American writer, magazine photographer and instructor in the department of journalism at the University of New Mexico 1971-’82. The winner of many awards, she is a lecturer at writer’s conferences.
The daughter of parents who were both photographers, Duncan attended Duke University and the University of New Mexico, from where she graduated cum laude in 1977. Prolific, she wrote under her own name and under the pen name of Lois Kerry, children, youth and juvenile novels, mystery, suspense and the supernatural, and poetry, with over 500 articles and stories to periodicals. Her work included “I Know What You Did Last Summer,” 1973, later made into a film.
Duncan began writing as a teenager and progressed to full-length manuscripts as a young housewife with lonely hours to fill while her husband attended law school. When her first marriage ended in divorce, she wrote to support her family of three kids. On 7/15/1965 she married electrical engineer Don Arquette; two kids; one deceased. She began to move into the suspense and supernatural genre at that time.
Duncan’s imaginary life crossed over into her real life in a tragic manner in 1989. “Don’t Look Behind You,” in which the heroine was chased by a hit man in a Camaro, was published in June 1989. A month later, on 7/16/1989, Duncan’s daughter, Kaitlyn Arquette (born 8/18/1970), was shot twice in the head about 10:50 PM while sitting alone in her car – by a hit man driving a Camaro, Albuquerque, NM. The girl never regained consciousness and died the next morning. Duncan began her own investigation and found that it was a hit order by a Vietnamese drug-running and car-insurance gang, a gang to which Kaitlyn’s boyfriend belonged.
In 1992 Duncan published a bestseller, “Who Killed My Daughter?” While researching the case she had so much help from psychics that she later wrote “Psychic Connections: A Journey into the Mysterious World of PSI.”
Kaitlyn was an organ donor; her heart saved the life of a recipient, however he began to have nightmares about being chased and shot and he died in January 1995.
Link to Wikipedia biography