A KILLER’S TOUCH
MICHAEL BENSON
PINNACLE BOOKS
Kensington Publishing Corp.
http://www.kensingtonbooks.com
All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.
Table of Contents
Title Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AUTHOR’S NOTE CHAPTER 1 - A DRIZZLY DAY CHAPTER 2 - THE ARREST CHAPTER 3 - JANUARY 18, 2008 CHAPTER 4 - CANINE SEKOU CHAPTER 5 - THE DISTURBED EARTH CHAPTER 6 - JANUARY 19, 2008 CHAPTER 7 - JANUARY 20, 2008 CHAPTER 8 - THE VICTIM’S CLOTHES CHAPTER 9 - FUNERAL CHAPTER 10 - THE PROSECUTORS CHAPTER 11 - INTERNAL AFFAIRS INVESTIGATION CHAPTER 12 - CRIMINOLOGISTS’ REPORTS CHAPTER 13 - PRELIMINARY HEARINGS CHAPTER 14 - KING’S WOMEN CHAPTER 15 - THE TRIAL CHAPTER 16 - DAY TWO CHAPTER 17 - DAY THREE CHAPTER 18 - DAY FOUR CHAPTER 19 - DAY FIVE CHAPTER 20 - SEPTEMBER 1, 2009 CHAPTER 21 - SEPTEMBER 2, 2009 CHAPTER 22 - SEPTEMBER 4, 2009 CHAPTER 23 - SEPTEMBER 4, 2009 EPILOGUE Copyright Page
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Some of my sources for this book have asked to remain anonymous, and so I can only thank them privately. The others I would like to gratefully acknowledge here. Thanks to Assistant State Attorneys Lon Arend, Karen Fraivillig, and Suzanne O’Donnell; Tekla Benson; the Honorable Deno G. Economou; Laura Forti at Turner Broadcasting; Rick and Sue Goff; Jane Kowalski; James D. Martin, assistant general counsel, Florida Department of Law Enforcement; Trooper Edward Pope and Lieutenant Patrick Riordan, of the Florida Highway Patrol; Wendy Rose, community affairs manager for the Sarasota County Sheriff’s Office; Alfred L. Thompson, correctional services assistant, Florida Department of Corrections; Tami Treadway, Saratoga County Animal Services supervisor; and Cortnie Watts, criminalistics specialist for the North Port Police Department.
Also, special thanks to my agent, Jake Elwell at Harold Ober Associates, super editor and man of ideas Gary Goldstein—and, as always, to my wife, my world, Lisa Grasso.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Violent crimes exact their toll on cops and bequeath a painful residue—something akin to post-traumatic stress syndrome. Peace officers are a courageous and stubborn lot, proud by nature, and not many would admit to weakness of any sort—but this one did.
“I’m not going to be able to give you an interview,” he said, a veteran of ten-plus years on the force.
“Why not?” the writer asked.
“I get nightmares. I don’t ... I don’t want to relive this again. I want to get my point across about this—but I can’t. I still get nightmares.”
In all of the cases he’d handled, all of those crime scenes, two still stuck in his psyche and probably would never let go. One was the very first unnatural-death scene he saw, a suicide by hanging. The other was the murder of Denise Amber Lee.
At night, he would close his eyes and return to that dungeon, that rape dungeon. Creepy wasn’t the word for it. Evil was the word. There was evil there. His hands shook the entire time he was there. His hands began shaking now, just from thinking about it....
The author has used a novelist’s methods but not his license. Although this is a true story, some names will be changed to protect the privacy of the innocent. Pseudonyms will be noted upon their first usage. When possible, the spoken word has been quoted verbatim. However, when that is not possible, conversations have been reconstructed as closely as possible to reality based on the recollections of those who spoke and heard the words. In places, there has been a slight editing of spoken words, but only to improve readability. The denotations and connotations of the words remain unaltered. In some cases, witnesses are credited with verbal quotes that in reality only occurred in written form. Some characters may be composites.
CHAPTER 1
A DRIZZLY DAY
Latour Avenue, like so many streets across America, had been whacked by the economy. In the town of North Port, Florida, the street boasted spread-out single-level stucco houses with two-car garages. When the homes were built, only a few years before, the plan was for this street, and many of the other streets in surrounding North Port Estates, to be a safe enclave for young families raising small children.
Stats told the story. In 2006, 4,321 new houses were built in North Port. In 2007, only 380 of them were purchased. Hundreds of homes were unfinished. Hundreds were in foreclosure. As the money left town, locals (most of them newcomers, strangers in town) lost their jobs, and crime seeped in. On Latour Avenue, there had been burglaries. Car break-ins. Vandalism. Crimes that would have been unthinkable only a few years before.
More stats: there were 130 burglaries in North Port in 2001. By 2007, that number had risen to 466.
Violent crime came to North Port in 2006 when a six-year-old girl was abducted and found murdered a few blocks from her home. For many months, that crime remained unsolved.
The community didn’t feel like a community anymore. Longtime residents felt hopelessly outnumbered by strangers. There was a time when people knew their neighbors. There was a time when people in North Port trusted each other. No more. And it was even worse during the winter when the town’s population was inflated by snowbirds, Northerners who migrated to the South to keep the chill of winter out of their bones.
Now the people on Latour, as well as the rest of the city, locked their doors—not just at night but