Michael Benson's True Crime Bundle (47 page)

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Authors: Michael Benson

BOOK: Michael Benson's True Crime Bundle
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He couldn’t find her house. “I had to give him directions
many times,
” she said.
They all rode around in his white van and stayed in one hotel room; the boys in one bed, Mike and Jennifer in the other. “Lights were left on. Nothing happened,” she added.
But he was so calm—and he made her comfortable. Next day, Mike drove Jennifer and her son home. The babysitter, a friend of Jennifer’s sister, met Mike and told Jennifer, “He’s a cute one. You better hang on to him.”
In another circumstance, Jennifer might have been suspicious that Mike was still married or had another girlfriend, but she could tell by the way Matt talked that there was no one.
Still, he had everything going for him, and she couldn’t figure why he’d be interested in a poor mother of two—especially one who lived fifty miles away. She never would have a good answer for that one.
The relationship grew. Mike met her parents and they all went together to the aquarium in Tampa. Jennifer’s mother got sick, had to be on a ventilator, and Mike came to visit Jennifer at the hospital in Ocala. “He’d come sit with me,” she said.
That was when they became lovers. They were at her house. The kids weren’t there.
“I don’t know who came on to who,” she said, although she considered herself the dominant one. The sex was normal—very, very straight. She remembered having to tell him to loosen up. He said he was not “involved that much” with sex. When he was married, there wasn’t a lot of sex involved, and she believed him. The only unusual thing he liked was having his feet rubbed, and she didn’t think it
that
strange. He was “just shy,” when it came to stuff like that.
“Of course, there were some things I told him right off the bat I wouldn’t do, so don’t ask. Nothing with toys, nothing that wasn’t the natural way. He said no problem to that,” Jennifer remembered.
She tried to buy him a pornographic magazine once, but he said he didn’t want it. The only magazines he was interested in were about cars. “Cars, cars, cars,” Jennifer said. He was still quiet, unless the subject was something he knew about. “If it was plumbing or cars, he’d run his mouth,” she recalled.
Her mom complained that Mike didn’t know how to make conversation, but her dad had better luck. Jennifer told her mother she had to talk about a man subject. “That was what Mike could do.”
Mike was more affectionate toward her daughter than her son, she noticed. She was the more affectionate child. It never made Jennifer uncomfortable, though. He didn’t handle her in a weird way or anything, and he was never left alone with her.
Mike was with her parents a lot more than she was with his. Jennifer met his parents a total of four times, tops. He drove her down there and she had dinner with them. “His mom was different. She was okay. His dad was a really nice guy,” Jennifer opined.
She asked Mike what was the deal with his ex-wife; did he think he’d ever get back with her? He said no way. She was out of state.
Maybe
they spoke twice a year.
In July 2006, Jennifer’s mom got out of the hospital and she left her kids in Homosassa and moved in with Mike at his house in North Port. The first time she saw the house on Sardinia was when she was moving in. She remembered he had a stomachache. Turned out to be ulcers or something. His kitchen was done up nice, because his mother had done that, but the rest of the house was sparsely furnished, with little or nothing on the walls. The school across the street was under construction, but scheduled to open for the next school year. She admitted she was a little worried about money. She doubted her father was going to keep paying her if she stopped working at his store. Mike said not to worry and gave her a small diamond ring. She had no friends in North Port, and the only friend of his that she knew about was a guy named Rob. They had dinner at his house once, with Rob and his wife.
The police showed Jennifer a photo of Rob Salvador, King’s friend from the shooting range—and she said that was the guy. She remembered Rob and his wife had a lot of kids (six, police knew) and were deeply religious. Before they went over there, Mike warned his son to watch his language in front of them. Jennifer remembered thinking, sure, it was okay for Matt to curse around
her.
There was also a guy named Carlos Saenz (pseudonym), who worked with Michael King. He was a funny guy, but not the type you’d want to hang around with, Mike said. He skipped work a lot and pulled the Hispanic card if they tried to fire him.
Did King mention any family living in North Port? Jennifer said he said something about having a cousin who lived nearby, but she never met the guy. (Police concluded this was a reference to Harold Muxlow.)
King didn’t want Jennifer to work, so she stayed home and cleaned. “That was the cleanest I ever had a house,” she said, “because I didn’t have anything else to do.”
He told her they would never break up. There was no reason for her to keep her home in Homosassa. He allowed her to pick up some of her stuff, but the washer and dryer stayed behind. If they did break up, he’d buy her a new one.
Jennifer went along with it, but she didn’t completely buy it. She’d been around the block once or twice, and had heard this story before. She left a lot behind, and he never took her back to get it.
She didn’t even call her parents. She had her cell phone but not the charger. King, she later learned, knew her family was looking for her, but didn’t relay the message.
It wasn’t right to call her a captive. She had her car and she could leave. Mike, in fact, would tell her to go out, go to a store. She didn’t know her way around, so she stayed in the house. The only road she knew was the one that went to Super Walmart.
They did get her kids, and her son went to school across the street. King wasn’t stingy with money and always made sure they had enough to eat.
When bored she’d go for walks during the day, but Mike said don’t, there were a lot of construction workers up and down the street and he didn’t want them looking at her.
Eventually Jennifer started talking to her dad again.
When that little girl was murdered in North Port, King told Jennifer that she and her daughter should be extra vigilant regarding strangers, and should always keep the door locked when he wasn’t around. King said they shouldn’t go to the grocery store. In fact, he didn’t think Jennifer should take her daughter outside at all. When he got home, he said, he would take them to the grocery store.
One time, a neighbor lady came to visit and Jennifer fixed her a cup of tea. When Mike heard about that, he was unhappy and told Jennifer he didn’t get along with his neighbors.
She was a big help to him when it came to paying his bills. He had trouble writing checks—getting the numerals in the right order and writing the amount in words—and Jennifer helped him. His mortgage payment was huge, she recalled, and she also had trouble writing a number that big in words.
Stuck in the house all day, Jennifer had plenty of time to snoop through his stuff. To her relief, she learned that he really was divorced. There was also evidence of previous girlfriends. One of his ex-girlfriends, in particular, left a bunch of stuff at his house. As far as Jennifer knew, she never got any of it back.
It was when they talked about his exes that they began to quarrel. The arguments with King got worse and worse.
In October 2006, the blowout fight started when Mike lied about going to a tanning place. He called her a nasty name and she threw macaroni and cheese at him. He said she was looking for an excuse to go back, and she said maybe she was. She grabbed her kids, some of their stuff, and hightailed it back toward Homosassa. As she was headed out, he got on the phone, making like he was calling the cops on her.
She didn’t make it all the way, but called her dad from a cheap hotel and told him she was broke. Dad said they were always welcome back home. Mike called Jennifer’s dad after a few days and said he just wanted to make sure she and the kids were safe.
During the last months of 2006, Mike continued to call. For weeks, she ignored the calls, but finally she talked to him. She said if they were ever going to live together again, it had to be up there. She couldn’t be in North Port anymore. It just wasn’t home.
And she was working again for her dad, and that wasn’t going to change. She knew Mike didn’t want her to work, but she had to. Life was too boring, otherwise.
He began to visit her frequently and talked about buying a house in Homosassa. By January 2007, they were back together, at least on weekends. It was at this point that Jennifer first realized that money was an issue for King. What up until then had appeared to be a bottomless well of funds started to dry. He admitted that he couldn’t afford to buy a house and needed to rent. He sold a couple of his cars. He tried to sell his house in North Port, but it wouldn’t sell.
By the end of January, she and Mike had rented a house—the same house where the police were currently asking her questions. He moved his furniture from the house on Sardinia up to the rented house in Homosassa, which was why the house down there was empty. Jennifer watched Matt, who went to school in Homosassa. Mike was still working at Babe’s Plumbing in Venice and had to get up at 3:30
A.M.
to get to work on time.
Eventually he quit his job at Babe’s and went to work for the local Homosassa Roto-Rooter. When he lost that job during the summer of 2007, he took his son and they left for Michigan. Jennifer had no clue how long he was there. A long time. Longer than a month.
When he did come back, he didn’t try to get a regular job but instead hatched a buying-and-selling cars scheme. They were together until Thanksgiving, 2007, when they broke up for good.
On that day, he needed to wear one particular pair of jeans, even though he had many identical pairs, and was taking forever to wash and dry them. She knew he was just stalling. He didn’t eat any Thanksgiving dinner and wouldn’t help clean up. She told him to get the heck out of her life and he started to scream, so much that she was embarrassed that her father was hearing it. Since they came in her truck, he and Matt walked the four miles home. When she finally returned home, Mike and his son, along with his car and a lot of their belongings, were gone.
There was another car at the house, a green Camaro. It was part of King’s buy-and-sell scheme. The car had damage on the front end, so King put the black “bra” on it to cover the damage up, and hoped to sell the car for a profit.
Jennifer searched her hiding spots, where she kept the money bags from her father’s store, and discovered King had stolen cash. The bags had been moved. Inside, the big bills were gone, but the small bills were left behind—so the bags still appeared full. More than $1,000 was missing. Jennifer called King’s mom, who was in Michigan at the time, and told her about the stolen money.
“If you hear from Michael,” Jennifer said to Patsy King, “tell him to return the money, no questions asked, and he can be on his way.”
She waited and waited, and nothing happened. She called her father and asked him what to do. Jennifer’s dad said she should call the Citrus County sheriff’s department. She explained to a deputy that she had to go to work the next day and was fearful King would return and clean her out. The next morning, as expected, King showed up with a U-Haul rental truck and began to load up his stuff. Lawn mower, propane tank. Three or four 4-wheelers. Later he called and denied taking the cash from the money bags.
“Somebody must’ve broken in,” Mike said, adding that he would help her pay the money back. She talked to the deputies again. They told her King said she made the story up about the missing money, that she’d probably taken the money for herself. They wanted her to take a lie detector test.
The last time she
saw
King was two weeks after Thanksgiving. She told him he was a pathological liar, but there was still hope for them. All he had to do was go to her father, admit that he took the money, and make arrangements to pay it back. He again denied it and left—and that was that. He called her at midnight on the dot, New Year’s, but she didn’t pick up. He didn’t leave a message. The last time she spoke to him was January 12, five days before the murder.
She said, “What do you want?”
He said, “Do you still love me?”
She repeated, “What do you want?”
He said he wanted to thank her, you know, for the good times. She asked where he was working. He said he was still plumbing. She asked where, and he said some odd name she’d never heard before. She didn’t ask from where he was calling.
Did he have a gun? Sure, she replied. He had a little brown pistol. The box for it was in the house somewhere, but he never kept the gun in the box. He was afraid the kids would get at it. She’d seen him clean it. He had it wrapped in a towel and in a closet. She was pretty sure he took it with him when he left for North Port.
Could they come in and take photos of her house? Sure, no problem. To get into the house—which was white but needed a coat of paint, or at least a hosing off—they had to climb up five rickety wooden steps. Although the house itself wasn’t of the best construction—a mobile home attached to a small structure of permanent construction, with a living-room ceiling on a slant—it was nicely furnished, and the living room featured a large flat-screen TV.

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