Then Pope felt a sinking feeling—as he put it, it was like waking up on Christmas morning and discovering Santa hadn’t come. There was no Denise, but there was a long-handled military-type shovel, which, like the suspect’s pants, was wet and dirty—recently used.
Looking over the exterior of the car, Pope found strands of hair adhering to the rear spoiler. The back of the car was also spattered with what he later referred to as “pellets” of blood. The car’s driver’s seat was wet and muddy—a sandy mud. After backup arrived, Pope kept a log of those entering and exiting the crime scene.
Because of the nature of the developing case, Pope was compelled to take King’s car keys and open up the trunk. Frustratingly, the missing woman wasn’t there, either.
The passenger-side window was rolled down halfway. Was this what King was doing when he leaned over the passenger seat? Was he rolling down the window, possibly to toss something out—maybe a weapon? Throwing it like a Frisbee, a person might be able to toss a gun or a knife twenty to thirty feet into the weeds alongside the road. Probably couldn’t reach the tree line, forty feet away.
(The weedy area beside the car was not secured that night, not until three or four days later. The car was considered a crime scene, but not the area surrounding the traffic stop. During that time, the grass near the shoulder of the road had been cut, and a crew went through the area picking up garbage. A highway worker could have found the weapon and wordlessly pocketed it.)
Sheriff’s deputies now had Michael King bent over the front of the car. Pope asked one more time where the girl was.
“I’d never seen an expression on a man’s face like the one King had then. It was cold, completely devoid of compassion or remorse,” Pope explained.
King uttered something nasty—“Pure evil,” the trooper recalled—and a couple of officers had to get between Pope and the suspect, who was promptly taken into protective custody.
The location of the arrest was communicated to the search helicopter—which was on the ground being refueled. The pilot agreed that he’d go back up as soon as he could and search the vicinity of the arrest for “hot spots.”
Pope knew that Denise had to be someplace close to the arrest. There was wet blood and DNA-type material on the car—material that would have flown off or dried if King had driven very far before being stopped.
With a report that a wet shovel had been found in the Camaro, the search for Denise Lee donned a grim heaviness. In addition to searching for the missing woman by air, a dive team was readied to search nearby bodies of water.
Alive or not, Denise was someplace where it was wet. Trouble was, after a rainy day, that could be almost anywhere.
Moments after the traffic stop, Detective Lieutenant Kevin R. Sullivan, of the North Port Police Department’s (NPPD) Criminal Investigations Bureau, arrived at the scene. By the time he got there, the suspect was already out of the car and had asked for a lawyer. Sullivan thought he looked familiar.
“Do I know you from somewhere?” Sullivan asked.
King replied that they had previously met through family.
“Are you okay?” Sullivan asked.
King assured him that he was. “I’m a victim here, too,” he said. He explained that he, like Mrs. Lee, had been kidnapped, and he was eager to do whatever he could to help law enforcement.
“Tell me what happened,” Sullivan said. He decided to play along and treat the man as a victim.
Observing the scene was Detective Christopher Morales, of the NPPD, who had also just arrived.
King agreed to a ride-along, sitting in the back of Sullivan’s car, to look for Denise. Sullivan hoped to keep the man talking. The man was in custody, so no harm could come from the little game they were playing. During the ride-along, a fog lowered over North Port, cutting visibility. King said, “A guy took me and that girl, and I was tied up and had a hood over my head.... He let me go at my car and I just drove off.”
The game did not bear fruit. In an attempt to throw the investigation a curveball, the suspect took the officers on a wild-goose chase, clear on the other side of town, as far from the scene of his arrest as they could get. Up and down. Back and forth. Till past 11:00 P.M. King had no idea where they were most of the time.
While they drove around, King was silently hopeful that his cousin Harold would keep his mouth shut. One statement from Harold Muxlow, and King’s lies were exposed. He didn’t know both Harold and his daughter had already spoken to police.
Trooper Pope was beat, but the adrenaline was still flowing. He couldn’t get rid of the driving voice in his head. He needed to get back out there and look for Denise.
Just before 11:00 P.M., the aerial search had to be called off because of the now-heavy fog.
Cops were sent out to locate and interview friends and relatives of the arrested man. One such person was Jennifer Robb, King’s ex-girlfriend, who lived in Homosassa, Florida, about fifty miles north. She was hoped to be a good source for info regarding King’s relatives. Jennifer wasn’t home, so patrols in Citrus County were informed that she was probably driving a red Nissan Frontier pickup, with black trim. It had a soccer ball bumper sticker on the back just above the license plate, and a decal at the top of the windshield that read ANGEL IN DISGUISE.
Police were also looking for a forty-one-year-old friend of King’s named Robert “Rob” Salvador, who lived in Venice.
Cortnie Watts, who had already participated in the processing of the Lee house, was now called to the scene of King’s arrest to photograph and collect evidence from the green Camaro. Watts had a routine that she followed. She always started at the outside of a scene and worked her way inward in ever-diminishing concentric circles. She created evidence swabs of the blood spatter on the car’s spoiler, collected and bagged as evidence long, dirty-blond hair found both on the hood and rear of the car, and swabbed a mucus-like glob of material on the hood.
The passenger-side door handle, Watts noticed, was covered with a sandy mud. She photographed the car’s interior—in particular, the red gas container, which sat on the passenger seat.
While she was doing this, Detective Michael Saxton was dusting the car’s exterior for fingerprints. On the outside of the driver’s-side window, he discovered a partial palm print, which he lifted with tape and placed on a white card.
The Camaro was secured with crime scene tape. That is, tape was placed over the space between the car doors and the rest of the car so that the doors could not be opened without breaking the tape. It was towed back to the NPPD and parked in the “evidence garage.” Watts followed the tow truck in her own vehicle. The decision to move the vehicle at that time was made because the wind had picked up, and there was concern a new rain might wash away evidence.
Watts stayed with the car until quarter to one in the morning of January 18.
She returned to the car on January 19 and took tire ink standards from all four tires, using Sirchie fingerprint slab ink, with a roller and a glass slab. She put ink on the roller and rolled ink onto the tires. She put brown craft paper under each tire and, with the help of Sergeant Scott Graham and Property Evidence staff assistant Deb Hill, rolled the Camaro over the paper so an ink impression of the tire treads was made. Still using Graham and Hill’s assistance, she pushed the vehicle out of the exam room and into a gated area in the police department’s