Michael Benson's True Crime Bundle

by Michael Benson

  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.”

  CHAPTER 3

  JANUARY 18, 2008

  At 1:38 A.M., police officers in South Venice knocked on the door of Robert Salvador and woke him up. When was the last time he’d seen Michael King? Did he know the whereabouts of Denise Lee? Robert said he knew no Lees and hadn’t seen King lately.

  He talked to the officers for about five minutes and then they left. He and his wife went on the Internet and found out what it was all about. Robert thought about it, and decided he might be deeply involved in this. His best bet was to tell the law everything he knew.

  In the morning, he called the Venice police, the agency closest to him. They said the case was not in their jurisdiction and was being handled by the North Port Police Department. They gave him the number to call.

  So Robert Salvador went to see Detective Morales, and Salvador had a very interesting story to tell about the captured suspect. He apologized for the delay, but he’d been a little slow on the uptake as to the importance of events. It took a while to sink in that anything quite this horrible could be real.

  Robert was a married man with six kids, a self-employed construction worker. He knew King as a plumber. They’d worked jobs at the same site. Robert remodeled or renovated. King did the pipes. Sometimes King tore up a wall to get at the pipes and Salvador came in immediately after to patch up the holes. He’d known King for a couple of years, and really got to know him when he did a job at King’s house on Sardinia. After that, Salvador and King hung out.

  Once King asked him to go deep-sea fishing with him, and Robert took his wife with him. King was with an older couple, whom he introduced as his girlfriend’s parents.

  There was a period of time when Robert didn’t hear from Michael King. He thought maybe King had lost his job. He heard from a third party that King had moved back to Michigan, where he was from. Then King called him, said he was back in Florida, and was wondering if Salvador knew of work. He claimed he was “trying to get his house back in order.” He needed furniture. His place was empty. Robert offered an old TV he could have.

  That was the last he heard from King until the day before. At 11:00 A.M., King called him and asked if he could pick up the TV. Robert told King it was raining, so he didn’t have to work—he’d been doing a lot of outside work lately. He was on his way to a gun range, where he enjoyed target shooting.

  “I went two, three times a month, usually on days when I had no job—or there was no work because of weather,” Robert told police.

  He had to admit, he was becoming addicted to target shooting. His wife knew that he went to the gun range on occasion, sure—but she had no idea how often. He had four guns: a nine millimeter, two small twenty-two pistols, and a Russian pistol.

  Salvador politely asked King to shoot with him. Surprisingly, King said yes. Robert asked him if he still had his .357 and King said no. Now King had a nine—but no nine ammunition.

  No problem. Robert had plenty of nine ammo, in the box where he kept all his ammo, a sealed plastic box, a dry box, important for when he went boating.

  So they went to Knight Trail Park & Gun Range in Nokomis. Salvador could tell that King had never been to this range before because he didn’t know where it was. After trying to give King directions, without success, Robert suggested that they meet at a nearby gas station and then go to the range together. King said fine.

  Robert drove his white minivan. King his green Camaro. Later, Robert wondered if King had ever been to any gun range. He didn’t know the rules. When they got to the range, King was wearing a black T-shirt, memorable in that its sleeves were longer than normal.

  Robert had given King ammo for his gun. Salvador said to police, “He could have pocketed one or two more.”

  He handed over all four guns that had been used at the firing range the previous day. No, he didn’t have King’s gun. As far as he knew, King had King’s gun.

  Jane Kowalski woke up at her grandmother’s house and had a cup of coffee in her hand when she turned on the TV. There, full screen, was a picture of Michael King.

  “Oh, my God, that’s the guy in the car,” she exclaimed. “Holy crap!”

  A picture of Denise Lee came on the TV. She realized that it hadn’t been a child whom she had heard screaming and pounding on the glass, but rather a young woman.

  She called the hotline number that flashed on the screen and explained, “You guys probably want to talk to me. I’m the one who made that 911 call.”

  “Okay, we’ll get someone to get back with you,” they said.

  No one called back.

  On the afternoon of January 18, Channel 10 News in Tampa Bay located Michael King’s parents, James and Patsy, in their mobile home in the Tidevue Estates, just north of U.S. 301, in the town of Ellenton, Florida.

  James said that he was “worried and scared” for his son. He had not seen Mike in twenty-four hours, and didn’t fully understand what was going on. The entire family had just returned from Michigan on Tuesday afternoon, January 15.

  He was asked how the arrest was affecting the family and responded, “We are still trying to figure this out. It has been hard.”

  “What is the relationship between your son and the missing woman?” a reporter asked.

  “I don’t know. I only hope she is found alive and in good health.”

  Patsy chimed in that she heard about it on the TV news. “It is totally out of character for Mike,” she said.

  At around that same time, only a few miles to the north from the Kings’ mobile home, the search for Denise had moved to Manatee County after a woman’s sandal was found. Police dogs, officers on foot, and a helicopter were called to the site south of U.S. 301. False alarm.

  A pile of women’s clothing was found on the north end of Salford Boulevard, south of Interstate 75, not far from Michael King’s home, but police dogs determined that these did not belong to the victim.

  The search team of Trooper Pope was in the woods in the vicinity of King’s arres
t; it was tough going because of the thickness of the brush. There were many areas where searchers could barely see the ground.

  Among those actively searching for Denise was her father. Rick Goff told Chief Deputy Bill Cameron that he wanted to “stay involved,” and was allowed to do so.

  For North Port police, there was an eerie and grim sense of déjà vu. Less than a year and a half before, six-year-old Coralrose Fullwood was abducted from her North Port home in the middle of the night. She was discovered several hours later, raped and murdered, behind a construction site only a few doors down from her home.

  Now a new search was under way. Some specialists boarded kayaks and johnboats to navigate canals and survey large ponds. Nothing. Police chased down twenty-five leads. The first twenty-four were false alarms.

  Then came number twenty-five.

  CHAPTER 4

  CANINE SEKOU

  Tami Treadway was a SCSO Animal Services supervisor, a civilian employee, who trained dogs to conduct search-and-rescue missions. The dogs, once trained, could no longer live in a normal home, and they needed to be placed with a search-and-rescue specialist or a member of law enforcement. She made sure everyone was trained properly—humans and dogs alike—and safeguarded the dogs’ health.

  She had her own dog, of course. Canine Sekou was his formal name; he was a golden retriever she’d handled for six years. Sekou was a South African word for “great warrior” or “learned one.”

  “He was my husband’s dog,” Treadway later said. “He got him from his nephew in New Orleans, where my husband is from. We weren’t together at the time, although we were both members of the team. He got Sekou to be a search dog, and trained him initially in wilderness searches. We got together when Sekou was young.”

  When her husband went to school to become a firefighter and a paramedic, Tami Treadway took over Sekou’s training. The dog was trained in human remains detection, and Treadway had been his handler since.

  “He’s still my husband’s dog in the family sense, but I’m the one who has worked him,” she noted.

  Treadway and Sekou were a team, she and that dog, two halves of a whole. She could read his body language like a book, and he “told” in a million ways just what he was doing and thinking. He was her partner. They lived together. They slept together.

  Golden retrievers made great search dogs, but they were by no means the only breed capable of doing the work. German shepherds, Labs, Australian cattle dogs, and even mixed breeds were also suitable. Aptitude varied more from dog to dog than from breed to breed.

  A dog trained in human remains detection followed the scent of decaying human body parts, so Sekou’s searches almost never had a happy ending. Most were just flat-out heartbreaking.

  “The one that sticks out in my mind was a case in Tampa, to the north of us. They had some intelligence that a girl might have had something bad happen to her with a guy who lived in the house, and they wanted us to search this empty house. Stripped-to-the-walls empty. It had a concrete floor, and they thought he might have buried her under the concrete.” They never went in with just one dog, always with three or four, because a “dog will be a dog” and they don’t have 100 percent success. All three dogs in this case came up with nothing in the house. In fact, they didn’t even want to be in the house. They kept trying to go outside. So they moved the search to the backyard, and the dogs hit on a spot near a shed. There, about six feet down, they found the girl’s body.

  The girl’s name? Treadway didn’t know. She might never know. “We try to be disconnected,” she said.

  But there was no way to be disconnected in this case. She lived in North Port and the search for the missing Denise Lee was all over the local news, even before she and Sekou took up the search.

  Even if you weren’t watching TV, you knew something was up, with so many roads closed by police. To make it even more personal, Denise was the same age as Treadway’s daughter; and her daughter had two little boys, just like Denise.

  The dogs don’t know, of course. They are just happy that they got their toy or their reward for a successful search. Sekou had a clownish personality, and that didn’t change just because he was searching for a cadaver. He never picked up on the grimness of the task.

  On January 18, 2008, Treadway and Sekou were called in to assist with the search for Denise Lee. She was given her orders by the sheriff, and they were one of six-to-eight canine teams involved in that day’s desperate activities.

  The initial plan was to search a wide variety of areas, in the vicinity of the Lees’ house, around King’s house, and the area around Harold Muxlow’s home.

  But Trooper Pope said their best bet was to search in the area of King’s arrest, and that was where Sekou and Treadway were happily doing their thing.

  CHAPTER 5

  THE DISTURBED EARTH

  The search continued into the early-morning hours. Tami Treadway and Sekou strode with purpose into a remote swampy section off an unfinished road. The dog was particularly curious around a large pile of sand, the grains of which resembled those found in the Camaro and on the suspect.

  There was an unfinished development off Toledo Blade, and the site was part of that. Construction had stopped in the middle when the economy fell; this part of the road had gone undeveloped. The location was just off Cranberry Boulevard.

  The search was interrupted briefly when a fire chief on the scene called it a night and ordered the search resumed in the morning. Many searchers, including Pope, left, but Treadway remained on the scene. She and Sekou returned to the area near the large pile of sand.

  Sekou wandered into the wooded area and then came back out. He went back in; this time, Treadway followed him.

  “Whatcha got, boy?”

  There were pine trees and a gully. At one point, both woman and dog had to go under a fence to proceed. Treadway saw a spot where pine needles had fallen, where perhaps there had been standing water, where the ground was darker. It was a sandy area, and it was a spot where the vegetation differed from the surrounding area. There was clay mixed in with the sand at that spot, indicating the surface was recently tilled.

  Plus, it was this spot that had Sekou reacting. A barbed-wire fence bordered the scene at its rear. Without touching anything, Treadway set out to call law enforcement to the scene, which was taped off and slowly excavated.

  No, it wasn’t that easy. The first police officer she encountered out on the street paid no mind to her. “He wasn’t interested and left,” Treadway later recalled with frustration in her voice.

  Luckily, there were other officers in the area, and eventually the area was sealed off. Looking at the ground at that spot carefully, armed with flashlights, police saw what appeared to be blood in the sand. The large sand pile nearby was missing shovelsful of sand on one side. The sand was very light, the kind Floridians called “sugar sand.” On the ground between the pile and the disturbed earth, there was bloody sand in two dinner plate–sized piles. It hadn’t been caused by someone bleeding over a sandy spot. The sand was on top of the blood, placed to hide the blood. The blood had already been there, pooled in spots.

  SCSO crime scene technician Lisa Lanham arrived on the scene. First order of business for her was to preserve the evidence. A tent was erected over the site to accomplish that. Because the ground was wet and sloped, sandbags were piled up on one side of the suspicious location, to help prevent water from seeping in.

  All of this was starting to paint a picture. The disturbed earth was now being referred to as the “potential grave site.” Lanham bagged blood, sand, and sandy blood. She noticed that there were some blades of grass in the area that were naturally red. Back at the lab, they would determine what was and wasn’t blood. Excavation would begin the following morning, under natural light. Lanham left the site and reported to another emergency; then she returned to the white tent on the morning of January 19.

  CHAPTER 6

  JANUARY 19, 2008

  On Saturday
morning, Jane Kowalski again called the hotline number. The reaction was still lukewarm.

  “We probably need to talk to you,” the operator said. “We’ll have someone call you back.”

  “Okay, I’ll be home all day,” Jane said.

  She never went far from her phone, but again the authorities didn’t call.

  Under the supervision of a professional archaeologist named Lewis “Skip” Wood, working for the SCSO, the excavation began at dawn. When Wood got there, he described the site as a shallow swale behind piles of palmetto root. For comparison purposes, Wood paced off fifty feet from the suspicious site and dug with a shovel a bit, overturning earth in a patch that measured two feet by two feet. He discovered that, as expected, the soil under the earth was similar in color to that found on the surface at the suspicious site. A quick visual analysis of the soil at the site revealed sand such as would be found at the beach; charcoal, the result of some past forest fire; and a brown soil that included degraded roots. The yellow sand found on the surface of the suspicious site had been twenty-two inches beneath the surface at the test patch that Wood had dug. What they had here was a hole that had been dug out, then filled back in.

  Material was removed from the potential grave site a wafer-thin layer at a time.

  With Wood was another archaeologist, Maxine Miller, who searched in vain for items that might yield a readable fingerprint. She took fresh photos of the site after each slice of earth was taken away. She placed measuring sticks on the ground before taking photos to provide a scale.

  Both archaeologists avoided contaminating evidence by donning gloves, caps, booties, and white jumpsuits. Pine needles and pinecones were found beneath the surface, another indication of digging and refilling. The edges of the suspicious site were obvious. The soil was hard-packed all around, but it was looser and softer at the site itself.