Michael Benson's True Crime Bundle

by Michael Benson

  “In the state of Florida,” O’Donnell said, “you can be schizophrenic and still be able to tell and appreciate the difference between right and wrong.”

  All of the things Murphy had done at the crime scene—cleaning up, for example, and his other attempts to avoid detection—could be used to argue he was sane.

  During the trial, Arend—with the supportive help of the two other assistant state attorneys—was masterful. He impeached all four doctors and convinced the jury to return with a guilty verdict.

  In May 2009, Murphy received a sentence of life in prison. Unlike the Murphy case, the King case was clearly capital murder, and Arend planned to pursue the death penalty aggressively.

  When Arend put together his team for King’s prosecution, he went straight to the short list. He asked the same two women who had done such a slam-bang job in the Murphy case to help him. They worked well together, and they were already a well-oiled team.

  First to be asked was Mary-Catherine Fraivillig, whom everyone knew as Karen. Her name was Karen, as far as she was concerned. Her parents were Catholic, and apparently, there’s no Saint Karen.

  “A priest went crazy,” she explained. “I had to be baptized as Mary-Catherine. I probably should have legally changed it years ago, but never got around to it.”

  Fraivillig was sixty-two years old, but didn’t have nearly as many years of legal experience as people assumed. Truth was, she started law school unusually late in life.

  “I am a land surveyor,” she explained. Her husband, Lee, was a civil engineer and had a family business back in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where they lived until 1993.

  He worked in the office—she outside with the crew, handling cases involving water, sewage, and pavement; performing topographic surveys; gauging the sturdiness of a piece of land before a construction project began.

  When their last child went off to college, her husband announced his intention to retire and move to Florida. She loved her work and didn’t want to stop, but she gave in to her husband’s plan with one caveat: “I’m going back to school,” she told him. “I had always wanted to be a lawyer. It’s just that circumstances always intervened.” Life always got in the way—but not this time.

  Fraivillig completed her undergraduate work at the New College of Florida, a school that didn’t have grades. However, in order to graduate, you had to write a thesis, give a dissertation, and then defend that dissertation in front of your professors. No pressure. From there, she went to Stetson Law, in St. Petersburg, graduated in 2002, and had been prosecuting cases ever since.

  Fraivillig was a large woman, with long blond hair, who moved deliberately and erect—as if balancing an invisible book atop her head. The effect was downright regal.

  She enjoyed taking on the bad guys. Sometimes she wondered about the human condition, but she felt better when tenaciously combating its darkest corners.

  She was ambivalent about the death penalty. Sometimes people had this image of prosecutors, that they wanted to hang and behead everyone. It wasn’t philosophically true. Prosecutors were educated people and knew that the death penalty was reserved for the worst of the worst.

  “But in the King case,” Fraivillig declared, “there was no question.”

  Fraivillig would be responsible for questioning the state’s eyewitnesses.

  Suzanne O’Donnell, the third member of the prosecution team, was a graduate of the University of Florida School of Law. Unlike some lawyers who’d seen things from both sides of the courtroom, O’Donnell always wanted to be a prosecutor. After school in 1999, she started as a prosecutor in St. Petersburg, Florida, and shortly after that came to Sarasota.

  Her forte was forensic evidence. When Denise Lee’s body was discovered, O’Donnell went to the burial scene and scoped things out.

  For four years, O’Donnell had been the state attorney’s specialist in sex crimes against children. Her work on the Murphy case had been invaluable, and Arend expected nothing less when it came to Michael King’s prosecution.

  Her job would be to introduce the evidence in the case, and to question the crime scene technicians who worked at the various crime scenes, as well as the scientists “back at the lab” who analyzed that evidence.

  She would handle all of the evidence, except for the DNA, which Arend was saving for himself.

  Lon Arend began strategizing immediately. He knew that the eyewitness and lab stuff in this case was very strong. His worry: what would King’s defense do?

  Arend thought of possible defenses and made efforts to combat them—indeed, to nip them in the bud.

  He informed law enforcement that he wanted the members of King’s family interviewed immediately before they had a chance to put their heads together and come up with a feasible psychiatric defense.

  Officers flew up to Michigan to conduct the family interviews—hopefully, before a defense attorney could get to them and tell them what to say. King had three brothers, Jim and Gary older, and Rodney who was younger. They could not pin down brother Gary to make a statement.

  When they went to see the mom and dad, the dad said he was too ill with heart problems to give a statement, but Michael’s mom volunteered to answer questions. They asked her about her son’s psychiatric background: any head injuries?

  “No,” Patsy King said.

  CHAPTER 11

  INTERNAL AFFAIRS INVESTIGATION

  By Sunday, January 20, 2008, just three days after the murder, it was clear that the mishandling of the Kowalski 911 call by personnel of the Charlotte County Sheriff’s Office Communications Section, specifically the dispatch center, had hindered law enforcement’s gallant attempt to save Denise Lee’s life.

  To see that nothing like this would ever happen again, Charlotte County sheriff John Davenport ordered a “professional standards Internal Affairs investigation” into the actions of two dispatchers: Susan Kirby Kallestad and Elizabeth Martinez.

  The investigation was conducted by Captain Donna H. Roguska, of the CCSO Internal Affairs Section, assisted by FDLE resident agent in charge Yolanda Carbia.

  On Monday, Captain Roguska interviewed Kallestad, who remembered well the call in question. At approximately 6:30 P.M., CCSO call taker Mildred Stepp realized the importance of the Kowalski call and stood up to say that the information needed to get out on the radio. Stepp wrote the key information on a piece of paper and brought it over to the dispatch area. According to Stepp, she advised CCSO communications supervisor Laurie Piatt of the situation. Piatt said she was trying to patch the radios, and dispatcher Kallestad said she did not believe that she could use her radio. Kallestad told CCSO dispatcher Elizabeth Martinez that the information had to get out. While call taker Stepp was still on the phone with the caller, she was also talking to both her and Martinez with updated information. It was approximately 6:40 P.M. that Stepp posted the information regarding the Kowalski call into the dispatch computer.

  And here came the sad coincidence, the key factor. It was just about at that same time that the shift change occurred. Afternoon dispatchers knocked off for the day and the night dispatchers started. According to Kallestad, CCSO dispatcher Kattie Beasley was assigned to take over the Mid-County (dispatch two) radio. Kallestad made sure Beasley was aware of the Kowalski information and advised her that it needed to get out. Kallestad said she later heard Beasley say that she “assigned it,” but was uncertain if Beasley was referring to the Kowalski information or something else.

  “Who replaced you on dispatch one?” Captain Roguska asked.

  “Brandie Schaefer,” Kallestad said.

  “Did you pass the information from the Kowalski call on to her?”

  “No.”

  “What else, if anything, did you do?”

  “Around this time, I recall putting out a BOLO about the green Camaro.”

  “Who directed you to do that?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  Captain Roguska checked Kallestad’s story and subsequent investiga
tion, in the form of the radio traffic log. It revealed that Kallestad had been contacted by Sergeant Floyd Davis to put out a BOLO to all units regarding the green Camaro. The radio log showed that Kallestad did as she was told, and the BOLO went out at 6:35 P.M.

  On the same day as the Kallestad interview, Roguska took a statement from dispatcher Elizabeth Martinez regarding the handling of the same emergency call. She said that on the day of Denise Lee’s murder, she had been working dispatch channel two, otherwise known as Mid-County. She knew that an important call had come in to Stepp.

  “Was a call to service entered?”

  “Not to my knowledge.”

  Martinez said she saw Stepp discussing the call with Kallestad and she thought she was rightfully out of the loop, since “the units responding to North Port were mostly on dispatch channel one.

  “I was busy on the radio and phone.”

  “Did Kallestad tell you to get the information out?”

  “She might have. I didn’t remember her saying that, but I talked to her later and she said she had.”

  What Martinez did remember was that even before the Kowalski call, two BOLOs had been received from North Port and subsequently put out regarding the missing woman and the suspect’s car, based on information gathered from the victim’s husband and elsewhere. This volunteered comment might have implied that dispatchers were aware that the crime being reported by Kowalski and the one reported by Nate Lee were one and the same. However, their actions made it clear that no such connection was made. Kowalski had reported an abducted child, and Denise Lee was a grown woman. The missing woman investigation involved a green Camaro. Kowalski reported a blue or black Camaro. There were similarities, for certain, but there was just enough difference to keep the connection from being automatic.

  Captain Roguska’s investigation ran into February, and everyone associated with the 911 center in Charlotte County was interviewed, some twice. After analyzing the data she’d collected, Roguska wrote her conclusion, which was released on February 13. She cited all of the failures to communicate in the communications center, blaming the bulk of them on personnel who were preoccupied when Stepp took the call from Kowalski. Piatt was on the phone with both the SCSO and NPPD trying to patch radio channels for better communications, an effort that was successful with the SCSO but not with the North Port police. Piatt was also answering the Nextel and the supervisor’s unrecorded line, while making calls out for additional resources. The preoccupation was with the disappearance of Denise Lee, a police sergeant’s daughter. Everything else was put on the back burner, so to speak; a tunnel vision existed, which served to eliminate the Kowalski call from consideration. Kallestad not only failed to put out the Kowalski info, but when she was advised by Davis to call North Port and get more info, she failed to do this as well.

  Based on the evidence in this investigation I recommend the ... charges against ... Kallestad be sustained, Roguska wrote. The charges were failure to send units to Toledo Blade and Route 41, and failure to follow Davis’s instruction. Kallestad stated under oath that she advised Martinez that the Kowalski info needed to go out. Martinez vaguely recalled Kallestad saying this to her, but couldn’t recall the details. Bottom line, info didn’t go out, and Roguska recommended the charges against Martinez—that she failed to send a unit to Toledo Blade and Route 41—be sustained as well.

  As Rick Goff put it, “We blew it—and I say ‘we’ because I’m part of that sheriff’s office.”

  Susan Kallestad was eventually suspended without pay for sixty hours, would participate in twelve hours of remedial training, and would be on six months’ disciplinary probation. Elizabeth Martinez was suspended for thirty-six hours, and received the same twelve hours of remedial training, and six months of probation. Martinez was also ordered to attend a Critical Incident Stress Management Debriefing.

  Jane Kowalski was asked her opinion and she said she was blown away. She had been on the phone with the dispatcher for—what?—something like nine minutes. She was reporting an incident with obvious serious consequences—indeed, even grave consequences—yet the call was “lost in the mix.”

  Nate Lee felt the two punished dispatchers should have been fired, and the woman who fielded the Kowalski call should have been terminated as well. Nate listened to the Kowalski call on tape and he heard incompetence. The point of the call was that a possible kidnap victim was in a car on Toledo Blade, and the operator—Mildred Stepp—seemed more concerned with the caller, her whereabouts and her safety. “Are your doors locked?” Please.

  Sheriff Davenport was aware of Nate’s feeling, but the sheriff defended his own actions. He believed there was no punishment he could dish out that would compare with the way Kallestad and Martinez were punishing themselves. Those women were going to have to consider the tragic consequences of their inaction for the rest of their lives. “They felt terrible about this. Terrible,” Davenport said.

  “We feel terrible about it.” The entire department had made a mistake. The sheriff also pointed out that for both Kallestad and Martinez, working under pressure was nothing new. This time, they made a mistake, but it wasn’t part of a pattern. They had each handled thousands of emergencies over the years, and they didn’t “choke.”

  Just a month after his wife’s death, Nate Lee granted a reporter an interview and said that, even though Denise was gone, she was still finding ways to surprise him. Just the other day, he was going through some stuff and found some things she had put in the back of their wedding album—cards and a note he wrote to her while they were dating. Nate said that he was only just getting an opportunity to grieve. “The past three weeks I haven’t had a chance to think about her as much as I want. I haven’t had a chance to pull out the camcorder and look at the videos.” For the past month, he had spent a lot of time wondering how it all could have happened, how someone could snatch away a woman with two little babies in the house. “I know what he did, the ruthless cruel nature of what he did. I laid in bed a couple of nights ago and was trying to say, you know, ‘I need to forgive him.’ And I couldn’t.”

  Glitches in the area’s law enforcement system kept emerging. On February 28, 2008, the Herald-Tribune reported that a delay in updating a state computer database might have cost authorities their chance to save Denise Lee. That database contained vehicle registration and other records; in this case, it failed to ID the Camaro as belonging to Michael King. In December 2007, King submitted a registration for his Camaro that included his North Port address, but that info was not entered into the database.

  According to local officials, there could be a ninety-day lag before the database picked up changes. If the database had been up-to-date, there was a chance that police might have arrived at King’s Sardinia home while King and his victim were still there. As it turned out, police didn’t learn of King’s name and address until Denise used his cell phone to call 911. Because of this case’s notoriety, the FDLE and the state’s Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles worked to shorten the lag time for updating database records from ninety days to no more than one week.

  Records showed that within a half hour of Nate Lee’s 911 call, after information was taken from the Lees’ neighbor about the suspicious green Camaro, local police searched the state database, known as the Factual Analysis Criminal Threat Solution (FACTS), for a list of all green Camaros registered to owners in North Port. But King’s name was not there. There were three other green Camaros on the list and police checked on those immediately, all before 5:30 P.M. on the day of the murder—of course, to no avail.

  Police felt they had enough evidence to convict Michael King, but they continued to search for more. Discovery of King’s nine-millimeter gun would have been great. The only way to search some areas was to kill and clear all of the vegetation.

  To do that, herbicides would need to be applied; and before police could do that, they required Consent to Search forms signed by all of the involved landowners. Those forms gave police
permission to search as much as they wanted for six months.

  This being Florida, dive teams that would search the waters of the region had a special concern: alligators. So, for the owners of those lakes and other bodies of water, a second form was signed, giving the Florida Department of Fish and Wildlife permission to “trap and relocate” all alligators that might hinder the police search.

  The evidence against King was presented to a grand jury, which indicted King on first-degree murder, a crime punishable by death.

  Presiding over every phase of the Michael King case would be Judge Deno Economou, a thin man whose salt-and-pepper hair grew in thick waves. He was no stranger to newsworthy cases, dating back to before his time on the bench, to when he was an assistant state attorney. In 1989, for example, he successfully prosecuted the third-degree murder and child abuse trial of a Sarasota couple, William and Christine Hermanson, who tragically deprived their seven-year-old daughter of medical care because of their Christian Science beliefs. The girl died of complications from diabetes in 1986. His comment at the time was “If they wish to become martyrs for their religion, they have that right. But I contend to you that they do not have the right to make a martyr out of a seven-year-old girl.”

  Now, on March 6, 2008, Judge Economou sat on his bench and heard Michael Lee King’s lawyers enter his plea of not guilty. The plea was a mere formality, and King did not appear in the courtroom. Also at the twenty-minute hearing, the judge denied a defense attempt to have the first-degree murder indictment thrown out because media publicity about the case might have tainted the grand jury. The defense attorneys didn’t expect the judge to rule in their favor, but asking was necessary to preserve issues for eventual appeals.