It’s been four years since serial killer Paul Raymond Apodaca confessed to killing three girls in the late ’80s, including the teen daughter of famed YA author Lois Duncan. 

For decades, the I Know What You Did Last Summer novelist strove to find who killed her daughter, 18-year-old Kaitlyn Arquette, in the summer of 1989. She even penned the prize-winning non-fiction book about the homicide, titled Who Killed My Daughter?, in 1992, years before police in Albuquerque, New Mexico solved the case in 2021.  

The tragedy impacted Duncan’s response to the popular 1997 slasher flick based on her 1973 novel, as reported by People. In 2010, she admitted during a Q&A that she was “quite horrified by the sensationalized violence,” especially considering the book had been geared toward a younger audience. 

“Several years earlier, my own teenage daughter, Kait, had been chased down in her car and shot to death, and I had seen, right in front of my eyes, what real violence is,” she said. “To have people screaming and laughing about it did not go down well.”

Duncan died in 2016, before finding out who was responsible for Arquette’s death. 

The murder of Althea Oakeley

University of New Mexico student Althea Oakeley, 21, of Taos, was last seen alive on the night of June 22, 1988, according to the Albuquerque Police Department (A.P.D.). After an argument with her boyfriend at an on-campus fraternity house party, she walked in the direction of her residence, which Oakeley shared with her brother. 

A short time later, she was stabbed to death outside her Buena Vista Drive home, but no suspects were identified at the time.  

Neighbors heard the screams and took life-saving measures to no avail, according to CBS Albuquerque affiliate KRQE. One witness who wanted to remain anonymous told the outlet there was “a lot of blood” and that Oakeley “didn’t want to die, and she collapsed right there.”

A.P.D. Chief Harold Medina, who personally knew the victim, took the case to heart and reexamined it in 2012, then again several years later. In a video created by the department, Medina — also of Taos — remembered his mother making dresses for the girls participating in the Taos Fiesta Queen pageant in 1985, describing Oakeley as a “very kind” person. 

“I was only a teenager at the time, but I remember the impact her death had on our community,” Medina said. 

Years later, Apodaca — then a security guard at a vocational school located just 0.7 miles from the victim’s home — confessed to watching Oakeley leave the frat house. He said he initially decided to rape her in a nearby parking lot but changed his mind, instead stabbing her with a Swiss army knife, per the CBS affiliate.

“She said ‘Hi,’ and she smiled at me. That’s the worst part. How do you hurt someone who smiles at you?” Apodaca cried to authorities. “I didn’t think my short little knife would be able to do that much damage.”

Oakeley allegedly cited his hatred of women and corroborated details of the murder that hadn’t been released to the public, according to Taos News. One key piece of evidence was a watch he left near the crime scene, a gift to him from his aunt. 

The murder of Stella Gonzales 

Months after Oakeley’s stabbing death, 13-year-old Stella Gonzales became the second of Apodaca’s victims, as detailed by police.

On September 9, 1988, at around 1:15 a.m., Gonzales and a female friend walked along Central Avenue, east of Tingley Drive, when an unknown man confronted them in a car, police stated. The killer fired multiple shots, and the teen later died at the hospital. 

Police said it appeared to be a random attack, possibly because Gonzales was “a female who was in a vulnerable position,” as previously reported by . 

“This is one of the things that breaks our hearts — this man was at the crime scene with the cops,” the victim’s sister, Kerry Arquette, told The Albuquerque Journal in 2021. “How obvious did it need to be to look into this guy? They just let him walk away.”

Years of billboards, public appeals, and TV specials got loved ones no closer to identifying a culprit in the case, and Lois Duncan’s book, Who Killed My Daughter? (1992), and its 2013 sequel, One to the Wolves: On the Trail of a Killer, yielded few answers during Duncan’s lifetime. 

“She always said she wouldn’t die unless this case was solved,” Kerry Arquette told The Albuquerque Journal in 2019. “Mother was always that little fireplug. She was this dreamy little novelist who sat out there under the shade tree dreaming of story plots. But once her baby was killed, she had to morph, and it was terribly hard for her, and she did it. But we all knew that it killed her.”

Apodaca’s confession

On July 20, 2021, A.P.D. officials say Paul Apodaca, a registered sex offender who’d spent 11 years in prison for raping his 14-year-old stepsister in 1995, “walked into” the University of New Mexico Police Department and confessed to killing Althea Oakeley. At the time, he was arrested on a probation violation.

After some discussion, he soon confessed to killing Gonzales and Arquette, as well as raping others. 

“One rape has been tied to Apodaca because of Mayor Tim Keller’s efforts to clear a backlog of more than 5,000 sex assault kits that sat on evidence shelves for decades,” police said following Apodaca’s arrest. “The DNA in one of those kits returned a match on February 2021. APD was recently notified that the DNA matched the known DNA of Paul Apodaca.”

Police said Apodaca had “no ties” to the victims, but knew “key details” about each crime scene.

Apodaca told detectives that in 2020, while serving time for an aggravated assault against a police officer with a deadly weapon, he “spent the last year in jail just crying and crying” after reading Duncan’s book, according to the CBS affiliate. 

The book spurred him to come forward and confess to the murders which, until then, were never connected.

“It’s not so much about relieving myself of that as it is to bring closure to the people I’ve harmed,” he purportedly told detectives.

Apodaca condemned gun violence and his own actions when taking responsibility for the killings. “I now know the sorrow I’ve caused by perpetuating that darkness and passing my pain onto others,” he told the court. 

Authorities such as Chief Medina celebrated Apodaca’s conviction. 

“These heinous crimes haunted three families for more than 30 years, leaving behind a wake of pain and suffering,” Medina said. “Growing up knowing Althea Oakeley’s family, I was able to share the news an arrest had been made, and it was evident there was still so much pain they were going through. I hope all the families can now move forward and find closure in a long-awaited resolution to their nightmare.”

The cases of Oakeley, Gonzales, and Arquette are now closed.