The True Crime Author Whose Greatest Mystery Was Her Own Daughter's Death
10 Minute Murder | Bingeable True Crime Stories
Joe
4.9 • 638 Ratings
🗓️ 28 August 2025
⏱️ 14 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | When your daughter calls to say she's breaking up with her boyfriend and then never makes it home that night, every parent's worst nightmare becomes reality. |
| 0:09.0 | But when your best-selling author Lois Duncan and the police decide your daughter was randomly targeted, you don't accept that answer. |
| 0:17.0 | You write a book about it. |
| 0:19.0 | You hire private investigators. |
| 0:24.2 | You become your daughter's voice when everyone else has moved on. |
| 0:29.7 | This is the story of what happens to 18-year-old Caitlin Arquette in 1989, |
| 0:33.4 | and why it took 32 years to get answers. |
| 1:00.6 | Music In the summer of 1989, 18-year-old Caitlin Arquette had her whole life mapped out. |
| 1:07.5 | She graduated from high school at Highland High and Albuquerque as an honors student and one clear goal in mind. |
| 1:09.5 | She was going to become a doctor. |
| 1:14.5 | She'd already been accepted at the University of New Mexico and was taking summer courses while working as a supervisor at Pier 1 imports. |
| 1:18.4 | Then came a car accident that initially looked like a setback, but turned into an opportunity. |
| 1:24.0 | The insurance payout was substantial enough that she could afford to move into her own apartment |
| 1:28.8 | with her boyfriend, Dung Wynne. Caitlin's parents had met Dung several times and found him to be |
| 1:34.9 | polite, respectful, and refreshingly different from typical teenage boys. Don Arquette and his wife, |
| 1:41.8 | Lois Duncan, the famous author of, I Know What You Did Last Summer, |
| 1:45.3 | appreciated that he wasn't a partier or a drinker. Most importantly, their daughter seemed |
| 1:50.9 | genuinely happy with him. But happiness can be deceiving. Six weeks after moving in together, |
| 1:57.5 | everything changed. Caitlin called her mother with news that would have made any |
| 2:01.7 | parents' heart sink. She and Dung have been having serious problems. The truth was they'd never |
| 2:08.0 | really gotten along very well, and living together had only magnified their incompatibility. But |
| 2:14.1 | Caitlin had a plan. She already asked a friend to move in with her, and she was going to |
... |
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