One to the Wolves, On the Trail of a Killer (9 page)

“What do
you
think happened that morning?” I asked her.

“According to the Internal Affairs file, Officer Nakamura — the honest cop — had Peter
out of the car with both hands in the air and no gun in either one of them, when they
heard a gunshot. Peter looked behind him and took off running. My guess is he may
have seen Griffin running toward him and realized he was going to be killed.”

“How can you possibly know what’s in the Internal Affairs file?”

“I stole it,” Renee said.

I stared at her in amazement.

“You
stole
the Internal Affairs file?”

“I prefer to consider it ‘borrowing’,” Renee said mildly. “I was in an attorney’s
office, sort of poking around while the lawyer was in the john, and right there on
his desk was that file. I read it, of course, and when I came to the part where Officer
Nakamura told his supervisor, ‘I can’t believe it!
They shot him in the back and he didn’t even have a gun!’
I flipped! Nakamura also said Peter followed all instructions and made no threatening
gestures, and two other officers backed him up on that. I knew nobody would believe
me if I quoted that statement, so I tucked the file under my arm, walked out past
the secretary, and got the thing copied. Then I sneaked the original back before it
was missed.”

“My God!” I exclaimed in awe. “How wonderful!”

“I only did what I had to do,” Renee said modestly. “There’s so much evidence of a
police cover-up you wouldn’t believe it. Rheardon’s report — he’s the former chief
justice who investigated for the police department – says in his very first paragraph,
‘I believe there is a question about whether Mr. Klunck was armed at the time he was
shot and, even if he was, whether it was necessary to shoot him.’ So, guess what the
police chief told the press? He issued a statement that the Internal Affairs investigator
had concluded that the shooting was
justified!

“Police can shape situations into anything they want. An honest cop called the Attorney
General’s office and told them the derringer was an alibi gun planted there by the
police. That cop said APD had intended to mask the whole thing, but the coroner’s
office leaked information that Pete was shot in the back, so that put a crimp in their
self-defense claim.

“The grand jury was told out-and-out lies, Lois! It took them seven minutes to come
to the decision that there wasn’t any evidence of wrong-doing. There was plenty of
evidence, but it had been
withheld from them! Can you imagine my fury and frustration?  There I sat with all
this material that pointed to murder and a police cover-up and nobody wanted to look
at it!”

“So what did you do?” I asked her.

“I gave it to the newspapers and all the TV stations,” she told me.

“So that’s how the
Albuquerque Journal
got a copy of it!”

“Everybody wanted to kill me,” Renee continued. “But by that time I didn’t give a
damn. The system can’t be allowed to screw around with the truth like that! There’s
a huge drug operation going on in New Mexico, involving VIPs with control over law
enforcement. That’s what Peter found out about, and Kait may have too. I have a gut
feeling there’s a link between our children’s cases.”

Don and I returned from our trip to Albuquerque to find a letter from my agent saying
that NBC had purchased film rights to one of my novels.

Ironically, the title was
Killing Mr. Griffin.

In the spring of 1994, the paperback edition of
Who Killed My Daughter?
came out. That led to a fresh round of media blitz, and one of the shows I appeared
on was
Sally Jessy Raphael.

That show provided an 800 number for tipsters, and one of the calls was from a woman
named Patricia Caristo.

The message she left for us was: “Do you know that a man with a record of violent
crime, who was at your daughter’s scene when police arrived, has never been interviewed?”

It turned out that Pat was a private investigator in Albuquerque, who, in 1992, had
been retained by a law firm to conduct an accident reconstruction of Kait’s shooting
in respect to a possible motor-vehicle insurance claim. When Don and I declined to
pursue that action, Pat’s job was officially over, but by then she had become so intrigued
by the case that she had not been able to let go of it.

“The crime scene appears to have been badly mishandled,” she told Don and me during
a three-way phone conversation. “When I read the reports, I was appalled. Not only
was the man at the scene not interviewed, but there was evidence that wasn’t followed
up on, and no evidence hold was placed on Kait’s car.  When I saw you on television,
still asking all the same questions I started asking two years ago, I felt that I
had to get in touch with you.”

“Who was the man at the scene?” Don asked her.

“His name is Paul Apodaca,” Pat said. “He’s a predator with a long record of violent
attacks on women. In one case he abducted a woman, tied her up, and struck her repeatedly
on the head with a baseball bat. Just three months before Kait’s murder, Paul and
a relative were arrested for negligent use of a handgun of the same small caliber
that is thought to have killed Kait.”

“What do you mean ‘is
thought
to have killed Kait’?” I asked. “Surely police could determine the caliber of the
bullets.”

“No bullets or casings were found,” Pat said.

“But a bullet went into the door frame!”

“Only a tiny piece of it was found in the car— not enough to determine the caliber.”

“The rest vanished into thin air?”

“Apparently so.”

“Two bullets went into her head—”

“They weren’t found either.”

“But there weren’t any exit wounds!” I exclaimed in bewilderment.

“The medical examiner told the Grand Jury — wait a minute, I’ve got his statement
right here—” We could hear her shuffling papers. “He said, ‘I recovered five very
small bullet fragments along the wound tract. The larger portion of the bullet was
not present in the body.”

It was too incredible to take in, so Don switched subjects.

“By ‘the evidence that wasn’t followed up on,’ do you mean the beer can?”

“That’s only part of it,” Pat said. “Police say they were able to identify the location
where Kait was shot by a large accumulation of broken glass. From there her car traveled
over seven hundred feet, crossed the median and the opposite lane, went up onto the
sidewalk and came to rest against a pole. It was found with the automatic transmission
in park, and one of her shoes was on the ground outside the closed door on the driver’s
side.”

“That’s impossible,” Don said. “Kait was in a coma. She couldn’t have put the gear
shift in park. And how would one of her shoes get outside the car?”

“That’s a good question, since neither of the first two officers at the scene admits
to opening the driver’s door. Both say they went directly to the passenger’s side,
which is why they didn’t notice the bullet hole in the doorframe. That bullet hole
is another piece of evidence that wasn’t taken seriously. Field investigators speculated
that the hole was made by a larger caliber bullet than the ones that must have shattered
in Kait’s head. If true, that means two guns were used.

“I’m a former police officer and intelligence analyst. With your permission, I’d
like to put together an analysis of the police investigation, based on the materials
in the case file, and present it to the new police chief, Joseph Polisar. When I worked
with the Intelligence Unit here in Albuquerque, Polisar was the supervisor, and he
seemed to value the concept of analysis.”

Pat did this work without charge and hand-delivered the seventy-five page report to
the chief’s office.

“Please, accept this analysis in the spirit in which it is offered,” she said in her
cover letter. “I have taken no actions that might compromise any on-going law enforcement
investigation. I am at your disposal to discuss my analysis and the results of my
investigation to date if you so desire.”

Chief Polisar didn’t respond.

In September, Don and I flew to Albuquerque to meet with Pat in person. By then w
e had checked out her background. The City of Philadelphia
and the Philadelphia PD had commended her for heroism and both they and the UNM PD
had awarded her commendations for meritorious performance before she moved on to become
a private investigator.

This was enough to make us feel safe in her hands.

In person, this new recruit in Kait’s Army turned out to be a vivacious brunette with
a professional manner that was an interesting contrast to the laugh lines at the corners
of her eyes and the array of family pictures on the shelf above her desk.
4

“I have so many questions about the crime scene that I hardly know where to start,”
Pat told us. “We have an off-duty police officer — I’ll call him Cop Number One —
stumbling onto the scene minutes after the shooting. According to his report, when
he first catches sight of the scene, he sees
two
cars, Kait’s red car against the pole and
another car.
As he passes the scene, he radios headquarters to ask if an accident has been reported.
The answer comes back negative, and he makes a U-turn and drives back to check things
out. By that time the second car’s gone, but Paul Apodaca is still there. Would you
believe that nobody has ever raised the question of what that second car was doing
there, who was in it, and why the driver took off when a cop showed up?

“Then Cop Number One radios in a report of an accident with no injuries.”

“He does
what
?” I gasped.

“You heard me right. The second officer at the scene — we’ll call her Cop Number Two
— was dispatched to a 10-44, an accident with no injuries. And neither cop took information
from Apodaca.”

“Do you have any idea why?”

“I’m totally stymied. This case appears to have been compromised before the investigation
started. You may be right when you speculated that Detective Gallegos was used as
a scapegoat by his own department. At the start he was doing a fine job, interviewing
all the right people and keeping good notes. Then it seems as if somebody closed him
down. Crucial information in his field notes was withheld from his reports, and he
destroyed all of his notes prior to discovery. Luckily for Miguel Garcia, his defense
attorneys found copies of the notes in a file the police apparently forgot to purge.
That’s when the DA dropped the charges against the Hispanics.”

“What sort of information was in those notes?” Don asked her.

“Things that indicate the shooting might not have been random. For example, Kait’s
next-door neighbor told Gallegos that Kait was followed from her apartment by a VW
bug. That statement is in Gallegos’s field notes, but not in his report.”

“Michael Bush was puzzled by that too,” I said. “Why would he withhold that important
piece of information?”

“Perhaps his superiors wanted to close the case quickly?” Don suggested. “A thorough
investigation would have taken a lot of manpower.”

“The problem with that theory is that a cover-up seems to have started long before
the complexities of the case became evident,” Pat said. “Witnesses who lived a half
block north of the scene reported being wakened by gun shots. They also reported seeing
a VW bug with more than one person in it race up their street, pull into a lot next
door to their house, turn off its lights, and after a short time make a U-turn and
drive slowly back the same way it came. I started to wonder if the killers disposed
of a weapon, so I decided to check to see if there was a Dumpster there. It turns
out there was, but, more important, there’s an auto body shop.
5
Police reports don’t acknowledge the existence of that building. Why didn’t they
interview the owner of that business? They talked to the owners of other businesses
in the area, so why omit
that
one? So many questions!”

“Michael talked with a P.I. who was investigating an auto repair shop,” I said. “I
wonder if this could be that shop.”

I phoned the investigator, Roy Nolan, identified myself as a friend of Michael’s,
and asked him what, if anything, he knew about the body shop.

“I’m aware of that place,” he responded cautiously. “Why are you interested?”

“We’re hunting for a possible connection to our daughter’s murder,” I told him.

“Like I told Mr. Bush, you’re looking at a crooked body shop where you take a wrecked
car, they give you an exorbitant repair figure, and you give it to the insurance company,”
Nolan said. “From what I’ve observed, they also chop parts from stolen cars. In 1991,
that shop was raided by the FBI, APD, ATF and the Department of Public Safety. They
confiscated guns, and the owners’ son was charged with drug dealing.”

I handed the phone to Pat.

The two investigators talked for half an hour.

“Nolan’s a gold mine of information,” Pat told us after she hung up. “He had that
shop under surveillance for weeks, and he says Vietnamese in expensive cars were always
coming and going. In fact, he’s established a link between the owner of that shop
and a Vietnamese consultant for APD, whose son is a close friend of Dung’s.

“The owner of the body shop also knew Kait. His girlfriend told Nolan they met Kait
at a disco when Kait was there with a woman who fits the description of Susan Smith.
Also, while Nolan was questioning the owner’s girlfriend, he saw a newspaper article
with a picture of Matt Griffin tacked up on the wall. The girlfriend told him the
shop was a hangout for Griffin and other cops who held late night parties there. It’s
a lot to be coincidence — Vietnamese in fancy cars; a Vietnamese consultant for APD,
whose son was one of Dung’s buddies; the Ninja Bandit and his cop friends — all linked
to a chop shop where drugs were sold and the owner knew Susan and Kait. And that’s
where the VW bug went after the shooting? It looks like we may have a tiger by the
tail.”