Man charged in 1988 slaying of UNM student

Aug. 19—ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — One night almost a month ago, University of New Mexico police picked up a man who they said was "making statements regarding murders from a long time ago."

It wasn't long, police say, before 53-year-old Paul Apodaca began confessing.

One of the crimes police say he confessed to? The brutal stabbing of a University of New Mexico student who was walking home from a party in 1988.

Althea Oakeley, a 21-year-old from Arroyo Hondo, collapsed on a nearby doorstep. She died at the hospital hours later.

After 33 years her case had long since gone cold.

But on Monday, Albuquerque Police Chief Harold Medina — who had met Oakeley as a teenager and was the first recipient of a scholarship set up in her name in 1990 — notified her parents that detectives had a suspect in custody.

Apodaca, who was being held in the Metropolitan Detention Center on a probation violation, was charged with murder Thursday. It would have been Oakeley's 55th birthday.

The Law Offices of the Public Defender is representing Apodaca on his probation violation case.

"As the case proceeds tomorrow, we will check to determine if there are any conflicts of interest and either represent Mr. Apodaca directly or appoint a contractor to represent him," said LOPD spokeswoman Maggie Shepard.

According to a criminal complaint filed in Metropolitan Court, Apodaca told detectives he was working at the Technical Vocational Institute — now Central New Mexico Community College — as a security guard when he saw Oakeley walking home on the night of June 22, 1988.

He said he wanted to go talk to her but then she was gone so he decided to pursue her in his vehicle. Then, he said, he decided to hold her at knifepoint and rape her.

When she passed by, Apodaca said, she smiled at him and said "hi." So, Apodaca said, he stabbed her in the shoulder blade and left side.

"When I thought about it, what made me do it, what made me attack her, was all the hatred I had for women," Apodaca told investigators. "Because growing up I seen men treating women bad and they, they go for the bad guys, and I try to be nice and be good and they just didn't want that."

Detectives looked through the case file and they say Apodaca provided details that were not in the media coverage at the time. They talked with neighbors, who still lived in the area, as well as his former boss, who corroborated when he would have been at work.

According to the complaint, he said he left his watch — one with a sun and a moon on it that his aunt had given him — at the scene, and a watch that matched that description was found near the blood trail.

Apodaca said he was living in the UNM area with his brother, Mark, at the time.

Several years after Oakeley's death, in 1995, the brothers made headlines after Mark Apodaca was convicted of murder and Paul Apodaca was convicted of raping his 14-year-old family member. Paul Apodaca told the judge he'd raped the girl in order to be sent to prison with his younger brother. He was sentenced to 20 years but was sent to a different facility.

Paul Apodaca was also at the scene of the 1989 fatal shooting of Kaitlyn Arquette, an 18-year-old UNM student who was killed on Lomas near Downtown. Arquette's mother, Lois Duncan, wrote a book titled "Who Killed My Daughter?", bringing the case to national attention, and she tirelessly searched for answers before her death a couple of years ago. Duncan was also the author of "I Know What You Did Last Summer."

Medina told the Journal on Wednesday that the man who confessed to killing Oakeley had also confessed to other homicides and sexual assaults and was a "typical poster child" for a lifetime of interactions with the criminal justice system.

More recently Apodaca appears to have been homeless.

According to court records, he pleaded guilty to aggravated assault with a deadly weapon in March and was sentenced to supervised probation for three years.

According to a probation violation report, he told his probation officer on July 16 that he was going to the West Side homeless shelter because he didn't have anywhere else to go. He was told he had to stay there until he was accepted into an inpatient program or a halfway house.

Then, on July 19, the officer received an alert that Apodaca failed to show up at the shelter. His "electronic monitoring" showed he was staying behind a Walgreens on Rio Grande and Central. He was arrested by UNMPD on the probation violation on July 20.

When a detective interviewed Apodaca in jail, she asked if anything in particular prompted him to confess now.

"He said no, it was a shame that it took him so long to get to this point," the detective wrote in the complaint. "Paul also said he realized what he had done was evil and dark. He said the word of God has helped him overcome this struggle."