Vietnamese criminal group
Before midnight on July 16, 1989, about one hour after the shooting,
Dung Nguyen phoned his and Kait’s mutual friend, Jane, hysterically
babbling, “Kait’s dead! They shot Kait!” Jane is sure of the time, as
she and her husband had just finished watching the news and were getting
ready for bed.
Dung Nguyen
However, at 3 a.m., when police arrived at the apartment Kait shared with Dung, he apparently was sleeping and knew nothing about the shooting. He told police that he had stayed away from the apartment all day because he and Kait had had a fight. He said when he came home he found that she had left him an affectionate note that said she was sorry. The unsigned note read, "Hon, where are you? I know you still mad, I'm so sorry okay! I miss you today. I went to Nam house to retune these books. I'll see ya! Love." Police accepted this note as evidence that Kait still loved Dung and was not breaking up with him.
A handwriting expert from the Vidocq Society has
since confirmed Kait’s family’s assertion that the note was not in
Kait's handwriting.
Police did a primer residue test to see if Dung had fired a gun. It
was negative. According to police reports, when investigators left the
apartment, Dung was leaving immediately to go to the hospital to be with
Kait. Instead, he and two carloads of his friends drove straight down
Lomas to the crime scene, by-passing the hospital en route.
Kait’s family wonders how they knew where the shooting occurred, why
Dung wanted to go there instead of to Kait, and how all his friends came
to be dressed and ready to go at 4 a.m.?
Dung eventually did join Kait’s family at the hospital. His two
carloads of friends remained in the hospital parking lot the rest of the
night.
The following evening, when Kait was pronounced dead, Dung called
his alibi friends, An Quoc Le and Khanh Pham, who were partying in
Kait’s apartment, to tell them Kait was dead. Phone records indicate
that An and Khah immediately called Bao Tran, the insurance fraud capper
in California, to report Kait’s death.
After Kait’s funeral, Dung was stabbed in the abdomen, (alleged
suicide attempt), in Khanh Pham’s dorm room on Kirtland Air Force Base.
(See “Possible Efforts to Intimidate Witnesses.”) An Quoc Le was there
also. According to the OSI spokesperson, Khanh Pham refused to talk to
police on the advice of his Air Force attorney. He never was
interviewed. Although this incident took place on federal property, the
knife and Dung’s bloody clothing somehow ended up in the APD evidence
room.
Dung survived, and when Kait’s mother visited him in the hospital,
told her that he knew who killed Kait and was deciding whether he had
the courage to tell. Apparently the answer was “no.”
Dung and his friends were obviously at the scene, or they would not
have known where the shooting took place, and Dung would not have been
calling people to tell them, “They shot Kait!” three hours before police
informed him of that fact. Kait’s family speculates that -- if the
Vietnamese were not the killers -- they knew or suspected that Kait was
in danger and followed her that evening.
It’s even possible they were trying to find her to warn her.
