Solved cold cases in New Mexico
3 documented cases.
Kaitlyn Arquette
Kaitlyn Arquette, 18, was driving home from a friend's house in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on the night of July 16, 1989, when she was shot in the head on Lomas near Arno. Her car hit a pole, and she died the next day. Police believed the shooting was random. Her mother, the young-adult novelist Lois Duncan, investigated on her own, wrote the 1992 book Who Killed My Daughter?, and died in 2016 without an answer. In July 2021 a University of New Mexico security guard found a man outside UNM Children's Hospital who said he wanted to confess to three murders. University police arrested Paul Apodaca on a probation violation on July 20, 2021. He first admitted killing a UNM student, Althea Oakeley, in 1988, then, in interviews with Albuquerque detectives, the 1988 killing of 13-year-old Stella Gonzales and the 1989 killing of Kaitlyn Arquette. Police said he had no known connection to the victims but knew key details of each killing. A grand jury had indicted him in Arquette's death by February 2022. In November 2023 a judge refused to suppress his confessions. In January 2024 he pleaded guilty to three counts of second-degree murder and was sentenced to 45 years in prison.
Katie Sepich
Katie Sepich, a 22-year-old New Mexico State University graduate student, was raped, strangled, set on fire and abandoned near the old city dump east of Las Cruces, New Mexico, in late August 2003; her body was found by target shooters on the morning of August 31. The killer left his DNA beneath her fingernails, but it matched no one in any database, and the case went cold. Gabriel Adrian Avila committed an aggravated burglary about three months later and was sent to prison, where his DNA was collected; in December 2006 that profile matched the crime-scene evidence. Avila confessed, pleaded guilty to first-degree murder, kidnapping, rape and tampering with evidence, and was sentenced on May 3, 2007 to 69 years in prison. Because Avila's DNA had been taken only on conviction rather than at arrest, costing years of delay, Katie's parents championed Katie's Law, which spread to dozens of states and became the federal Katie Sepich Enhanced DNA Collection Act of 2010.
William Blodgett
William "Bill" Blodgett, 69, a landlord in Roswell, New Mexico, disappeared in late December 2008. His son reported him missing on January 3, 2009, after the family could not reach him for more than ten days. Police learned that Blodgett had had a dispute with his tenant, Tony Peralta, and had tried to evict him. Peralta was considered a suspect early on and was interviewed, but "no new leads" came of it. Searches of the home and neighborhood, including with a cadaver dog, found nothing; Blodgett's vehicle was still at the house and there had been no withdrawals from his bank account. The case was closed pending further leads and went cold. On May 1, 2023, Peralta, then 37, borrowed a phone at a convenience store, called 911 and said he had killed someone. He took officers to the house, where they removed plywood floorboards and found bones, a boot and a set of dentures. The dentures were compared with dental records obtained in 2009. Peralta was charged with first-degree murder and pleaded not guilty. In August 2023 he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and received a 15-year prison sentence.