Harold told police he was surprised when his cousin showed up at his house, even before he realized there was a captive in the Camaro. “I’ve scarcely seen him for months,” he said.
The woman had begged him to “call the cops,” but Harold hadn’t. Why?
“Well, he had a history of psycho girlfriends. Drama wasn’t necessarily unusual.” Harold said that despite the frantic woman in his car, King seemed calm. At one point, Harold told police, he was about fifteen feet from the Camaro, and he and King were having a calm conversation about King’s life. “I guess he had some problems, but he seemed pretty calm about it.”
As for the woman, Muxlow said, he didn’t really get a good look at her. Just a glimpse, really. The windows were “kind of” tinted. “He got the stuff he borrowed. I heard a bang when he put the stuff in the side door. I heard somebody say, ‘Call the cops,’ and then he said, ‘Don’t worry about it,’ and took off. I didn’t hear much. I thought it was that psycho broad he was with. I hadn’t seen him in so long. It just didn’t compute.”
One reason it didn’t sink in right away was his cousin was such a laid-back guy. King didn’t seem like the type to kidnap someone—didn’t drink, didn’t do drugs. Didn’t cause trouble.
King did have a tendency to spin a tall tale now and again—“Mikey had a big imagination”—so you always had to take his stories with a grain of salt.
Still, after Harold pondered it a bit, it didn’t sit right—the “call the cops” part—so he phoned his daughter. Then he got in his car and drove to the 7-Eleven gas station on Price Boulevard and Sumter Boulevard, where he called 911 himself. By the time he got home, a state trooper was at his house waiting for him.
Harold Muxlow’s emotions overcame him as he talked to police, and he began to weep.
“It’s hard talking about it,” he said. “When I think about it, I feel so bad for the girl and the family.”
A search warrant was acquired for Michael King’s clothes and person. Pamela “Pam” Schmidt, a criminalistics specialist, who wore a dark blue T-shirt, with a big white C.S.I. on the back, took fingernail scrapings and clippings. King’s clothes were confiscated. Schmidt photographed him while he was naked from the waist up; then she photographed and swabbed spots on his right elbow and back where the skin had been broken.
Schmidt asked King how he had suffered those injuries.
King said, “He had duct tape all over me. I know that.”
He was ordered to remove his jeans, which were placed in a large paper bag. New photos were taken as he stood in his black boxer shorts. He was instructed to lean on a chair as the bottoms of his feet were photographed one at a time.
“Now your underwear,” Schmidt said. King removed his shorts, and these were placed in another bag. Present was Detective Michael Saxton, who was somewhat surprised to see that King’s pubic hair was completely shaved off. More photos were taken, particularly of “fresh marks” near his groin. King said these might have been caused by him trying to use the bathroom while handcuffed.
Michael King was issued an orange jumpsuit; then he was escorted from the interrogation room to be booked formally on charges of kidnapping with intent to commit or facilitate a felony. He was listed as five feet eight inches tall, two hundred pounds, hair blond, eyes blue. His mug shot showed him glaring—a mean man, his soul consumed.
Without allowing the two to see each other in the hallway, police took Michael King out of the interrogation room and brought in Nate Lee. Two CCSO detectives—one male, one female—did the questioning. They informed him that they intended to take a sworn statement and that he could be charged with perjury if he lied. Once sworn in, Nate said he’d been married to Denise since August of ’05. Her birthday was August 6, 1986.
They met when he was a senior at Lemon Bay High School and had taken a law class together. They knew of each other at that point, but they had never communicated. Their first face-to-face meeting came while sharing a calculus class at Manatee Community College—she was a math whiz—spring semester, 2004. He was in college with a job working for a construction company called J.L. Concrete, but she was still a high-school senior, taking a college course, and making extra money babysitting. They began dating almost immediately. Denise spoke to Nate first, which was surprising, since she was so shy. She said, “Hey, weren’t you in my law class?” Their first date was a study date, in January ’04.
By February, they were pledging their love. He gave her a $40 ring, with a heart on it. She wore it even after they were engaged and then married. He met her family. Rick Goff and Nate had things in common and got along. Nate played baseball in high school, Rick coached baseball—so they always had something to talk about.
When Denise graduated, she and Nate moved to Tampa, where they attended the University of South Florida (USF). They both lived with a friend of his in the Lakeview Oaks apartment complex. They were there for a couple of months over the summer before the semester started; then they moved to another apartment right across the street from USF. They shared the apartment with a friend, the same from Lakeview Oaks, and his girlfriend.
In Tampa, Nate didn’t have a job at first, but Denise had a credit card that her parents had given her. He was going to school full-time, and his parents were paying for his living expenses, so he wasn’t in “a real hurry to get a job.” They had two cats, enjoyed going out to dinner, and occasionally had Nate’s friends over to play poker.
“She didn’t really have any USF friends, just the friends she had in high school,” Nate told the detectives. She did have college study groups that “got together” and discussed school online.
Denise took a job at CVS; soon thereafter, she learned she was pregnant. That was a stressful time. Telling their parents that they were expecting was tough. But the stressful period didn’t last long. Once they decided to wed, everyone relaxed, although neither set of parents had pressured them.
Was she neat? Was she a slob? She was neat, but it wasn’t like she needed everything to be spotless, Nate explained. “Obviously, our house now is a mess, but that’s a different situation.” She liked things being clean, but she wasn’t obsessive-compulsive about it. The detectives asked if she had hobbies. That was a stumper. No, not really. They enjoyed going to the movies. She enjoyed TV shows—cop shows. One day, she wanted to be part of that world. Not the show business version, but in real life. She liked her cats. Before she had real kids, her cats were her kids.
Nate and Denise would go places, not often—the zoo, the aquarium, places like that. They didn’t have a lot of money, but she liked to shop, go to the mall.
What were Nate’s hobbies? Sports, playing them and watching them. Golf. He would like to play more often, but he couldn’t afford it. He played the trumpet. He played cards every Friday night. Someday he would like to build a model train set.
Nate and Denise had known from very early in their relationship that they wanted to get married someday, but their plans were to finish school first. Pregnancy just moved up the date. They wanted to be married when the baby was born; so they exchanged vows in August 2005.
Nate stopped going to classes and took a full-time job at a Best Buy that fall, and the baby, Noah, was born January 8, 2006. For a little more than a year, Denise and Nate lived with his in-laws, and he considered taking a job in the sheriff’s office. He wasn’t sure why the CCSO turned down his application, but it might have been because he lied during his polygraph exam about smoking pot as a kid. Denise never smoked anything. She hated smoking. Nate would have a cigar now and again while playing poker, and his wife hated it. So, instead of being a cop, he worked for a company that built docks and seawalls.
They lived with Denise’s parents for a year, and that was okay. They had their privacy; the house was big; the garage had been converted into a bedroom. But as soon as Nate was making enough money for them to rent their own place,