Read Michael Benson's True Crime Bundle Online
Authors: Michael Benson
Michael Benson's True Crime Bundle (73 page)
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Any questions before deliberation began? Yes, the foreperson responded. Could the whiteboard be moved into the jury room? No problem, Judge Economou said, and deliberation began.
A half hour later, the jury had another question. Could a juror vote for death even if he or she didn’t agree with all four of the aggravators? Judge Economou wasn’t allowed to answer that one and responded merely that the answer was in the instructions he’d already given them. They were the jury; they decided what to do.
After three hours of deliberation on Friday, September 4, the jury sent a message to Judge Economou that it had reached a decision. At 2:41
P.M.
, Michael King was brought into the courtroom. A minute later, the jury filed in.
P.M.
, Michael King was brought into the courtroom. A minute later, the jury filed in.
North Port police chief Terry Lewis, a spectator in the courtroom, quickly crossed himself and then held his head in his hands in silent prayer. Nate Lee was also praying. He sat between his parents, who locked their arms behind his chair. Rick Goff wore a cross and held his wife’s hand.
Absent from the courtroom were any King supporters, including members of his family.
The jury unanimously recommended the death penalty.
The judge thanked the jury for doing its civic duty: “For three weeks, you have given a part of yourselves to this process.”
Judge Economou said that sometime in the next two months, he would announce his verdict. Economou said he “rarely” went against a jury’s wishes, but he would give everything the once-over before confirming the recommendation for death.
The judge reminded the jury that no one could force a juror to talk. If any of them wanted to, they could slip out of the courtroom and remain forever silent and anonymous. On the other hand, if they wanted to speak with the media, they had that right as well. No one could force them to be quiet. It was their decision, and their decision alone. The judge repeated that at some point in the future, not then and there, he would announce the date for sentencing. He offered the jury his profound thanks, adding that the system wouldn’t work without citizens who were willing to make the sacrifice.
The panel of twelve peers was discharged.
Hearing the verdict, the members of the Lee and Goff families cried and smiled, sometimes at the same time. Chief Lewis hugged Nate Lee, Rick Goff, and other family members. Nate was struggling. He still looked to be in shock.
“Mr. King, you are remanded to the Sarasota County Jail,” the judge said. The defendant looked less catatonic than he had during the bulk of the proceedings. In fact, he appeared angry.
Six bailiffs surrounded Michael King, who was handcuffed, wrists behind his back, and escorted him out.
Right up until the very end of the trial, Amanda Goff, Denise’s twenty-year-old sister, continued to take notes for the college paper she had promised to write, in exchange for permission to attend the trial and miss school. The deal with her teachers had changed since the trial began, however. The original agreement had been that she would write a paper about every detail of the trial and case. However, when members of the North Port Police Department, as well as representatives of victims’ advocate groups, heard about the arrangement, they contacted Amanda’s teachers. They stated that, because of the nature of the case, they didn’t think it would be good for Amanda’s well-being to write such a paper. So a compromise was made, and the young woman’s teachers agreed that she should write her paper about just the trial procedures, leaving out the obviously upsetting details of the case. Her new focus was on the testimony of doctors and mental-health experts on either side.
King’s defense team—Carolyn Schlemmer, John Scotese, and Jerry Meisner—announced that there would be an appeal, hardly a surprise since an appeal was mandatory in Florida for capital murder cases. They then quickly left the courtroom, leaving the winning side alone. Lon Arend, Suzanne O’Donnell, and Karen Fraivillig hugged Denise Lee’s family, friends, and members of the law enforcement community. Fraivillig gave Nate Lee a big squeeze and looked into his eyes.
Outside the courtroom, Chief Lewis expressed surprise that the jury had recommended the death penalty following a unanimous vote. “I expected ten to two, or eleven to one, but twelve to zero speaks volumes about the quality of the prosecution. It was a group effort on behalf of many community agencies in our area.”
Because Denise was the daughter of a cop, law enforcement was well represented in the spectator section of the courtroom throughout the trial. Chief Lewis, as well as four members of the North Port Police Department, had been in the courtroom for every day of the trial.
Rick Goff told a reporter, “Denise took another piece of trash off the street. She put him where he belongs. I’m sorry for King’s son’s loss, but we are without Denise, and her boys are without their mother.”
Nate Lee added that justice had been served. “I’m sick of going to court and hearing all of the horrific evidence. I want to move on and spend time with the boys.” During the penalty phase of the trial, he had sensed his wife holding his hand and giving him strength. “And she was with me today, I know she was,” he said.
Nate Lee’s mother, Marguerite, better known as Peggy, said she understood why the jury had voted unanimously for the death penalty. It wasn’t just “because of who King was, but because Denise was so wonderful.”
The jurors, of course, were under no obligation to speak to the press, but neither were they forbidden to do so, and one juror, Marcia K. Burns, said that Denise Lee was an amazing woman to have the presence of mind, in the face of knowing what was going to happen to her, to leave enough evidence to allow them to convict her murderer. She didn’t think the average person would have been able to do that, and she hoped that Denise’s family felt pride in addition to their heartache.
Another juror explained that the vote for death had not been unanimous at first. It was eleven to one. One person had a problem with the wording of something. Once that was cleared up, it was twelve to zero. Despite the horror of it, they relistened to the victim’s 911 tape. The killer could be heard saying something to the effect of “I was going to let you go, but ...” The statement seemed to define “heinous” and “cruel.”
It was going to feel good rejoining society after three weeks of living in a bubble and watching only the NFL channel on TV, a channel where they could be certain they wouldn’t inadvertently hear any real news.
The hardest part was to delay deliberation until the trial was over. The jurors were stuck together for hours at a time, and the only thing they had in common was the case—the very thing they were not allowed to discuss. It seemed like they spent most of their time sitting together in silence, doing their best to ignore the four-hundred-pound gorilla in the room.
When the time to deliberate did come, they gave great weight to the borrowed shovel. King knew then and there what he was going to do—which made the crimes as cold and calculated as they could get. He might have been overheard on the 911 tape saying he’d planned on letting her go, but he never did.
They gave much, much less weight to the scientific evidence. The panel didn’t particularly care how doctors interpreted a PET scan of Michael King’s brain.
A reporter asked if the jury had been bothered by the fact that the defendant’s mother had not testified, despite the fact that she was alive and well and had, according to the story, been the one to sit up at night with her son during the days and nights following his head injury.
Yes, the subject of the silent mother had come up, and it was agreed that the only explanation was that she had information that would come out that would not be helpful to the defense.
Some of the jurors were experiencing anxiety because of the nature of the trial—some of the things they’d had to hear, some of the exhibits they were obliged to view. Jurors were experiencing insomnia. They wondered how long it would take for them to decompress, now that it was over. Hopefully, everyone would eventually be able to move on.
The jurors who spoke publically agreed that they would return to the courtroom in three weeks for the sentencing hearing. They had invested so much time and emotion into the case that they did not want to miss Judge Economou confirming their decision.
Following the trial, Lon Arend took a moment to reflect on what had occurred. He was asked about the testimony of Michael King’s family.
Early in the investigation, he had asked law enforcement to get in touch with King’s family as quickly as possible and to interview them separately before they had a chance to get together and come up with a story that would put their Mike in a good light. The plan had worked. Both King’s mom and his ex-wife had told police the day after the murder that he had never suffered a significant head injury.
Years and years in law enforcement had taught Arend a few things about human nature. One thing you could count on was that when someone does something this horrible, his or her family members would sit, think, and wonder,
how?
How could it have happened? And they would remember back to things that had happened, and they would start projecting importance on those occurrences. By the time they came to testify, they believed what they were saying—even though it was, often, a construct of their inability to process what had occurred. They weren’t technically making stuff up. They were trying to come up in their own minds with an explanation for what had happened. When they did that as a group, they’d tend to formulate one story and stick to it. So, coming into the trial, Arend knew that the relatives, the ones he hadn’t gotten statements from, were going to come into court united with a wild story, but he couldn’t have anticipated that it would be as wild as it was. His head hit a pole—or a shed, whatever it was—at ninety miles per hour? If the story had been more feasible, Arend could’ve used the statements of the defendant’s own mother to send him to the executioner, and he was glad that wasn’t necessary. The obvious conclusion, Arend said, was that the whole story of Michael King’s head injury was “fabricated, embellished, or exaggerated.”
how?
How could it have happened? And they would remember back to things that had happened, and they would start projecting importance on those occurrences. By the time they came to testify, they believed what they were saying—even though it was, often, a construct of their inability to process what had occurred. They weren’t technically making stuff up. They were trying to come up in their own minds with an explanation for what had happened. When they did that as a group, they’d tend to formulate one story and stick to it. So, coming into the trial, Arend knew that the relatives, the ones he hadn’t gotten statements from, were going to come into court united with a wild story, but he couldn’t have anticipated that it would be as wild as it was. His head hit a pole—or a shed, whatever it was—at ninety miles per hour? If the story had been more feasible, Arend could’ve used the statements of the defendant’s own mother to send him to the executioner, and he was glad that wasn’t necessary. The obvious conclusion, Arend said, was that the whole story of Michael King’s head injury was “fabricated, embellished, or exaggerated.”
The prosecutor’s impression of Jim King and his wife was that they were very nice people and did not want to lie—and that the things Mike had done horrified them. “I felt really bad for them,” Arend said.
Rodney, on the other hand, seemed hell-bent on saving his brother. “Either he was better focused on the task than the others, or he was coached really well,” Arend said. The prosecutor remembered that once Rodney got started talking, he had a hard time stopping. He would inevitably give an answer that journeyed beyond the scope of the question. In some cases, a prosecutor would want to stop this, would want the witness to stick to answering just the questions as they were being asked, but not in this case. Rodney rambled; and when he did, he often said things that told the jury just who he was and what he was up to. Arend just sat back and let him go. A couple of times, Rodney’s monologues journeyed into the realm of the ridiculous. When he said Mike hit the pole at eighty to ninety miles per hour, Arend thought to himself,
Goodness, I gotcha now.
Goodness, I gotcha now.
“After the trial, one juror told me that when Dr. Wu explained that there was a divot in Michael King’s head, he looked at the heads of King’s brothers, and it looked to him like one sibling had the same divot—that it was a genetic trait, not a result of a head injury,” Arend recalled. “The juror said, ‘Holy crap, they’ve all got it.’“ Arend added that he personally did not remember seeing a similarity in the shape of the brothers’ heads.
Was there ever a moment when he knew he was going to win? “Oh, no!” Arend said. He claimed he worried to the point of panic throughout the trial. You never knew what a jury was going to do. Not so much in the guilt phase, but in the penalty phase. The biggest concern was that the jurors, despite his successful cross-examination, would buy Dr. Wu’s presentation and rule against the death penalty. “The key to Dr. Wu wasn’t what he said, but what he was basing it on. He hadn’t interviewed anybody,” Arend commented.
In his years as a prosecutor, how many murderers had he sent to death row? “One,” Arend said. Michael King. Arend had prosecuted about twenty non–capital murder cases, and maybe twenty capital cases, but in each of those, the defendant had pleaded guilty and received a life sentence. A couple of times, he started the case as capital but, for one reason or another, took the death penalty off the table.
The penalty phase of King’s trial was a first for him—and regardless of the circumstances, it was hard for a person to put another person to death. Luckily, you didn’t need a unanimous vote by the jury in Florida to put a prisoner on death row. All that was needed was a simple majority. When it came down to it, though, they did get a unanimous vote, and that was an indication that the entire prosecution team had done a good job during death qualifying of the jury pool and voir dire.
“In our circuit, we only have six people on death row,” the prosecutor said. “So it is very uncommon for the death penalty to stay on the table all the way through a trial.”
The slow pace of the process would frustrate those in a hurry to see Michael King executed. One of the men on his circuit’s death row had been there for more than twenty years. Even if all went smoothly, the earliest one might expect to see King executed would be 2017.
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