by Lois Duncan
In kindergarten, Duncan composed rhymed verse, which she recited at show-and-tell. Instead of the praise she expected, she was punished and had to give up her snack. Her teacher thought Duncan was lying about writing the poems and had stolen them from a published writer. At age ten, Duncan began submitting stories to magazines. Her manuscripts were rejected, but she kept on writing and submitting, until she had accumulated so many rejection slips that her mother asked her if she wanted to paper a wall with them.
In 1946, Duncan’s family moved to Sarasota, Florida, where Duncan and her brother grew up in a rustic, isolated beach house. Today Siesta Key Beach is lined with hotels, but during Duncan’s childhood you could walk for miles and never see a soul. It was a perfect place for Duncan to scribble in notebooks and start pecking out stories on a manual typewriter.
Duncan is pictured here in 1950. She dreamed about becoming a professional writer, and at age thirteen, she made her first sale to a national magazine. Because her name, Lois Steinmetz, was the same as her mother’s, she decided to use her middle name, Duncan, as a pen name. She continued writing for magazines throughout her teens and eventually earned enough money to buy herself a Jeep.
Duncan’s photographer parents often traveled on assignments for magazines. Whenever possible Duncan and her brother went with them, and those expeditions served both as business trips and family vacations.
Everybody in Duncan’s family was expected to act as a photo model. This picture, which Duncan’s father took of her on a Florida beach, ended up as the cover of Collier’s magazine in 1949.
Duncan shown with her two oldest children, Robin and Kerry. A son, Brett, soon followed. Duncan attended Duke University for one year and then dropped out to get married. She wrote her first young adult novel, Debutante Hill, when she was twenty and entered it in a contest. It won the Seventeenth Summer Literary Award and was published as a result. When Duncan’s husband entered law school, she continued to write books, which helped pay for his tuition and support their growing family.
In 1962, Duncan divorced, then moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, with her children. She continued to write books, some of which were starting to win awards, and taught a class in magazine writing at the University of New Mexico. In 1965, she married Don Arquette, an electrical engineer who worked in missile design. Arquette adopted her three children and raised them as his own.
In 1967, another son, Don Arquette Jr. (Donnie), joined the family. This portrait was taken one year later, in 1968.
In 1970, another daughter, Kaitlyn Arquette (Kait), was born, and Duncan’s family was complete.
The 1970s were happy years, filled with camping trips, ski trips, and the everyday activities of a busy family. Duncan continued to write while also maintaining the family’s home. This 1973 photo is the final picture of all family members together before the oldest children started to fly the nest. Back row: Kerry and Brett; front row seated: Don with Donnie, and Duncan with Kait.
Duncan became a student at the University of New Mexico, taking classes while also teaching there. In 1976, she graduated cum laude with a BA in English.
Duncan’s youngest child, Kait, shown here at age eighteen, graduated from high school with honors in 1989. Kait dreamed of becoming a doctor. She rented her own apartment in Albuquerque, and her boyfriend, Dung Nguyen, moved in with her. Once she was living with Dung, Duncan believes, she discovered that he and his friends were part of a Vietnamese gang and were involved in interstate criminal activities.
On July 15, 1989, Kait announced to her parents that she was breaking up with Dung and had ordered him to move out. That night, while driving to her parents’ house after dinner with a girlfriend, Kait was chased down in her car and shot twice.
When police closed the unsolved case as a “random drive-by shooting,” Duncan wrote a nonfiction book, Who Killed My Daughter?, to motivate tipsters and to prevent the case from disappearing. Duncan believes that Kait was murdered because she was preparing to become a whistle-blower. Once the book was published, Duncan’s family began to receive death threats. They all fled Albuquerque in fear for their own lives.
Although Kait’s murder became a cold case, Duncan and Arquette continued their personal investigation with the help of outside detectives. They post their findings online at www.kaitarquette.arquettes.com.
After the publication of Who Killed My Daughter?, many other families of murder victims contacted Duncan, sharing their own experiences with incompetent and fruitless investigations. Duncan and Arquette created a website, www.realcrimes.com, to bring these cases to the media’s attention. Duncan helps the families tell their stories and Arquette compiles their documentation.
Duncan also volunteers as a resource counselor for a women’s crisis center to help women in desperate circumstances find the help they need.
Duncan has now written more than fifty books and has received many awards. She is most proud of her Margaret A. Edwards Award, which is presented by the American Library Association to honor an author for a distinguished body of work for young adults.
The most recent movie based on one of Duncan’s novels is Hotel for Dogs (2009). Other film adaptations are forthcoming.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1969 by Lois Duncan
cover design by Mimi Bark
978-1-4532-6340-2
This edition published in 2012 by Open Road Integrated Media
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