Michael Benson's True Crime Bundle (49 page)

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Authors: Michael Benson

BOOK: Michael Benson's True Crime Bundle
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CHAPTER 9
FUNERAL
Denise Lee’s funeral was handled by the Lemon Bay Funeral Home in Englewood and held on Wednesday, January 23, at the First United Methodist Church in Punta Gorda, the same church where Nate and Denise were married three years earlier.
As expected, there was quite a crowd—friends and family, of course, but also many strangers, attracted by the media attention. Every police officer in the area was there. It was the biggest funeral in the region’s history.
As the Reverend John Bryant, the church’s pastor, read “The Lord’s Prayer,” Nate Lee and Rick Goff sat in the front pew, each holding one of Denise’s two boys.
The pastor said, “Today I extend my heartfelt sympathy and love to Nate, little Noah, and Adam, who probably don’t know what I’m saying now, to mom Susan, to Rick, to Amanda and Tyler, grandparents, and to the extended family and friends of Denise.”
Rick Goff kissed a large photo of Denise on his way to the pulpit, then said Denise was a wonderful, special, downright extraordinary person. She was so smart—honor roll in tenth grade—but also so nice. Not a mean bone in her body, always a bright smile; when she smiled, everyone else smiled, too. Her happiness was contagious, a physical manifestation of positive vibes. She could have used her charm to get what she wanted, but she didn’t want that. She was too concerned with how she could be helpful in a situation and was always a willing worker. As a teenager, she behaved like a girl beyond her years, and it didn’t surprise her father when she became a wife and mother so quickly after she graduated from high school. She always seemed like a fully mature woman who was ready for responsibility. As a student, she couldn’t have been more organized and prepared. Rick was familiar with his daughter’s study habits because she took a course he taught in law enforcement, during which his lectures touched upon a myriad of controversial subjects. Yet, the papers Denise wrote were thoughtful and contemplative. Plus, she was humble. You could try to tell her how great she was, but she would laugh it off with a delicate touch of self-depreciative humor.
“She’s the most wonderful person I’ve ever known. She’s my baby girl, and I’m going to miss her,” he said. He didn’t know how the family would get along without her. They would need enormous strength. “The Lees are an awesome family, and thank you. I love you, baby girl, and I know you’re home,” he concluded.
Goff was thinking things he hadn’t said aloud. He’d seen trouble coming. It was that damned neighborhood the kids had moved into—a new housing development that was only partly filled. Many of the houses around theirs were empty, as the developer had failed to anticipate a shrinking market. There were even empty lots where houses were planned but never built.
One of the reasons the Lees had decided to settle in that section of North Port was rents were cheap. The relatively low cost of living had made North Port a rapidly growing community, population fifty thousand and getting bigger every day. But who were these newbies? A big question mark, that was who.
 
 
When it was his turn, Nate Lee called his wife amazing and selfless. His father-in-law stood by his side and placed a hand on his shoulder when his voice filled with emotion. He recalled moving into the house in the North Port Estates section of North Port, about forty miles from Sarasota, more rural than suburban. Nate and Denise called it “living in the sticks.” They were close to their parents—but not too close. Nate had three jobs; Denise was home with the boys. Times were tough, but certainly not bleak. They were happy together in their new rented home—three bedrooms, two baths—in North Port.
They just didn’t have much money. All in all, affluence was a secondary concern when you have as much love in your hearts as Nate and Denise had.
Besides, they were poor now, but that didn’t mean they were going to be poor forever. They were smart and eventually life would grow easier. They knew. There was no hurry. They were very, very young—time was their security blanket. They had all of the time in the world.
“We were going to grow old together,” Nate recalled.
As 2008 dawned, Denise found herself a woman with her hands full. Taking care of a two-year-old and a six-month-old was a full-time job, 24/7. She could never take her eyes off either one of them. Plus, she was still breast-feeding the little one.
Nate trusted her completely and could concentrate fully on the things he needed to do because he knew that the boys were safe and happy with their mother.
And they were a handful. The oldest was two when the youngest was born. He remembered her going online and googling “potty training.”
“It didn’t work,” the widower recalled.
Those boys were going to be the smartest kids in pre-K and kindergarten, Nate knew. That was because, when she wasn’t feeding them, she was teaching them: the ABC’s, counting from one to ten.
She could never be alone. “She even had to bring the boys with her when she went to the mailbox,” he remembered.
Plus, he was well taken care of. When he got home at night, Denise was busy fixing dinner. And, in addition to all of that, she’d gone back to school and had plans to become a speech therapist.
“We were living the American Dream,” Nate said. He used to joke and say that he didn’t notice her in that first class they had together at school, but it was a fib. “I knew exactly what seat she sat in,” he said.
He concluded by making a promise to his wife: “I will be as strong as I can be. I love you so much, Denise, and I will talk to you every day. Your boys will know who their mother was. They will know you.”
 
 
Reverend Bryant concluded the ceremony by offering “The Wind Beneath My Wings” as a final song in remembrance of Denise’s spirit. As they recessed, mourners filed past Denise’s royal blue casket.
A half hour later, a thirty-mile funeral procession began, 150 cars long, headlights on, to the easternmost section of Gulf Pines Memorial Park, where Denise Lee would be interred.
There were rose petals in the road. Fire trucks led the way, their lights going around. Spectators lined the road and saluted as the hearse carrying Denise’s coffin drove by. Elementary schools emptied so students could stand outside and watch.
State troopers pulled up in front of the cemetery and parked so that they were blocking the southbound lanes of traffic on State Route 776. The long parade quietly entered.
 
 
Nate Lee’s mind was haunted by memories. Nightmares. Alternate realities. What if? What if? After the ceremony at the cemetery, he found himself thinking about how the bad thing had started.
The creep showed up at the house and somehow managed to get in. He must’ve had a gun, threatened to hurt the boys. Denise would have done anything to protect those boys—even leave with a man with a gun.
But how had he gotten into the house?
Then he had a thought, a horrible thought. The killer drove a ’95 green Camaro. Lee drove a ’94 green Dodge Avenger. The cars resembled one another. Maybe Denise saw King’s car pull into the driveway and thought Nate was home.
Someone had shut the windows but not latched them. Two possibilities: the creep did it so neighbors wouldn’t hear screaming, or she did it so the boys wouldn’t be able to wander off while she was gone. She knew she was going away and leaving them behind.
Part of him didn’t want to focus on what Denise must have been thinking during those desperate last hours. But the bigger part of him couldn’t help but dwell there.
He was always blown away by how competent she was, even during that horrible crisis. She left so many clues— evidence to both facilitate her discovery and to help catch the creep if she was never found.
All during that time, she must have been bolstered by confidence, thinking her father, the cop, would make sure that the search for her was as massive and efficient as possible.
Leaving the ring in the back of the killer’s car was pure genius. That was the first ring he ever gave her and it had grown tight. The ring didn’t accidentally fall off into the Camaro’s backseat, that was for sure.
Part of him would have liked to shrug and say, “It was fate, and these things happened, and it must have all been part of God’s master plan.” But the bigger part of him knew she should have been saved but wasn’t. And he knew who was to blame: certain employees of the CCSO.
CHAPTER 10
THE PROSECUTORS
Assistant State Attorney (ASA) Lon Arend would helm the prosecution of Michael King, with a supporting cast of his colleagues Karen Fraivillig and Suzanne O’Donnell.
Arend did his undergraduate work at Florida State University, and earned his law degree at the University of Florida. He’d been a prosecutor for fourteen years, including eight as chief prosecutor in the DeSoto County office. He became the Sarasota region’s chief homicide prosecutor.
The trio of Arend, Fraivillig, and O’Donnell were no strangers to big cases, having successfully countered the insanity defense in the disturbing murder trial of Elton Murphy.
Elton Murphy—now there was a sick dude. “One of the scariest individuals I’ve ever encountered,” O’Donnell recalled.
Fraivillig added that to understand that thoroughly weird case, you needed a little background on the fabric of the area. Sarasota County was a beautiful little section of Florida, but it did have its pretensions. Nothing sinister, of course, but Sarasota was a community that liked to cast itself as artsy. There was opera, ballet, and a formation of art galleries on the main drag. Just how artsy Sarasota really was could be argued, but art and culture were important facets of its self-image.
So it hit the town where it lived when downtown Sarasota art gallery owner Joyce Wishart was found hacked to death in 2004 on the floor of the Provenance Gallery on Palm Avenue—posed to shock, and missing her vagina.
The killer had apparently taken the victim’s female parts with him, maybe to dabble in cannibalism or necrophilia, or maybe just to remove DNA evidence from the crime scene.
Didn’t work.
Cops found DNA foreign to the victim at the crime scene—a piece of skin under the body, and blood droplets—and inevitably that was what solved the case. The vagina was never found.
At first, police thought there might be a connection between the grisly murder and the Sarasota Film Festival, which had attracted upward of thirty thousand strangers into town.
The case broke eight long months later when Elton Murphy was caught in Texas, where he had fled, committing a burglary. There was a DNA hit, and they had their man.
During interrogation, Murphy was deemed to be a little wacky and was examined by four psychologists, one of whom worked for the state. Murphy was found incompetent to stand trial.
The case lingered and lingered, until Arend decided he wanted to bring the case to trial—even if it meant butting horns with a formidable insanity defense. Arend concluded that Murphy was seriously mentally ill but not legally insane, and he was fairly certain a jury would see it the same way.
“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.

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