Michael Benson's True Crime Bundle

by Michael Benson

  Judge Economou called the midmorning break.

  The prosecution called Jennifer Setlak, who identified herself as an FDLE lab analyst, Biology Division. Suzanne O’Donnell asked the witness for a summary of her background. The witness said she had a bachelor’s degree in science—major biology, minor chemistry. She’d done postgraduate work at the University of Florida in genetics and had been with the crime lab for three years.

  She explained that she worked in DNA, the nucleic acid in a person’s body—half provided by the mother, half by the father—that made everyone (except identical twins) unique. She described the manner in which she did her testing. She took a sample found at a crime scene and created a DNA profile, and then she compared that profile to that of samples of known origin. In this manner, for example, a semen stain at the scene of a rape could be matched with 100 percent certainty to a suspect. She explained that she had taken classes in biological statistics, and received continuing education in DNA statistics. Statistics were important in cases in which DNA cannot be matched to an individual. In such cases, the characteristics of the DNA can be used to determine the characteristics of the unknown subject.

  “What things from the human body can be used to create a DNA profile?”

  “Every cell in the human body contains DNA unique to that individual. Most commonly, we use hair and skin samples. Various bodily fluids are used as well.”

  As part of her work on this case, Setlak explained, she had developed a DNA profile for the victim, using a cheek swab made at the victim’s autopsy. She also created a profile for Michael King, using the DNA samples collected by Michael Saxton from the defendant at the Sarasota County Jail.

  She tested the vaginal swabs taken from the victim during her postmortem procedure. The witness quickly determined that there were sperm cells mixed in with that sample.

  “You can distinguish a sperm cell from other types of cells?”

  “Yes. Part of my training is to know the unique shape and size of sperm cells.”

  “In this case, were you able to create a DNA profile from the sperm cells found in the victim’s body?”

  “Yes. The DNA profile for the sperm cells found in [Denise] Lee matched the DNA profile of Michael King.”

  “In terms of statistics, how frequent would that particular DNA profile be?”

  “In Caucasians, that profile would occur once in every one quadrillion Caucasians.”

  “One quadrillion. That is one followed by how many zeroes?”

  “One followed by fifteen zeroes.”

  The witness was shown a bag holding duct tape that was found on the floor of King’s home. She was asked if she recognized this evidence. Setlak said she did. She had taken a swab from the tape, and successfully developed a DNA profile from it that matched King’s DNA.

  On the duct tape discovered in King’s trash can, she tested the adhering hairs and found them to have a DNA profile matching that of the victim. The odds of that DNA belonging to anyone else were 1 in 110 quadrillion. Hair and blood found on the hood of the Camaro also proved to belong to the victim.

  “The evidence that you tested all arrived to you in sealed bags?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did any of it appear to be tampered with in any way?”

  “No.”

  “When you were done with the evidence, did you reseal it in its bag?”

  “Yes.”

  “If a seal had been broken, you would have been able to tell?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “And none of the seals were broken on any of the evidence you analyzed?”

  “None.”

  “No further questions, Your Honor,” O’Donnell said.

  Jerry Meisner said, “Thank you, Your Honor, and good morning, Ms. Setlak.”

  “Good morning,” the witness replied.

  “Was there among the evidence you received an anal swab taken from Denise Lee during her autopsy?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you obtain a profile from that swab?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was there any DNA foreign to Denise Lee found on the anal swabs?”

  “No.”

  “No semen?”

  “No.”

  “Did you ever obtain a known sample from a man named Robert Salvador?”

  “No.”

  “About how many people are there in the world?”

  “Around 6.5 billion people.”

  “What is the highest frequency of occurrence of DNA typing in an unknown that you attributed to King?”

  “One in one quadrillion.”

  “How many zeroes?”

  “Fifteen.”

  “And how many people are in the database that you use to create these numbers?”

  “About two hundred individuals are tested to make up the database.”

  Meisner’s face said it all. A quadrillion was an unimaginable number—it was so huge—and to base such an estimate on two hundred test cases! The numbers were meaningless.

  Meisner continued picking away at DNA technology, trying to make it seem like it didn’t produce the certainty that the prosecution was trying to make it out to be. He made the witness describe the process in the most scientific of terms, better to sell the whole package as scientific mumbo jumbo.

  The prosecution team was not terribly concerned with this tact. Juries either believed in DNA or they didn’t. Although it had only been around for a generation, most people saw DNA identification every bit as damning to a defendant as fingerprints.

  “You tested a red-and-black jacket, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Find any blood on it?”

  “No.”

  “You tested scrapings from Denise Lee’s fingernails, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you find any DNA foreign to Denise Lee in those scrapings?”

  “No.”

  Christina Sanders testified that she, like Setlak, was an FDLE employee. In fact, she worked in the same crime lab as Setlak, but with a different focus: trace evidence. She used a range of microscopes to distinguish and identify varieties of soil, vegetation, fibers, etc.

  Sanders had a bachelor’s degree in forensic science from the University of Central Florida. As an undergraduate, she completed a sixteen-hour-per-week internship in the crime lab. The first phase of her training consisted of background with a lot of hands-on training, and she also took a basic textile course. The second portion involved supervised casework. She was supervised by experienced analysts, who ensured she was doing everything properly. She was what was called a “testifying analyst” in that she had been deemed qualified to testify in court about the results of her analyses. This would be the eighteenth time she had testified in a criminal trial.

  Suzanne O’Donnell drew Sanders’s attention to the duct tape that had been earlier entered as state’s evidence.

  “Is duct tape the sort of thing you analyze?”

  “Yes.”

  “What sort of analysis do you do?”

  She explained that she would observe the tape carefully, both with the naked eye and using a low-powered microscope, searching for fibers or other small items adhering to the tape that might help link a crime scene to a suspect. Also, she’d look at the physical makeup of the tape: “the number of yarns, and the spaces between those yarns.” She did this to determine if separated sections of tape came from the same roll.

  Then she would look at the end of each piece, the pattern created by the tearing or cutting of the tape, to determine if the sections had once all been one piece.

  “That’s called making a fractured match,” Sanders said, explaining that fractured matches were difficult to determine with duct tape because the ends became distorted.

  O’Donnell asked the witness to focus on this case’s duct tape. Yes, Sanders analyzed it. No, she couldn’t make a fractured match, but she did examine them thoroughly. She separated the pieces and laid each one out individually on pieces of ac
etate. These pieces were very similar, sharing all of the same class characteristics—same number of yarns, yarns running north-south, space between yarns.

  O’Donnell took Sanders through the rest of her work on the case. She’d been given a bra strap and a bra that was missing a bra strap, and asked if they had once been a complete bra. The bra with the missing strap was in bad shape, having been found, apparently buried, by a grater that was scraping earth away at the search site, one inch at a time. Again the items were examined thoroughly, visually and microscopically. She spent particular time studying the strap that was still attached to the bra. It wasn’t, in the strictest sense, a strap at all. The strap, instead of being sewn, fit inside two pieces of cloth. That meant that the strap could be pulled asunder from the bra without tearing, thus making it impossible to find a fractured match. There was no fracture. The witness stood and used a laser pointer, showing the jury what she meant. So instead she listed the similarities. She looked at the dot pattern. The smoothness and roughness of the sides, patterns in the material, and how far from the edge it stopped.

  “And how did the separated strap compare with the strap still on the bra?”

  “There were similarities, yes,” the witness said.

  She had not compared the strap to the found bra, because that bra was too old and had been exposed to the elements. There was no way to determine what alterations the weather or animals might have made.

  “So what did you do?”

  “I used the characteristics of the bra to purchase a new bra of the same type from the same manufacturer.” Sanders went shopping at several stores before finding the bra she was looking for at Kmart.

  O’Donnell showed the witness a new-looking bra, and Sanders ID’d it as the one she’d purchased at the megastore. The witness again gave the jury details of her analytical process. Back in the lab, the newly bought bra was placed on a foam torso-only mannequin for testing. To simulate the bone at the top of the shoulder, the handle to a pair of rubber mallets was placed under the straps at the top. Similarities were found, but no absolute match could be made.

  On that tepid note, Christina Sanders’s direct testimony ended. Jerry Meisner was eager to cross-examine, to emphasize for the jury how vague Sanders’s conclusions had been. She’d been asked to find a fractured match in the pieces of duct tape found in King’s house—in the kitchen garbage bag, on the counter, and in the victim’s hair at the autopsy. No matches.

  Regarding the bra: “Did it occur to you that, because this evidence was discovered by a piece of heavy machinery, pulled at and dragged by an earth grater, that this process, the very discovery of the evidence, might have been the cause of the missing strap?”

  “The heavy machinery could have been responsible for the missing strap,” the witness agreed.

  “You compared at some point the duct tape found at the autopsy with the duct tape found in the garbage bag?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you find visual differences?”

  “Yes.”

  On redirect, Suzanne O’Donnell asked if all of the duct tape could have come from the same roll of tape. Christina Sanders said that although she couldn’t say for sure, the tape could have come from a common source.

  Judge Economou called the lunch recess and ordered everyone back by 1:45 P.M.

  The afternoon session began with a short field trip for the jurors. They were escorted to a well-guarded portion of the courthouse parking lot, where they were allowed to observe the defendant’s Camaro. No witnesses were called or questions allowed while the jury and lawyers were outside. Jurors could bring their notepads with them if they wished, but they were under no obligation to do so.

  To establish the defendant as a man in possession of a nine-millimeter handgun and the ability to use it, Suzanne O’Donnell called Robert Salvador to the stand.

  The witness testified that he was a friend of the defendant’s and, only hours before Denise Lee’s abduction, had made arrangements with Michael King to meet at a pistol range. Robert, in his white minivan, and King, in his Camaro, met up at a gas station and then drove to the range together. They parked in the range’s lot, with one parking space between them; Robert Salvador on the right, Michael King on the left.

  “When you got there, did you have your weapons in a case with the ammo?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you observe King get his weapon?”

  “He opened the [car] door, got out, and pulled it out from under the passenger seat, and that’s when I told him, ‘You can’t just walk up there with your gun out of a case.’ I told him they were pretty strict about that.” The witness said he felt stress when he saw King do that. He thought they were going to come and get him for pulling his gun out in the parking lot like that. “So I put it in my case for him.”

  “It is required to have your gun in a case?”

  “I don’t know if it’s required. I do know that it’s an expected thing.”

  Yes, the witness saw King firing at the gun range, using a semiautomatic nine-millimeter gun. Yes, he got a good look at it. “It was mostly black, had a clip,” he said.

  “Do they charge for using the gun range?”

  “Yes, but I had sessions paid for in advance, so I told them to take two sessions off my account.”

  “Did you have to sign in?”

  “Yes.”

  The witness identified the sign-in sheet from the gun range for the day of the murder. Yes, there were the defendant’s and the witness’s signatures. The time was recorded as 11:57 A.M.

  “How long did you practice?”

  “About an hour.”

  “Were there a lot of other people there?”

  “It wasn’t as crowded as I’ve seen it, but there were other people.”

  “What was the layout like?”

  “It’s all a pavilion, and they have tables all along, and then there’s a divider, and then you walk to other pavilions that are in the one-hundred-yard range.”

  “Is there a range master to make sure everyone is doing the right thing?”

  “Yes.”

  “What range were you in?”

  “I usually go to the short ten-yard one, and sometimes the twenty-five-yard [one].”

  “You weren’t at the one-hundred-yard range?”

  “No.”

  “Did you fire all of your weapons?”

  The witness said he did not, just the nine-millimeter gun and the two .22s. He didn’t fire the Russian pistol.

  “Which weapons did King fire?”

  “He fired his own, and then he asked to shoot my nine a couple of times.”

  “Where do you buy your ammunition?”

  “Wherever I can find it cheapest. Walmart. I buy reload.”

  “The nine-millimeter ammunition you brought, was it reload?”

  “Some of it was new, some reload.”

  “As you were shooting, did someone occasionally come by and broom away the shell casings?”

  “Yes.”

  “What time was it when you and the defendant left the gun range?”

  “Sometime around one o’clock.”

  “And as you left, you had the defendant’s gun?”

  “Yes, I gave him his gun back when we got to his car.”

  “And you saw the defendant put his gun back under the seat of his car?”

  “No, I put his gun under his seat for him.”

  “And then?”

  “We parted, and I went back to work.”

  “On that day, on January seventeenth, did you know what was going on in regard to this case?”

  “No.”

  “When did you find out?”

  “When officers rang my doorbell at two, the next morning.”

  “When they started asking questions, did you know what they were talking about?”

  “No. They told me he’d been apprehended and why.”

  “How long did the police talk to you at that point?”

  �
��Just a few minutes.”

  “And what did you do after the police left?”

  “My wife and I went on the Internet and we verified that what the police were saying was true. At first, we didn’t think it was that big of a deal, that this was just some domestic dispute with a girlfriend he had.” When the witness realized that there was more to it, he voluntarily went to the police and gave them his story in detail.

  As he wasn’t sure which law enforcement agency the officers from the previous night were from, he called the Venice police, the closest police to where he lived. They gave him the phone number for the NPPD, which was handling the case. Later on that day, he went to the NPPD and gave them a detailed interview.

  “How were they treating you?”

  “They were hard on me. Looking back, I understand now. They were still trying to find her. So they were not being nice, but I guess they were being as nice as they could, under the circumstances.”

  Robert gave the police some receipts he kept in his wallet. He was certain they lacked relevance to the case because he only kept receipts that had to do with his work, for tax purposes. But police didn’t know that and checked the receipts out.

  “No further questions, Your Honor.”

  “Mr. Meisner?”

  “Thank you, Your Honor ... ,” Jerry Meisner said. Under cross, Robert Salvador said he’d met Michael King three or four years earlier. He’d worked with him. Hired him. Paid him. Made a lot of referrals.

  “You drove by his house?”

  “Yes. Once. To see if he knew of any work. I knew where his house was because I worked there.” Yes, they’d gotten together socially as well, a fishing trip being the best example. Under defense questioning, the witness rehashed his testimony, now framed the way the defense wanted it in jurors’ minds. He testified that, as he said before, it was not uncommon for him to go to the gun range, that he liked to think of himself as a gun enthusiast. He owned upward of twenty guns in all, and it had been his idea to go shoot together. He met King at a gas station and led him to the range. King didn’t even have any of his own ammo.