Michael Benson's True Crime Bundle

by Michael Benson

  When the practice shooting was done, there were still nine-millimeter bullets left unfired, and Robert offered those to the defendant—but the offer was only for firing then and there. He did not offer bullets to King to take home with him or to use later. When King demonstrated that he was done shooting, Robert took back the bullets. As far as he knew, King had not pocketed any.

  How did he know King was done shooting? Because there was a process that shooters went through when they were finished firing. With a semiautomatic, they would put the gun down, take it apart, and inspect it to see that there were no bullets in the magazine.

  “You took the bullets with you?”

  “Yes.”

  “As far as you know, King left with no ammunition whatsoever?”

  “Correct.”

  “Let’s skip ahead. At two the next morning, you get up because there’s a ringing at the door. An officer asks to speak with you, and this is your first contact with the police?”

  “Yes.”

  “You lied to them at that point? You said you hadn’t been practice shooting with him?”

  “They never asked if I saw him. I told them about seeing him the next day.”

  “So you lied.”

  “Well, I spent a lot of that night thinking about it. Technically, it was a lie. They asked me if I knew him and I said yes. They asked if I’d seen him, I said no. My wife didn’t know I’d been to the gun range, so I didn’t volunteer it in front of her. But it bothered me all night.”

  “You didn’t just deny seeing him, you also deleted calls on your cell phone from King. Isn’t that right?”

  “Yes. I wasn’t up front with my wife about how often I went to the gun range, so I took those calls off my phone so I wouldn’t have to tell her why.” As it turned out, he’d done a sloppy job of it. Even though he tried to erase all records of his calls to King, he missed one.

  “After you left the gun range, you went to a customer’s house?”

  “Yes.”

  “And after that, Home Depot?”

  “I don’t remember. It’s possible. I have a lot of info to remember and it happened a long time ago.” After reading a written statement that he’d made on January 20, 2008, Salvador agreed that he’d gone to Home Depot after the customer’s house. After Home Depot, he went to Checkers and got something to eat; he had a receipt to prove it.

  “That would have been about four o’clock?”

  “If that’s what I said.”

  “You told the police between four and five o’clock.”

  “Then, yes.”

  “Isn’t it true that when you first talked to police you didn’t mention Home Depot?”

  “Yes. I was running all around, didn’t remember where-all I went.”

  “I’m sure you were very careful about telling the truth, right? When police question you about a possible homicide, you want to make sure the information you give them is accurate.”

  “Yes.”

  “But you didn’t give them accurate information on the first day, did you?”

  “I didn’t mean to.”

  “You purposefully withheld information from the police, didn’t you?”

  “If I did, it was not on purpose.”

  “Before you left the pistol range, before you parted ways with Michael King, you arranged to meet him later in the day, didn’t you?”

  “No, sir.”

  “And didn’t you go over to his home on Sardinia that day, January 17, 2008?”

  “No, sir—I did not.”

  “And wasn’t the purpose of going over there to bring a lawn mower and a gas can?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “To help him cut the grass?”

  “No, sir.”

  “And didn’t you meet him out on Plantation Boulevard during the evening hours of January 17, 2008?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Didn’t you fire the shot that killed and took the life of Denise Lee?” Jerry Meisner asked.

  “Absolutely not.”

  “You said you wanted to ‘burn’ King. Isn’t that right?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “No further questions, Your Honor,” the defense attorney said with disdain.

  On redirect, the prosecution found the quote in Robert Salvador’s written statement in which he’d used the phrase “burn King.” When the sections before and after the quote were read, it became clear that what the witness actually meant was that he felt as if he’d been taken advantage of, that King took his bullets at the gun range without his knowledge for the purpose of killing a person. Salvador was angered and felt that justice should be done as far as King was concerned, if what police were saying about him was true. “Burn” in this case being the opposite of “protect.” He should burn.

  “Did your wife like you being around King?”

  “No.”

  “Did your wife like his number being on your phone?”

  “No.”

  The witness said it was routine for him to visit his storage unit after shooting, as that was where he stowed his guns and his gun-cleaning equipment.

  “And you subsequently took the police to your storage unit and gave them your guns?”

  “Yes.”

  “When you were at the range, when someone takes a clip out, can you tell if there is ammo in the magazine?”

  “If you look hard enough.”

  “Could you tell if King had ammo when you and he finished shooting?”

  “No, I had no reason to.”

  “Did you keep your ammunition next to you?”

  “It was between us.”

  “And there were times when your eyes were not on the box?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is it possible that he took some of your ammo without you knowing it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know whether or not he left the gun range with any of your ammo?”

  “No.” But, the witness added, with the machinations of the range being what they were, there were “many opportunities” for King to take bullets and pocket them without his seeing him.

  “While at the range, did you and King ever trade nine-millimeter pistols?”

  “No.”

  “Now you admitted that when you first talked to police, you didn’t say everything... .”

  “I didn’t make a point to lie. I was terrified—plus, it was difficult for me to remember everything that went on.”

  “Did the police treat you like a suspect?”

  “I didn’t realize it at the time, but yes, they did.”

  “Did you ever see Denise Lee?”

  “No.”

  “Did you shoot her?”

  “No.”

  On recross, the witness admitted that the Checkers receipt was the only thing he had in terms of an alibi.

  “When Michael King left the range, you thought he didn’t have bullets with him, right?”

  “Yes. Correct. I had no reason to think otherwise,” Robert Salvador said.

  Before the next witness was called, there was a ten-minute break followed by an argument that started when Lon Arend complained about the defense’s cross-examination techniques. They seemed to be asking questions out of the blue, and not based on facts in evidence, just to place a notion in the jurors’ heads.

  Okay, the last witness wasn’t completely candid with law enforcement when he was first questioned. How do you get from there to he killed Lee?

  That was quite a jump.

  Jerry Meisner said he had statements to back up his questions, but the only statement he would name was a previous statement indicating Robert Salvador had indeed agreed to meet with the defendant later on after practicing at the gun range.

  The implication was that Jerry Meisner was basing his questions for Robert Salvador on statements that had been made to him by Michael King, statements that Meisner did not have to quote in court because of lawyer/client confidentiality rules.

  Judge Economou didn
’t think this provided adequate foundation for asking if he was a murderer. The defense was, in law school vernacular, trying to walk through a door that hadn’t been opened.

  There was no “good faith” basis for asking those questions. The “agreed to meet” statement came from the defendant himself during an early police interview—the same interview in which he claimed that someone shooting from a helicopter murdered Denise Lee.

  Meisner said that questioning Robert Salvador about what really happened was allowable once it was established that he’d lied to police, and the defense attorney itemized the differences between his earlier statements and this day’s testimony. There were all sorts of reasons to suspect the witness. He lied about being with Michael King. He lied about ever being in King’s home, and about the extent of their friendship. Plus, there were indications of deception—i.e., he deleted calls from King on his phone. And because his client never admitted anything involving Denise Lee’s death, the defense could question this known liar without contradicting King.

  The judge ruled that the questions involving Robert Salvador knowing and killing Denise Lee did not have proper foundation and constituted improper cross-examination.

  When the jury was brought back in, the judge informed them to disregard that portion of Robert Salvador’s testimony, and that that portion of the Q&A had been stricken from the record.

  Judge Economou read for the jury the specific questions and answers they were to disregard, so everyone would know exactly what they were supposed to forget.

  The question and answer regarding whether Robert Salvador and Michael King ever traded guns at the range would be allowed in, however, as it did not imply guilt on Salvador, and the handling of the guns and ammunition during the hours before the murder was clearly relevant and proper cross-examination.

  John Romeo, a Florida crime lab supervisor/firearm expert, testified that he had a bachelor’s degree from South Florida, completed a two-year course in ballistics, been tested annually for fifteen years in his proficiency and never failed, and had testified in court about one hundred times before.

  After establishing his firearms expertise, Romeo was shown a gun like the one Robert Salvador said Michael King was practicing with at the range. Romeo described the nine-millimeter gun as a semiautomatic pistol made to resemble a Glock. He demonstrated for the court how the gun was loaded, using a detachable magazine. When fired, the gun automatically ejected the spent shell casing, which would go up and to the right, landing about three to five feet from the shooter.

  “Would it be possible for an ejected shell casing from this gun to travel ten feet?”

  “That is not unheard of.”

  Romeo said he’d been given forty-seven shell casings taken from the gun range—near the spot where the two men were practicing—and, for comparison purposes, the shell casing recovered near the burial site. He looked at each shell through a microscope and placed shells next to each other to compare them. He looked for any tool marks, impressions, or scratches on the case.

  “Tool mark?”

  “The metal of a gun is harder than that of a bullet casing, so the gun makes marks on the casing through all stages, from loading to firing.”

  “Tool marks help you identify the weapon?”

  “Yes, the tool marks left by every gun are unique.”

  Another key method of determining if two shells had been ejected from the same gun was the impression made by the firing pin.

  “And what did you discover during your analysis of these casings?”

  “I found that four of the casings from the gun range were ejected by the same gun that ejected the casing at the crime scene.”

  “Are you certain of this?”

  “One hundred percent.”

  John Scotese cross-examined the witness. He directed his attention to the four range shells that he’d ID’d as coming from the probable murder weapon. Did he collect those shells? No. Did he bag them? No. Did he have any control of the collection and packaging of the evidence up until the time it was delivered to his lab? No, he did not.

  The implication was that this was manufactured evidence, that the fix was in. Michael King was being railroaded.

  Scotese induced testimony that various ballistics experts will sometimes use different terminology, and then he used that to imply that there was a subjective component to the witness’s science.

  The witness acknowledged that in some cases this might be true, but that there was always a great deal that was objective. John Romeo admitted that the same gun might not always make the same tool marks on the casings it ejected, and that those marks might vary slightly depending on the manufacturer of the ammunition.

  There were also misfires to take into consideration. In some cases, the gun itself proved faulty, in which case the tool marks on an ejected casing might vary from a casing ejected from the same weapon when it was functioning properly.

  He also noted that unlike fingerprint analysis in which a certain number of common features officially made two fingerprints a match, no such magic number existed with shell casings from semiautomatic pistols. The number of identical markings that would constitute a match varied from scientist to scientist.

  Yes, there could be a situation where one ballistics expert might call two shell casings a match, while another would determine that the evidence was inconclusive.

  Romeo fought back, however, emphasizing that it was not the number of identical marks on two shell casings that determined a match, but the uniqueness of the shapes. And the identical nature of two marks’ shapes was very objective and “used scientific principles.” It was very rare for well-trained examiners to disagree.

  On redirect, John Romeo said that although it was conceivable that variant manufacturers could hinder a scientific match with two casings fired from the same gun, the various manufacturers of the ammunition in this case did not affect the comparison.

  On recross, Romeo said that no, he didn’t know the metal content and composition of the casings he’d compared in this case.

  Romeo was excused, and the third day of testimony came to an end.

  CHAPTER 18

  DAY FOUR

  Court began on day four with Jerry Meisner moving for a mistrial because the evidence regarding Robert Salvador had been disallowed. Judge Deno Economou denied the motion.

  Lon Arend asked the judge to add to the state’s witness list the name of Robert Salvador’s wife, whom he wanted to question regarding the specifics of Salvador’s alibi.

  The state argued that it should be allowed to bolster Robert Salvador’s testimony by calling his wife to the stand. He was where he said he was, and his wife, Betsy, would back him up on that.

  The defense didn’t like that idea, arguing that if the state wanted to call Mrs. Salvador to the stand they should have put her on their pretrial witness list. Besides, such an addition to the list would necessitate a delay as the defense would need an opportunity to prepare cross-examination. And thirdly, Mrs. Salvador had been a spectator in the courtroom during her husband’s testimony. By rule, witnesses had to be kept out of the courtroom until after they were done testifying.

  Arend argued that because Michael King’s DNA, and only King’s DNA, had been found during Denise Lee’s autopsy, there was no evidence that Harold Muxlow, Robert Salvador, or anyone else for that matter were present when Denise Lee was murdered.

  The judge agreed with the defense and ruled that Betsy Salvador should not be added to the list of prosecution witnesses. With that, the jury was brought into the courtroom and testimony resumed.

  The prosecution’s first witness of the morning was NPPD officer Todd Choniere, questioned by Suzanne O’Donnell. He testified that at 6:35 P.M., on January 17, 2010, he and Pamela Jernigan went to the home of Harold Muxlow, knocked on his door, and found no one home. They canvassed the neighborhood, asking people if they’d seen anything suspicious. They gave the Muxlow property the once-over. Behind the house, there were two
structures: a workshop and a storage shed. There were also a couple of vehicles back there on blocks. In the front, an unhitched trailer was parked on the lawn next to the street.

  At 6:56 P.M., Harold Muxlow returned home in his white Chevy pickup, so the witness and Jernigan questioned him. They talked to him for ten minutes outside, and then they went into his home. Crossed Confederate flags were featured in his decorating, along with the slogan “Git-R-Done.” He had his own slot machine. Choniere took photos.

  Harold didn’t bother to hide his weapons. Immediately upon entering, Choniere and Jernigan observed a black nine-millimeter Wesson pistol.

  “I told Muxlow not to touch the firearm while their investigation was under way, and Muxlow said okay.” The officers left; and for the rest of the evening, until midnight, the Muxlow house was under surveillance, thus verifying that he and his white truck did not leave.

  There was no cross-examination.

  Suzanne O’Donnell questioned William Dunker, a twenty-five-year-veteran fingerprint expert with the SCSO. He had received every conceivable training in latent prints, and tested other fingerprint experts in their proficiency. He’d developed and taught a course in South Dakota.

  Dunker proudly testified that fingerprints were still the best way to connect a criminal with a crime, and they had been globally used in that capacity for more than one hundred years. Fingerprints, he said, were permanent and remained unchanged. And in history, no two different people had been found to share the same fingerprint. The quality of a fingerprint was variant depending on the amount of oil or dirt or other substance—such as blood—on the fingertip, and the smoothness or roughness of the surface being touched. Another factor was how a touch was made. If the fingertips dragged across a surface, a fingerprint could be smeared.

  Dunker went over the methods used to make fingerprints easier to see. Old-fashioned dusting and lifting was still the most common method.