In 2012, Paul Apodaca, who had been released from prison for the rape conviction, returned with a 12-year sentence after splitting open his girlfriend’s forehead and stealing her car. In March, I wrote him asking if he would discuss the case. He did not respond.

I knocked on the front door of a one-story brick house in Martineztown where I heard a relative of Escobedo’s might live. A man with a wild Fu Manchu mustache told me that he was Escobedo’s older brother. Juve, he said, lived in a back room for a while, but he rarely heard from him, and he didn’t even know how to reach him. I told him about the story I was working on and gave him my phone number in the unlikely event that he did.

A half hour later, my cell phone rang. “This is Juve Escobedo,” the voice said. By 4:30, Escobedo and his teenage daughter, McKayla, were sitting in the lobby of my airport hotel. Escobedo scarcely resembled the just-old-enough-to-drink kid of the television news clips. He was tiny, with a paunch and a receding hairline, faded jeans, and a gray T-shirt. He had never discussed the case with a reporter before, and as we talked, he spoke slowly and deliberately, never taking his eyes off mine; occasionally, he leaned forward to emphasize a point. A couple of times, he teared up. McKayla, whose eyes were attached to the smartphone in her hands, periodically glanced at her father and grinned.

Escobedo was raised in a dirt-road village in central Mexico; he arrived in Albuquerque with his mother on Jan. 1, 1979, when he was in third grade. Before the winter of 1990, life was pretty good: He got in some trouble — a DWI — but nothing on the scale of what was coming. “I was a happy kid,” he said. He’d known Miguel Garcia and the two other guys for years. One was a neighbor whose sister he had a crush on; another would help wash the Camaro in lieu of paying gas money for rides.

In Escobedo’s telling, he was at his sister’s apartment the first time he heard of Kait’s murder. They were watching the news one night when the story flashed across the television. It caught his attention because of the location — one of his brothers lived nearby. “I never knew that down the road I was going to be blamed for it,” he said.

When Escobedo was arrested at his girlfriend’s apartment six months later, he said he told the police the same thing over and over: "You arrested the wrong guy." After he was released, he ran into the two friends that talked to the police, and both told the same story: They were railroaded. Escobedo believed them, but their friendships were over. He saw Garcia too, but they never talked about the murder. “He’s never told me if he did it or if he didn’t do it,” Escobedo said. When the charges were reinstated, Escobedo said he didn’t flee the state or the country; he didn’t even leave Albuquerque. “I’d rather take my life into my own hands and control it,” he said.

Escobedo went on to work in construction and have a family, and when his son and daughter came of age, he would tell them about how he had once been accused of murder, but how it wasn’t true. He moved away from Martineztown, but would periodically hear about the three men he was arrested with: One died of a drug overdose. Another was homeless. Garcia hadn’t done well either. He wouldn’t speak to me for this story, but Escobedo said he tried to commit suicide after the murder charges were dropped, and he had been in and out of prison in the years since.

Not a week goes by, Escobedo said, that he doesn’t think about what he called the “gorilla on his back” — the murder accusation that never went away — or about Lois, whose first book about Kait he read, and who he once saw on a talk show discussing the case. He didn’t like that she seemed to rely so heavily on psychics, but he said he understood her desperation. Since Escobedo’s own 20-year-old son, Andrew, died in a construction accident two years ago, he’s found himself thinking a lot about the loss a parent feels when a child is killed. “I kind of relate to Ms. Lois in that sense,” he said. “We didn’t get a chance to say good-bye to our son either.” Still, he understood the stark difference between them. “I know who took my son’s life,” he said. “I know how it happened. Where it happened. When it happened. Unfortunately, she doesn’t know. She’s going to live the rest of her life like that. It’s not fair.”

Back in Sarasota, Lois wasn’t sure what to make of Escobedo. He and the others had surely been arrested to close the case as quickly as possible, she conceded, but she still believed that they may have been involved, if only on the periphery. Yet she and Escobedo shared a similarly bleak view about the future of Kait’s case: Whatever happened to her could very well remain a mystery. “The Albuquerque Police Department does not want this case solved,” Lois said. “That’s what we’ve come to believe, although that’s the last thing we would’ve ever thought."