This report is the second of a two-part series by City Desk’s Elise Kaplan and Bethany Raja. To read more about the court hearing and Apodaca’s plea, find part one here.
(c) City Desk ABQ. Republish our stories with permission from editor@abq.news
One night in 1988, 13-year-old Stella Gonzales—a bubbly 5th grader at Washington Middle School who liked telling jokes and “the ugliest dogs”—pleaded with her mother to let her stay at her aunt’s house. It was a school night in early September and Stella’s mother, Gina Cerrillo, was hesitant.
But eventually she relented.
Early the next morning, she got the call. Stella had been shot in the head.
Cerrillo soon learned that the teenager had convinced her aunt to let her go out with a friend and the two went to a party on the west side. Around 1:15 a.m. the girls were walking near Tingley Beach when someone shot at them from a car. Stella was hit and died not long after.
Thirty-five years later, Cerrillo had a chance to face—over Zoom—the man who killed her daughter. At a virtual hearing on Thursday, Paul Apodaca, now 55, pleaded guilty to killing Stella and two others: Althea Oakeley, a 21-year-old University of New Mexico student, and Kaitlyn Arquette, the 18-year-old daughter of bestselling author Lois Duncan. He faces spending the rest of his life in prison.
The three homicides, from July of 1988 to July of 1989, had gone cold until the summer of 2021 when UNM police officers found Apodaca on campus. He was wanted for a probation violation and when officers picked him up they say he began confessing to first one killing, and then the others.
Cerrillo spoke with City Desk ABQ—her first time speaking with the media—as she prepared to attend the virtual hearing on zoom from her west side home. She and her daughter—Stella’s younger sister by 11 months—wore matching shirts bearing Stella’s photo.
“I have pictures of her on the wall and I look at her and I can’t get over it,” Cerillo said. “I don’t think I’ll ever get over it. I never got to see her be a grown adult. She was just 13. I never got to see a graduate, never got to see her get married, have a first boyfriend, have kids.”
The news that Apodaca had been arrested brought another shocking twist for Cerrillo—a former landlady called to tell her that the two had actually lived in the same apartment complex for a period of time decades ago, after Stella’s death.
What would she have done if she’d known then what she knows now?
“Oh, my God, I don’t think I don’t think I’d be sitting here talking to you, I think I would have been in prison,” Cerrillo said. “I had so much anger and so much hate. I finally started praying and said get this anger and this hate away from me, because not all people are bad. Just because there’s one bad seed don’t take it out on everybody.”
“Who Killed My Daughter?”
After her daughter was killed in July of 1989, Duncan—who wrote the book-turned-movie “I Know What You Did Last Summer”—devoted the rest of her life to searching for answers. She wrote “Who Killed My Daughter?” about the case in 1992 and she and her family have been outspoken critics of the way the Albuquerque Police Department handled the case.
At Thursday’s hearing, Kaitlyn’s older sister, Kerry Arquette, addressed Apodaca, telling him how he “killed my sister, and murdered my family.”
“The destruction of our family began when we each walked into the hospital room and saw Kait lying there,” Kerry Arquette said. “Her head was the size of a basketball. I was shocked. I didn’t know a skull could swell like that. Then I realized that the bandages had slipped and I could see the hole in Kait’s temple, where the bullet entered. I have no words to describe that moment and no way to get the image out of my head. It’s superimposed over every memory I have of Kait.”
Duncan’s quest for closure meant she consulted with private detectives, went on TV news shows, wrote books, articles and poems about the case and spoke at conferences. All this meant that she wasn’t able to be fully present for the children and grandchildren she still had, Kerry Arquette said.
“Mother was the backbone of our family, the glue that held us together and after Kait’s murder mother lived for her dead child rather than the ones she left behind,” she said. “I didn’t blame her.”
Robin Burkin, Kaitlyn’s other sister, said for her part watching Apodaca sitting in front of the computer in a cell in the Lea County Correctional Facility, she was surprised to see how ordinary he is.
“I kind of expected to see a monster, but you could walk among us and nobody would know,” Burkin said. “You just are indescribably unmemorable.”
For his part, Oakeley’s father asked Judge Cindy Leos to read the letter they had written to Apodaca for them. The family declined an interview request.
“You chose to attack our daughter Althea—sister, family and friend and had no remorse for 33 years,” Leos read. “You don’t deserve any kind of leniency … We want the maximum penalty and having you sit in prison and relive the nightmare you have put us through.”
Four men from Martineztown
There is another person in the city who has been anxiously awaiting news on the case. He checks the TV stations regularly, looking for answers.
Juvenal Escobedo was 21 years old when he and three other young men from his Martineztown neighborhood were arrested and charged with killing Kaitlyn Arquette. Shortly after the charges were announced it was revealed that one of the accused had actually been locked up in the Juvenile Detention Center at the time of the shooting.
Still, the then-District Attorney proceeded with the case against Escobedo and his friend Miguel Garcia and they were indicted on murder charges. The case was dismissed 18-months later but the damage was done.
Escobedo, now 55, told City Desk ABQ that before he was wrongfully arrested he had been hoping to maybe open up a mechanic shop, or become a police officer. But the fallout from the case, and the publicity surrounding it, changed the trajectory of his life. Duncan’s book mentions his name throughout as one of the main suspects in the case.
“Everything just fell down the drain,” he said, adding that he was hesitant to tell people his full name and it was impossible to get the kind of jobs he wanted.
When Apodaca was arrested in 2021, it brought up all the bad memories, Escobedo said, and for the past couple of years he has been kept awake at night worrying that he will be dragged into the fray again somehow.
“It just hits back hard: what I went through, what the police put me through for no reason,” he said. “I have no idea why. I still don’t know how my name got involved.”
In the past two years, Escobedo’s first grandchild was born. And he began painting again, returning to a hobby he had in high school, but hadn’t pursued in decades.
After hearing that Apodaca pleaded guilty Thursday afternoon, Escobedo said he’s still trying to process the whole thing. He said he’s glad Arquette and her mother can now rest in peace.
“I want reparation, I want to know who involved me, I want part of the book earnings,” he said. “Just a lot going through my head, I want to know it’s for real.”