Michael Benson's True Crime Bundle (46 page)

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Authors: Michael Benson

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CHAPTER 4
CANINE SEKOU
Tami Treadway was a SCSO Animal Services supervisor, a civilian employee, who trained dogs to conduct search-and-rescue missions. The dogs, once trained, could no longer live in a normal home, and they needed to be placed with a search-and-rescue specialist or a member of law enforcement. She made sure everyone was trained properly—humans and dogs alike—and safeguarded the dogs’ health.
She had her own dog, of course. Canine Sekou was his formal name; he was a golden retriever she’d handled for six years.
Sekou
was a South African word for “great warrior” or “learned one.”
“He was my husband’s dog,” Treadway later said. “He got him from his nephew in New Orleans, where my husband is from. We weren’t together at the time, although we were both members of the team. He got Sekou to be a search dog, and trained him initially in wilderness searches. We got together when Sekou was young.”
When her husband went to school to become a firefighter and a paramedic, Tami Treadway took over Sekou’s training. The dog was trained in human remains detection, and Treadway had been his handler since.
“He’s still my husband’s dog in the family sense, but I’m the one who has worked him,” she noted.
Treadway and Sekou were a team, she and that dog, two halves of a whole. She could read his body language like a book, and he “told” in a million ways just what he was doing and thinking. He was her partner. They lived together. They slept together.
Golden retrievers made great search dogs, but they were by no means the only breed capable of doing the work. German shepherds, Labs, Australian cattle dogs, and even mixed breeds were also suitable. Aptitude varied more from dog to dog than from breed to breed.
A dog trained in human remains detection followed the scent of decaying human body parts, so Sekou’s searches almost never had a happy ending. Most were just flat-out heartbreaking.
“The one that sticks out in my mind was a case in Tampa, to the north of us. They had some intelligence that a girl might have had something bad happen to her with a guy who lived in the house, and they wanted us to search this empty house. Stripped-to-the-walls empty. It had a concrete floor, and they thought he might have buried her under the concrete.” They never went in with just one dog, always with three or four, because a “dog will be a dog” and they don’t have 100 percent success. All three dogs in this case came up with nothing in the house. In fact, they didn’t even want to be in the house. They kept trying to go outside. So they moved the search to the backyard, and the dogs hit on a spot near a shed. There, about six feet down, they found the girl’s body.
The girl’s name? Treadway didn’t know. She might never know. “We try to be disconnected,” she said.
But there was no way to be disconnected in this case. She lived in North Port and the search for the missing Denise Lee was all over the local news, even before she and Sekou took up the search.
Even if you weren’t watching TV, you knew something was up, with so many roads closed by police. To make it even more personal, Denise was the same age as Treadway’s daughter; and her daughter had two little boys, just like Denise.
The dogs don’t know, of course. They are just happy that they got their toy or their reward for a successful search. Sekou had a clownish personality, and that didn’t change just because he was searching for a cadaver. He never picked up on the grimness of the task.
On January 18, 2008, Treadway and Sekou were called in to assist with the search for Denise Lee. She was given her orders by the sheriff, and they were one of six-to-eight canine teams involved in that day’s desperate activities.
The initial plan was to search a wide variety of areas, in the vicinity of the Lees’ house, around King’s house, and the area around Harold Muxlow’s home.
But Trooper Pope said their best bet was to search in the area of King’s arrest, and that was where Sekou and Treadway were happily doing their thing.
CHAPTER 5
THE DISTURBED EARTH
The search continued into the early-morning hours. Tami Treadway and Sekou strode with purpose into a remote swampy section off an unfinished road. The dog was particularly curious around a large pile of sand, the grains of which resembled those found in the Camaro and on the suspect.
There was an unfinished development off Toledo Blade, and the site was part of that. Construction had stopped in the middle when the economy fell; this part of the road had gone undeveloped. The location was just off Cranberry Boulevard.
The search was interrupted briefly when a fire chief on the scene called it a night and ordered the search resumed in the morning. Many searchers, including Pope, left, but Treadway remained on the scene. She and Sekou returned to the area near the large pile of sand.
Sekou wandered into the wooded area and then came back out. He went back in; this time, Treadway followed him.
“Whatcha got, boy?”
There were pine trees and a gully. At one point, both woman and dog had to go under a fence to proceed. Treadway saw a spot where pine needles had fallen, where perhaps there had been standing water, where the ground was darker. It was a sandy area, and it was a spot where the vegetation differed from the surrounding area. There was clay mixed in with the sand at that spot, indicating the surface was recently tilled.
Plus, it was this spot that had Sekou reacting. A barbed-wire fence bordered the scene at its rear. Without touching anything, Treadway set out to call law enforcement to the scene, which was taped off and slowly excavated.
No, it wasn’t that easy. The first police officer she encountered out on the street paid no mind to her. “He wasn’t interested and left,” Treadway later recalled with frustration in her voice.
Luckily, there were other officers in the area, and eventually the area was sealed off. Looking at the ground at that spot carefully, armed with flashlights, police saw what appeared to be blood in the sand. The large sand pile nearby was missing shovelsful of sand on one side. The sand was very light, the kind Floridians called “sugar sand.” On the ground between the pile and the disturbed earth, there was bloody sand in two dinner plate–sized piles. It hadn’t been caused by someone bleeding over a sandy spot. The sand was on top of the blood, placed to hide the blood. The blood had already been there, pooled in spots.
SCSO crime scene technician Lisa Lanham arrived on the scene. First order of business for her was to preserve the evidence. A tent was erected over the site to accomplish that. Because the ground was wet and sloped, sandbags were piled up on one side of the suspicious location, to help prevent water from seeping in.
All of this was starting to paint a picture. The disturbed earth was now being referred to as the “potential grave site.” Lanham bagged blood, sand, and sandy blood. She noticed that there were some blades of grass in the area that were naturally red. Back at the lab, they would determine what was and wasn’t blood. Excavation would begin the following morning, under natural light. Lanham left the site and reported to another emergency; then she returned to the white tent on the morning of January 19.
CHAPTER 6
JANUARY 19, 2008
On Saturday morning, Jane Kowalski again called the hotline number. The reaction was still lukewarm.
“We probably need to talk to you,” the operator said. “We’ll have someone call you back.”
“Okay, I’ll be home all day,” Jane said.
She never went far from her phone, but again the authorities didn’t call.
 
 
Under the supervision of a professional archaeologist named Lewis “Skip” Wood, working for the SCSO, the excavation began at dawn. When Wood got there, he described the site as a shallow swale behind piles of palmetto root. For comparison purposes, Wood paced off fifty feet from the suspicious site and dug with a shovel a bit, overturning earth in a patch that measured two feet by two feet. He discovered that, as expected, the soil under the earth was similar in color to that found on the surface at the suspicious site. A quick visual analysis of the soil at the site revealed sand such as would be found at the beach; charcoal, the result of some past forest fire; and a brown soil that included degraded roots. The yellow sand found on the surface of the suspicious site had been twenty-two inches beneath the surface at the test patch that Wood had dug. What they had here was a hole that had been dug out, then filled back in.
Material was removed from the potential grave site a wafer-thin layer at a time.
With Wood was another archaeologist, Maxine Miller, who searched in vain for items that might yield a readable fingerprint. She took fresh photos of the site after each slice of earth was taken away. She placed measuring sticks on the ground before taking photos to provide a scale.
Both archaeologists avoided contaminating evidence by donning gloves, caps, booties, and white jumpsuits. Pine needles and pinecones were found beneath the surface, another indication of digging and refilling. The edges of the suspicious site were obvious. The soil was hard-packed all around, but it was looser and softer at the site itself.
As the digging continued, Wood and Miller could see “scallop marks” at the edges of the site, evidence of digging with a round-nosed shovel.
When the hole was still only inches deep, a human shoulder became visible.
As expected, it was the remains of Denise Amber Lee.
The medical examiner was called. Body found.
 
 
Wood and Miller used a variety of small shovels at first, but they switched to brushes once the body became visible. There would come a time when digging from the top of the hole was no longer practical. They would need a way to get at the earth at the sides of and underneath the body without hanging upside down. This, in essence, opened a door to the grave site and allowed them greater access to the soil under the body. The shallow grave ended up being four feet deep. Photos and videos were taken throughout the excavation. After a time, a plastic sheet was placed over it to prevent contamination from any trace evidence, possible wind-borne, that might blow into the hole.
The medical examiner was off duty, so his backup, Dr. Daniel Schultz, a competent forensic anthropologist in his own right, came to the scene and took charge. He officially pronounced the body dead, and the remains were wrapped in a plastic sheet, then lifted from the hole at 3:56
P.M.
There was soil still stuck to the body’s face, but Dr. Schultz didn’t remove it. He could see that there was also blood on the face, and he didn’t want to disrupt that.
The body had been packed in moist soil, a factor when he tried to determine time of death by taking the body temperature. The remains were wet for a while. The hands were a washerwoman’s hands. He’d seen hands like those before, on bodies pulled from swimming pools.
Once out of the hole, the cadaver was briefly unwrapped. Dr. Schultz noted fixed lividity—that is, a bruise-like discoloration—on the left side. With death, the blood stopped circulating and became subject to little else but gravity. Blood pooled on the bottom. Rigor mortis had set in. The woman had survived only a matter of hours after her abduction.
Dr. Schultz didn’t want to jump to conclusions as to cause of death, but the woman had suffered a potentially fatal gunshot wound to the head. He ordered her rewrapped and taken to the morgue. Everything he could see here, he could see better in the perfect light of the autopsy room.
 
 
After the body was photographed and removed, the archaeologists noted that some water seepage had gotten into the bottom of the grave site and the trench they’d dug.
Work continued at the grave site even after the body was gone. More layers of dirt were removed, sifted for hidden evidence, and bagged for laboratory analysis.
As soon as the victim’s body was found, and it was determined that a single gunshot most likely killed her, crime scene specialists examined the area with that in mind. They found a ring of dirty blond hair around an apparent bullet hole in a palmetto leaf only a few paces from the hole in the ground. Along that same path, police found a patch of shredded bark close to the ground, where the bullet apparently grazed a tree trunk. By running a string taut between the hole in the leaf and the groove in the trunk, they accurately determined the path of the bullet, which hit the ground just a couple of feet on the other side of the barbed-wire fence.
 
 
Well-wishers tied yellow ribbons around trees near the Lees’ home. Denise’s family was notified of the body’s discovery; they gathered at the Goff home for the grim wait, until the remains were positively identified.
Police, however, didn’t have to wait. They were allowed to assume. They theorized immediately that Michael King took Denise Lee to the remote location, dug the grave with a shovel he’d borrowed a few hours earlier, shot Denise to death, and then jumped into a pond or drainage ditch in an attempt to wash blood from his clothes and skin. The search continued for the victim’s clothes and the murder weapon.
The sad duty of telling the press of the discovery went to North Port police chief Terry Lewis, who said, “Today, forensics experts from the Sarasota County Sheriff’s Office and the medical examiner’s office did a very detailed, long search, and we’ve discovered the remains of an unidentified white female buried at that location. It will take several hours to make a positive identification of the remains.”
Still, the assumption was there, and everyone knew it.
Any connection between the suspect and the victim? No, Lewis said. “We have nothing to believe this was anything other than a random act of violence.”
When King’s neighbors heard about the murder, they almost exploded with frustration. Everyone knew there was something wrong in that house. Brian and Dana Lewis, King’s next-door neighbors, had called police on King twelve times since 2003, but police said they could never do anything because of lack of evidence. The Lewises complained that he’d thrown battery acid in their pool, pelted their car with eggs, and had slashed their tires, among other things. They said that until the previous year, Michael King, who was divorced, had been living with his grade-school-aged son. One neighbor complained that King had been stalking his daughter from the bus stop.
 
 
Sitting in his jail cell, Michael King was informed that a body had been found, more than likely that of the woman he’d been with.
“I’ll never go to prison,” he said. “I’ll kill myself first.”
In short order, the remains were identified as those of Denise Lee. Murder charges were added to those already filed against King.
Rick Goff tried to make a public statement but broke down. Nate Lee managed to say, “I’m going to miss her so much. And I don’t know how I’m going to go through the rest of my life without her.”
Investigation revealed that their suspect had been having financial troubles due to unemployment. He was under threat of foreclosure on his Sardinia Avenue home.
 
 
Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) Crime Laboratory analyst Steve Balunan processed the Lee home in search of previously undiscovered evidence. The residence was freshly photographed, documented, searched, and sketched.
The living-room carpet was vacuumed for trace-type evidence, and carpet standards were obtained. The house was thoroughly dusted for fingerprints. Among others, three prints were lifted from the interior of the sliding glass doors at the rear of the house.
Collected as evidence from the home were three pillowcases and a sheet from the master bedroom. A feminine pad from the bedroom garbage can was also seized. Three toothbrushes were taken from the master bathroom.
Other items taken were the cell phone resting atop a dresser in the southeast bedroom, and a tissue from the floor in front of the nightstand in the master bedroom.
 
 
That same day, just past noon, police tracked down Jennifer Robb, King’s ex-girlfriend, at her home in Homosassa, Florida. The lawn had been mostly burned away, revealing a near-white sandy soil. There were children’s toys in the back, and a rusted burn barrel on the side.
As were all of King’s women, Jennifer was diminutive. She weighed 102 pounds, and was born January 29, 1976. She admitted to knowing King, and ID’d his photo. Cops asked, “When and where did you meet Mike?”
“February 2006, at a wedding in Ocala,” she said. “We were both alone and they had dancin’.” She approached him. He said he didn’t dance, but they got to talking.
Mike introduced himself, said he lived in Sarasota, was divorced, had a son. She said she was a single parent also—two kids, a ten-year-old boy and a three-year-old girl. They exchanged numbers.
After the wedding, three weeks went by, and she called him. They spoke regularly on the phone over the next month before arranging to get together.
No e-mails. She didn’t do computer. She had one, but they said it didn’t have enough megabytes to get on the Internet, so she just played games on it. Mike didn’t have a computer. Well, his son did—but it only was used for game playing as well.
For their first date, Mike drove up to Homosassa. She didn’t travel well. He arrived about 10:00
P.M.
They met in a video store parking lot, each driving his and her own car. From there, he drove her—in his red Corvette—to Denny’s, where they had dinner. Afterward, they went to a dock, where it was dark and they were alone. Jennifer made jokes about being in such a vulnerable position with a “practical stranger.”
She couldn’t swim, but she didn’t let him know that. She told him, for all he knew,
she might be the psycho
and she could push
him
into the water. She asked if he could swim. The jokes made Mike nervous. He was so quiet.
They moved off the dock when a bunch of rowdy kids showed up and ruined the ambiance. They went to a different spot, on the other side of the parking lot, where they talked till dawn.
“Talked about this and that. I don’t know about what all—but I did most of the talking,” Jennifer explained.
Mike told her he was a “master plumber,” made good money. She said she worked at her dad’s pet store. She said he probably wouldn’t like her neighborhood, as it was all “trailer trash.” He said his mom lived in a trailer. She told him her son was biracial and asked if that was an issue. Mike said he had no problem with that. He and his family were familiar with biracial couples. With the morning light, he drove Jennifer back to her car. He had a long drive back down to North Port. He tried to give her fifty bucks. “I don’t need no money. I’m not strugglin’ that bad,” Jennifer said. He told her to spend it on her kids. She couldn’t argue with that, so she took the money.
They had a couple of dates after that, one at a flea market; then they got together at a park with their kids, so everyone could meet. He said he wanted to make sure Jennifer and his son, Matthew, got along because the kid had had issues with the women in his life.
Matt and Tyler were about the same age, so they hit it off. Mike and Jennifer did weekends together after that, including a trip to Disney. He picked her and her son up at her house. Her daughter stayed home with a sitter.

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