Michael Benson's True Crime Bundle

by Michael Benson

  His girlfriend, Jennifer Robb, broke up with him on Thanksgiving Day. He was unemployed, losing his home to foreclosure. His house was pretty much empty because his furniture was all at Jennifer’s—where he had been living before they broke up.

  He sought work, but each failure contributed to his developing and growing depression and paranoia. He returned to Michigan, where things were no better, and then headed back to Florida. He could no longer take care of his son; so he left him with his brother and sister-in-law. He spent Christmas in Michigan, where it became increasingly obvious that he was a sick guy. He was facing bankruptcy, and was scheduled to see a bankruptcy lawyer on the morning of the murder.

  Schlemmer summed up: “After listening to all of the evidence, ladies and gentlemen, after you weigh the aggravating factors with the mitigating factors, this most important decision you’ll ever make, I hope that you will set aside your anger and emotionsI know that isn’t an easy thing to do—and see that Mr. King is not the worst of the worst.”

  She noted that what she was recommending they do was not exactly merciful: “Michael King should be made to live the rest of his life in prison, away from his son, deprived of his freedom, where he will die in prison. The law allows you to do that.”

  Regardless of their findings with respect to the comparative weight of the aggravating and mitigating factors, they were never required to recommend death. She thanked them and concluded her eight-minute statement.

  Reading from a written statement, the prosecution’s first witness began, “‘Good morning. I am Rick Goff, Denise’s father.’”

  On behalf of his wife and himself, he wanted the jury to know more about the daughter they lost, and to recognize how extraordinary she truly was.

  He read aloud two statements written by Denise’s former teachers. Her tenth-grade honors teacher, Kari Burgess, described Denise as “bright as a shiny new penny.” A girl who “lit up a room with her smile.”

  Denise’s law teacher called her “quiet,” but always willing to contribute to classroom discussions. He found her to be calm and imperturbable. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t “get a rise out of her” during lively classroom arguments. She was a “rocklike presence” in his class. When tempers flared, Denise had a calming influence. Her words were a “salve” to relax the tension.

  The law teacher noted that he got to know Denise best through her writing, which was “thoughtful and contemplative.” Because of the differences between her spoken and written words, the teacher suspected that Denise did not want people to know just how smart she was. He called her “whip-smart, gentle, and compassionate with words.”

  Rick then spoke on his own behalf, discussing the strength of his daughter’s character, a strength that developed when she was very young.

  “‘She was a caring mother who always put her children first,’” Goff read. She loved the TV shows CSI and Law & Order, and never gave up her dream of one day attending law school.

  She’d been a great friend, student, wife, and mother. Her life was bursting with potential. She breast-fed both children, and was still breast-feeding her youngest son when she was murdered.

  “‘Denise was everything we could have wished for in a daughter and more,’” he concluded. Goff thanked the jury for listening, left the stand, and returned to his seat in the spectator area.

  Nate Lee took his place. Whereas Rick Goff’s voice had been strong during his difficult testimony, Nate’s voice faltered. His voice shuddered with the never-ending pain of his ordeal, and he seemed on the verge of breaking down.

  The widower described for the jury a videotape Denise had made of the boys. On the video, Denise’s voice could be heard, alive and happy as she played with her children. She was taking the video of the boys and could be heard saying, “Look, Noah. Oh, good job, Adam.” Her voice was soft and warm. The oldest boy took note of the camera and began to perform, bouncing up and down enthusiastically. “Are you dancing, Noah? You are silly.”

  Nate told the jury that the video captured the real Denise, doing the thing she loved to do most, playing with her boys. She’d devoted her entire life, “her every breath,” to her family. Their two little boys were her life. He recalled her as a woman who could multitask. Breast-feed, change a diaper, do her homework, and fix dinner. Despite her hectic life, she maintained an even strain. She was task oriented, and no one who heard her voice on that video could question her nurturing nature.

  Nate recalled one night when they were driving home from the Goffs’ house and Adam was very upset. He was screaming at the top of his little lungs. Nate urged his wife to go into the backseat and nurse the boy so that he would be quiet. Denise became angry at this suggestion because driving with the child out of his car seat was prohibitively dangerous. Sure, his screaming was annoying, but it was nothing compared to the risk they would be taking, the risk to his health, if he was removed from the car seat. Nate remembered being angered by her point of view at the time. But now, looking back on it, he realized that it was so typical of Denise, to see past the little bothers of life and look only at the big picture. The safety of the boys, of course, had to be their top priority at all times.

  Lee recalled that when Noah turned two, Denise decided it was time to start potty training. His birthday had been in January of 2008, the same month in which Denise was taken from them. Denise went online and found a set of potty-training instructions she liked. She wanted to print them out, but their printer was broken. Instead, she hand-wrote two full pages of instructions.

  For Denise, taking time for herself was never an option. She was either fixing dinner, doing laundry, nursing Adam, helping Noah with his ABC’s, or taking pictures of how cute they were. She wouldn’t even go to the mailbox without the boys. She’d changed her mind about being a lawyer. Now she wanted to be a speech therapist for autistic children.

  Being a wife and a mother was “what Denise lived for.”

  “‘The love in her heart was so warming that I never wanted to be away. I was proud to call her my wife,’” Nate said to the jury. “‘She was the love of my life, my soul mate. She was the perfect girl.’” Noah was now three and Adam two. They were amazing and knew that their mommy had gone to heaven and was an angel. The virtues that she already ingrained in them would forever radiate her love.

  Finished, Nate Lee flashed a brief but meaningful glance at Michael King—if looks could kill—then returned to his seat.

  “Prosecution rests its case, Your Honor,” Arend said.

  “Is the defense prepared to call its first witness?” Judge Economou asked.

  “Yes, Your Honor. Defense calls Dr. Joseph Wu.”

  Dr. Wu had a round face, a mustache, and a thick Asian accent. He wore half-moon glasses, which he looked over as they sat perched on his nose. He told the jury that his full name was Joseph Chang-Sang Wu. He was a graduate of Stanford, an expert on psychiatric disorders and brain scanning, the associate professor in residence in the department of psychiatry and human behavior at the University of California at Irvine’s Brain Imaging Center. He was a leading expert in using so-called PET scans to visualize brain function and/or activity. He’d published multiple articles on PET scans of neuropsychiatric conditions, and had received during the course of his career more than a million dollars in grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). He was a busy guy, teaching programs as an assistant professor, doing medical research, cutting-edge stuff. He’d been published many times.

  “Articles?” Carolyn Schlemmer asked.

  “Yes, and sometimes chapters in books.” He had written more than fifty peer-reviewed articles on PET scans and their usefulness regarding a variety of brain ailments, including Alzheimer’s, brain injuries, tumors, and epilepsy. In the leading book on psychiatry, Kaplan and Sadock’s Synopsis of Psychiatry, Dr. Wu wrote the chapter on functional brain imaging.

  “You are a medical doctor, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Dr. Wu, p
erhaps you could explain for the jury just what a PET scan is.”

  “Certainly,” Dr. Wu replied. He explained that PET stood for positron emission tomography, which referred to a nuclear medicine imaging technique that produced a three-dimensional image. The PET camera detected radiation from the emission of positrons. Point was, the resulting image not only showed the physiological makeup of the brain, but also revealed the level of activity in each portion of the brain.

  “How are PET scans taken?”

  As was true of other internal examination methods, a preparatory radioactive “tracer” was introduced into the body, usually via direct inoculation into the bloodstream.

  The PET scan system indirectly emitted gamma rays in pairs that could be captured in an image. The tracer was allowed to remain in the body for a waiting period before the scan was taken. Flat images were captured at minutely varying depths within the target organ, and a computer subsequently assembled those slides into a 3-D image. The scan created a picture that didn’t just illustrate the size and density of a human organ, but also made sort of a map of its functional processes. You could tell which parts of the brain were functional and/or had structural differences from the norm.

  “How long has this technology been around, Dr. Wu?”

  “Approximately thirty years.”

  “You could, for example, use a PET scan to find a brain tumor?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can a PET scan see even the smallest brain injury?”

  “Often times, yes. It is quite precise.”

  The technology could also be used to monitor persistent neurological symptoms. It could be used in conjunction with the treatment of post-concussive syndrome, as well as certain types of chronic headaches.

  Any neurologist would tell you that severe head trauma could have an effect on behavior. This was well known even before scientists developed a way to photograph the inner brain. Brain damage could result in psychosis. Dementia. It could be completely debilitating. Some don’t recover, and the brain injury ends up affecting the rest of their lives. It was “fairly common” for brain injuries to result in patients who could no longer work for a living.

  “Dr. Wu, when you first get your cases, is there already a belief that there is some abnormality? How do you get your cases?” Schlemmer asked.

  “When cases are referred to me for imaging, it is usually the last step in a multistep process. PET scans are expensive, and are usually only done after patients have other types of clinical histories.”

  “Are there instances where you do your PET scan and find the brain to be normal, so you do not testify?”

  “That happens on occasion—although a vast majority of patients who are referred to me do have a positive PET scan.” That was, he explained, because patients he examined had a history of neurological abnormality. They did not represent a cross section of society.

  Dr. Wu emphasized that PET scans would never be used as the sole criterion for diagnosis and treatment, unless the person was completely catatonic. Otherwise, the diagnosis would be based on a combination of a PET scan, personal interviews, and observations of social interaction.

  “Where is the portion of the brain that controls behavior? Where is a man’s conscience, his ability to appreciate right from wrong?”

  “Here, in the front,” Dr. Wu said, pointing at the center of his forehead.

  “You took a PET scan of Michael King’s brain?”

  “Yes.” The scan was made during August of 2008 at the National PET Scan Center. Conditions for making the scan were good, and there were no difficulties.

  Dr. Wu was allowed to move from the witness stand so he could speak directly to the jury and operate a slide show from a laptop computer.

  Schlemmer asked the difference between a PET scan and the more familiar MRI. Dr. Wu explained that the magnetic resonance imaging showed only structure. PET showed function. An MRI of a just-dead cadaver’s brain might be normal, while the PET scan would be able to determine that all brain function had ceased.

  Asked to explain how PET scans were made, Dr. Wu likened the process to “Star Trek’s USS Enterprise starship engine.” He acknowledged that the show was fiction but said that the matter/antimatter science that the engine functioned on was a recognized principle of physics. Sugar was fuel for the brain. The PET scan determined function by measuring how much sugar was being burned in the brain.

  A series of slides was shown: an Alzheimer’s patient versus a normal brain; a patient with a tumor versus normal; an epileptic’s brain versus normal; a traumatically injured brain versus normal.

  A PET scan was shown that Dr. Wu identified as an image of the inside of Michael King’s brain. Dr. Wu testified that the PET scan clearly showed that the defendant had abnormalities in his brain—not so much in the back of the brain, but in the front. There was an abnormal lack of frontal-lobe activity. To put it in automotive terms, the front of King’s brain was not firing on all cylinders.

  In a normal brain, the front burned as hot or hotter than the back. In King’s brain, the front was cooler than the back. This was consistent both with brain injury and schizophrenia.

  There was a hole in the frontal lobe, a “divot.” The ratio of the back of the brain to the front was too high.

  After a study of his medical history, it seemed a near certainty that this abnormality was damage caused by a snowmobile accident the defendant had when he was six. After the accident, Michael demonstrated a change in behavior. The description of the accident, which he’d gotten from King’s two brothers, matched the injury he was seeing on the PET scan. Put everything together and you had a clear picture of what happened to Michael and what the results were.

  Such an injury, Dr. Wu said, might cause an inability to express emotions or demonstrate rational, logical behavior—as well as psychotic-like behaviors.

  “Such as?”

  “Paranoia, catatonia, the inability to think, impaired cognition, delusion, a blunted effect... .”

  “What do you mean by a ‘blunted effect’?”

  “We know that some people with this type of brain injury—patients will have little or no expression on their faces, as their brains have lost the ability to properly process emotion. These patients will demonstrate difficulty regulating their moods and will have a greater vulnerability to depression. These are all things likely to occur after someone has sustained a brain injury.”

  Dr. Wu also said this type of brain injury could cause schizophrenia, which impaired ability to separate fantasy from reality.

  Not every brain-injured patient was going to become schizophrenic, or psychotic, or anything else. But the likelihood of developing those mental problems increased with people who had injured frontal lobes.

  Dr. Wu used the analogy of smokers. People who smoked cigarettes were far more likely to develop lung cancer than people who didn’t smoke—but that didn’t mean that all smokers developed cancer, or that all nonsmokers didn’t.

  Studies had shown that Vietnam veterans were more likely to demonstrate aggressive behavior after their return to civilian life, but did that mean that all Vietnam vets were aggressive? Hardly.

  People with frontal-lobe injuries were at a greater risk of behavioral difficulties, such as impulse control. A person who merely enjoyed gambling before an injury might find himself a compulsive gambler after the injury. What had really changed was his ability to tell himself no.

  “Are symptoms that follow brain injuries constant and steady?”

  “No, as a rule they are more episodic. They may be triggered by stress or some other factor.”

  Another analogy: the brakes on a car. A patient with frontal-lobe damage might have trouble hitting the behavioral brakes, and might just go ahead and do something because he had the urge at that moment—he’d do it without properly considering the morality or the consequences of his actions.

  Dr. Wu discussed specific witness statements he’d read and how they reenforced his testimony.
It was a statement from Michael King’s ex-girlfriend, he felt, that best demonstrated the depth of the defendant’s paranoia. The ex said King “always thought someone was following him.” He’d nailed his windows shut, kept a handgun under his pillow. He was convinced there was a cop living across the street from him who was out to get him. On January 15, 2008, two days before the murder, the girlfriend reported that his paranoia was worse than usual, and she’d noticed that stress tended to make it worse.

  According to one of the brothers’ statements, King had had difficulty distinguishing reality from fantasy starting at a very early age. When he was in the third grade, he reportedly chopped down several trees because he was fearful that there were witches in them. His brothers thought, even back then, that it was very odd that Michael would have gone to such lengths, to the grueling effort of chopping down trees at eight years old, because of a fantasy.

  “Dr. Wu, do you recall the so-called chain saw incident?”

  “Yes, when Mike was seventeen, he acted out a scene from a horror movie called The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. He took a real chain saw, started it, and chased family members around the house with it. It was almost as if he placed himself in the movie and had difficulty separating fantasy from reality.”

  Throughout King’s life, there were repeated episodes in which King had difficulty regulating his impulses. At these times, witnesses said, his face was expressionless. When King was thirteen, he reportedly acted out a scene from a Bugs Bunny cartoon, shooting a bow and arrow at his brother. He even went so far as to say, “Say your prayers, rabbit,” as the character in the cartoon had, just before releasing the arrow in real life. There was always a connection between King’s aggressive behavior and the dull, blank expression on his face. The two went together. Once, when the defendant stole a car, he had the dull expression. Another time, he rode a motorcycle recklessly with no helmet—blank expression.

  According to Dr. Wu’s sources, in December 2007, a couple of months before the murder, the blunted effect on King’s emotions regularly took on “catatonic-like proportions.” By that time, his symptoms, when at their worst, resembled those you might see in an invalid, a psychotic.