS, ON THE NIGHT
OF KAIT’S DEATH?

  ANSWER: There’s a sense of something sliding across the chest—across the heart chakra—and going up the right side of the neck. It will be as if there was a very masculine feeling about this place.

  “The right side is the masculine side,” Betty explained to me.

  ANSWER: There is this energy around this Desert Castle that will show that there will be in a very near time something that will come up about this place that will show that what went on there on the night of Kait’s death will be something that will occur more often than thought

  There is a sense about this place that the subject of death is quite often spoken of, and there is some manner of connection with death. This will seem to be very male oriented, and there is in this some kind of cultlike energy which is so strong around this death subject that it hits one directly emotionally.

  There will be in this place one who will claim to be the possessor of this place, but this is a lie. This one is not the owner of anything and will be a fraud from all descriptions.

  There is a sense of illegitimacy about this place and the proceedings in this place. This is a meeting place for those who would have ideas about a misuse of power. There is a thought that anything is permissible as long as it serves the immediate purposes of the group. This is a place in which those will be found who will work with death and who will do so for money. The ownership is in question, and it has a sense of having been abandoned out of fear of this group of occupants, occupants who are illegitimate in their actions and in their possession of this place. The essence is a cult gang energy.

  “I get the feeling that the people in this ‘Desert Castle’ are the ones who issued the hit order,” Betty said. “It also sounds like they’re going to do it again. At least, that’s how I interpret that part about something soon happening at that place that ‘will show that what went on there on the night of Kait’s death will be something that will occur more often than thought.’ I think we need to get braced for another murder.”