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Authors: Michael Benson

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She thought he was strange. Not his looks. She kind of liked the way he looked. He had different personalities. He was controlling. Not violent, but domineering. She stayed at his house, for maybe a month. His son was there at the time. She got along with him okay. The kid just wanted to watch TV or play video games. Amy Sue tried to get him to ride his bicycle and go outside and “do the normal things that kids do.”
Amy Sue became increasingly reluctant to talk. Maybe because talking to police was against her principles, maybe because she simply lacked the articulation to answer their questions adequately. They would ask what King was like and she’d say, “I don’t know what you want me to say.” The police emphasized that she was not in any trouble, wasn’t going to get in any trouble. They wanted to know about Mike King.
“We’re going to need to know about some personal things, Amy—like Michael King’s sexual preferences.”
“That’s filthy stuff,” she said.
“I think you should know that Michael King is under arrest in Florida. The charge is murder. We think he murdered someone, okay?”
This was news to Amy Sue. “He don’t seem like that kind of a person,” she said with a small nervous giggle.
They gave her the horrible details of King’s crimes. They told her the victim looked
a lot
like her.
“That’s why we’re here. That’s why we need you to cooperate with us totally on everything. We don’t drive eight hundred miles just to say ‘hey’ and buy you a bottle of (Mountain) Dew.”
“I really need a cigarette. You guys are stressing me out.”
“I don’t think you can smoke in here. There was a deputy out there. He had to step outside to smoke.” She said she didn’t have a cigarette; so one of the policemen went out to search for one, while the other continued the questioning.
She said Mike didn’t let her have any money and she didn’t have any way of getting around when she was living on Sardinia Avenue with Mike. The best she could do was walk around the school across the street and maybe sit on a bench. She didn’t fight back when he tried to control her.
“I just stayed to myself,” she told the cops.
After she went back to Tennessee for the last time, she tried to call King. He’d changed his cell phone number, though. She called him at his work, Babe’s Plumbing, Inc., and she told him where she was. “I told him I had his baby here,” she explained. One time she called and they said he was in Michigan because of a family emergency. They didn’t know if he was coming back or not. She didn’t leave her real name. She said to tell him “Kelly” called. (The police knew Amy Sue was telling the truth. The message from Kelly had been found in King’s personnel file at Babe’s Plumbing.)
She told the cops she was “pretty sure” her most recent baby was King’s. So, yes, they did have a sexual relationship. They asked if he did anything odd sexually or asked her to do anything that made her feel uncomfortable. She said no, but in a barely audible voice.
“Any anal sex?”
“No, just vaginal. He might’ve tried anal, but nothin’ ever come of it.”
“How often did he want sex?”
“He liked it every day. But I didn’t.”
“Any bondage situations?”
“No.”
“Did he have a favorite position?”
“No.”
“Always in a bed?”
“Yeah. Or a couch.”
At that point, the cigarette arrived. “You don’t know what I had to go through to get this!” a cop said. She laughed. After the cigarette break outdoors, the questioning resumed.
She said she split from Florida twice. Three times, really, but once she didn’t make it. She didn’t stay in Florida long the first time. The fun only lasted a few days to a week. She said she had to go, and he bought her a Greyhound bus ticket and dropped her off at the station in Port Charlotte. It was December 24, because she told him she had to be home for Christmas. But she was only on the bus for a few minutes when he called her cell phone and talked her into getting off the bus in Ocala, where he picked her up. They made a stop at a nearby motel and eventually made it back to Sardinia Avenue. Soon thereafter, his meanness returned and she said she had to leave again. This time, he said he would drive her. She started to get scared. She didn’t know anybody in Florida and she was completely under his control. He didn’t hit her, but he’d get right in her face and yell. “He looked like he might hit me sometimes, but he didn’t.” So she told King she was underage and he had better take her home or else her family would call the police. King talked to Amy Sue’s grandmother and aunt, and they backed up her story. She was underage and he’d better bring her home. And he did. He still wasn’t sure, though. Three or four times, Amy Sue dozed off in the car during the ride. When she woke up, he’d turned the car around and was heading back toward Florida. He wouldn’t stop the car to let her pee. Eventually he got her back to her grandma.
For the ride back to Tennessee, she didn’t remember much because King bought her about thirty “totem poles,” ten bucks apiece, and she was pretty zonked. The cops asked her what a totem pole was. She giggled and explained that they were like ten Xanaxes rolled into one. Did she know where he got the drugs?
“From Asian dudes, or sump’n,” she said. “Not far from his house.”
He never did drugs with her. When she told him that she needed drugs, something she didn’t tell him right away, he knew exactly where to go to get them. She thought there might have been a connection through some guys with whom he worked.
The police wanted to know what she told King to get him to buy the drugs.
“I told him I can’t sleep at night.”
The cops tried to press her for more info regarding the drug dealers, but she cut them off.
“When it comes to drugs, I don’t ask for names. Just give me my drugs and I’m out of here. They might’ve been good-looking guys. I don’t know. They didn’t look Mexican or black or white. They looked Asian to me.”
At her request, Mike came back and got her a second time—at which time, she told him that she
wasn’t
underage.
“He should have known better, anyway. I had a five-year-old son at home,” she said with a laugh.
This time, not long after she arrived, she talked King into buying her a car so she and his son could go out and do things—and he brought one home for her that night. She thought he might have purchased it in Port Charlotte.
The next day, when he went to work, she got in her new car and split, spent a couple of days in Georgia, visiting her friend Brian, and then went back to Tennessee. While in Georgia, she got a call from a North Port cop regarding a stolen car. Brian didn’t need the law at his house, so she had to leave—and took the hot car with her.
She stayed with her dad. A cop showed up at the door and took the car. She talked to King only one more time after that, maybe a month later. He told her that breaking up was her fault. She had a drug problem and he didn’t think she would straighten out. He said he was moving to Ocala and was living with somebody, and they were very happy together.
She did text him once after that, to tell him she was pregnant and to request a sample of his DNA. He changed his cell phone number after that.
She was so confused about all of this. Mike King didn’t seem like the kind of guy who would kill someone. He had a job and a nice house. But back home, her friend Randall said there was something wrong.
Randall said, “What’s up with this guy? There are a lot of beautiful women in Florida. Why’s he got to come all the way up here to Tennessee and get you?”
The cops explained that Michael King had lost his job, and was in the process of losing the house to foreclosure. A year earlier, he was doing better; but since then, he’d been digging himself a hole that he couldn’t get out of.
She told the police she had never seen King with a gun, no weapon of any sort—and there was no gun in the house on Sardinia.
Amy Sue was concerned about what became of King’s son and was pleased to learn the boy Matthew was in Michigan living with an uncle.
She repeated that she
really did
think her third child was Mike’s, that Robert was taking care of the baby, but she didn’t think her husband could have kids.
She and Robert had unprotected sex for years and she never got pregnant, and he’d had unprotected sex with other women, and none of them got pregnant, either. The baby must be Mike’s.
The cops ended the interview by scolding Amy Sue, telling her how stupid it was to get in cars with strangers and drive away. It could have been her with a bullet in her head in that shallow grave instead of Denise Lee.
“We don’t know if this is the only woman he ever killed. As soon as he got out of the car, he wanted a lawyer. He never told us where she was, never helped us in any way, and he was ice-cold.”
One thing Amy Sue did notice was that he liked to stretch the truth, told a few whoppers, lied about things you didn’t even need to lie about. She never let on that she didn’t believe him, but in her mind she’d say,
Yeah, right.
“I knew I was a little bit too far from home to be questioning him,” she said.
CHAPTER 15
THE TRIAL
Jury selection commenced on Monday morning, August 17, 2009. As this was a death penalty case, members of the jury pool had to pass two levels of questioning. First they had to be “death qualified.” People who believed that the death penalty should
never
be used were dismissed, as were people who believed the death penalty should
always
be used. This portion of the questioning tended to be repetitive and tedious.
On the prosecution side, the work was divided up between Lon Arend and Suzanne O’Donnell. They asked, “Can you listen to the evidence and make a determination? Will you consider the aggravating and mitigating factors?”
Once “death qualified,” jurors were questioned a second time—voir dire, it was called—and prosecutors and defense attorneys asked questions regarding the general aspect of a murder trial, and about each potential juror’s exposure to media reports on the case. Karen Fraivillig handled this task for the state.
Judge Economou scheduled a week for jury selection because of the exceptional publicity the case had received. And the process required all of that time. An unusually large jury pool, four hundred people, was eventually whittled down to twelve jurors and four alternates.
The prosecution had their game plan in place. Arend would deliver the state’s opening statement, Fraivillig would examine eyewitnesses, and O’Donnell would handle the introduction of evidence.
The prosecution worked right up till trial time to maximize their presentation’s power. Four days before opening statements, NPPD criminalistics specialist Cortnie Watts flew in the police helicopter taking aerial photographs of the various crime scenes that would serve as visual aids for the jury.
Nate Lee talked briefly about the upcoming trial. Yes, he planned to be there every day, as did many of Denise’s friends and loved ones. He said, “In the coming weeks, I’m going to have my friends and family near me, and that’s what really matters. Justice will be served, and that’s what we’re focusing on.”
 
 
The trial began on Tuesday, August 25, 2009. Because of the case’s emotional nature, security was tight. Double metal detectors were employed, at the courthouse and at the courtroom door.
Press presence was to be strictly governed. At any given time, only eight handpicked members of the media were allowed in the courtroom. The rest of the pack was corralled into a “media room” on the courthouse’s main floor and allowed to watch on TV.
As he would throughout the trial, King wore a collared shirt in a “happy” color and dark pants, looking like he hadn’t slept since his arrest. Beneath his sunken eyes were dark circles and heavy bags, the haunted eyes of a man plagued and then defeated by his own demons. He would display no emotion. He wasn’t sad or angry or nervous or frightened. Tabula rasa. Could he even focus on his surroundings?
Michael King’s utter blankness caught the attention of Judge Dena Economou—and troubled him.
 
 
Among those sitting in the spectator section was Amanda Goff, Denise Lee’s younger sister, who was twenty and a student at the University of Central Florida. She would always sit behind her parents and her younger brother, Tyler.
Unlike her family members, however, Amanda took copious notes. A poli-sci major with a minor in legal studies, she’d already received an associate’s degree from Valencia Community College in Orlando on what would have been Denise’s twenty-second birthday.
Amanda had permission to take time off from school to attend the trial; but upon her return, she had to submit a long essay on the trial’s “every detail.”
 
 
Judge Economou told spectators that he wouldn’t have a lot of coming and going in his courtroom. “If you leave, you may only return during a break,” he said.
He gave the jury instructions: They were to have no preconceived notions, and there was no assigned seating in the jury box. Jurors could sit anywhere they wanted, as long as they were in the box. It was the jury’s job to determine what the facts were, but it was his job to apply the law to those facts. The charges against the defendant were solemn: murder in the first degree, kidnapping with the intent to commit murder, sexual battery by threat to use force. Outside court, jurors would not discuss the case. Not even among themselves. They should weigh the testimony on the last day the same as that on the first. If the defendant decided not to testify, that shouldn’t be held against him. Taking notes was optional. Pen and paper would be provided—but all notes would be destroyed following deliberation.
Lawyers briefly met in a sidebar to agree upon stipulations, things that didn’t need to be entered into evidence because both the prosecution and defense agreed they were true.
A quick glance around revealed the spectator section to be about one-third filled. Only those with a personal interest in the case were there in person. (Don’t think the press corps in the media room didn’t notice that!) The rest were content to watch the trial on TV, or read summaries of the action on the Internet and in the daily newspapers.
 
 
The prosecution began its case by reading from a transcript of the horrifying 911 call the victim had made on her own behalf. ASA Lon Arend addressed the jury, quoting Denise Lee’s words that she spoke during her 911 call: “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I just want to go. I just want to see my family again, please. Oh, please.”
The emotional response from the victim’s family was obvious. Denise’s sister and mother wept. Her father lowered his head, his elbows on his knees. When he raised his head, he gave Michael King a look that could kill.
Rick Goff would later say that sitting in the same room with the man who killed his daughter was the toughest thing he ever had to do in his whole life.
ASA Arend said the state intended to prove that moments after that 911 call ended, the defendant took the victim to a secluded spot, took her life with a single bullet to the head, and, using the shovel he’d just borrowed, buried her in a shallow grave.
It was Arend’s sad duty to relate to them the details of the crime, which, he assured the members of the jury, were almost unbelievably horrible. They would be hearing from crime scene technicians about those details. Denise Lee was abducted from her home, leaving her two young sons home alone, and then driven to the defendant’s home, where she was raped. She was found with duct tape still in her hair, bruised thighs, and vaginal and anal injuries.
Using DNA evidence, the state would prove that the defendant transported her to the grave site in his car and killed her there. There was an eyewitness—the man from whom the defendant borrowed the shovel—who saw him struggle with the victim in his car and push her head down. A neighbor saw the defendant’s Camaro drive back and forth in front of Denise’s house several times that morning. To pull it together like a bow around a complete package, they would hear from the victim’s husband, a man left alone with his two sons, who no longer had a mom. They would hear him identify boxer shorts found as his, a pair he knew his wife liked to wear.
 
 
Jerry Meisner delivered the opening statement on behalf of the defense. As he spoke, Denise Lee’s mother, Susan Goff, wept. Rick Goff reached over to give his wife’s hand a squeeze. Sitting behind them, Nate Lee also became teary.
Meisner said the prosecution was going, no doubt, to do a thorough and highly skilled job of presenting the evidence. His job, however, was to make just as obvious the evidence that was missing. Where was the murder weapon? Where were the bullets? Where was the blood on Mike’s clothing?
“The medical examiner will tell you that the victim was shot point-blank by that nine-millimeter gun,” Meisner said, “but will not be able to say who shot that gun. That question of identity will be left to you. The evidence will show that Michael King
did not
fire the shot that ended Denise Lee’s life.”
This was a simple case of mistaken identity, Meisner said. He told the jury that the defendant had gone pistol shooting with a business colleague that day. The defendant had never gone shooting at that gun range before; he did so on this day only at his colleague’s invitation. It was the colleague who last held the presumed murder weapon.
The defense submitted that the prosecution, though perhaps well-intentioned, was—figuratively speaking—target shooting in the dark. There was every chance that it was that colleague, and not the defendant, who killed Denise Lee.
The prosecution had another witness, a cousin of the defendant’s who knew him his whole life. The cousin would say he loaned Michael a flashlight and a shovel, but he wouldn’t be able to tell you where the defendant went after he left, or that he saw Michael shoot Denise.
When the police stopped Michael that day as he drove his Camaro along I-75, there was no victim, no gun, and no bullets in the car.
Meisner said they would hear much about the shot that killed Denise Lee, but he was certain they would find, when all was said and done, that there was more than a reasonable doubt as to the identity of the shooter.
 
 
The first prosecution witnesses were members of the North Port Police Department, Sarasota County Sheriff’s Office, Florida Highway Patrol, and Florida Department of Law Enforcement, as well as crime scene technicians who laid down the evidence against Michael King in an orderly and methodical manner.
NPPD detective Christopher Morales said he’d been nine years with the department, and he was the lead detective in the case. He summarized his activity in the case, reporting first to the Lees’ home, then to King’s home. He told the jury about the defendant’s arrest and the subsequent sad search for Denise, which involved search dogs and helicopters.
The detective used a series of maps to show the locations and the testimony that the jury would be hearing about during later testimony: Latour, Sardinia, Muxlow, Kowalski, grave, arrest, and the location where Denise’s undergarments were found dumped.
This gave the jury some perspective, a look at the relationship between the sites. All of the locations were in North Port. Denise lived in the northwest corner of the city. King’s house was in a more crowded neighborhood, but also off I-75, immediately facing an elementary school.
Photos of the locations were shown, the witness identifying and describing each. Morales said that each photo shown was a fair and accurate depiction of how that site looked.
The detective concluded his direct testimony by saying that yes, it was he who prepared the search warrants for King’s home, and that as a result of that search, clothes were seized as evidence.
 
 
Under cross-examination, Detective Morales was forced to admit that despite an exhaustive search of roadway sewers and ditches, the murder weapon was never found. When Michael King was arrested, there were no guns or bullets in the car. None were found at King’s home, either. Retention ponds were drained, but no luck. Dive teams searched area lakes. Nothing. The search did turn up an old rusty gun unrelated to the case.
Morales admitted that one of the guns turned in by Robert Salvador was a nine millimeter, but it was never tested to see if it was the murder weapon. And a nine-millimeter gun was found at Harold Muxlow’s home as well. No, that one wasn’t tested, either. Why? Both men had alibis; so neither gun could have been involved.
 
 
On recross, Christopher Morales admitted that Rob Salvador gave police two statements, one on January 18 and one on January 20, and that there were discrepancies in those statements involving receipts that Salvador was asked to show to prove his whereabouts during the key hours.
During his first interview, he said he had no receipts. But on January 20, he submitted to cops a timed-and-dated receipt from a Checkers restaurant indicating that he’d purchased a hamburger. During his first interview, he said he went straight home after the firing range. But on his second, he said he’d gone to Checkers and then to a storage facility between the range and home. Rob Salvador had initially denied seeing Michael King on January 17, but rather quickly admitted that he had. At first, he didn’t admit that he’d visited King’s house about a week before the crime. Later he admitted he had.
“When he came in on the twentieth, he admitted he lied on the eighteenth. Is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“No further questions, Your Honor.”
 
 
“Prosecution calls Sergeant Pamela Jernigan.”
Jernigan testified that she had served with the North Port Police Department for eleven years. She was the first responder at the Lee residence on the day of the murder. Because the mother had left without her kids, purse, or keys, she determined that a suspicious circumstance existed, and a criminal investigation detective should be called in. That day, she next traveled to Harold Muxlow’s home. Harold wasn’t home at first, so she canvassed his neighbors to see if anyone had observed the Camaro, with the apparent hostage inside. When Harold Muxlow returned home just shy of seven o’clock that evening, Jernigan and Todd Shernier, another police officer, interviewed the witness and obtained a written statement. Jernigan visited area gas stations to see if any had serviced a green Camaro. When this bore no fruit, Jernigan participated in a meeting at which the methodical search for Denise Lee was organized. At about nine o’clock that night, she was notified that Michael King had been apprehended. She participated in the search of a sod farm and other isolated areas near Toledo Blade, north of the interstate, but found nothing of importance.
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