A KILLER'S TOUCH-Michael Benson

was a ticking time bomb. Incredibly, Denise managed to call nine one one twice during her abduction. Eyewitness and her distraught husband also called, but a slow, inefficient system tragically failed her. King was sentenced to death, but for Denise and her loving family, it was too late. The book that we're featuring this evening is a Killer's Touch with

my special guest, journalist and author Michael Benson. Thank you for agreeing to this program and welcome back to The True Murder Michael Benson.

people overestimated its popularity. When the real estate market dropped, they continued to build houses. What happened was there were more houses than there were people, and yet housing tracks that were only partially occupied. And that was the neighborhood where the Lees lived. So it was an area that fifty years before had been virtually crime free, and now it was an area plagued by burglaries. Now you know, Denise name was Denise Amberley. She grew up as Denise Goth.

She was, as you said, twenty one year old, mother of two little boys, lived on La Tour Avenue. The housing tract was only partially occupied. She was a beautiful blonde. She liked to walk around your house wearing a T shirt and her husband's boxer shorts. And her husband had asked her repeated to keep the blinds closed when you dressed like that, and she always said, well, well, why, you know, it's hot out and there's nobody on the street anyway, nobody's going to look in. She'd done a

good student, smart girl, had attended some college. She met and fell in love with her husband, Nate Lee, while they were still in high school, and they started a very adult life at a very young age two kids. At the age of twenty one, Nate was working three

jobs along with being a musician in the local Philharmonic Orchestra. Also, Denise could stay home and take care of the babies, which was quite a job in itself because they were both in diapers and Nate was working as a meter reader when this happened, and he knew something was wrong well before he arrived home. He'd called eight Turns on his cell phone while in his car and was deeply distressed by the fact that Denise wasn't answering her phone.

on the downturn for him. In two thousand and eight, when this happened, his life was getting to be a bit of a mess. He was divorced, custody of a son he couldn't afford. He was dating a series of small blonde women. He had a type all with. All of his girlfriends looked alike. They're small blond women, and some of them were also crippled by dysfunction. So it was getting harder and harder for him to find work.

He was facing foreclosure on his north Port home, which had already been emptied of furniture by one of the exes. He was angry at the women he dated. He didn't have a criminal history, but when the monster within him emerged, it came out a big time. You know, his financial worries and his girlfriend troubles combined into an intense anger with a strong sexual component, and in frustration, he decided he was going to steal a woman and take what he wanted. As it turned out, boy did he ever

pick the wrong woman? Right? Let me tell you about.

She looked out the front window and you know, wondered what this guy in the car was up to. Let's go back and forth, back and forth, and at one point she even went outside, thinking the guy might be lost in need of directions. But for some reason, the man in the car did not watch Jennifer. He pulled into the next door neighbors park driveway instead, and so maybe he saw her through the living room window, just as Nate had warned her about. We don't know. We

don't know when it made him stop. But the car crawled into the Lee driveway very slow, and Jennifer went back to watching TV. The next thing she knows a few minutes later and the car is burning rubber down the street. You know, the guy completely peeled out, like a bat out of hell. He rives going very slowly

and leaves going very fast. Jennifer turned out to be a very important witness because as soon as police were informed that there was a woman missing, Jennifer was able to give them a description of the suspicious car and its driver. And when Nate Lee came home and found Denie gone, he didn't call nine one one. First, he called his father in law, Rick, who was a police sergeant in nearby Charlotte County. And if the victim had been anyone else, there might have been a delay in

the search because police would have been questioning Nate. When something bad happens to a married person, the spouse is always the first suspect. And you know, in other cases, police may assume that there had been in an argument, the life simply ran off and by be back soon. But in this case, because the victim's father was a cop, the search for her started right away, and within minutes of the call, you know that Denise was missing. There were k nineteens out in helicopters joining the search.

wrong right away, right you know. I. You know all books that have their own personalities when you when you research them, and in this one, I had a pretty good luck. Just about everybody I wanted to talk to offered their part of the story, but it was it turned out to be a person who didn't want to be interviewed that it gave me preaps the most profound message.

There was one veteran police officer who turned me down, not because he didn't want to be helpful, but because of something that seemed to me resemble post traumatic stress. He said that during his time as a cop, only two cases had gotten under his skin. The first unnatural death he ever saw, which was a suicide by hanging the investigator when he was a rookie. In this case, he just didn't want to relive it again. He got nightmares,

his hands started shaking just thinking about it. And he told me that for weeks, every time he closed his eyes, he saw the room in Michael King's house, where Denise Lee was, you know, repeatedly attacked me. I'll describe that more later. It wasn't the creepiness that got to him, but it was the evil he felt in that room. He didn't say so, but I think there was something

else as well. Not only was what happened to DENISLI disgusting and tragic, and her murder or evil to the core, but there was a sense of a wasted opportunity, that this was a murder that could have then prevented. Absolutely, yeah, I mean the thing as it's unbelievable. I want to make one quick correction of your introduction. The niece was only only managed to call nine one once. That just says it on the back of the book. But that's

an error, right. There were five nine one one calls made the law enforcement between the times Denise Li was abducted and when she was murdered. One call came from her and another came from a witness who could report the location of the kidnappers power as it drove through Northport in real time. The amount of info police had was incredible. Let me tell I'll run through the nine one one calls for you. Absolutely, because yeah, I mean. The first one is from Nate Lee, the husband, and

he reports that she's missing. And then but that's almost, you know, it's almost a mood point, because Rick Goff has already called for the dogs and the helicopters. The second call, second calls from Denise. She has managed to a quarter after six in the evening. And I have to admit that although I've read the transcript of this call many times, I've only been able to actually listen to it once. It's the most horrifying thing I've ever heard.

Panicky screams and cries in a woman who's just been repeatedly raped and sodomized, and who was now on her way to a secluded spot where she was to be killed. She just heard her abductor borrow a shovel from his cousin, and she knew what that shovel was for. He was going a barrier, And while in the backseat of the guy's come she managed to steal his cell phone and

call nine to one one. So she's in the back seat and he's driving, and in the backseat with her is the shovel and also the other things he had borrowed, a can of gasoline, and a flashlight, so she's got a good idea what's in store for her now. The nine one one system down there won no awards that day, but in this case, the operator did a really good job.

The operator quickly figured out what the situation was. She was reporting her own Denise was reporting her own abduction, and her abductor was nearby and didn't know she could hear the kidnappers. The operator could hear the kidnappers' voice in the background, and the operator was careful informing her questions, and Denise was brilliant in giving her answers so that her abductor didn't realize she was having two conversations at once.

Maybe a couple examples, Denise said, my name is Denise, I'm married to a beautiful husband, and I just wanted to see my kids again. That was after the operator asked her for he her name. When the operator asks where she lives, Denise says, please take me back to my house on Latour Avenue. It's the name of the street. At one point, the kidnapperr asks her where his phone is, while simultaneously the operator asks her if she knows this guy, and she says, I don't I don't have it, so

she answered both questions. Then the operator could hear the man's voice yell and anger at the woman as he realized that she did have his cell phone, and the call ends abruptly. You know, just that that's the most terrifying part when the call ends, because you realize, you know,

that's it. The key thing Denise did was she managed to keep a nine one one operator on the phone for more than six minutes, plenty of time for the cops to trace the call and learn that it was coming from the cell phone of Michael King, and minutes later, a motor vehicle data search shows that King drove a green Chevy Camaro, precisely the makeup car that Jennifer Eckert had seen behaving suspiciously hours earlier. And a couple of minutes later, nine one one is called again, and this

time there was a young woman. She identifies this identifies herself as Sabrina Muckslow. She totally operator.

name was Mucklow. The operator asked how did she know there was a woman in the car, and Sabrina said the woman had tried to escape, but King had pushed her back into the car. Now, the fourth call, the fourth nine one one call, was the most important and the one that was handled the worst. If he had to take a precise moment when law enforcement failed to save Benissa's life, it would be sometime during this ninety

one one call. It came only seven minutes after Sabrina Muckslow's call, and it came from a woman named Jane Kowalski, who said that she was driving through Northport to dead She was talking as she was driving. She's on her way to visit her grandmother, and she was seeing and hearing something that disturbed her. There was a man in a dark Camaro driving behind her, and he had a terrified child in his car. Jane had heard the child scream for help and saw a little hand on the window.

Jane was able to tell the operator in real time where the car was, and she continued to give the operator a running account of the Camaro's location until the car made an unexpected left turn and Jane lost it. Now, at that very moment that Michael King's driving his car, She's driving right past the police car that was stopped

at the intersection. But because of mixed communications in the nine to one one system and because there was a change of ships at that very moment, this incredibly urgent message did not go out to police cars on the road until many minutes later, and the opportunity was lost. The operator stayed on the line with Jane Kwalsky and made sure she was safe. Are your windows rolled up? The operator asked. She told Jane to pull over and wait for a police car to come and take her story.

While more time was lost as the operator tried to nail down in which parking lot Jane had parked, and the call ended. Jane waited and waited, but no cop car ever showed up. Jane called nine one one a second time, but the shift had changed. The operator had no idea who she was, and she had to start

all over. No pop power ever appeared in the parking lot where she pulled over, so eventually, you know, hoping that her eyes and her ears had been deceiving her, she continued on her way to Fort Myers to visit her grandmother. Okay, here's one to put in your what are the odds? Category? Jane Kowalski, the woman who called in, was a computer expert and had worked on a computer aided dispatch system for nine one one calls, so she knew exactly the information the operator needed and was giving

it to her in clear and concise manner. And she was giving the info in the correct order so they could be most easily entered into the computer system. Still the operator got it wrong. Now, since then, Jane Kwalski has given thousands of interviews and she always says the same thing. I was giving her exact locations. How could

they mess it up that they had? It took some doing, but Kowalski did convince the police that she was an important witness, and she picked out King from a line up at the police station, and months later was an effective witness for the prosecution at King's murder trial. Which brings us the night one call number four, about ten minutes to seven in the evening. And this call did

that come from somebody with Jane Kwalsky's communication skills. It came from Harold ms, the father of Sabrina, who had called earlier, and he managed to spit out that although he was not exactly sure of the nature of the emergency, he knew that there was somebody that don't want to be where they need to be, and they were in a green ninety five Camaro in Northport someplace. He said he knew this because the man had stopped by his house with a girl in the car to borrow a

shovel a gass can in a flashlight. But so I asked the man why he needed the items, and King said his lawnmower had broken down. Now, while Mukshah was giving the man the items, he saw he saw a girl get out of the car. She was tied up in some fashion and trying to escape, and the woman said Muslow called the tops. So Muxwell asked the man, Hey, what's this all about, and the guy said, don't worry about it. The operator asked for the man's identity and

Musloll said he didn't know the guy's name. Well, they knew from the from the previous call that they were cousins. Now Muxlow's attempted to keep himself in King Anonymous was in vain. Police listening to the tape of Denise's ninety one one call, heard the man in the background refer to his cousin Harold. Turned out King only had one cousin named Harold, and that was Harold Muxlow, and he lived in Northport, Bingo. And Muxwell made his call from

a pay phone so his idea would be protected. But by the time he got home, police were there waiting for him. So an assist call was from a guy named Sean Johnson, and he, like Jane Kowalski, was in traffic while King was driving Denise Lee and she was making a fuss in the back seat. But unlike Jane, Sean didn't call nine one right away. He had to think about it and it wasn't until he got home that he realized maybe he should report what he had heard. And they said he heard screams for help and so

one pounding on the window in panic. So there was five nine one one calls and by the time police discovered Mike King driving his Camaro, there was blood spatter on the car, a shovel in the back seat was wet, his shoes were sandy, and his jeans were sulking wet, and Denise Lee was nowhere to be seen. So that brings us to the discovery of the rape dungeon and the murderer's arrest.

There was blood and seamen stains on the rug, and throughout the house, investigators discovered pieces of duct tape with long blonde hairs clinging to them. A full length mirror that had been mounted to the living room wall had been removed and leaned against the bedroom wall positions so that the rapist could watch himself as he assaulted his victim. There was there was also a blanket that had bloodstains on it. The whole house was declared a crime scene

and sealed off. The arrest the arrested. Yeah, this life can be stranger than fiction. One of the more compelling characters in A Killing, Killer's Touch, I'll kill You. I'll get the title book right, A Killer's Touch the State trooper Eddie Pope. He was the arresting officer and if he's had to back ahead of time who would make the arrest. Pope would have been in odds on favorite.

He was smart, and he was lucky, and by always positioning himself in the best spot, he was often in a big bus and then he was the first to help during emergencies. He'd been named Trooper of the month so often, four times that he'd been trooped and also named Trooper of the Year and asked to throw out the first pitch at Tampa Bay Rays baseball game, and

that was before this case. So it's only to be expected that it was Pope who spotted the Camaro on the expressway and pulled him over and made the arrest. Pope saw the spatter in the car and noticed that it was still wet. Now because of that, he knew De Niee could not be far away. If she was too far away, the spatter would have either dried or flown off the car. And of course, you know, Pope's heart sunk because he knew what the spatter meant. He knew that the chair to the finding and he's still

alive were no longer very good. She also realized it's what a genius Denise was. In addition to her nine one one call, which showed quick thinking and in a moment of ultimate stress, she also managed to take her ring off and leave it in the backseat of King's car. She was going to make sure you know that this scumbag never hurt anyone ever again. Unfortunately, there wasn't much of a search that night. It stopped raining, but with the nighttime came a thickening fog, so the helicopters were

forced to land and did everybody get called home? So they waited till the morning to continue the search, and the meantime, King was brought in and questioned all night. The hope, of course, was that King would immediately tell them where Denise was, but he didn't. He kind of cotied a wild story about picking up a hitchhiker who attacked him, and eventually he and Denise were both hostages.

In an inspired move, the troopers put Harold Muxlow cousin Harold, who'd lent him to shovel, in the room with King and left them alone. Of course, the surveillance camera was running the whole time. Muxillow did a great job of quizzing King. He uh, you know, watched the tape a couple of times, and you know, he really did a good job of trying to trying to get King to mess up his story and be in a position where

he had to tell the truth. Obviously, obviously, when King came to Muxlow's house earlier that evening with Denise and Carr, there hadn't been another man who was holding them both hostage. But despite this, no matter how silly and unlikely King's story became, he stuck to it, and the Muxhill experiment didn't work, and Muxwell seemed to be searching for King's conscience. You know, he said things like, her parents are going

to need relief. They've got to find her body. Otherwise you've got to live with that, live with that for a long time. Otherwise her parents are all to be wondering where she is. She's still alive. But King didn't have a conscience to find Eventually, Muslaw was allowed to leave and police took up the interrogation, but King did not budget. Instead, he lawyered up.

I tell you the we talked a little bit about Robert Salvador, I remember him from the book.

began earlier that drizzly day. He'd gone target shooting with his gun, the only time he'd ever been known to go target shooting. You know, he went at the invitation of a coworker named Robert Salvador. Salvador went target shooting all the time, and King told police that Salvador early during the King told police about Salvador early during the interrogation, and police knocked on Salvador's door in the middle of the night. So Salvador had no idea that this woman missing,

none of that. Police ask him, have you seen Michael King lately? He says no. Now, did you go target shooting today? He says no. But his reason for lying didn't anything do with the crime. They were marital. Salvador's wife didn't like King, he was a creepy guy, and she thought her husband spent way too much time and money at the firing range. So this was double reason

for Salvador to lie, he claimed. Salvador claims he was he wasn't aware of the seriousness of the crime he was involved in, and he lied just so they wouldn't catch holy help from his wife, And like Harold Muxlow, his realization of the situation came in increments hours after police left his house. The following morning, as the sun was coming up, Salvador hears the news and he calls the police back and says, yeah, I saw King, and

yeah we did to a target shooting. Salvador said that King had his own nine milimeter gun, no ammunition, so Salvador gave him some ninammo. And police theorized the King pocketed a couple of bullets so you'd be able to use them in his gun later that day, and Salvador said he certainly had the opportune opportunity to do that. And Salvador passed the light detector text, so that's premeditation. King had practiced with the handgun he's already planned on

using later in the day. He borrowed his shovel, already planning the diggest shallow grave. Now, unfortunately for Salvador, he later became the target of King's defense team. They claimed that despite any logic or evidence, that Salvador had accompanied King throughout the attack and had in fact been the man to shoot thenies through the head. Of course, the jerry didn't buy Nobody nobody thought it.

but yeah, possible. And that was about the extent of it. Yeah, that's about all they had.

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the spot where he was apprehended. The shallow grave was discovered in the sandy soil off the Desolate Road. Road had been built to accommodate a housing development that was never built. So the case where land developers start working before they had buyers and then there were no buyers, so it was an odd site. There was a paved road, smooth rows of lines painted on it. There were fire hydrants, there was sidewalks, and yet you were in the middle of nowhere. It was a place where a madman could

do his dirty work without worrying about untimely interruptions. The body was discovered by the canine team with Tamy Treadway and her dog Ciccu. I had a really nice interview with Tanny Treadlights, a lovely woman and she loves her dog. There were blood spots in the sand and the CSI people were called in and the spot was excavated by forensic archaeologists and ANCHI at a time until the remains of Deniseli were unearthed. She was naked and shot once

through the right temple. There were bruises in the shape of handprints on her body. She'd been brutally and multiply penetrated, and DNA results indicated her attacker was Michael King because she was the daughter of a well known and liked cop. Her funeral was huge. On the trip from the church to the cemetery, rose petals were sprinkled in the road.

Fire trucks led the way, their lights going around. Spectators lined the road and saluted as the hearst carrying Denise's coffin drove by elementary schools emptied so students could stand outside and watch. It was a big deal. I don't think that there's going to be anything like that on the day that they killed Michael King.

You know, it's it's hard to compare because Nate didn't handle it nearly as well as rip kids, and nobody possibly could. Yeah, I've noticed there's some of the cases where there are professionals who are used to dealing with very differentical scenes and subjects. They have a place in their brain where they go. I once covered a case where a physician had lost his family to a home invasion, and when he talked about the case, he talked about it as a doctor would. And Rick talks about this

case as a cop would. You know. He tried to get him to talk about it as a dad would, and it doesn't happen. He's not going to share that part.

You know, I hate to say anything disparaging about the Denise amber Lee Foundation, but they're trying to make a universal issue out of what it is largely a local one. People why I live in New York, if I call nine one one in five minutes, I will have a fire truck, an ambulance, and a police power out in

front of my house. John stain case. Nine one one systems in most places are just they're very efficient, they're great, and because this one operator screwed this up to try to make it a national deal, nine one one systems are inadequate and they need to be better. Is a little bit of a stretch, which isn't to say that he's not a great guy and he's trying to do what's right in his mind. But I think that maybe

a victim's advocacy foundation would be better. I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out why Michael King did what he did. You know, I think with most criminals, we see obvious foreshadowing, harbingers of things to come, you know, a slow deterioration of civilized behavior until boom, you know, they snapped and they turned into a psycho killer. But

with Michael King, not so much. I think You could have talked to him the day before it happened and you would have said, well, you know, he's not the brightest guy in the world. He's okay guy. So maybe there's something in his history of dating it triggered this. So I put together a little short, you know, sketches of the women we know from his past to see if we can find clues that might you know, and you tell me, and then your listeners. I would love

to hear their feedback as well. But I'll start with Danielle. She was King's wife, and that's as hard as we don't know about anything about his dating career before her. She was his wife and the mother of his son, who was an adolescent when this happened. We get an inkling of what sort of person she was by the fact that a judge awarded King custody of their boy. Danielle had met a new man through the Internet and

took off at the time of the murder. King said he talked to her maybe once or twice a year at the most, So okay, you might have some hostility towards women over there. Next, we have a woman and the in the book I call Amy Sue probably the most bizarre relationship that he had with a woman. He met her on a phone sex chat line and she told him that she was fifteen years old, although she was actually twenty five. She later said, how he thought I was really fifteen. I don't know. I had a

five year old son. He must have figured it out, but he didn't. She said she lived and she thought was back on the phone sex challenge. She said she lived in Tennessee and was looking to get away and have an adventure. She said she was five too, weighed just one hundred pounds and had blonde hair, just what he liked. So King drove to Tennessee and picked her up and brought her back to his house in Northport. She was stuck in the house with no place to go,

nothing to do. She later said he was very controlling. She was allowed to do things for shopping and go for the walks only when she was with him. She tried to run away a few times, but he caught her and brought her back. Since she was a drug add he bought her drugs and that you know, kept her home in content for a while and when she ran away, you know, he would just offer her drugs

and she said, okay, I'll come back. One time she got a member of her family to call King and remind him that she was only fifteen and needed to be home or else, and that did the trick for a while. She agreed to come back at one point if he bought her a car, which he did, and as soon as she got the car, she used it to drive back to Tennessee and he reported the car stolen. So it's a mess. Amy Sus said that Shelley talked

to him once after the stolen car incident. She called him from Tennessee to say that she was pregnant and the child was his, and then, you know, an attempt to extort more money out of him, and after the conversation, she said, he changed his phone number. During during his time with Amy Sue, he was a regular. King. One King was a regular at a beauty parlor where he had blonde highlights put in his hair and had his body waxed, a full Brazilian. You know what that means.

all together, like the Brady Bunch. She told police the King wanted to experiment sexually, but she wasn't into it. She had rules, no toys, and nothing that wasn't natural. Jennifer said that before they moved to her house, they tried to live together in his, but King didn't want her to work, so she stayed home and cleaned, and she didn't even have the opportunity to call her parents. She had her cell phone with her, but not her charger.

King managed to cut her off from the rest of her life for a time, and it took her a long time to get as semblance with control back. She grabbed her kids and high taled it back to her

own home. He visited her there frequently and eventually moved in with her, and he took his stuff with him, and when he was kicked out of there after money disappeared at the store run by Jennifer's dad, he left without his furniture and his time with Jennifer overlapped with his next and final girlfriend, who was named to Neil. To Neil seemed very regular. I mean, she seemed like a little sweeter, also not so bright, But it seemed like an attempt by Michael King to find a good woman.

Not am not a woman who was going to kick ef sex with him, or who was fifteen years old or any of that, but got good companion. And he met her because she played dingo with his mom. And she told police that in the days before the murder, King had fouled for bankruptcy and had hopes that he was going to be able to keep his house. She had no idea that there was a brutal sex crime in him. She said a typical date with him was going to Applebee's shopping at Walmart. They like to cuddle

up together and watch movies. Said sex with King was frequent, but not unusual. Sure, oral, but no bondage, no role playing. It had sex twice during the previous week before the attack on Denise, so you know he wasn't he was. He should have been satiated to a certain extent. And he didn't use the condon but that was okay because she had had her tubes tied and was also on

the pill, just to be sure. The last number of our rogues gallery of kingswomen is a woman I call Stephanie in the book, and Stephanie, it's all to be unfair to call her a girlfriend. She was even tinier than the other She's four ten, and she demonstrates the lengths to which King would scheme in order to have sex. She was a drinker and the wife of one of King's co workers. He did repeat favors for this guy who was down and out and needed work just to

have excuses to get near his wife. And when he was alone with the woman, he told her what a bad guy her husband was. You know it. He's a steamer. One day he takes Stephanie to his house and his son and his parents are in the living room. They put Stephanie in his bedroom and gives her a couple six packs of beer, knowing that she'll drink it because she's a drinker. She drinks and she falls asleep, and when she wakes up, she's on her stomach on the bed,

her pants are down, and King is raping her. She just, you know, she just called her husband and told him to come and pick her up. And when police talked to her after the murder, she recalled hearing King and some of his friends talking about the underage girls they'd had sex with, a conversation that she said creeped her out. So, yikes.

you want You wanted to talk about the trial more. Obviously, the dramatic highlight at the trial is Denise's nine one one tape. Sure, the prosecution read a transcript of the tape during the opening arguments, but it was it was the playing of the tape itself. There was the emotional peak at the trial. Friends and loved ones were alerted ahead of time, but the tape was going to be played, so they would have an opportunity to step out in the hall if they wanted to. And it's hard to have. Yeah,

the women did and Nate both stayed. It's hard to describe the effects the tape had on people, and it did, you know, It's just it's traumatizing. Like I said, I was to it once, I said, okay, I got it. I never have to listen to that again. The amazing thing is, yeah, Rick and Nate stay rocks rhythmically and shutters. He looks like he's he's working to stay inside his skin, and Nate remains perfectly still, which a little bit of

a opposite of what I would have expected. Nate's Nate just kind of closes his eyes and eyes and goes into a very still place. And Rick, I'm sure he's just you know, every ounce of his energy is not attacking the guy sitting at the defendant's table. They both heard the tape before. I should note Rick heard it only minutes after it was recorded. He was going, who idd the voices that on the tape? As you know

that of Denise? And Nate listened to it once before, just so that he wouldn't be hearing it for the first time in court.

against them. Sure, you don't want them reacting to things, especially you know, angrily, And that was true in this case. To the extreme. King seems so catatonic during the proceedings. He would sometimes go the entire court day moving nothing but his eyes, and they would flick about the courtroom. He wouldn't turn his head, look from side to side, end up and down. Wow, very odd. The judge Economy h had had had his fill of this after a

while and he stopped proceedings. He said, We're not going to have any more testimony until somebody examines this guy and you know, tells me that he still knows what's going on here. So they had some the shrinks give him ask some of the questions, what are the rules of the court, Why are you here? What role does this guy play? What role does that guy play? He got all the answers right, and the trial went on becaus I said before. The defense came in two stages.

At first, they argued that King was innocent, not of the abduction. In the rape. There was no you know that that had been pretty much proven. But because there was no gun, they argued that the murder had been committed by Rob Sellador, right, you know. It wasn't until after the jury had found King guilty of murder after less than two hours of deliberation and during the penalty phase of the trial that the defense tried to argue that King was legally insane at the time he ended

Denise's life. I don't know if you remember. Last time I was on with you, we talked about the Steven

Stanko who and the book Watch Mommy Die. And there was a doctor Wu who testified that Stanko was not guilty by reason of insanity due to brain damage, and to prove this he brought out PET scans, stood for positron emission tomography, and the doctor claimed that he could make pictures in which you could see insanity that as you could see that the patient's frontal lobes weren't firing on all cylinders and thus the patient had no impulse controled.

In that case. The Stanko case, the claim was that Anko had been hit in the head with a coat pile as a teenager, and in this case it was a fledding accident. But you know whatever, Doctor Ruth does this all the time, and he gives remarkably similar testimony in every case, and he's never been successful in the criminal case, but he did once help someone win a civil case with his pet scans, so yeah, but they got his brothers to testify after showing the pictures of

King's brain with the frontal lobes not firing properly. They got King's brothers to testify that when he was a boy, he was riding on a sled being pulled by snowbollfild, being driven by his older brother, and they were going eighty miles an hour, and when the brother made a turn, Mike swung and his head hit a shed or a pole,

depending on which family member you believed. Family members couldn't corroborate the claim that with any medical paperwork, and experts say that a head hitting a pole at that speed would smash like a pumpkin. Prosecutor prosecutor Karen Frevelegg said that kind of impact would have turned King's head into

apple sauce. So now, Interestingly, King's mother didn't testify at the trial because she'd she'd earlier been asked that the prosecutor ln Errand had as many of the family members interviewed as right after the arrests as he could get a hold of, and they asked they asked King's mom if he'd ever suffered any head injuries and she'd said no, So if she wanted to testify to the sledding injury at the trial, she was gonna have to explain that answer,

and they didn't put her on the stand. The defendant's brothers also took turns talking about several incidents in Mike's life in which his damaged brain had caused him to act in a a dangerous trance kind of a fugue state. Most memorable of these was once when Mike King watched the movie The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and then, imitating the movie, ran around the house wielding a gas operating chainsaw, scaring

everyone and filling the house with exhaust. And there was another time when he was imitating Elmer Fudd from a Bug's Bunny cartoon and used an actual bow to fire an actual arrow at his brother so hard that the

arrow went right through a door. Now the brothers all agreed that Mike King had been having nosebleeds and ringing in his ears ever since his brain injury, and King's girlfriend Jennifer was called to the stand to describe how his behavioral problems, paranoia and the like had grown worse during the months leading up to his attack on Denise. But on September fourth, two thousand and nine, after three hours of deliberation, the jury unanimously recommended the death penalty

from Michael Camp. And he waits, he waits, he waits the valium needle.

get Michael King to confess, which seemed heartfelt. And but the other thing was there's a very good argument that Muck's so stupid. And you know, he came not only that, but he came from a culture of a segment of society in which no one ever calls the cops ever for any reason, especially if on his cousin on family. You know, the light bulb on over his head went

on just a little bit at a time. When he called his daughter and asked what he should do, he thought about what his cousin had said, and you know, he needed the can, the gas, the cand of gas, the shovel in, the flashlight for his riding mower that had broken down. So the first thing he does, he gets in his car and he goes over to Mike King's house and to see if there's a broken down riding mower on the lawn. You know, the story might

be true. He's still thinking, and only after he sees that there, you know, there is no riding mower, that he goes to the payphone and calls nine to one one. He's not completely innocent, obviously, he was looking to protect his own butt as well. He didn't give his name when he called. But we do know that, you know, Michael King might not have had a conscience, but Harold Muxlow did. As Muckslough was describing for police, his realization when he first realizes he could have shave that woman

but didn't, he pursed into tears. Yeah, but that's that evil man, that's the man who was slow on the uptake.

chance to cool down if you could separate them. But now with Facebook, in my Space and that kind of thing, they can act it back, you know, twenty four hours of just needling each other, and because it's a social media's fall in public. And the story takes a tragic turn when one of them brings a knife to the fistfight. One girl stabbed to death and the other, who's far smaller than the victim, claims she was jumped ahead a

right to defend herself. With a weapon. And in the meantime, the young man who's the subject of their love, you know, is a pretty boy and a complete piece of craft. So that's that's that's the next book.

when I was growing up. Two teenage girls were friends of mine. Georgia Ane Formacola and Catherine Ann Bernhardt, disappeared on the first weekend of summer vacation in nineteen sixty six, while swimming in a creek that ran behind my house, next to an old stone trestle. Their bodies were found a month later, brutally murdered with a knife in bushes next to railroad tracks. They disappeared on one side of

my house and were found on the other. So I grew up knowing that the boogeyman had crossed my back field one night. Makes it kind of hard to sleep, and maybe the reason why I've ended up doing what I do for a living too. I think that's probably belief.

Kathy Bernhard. So I've been talking to everyone I can find who might know something, and learned just last week that the Monroe County Sheriff's Office is going to release their files to me, despite the fact that it's technically an open case. I convinced them that they have an eighty six year old woman here who needs closure. Let's declare this historical and make it public. So we're making progress there.