Serial Killer and Rapist Paul Apodaca - The Land of Entrapment

On July 20, 2021, Paul Apodaca waltzed into an Albuquerque police station and said that he wanted to talk about some murders and rapes he had committed. Apodaca went on to tell police he was responsible for three Albuquerque cold cases from the late 80s. The police then charged him with Althea Oakley’s murder and arrested him. While he was in jail, they investigated and processed charges for two other murders.

Why did he kill three girls in the 80s? Well, according to Apodaca, he was “a nice guy.” He hated how women always went for the bad boys and never gave him a chance. So he decided to really show them by murdering innocent girls. Yeah, what a nice guy!

Only I have to wonder if he really committed these crimes, or at least all of them. I think he killed Althea Oakley and maybe also Kaitlynn Arquette, but I’m not sure about Stella Gonzales. I’ll get to that in a minute.

After getting out of jail for a battery against a household member a year before, Apodaca was on probation. He was in trouble for violating that probation and he was living on the streets when he decided to turn himself in for the murders. He claimed that he had turned to the word of God, which made him want to repent for his sins. He also claimed that he wanted to help the families of his victims heal. Again, what a nice guy!

Here are the victims that Apodaca said he killed because he felt entitled to their bodies and their time. These girls were all young and they had their lives ahead of them. They were robbed of every opportunity and every chance at making their dreams come true, all because of a man’s sick sense of entitlement.

Althea Oakley

Althea Oakley was walking home from a frat party near CNM after fighting with her boyfriend on June 22, 1988. Her boyfriend had refused to take her to a movie, which miffed her. Apodaca was working as a security guard of the Technical Vocational Institute, which is now CNM. He spotted her walking alone and decided to rape her at knifepoint. As he approached her, Oakley smiled at him and said hi. For some reason, that smile trigged something in Apodaca and he decided to mercilessly stab her four times. He claimed that Oakley had not even had time to defend herself. Then Apodaca returned to his security guard shift.

Oakley had been stabbed in front of a house at 1320 Buena Vista Dr. SE – within view of the house she shared with her brother. She screamed for help and the house’s resident ran out and caught a glimpse of Paul Apodaca. She promptly called 911. “There was a lot of blood,” the neighbor later recalled. “…She didn’t want to die.”

But Oakley died within hours at UNM Hospital. Apodaca claimed that he hadn’t meant to kill Althea Oakley and he only learned she had died on the news later. The news showed a sketch of him and he said he couldn’t tell if it looked like him or not. He thought that killing was the ultimate sin, so after Oakley’s death, he decided “nothing mattered anymore.” He also said that he felt terrible for hurting someone who smiled at him.

After that, he said he started cruising with a rifle, hunting for victims. Just three months later, he would shoot and kill Stella Gonzales.

Oakley’s case sat cold for over 30 years until Apodaca was charged with her death. The police were going to file the first degree murder charge against Apodaca on August 18, 2021, but they decided to hold off for a day to file it on the 19th, Oakley’s birthday. They wanted this to be a gift to her in Heaven. When Apodaca was finally charged with her murder in 2021, the Albuquerque police chief, Harold Medina, personally drove to Taos to inform her parents about it. He did this because he had known Althea Oakley personally – he had been the teenage son of a Taos seamstress who fit Althea’s dress for a Taos Fiesta Queen pageant and he remembered how sweet Althea Oakley had always been to him.

Althea Oakley was only 21. From Taos, she was an ambitious UNM student who lived with her brother near the place where she was murdered. People remember her as kind. She had even been in the running for Taos Fiesta Queen. After she died, her parents set up a scholarship in her name, and Harold Medina was the first recipient of it.

Stella Gonzales

Stella Gonzales was a beautiful thirteen-year-old girl living in Albuquerque. Paul Apodaca shot her on September 9, 1988. She was walking near Central Ave and Tingley Drive at 1:15 am with her friend. A gray Chevrolet Chevelle pulled up beside the girls; there were three men inside. One of the men shot at the girls. Two of the bullets hit Stella in the back of her head, killing her.

While confessing to the killings of Kaitlyn Arquette and Althea Oakley, Paul Apodaca also said that he shot another girl in 1988. He did not recall her name. He provided some details and detectives worked to see if they matched the crime scene of Stella’s murder. They ultimately decided they had enough to move forward with charging Apodaca and he was indicted by a grand jury.

Interestingly, the original reports of Stella Gonzales’s death talk about three men in a gray Chevelle. Apodaca claims he hunted women alone and also he drove an orange Volkswagen in the late 80s. Another thing that seems weird to me is that Paul Apodaca cried about his victims and vividly remembers every moment of what he did to Althea Oakley and Kaitlyn Arquette. He also liked to watch the news to learn about what happened to his victims. Yet for some reason he didn’t remember Stella Gonzales’s name? Did he even commit this murder? Or did he give a false confession, and police took it in their eagerness to close out some cold cases?

Attempted Murders

After supposedly murdering Gonzales, Apodaca says that he went on to commit two attempted murders. The first was when he shot a transgender woman. He was arrested for that crime in 1988 and he told police that the trans woman had tricked him so he shot at her. He went to jail for the crime but got off within a few months. The transgender woman survived. There is not much information available about her. I cannot believe that police saw her as so beneath justice that someone could shoot her and do hardly any time.

Apodaca also shot a woman in the face on the West side in 1988. The woman survived but I imagine her quality of life was extremely impaired. Apodaca later saw she had survived on the news.

I believe this woman may have been Marcia Been. She was 31 in 1988, when she was driving and two men started following her. She moved over to let the car pass when someone fired a shot at her. She suffered a face wound but was OK overall. Her story was reported in the same article as Stella Gonzales’s shooting, which happened in the same week.

Police questioned the woman again in 2021. Unfortunately, the statute of limitations had run out on the attempted homicide, so Apodaca did not face justice for that.

I find it weird that Been reported two men had been following her. Apodaca claimed he acted alone, so did he have an accomplice? Or is he taking credit for crimes he did not even commit? This sounds like the Gonzalez case, where the details just don’t match Apodaca’s recollections later on.

Kaitlyn Arquette

Kaitlyn Arquette was only 18 and she had just graduated from Highland High School and looked forward to starting college soon. She was returning home from dinner with a friend on July 16, 1989, when she stopped at a red light on Lomas, near Broadway. Someone drove up beside her and shot at her two times. The bullets hit her in the head. She careened off the road and into a light pole, later dying in the hospital.

Arquette’s mom, Lois Duncan, was actually a mystery novel writer. She wrote I Know What You Did Last Summer, which inspired the movie of the same title. When her daughter died, she gave up the mystery genre and threw herself into the case with her whole heart. She wrote two books about the case and her struggles with law enforcement to get her daughter’s case solved: Who Killed My Daughter? and One to the Wolves. The case sat cold for thirty-two years and the Arquette family was never the same. Kaitlyn left behind four siblings. Her sister Kerry went on to become a criminologist in Denver because of her sister’s murder.

Duncan suspected Kaitlyn’s boyfriend, Doug Nguyen, had something to do with the murder. Nguyen was 26 and Kaitlyn had just moved into an apartment with him. After Kaitlyn’s death, Duncan learned that Nguyen was running a car insurance scam. Duncan started to believe that Arquette was murdered by the Asian Mafia over a car insurance scam ring. She also turned to psychics to try to solve her daughter’s murder. You can read one of the psychics’ vision here.

Duncan and the psychic were not the only ones to suspect the Asian Mob had something to do with Arquette’s death. When Nathan Romero was jumped and stabbed by Asian gangsters in Albuquerque, his case took a long time to solve. At one point, a police captain yelled at Nathan Romero’s mother that they knew who killed her son, just as they knew who killed Kait Arquette. When Nathna’s mom asked why he connected the two cases, he told her to forget he had said anything. It appears the police also saw merit in the Asian crime ring theory.

Apparently, the real culprit had been under the police’s noses the entire time. The night Arquette was killed, Apodaca was passing by the area. Police took down his contact information and license plate. They noticed that he had an extensive history of violence against women, yet they let him go after a few perfunctory questions. A cop did come to his house to talk to him a few days later, but they still didn’t nab him until his confession over 30 years later. According to him, Arquette was just another one of his hunting victims.

Early in the case, Duncan also enlisted the help of a private investigator. This investigator zeroed in on Apodaca as a suspect right away and focused on him for years. She even visited him and questioned him while he was in prison for the 1995 rape of his stepsister. Other people also pinpointed Apodaca as a likely suspect and demanded to know why he wasn’t questioned in the murder.

Eerily, Apodaca checked out Lois Duncan’s book Who Killed My Daughter? from the prison library. He claimed that he was obsessed with his victims and cried every night over the murders he had committed in prison.

The tragic thing is that Lois Duncan died in 2016. She never got to see justice for her daughter. Kerry Arquette is still dedicated to the case and glad to see justice for her sister. She wants the Albuquerque Police Department held accountable for their failure to close this case sooner.

Rapes

In 1995, Apodaca kidnapped and raped his fourteen-year-old stepsister so that he could get sent to prison at the same time as his little brother. According to Apodaca, he wanted to protect his little brother on the inside. He served only 11 years for that crime and was then released in 2012 to hurt more women after that.

Apodaca also confessed to three rapes from the late 80s and early 90s. He has only been definitively tied to one by DNA. The names of the victims have been withheld for their privacy.

Since the 1995 rape of his stepsister, Apodaca has been a registered sex offender and his DNA had been on file with the state. But a rape kit from 1990 had sat untested in the state crime lab until 2021, so it was never matched to Apodaca until then. The results finally came back the very same week in July 2021 that he confessed to the three murders.

The massive backlog of rape kits in New Mexico means that he may have committed other sex crimes that still have not been tied to him.

I hope that Apodaca’s arrest gave his rape victim at least a little spark of vindication. I also hope that it helped her in healing from the trauma she had to go through. Hopefully soon the other two victims will also have closure.

Domestic Violence

In April 2020, Apodaca’s aunt made a frantic call to the police, saying that Paul Apodaca was punching her in the face. Police swarmed the house, where Apodaca refused to stand down. He held some knives and demanded that the police kill him when they asked him to put the knives down. Police entered the house through a window in the back and rescued the aunt and a 96-year-old female relative by escorting them down a ladder.

Eventually, Apodaca finally put down the knives and walked out the back door. Though he was now unarmed, he was uncooperative as he was arrested. He did a year-long stint in jail for that domestic violence incident. He had committed so many crimes against women, including women in his own family, that it is disgusting he lived among us for so long.

After getting out of jail, Apodaca claimed that he found the word of God. He was also homeless. That led him to confessing to the three women he had killed. But I almost wonder if he wasn’t the one responsible for these murders, or at least not Stella Gonzales’s. He has a history of trying to get into prison for ulterior motives. Did he confess to all these murders just to get a place to stay, since he was homeless at the time?

His poignant description of Althea Oakley’s murder and his remembrance of the details do seem quite real. Given the fact he is a confirmed rapist, I definitely believe he was capable of such a crime. He was also near the scene of Kaitlyn Arquette’s murder, suggesting he was guilty of that, too.

But what if he didn’t commit Arquette’s murder and he just witnessed it and took credit for it later on because he loved the idea of a young girl suffering? He has admitted to reading Lois Duncan’s book on the murder, so he would undoubtedly have a great deal of knowledge about the crime.

I really doubt he killed Stella Gonzales. Stella’s friend remembered three men shooting at them, suggesting Stella may have been the victim of gang-related crime, intended to kill her to hurt or threaten someone close to her. That couldn’t have been Paul Apodaca – unless he had two accomplices that he is protecting. The younger brother he “protected” in prison comes to mind as a possible accomplice.

Nevertheless, Apodaca was a clearly a rapist who had no respect for women and no regard for women’s lives and bodily autonomy. He has been definitively linked to two rapes – his stepsister’s and another victim’s. I wonder how many other women he has hurt. It is disgusting that it took this long to put him away.

Final Jail Sentence

I’m not going to waste any more page space on Paul Apodaca. He’s in jail, where he belongs. As he awaits trial for the three cold cases, he has been ordered to stay behind bars. He went free for too long. Now he’s in his 50s and will probably die in prison. If he hadn’t confessed, it is doubtful that APD would have ever solved these crimes. And if he falsely confessed to Stella Gonzales’s murder, then I wonder if APD is farther than ever in getting that poor little girl justice.

What I do want to talk about, though, is how the NM justice system routinely leaves women and children in danger with their lax sentencing laws. Apodaca was clearly a dangerous individual with a taste for women’s blood, yet he was let out of prison after 11 years despite ruining his stepsister’s life. Criminals like him are often released after short sentences, without any valid attempts to rehabilitate them. I’m not even sure offenders like this can be rehabilitated, but that’s a debate for another day.

So many of the crimes I’ve written about center around men who already had been suspected or convicted of hurting women before. They are released after short sentences and allowed to roam free after and then more women get hurt. Well, duh. Case in point would be Lorenzo Montoya, who was seen by detectives choking and raping a prostitute with only $2 in his pocket, indicating he never intended to pay the woman and possibly planned on killing her. Yet he was not even charged by the state after the victim refused to press charges, and as a result, he was free to kill Sherricka Hill in his home. He is also suspected of having committed the West Mesa murders. How many women would still be here if the justice system and the police had properly gone after him, regardless of whether or not the sex worker wanted to press charges?

I think these predators indicate a need for a complete justice system overhaul. Stricter sentencing and even death row seem like good options for men who routinely hunt and harm women and children. Yet New Mexico often just gives these men slaps on the wrist. It’s as if the men matter more than women here.

https://www.krqe.com/news/crime/witness-to-althea-oakeley-murder-speaks-out-following-confession-of-suspect/

https://www.oxygen.com/crime-news/paul-apodaca-charged-in-three-cold-case-murders

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/murder-lois-duncan-kaitlyn-arquette-1217608/