Michael Benson's True Crime Bundle

by Michael Benson

  “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-t
hirty.

  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.