Kaitlyn Arquette Murder: Apodaca Confession, Plea, and Sentence

The Kaitlyn Arquette murder was solved in 2021, more than 32 years after the 18-year-old was shot to death on an Albuquerque street, when a stranger named Paul Raymond Apodaca walked into a University of New Mexico police station and confessed. Apodaca pleaded guilty in January 2024 to killing Arquette and two other young women in the late 1980s, and was sentenced to 45 years in prison. Police said he had no connection to any of his victims.

What Happened on Lomas Boulevard

On the night of July 16, 1989, Arquette was driving her 1984 red Ford Tempo east on Lomas Boulevard when another car pulled alongside. Someone inside shot her twice in the head. Her car crossed three lanes of traffic and struck a telephone pole.¹ She was found in a coma, taken to a hospital shortly before midnight, and died less than 24 hours later.²

A private investigator hired by the Arquette family later concluded that someone had run her car off the road before shooting her at close range.¹ One detail from the scene would matter decades later. Paul Apodaca was there before first responders arrived. Officers did not question him or take down his address.³

The Wrong Men Charged

Six months after the shooting, the Albuquerque Police Department classified Arquette’s death as a random act of violence. Acting on an informant’s tip, detectives pursued Juvenal Escobedo, who had sold a brown Chevrolet Camaro matching a car a truck driver reported seeing chase Arquette that night. Escobedo and another man, Miguel Garcia, were indicted for the murder.²

The case collapsed. One of the original four suspects turned out to have been in the Juvenile Detention Center at the time of the shooting.⁴ Prosecutors also concluded the case was “unwinnable” because the defense could raise a connection to an insurance scam involving Arquette’s boyfriend.⁵ The charges were dismissed about eighteen months after the indictment. Escobedo later said the wrongful prosecution derailed his plans to open a mechanic shop or become a police officer and left him with lasting stigma and anxiety.

Lois Duncan’s 27-Year Search

Kaitlyn’s mother was Lois Duncan, the young-adult novelist best known for I Know What You Did Last Summer. After the murder, she spent the rest of her life trying to find the killer. She published Who Killed My Daughter? in 1992 and a sequel, One to the Wolves: On the Trail of a Killer, in 2013. She funded billboards, appeared on television specials, and made repeated public appeals.¹

Duncan came to believe her daughter had been killed to stop her from exposing a multi-million-dollar insurance fraud scheme, which Duncan linked to a Vietnamese organized crime group in Orange County, California. Albuquerque police never pursued that theory. Lead detective Steve Gallegos said he saw no evidence connecting any Vietnamese group to the homicide.² The case was featured on multiple seasons of Unsolved Mysteries. In One to the Wolves, Duncan alleged cover-ups, disappearing evidence, and threats, and wrote that the search had forced the family to move and had contributed to her own stroke and seizures.⁶

Duncan died in 2016 without learning who killed her daughter. Her daughter Kerry later said Duncan “always said she wouldn’t die until she got justice for Kaitlyn.”⁷

How Paul Apodaca Confessed

On July 20, 2021, Paul Raymond Apodaca, then 55, was arrested at the University of New Mexico on a probation violation. While being processed, he told a security guard he wanted to discuss “murders from a long time ago.”⁸ He first confessed only to the 1988 stabbing of 21-year-old UNM student Althea Oakeley. Under further questioning by Albuquerque Police Department homicide detectives, he added two more killings: the 1988 shooting of 13-year-old Stella Gonzales and the 1989 murder of Kaitlyn Arquette.⁹

Apodaca told detectives that while serving time in 2020 for aggravated assault on a police officer, he read Lois Duncan’s Who Killed My Daughter? and “spent the last year in jail just crying and crying.” He said the book pushed him to come forward “to bring closure to the people I’ve harmed.”¹ Investigators said he offered details from each crime scene that had never been made public.¹⁰

Who Paul Apodaca Is

Apodaca had a long violent history. Police described him as having spent a substantial amount of time in prison across various offenses. From 1988 to 1990, he worked as a security aide at TVI, now Central New Mexico Community College, patrolling parking lots. Detectives said he used that job to watch potential victims.⁸

In 1995, Apodaca was convicted of raping a 14-year-old family member and became the first person in Bernalillo County sentenced under a law requiring sex offenders to register upon release. That conviction also placed his DNA on file, and he was later tied to at least three cold-case rapes in addition to the three murders.⁸ Regarding the killing of Oakeley, Apodaca told police “what made me attack her was all, all the hatred I had for women.” At sentencing, he attributed his violence to childhood trauma, saying he had been committed to a psychiatric center after his father died by gun violence, and said he stopped killing after a felony conviction in the 1990s prevented him from legally possessing firearms.¹¹

Kerry Arquette, Kaitlyn’s sister and a Denver-based criminologist, was sharply critical of the department. She noted that Apodaca had been standing at the crime scene in 1989 when officers arrived and was allowed to leave. “How obvious did it need to be to look into this guy?” she said. “They just let him walk away.”⁷

The Fight to Keep the Confession

Apodaca was indicted for Arquette’s murder in February 2022.¹⁰ His defense entered a not-guilty plea, called the indictment “spurious,” and moved to suppress his confessions on the grounds that he was not read his Miranda rights during the initial encounter and lacked the mental capacity to give a valid statement.

Bernalillo County District Judge Cindy Leos rejected most of the defense’s arguments. She ruled that Apodaca’s initial statements to a UNM hospital security guard were voluntary and admissible because he was not in custody and had approached the guard on his own. She suppressed statements made to UNM police after they took him into custody without reading him his rights. But she found that a later interview with APD detective Jodi Gonterman was admissible in full. Gonterman had not been told about the earlier confession, so there was no “contamination of information,” and once Apodaca began to confess in that interview, she stopped him and read him his rights before continuing. Apodaca showed he understood, telling the detective, “That I don’t have to say anything.”¹² Judge Leos also rejected the mental-capacity argument, noting that medical officials had determined Apodaca was not experiencing a psychiatric episode and that he appeared “lucid, his memory was clear and he was responsive.”¹³

Guilty Plea and 45-Year Sentence

On January 25, 2024, Apodaca pleaded guilty before Judge Leos to three counts of second-degree murder, one count of attempted rape, and one count of kidnapping. He was sentenced to 45 years in the New Mexico Department of Corrections and ordered to register as a sex offender.¹⁴

At the virtual sentencing hearing, the victims’ families spoke. Kerry Arquette told Apodaca, “Apodaca killed my sister and murdered my family.” Another sister, Robin Arquette, said, “My sister Kait deserved to live her life. She was romantic and brilliant and planned to be a doctor.” Addressing Apodaca, Robin said, “I kind of expected to see a monster, but you could walk among us and nobody would know. You just are indescribably unmemorable.”⁴

The family of Althea Oakeley asked for the maximum penalty in a letter read by the judge. Stella Gonzales’s mother told Apodaca, “Since the day you killed her, there’s an emptiness in my heart that can never be filled. May God forgive me, but I hope you go to hell.” Apodaca apologized, saying, “I apologize with all my heart for the pain I’ve caused,” and added, “I now know the sorrow I’ve caused by perpetuating that darkness and passing my pain onto others.”¹¹

The book Lois Duncan wrote to find her daughter’s killer was what eventually brought him in, five years after her death.¹

1
Oxygen. Lois Duncan Daughter Serial Killer Paul Apodaca
2
Unsolved Mysteries. Kaitlyn Arquette
3
Fox 13 Memphis. Alleged Killer Admits to Three Unsolved Murders Including That of Author Lois Duncan’s Daughter
4
City Desk. A Killer Confesses: What Happens to Those Left Behind
5
Sarasota Herald-Tribune. Lois Duncan and the Answer She Never Found
6
Lesa’s Book Critiques. One to the Wolves by Lois Duncan
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KRQE. Kaitlyn Arquette’s Sister Reacts to Murder Confession
8
KOAT. Paul Apodaca New Mexico Cold Cases
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Sacramento Bee. Paul Apodaca Sentenced for Three Cold Case Murders
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KOAT. Paul Apodaca Murder Kaitlyn Arquette New Mexico
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KRQE. Victims’ Families Address Albuquerque Serial Killer
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KRQE. Judge in Apodaca Trial Says Portions of Confession Admissible
13
Albuquerque Journal. Judge Rejects Request to Toss Confessions in Three Cold Case Killings
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City of Albuquerque. Chief Medina Reacts to 45-Year Sentence of Serial Killer in Three Cold Case Homicides