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Speaker 6: You are now listening to True Murder, The most Shocking
Speaker 6: Killers in True Crime History and the authors that have
Speaker 6: written about them Gasey Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker VTK. Every
Speaker 6: week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and
Speaker 6: infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host,
Speaker 6: journalist and author Dan Zupansky.
Speaker 7: Good evening, This is your host Dan Zupanski for the
Speaker 7: program True Murder, The most shocking Killers in true crime
Speaker 7: History and the authors that have written about them. Denise
Speaker 7: Amberlee was a twenty one year old, happily married mother
Speaker 7: of two little boys. She had her whole life ahead
Speaker 7: of her until an intruder broke into her Florida home.
Speaker 7: Within a few short hours, she was savagely terrorized and murdered.
Speaker 7: Michael King, a thirty eight year old out of work plumber,
Speaker 7: was a ticking time bomb. Incredibly, Denise managed to call
Speaker 7: nine one one twice during her abduction. Eyewitness and her
Speaker 7: distraught husband also called, but a slow, inefficient system tragically
Speaker 7: failed her. King was sentenced to death, but for Denise
Speaker 7: and her loving family, it was too late. The book
Speaker 7: that we're featuring this evening is a Killer's Touch with
Speaker 7: my special guest, journalist and author Michael Benson. Thank you
Speaker 7: for agreeing to this program and welcome back to The
Speaker 7: True Murder Michael Benson.
Speaker 4: Hey, thanks for having me dance.
Speaker 7: Thank you very much, Michael. Great book. By the way,
Speaker 7: I'm sure the audience is looking forward to this interview.
Speaker 7: It's a very different story. We'll get right into it
Speaker 7: right now for our audience. Let's do a little go
Speaker 7: back to where this takes place in Northport. Describe the
Speaker 7: area where this crime goes down, and then let's go
Speaker 7: backwards and also talk first about Denise Amberlee and then
Speaker 7: we can talk about Michael King.
Speaker 4: Sure, the story takes place in Northport, Florida. It's a
Speaker 4: town outside of Sarasota. It originally been a small village
Speaker 4: surrounded by farms, but it build up into a sprawling
Speaker 4: suburb with lots of tract housing. Population grew not just
Speaker 4: because people moved there permanently, but also because it was
Speaker 4: a popular destination for snowbirds, folks who lived up north
Speaker 4: in the summer and then lived in Florida during the winter.
Speaker 4: Northport had grown so rapidly that it really real estate
Speaker 4: people overestimated its popularity. When the real estate market dropped,
Speaker 4: they continued to build houses. What happened was there were
Speaker 4: more houses than there were people, and yet housing tracks
Speaker 4: that were only partially occupied. And that was the neighborhood
Speaker 4: where the Lees lived. So it was an area that
Speaker 4: fifty years before had been virtually crime free, and now
Speaker 4: it was an area plagued by burglaries. Now you know,
Speaker 4: Denise name was Denise Amberley. She grew up as Denise Goth.
Speaker 4: She was, as you said, twenty one year old, mother
Speaker 4: of two little boys, lived on La Tour Avenue. The
Speaker 4: housing tract was only partially occupied. She was a beautiful blonde.
Speaker 4: She liked to walk around your house wearing a T
Speaker 4: shirt and her husband's boxer shorts. And her husband had
Speaker 4: asked her repeated to keep the blinds closed when you
Speaker 4: dressed like that, and she always said, well, well, why,
Speaker 4: you know, it's hot out and there's nobody on the
Speaker 4: street anyway, nobody's going to look in. She'd done a
Speaker 4: good student, smart girl, had attended some college. She met
Speaker 4: and fell in love with her husband, Nate Lee, while
Speaker 4: they were still in high school, and they started a
Speaker 4: very adult life at a very young age two kids.
Speaker 4: At the age of twenty one, Nate was working three
Speaker 4: jobs along with being a musician in the local Philharmonic Orchestra. Also,
Speaker 4: Denise could stay home and take care of the babies,
Speaker 4: which was quite a job in itself because they were
Speaker 4: both in diapers and Nate was working as a meter
Speaker 4: reader when this happened, and he knew something was wrong
Speaker 4: well before he arrived home. He'd called eight Turns on
Speaker 4: his cell phone while in his car and was deeply
Speaker 4: distressed by the fact that Denise wasn't answering her phone.
Speaker 7: Okay, let's go back to the actual That day that
Speaker 7: we're talking about is January seventeenth, two thousand and eight.
Speaker 7: But before we do that, let's get to the character
Speaker 7: of Michael King. Very much unlike your book Woods, Let's
Speaker 7: get the character of Michael King so that we know
Speaker 7: because this person is late in Life Killer here, so
Speaker 7: he's either thirty eight or thirty six I got inflicting him.
Speaker 4: I'm not quite sure that I have thirty seven.
Speaker 7: We'll go in between that. Okay, So tell us about
Speaker 7: Michael King before we get to January seventeen, two thousand
Speaker 7: and eight.
Speaker 4: Well, I think Michael King would have been a notorious
Speaker 4: killer if he hadn't been caught so quickly after his
Speaker 4: crime was pretty started. And the reason he was caught
Speaker 4: as quickly as he was was because he picked the
Speaker 4: wrong victim. I mean, Denise Lee was a CoP's daughter,
Speaker 4: and she was smart and he wasn't. He grew up
Speaker 4: in Michigan. He's not terribly bright fellow, and for years
Speaker 4: he'd made a living as a handyman and a plumber.
Speaker 4: But for the last couple of years things had been
Speaker 4: on the downturn for him. In two thousand and eight,
Speaker 4: when this happened, his life was getting to be a
Speaker 4: bit of a mess. He was divorced, custody of a
Speaker 4: son he couldn't afford. He was dating a series of
Speaker 4: small blonde women. He had a type all with. All
Speaker 4: of his girlfriends looked alike. They're small blond women, and
Speaker 4: some of them were also crippled by dysfunction. So it
Speaker 4: was getting harder and harder for him to find work.
Speaker 4: He was facing foreclosure on his north Port home, which
Speaker 4: had already been emptied of furniture by one of the exes.
Speaker 4: He was angry at the women he dated. He didn't
Speaker 4: have a criminal history, but when the monster within him emerged,
Speaker 4: it came out a big time. You know, his financial
Speaker 4: worries and his girlfriend troubles combined into an intense anger
Speaker 4: with a strong sexual component, and in frustration, he decided
Speaker 4: he was going to steal a woman and take what
Speaker 4: he wanted. As it turned out, boy did he ever
Speaker 4: pick the wrong woman? Right? Let me tell you about.
Speaker 7: Yeah, tell us about January seventeenth, two thousand and eight.
Speaker 7: Just tell it was okay.
Speaker 4: Go ahead, this is home along with the caid. So
Speaker 4: she's given one of her boys a haircut, dressed, you know,
Speaker 4: didn't men underwear, which was her choice on hot days.
Speaker 4: And it was dark and drizzly, kind of a gray day,
Speaker 4: and Michael King was driving his green Camaro up and
Speaker 4: down the tour avenue looking for a victim. And next
Speaker 4: door to the Lee's house there was a woman named
Speaker 4: Jennifer Eckert who was also a tiny blonde woman, and
Speaker 4: she was waiting for her boyfriend to pick her up.
Speaker 4: She looked out the front window and you know, wondered
Speaker 4: what this guy in the car was up to. Let's
Speaker 4: go back and forth, back and forth, and at one
Speaker 4: point she even went outside, thinking the guy might be
Speaker 4: lost in need of directions. But for some reason, the
Speaker 4: man in the car did not watch Jennifer. He pulled
Speaker 4: into the next door neighbors park driveway instead, and so
Speaker 4: maybe he saw her through the living room window, just
Speaker 4: as Nate had warned her about. We don't know. We
Speaker 4: don't know when it made him stop. But the car
Speaker 4: crawled into the Lee driveway very slow, and Jennifer went
Speaker 4: back to watching TV. The next thing she knows a
Speaker 4: few minutes later and the car is burning rubber down
Speaker 4: the street. You know, the guy completely peeled out, like
Speaker 4: a bat out of hell. He rives going very slowly
Speaker 4: and leaves going very fast. Jennifer turned out to be
Speaker 4: a very important witness because as soon as police were
Speaker 4: informed that there was a woman missing, Jennifer was able
Speaker 4: to give them a description of the suspicious car and
Speaker 4: its driver. And when Nate Lee came home and found
Speaker 4: Denie gone, he didn't call nine one one. First, he
Speaker 4: called his father in law, Rick, who was a police
Speaker 4: sergeant in nearby Charlotte County. And if the victim had
Speaker 4: been anyone else, there might have been a delay in
Speaker 4: the search because police would have been questioning Nate. When
Speaker 4: something bad happens to a married person, the spouse is
Speaker 4: always the first suspect. And you know, in other cases,
Speaker 4: police may assume that there had been in an argument,
Speaker 4: the life simply ran off and by be back soon.
Speaker 4: But in this case, because the victim's father was a cop,
Speaker 4: the search for her started right away, and within minutes
Speaker 4: of the call, you know that Denise was missing. There
Speaker 4: were k nineteens out in helicopters joining the search.
Speaker 7: Now, can you tell us a little bit about what
Speaker 7: I found interesting too? Is it's just a little bit
Speaker 7: more of Nate finding what he did find. He talked
Speaker 7: to his wife at eleven something in in the morning anyway,
Speaker 7: and he came home at three point thirty. He told
Speaker 7: her open the windows, get some fresh air. He came home,
Speaker 7: the windows were all closed, and how did he What
Speaker 7: did he find in the home?
Speaker 4: That was well? He finds he finds both babies in
Speaker 4: the same playpen, which is something that Denise would never
Speaker 4: do because the older boy was a little bit rambunctious
Speaker 4: and hadn't learned how to be gentle, and they tended
Speaker 4: to not leave him alone. Ri could smack around his
Speaker 4: little brother. So the fact they were both in the
Speaker 4: same playpen was very odd and plus you know, her
Speaker 4: purse was had been dumped out and with the contents
Speaker 4: kind of sloppily spilled out, so he knew something was
Speaker 4: wrong right away, right you know. I. You know all
Speaker 4: books that have their own personalities when you when you
Speaker 4: research them, and in this one, I had a pretty
Speaker 4: good luck. Just about everybody I wanted to talk to
Speaker 4: offered their part of the story, but it was it
Speaker 4: turned out to be a person who didn't want to
Speaker 4: be interviewed that it gave me preaps the most profound message.
Speaker 4: There was one veteran police officer who turned me down,
Speaker 4: not because he didn't want to be helpful, but because
Speaker 4: of something that seemed to me resemble post traumatic stress.
Speaker 4: He said that during his time as a cop, only
Speaker 4: two cases had gotten under his skin. The first unnatural
Speaker 4: death he ever saw, which was a suicide by hanging
Speaker 4: the investigator when he was a rookie. In this case,
Speaker 4: he just didn't want to relive it again. He got nightmares,
Speaker 4: his hands started shaking just thinking about it. And he
Speaker 4: told me that for weeks, every time he closed his eyes,
Speaker 4: he saw the room in Michael King's house, where Denise
Speaker 4: Lee was, you know, repeatedly attacked me. I'll describe that
Speaker 4: more later. It wasn't the creepiness that got to him,
Speaker 4: but it was the evil he felt in that room.
Speaker 4: He didn't say so, but I think there was something
Speaker 4: else as well. Not only was what happened to DENISLI
Speaker 4: disgusting and tragic, and her murder or evil to the core,
Speaker 4: but there was a sense of a wasted opportunity, that
Speaker 4: this was a murder that could have then prevented. Absolutely, yeah,
Speaker 4: I mean the thing as it's unbelievable. I want to
Speaker 4: make one quick correction of your introduction. The niece was
Speaker 4: only only managed to call nine one once. That just
Speaker 4: says it on the back of the book. But that's
Speaker 4: an error, right. There were five nine one one calls
Speaker 4: made the law enforcement between the times Denise Li was
Speaker 4: abducted and when she was murdered. One call came from
Speaker 4: her and another came from a witness who could report
Speaker 4: the location of the kidnappers power as it drove through
Speaker 4: Northport in real time. The amount of info police had
Speaker 4: was incredible. Let me tell I'll run through the nine
Speaker 4: one one calls for you. Absolutely, because yeah, I mean.
Speaker 4: The first one is from Nate Lee, the husband, and
Speaker 4: he reports that she's missing. And then but that's almost,
Speaker 4: you know, it's almost a mood point, because Rick Goff
Speaker 4: has already called for the dogs and the helicopters. The
Speaker 4: second call, second calls from Denise. She has managed to
Speaker 4: a quarter after six in the evening. And I have
Speaker 4: to admit that although I've read the transcript of this
Speaker 4: call many times, I've only been able to actually listen
Speaker 4: to it once. It's the most horrifying thing I've ever heard.
Speaker 4: Panicky screams and cries in a woman who's just been
Speaker 4: repeatedly raped and sodomized, and who was now on her
Speaker 4: way to a secluded spot where she was to be killed.
Speaker 4: She just heard her abductor borrow a shovel from his cousin,
Speaker 4: and she knew what that shovel was for. He was
Speaker 4: going a barrier, And while in the backseat of the
Speaker 4: guy's come she managed to steal his cell phone and
Speaker 4: call nine to one one. So she's in the back
Speaker 4: seat and he's driving, and in the backseat with her
Speaker 4: is the shovel and also the other things he had borrowed,
Speaker 4: a can of gasoline, and a flashlight, so she's got
Speaker 4: a good idea what's in store for her now. The
Speaker 4: nine one one system down there won no awards that day,
Speaker 4: but in this case, the operator did a really good job.
Speaker 4: The operator quickly figured out what the situation was. She
Speaker 4: was reporting her own Denise was reporting her own abduction,
Speaker 4: and her abductor was nearby and didn't know she could
Speaker 4: hear the kidnappers. The operator could hear the kidnappers' voice
Speaker 4: in the background, and the operator was careful informing her questions,
Speaker 4: and Denise was brilliant in giving her answers so that
Speaker 4: her abductor didn't realize she was having two conversations at once.
Speaker 4: Maybe a couple examples, Denise said, my name is Denise,
Speaker 4: I'm married to a beautiful husband, and I just wanted
Speaker 4: to see my kids again. That was after the operator
Speaker 4: asked her for he her name. When the operator asks
Speaker 4: where she lives, Denise says, please take me back to
Speaker 4: my house on Latour Avenue. It's the name of the street.
Speaker 4: At one point, the kidnapperr asks her where his phone is,
Speaker 4: while simultaneously the operator asks her if she knows this guy,
Speaker 4: and she says, I don't I don't have it, so
Speaker 4: she answered both questions. Then the operator could hear the
Speaker 4: man's voice yell and anger at the woman as he
Speaker 4: realized that she did have his cell phone, and the
Speaker 4: call ends abruptly. You know, just that that's the most
Speaker 4: terrifying part when the call ends, because you realize, you know,
Speaker 4: that's it. The key thing Denise did was she managed
Speaker 4: to keep a nine one one operator on the phone
Speaker 4: for more than six minutes, plenty of time for the
Speaker 4: cops to trace the call and learn that it was
Speaker 4: coming from the cell phone of Michael King, and minutes later,
Speaker 4: a motor vehicle data search shows that King drove a
Speaker 4: green Chevy Camaro, precisely the makeup car that Jennifer Eckert
Speaker 4: had seen behaving suspiciously hours earlier. And a couple of
Speaker 4: minutes later, nine one one is called again, and this
Speaker 4: time there was a young woman. She identifies this identifies
Speaker 4: herself as Sabrina Muckslow. She totally operator.
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Speaker 4: She just got a call for her father, who reported
Speaker 4: that their cousin, Michael King, had a girl tied up
Speaker 4: in his car, and she said King had visited her
Speaker 4: father borowed a gas canis shovel in the third item
Speaker 4: she didn't recall. Goperator asked for what her father's name was,
Speaker 4: and she said her father didn't want to get involved
Speaker 4: and wanted to remain anonymous. Well their apprecier his last
Speaker 4: name was Mucklow. The operator asked how did she know
Speaker 4: there was a woman in the car, and Sabrina said
Speaker 4: the woman had tried to escape, but King had pushed
Speaker 4: her back into the car. Now, the fourth call, the
Speaker 4: fourth nine one one call, was the most important and
Speaker 4: the one that was handled the worst. If he had
Speaker 4: to take a precise moment when law enforcement failed to
Speaker 4: save Benissa's life, it would be sometime during this ninety
Speaker 4: one one call. It came only seven minutes after Sabrina
Speaker 4: Muckslow's call, and it came from a woman named Jane Kowalski,
Speaker 4: who said that she was driving through Northport to dead
Speaker 4: She was talking as she was driving. She's on her
Speaker 4: way to visit her grandmother, and she was seeing and
Speaker 4: hearing something that disturbed her. There was a man in
Speaker 4: a dark Camaro driving behind her, and he had a
Speaker 4: terrified child in his car. Jane had heard the child
Speaker 4: scream for help and saw a little hand on the window.
Speaker 4: Jane was able to tell the operator in real time
Speaker 4: where the car was, and she continued to give the
Speaker 4: operator a running account of the Camaro's location until the
Speaker 4: car made an unexpected left turn and Jane lost it. Now,
Speaker 4: at that very moment that Michael King's driving his car,
Speaker 4: She's driving right past the police car that was stopped
Speaker 4: at the intersection. But because of mixed communications in the
Speaker 4: nine to one one system and because there was a
Speaker 4: change of ships at that very moment, this incredibly urgent
Speaker 4: message did not go out to police cars on the
Speaker 4: road until many minutes later, and the opportunity was lost.
Speaker 4: The operator stayed on the line with Jane Kwalsky and
Speaker 4: made sure she was safe. Are your windows rolled up?
Speaker 4: The operator asked. She told Jane to pull over and
Speaker 4: wait for a police car to come and take her story.
Speaker 4: While more time was lost as the operator tried to
Speaker 4: nail down in which parking lot Jane had parked, and
Speaker 4: the call ended. Jane waited and waited, but no cop
Speaker 4: car ever showed up. Jane called nine one one a
Speaker 4: second time, but the shift had changed. The operator had
Speaker 4: no idea who she was, and she had to start
Speaker 4: all over. No pop power ever appeared in the parking
Speaker 4: lot where she pulled over, so eventually, you know, hoping
Speaker 4: that her eyes and her ears had been deceiving her,
Speaker 4: she continued on her way to Fort Myers to visit
Speaker 4: her grandmother. Okay, here's one to put in your what
Speaker 4: are the odds? Category? Jane Kowalski, the woman who called in,
Speaker 4: was a computer expert and had worked on a computer
Speaker 4: aided dispatch system for nine one one calls, so she
Speaker 4: knew exactly the information the operator needed and was giving
Speaker 4: it to her in clear and concise manner. And she
Speaker 4: was giving the info in the correct order so they
Speaker 4: could be most easily entered into the computer system. Still
Speaker 4: the operator got it wrong. Now, since then, Jane Kwalski
Speaker 4: has given thousands of interviews and she always says the
Speaker 4: same thing. I was giving her exact locations. How could
Speaker 4: they mess it up that they had? It took some doing,
Speaker 4: but Kowalski did convince the police that she was an
Speaker 4: important witness, and she picked out King from a line
Speaker 4: up at the police station, and months later was an
Speaker 4: effective witness for the prosecution at King's murder trial. Which
Speaker 4: brings us the night one call number four, about ten
Speaker 4: minutes to seven in the evening. And this call did
Speaker 4: that come from somebody with Jane Kwalsky's communication skills. It
Speaker 4: came from Harold ms, the father of Sabrina, who had
Speaker 4: called earlier, and he managed to spit out that although
Speaker 4: he was not exactly sure of the nature of the emergency,
Speaker 4: he knew that there was somebody that don't want to
Speaker 4: be where they need to be, and they were in
Speaker 4: a green ninety five Camaro in Northport someplace. He said
Speaker 4: he knew this because the man had stopped by his
Speaker 4: house with a girl in the car to borrow a
Speaker 4: shovel a gass can in a flashlight. But so I
Speaker 4: asked the man why he needed the items, and King
Speaker 4: said his lawnmower had broken down. Now, while Mukshah was
Speaker 4: giving the man the items, he saw he saw a
Speaker 4: girl get out of the car. She was tied up
Speaker 4: in some fashion and trying to escape, and the woman
Speaker 4: said Muslow called the tops. So Muxwell asked the man, Hey,
Speaker 4: what's this all about, and the guy said, don't worry
Speaker 4: about it. The operator asked for the man's identity and
Speaker 4: Musloll said he didn't know the guy's name. Well, they
Speaker 4: knew from the from the previous call that they were cousins.
Speaker 4: Now Muxlow's attempted to keep himself in King Anonymous was
Speaker 4: in vain. Police listening to the tape of Denise's ninety
Speaker 4: one one call, heard the man in the background refer
Speaker 4: to his cousin Harold. Turned out King only had one
Speaker 4: cousin named Harold, and that was Harold Muxlow, and he
Speaker 4: lived in Northport, Bingo. And Muxwell made his call from
Speaker 4: a pay phone so his idea would be protected. But
Speaker 4: by the time he got home, police were there waiting
Speaker 4: for him. So an assist call was from a guy
Speaker 4: named Sean Johnson, and he, like Jane Kowalski, was in
Speaker 4: traffic while King was driving Denise Lee and she was
Speaker 4: making a fuss in the back seat. But unlike Jane,
Speaker 4: Sean didn't call nine one right away. He had to
Speaker 4: think about it and it wasn't until he got home
Speaker 4: that he realized maybe he should report what he had heard.
Speaker 4: And they said he heard screams for help and so
Speaker 4: one pounding on the window in panic. So there was
Speaker 4: five nine one one calls and by the time police
Speaker 4: discovered Mike King driving his Camaro, there was blood spatter
Speaker 4: on the car, a shovel in the back seat was wet,
Speaker 4: his shoes were sandy, and his jeans were sulking wet,
Speaker 4: and Denise Lee was nowhere to be seen. So that
Speaker 4: brings us to the discovery of the rape dungeon and
Speaker 4: the murderer's arrest.
Speaker 7: This is about six hours later that finally he's pulled over,
Speaker 7: and this is after he's already disposed of Denise Aberley
Speaker 7: in a shallow grave.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they were well. First police go to King's house.
Speaker 4: They get there before just before seven o'clock, a couple
Speaker 4: of hours earlier, and fearing that she's in there being harmed.
Speaker 4: They bust in. The ouse has no furniture, and both
Speaker 4: the TV set in the living room and the radio
Speaker 4: in one of the bedrooms had been turned up full volume.
Speaker 4: And in that bedroom a blanket had been taped over
Speaker 4: the window. And this is a scene that gave the
Speaker 4: cop the shakes. A blanket had been taped over the window.
Speaker 4: There was blood and seamen stains on the rug, and
Speaker 4: throughout the house, investigators discovered pieces of duct tape with
Speaker 4: long blonde hairs clinging to them. A full length mirror
Speaker 4: that had been mounted to the living room wall had
Speaker 4: been removed and leaned against the bedroom wall positions so
Speaker 4: that the rapist could watch himself as he assaulted his victim.
Speaker 4: There was there was also a blanket that had bloodstains
Speaker 4: on it. The whole house was declared a crime scene
Speaker 4: and sealed off. The arrest the arrested. Yeah, this life
Speaker 4: can be stranger than fiction. One of the more compelling
Speaker 4: characters in A Killing, Killer's Touch, I'll kill You. I'll
Speaker 4: get the title book right, A Killer's Touch the State
Speaker 4: trooper Eddie Pope. He was the arresting officer and if
Speaker 4: he's had to back ahead of time who would make
Speaker 4: the arrest. Pope would have been in odds on favorite.
Speaker 4: He was smart, and he was lucky, and by always
Speaker 4: positioning himself in the best spot, he was often in
Speaker 4: a big bus and then he was the first to
Speaker 4: help during emergencies. He'd been named Trooper of the month
Speaker 4: so often, four times that he'd been trooped and also
Speaker 4: named Trooper of the Year and asked to throw out
Speaker 4: the first pitch at Tampa Bay Rays baseball game, and
Speaker 4: that was before this case. So it's only to be
Speaker 4: expected that it was Pope who spotted the Camaro on
Speaker 4: the expressway and pulled him over and made the arrest.
Speaker 4: Pope saw the spatter in the car and noticed that
Speaker 4: it was still wet. Now because of that, he knew
Speaker 4: De Niee could not be far away. If she was
Speaker 4: too far away, the spatter would have either dried or
Speaker 4: flown off the car. And of course, you know, Pope's
Speaker 4: heart sunk because he knew what the spatter meant. He
Speaker 4: knew that the chair to the finding and he's still
Speaker 4: alive were no longer very good. She also realized it's
Speaker 4: what a genius Denise was. In addition to her nine
Speaker 4: one one call, which showed quick thinking and in a
Speaker 4: moment of ultimate stress, she also managed to take her
Speaker 4: ring off and leave it in the backseat of King's car.
Speaker 4: She was going to make sure you know that this
Speaker 4: scumbag never hurt anyone ever again. Unfortunately, there wasn't much
Speaker 4: of a search that night. It stopped raining, but with
Speaker 4: the nighttime came a thickening fog, so the helicopters were
Speaker 4: forced to land and did everybody get called home? So
Speaker 4: they waited till the morning to continue the search, and
Speaker 4: the meantime, King was brought in and questioned all night.
Speaker 4: The hope, of course, was that King would immediately tell
Speaker 4: them where Denise was, but he didn't. He kind of
Speaker 4: cotied a wild story about picking up a hitchhiker who
Speaker 4: attacked him, and eventually he and Denise were both hostages.
Speaker 4: In an inspired move, the troopers put Harold Muxlow cousin Harold,
Speaker 4: who'd lent him to shovel, in the room with King
Speaker 4: and left them alone. Of course, the surveillance camera was
Speaker 4: running the whole time. Muxillow did a great job of
Speaker 4: quizzing King. He uh, you know, watched the tape a
Speaker 4: couple of times, and you know, he really did a
Speaker 4: good job of trying to trying to get King to
Speaker 4: mess up his story and be in a position where
Speaker 4: he had to tell the truth. Obviously, obviously, when King
Speaker 4: came to Muxlow's house earlier that evening with Denise and Carr,
Speaker 4: there hadn't been another man who was holding them both hostage.
Speaker 4: But despite this, no matter how silly and unlikely King's
Speaker 4: story became, he stuck to it, and the Muxhill experiment
Speaker 4: didn't work, and Muxwell seemed to be searching for King's conscience.
Speaker 4: You know, he said things like, her parents are going
Speaker 4: to need relief. They've got to find her body. Otherwise
Speaker 4: you've got to live with that, live with that for
Speaker 4: a long time. Otherwise her parents are all to be
Speaker 4: wondering where she is. She's still alive. But King didn't
Speaker 4: have a conscience to find Eventually, Muslaw was allowed to
Speaker 4: leave and police took up the interrogation, but King did
Speaker 4: not budget. Instead, he lawyered up.
Speaker 7: Now, who did represent him at court? What type of
Speaker 7: experience did this person have, since we're dealing with Florida
Speaker 7: in a capital case, did he get how experienced was
Speaker 7: a lawyer that he was assigned.
Speaker 4: Well, he got Jerry Meiser and John Scotchies out of
Speaker 4: the you know, out of the they appointed him his lawyers.
Speaker 4: He had no money to his own lawyer. But he
Speaker 4: also for the major part of the trial that his
Speaker 4: defense was in the penalty phase, and for that he
Speaker 4: got Carolyn Schlemmer, who was a very, very experienced in
Speaker 4: capital cases. Her job is basically to get killer's life
Speaker 4: in prison red than the death penalty, and you know
Speaker 4: she fought tooth and nailed to do that in this case.
Speaker 4: I tell you the we talked a little bit about
Speaker 4: Robert Salvador, I remember him from the book.
Speaker 7: Yes he was.
Speaker 4: Yeah, history tells us a little something about the nature
Speaker 4: of the crime. If you start thinking that this was
Speaker 4: a spur of the moment thing, and perhaps Michael King
Speaker 4: it just he was a time bomb and it went
Speaker 4: off not so much. I think it was a lot
Speaker 4: worse than that. There are signs of premeditation all over
Speaker 4: the place. This was the scheme, and he carried it
Speaker 4: out right from the abduction to the burial. Everything was planned.
Speaker 4: And we know this because even before the crime spree
Speaker 4: began earlier that drizzly day. He'd gone target shooting with
Speaker 4: his gun, the only time he'd ever been known to
Speaker 4: go target shooting. You know, he went at the invitation
Speaker 4: of a coworker named Robert Salvador. Salvador went target shooting
Speaker 4: all the time, and King told police that Salvador early
Speaker 4: during the King told police about Salvador early during the interrogation,
Speaker 4: and police knocked on Salvador's door in the middle of
Speaker 4: the night. So Salvador had no idea that this woman missing,
Speaker 4: none of that. Police ask him, have you seen Michael
Speaker 4: King lately? He says no. Now, did you go target
Speaker 4: shooting today? He says no. But his reason for lying
Speaker 4: didn't anything do with the crime. They were marital. Salvador's
Speaker 4: wife didn't like King, he was a creepy guy, and
Speaker 4: she thought her husband spent way too much time and
Speaker 4: money at the firing range. So this was double reason
Speaker 4: for Salvador to lie, he claimed. Salvador claims he was
Speaker 4: he wasn't aware of the seriousness of the crime he
Speaker 4: was involved in, and he lied just so they wouldn't
Speaker 4: catch holy help from his wife, And like Harold Muxlow,
Speaker 4: his realization of the situation came in increments hours after
Speaker 4: police left his house. The following morning, as the sun
Speaker 4: was coming up, Salvador hears the news and he calls
Speaker 4: the police back and says, yeah, I saw King, and
Speaker 4: yeah we did to a target shooting. Salvador said that
Speaker 4: King had his own nine milimeter gun, no ammunition, so
Speaker 4: Salvador gave him some ninammo. And police theorized the King
Speaker 4: pocketed a couple of bullets so you'd be able to
Speaker 4: use them in his gun later that day, and Salvador
Speaker 4: said he certainly had the opportune opportunity to do that.
Speaker 4: And Salvador passed the light detector text, so that's premeditation.
Speaker 4: King had practiced with the handgun he's already planned on
Speaker 4: using later in the day. He borrowed his shovel, already
Speaker 4: planning the diggest shallow grave. Now, unfortunately for Salvador, he
Speaker 4: later became the target of King's defense team. They claimed
Speaker 4: that despite any logic or evidence, that Salvador had accompanied
Speaker 4: King throughout the attack and had in fact been the
Speaker 4: man to shoot thenies through the head. Of course, the
Speaker 4: jerry didn't buy Nobody nobody thought it.
Speaker 7: What was the other?
Speaker 6: Was it?
Speaker 7: The other strategies that at trial were also about the
Speaker 7: evidence contamination. Tell us about what else they attempted at
Speaker 7: trial and in their defense.
Speaker 4: Well, right, they all of the the evidence was pre
Speaker 4: air tight. Sure had they had DNA, they you know,
Speaker 4: they had proof that Denise was in his house. They
Speaker 4: had proof that Denise was in his car. They what
Speaker 4: they didn't have was a gun. So they asked every witness, sort,
Speaker 4: did you find a gun? I didn't find you find
Speaker 4: the bullet? No, I didn't find a bullet. And they
Speaker 4: would think this, was it possible all these DNA people,
Speaker 4: Is it possible for the stuff to be contaminated? Unlikely,
Speaker 4: but yeah, possible. And that was about the extent of it. Yeah,
Speaker 4: that's about all they had.
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Speaker 7: How about the evidence tampering? They said something, Yeah, well.
Speaker 4: Implication of is it possible for it to be contaminated
Speaker 4: on purpose? Well yes, but I've never heard anything like
Speaker 4: that ever happening. Yeah, I don't think that the jury
Speaker 4: thought about it for two seconds. Let me tell you
Speaker 4: a little bit bit more about But the discovery of
Speaker 4: the body, Okay, yeah, Trooper Pope, it predicted that the
Speaker 4: body was going to be close to the place where
Speaker 4: the arrest took place. Yeah, apparently, Trooper Pope is never wrong,
Speaker 4: as Denise's body was found less than a mile from
Speaker 4: the spot where he was apprehended. The shallow grave was
Speaker 4: discovered in the sandy soil off the Desolate Road. Road
Speaker 4: had been built to accommodate a housing development that was
Speaker 4: never built. So the case where land developers start working
Speaker 4: before they had buyers and then there were no buyers,
Speaker 4: so it was an odd site. There was a paved road,
Speaker 4: smooth rows of lines painted on it. There were fire hydrants,
Speaker 4: there was sidewalks, and yet you were in the middle
Speaker 4: of nowhere. It was a place where a madman could
Speaker 4: do his dirty work without worrying about untimely interruptions. The
Speaker 4: body was discovered by the canine team with Tamy Treadway
Speaker 4: and her dog Ciccu. I had a really nice interview
Speaker 4: with Tanny Treadlights, a lovely woman and she loves her dog.
Speaker 4: There were blood spots in the sand and the CSI
Speaker 4: people were called in and the spot was excavated by
Speaker 4: forensic archaeologists and ANCHI at a time until the remains
Speaker 4: of Deniseli were unearthed. She was naked and shot once
Speaker 4: through the right temple. There were bruises in the shape
Speaker 4: of handprints on her body. She'd been brutally and multiply penetrated,
Speaker 4: and DNA results indicated her attacker was Michael King because
Speaker 4: she was the daughter of a well known and liked cop.
Speaker 4: Her funeral was huge. On the trip from the church
Speaker 4: to the cemetery, rose petals were sprinkled in the road.
Speaker 4: Fire trucks led the way, their lights going around. Spectators
Speaker 4: lined the road and saluted as the hearst carrying Denise's
Speaker 4: coffin drove by elementary schools emptied so students could stand
Speaker 4: outside and watch. It was a big deal. I don't
Speaker 4: think that there's going to be anything like that on
Speaker 4: the day that they killed Michael King.
Speaker 7: No, no, tell us a little bit about her father
Speaker 7: through this whole thing, because we haven't spoke too much
Speaker 7: obviously as it active, he's distraught. He works at the
Speaker 7: same Charlotte County, ironically, at the same Sheriff's department and
Speaker 7: mishandled this the nine one one calls, not that they
Speaker 7: are so involved with those calls themselves, but still, ironically
Speaker 7: he works at that county.
Speaker 4: You know, he always says, we screwed up, you know,
Speaker 4: he he doesn't. He doesn't distance himself from the error
Speaker 4: at all. It was a department error, and he's part
Speaker 4: of the department, so it was our error. She's a rock.
Speaker 4: All my dealing with the family was with him. He's
Speaker 4: the spokesperson, he's the man, he's the he's the guy
Speaker 4: at the point. And if you want to talk to
Speaker 4: somebody from Denise's family, you talk to Rick and uh Rick.
Speaker 4: You know, it's it's hard to compare because Nate didn't
Speaker 4: handle it nearly as well as rip kids, and nobody
Speaker 4: possibly could. Yeah, I've noticed there's some of the cases
Speaker 4: where there are professionals who are used to dealing with
Speaker 4: very differentical scenes and subjects. They have a place in
Speaker 4: their brain where they go. I once covered a case
Speaker 4: where a physician had lost his family to a home invasion,
Speaker 4: and when he talked about the case, he talked about
Speaker 4: it as a doctor would. And Rick talks about this
Speaker 4: case as a cop would. You know. He tried to
Speaker 4: get him to talk about it as a dad would,
Speaker 4: and it doesn't happen. He's not going to share that part.
Speaker 7: I mean.
Speaker 4: In the meantime, Nate has turned this into kind of
Speaker 4: a cause. He has formed the Nie amber Lee Foundation
Speaker 4: and they want to revamp nine one one systems everywhere.
Speaker 4: On April twenty fourth, two thousand and eight, the Florida
Speaker 4: legislature unanimously passed the Denise amber Lee Act, which provided
Speaker 4: for voluntary training for all nine to one operators. And
Speaker 4: there was a step in the right direction, but they
Speaker 4: weren't satisfied. They want mandatory training and certification for all personnel.
Speaker 4: You know, I hate to say anything disparaging about the
Speaker 4: Denise amber Lee Foundation, but they're trying to make a
Speaker 4: universal issue out of what it is largely a local one.
Speaker 4: People why I live in New York, if I call
Speaker 4: nine one one in five minutes, I will have a
Speaker 4: fire truck, an ambulance, and a police power out in
Speaker 4: front of my house. John stain case. Nine one one
Speaker 4: systems in most places are just they're very efficient, they're great,
Speaker 4: and because this one operator screwed this up to try
Speaker 4: to make it a national deal, nine one one systems
Speaker 4: are inadequate and they need to be better. Is a
Speaker 4: little bit of a stretch, which isn't to say that
Speaker 4: he's not a great guy and he's trying to do
Speaker 4: what's right in his mind. But I think that maybe
Speaker 4: a victim's advocacy foundation would be better. I've spent a
Speaker 4: lot of time trying to figure out why Michael King
Speaker 4: did what he did. You know, I think with most criminals,
Speaker 4: we see obvious foreshadowing, harbingers of things to come, you know,
Speaker 4: a slow deterioration of civilized behavior until boom, you know,
Speaker 4: they snapped and they turned into a psycho killer. But
Speaker 4: with Michael King, not so much. I think You could
Speaker 4: have talked to him the day before it happened and
Speaker 4: you would have said, well, you know, he's not the
Speaker 4: brightest guy in the world. He's okay guy. So maybe
Speaker 4: there's something in his history of dating it triggered this.
Speaker 4: So I put together a little short, you know, sketches
Speaker 4: of the women we know from his past to see
Speaker 4: if we can find clues that might you know, and
Speaker 4: you tell me, and then your listeners. I would love
Speaker 4: to hear their feedback as well. But I'll start with Danielle.
Speaker 4: She was King's wife, and that's as hard as we
Speaker 4: don't know about anything about his dating career before her.
Speaker 4: She was his wife and the mother of his son,
Speaker 4: who was an adolescent when this happened. We get an
Speaker 4: inkling of what sort of person she was by the
Speaker 4: fact that a judge awarded King custody of their boy.
Speaker 4: Danielle had met a new man through the Internet and
Speaker 4: took off at the time of the murder. King said
Speaker 4: he talked to her maybe once or twice a year
Speaker 4: at the most, So okay, you might have some hostility
Speaker 4: towards women over there. Next, we have a woman and
Speaker 4: the in the book I call Amy Sue probably the
Speaker 4: most bizarre relationship that he had with a woman. He
Speaker 4: met her on a phone sex chat line and she
Speaker 4: told him that she was fifteen years old, although she
Speaker 4: was actually twenty five. She later said, how he thought
Speaker 4: I was really fifteen. I don't know. I had a
Speaker 4: five year old son. He must have figured it out,
Speaker 4: but he didn't. She said she lived and she thought
Speaker 4: was back on the phone sex challenge. She said she
Speaker 4: lived in Tennessee and was looking to get away and
Speaker 4: have an adventure. She said she was five too, weighed
Speaker 4: just one hundred pounds and had blonde hair, just what
Speaker 4: he liked. So King drove to Tennessee and picked her
Speaker 4: up and brought her back to his house in Northport.
Speaker 4: She was stuck in the house with no place to go,
Speaker 4: nothing to do. She later said he was very controlling.
Speaker 4: She was allowed to do things for shopping and go
Speaker 4: for the walks only when she was with him. She
Speaker 4: tried to run away a few times, but he caught
Speaker 4: her and brought her back. Since she was a drug
Speaker 4: add he bought her drugs and that you know, kept
Speaker 4: her home in content for a while and when she
Speaker 4: ran away, you know, he would just offer her drugs
Speaker 4: and she said, okay, I'll come back. One time she
Speaker 4: got a member of her family to call King and
Speaker 4: remind him that she was only fifteen and needed to
Speaker 4: be home or else, and that did the trick for
Speaker 4: a while. She agreed to come back at one point
Speaker 4: if he bought her a car, which he did, and
Speaker 4: as soon as she got the car, she used it
Speaker 4: to drive back to Tennessee and he reported the car stolen.
Speaker 4: So it's a mess. Amy Sus said that Shelley talked
Speaker 4: to him once after the stolen car incident. She called
Speaker 4: him from Tennessee to say that she was pregnant and
Speaker 4: the child was his, and then, you know, an attempt
Speaker 4: to extort more money out of him, and after the conversation,
Speaker 4: she said, he changed his phone number. During during his
Speaker 4: time with Amy Sue, he was a regular. King. One
Speaker 4: King was a regular at a beauty parlor where he
Speaker 4: had blonde highlights put in his hair and had his
Speaker 4: body waxed, a full Brazilian. You know what that means.
Speaker 7: Oh yeah, he's in like body air.
Speaker 4: The owner of the parlor said that one time King
Speaker 4: came in with a little blonde bragged that she was
Speaker 4: only fifteen years old and made out with her right
Speaker 4: there in the beauty parlor in front of everyone.
Speaker 7: Why not?
Speaker 4: Yeah, okay, So now that that was by farther words. Example,
Speaker 4: his next girlfriend a woman named Jennifer, and she's tiny, blonde,
Speaker 4: weighs about one hundred pounds, and she was the reason
Speaker 4: that King didn't have any furniture in his house. She
Speaker 4: took it and it was at her house in Homa Sassa.
Speaker 4: It's a town in Florida, maybe twenty miles north of Northport,
Speaker 4: and they had lived together at her place for a while.
Speaker 4: She had a couple of kids about the same age
Speaker 4: as King's son, and they went on a few vacations
Speaker 4: all together, like the Brady Bunch. She told police the
Speaker 4: King wanted to experiment sexually, but she wasn't into it.
Speaker 4: She had rules, no toys, and nothing that wasn't natural.
Speaker 4: Jennifer said that before they moved to her house, they
Speaker 4: tried to live together in his, but King didn't want
Speaker 4: her to work, so she stayed home and cleaned, and
Speaker 4: she didn't even have the opportunity to call her parents.
Speaker 4: She had her cell phone with her, but not her charger.
Speaker 4: King managed to cut her off from the rest of
Speaker 4: her life for a time, and it took her a
Speaker 4: long time to get as semblance with control back. She
Speaker 4: grabbed her kids and high taled it back to her
Speaker 4: own home. He visited her there frequently and eventually moved
Speaker 4: in with her, and he took his stuff with him,
Speaker 4: and when he was kicked out of there after money
Speaker 4: disappeared at the store run by Jennifer's dad, he left
Speaker 4: without his furniture and his time with Jennifer overlapped with
Speaker 4: his next and final girlfriend, who was named to Neil.
Speaker 4: To Neil seemed very regular. I mean, she seemed like
Speaker 4: a little sweeter, also not so bright, But it seemed
Speaker 4: like an attempt by Michael King to find a good woman.
Speaker 4: Not am not a woman who was going to kick
Speaker 4: ef sex with him, or who was fifteen years old
Speaker 4: or any of that, but got good companion. And he
Speaker 4: met her because she played dingo with his mom. And
Speaker 4: she told police that in the days before the murder,
Speaker 4: King had fouled for bankruptcy and had hopes that he
Speaker 4: was going to be able to keep his house. She
Speaker 4: had no idea that there was a brutal sex crime
Speaker 4: in him. She said a typical date with him was
Speaker 4: going to Applebee's shopping at Walmart. They like to cuddle
Speaker 4: up together and watch movies. Said sex with King was frequent,
Speaker 4: but not unusual. Sure, oral, but no bondage, no role playing.
Speaker 4: It had sex twice during the previous week before the
Speaker 4: attack on Denise, so you know he wasn't he was.
Speaker 4: He should have been satiated to a certain extent. And
Speaker 4: he didn't use the condon but that was okay because
Speaker 4: she had had her tubes tied and was also on
Speaker 4: the pill, just to be sure. The last number of
Speaker 4: our rogues gallery of kingswomen is a woman I call
Speaker 4: Stephanie in the book, and Stephanie, it's all to be
Speaker 4: unfair to call her a girlfriend. She was even tinier
Speaker 4: than the other She's four ten, and she demonstrates the
Speaker 4: lengths to which King would scheme in order to have sex.
Speaker 4: She was a drinker and the wife of one of
Speaker 4: King's co workers. He did repeat favors for this guy
Speaker 4: who was down and out and needed work just to
Speaker 4: have excuses to get near his wife. And when he
Speaker 4: was alone with the woman, he told her what a
Speaker 4: bad guy her husband was. You know it. He's a steamer.
Speaker 4: One day he takes Stephanie to his house and his
Speaker 4: son and his parents are in the living room. They
Speaker 4: put Stephanie in his bedroom and gives her a couple
Speaker 4: six packs of beer, knowing that she'll drink it because
Speaker 4: she's a drinker. She drinks and she falls asleep, and
Speaker 4: when she wakes up, she's on her stomach on the bed,
Speaker 4: her pants are down, and King is raping her. She just,
Speaker 4: you know, she just called her husband and told him
Speaker 4: to come and pick her up. And when police talked
Speaker 4: to her after the murder, she recalled hearing King and
Speaker 4: some of his friends talking about the underage girls they'd
Speaker 4: had sex with, a conversation that she said creeped her out. So, yikes.
Speaker 7: Yeah, there's a lot of the characteristics of some of
Speaker 7: these other killers.
Speaker 4: You see little bits and pieces of it, and it
Speaker 4: all comes together in one act of madness at the end.
Speaker 4: It's cruelty, unbelievable cruelty. But there's a strong component of pedophilia.
Speaker 4: You know, any guy whose girlfriends are all that diminutive
Speaker 4: and the one he seems proudest of is the one
Speaker 4: who's lying and saying she's just fifteen. Yeah, that would
Speaker 4: seem to be the thing and of course Denise is
Speaker 4: only twenty one. She looks you know, she could have
Speaker 4: been fifteen. She's a very young looking woman. Oh yeah,
Speaker 4: you want You wanted to talk about the trial more. Obviously,
Speaker 4: the dramatic highlight at the trial is Denise's nine one
Speaker 4: one tape. Sure, the prosecution read a transcript of the
Speaker 4: tape during the opening arguments, but it was it was
Speaker 4: the playing of the tape itself. There was the emotional
Speaker 4: peak at the trial. Friends and loved ones were alerted
Speaker 4: ahead of time, but the tape was going to be played,
Speaker 4: so they would have an opportunity to step out in
Speaker 4: the hall if they wanted to. And it's hard to have. Yeah,
Speaker 4: the women did and Nate both stayed. It's hard to
Speaker 4: describe the effects the tape had on people, and it did,
Speaker 4: you know, It's just it's traumatizing. Like I said, I
Speaker 4: was to it once, I said, okay, I got it.
Speaker 4: I never have to listen to that again. The amazing
Speaker 4: thing is, yeah, Rick and Nate stay rocks rhythmically and shutters.
Speaker 4: He looks like he's he's working to stay inside his skin,
Speaker 4: and Nate remains perfectly still, which a little bit of
Speaker 4: a opposite of what I would have expected. Nate's Nate
Speaker 4: just kind of closes his eyes and eyes and goes
Speaker 4: into a very still place. And Rick, I'm sure he's
Speaker 4: just you know, every ounce of his energy is not
Speaker 4: attacking the guy sitting at the defendant's table. They both
Speaker 4: heard the tape before. I should note Rick heard it
Speaker 4: only minutes after it was recorded. He was going, who
Speaker 4: idd the voices that on the tape? As you know
Speaker 4: that of Denise? And Nate listened to it once before,
Speaker 4: just so that he wouldn't be hearing it for the
Speaker 4: first time in court.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 4: That might explain why he took it so well, because
Speaker 4: we have no idea how he attacked, how he reacted
Speaker 4: the first time. Yeah, you know, it's common for defendants.
Speaker 4: I'm sure you can hear this all the time. Uh,
Speaker 4: Defendants at long murder trials always seem suspiciously sedate. They
Speaker 4: sit at the defense table and they don't move. It's
Speaker 4: long been suspected that defense attorneys drug their clients to
Speaker 4: keep them from behaving away they might turn the jury
Speaker 4: against them. Sure, you don't want them reacting to things,
Speaker 4: especially you know, angrily, And that was true in this case.
Speaker 4: To the extreme. King seems so catatonic during the proceedings.
Speaker 4: He would sometimes go the entire court day moving nothing
Speaker 4: but his eyes, and they would flick about the courtroom.
Speaker 4: He wouldn't turn his head, look from side to side,
Speaker 4: end up and down. Wow, very odd. The judge Economy
Speaker 4: h had had had his fill of this after a
Speaker 4: while and he stopped proceedings. He said, We're not going
Speaker 4: to have any more testimony until somebody examines this guy
Speaker 4: and you know, tells me that he still knows what's
Speaker 4: going on here. So they had some the shrinks give
Speaker 4: him ask some of the questions, what are the rules
Speaker 4: of the court, Why are you here? What role does
Speaker 4: this guy play? What role does that guy play? He
Speaker 4: got all the answers right, and the trial went on
Speaker 4: becaus I said before. The defense came in two stages.
Speaker 4: At first, they argued that King was innocent, not of
Speaker 4: the abduction. In the rape. There was no you know
Speaker 4: that that had been pretty much proven. But because there
Speaker 4: was no gun, they argued that the murder had been
Speaker 4: committed by Rob Sellador, right, you know. It wasn't until
Speaker 4: after the jury had found King guilty of murder after
Speaker 4: less than two hours of deliberation and during the penalty
Speaker 4: phase of the trial that the defense tried to argue
Speaker 4: that King was legally insane at the time he ended
Speaker 4: Denise's life. I don't know if you remember. Last time
Speaker 4: I was on with you, we talked about the Steven
Speaker 4: Stanko who and the book Watch Mommy Die. And there
Speaker 4: was a doctor Wu who testified that Stanko was not
Speaker 4: guilty by reason of insanity due to brain damage, and
Speaker 4: to prove this he brought out PET scans, stood for
Speaker 4: positron emission tomography, and the doctor claimed that he could
Speaker 4: make pictures in which you could see insanity that as
Speaker 4: you could see that the patient's frontal lobes weren't firing
Speaker 4: on all cylinders and thus the patient had no impulse controled.
Speaker 4: In that case. The Stanko case, the claim was that
Speaker 4: Anko had been hit in the head with a coat
Speaker 4: pile as a teenager, and in this case it was
Speaker 4: a fledding accident. But you know whatever, Doctor Ruth does
Speaker 4: this all the time, and he gives remarkably similar testimony
Speaker 4: in every case, and he's never been successful in the
Speaker 4: criminal case, but he did once help someone win a
Speaker 4: civil case with his pet scans, so yeah, but they
Speaker 4: got his brothers to testify after showing the pictures of
Speaker 4: King's brain with the frontal lobes not firing properly. They
Speaker 4: got King's brothers to testify that when he was a boy,
Speaker 4: he was riding on a sled being pulled by snowbollfild,
Speaker 4: being driven by his older brother, and they were going
Speaker 4: eighty miles an hour, and when the brother made a turn,
Speaker 4: Mike swung and his head hit a shed or a pole,
Speaker 4: depending on which family member you believed. Family members couldn't
Speaker 4: corroborate the claim that with any medical paperwork, and experts
Speaker 4: say that a head hitting a pole at that speed
Speaker 4: would smash like a pumpkin. Prosecutor prosecutor Karen Frevelegg said
Speaker 4: that kind of impact would have turned King's head into
Speaker 4: apple sauce. So now, Interestingly, King's mother didn't testify at
Speaker 4: the trial because she'd she'd earlier been asked that the
Speaker 4: prosecutor ln Errand had as many of the family members
Speaker 4: interviewed as right after the arrests as he could get
Speaker 4: a hold of, and they asked they asked King's mom
Speaker 4: if he'd ever suffered any head injuries and she'd said no,
Speaker 4: So if she wanted to testify to the sledding injury
Speaker 4: at the trial, she was gonna have to explain that answer,
Speaker 4: and they didn't put her on the stand. The defendant's
Speaker 4: brothers also took turns talking about several incidents in Mike's
Speaker 4: life in which his damaged brain had caused him to
Speaker 4: act in a a dangerous trance kind of a fugue state.
Speaker 4: Most memorable of these was once when Mike King watched
Speaker 4: the movie The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and then, imitating the movie,
Speaker 4: ran around the house wielding a gas operating chainsaw, scaring
Speaker 4: everyone and filling the house with exhaust. And there was
Speaker 4: another time when he was imitating Elmer Fudd from a
Speaker 4: Bug's Bunny cartoon and used an actual bow to fire
Speaker 4: an actual arrow at his brother so hard that the
Speaker 4: arrow went right through a door. Now the brothers all
Speaker 4: agreed that Mike King had been having nosebleeds and ringing
Speaker 4: in his ears ever since his brain injury, and King's
Speaker 4: girlfriend Jennifer was called to the stand to describe how
Speaker 4: his behavioral problems, paranoia and the like had grown worse
Speaker 4: during the months leading up to his attack on Denise.
Speaker 4: But on September fourth, two thousand and nine, after three
Speaker 4: hours of deliberation, the jury unanimously recommended the death penalty
Speaker 4: from Michael Camp. And he waits, he waits, he waits
Speaker 4: the valium needle.
Speaker 7: And Florida does execute fairly soon compared to other states,
Speaker 7: doesn't it.
Speaker 4: Well, yeah, it's never soon, but yeah, they do what
Speaker 4: they do eventually get around to it. Yes, yea. The
Speaker 4: average weight I think is six years. One more thing
Speaker 4: about Harold Muxlow. When he testified during the trial, there
Speaker 4: were people, I mean, I know that the Denise's family
Speaker 4: just thinks he's evil. That he should have you know,
Speaker 4: all he had to do was call right away, and
Speaker 4: he would have saved your life. And and I'm not
Speaker 4: so sure. The one thing I've seen his attempt to
Speaker 4: get Michael King to confess, which seemed heartfelt. And but
Speaker 4: the other thing was there's a very good argument that
Speaker 4: Muck's so stupid. And you know, he came not only that,
Speaker 4: but he came from a culture of a segment of
Speaker 4: society in which no one ever calls the cops ever
Speaker 4: for any reason, especially if on his cousin on family.
Speaker 4: You know, the light bulb on over his head went
Speaker 4: on just a little bit at a time. When he
Speaker 4: called his daughter and asked what he should do, he
Speaker 4: thought about what his cousin had said, and you know,
Speaker 4: he needed the can, the gas, the cand of gas,
Speaker 4: the shovel in, the flashlight for his riding mower that
Speaker 4: had broken down. So the first thing he does, he
Speaker 4: gets in his car and he goes over to Mike
Speaker 4: King's house and to see if there's a broken down
Speaker 4: riding mower on the lawn. You know, the story might
Speaker 4: be true. He's still thinking, and only after he sees
Speaker 4: that there, you know, there is no riding mower, that
Speaker 4: he goes to the payphone and calls nine to one one.
Speaker 4: He's not completely innocent, obviously, he was looking to protect
Speaker 4: his own butt as well. He didn't give his name
Speaker 4: when he called. But we do know that, you know,
Speaker 4: Michael King might not have had a conscience, but Harold
Speaker 4: Muxlow did. As Muckslough was describing for police, his realization
Speaker 4: when he first realizes he could have shave that woman
Speaker 4: but didn't, he pursed into tears. Yeah, but that's that
Speaker 4: evil man, that's the man who was slow on the uptake.
Speaker 7: Yeah, he might have been slow to react, but he
Speaker 7: seemed genuine in his Again, like you say, his remorse
Speaker 7: and his and his effort to help police seems sincere
Speaker 7: by the account of the book, for sure.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Well, my next book coming up in a few
Speaker 4: months is going to be called A Knife in the Heart.
Speaker 4: It's about the world of juvenile delinquency again. Down in Florida,
Speaker 4: juvenile delinquents were addicted to painkillers and act out and
Speaker 4: sometimes brutally violent fashion. In this case, it's two girls
Speaker 4: and involved in a love triangle who used the social
Speaker 4: media to amp up the rhetoric of their dispute. In
Speaker 4: the old days, disputes between teenage girls were given a
Speaker 4: chance to cool down if you could separate them. But
Speaker 4: now with Facebook, in my Space and that kind of thing,
Speaker 4: they can act it back, you know, twenty four hours
Speaker 4: of just needling each other, and because it's a social
Speaker 4: media's fall in public. And the story takes a tragic
Speaker 4: turn when one of them brings a knife to the fistfight.
Speaker 4: One girl stabbed to death and the other, who's far
Speaker 4: smaller than the victim, claims she was jumped ahead a
Speaker 4: right to defend herself. With a weapon. And in the meantime,
Speaker 4: the young man who's the subject of their love, you know,
Speaker 4: is a pretty boy and a complete piece of craft.
Speaker 4: So that's that's that's the next book.
Speaker 7: What is a What is a juvenile? Just for for audience,
Speaker 7: I know I'm Canada here we eighteen is an adult
Speaker 7: and they can't do have some provision that they could
Speaker 7: raise up to adult court at sixteen. What are the
Speaker 7: laws in Florida? What do they consider a juvenile?
Speaker 4: And is it any It's the same, it's it's eighteen.
Speaker 4: The smaller of the two girls a couple of years
Speaker 4: older than that. She was an adult. The victim was
Speaker 4: a high school girl. Right now, in these days, I'm
Speaker 4: doing something completely well not completely different, but it's quite
Speaker 4: different from what I've been doing. I don't even know
Speaker 4: if this is going to end up being a book
Speaker 4: or not, but I'm investigating an unsolved cold case. It
Speaker 4: took place in my neighborhood south of Rochester, New York,
Speaker 4: when I was growing up. Two teenage girls were friends
Speaker 4: of mine. Georgia Ane Formacola and Catherine Ann Bernhardt, disappeared
Speaker 4: on the first weekend of summer vacation in nineteen sixty six,
Speaker 4: while swimming in a creek that ran behind my house,
Speaker 4: next to an old stone trestle. Their bodies were found
Speaker 4: a month later, brutally murdered with a knife in bushes
Speaker 4: next to railroad tracks. They disappeared on one side of
Speaker 4: my house and were found on the other. So I
Speaker 4: grew up knowing that the boogeyman had crossed my back
Speaker 4: field one night. Makes it kind of hard to sleep,
Speaker 4: and maybe the reason why I've ended up doing what
Speaker 4: I do for a living too. I think that's probably belief.
Speaker 7: I was gonna ask that answer questions question. You know
Speaker 7: it's there. You're not the first two crime writer as well.
Speaker 7: I mean, not that it's not unique, but Ron Francell
Speaker 7: wrote The Darkest Night, the same sort of situation where
Speaker 7: he personally knew the victims of this crime and wrote
Speaker 7: about it and was quite successful.
Speaker 4: Well, and Rule starts her because she's already writting for
Speaker 4: true detective magazines like she meets Bundy. But she she
Speaker 4: she'd invented the true crime genre pretty much because she
Speaker 4: was a campaign worker sitting next to Ted Bundy.
Speaker 7: Well she was, yeah, no, it was a crisis hotline.
Speaker 7: It was a crisis.
Speaker 4: That's right, that's right for suicide and things. Yeah, that
Speaker 4: last summer. Last summer, one of the victims mothers, who's
Speaker 4: a friend of my mom, asked me to do a
Speaker 4: fresh investigation because you know, I'm a true crime writer
Speaker 4: and she couldn't afford a detective and the police have
Speaker 4: stopped thinking of it many years ago, to see if
Speaker 4: I could figure out what happened. Also, she said she
Speaker 4: thought everyone had forgotten about the girls way too soon,
Speaker 4: and she wanted me to help people remember her daughter,
Speaker 4: Kathy Bernhard. So I've been talking to everyone I can
Speaker 4: find who might know something, and learned just last week
Speaker 4: that the Monroe County Sheriff's Office is going to release
Speaker 4: their files to me, despite the fact that it's technically
Speaker 4: an open case. I convinced them that they have an
Speaker 4: eighty six year old woman here who needs closure. Let's
Speaker 4: declare this historical and make it public. So we're making
Speaker 4: progress there.
Speaker 7: Well, congratulations, And that's quite flattering too, for someone to
Speaker 7: come to you after these all these books that you've
Speaker 7: penned and to ask your help in such an official
Speaker 7: police sort of manner.
Speaker 4: Basically, Oh, it sure was, Yeah, I explained to her
Speaker 4: right away. I mean, I'm not a detective, i am
Speaker 4: not a cop, but I know when I promised it,
Speaker 4: I'm going to help. I'm going to do everything I
Speaker 4: can possibly do to help, and I'm not going to
Speaker 4: give up.
Speaker 7: Well, I think your journalist them acts of the same way,
Speaker 7: and your sense of investigation every one of your books
Speaker 7: is so comprehensive and thorough that I think you'll have
Speaker 7: a lot of success with this and do this case
Speaker 7: justice for sure. Certainly.
Speaker 4: Thanks.
Speaker 7: Yeah, well, it's been an exciting hour, Michael. Thank you
Speaker 7: very much once again for gracing my program that True
Speaker 7: Murder and talking about killer. Well, thank you very much. Well,
Speaker 7: you take care of Michael, and we'll be in touch
Speaker 7: very shortly because you're a very prolific writer and I
Speaker 7: wanted to hear a knife in the Hunt and your
Speaker 7: next cold case. So we'll be talking to you soon,
Speaker 7: I'm sure.
Speaker 4: Very good. Jan thanks a lot, Thank you, Michael.
Speaker 7: Good night, you've been listening to the program True Murder,
Speaker 7: the most shocking killers in true crime history and the
Speaker 7: authors have written about them. Good Night,