Читать книгу A Killer's Touch - Michael Benson - Страница 7

CHAPTER 2

THE ARREST

Trooper Edward “Eddie” Pope was born and raised in Mount Vernon, New York, right across the border from the Bronx, until he was ten years old. Then Eddie moved to West Babylon, on Long Island. With dreams of one day being a state trooper, Pope had his first job in law enforcement with the CCSO in Florida.

Right from the start, Eddie Pope had a knack for being where the action was. Crimes sometimes came to him. Pope recalled, “I was working a security detail at Fishermen’s Village, a mall where the road runs through the center. A guy came running out of a bar, got in his car, and tried to hightail it out of there. There were two little kids in front of their mom getting ready to cross the road. I grabbed the kids and threw them out of the way. The car hit me and dragged me about fifty feet.” The accident tore up both of Pope’s knees—which had to be surgically repaired—and derailed his career for a while.

He was going to school at the time and took a job teaching special education at the Liberty Elementary School in Port Charlotte. The doctors told him he should abandon any notion of working for the state police, but he refused to let go of his dream.

The teaching job turned out to be perfect rehab for his damaged legs. “Special education kids are always on the move. A lot of time they are trying to escape,” he recalled, adding that his nickname at the time was “Kindergarten Cop.” When he first began, he would trot in pursuit of escapees. Over two school years, he began “getting to the fence before they did.”

His legs as strong as ever, he applied for a job with the Florida State Police (FSP); in 2003, he was accepted. He graduated from the police academy at the top of his class, earning both the Athletic and Presidential Awards.

During his time as a trooper for the state of Florida, Pope grew accustomed to being in the right place at the right time, partially because he was lucky, but mostly because he was a clear thinker and had the uncanny ability to position himself where he could do the most good.

His skills had not gone unnoticed. He earned the Trooper of the Month Award for the first time, in January 2006, when he both recovered stolen property and seized a half pound of pot.

Pope set a record when he was named the Trooper of the Month three more times in 2007. He was honored for three acts: another case involving recovery of stolen property, a life-saving effort in an attempted suicide, and the rescue of two motorists from a submerged vehicle in alligator-infested waters. He received the 2007 Trooper of the Year Award from the governor, and he got to throw out the first pitch at a Tampa Bay Rays game versus the Boston Red Sox.

During the search for Denise Amber Lee and her abductor, the forty-year-old Eddie Pope was working “aggressive driving” patrol on the 3:00 to 11:00 P.M. shift. He knew the Goff family well and realized this case was special. It was like trying to save his own sister.

At just after nine o’clock, Road Deputy Christian Wymer’s car was parked on a grass median near Toledo Blade and Interstate 75, watching each car as it went by. After a while, Pope parked next to Wymer in his souped-up unmarked Mercury Marauder.

Facing opposite directions so they could watch traffic coming both ways, Wymer and Pope rolled down their windows and talked about the BOLO, the type of car they were after, and the description of the wanted driver.

Wymer later recalled that picking out Camaros from a stream of traffic was difficult. It was next to impossible, for example, to tell a Camaro from a Firebird in the dark.

At 9:16 P.M., a “definite possible” approached. Pope looked in his rearview and saw the car come off a side road about three hundred yards away and pull into the northbound lane of Toledo Blade. It was on Pope’s side, the northbound side. It was a Camaro—correct year as well.

The car passed by and pulled onto the interstate. Pope quietly put his car in drive and followed. It had been dark since seven-thirty, but the streetlights were bright along that stretch. The weather had cleared. Visibility was excellent.

Pope pulled onto the road behind the Camaro. At first, there were about six cars between them, so he couldn’t read the plate. A quarter mile later, Pope had maneuvered immediately behind the suspicious vehicle.

Pope tried the radio, but, as was not uncommon, there were transmission difficulties. “From the 179 to the 170,” Pope recalled, “we get intermittent radio trouble. Sometimes it sounds like a muted trombone, like grown-ups talking on those old Charlie Brown shows. ‘Waaah, wah-wah-wah, waaah.’” Pope had to speed to keep up with the subject’s car.

“When I saw the first three letters on his tag, it was just like the old expression, I really could feel the little hairs standing up on the back of my neck,” he said. “I also had that kind of warm sensation you get in your mouth, like you’re going to throw up. I knew I had the right vehicle.”

Should he continue to follow the car and risk losing it? Or, take it on his own initiative to make the stop? Denise Lee might’ve been in the car, so it was a no-brainer. Pope put on his lights and siren. The Camaro pulled over almost immediately, easing onto the interstate shoulder. The trooper pulled right up on his rear bumper in his Marauder. Because he was in an unmarked vehicle, he didn’t have a spotlight and couldn’t illuminate the interior of the suspect’s vehicle. Pope executed what was called a “felony stop.” He used his “loud Italian New York voice” to order the driver out of the car.

No response.

The trooper could see the driver inside the car moving around a little bit. Was he trying to dispose of evidence? Was he arming himself for a shoot-out?

Pope commanded the suspect to get out of the car with his hands up. Typically, when a cop ordered a driver out of his vehicle, the driver’s-side door swung all the way open. Here, the driver’s-side door opened only a few inches and then stopped. No one got out.

“He was trying to manipulate the door so he could find me in the rearview mirror,” Pope said, possibly so he would know where to aim if he came out firing.

For his own safety, Pope had to assume he was armed, even though there wasn’t enough evidence at that point to tell if a weapon was in play.

“I had to change my location,” Pope said. During this sequence, no cars came down the southbound interstate, so it was easy for Pope to dash across the road, crossing four lanes. He took up a tactical position near a tree so he could look into the Camaro’s driver’s side.

Five times, Pope ordered the driver out of the car. “I shouted myself out” was how he later explained it. The Camaro had a high console between the front seats that stuck up. Pope knew this because he’d owned a ’94 Camaro.

The driver moved so that he was bent over that console, his head pointing toward the passenger seat.

The fifth time Pope barked the command, he said, “Get out of the car with your hands in the air, or I’ll fire!” That got a response. The driver’s door finally swung all the way open. The driver was kneeling on the driver’s seat, doing something on the passenger side. Then he started to back out, ass first. Pope didn’t like the notion that the driver was exiting so that his hands came out last.

But he emerged with his hands on his head, his back still turned to the trooper. Pope charged. The suspect didn’t have a weapon in his hands, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have one in his waistband or something.

“Turn around slowly,” Pope ordered.

The suspect complied.

The guy had a goatee and was wearing a camouflage shirt and jeans. Pope heard him utter something. Pope noticed two things. First, no gun in the waistband. Second, from the waist down, the subject was soaking wet. A closer look revealed that his pants and shoes were muddy as well. Pope ordered the man to move to the rear of the vehicle, then to lie down on the asphalt.

“He was a little resistant about getting down on the ground,” Pope remembered. But eventually he obeyed.

“Where’s the girl?” Pope yelled. “I don’t care about anything else. I just want to know where the fucking girl is.”

“I was kidnapped, too,” the suspect said as the cuffs tightly snapped in place. “I was a hostage, too.”

“You’re full of shit,” Pope replied.

Only after the man was down and restrained did Trooper Pope call for backup, which arrived three or four minutes later.

Pope patted the suspect down and found a wallet in his left rear pocket. A quick look at the wallet’s contents and his photo ID verified that this was indeed Michael Lee King.

In King’s front pocket, Pope found a black phone, with a silver emblem on it, which had had the battery and SIM card pulled out. Also in his pants pockets were foam earplugs, like those used by people who operate noisy machinery or who fire weapons at a range.

With the suspect’s body searched, Pope turned his attention to the car. There was a blue metal flashlight and a red gas can on the passenger seat. On the backseat was a yellow blanket. When that was moved, officers found a woman’s ring shaped like a heart. (Nate Lee would later identify the ring as belonging to his wife.) On the floor was a piece of paper with a footprint on it, a pencil, a phone battery, a post from a headboard, and a blue-handled Phillips-head screwdriver.

Then Pope felt a sinking feeling—as he put it, it was like waking up on Christmas morning and discovering Santa hadn’t come. There was no Denise, but there was a long-handled military-type shovel, which, like the suspect’s pants, was wet and dirty—recently used.

Looking over the exterior of the car, Pope found strands of hair adhering to the rear spoiler. The back of the car was also spattered with what he later referred to as “pellets” of blood. The car’s driver’s seat was wet and muddy—a sandy mud. After backup arrived, Pope kept a log of those entering and exiting the crime scene.

Because of the nature of the developing case, Pope was compelled to take King’s car keys and open up the trunk. Frustratingly, the missing woman wasn’t there, either.

The passenger-side window was rolled down halfway. Was this what King was doing when he leaned over the passenger seat? Was he rolling down the window, possibly to toss something out—maybe a weapon? Throwing it like a Frisbee, a person might be able to toss a gun or a knife twenty to thirty feet into the weeds alongside the road. Probably couldn’t reach the tree line, forty feet away.

(The weedy area beside the car was not secured that night, not until three or four days later. The car was considered a crime scene, but not the area surrounding the traffic stop. During that time, the grass near the shoulder of the road had been cut, and a crew went through the area picking up garbage. A highway worker could have found the weapon and wordlessly pocketed it.)

Sheriff’s deputies now had Michael King bent over the front of the car. Pope asked one more time where the girl was.

“I’d never seen an expression on a man’s face like the one King had then. It was cold, completely devoid of compassion or remorse,” Pope explained.

King uttered something nasty—“Pure evil,” the trooper recalled—and a couple of officers had to get between Pope and the suspect, who was promptly taken into protective custody.

The location of the arrest was communicated to the search helicopter—which was on the ground being refueled. The pilot agreed that he’d go back up as soon as he could and search the vicinity of the arrest for “hot spots.”

Pope knew that Denise had to be someplace close to the arrest. There was wet blood and DNA-type material on the car—material that would have flown off or dried if King had driven very far before being stopped.

With a report that a wet shovel had been found in the Camaro, the search for Denise Lee donned a grim heaviness. In addition to searching for the missing woman by air, a dive team was readied to search nearby bodies of water.

Alive or not, Denise was someplace where it was wet. Trouble was, after a rainy day, that could be almost anywhere.

Moments after the traffic stop, Detective Lieutenant Kevin R. Sullivan, of the North Port Police Department’s (NPPD) Criminal Investigations Bureau, arrived at the scene. By the time he got there, the suspect was already out of the car and had asked for a lawyer. Sullivan thought he looked familiar.

“Do I know you from somewhere?” Sullivan asked.

King replied that they had previously met through family.

“Are you okay?” Sullivan asked.

King assured him that he was. “I’m a victim here, too,” he said. He explained that he, like Mrs. Lee, had been kidnapped, and he was eager to do whatever he could to help law enforcement.

“Tell me what happened,” Sullivan said. He decided to play along and treat the man as a victim.

Observing the scene was Detective Christopher Morales, of the NPPD, who had also just arrived.

King agreed to a ride-along, sitting in the back of Sullivan’s car, to look for Denise. Sullivan hoped to keep the man talking. The man was in custody, so no harm could come from the little game they were playing. During the ride-along, a fog lowered over North Port, cutting visibility. King said, “A guy took me and that girl, and I was tied up and had a hood over my head.... He let me go at my car and I just drove off.”

The game did not bear fruit. In an attempt to throw the investigation a curveball, the suspect took the officers on a wild-goose chase, clear on the other side of town, as far from the scene of his arrest as they could get. Up and down. Back and forth. Till past 11:00 P.M. King had no idea where they were most of the time.

While they drove around, King was silently hopeful that his cousin Harold would keep his mouth shut. One statement from Harold Muxlow, and King’s lies were exposed. He didn’t know both Harold and his daughter had already spoken to police.

Trooper Pope was beat, but the adrenaline was still flowing. He couldn’t get rid of the driving voice in his head. He needed to get back out there and look for Denise.

Just before 11:00 P.M., the aerial search had to be called off because of the now-heavy fog.

Cops were sent out to locate and interview friends and relatives of the arrested man. One such person was Jennifer Robb, King’s ex-girlfriend, who lived in Homosassa, Florida, about fifty miles north. She was hoped to be a good source for info regarding King’s relatives. Jennifer wasn’t home, so patrols in Citrus County were informed that she was probably driving a red Nissan Frontier pickup, with black trim. It had a soccer ball bumper sticker on the back just above the license plate, and a decal at the top of the windshield that read ANGEL IN DISGUISE.

Police were also looking for a forty-one-year-old friend of King’s named Robert “Rob” Salvador, who lived in Venice.

Cortnie Watts, who had already participated in the processing of the Lee house, was now called to the scene of King’s arrest to photograph and collect evidence from the green Camaro. Watts had a routine that she followed. She always started at the outside of a scene and worked her way inward in ever-diminishing concentric circles. She created evidence swabs of the blood spatter on the car’s spoiler, collected and bagged as evidence long, dirty-blond hair found both on the hood and rear of the car, and swabbed a mucus-like glob of material on the hood.

The passenger-side door handle, Watts noticed, was covered with a sandy mud. She photographed the car’s interior—in particular, the red gas container, which sat on the passenger seat.

While she was doing this, Detective Michael Saxton was dusting the car’s exterior for fingerprints. On the outside of the driver’s-side window, he discovered a partial palm print, which he lifted with tape and placed on a white card.

The Camaro was secured with crime scene tape. That is, tape was placed over the space between the car doors and the rest of the car so that the doors could not be opened without breaking the tape. It was towed back to the NPPD and parked in the “evidence garage.” Watts followed the tow truck in her own vehicle. The decision to move the vehicle at that time was made because the wind had picked up, and there was concern a new rain might wash away evidence.

Watts stayed with the car until quarter to one in the morning of January 18.

She returned to the car on January 19 and took tire ink standards from all four tires, using Sirchie fingerprint slab ink, with a roller and a glass slab. She put ink on the roller and rolled ink onto the tires. She put brown craft paper under each tire and, with the help of Sergeant Scott Graham and Property Evidence staff assistant Deb Hill, rolled the Camaro over the paper so an ink impression of the tire treads was made. Still using Graham and Hill’s assistance, she pushed the vehicle out of the exam room and into a gated area in the police department’s parking lot. A vehicle cover was placed over the car and locked into place with a padlock to secure the evidence.

Seeking a motive, police asked Denise’s family and friends if they knew Michael King. They all shook their heads. No one had ever seen or heard of him before.

Michael Lee King was brought to the NPPD at 11:30 P.M., and put in an interrogation room. He sat in a corner, his hands cuffed in front of him, and told Detective Morales that he was born on May 4, 1971. King described the traffic stop and how Trooper Pope had repeatedly screamed, “Put your hands on your head” and “Where’s the girl?” The trooper, King noted, was angry, pushing King’s head up against the car, telling him that police had already been inside his house and had seen stuff.

King said he’d asked for a lawyer “all the way through” his apprehension, but he had been ignored.

Morales said, “When I got there, you were saying that you were the hostage.”

King said he remembered saying that to somebody and complained that he hadn’t been read his rights or given a chance to lawyer up.

Morales did read King his Miranda rights at that time, pausing after each line to verify that King understood what he was being told. King said he did, adding that he did not want to give Morales a statement. He just wanted an attorney—and he needed to use the bathroom. He was escorted out.

When King returned to the interrogation room, he was left alone until, around midnight, a cop King knew wandered into the interrogation room to “shoot the breeze.” When was the last time they’d seen each other?

King said, “About three years ago.”

“Still doing plumbing?”

“Yeah.”

“Here or up north?”

“Here. There ain’t nothing up north.”

“The last time I saw you, I think we ran into each other on the street. Didn’t you say you had a live-in girlfriend or something?”

“Yeah.”

“You were having some kind of issues that the cops couldn’t help you out with. What was that all about?”

“She took off in my car, went to Tennessee. Knoxville. I had to go all the way up there and pick it up.”

“How long did you date her?”

“Not too long.”

“What was her name?”

“Oh, shoot. Jen ... Jennifer, something like that. Amy, it was Amy Sue (pseudonym).”

“I remember a Jennifer. I don’t remember an Amy,” the cop said, nice and chummy. He asked the name of King’s ex-wife.

“Danielle.” He had been married to her for ten years, but she didn’t work. She just played games on the computer all day.

“Yeah, I remember when you first came down here, with the jet skis and everything. It was 2003. All the trouble and shit with your neighbors—that’s how I remember that stuff. So what have you been doing lately?”

“Not too much. Just hanging in there.”

“How’s everybody treating you? It was a madhouse when I showed up. I didn’t know what was happening.”

“When I first got pulled over, the friggin’ guy was mad or something. He wouldn’t let me talk. He’s just screamin’, ‘Where’s she at? We found duct tape.’ Like that. I tried to tell him my side, but he didn’t want to hear my side. ‘Just tell me where she’s at?’ I said I wanted a lawyer present.”

“Who was the cop talking about? I’m kind of lost.”

“I don’t know. I said I wanted a lawyer present, and he said, ‘You ain’t gettin’ one.’”

“He told you that? Wow.”

“I got bad luck. I ain’t pickin’ up nobody anymore.”

“Who’d you pick up?”

“Guy on the side of the road.” King told his story: The second the guy got in the car, he pushed King’s head down and threw a hood over his head. “I couldn’t even freakin’ move, man.”

“You look like you put on a few pounds since the last time I saw you. This guy must’ve been pretty big.”

“Between you and me, I’ve never been in a fight in my life. He was a jerk.”

The cop changed the subject: “Yeah, I remember Jen. I don’t remember no Amy.”

“Yeah, Amy was something else. They said she was on cocaine. I thought she was straight, turned out she was just out of detox. Met her through friends. I picked her up, went all the way up to Tennessee to pick her up. The only reason I got mad at her was she took the car.”

He said the house on Sardinia was the only place he stayed when he was in North Port. Although for a while, he was living in Homosassa, and then he’d been back to Michigan a few times, visiting his family.

“When was the last time you were in Michigan?”

“Three, four days ago. I got back Saturday.”

“So you just got back. How was it up there? Cold?”

“Ice-cold, yeah. I was looking for work up there, filled out a bunch of applications, but it’s slow right now. I got to see my kid. He wanted to stay up there, so I let him stay with my brother.” He explained that his house had no furniture. His furnishings were at an old girlfriend’s house. He didn’t want the drama, so he just left it. That was Jennifer, the one in Homosassa. “I figured I’d just keep walkin’.” She and his son didn’t get along at all.

After a pause, King said, “I was hijacked. Crazy shit. It was the worst thing.”

“Are they helping you out? Is that what you’re waiting on?” the cop asked.

“They read me my Miranda rights and explained what it meant.”

“You can do whatever you want. What is it you want to do?”

“I can just sit here all night. I can’t tell them nothing. I don’t know anything. I wouldn’t mind going home.”

“You got a girlfriend now? Got anyone waitin’ on you?”

“Yeah, Tennille. Met her because she played bingo with my mom. She wanted to move in, but I said I don’t want that right now. She’s pretty nice. She’s got no kids. But I been through a lot of shit. I just want to work.”

“You still having problems with your neighbors? I remember you used to have a real feud going.”

“No, when I wave, they wave. Just hi/bye. No problems anymore.” There had been someone coming into his house while he was away. There wasn’t anything to steal, so he didn’t call the cops; however, someone was going inside and doing whatever. The front door was always jimmied open. Probably kids.

The cop left. For a time, King was alone to ponder his dilemma. He sat motionless, with head bowed. When the cop returned, he brought King something to eat and some water. King was thirsty, but he didn’t feel like eating.

In the meantime, police had picked up Harold Muxlow and had questioned him at greater length about his cousin borrowing a shovel, and about the bound woman attempting to escape in front of his house.

Harold said he didn’t intervene because he didn’t think it was any of his business, that it was just another one of good ol’ Mike’s “crazy relationships.”

Then police had an inspired idea. They put Harold in the interrogation room—just the two of them—and taped the conversation with a surveillance camera.

“What the hell you doin’?” Harold asked King.

King said, “I got hijacked. I couldn’t, I tried to put 911 on the phone and everything. And here I am. I couldn’t do anything, couldn’t say anything, or he’d’ve took everybody out.”

“Who was it?”

“I don’t know, man. He was saying, ‘I’m gonna kill them all.’”

“You were afraid of this guy?”

“Dude, he was big. It don’t make no difference. I don’t fight.”

“They say somebody on the street seen you and somebody called. I got cops at my house, and I’m like, what the f ***? What am I supposed to do, you know?”

“No, you did the right thing. I couldn’t have called without him knowin’.”

“Was he colored? Mexican?”

“He had a ski mask on. I don’t know.”

“How did you get involved with these people? You just got back into town, right?”

“I pulled over. I thought they were broke down or something. As soon as the door opened, something hit me in the head with the heel of his palm—so hard I saw white specks. Then something got pulled over my head, tight here,” King said, gesturing with his cuffed hands toward his neck. “I think he knew somethin’. Karate or somethin’. One time, he hit me in the gut and I couldn’t even breathe.”

“When you were at my house you should’ve written something down, let me know what’s going on.”

“I should’ve thought of something, dude. He said, he promised, if we did everything, he said he was going to let this girl go.”

“I don’t get it. What would he gain? Holding on to you. Holding on to her. What would he gain? I can’t see what gain there would be.”

“Maybe he was sick, man. Maybe his was a totally different world from ours. You could tell by the way he talked and the shit he said.”

“Just one guy?”

“Well, there had to be somebody else. He was talking to someone on the phone. ‘Where you at now? Where you at now?’ I couldn’t hardly hear him. They put earplugs in my ears.”

“Why’d they let you go and not her?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going on. They probably let her go, too. Shouldn’t they? I don’t know.”

“If they do find her ...”

“Then I can get out of here,” King said with a note of hope.

“If they find her—I mean, I hope they find her alive... .”

“Thank God!” King exclaimed.

“But if something did happen to her, they got forensics now, and they can tell.”

“That’s good. That’s good. That’s what I need, man. They find her—I’m good to go.”

“What did you need the flashlight for?”

“He told me. That and the shovel and the gas can. I don’t even have a f***in’ riding mower. He just told me to say that.”

King began to describe what his abductor did to him, making him lie on the ground, take his shoes off. Put cuffs on him.

“The guy or the cop?” Harold asked.

“It was the same,” King replied.

They talked about King’s problems with women. It was one thing after another.

Harold said, “They say this girl got snagged. They took her right from her house. She had two kids, two little ones. They didn’t take money. Nothin’.”

“That’s crazy,” King said.

“How this girl get in your car, though?”

“I pulled over and they weighed me down, and that was it, you know. Stupid, man, just stupid.” King complained about the rough treatment he’d received when arrested.

“Can you blame him? Twenty-one-year-old girl kidnapped and you’re the last one seen with her. When the guy let you go, you should’ve flagged down a cop right away.”

“There’s a lot of things I should’ve done,” King said with a sigh.

“What would your brother Gary have done?”

“He thinks faster than I do. He’d’ve taken the guy. He was in the military.”

“What did the guy have? A gun? A knife?”

“I couldn’t tell. I wasn’t paying attention.”

“It’s not good, dude. You’re not in a good situation. So what did this guy want with a shovel for?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t ask him, and he didn’t tell me.”

“You’d better take a lie detector test, dude. If you don’t, you are going to be screwed. It looks bad. I keep thinking what if it was my daughter that got snagged. How would I feel? Now, if they find her alive—”

“Thank God.”

“But if they don’t, the parents are going to need relief. They got to find her body. Otherwise, you got to live with that—live with that for a long time. Otherwise, her parents always be wondering, ‘Where she at? Is she still alive?’”

“Right.”

“Is she buried somewhere? You would want to know. I would want to know. It would haunt you for the rest of your life until you find out exactly... .”

King told Harold how he’d tried to use his cell phone, to call Tennille, his girlfriend, but the guy caught him and threw the phone into the backseat where the girl was.

“She made a call,” Harold shared.

“She did? Thank God. Because that was what I was trying to do, you know?”

“Her dad works for the sheriff’s department. That’s bad for you. They got to find where she’s at.”

“Exactly.”

“There ain’t nothin’ you remember that might help them?”

“I tried,” King said, shaking his head. “It was like a roller coaster.”

“If you told them where the part of the road was where you pulled over, maybe somebody would recognize something.”

“It doesn’t help when you got that stupid thing on your head. Everything was black. Why me?”

“Were you wearing that shirt earlier?”

“Yeah.”

“You weren’t wearing something white?”

“No, I do have a nice white T-shirt, short sleeve, but I only wear that once in a great while.”

“You got to piece it together and get ’er done, man. Eventually they will find her, but till then, her dad and her husband are probably going nuts, not knowing. I would be that way,” Harold said.

“I would, too—you know,” King replied.

Harold tried to get King to remember landmarks. After all, there was no hood on his head when King came to his house looking for a shovel. All King could remember, he said, was he thought he was at his house at one point because he heard his garage door open and close.

What kind of car did his abductor drive? King thought he might’ve said something about it being a Sebring, but he couldn’t be sure. Earplugs, you know.

“You got to take a lie detector test because this ain’t going away. She called 911 on your phone. It don’t look good. You better figure out something, dude. You got to take the test soon, before you get a lawyer. Once you get a lawyer, he won’t let you take the test. Your mom and dad ain’t too happy,” Harold told his cousin.

“I understand that.”

“What about the lie detector test?”

“They stick needles in you for that, right? I don’t like needles.”

“No needles. They just put a thing on you [and] ask you questions. The machine says if you’re telling the truth. It won’t hurt you. Can only help you. God knows what really happened. Nobody else.” Harold Muxlow shook hands with his cousin and left. It was almost 5:00 A.M. Again, Michael King was alone in the room.

“He makes it sound so real,” Harold said to the police outside, “but I don’t think so. He may lose his house, he doesn’t have a job, and then some of the relationships he’s had with women ... he probably just snapped.”

Harold told police he was surprised when his cousin showed up at his house, even before he realized there was a captive in the Camaro. “I’ve scarcely seen him for months,” he said.

The woman had begged him to “call the cops,” but Harold hadn’t. Why?

“Well, he had a history of psycho girlfriends. Drama wasn’t necessarily unusual.” Harold said that despite the frantic woman in his car, King seemed calm. At one point, Harold told police, he was about fifteen feet from the Camaro, and he and King were having a calm conversation about King’s life. “I guess he had some problems, but he seemed pretty calm about it.”

As for the woman, Muxlow said, he didn’t really get a good look at her. Just a glimpse, really. The windows were “kind of” tinted. “He got the stuff he borrowed. I heard a bang when he put the stuff in the side door. I heard somebody say, ‘Call the cops,’ and then he said, ‘Don’t worry about it,’ and took off. I didn’t hear much. I thought it was that psycho broad he was with. I hadn’t seen him in so long. It just didn’t compute.”

One reason it didn’t sink in right away was his cousin was such a laid-back guy. King didn’t seem like the type to kidnap someone—didn’t drink, didn’t do drugs. Didn’t cause trouble.

King did have a tendency to spin a tall tale now and again—“Mikey had a big imagination”—so you always had to take his stories with a grain of salt.

Still, after Harold pondered it a bit, it didn’t sit right—the “call the cops” part—so he phoned his daughter. Then he got in his car and drove to the 7-Eleven gas station on Price Boulevard and Sumter Boulevard, where he called 911 himself. By the time he got home, a state trooper was at his house waiting for him.

Harold Muxlow’s emotions overcame him as he talked to police, and he began to weep.

“It’s hard talking about it,” he said. “When I think about it, I feel so bad for the girl and the family.”

A search warrant was acquired for Michael King’s clothes and person. Pamela “Pam” Schmidt, a criminalistics specialist, who wore a dark blue T-shirt, with a big white C.S.I. on the back, took fingernail scrapings and clippings. King’s clothes were confiscated. Schmidt photographed him while he was naked from the waist up; then she photographed and swabbed spots on his right elbow and back where the skin had been broken.

Schmidt asked King how he had suffered those injuries.

King said, “He had duct tape all over me. I know that.”

He was ordered to remove his jeans, which were placed in a large paper bag. New photos were taken as he stood in his black boxer shorts. He was instructed to lean on a chair as the bottoms of his feet were photographed one at a time.

“Now your underwear,” Schmidt said. King removed his shorts, and these were placed in another bag. Present was Detective Michael Saxton, who was somewhat surprised to see that King’s pubic hair was completely shaved off. More photos were taken, particularly of “fresh marks” near his groin. King said these might have been caused by him trying to use the bathroom while handcuffed.

Michael King was issued an orange jumpsuit; then he was escorted from the interrogation room to be booked formally on charges of kidnapping with intent to commit or facilitate a felony. He was listed as five feet eight inches tall, two hundred pounds, hair blond, eyes blue. His mug shot showed him glaring—a mean man, his soul consumed.

Without allowing the two to see each other in the hallway, police took Michael King out of the interrogation room and brought in Nate Lee. Two CCSO detectives—one male, one female—did the questioning. They informed him that they intended to take a sworn statement and that he could be charged with perjury if he lied. Once sworn in, Nate said he’d been married to Denise since August of ’05. Her birthday was August 6, 1986.

They met when he was a senior at Lemon Bay High School and had taken a law class together. They knew of each other at that point, but they had never communicated. Their first face-to-face meeting came while sharing a calculus class at Manatee Community College—she was a math whiz—spring semester, 2004. He was in college with a job working for a construction company called J.L. Concrete, but she was still a high-school senior, taking a college course, and making extra money babysitting. They began dating almost immediately. Denise spoke to Nate first, which was surprising, since she was so shy. She said, “Hey, weren’t you in my law class?” Their first date was a study date, in January ’04.

By February, they were pledging their love. He gave her a $40 ring, with a heart on it. She wore it even after they were engaged and then married. He met her family. Rick Goff and Nate had things in common and got along. Nate played baseball in high school, Rick coached baseball—so they always had something to talk about.

When Denise graduated, she and Nate moved to Tampa, where they attended the University of South Florida (USF). They both lived with a friend of his in the Lakeview Oaks apartment complex. They were there for a couple of months over the summer before the semester started; then they moved to another apartment right across the street from USF. They shared the apartment with a friend, the same from Lakeview Oaks, and his girlfriend.

In Tampa, Nate didn’t have a job at first, but Denise had a credit card that her parents had given her. He was going to school full-time, and his parents were paying for his living expenses, so he wasn’t in “a real hurry to get a job.” They had two cats, enjoyed going out to dinner, and occasionally had Nate’s friends over to play poker.

“She didn’t really have any USF friends, just the friends she had in high school,” Nate told the detectives. She did have college study groups that “got together” and discussed school online.

Denise took a job at CVS; soon thereafter, she learned she was pregnant. That was a stressful time. Telling their parents that they were expecting was tough. But the stressful period didn’t last long. Once they decided to wed, everyone relaxed, although neither set of parents had pressured them.

Was she neat? Was she a slob? She was neat, but it wasn’t like she needed everything to be spotless, Nate explained. “Obviously, our house now is a mess, but that’s a different situation.” She liked things being clean, but she wasn’t obsessive-compulsive about it. The detectives asked if she had hobbies. That was a stumper. No, not really. They enjoyed going to the movies. She enjoyed TV shows—cop shows. One day, she wanted to be part of that world. Not the show business version, but in real life. She liked her cats. Before she had real kids, her cats were her kids.

Nate and Denise would go places, not often—the zoo, the aquarium, places like that. They didn’t have a lot of money, but she liked to shop, go to the mall.

What were Nate’s hobbies? Sports, playing them and watching them. Golf. He would like to play more often, but he couldn’t afford it. He played the trumpet. He played cards every Friday night. Someday he would like to build a model train set.

Nate and Denise had known from very early in their relationship that they wanted to get married someday, but their plans were to finish school first. Pregnancy just moved up the date. They wanted to be married when the baby was born; so they exchanged vows in August 2005.

Nate stopped going to classes and took a full-time job at a Best Buy that fall, and the baby, Noah, was born January 8, 2006. For a little more than a year, Denise and Nate lived with his in-laws, and he considered taking a job in the sheriff’s office. He wasn’t sure why the CCSO turned down his application, but it might have been because he lied during his polygraph exam about smoking pot as a kid. Denise never smoked anything. She hated smoking. Nate would have a cigar now and again while playing poker, and his wife hated it. So, instead of being a cop, he worked for a company that built docks and seawalls.

They lived with Denise’s parents for a year, and that was okay. They had their privacy; the house was big; the garage had been converted into a bedroom. But as soon as Nate was making enough money for them to rent their own place, they did.

Since March ’07, he’d been a meter reader for Florida Power and Light (FP&L). That same month, they began renting the house on Latour. Four months after that, Adam, another surprise, was born.

The couple hated the house on Latour. It was one of a bunch of North Port houses that had been built but had not sold, so they were put up for rent at $800 a month. It was a good location for him to get to and from work. However, trouble started right away. They’d only been living there for a couple of weeks when someone stole $600 worth of CDs and a pair of Oakley sunglasses out of Nate’s car, which he’d left unlocked in the driveway. They’d been there for two weeks and already they were trying to figure out how they were going to get out of their lease. They would have had to pay the rent there until they got someone else to move in, and nobody else was going to want to rent that house. They couldn’t put a security system in the house because it wasn’t theirs. He worried because Denise didn’t work and she was home alone with the babies every day.

Nate followed the same routine every morning, up at six-ten, out the door by six-twenty. He showered at night, had his clothes laid out—in the morning, he did nothing. Didn’t eat breakfast. Put his clothes on, grabbed his phone and wallet, then headed out the door. Monday through Friday, weekends off.

For a time, he had a second job at a Winn-Dixie. He dropped it just that past December because he never got to see his family. The boys would be asleep when he left, asleep when he got home.

They paid the bills—rent, car, insurance, phone, Internet—just barely each month. It always came down to the last penny.

This most recent Christmas season, he’d had a few gigs playing the trumpet with the Venice Symphony, in churches and things like that.

He admitted to a small amount of tension at home, just because Denise wanted to go out all the time—because she was stuck in the house—and he wanted to stay in, because he was out all the time. When they did go out, it was usually so the boys could see their grandparents, both sets, or to go to the mall or Walmart.

He knew her routine pretty well. He talked to her every day, several times throughout the day. He would put her on speakerphone and talk to her as he worked. Noah got up between seven and eight every morning. That’s when Denise would get up. Adam woke up not long after that. Adam could talk to himself in his crib for hours and be fine; but the second Noah woke up, he needed attention. She would breast-feed Adam and give Noah oatmeal and chocolate milk. She watched TV a lot, went on the Internet, talked with her friends on Myspace. She put pictures of the kids on there, but she only communicated with people she knew.

The boys napped in the early afternoon. They had lunch midafternoon. She’d make Noah a sandwich—grilled cheese. The only time she would leave the house was to go to the store—and only then when they actually needed something, if they were out of juice or something like that. She would have to take the boys with her. They did not use a sitter much.

“Nobody wanted to drive all the way out to North Port to watch them,” Nate said.

She didn’t go shopping for fun with the boys because Noah would want to run around, and it was too stressful. They’d gone to the park maybe once since they moved to North Port. Maybe once they went to Walmart to get a money order. She couldn’t even go to the gas station with the kids because she had to pay in cash, and it was a hassle. They did those things together. He drove a ’95 Dodge Avenger. Denise drove a Corolla.

One thing that made Nate nervous was that she would walk around the house wearing nothing but a shirt and underwear—and she didn’t necessarily always have the blinds closed. He would tell her to close the blinds and she would say, “No one can see,” because the house was so secluded. He said it was true that there were no neighbors who could look in, but a driver on the street could see “right in.”

For the past month, the weather was nice and Denise had been opening windows, and raising the blinds so they wouldn’t blow in the wind. There were screens, but that was it. He knew for a fact that the windows were open on Thursday because he’d talked to her that morning and she’d said so.

There were two locks on the front door—one on the handle and a dead bolt. They locked both at night; but during the day, usually just the handle was locked.

One potential security problem with the house was the garage door—the door from the garage into the house, which didn’t lock all the time. They’d had a problem with it since they moved in.

The detectives asked Nate about events of the recent past. Tuesday night, he’d had rehearsal. Wednesday night, they’d had dinner with his parents. During that night, she’d gotten up a couple of times in the middle of the night because she was having her period. He thought she was wearing a white shirt, but he couldn’t be sure.

On Thursday, he’d called Denise about 7:55 A.M., which was early, and he’d been afraid she would still be asleep. But she was up and they had a five-minute conversation.

He also talked to her around eleven o’clock. She said she’d taken a shower. He asked her what was for dinner. She said she had chicken out or they could have pasta, but they were out of ingredients for that. She also said they were out of milk and juice—and he had the money.

He talked to her less than normal that morning. It was raining and he wanted to get his route done as quickly as possible because he wasn’t enjoying getting wet. When he did finish, he called home to see if he still needed to go to the store and to let Denise know he’d be home by three-thirty.

No answer.

The phone was ringing all the way through, so he knew it was turned on. He called again, and again. Six, seven times. He figured she must have gone to the store and left her phone at home. When he got home, the first thing he noticed was that the windows were shut, garage door shut, Denise’s car in the driveway, and front door locked. He opened it with a key.

When he got inside, he saw Denise’s phone on the reclining chair near the front door. It was plugged into a charger and said: Seven missed calls. Then he heard Noah, who was in Adam’s crib with Adam. Very odd. Denise would never allow that. Noah was so much bigger than Adam, and he didn’t completely know how to be gentle. Nate picked up Noah; then he checked the bedroom and bathroom. No Denise. He began yelling her name. Checked the whole house, opened all the closets, pulled back the covers on the bed, went outside and checked all sides of the house, called 911, went to a neighbor’s house and knocked on the door. Seen my wife? They said no. Both kids had full diapers. He changed the diapers and asked Noah where Mommy was. Noah pointed in the bedroom, but she wasn’t there. She wasn’t anywhere. The windows were shut but not locked. That wasn’t right. They were either open or closed and locked. Nothing was broken. It was 82 degrees in the house, so Nate turned on the AC.

At some point, he tried calling his mother-in-law—no answer. Then he called Rick, who said he was on his way. It started hitting Nate then, and he began to cry. The next time he looked out the window, the first police car was pulling up. Two police cars came. A few minutes later, Rick arrived. Nate dressed the boys. Police kicked everyone out and shut down the house as a potential crime scene.

The search for Denise Lee utilized the combined strength of the areas’ multiple law enforcement agencies. Canine search-and-rescue were active. Sheriff’s deputies from two counties, North Port cops, Fish & Wildlife agents, Animal Services, and Florida Highway Patrol all had people searching.

There were even civilian volunteers; some working in coordination with officials, some out on their own. All off-duty officers reported for duty.

Trooper Eddie Pope, the arresting officer, appreciated the numbers. It was a hell of a search team, but the game plan missed the mark. The evidence on the car was still wet. They should just draw a circle around the point of the arrest—or better yet, three or four hundred feet south on Toledo Blade, where he first saw the Camaro.

The trooper joined up with a corporal and went to a search command center at Sumter. He talked to some bigwigs he hadn’t seen before. They had it wrong.

Three hundred searchers all over the grid. No disrespect, but Pope was pretty sure Denise was close to the arrest site. They should concentrate on that region.

“Hey, we appreciate what you did. Good job—but we’ve got it from here,” they told Pope, who felt dissed. He was invited to join a new search team being put together just outside the trailer. The trooper and the corporal opted out of that detail and forged off on their own. Pope pointed his Marauder toward the corner of Cranberry and Toledo Blade. At that site was the staging area for the canine units, Fish & Wildlife, and the Sarasota Response Team.

Pope talked to a captain and told him his story. Turned out the search teams had not been told where the arrest was made, nor had they heard about the evidence found on the car. Pope and a team, which included dogs, headed for the spot he had in mind.

The initial reports in the local papers befuddled residents. One typical comment from a North Port woman was “Maybe I need more coffee, but this story doesn’t make sense. Surely, no one would give him a shovel after seeing her in that situation.” She wasn’t the last person to question Harold Muxlow’s actions.

Harold Muxlow had not been quick to act, but his daughter had. She, too, seemed confused about her dad’s hesitance when she said, “It’s common sense. The woman needed help. She was yelling, ‘Help!’ If someone needs help, then you get help. You don’t stop and think about it.”