When eighteen-year-old Kaitlyn Arquette called her mom to say she was breaking up with her boyfriend, it should have been routine relationship drama. Instead, it became the last conversation they'd ever have. Hours later, Kaitlyn was shot twice in the head while stopped at a red light in Albuquerque, and what followed was a mother's thirty-two-year quest for answers that would outlast police interest, public attention, and eventually her own life.
This is the story of bestselling author Lois Duncan, who refused to accept that her honor student daughter was killed randomly. Duncan believed Kaitlyn had stumbled into a Vietnamese insurance fraud ring, and that her decision to leave her boyfriend had made her a liability worth killing. The evidence was compelling: mysterious phone calls from Kaitlyn's apartment the night she died, a boyfriend whose grief seemed performative, and a California car accident that paid out way too much money.
But sometimes the truth is stranger than the theories we create to make sense of senseless loss. In 2021, a confession from serial killer Paul Apodaca finally solved Kaitlyn's murder, revealing a reality that was both simpler and more heartbreaking than anyone had imagined. Duncan had spent decades chasing the wrong leads, but her instinct that this wasn't random violence had been right all along.
This case asks hard questions about how we process grief, the stories we tell ourselves when tragedy strikes, and what happens when a mother's love becomes an investigation that spans decades. It's about the difference between closure and answers, and why sometimes getting what you've been searching for comes too late to matter.
#truecrime #coldcase #serialkiller #unsolved #mothersgrief #albuquerque #loisduncan
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