Michael Benson's True Crime Bundle (44 page)

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Authors: Michael Benson

BOOK: Michael Benson's True Crime Bundle
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“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.

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