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Authors: Michael Benson

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In a storage area in the corner of a bedroom, they found a set of weights for lifting, an electric keyboard, which looked like it hadn’t been played in a while, and a box for a single-action semiautomatic nine-millimeter Parabellum pistol. When they opened the box, they found no gun, just a single shotgun shell and the nine’s instruction and safety manual. The box indicated that the gun had been purchased from Kassnar Imports of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
There were lots of photos of King, holding and kissing a little girl, fishing and lounging on a boat in the ocean, and one of him just standing there wearing what appeared to be the same sleeveless camouflage-colored shirt that he’d been arrested in.
Jennifer had learned about Denise Lee’s murder when her aunt called her up.
“Your Michael, what was his last name?” the aunt asked.
“King.”
“In that case, you’d better turn on the TV,” the aunt replied.
She couldn’t believe it. How could the man she knew and cared for behave this way? There must have been some mistake. She couldn’t believe that Michael would just randomly pick a woman to rape and kill.
Jennifer Robb still had feelings for Michael King—no matter what he did. She always would have feelings for him. He did so much for her family when they were together. He was a family guy. If Michael had been with her right then and there, she wouldn’t even feel nervous. She would feel completely safe. If anything, she felt guilty; it was clear to her that Michael needed help. There was something wrong with him to make him do these things. He needed help, and no one recognized that fact.
She’d never heard him mention any Denise. When she saw the photo of the slain woman on TV, she knew right away that she’d never seen her before.
Did King ever mention the name Coralrose?
Jennifer thought for a moment, failed to recognize the murdered little girl’s name, and shook her head.
The cops noted that when King was arrested, he had dyed hair. Did he do that when he and Jennifer were together? She said that he did. King went to the “hairdresser’s” and had it done. Jennifer didn’t like it and told him so. “I said he looked like a guy who likes other guys,” she said.
Wasn’t it true that he also shaved his chest and pubic hair? Yes, but she didn’t think that was odd because she shaved down there also. She told him it was cleaner, so she figured he was just trying to be like her.
Police located and interviewed Michael King’s current girlfriend, Tennille Ann Camp, who said she and King had been seeing each other off and on for about a year. They started dating in December 2006, but they broke up and King went back to his old girlfriend, a woman named Jennifer Robb, who lived in Homosassa. Then they got back together, late in 2007.
Although she and Mike were both from Michigan, that was just a coincidence. They hadn’t known each other “up north.” They met because she, like King’s parents, lived in Ellenton, and she played bingo with his mom. His parents were snowbirds, and they only lived in Florida during the winter.
She had stayed with Mike the previous Tuesday night. She called him on the phone on January 17, at 11:00
A.M.
She asked him how his appointment with the lawyer had gone that morning and he said fine. He was filing for bankruptcy, hoping to keep his house. He said he was watching TV at his house with his friend Rob [Salvador]. She asked him if he wanted to go to the Fifties and Sixties dance the next week, and he said he’d like that. He seemed normal.
She talked to him again, at 3:45 or 4:45
P.M.
(a time that police knew was during the abduction and attack of Denise Lee). Tennille asked him what he was doing and he said his parents had dropped off a trailer full of stuff at his house and he’d been going through that. He said he’d talk to her later. Again, he seemed perfectly normal. When she called back a couple of hours later, her call went straight to his voice mail.
Mike had been in Michigan for Christmas, and Tennille flew up there to be with him at that time. On the evening of King’s arrest, Tennille talked to his mom, who, apparently unaware of what had occurred, said she had a bed and a mattress for Mike, and to let him know if Tennille saw him. Tennille believed that King last saw his parents on Wednesday, the day before the murder.
She said Mike was a quiet guy, and he didn’t seem to be the type to do something “like this.” “Not that I know of,” Tennille added.
She described a typical date as going out to dinner—he liked Applebee’s—or shopping at Walmart or something like that. Sometimes they’d “cuddle up together and watch movies.”
He liked to fish and to work on cars. She knew that King had been married when he was in his twenties and that his ex-wife lived in Las Vegas with her boyfriend. Mike had a son, Matty, who turned twelve on Monday and lived up north with an uncle.
Tennille said sex with Mike was frequent but not unusual. Sure, oral—but no bondage, no role-playing. They’d had sex twice during the previous week—Sunday night and Tuesday night—both times at his house. He didn’t use a condom, but that was okay because she had her tubes tied. Plus, she was on the pill to be sure.
CHAPTER 7
JANUARY 20, 2008
Dr. Daniel Schultz began the postmortem procedure on the remains of Denise Lee at 8:30
A.M.
, January 20. In attendance were NPPD criminalistics specialists to process any discovered evidence.
The only thing she wore was jewelry: a gray-metal necklace with a heart-shaped pendant around her neck, and a wedding ring on her left ring finger. Her ears were pierced, but she was missing an earring, which would at some point be discovered near the grave site.
Two pieces of duct tape were removed from the back of the victim’s head. Those pieces were stretched out and placed on a board so they could be photographed, then bagged as evidence.
Once everything was removed from the body, it was measured and weighed. Five feet two inches, 109 pounds. Speaking aloud for the record, Dr. Schultz listed the wounds he found on the body’s exterior.
There was a bruise and abrasion on the back of the left arm and on the wrist. These looked as if they might have been caused by someone squeezing the arm and wrist with a powerful hand.
There were other bruises as well, apparently from hard impact with objects. On the legs, there were more bruises, shaped like handprints, in places where the killer had gripped her cruelly hard to control her during the attack. Four bruises that were lined up along the victim’s inner thigh represented fingers that had dug deep into the flesh.
The bruises were not healing—and, of course, would never heal. The pathologist could tell by their purplish hue that they had been suffered short moments before the woman expired.
The body was flipped over and the back observed. There was an abrasion to the scapula and a yellow discoloration that might indicate this wound was caused postmortem.
The body exhibited blunt-force trauma to the chin, along the angle of the jaw; plus, there was a contusion and abrasion on the left side of the face.
Also on the cheek was a pattern of abrasions that ranged in size from five millimeters to one centimeter. The bruises were parallel to one another, along a line, and separated by a three-millimeter gap.
The abrasions were surrounded by a maroon contusion, the color indicating that the wound was caused several hours before, but probably on the day of death.
Dr. Schultz now took a look at the gunshot wound. The entrance wound was on the right side of the face, and the exit wound, which was larger as expanding gases exited along with the bullet, was on the back left of the head.
He could tell that the killer had not just fired the gun from point-blank range, but had pressed the gun firm against the woman’s temple before pulling the trigger.
The entrance and exit wounds were carefully photographed, measured, and described. The bullet had done collateral damage. The shot had been fired so it traveled parallel to and directly behind the left eyebrow. The bullet passed immediately adjacent to the left eyeball with such force that the left eye had been exploded outward. There were fractures of the skull at the exit wound, and also at both sides of the left eye socket.
A sexual assault kit was used to take internal and external swabs from the victim’s mouth, vagina, and anus. The doctor created the swabs and then handed them off to a technician, who in this case was NPPD criminalistics specialist Pamela Schmidt.
Dr. Schultz described aloud the condition of the victim’s private area, a sad necessity because of the crime’s sexual nature. Looking at the vagina, the pathologist noted bruising on both sides of the labia minora. There was also bruising along the lower left portion of the vagina. Being a veteran investigator of sex crimes, Dr. Schultz recognized that these wounds were caused by insertion trauma, either the rough penetration of the vagina with a foreign object, or were caused when the victim struggled as she was about to be raped. They were a clear indication that a sex crime had occurred, as such bruises were extremely rare in cases of consensual sex. There were also injuries around and in the anus. There was a skin tear at the edge of the anus, measuring ten millimeters by two millimeters, with a contusion. This wound, like those on the vagina, was caused by insertion trauma—again, a wound that would have been extremely unlikely if the anal sex had been consensual. The wounds to both vagina and anus were caused before death.
DNA testing on the autopsy evidence received top priority. A test that normally might have taken weeks was done pronto. Those tests revealed that Denise Lee had indeed been raped, and the rapist was Michael King.
 
 
Back at the site of the shallow grave, Sarasota County deputy Anthony Egoville was searching with a metal detector. Squatting down and carefully moving the grass out of the way with his gloved fingers, he discovered a shell casing only a few feet from the sand pile. At first glance, he guessed it was either a thirty-eight caliber or a nine millimeter. (It turned out to be a nine.) He didn’t touch the casing, but rather he placed a marker at the spot and someone from forensics collected it.
 
 
At the NPPD, an SCSO polygraph expert administered a lie detector test to Robert Salvador, the man who’d gone target shooting with Michael King only hours before Denise Lee’s abduction. Robert said he had no knowledge of Denise’s ordeal and passed with flying colors.
 
 
It was also on Sunday that law enforcement finally returned Jane Kowalski’s phone calls. The call came from the case’s lead investigator, Detective Christopher Morales himself.
She intended to be fully cooperative, but first she was going to give him an earful. Considering her importance as an eyewitness, his callback was way past overdue.
Her memory was pretty good as it turned out, but they didn’t know that. For all they knew, precious details might have been lost due to the delay.
She was still at her grandmother’s, but ... “I’m coming home today,” she said. “I’ll stop by in North Port on my way.”
Morales said that would be fine.
Once the police had her, they did do a thorough job with her. With videotape rolling, Jane Kowalski sat down with two detectives and discussed “every little thing” she had seen on the evening of the murder.
They showed her a photographic lineup and she picked Michael King out of the pack without hesitation.
“Is that because you saw him on TV?” they asked.
“No, that’s the guy in the car,” she replied.
CHAPTER 8
THE VICTIM’S CLOTHES
On January 21, 2008, NPPD detectives interviewed Joe Dalton, who was Michael King’s boss at Babe’s Plumbing Inc., in Venice. According to Dalton, King began work there on September 14, 2004, and quit on June 20, 2007. He quit because he was going to take over a Roto-Rooter franchise in Port Charlotte, he claimed. He came in one Monday morning and said he’d met a guy over the weekend who was going to give him a Roto-Rooter franchise. Dalton didn’t want to stand in the way of a man making better for himself and said “Good luck to ya.”
King was rehired by Dalton on September 13, 2007, and worked until October 15, 2007. The Roto-Rooter deal apparently was fiction, because between June and September of 2007, Dalton knew, King worked at another plumbing company called Hill & Hill, which was just on the other side of the bridge, and owned by a guy named Seth Hill. When he came back looking for his old job, Dalton said sure. King had always been a good employee. Dalton always received positive feedback regarding King. He was clean and courteous, was willing to work at night if a job came up, always volunteered, never complained. Never once was there a complaint about Mike King.
One of the detectives asked about the time a woman said Michael King had exposed himself to her in September of 2006. Dalton said he never heard anything about that. When King left the company the second time, he said he had some estate business to take care of up in Michigan. Then he never heard from him again. Dalton said that he was surprised to see King’s mother interviewed on TV after the murder. One of the times Mike went back to Michigan, he said, was to attend his mother’s funeral.
“He was a BSer like a lot of these guys. He would always have these deals, you know?” He got a special deal on his house in North Port; he knew a guy involved with car auctions; he was always getting deals on cars—that sort of thing. Dalton never got involved in any of that because it had nothing to do with his plumbing business. “I sort of had to separate myself,” he said.
The policemen said they’d heard King got in trouble moonlighting on his own, using one of Dalton’s trucks. Dalton said that wasn’t true. He never took the truck home, unless he had a job to do at night, and the lot was locked up by the time he was finished. Even then, a lot of times he would park the truck nearby and go home in his own vehicle. He drove a red Corvette for a while, and a motorcycle; then he dated a girl in Ocala and she had a “hopped-up” black Mustang.
The policemen went through King’s personnel file. One of the last papers in there was a phone message from a woman named Kelly, asking Mike to call her back.
On January 22, Lieutenant Ed Fitzpatrick supervised a search of heavy brush on either side of Plantation Boulevard. A large truck containing a crime scene command center was parked by the side of the road.
Incongruous to the desolation was a manhole cover, a fire hydrant, and a fresh and even sidewalk along the road, only a few yards from the crime scene, an indication of tract housing planned for but never built.
Fitzpatrick and the officers under his command performed what was called a “line search.” The men stood shoulder to shoulder and moved slowly through an area, methodically covering every square inch. In this case, they started close to the grave site and moved outward. There were two teams of six and seven officers working simultaneously.
At some point during the search, Fitzpatrick was alerted that the other team had a possible hit on something—an item that could be seen on the other side of a fence from where they’d been searching. Approximately a quarter of a mile from the burial site, on the other side of the street, pieces of clothing were discovered. Something white was snared to a tree limb.
The lieutenant did not approach the items but rather ordered the area around the items secured as a crime scene, a process that took approximately ten minutes.
The items turned out to be a pair of light blue men’s boxer shorts and a pair of red panties. The item on the tree branch turned out to be a bra strap. A close look at the strap revealed dark red stains that could have been blood.
Fitzpatrick called in Pam Schmidt, who photographed the site thoroughly and then collected and processed the evidence. A thorough search of the area was impossible because of the thickness of the foliage in places. Heavy equipment was needed.
That equipment—an excavation shovel with claw—arrived a week later, January 29, and was used to pull out the vegetation. While the machine was “skimming” the earth, it unearthed a half-buried piece of cloth. Pam Schmidt was called back to photograph the item, a woman’s shirt with one strap broken. Schmidt dug up the shirt, also removing a big hunk of the dirt in which it had been embedded. During this process, the rest of the bra was also recovered.
 
 
A blond woman named Anitra Fritz told police that sometime the previous week—she wasn’t sure what day it was—when she was either coming back from her babysitter’s or the post office, she was driving east on Tropicaire Boulevard in North Port when she passed a slow-moving westbound green Camaro with a “bra” on the front, which was going in the opposite direction from her.
The car must have made a U-turn, because the next thing she knew, it was right behind her. She feared the driver was stalking her. She had her baby in the car and didn’t know if her husband was home, so she didn’t go there. Instead, she turned off Tropicaire onto Imbe Street and decided to go to the home of a friend whose husband was a cop. The Camaro followed. She made a second turn, onto Leryl Avenue; this time, he didn’t follow, so she returned to Tropicaire.
When she got home, she told her husband she thought she’d been followed. He was not concerned. She didn’t think it was the day of the murder, but it was close to that day. When she learned about the murder, she was frightened to see how much she resembled the victim. She could have been the one who got abducted.
Anitra added that she had psychic abilities and felt the killer had a girlfriend who was a petite blonde who’d been pregnant but had an abortion, and he flipped out.
 
 
A man named James Navin (pseudonym) told police that he believed he might have witnessed the moment when Michael King chose Denise Lee as his target for the day. It happened at five minutes before two in the afternoon, about thirty minutes after Rob Salvador last saw King at the firing range, and about twenty-five minutes before a neighbor saw a man in a green Camaro at the Lees’ house.
The witness claimed he saw both King and Lee waiting in line at the North Port Post Office. Police asked him how he could be so sure, and he said he recognized them from photos he’d seen on television the day after Denise Lee disappeared.
“I turned around and looked at the girl behind me and it was her, and she was holding a good-sized box.” James said King was farther back in the same line. “He caught my attention because he was, I don’t know, grisly. He had strange-looking eyes when he looked at me, a lot of white in them.”
Doubt was cast upon James Navin’s observations, however, when it was pointed out that, as far as anyone knew, Denise mailed no box, and she went nowhere without her kids.
The police quickly filed this information in the round receptacle labeled “urban legends.”
How Michael King chose Denise Lee as his victim remained a mystery.
 
 
News of Denise Lee’s murder sent reporters mining for background information. One fruitful dig occurred at the online social network Myspace, where Denise’s account painted a picture of her busy life as a young mom, an occupation not just mentally challenging but physically demanding as well. In August of 2007, Denise wrote: Something so simple as going to the mall to buy a pair of sunglasses is a thousand times harder when you have two boys under tow. They shopped a little, retreated to the car so she could breast-feed Adam, and returned to a mall bench for a break. Noah ran around a play area and twice was knocked down by older boys. Adam needed a new diaper, but changing it became tough. Every time she took her eyes off Noah, he ran across the mall. She ended up changing the diaper, with Noah sitting on the hanging table. In jcpenney, she tried on sunglasses, but Noah again made a run for it. An old man told her she sure had her hands full and checked the bottom of her stroller to make sure she didn’t have a third kid in there. But it was still fun, she concluded. Any time I get to leave the house is a treat for me.

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