Guilty verdict in bride's slaying: Prosecutor says jurors found 'too many lies' in King's story
 |
|
||||||||||||||||
He lied to police. He lied to the Immigration and Naturalization Service. He lied to the parents of his young mail-order bride.
And Snohomish County jurors believed Indle King Jr. lied to them, too, when he denied killing his wife two years ago.
Yesterday, after deliberating for less than 5 ½ hours, they found him guilty of first-degree murder in Anastasia King's death.
"I don't believe he did himself any favors" by testifying, said deputy prosecutor Coleen St. Clair, after speaking with jurors following the verdict. They declined to talk to reporters.
"They said they would have reached the same verdict" without King's testimony, she said. "It just would have taken longer."
King, 40, stared straight ahead as the verdict was read, blinking once after the word "guilty" was pronounced.
Anastasia's parents sat in the back of the packed courtroom, as they had throughout the trial, and her mother, Alevtina Solovieva, wept quietly.
She cried later at a news conference as she thanked the community and investigators for helping search for her daughter and then bring her killers to justice.
She and her husband both were bitter about King, who they entrusted with their only child.
"When Anastasia said, 'This is a man who is very hard to live with,' I would say to her, 'Maybe you are exaggerating things,' " she said through a translator. "The fact he gained our confidence, that we trusted him, turned out to be a knife in the back."
Prosecutors say King killed their 20-year-old daughter because he wanted a new mail-order bride but didn't want to lose money in a divorce. They say he restrained Anastasia King and ordered a tenant in their Mountlake Terrace home to strangle her with a necktie.
Daniel Larson, 21, earlier pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in Anastasia's death, and testified against King.
King's Seattle attorneys, David Allen and Cassandra Stamm, argued that Larson, a convicted sex offender, killed Anastasia alone because he was afraid of being homeless and thought she wanted him out of the house. They said he hated certain immigrant groups, including Russian immigrants.
Allen described King as "resigned" after the verdict. "It's very tough on him," he said.
He said King wanted the chance to tell his story in court. Asked if he agreed with King's decision to testify, Allen said it was "not for me to say."
During his three days on the witness stand, King often squinted and fidgeted with his tie and glasses, tripping over his words at times and shouting out answers at others.
During her closing argument, St. Clair described him as squeaking "like a dog toy" when he lied.
His wife was last seen alive Sept. 22, 2000, when the couple returned to Seattle from a trip to her native Kyrgyzstan. Indle King told police he returned alone after fighting with Anastasia in Moscow, but detectives confirmed the couple cleared U.S. Customs at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport within a minute of each other.
King testified that after they got home, he went out to buy her some things and when he returned about 1 ½ hours later, she was gone. He said that Larson led him to believe she had left him, and that he lied to police because he felt humiliated.
St. Clair and Jim Townsend, the county's chief criminal deputy prosecutor, argued that this made no sense — getting dumped would have been humiliating whether it happened in Moscow or Mountlake Terrace — and that if King loved his wife as he claimed, he would have helped police find her.
They painted him as a controlling, jealous, petty man who viewed women as little more than commodities able to cook, clean, earn income, gratify him sexually and provide him with the children he desperately wanted. They said he was still bitter over a divorce from his first wife, a Russian woman whom he also found through advertising and who he believed used him for a green card, and was determined not to be used again.
He admitted on the witness stand that he committed fraud to try to hurt Anastasia's immigration status, claiming to the Immigration and Naturalization Service that she submitted forged documents when he, in fact, had them forged unbeknownst to her. He also admitted to trying to have a friend create an alibi for him, claiming he feared Larson would pin the murder on him. The jury also convicted him of witness tampering for trying to get Larson to lie about King's whereabouts during the murder.
Jurors said there were "too many lies and too many inconsistencies on critical issues" in King's testimony, according to St. Clair.
King's attorneys argued during the monthlong trial that Larson's account of what happened didn't make sense, and that he was testifying to what he thought prosecutors wanted to hear in hopes of getting a good deal on his murder plea and an unrelated indecent-liberties conviction.
Larson claimed the two men attacked Anastasia in the garage of the house, then put her body in the back seat of a car, got gas and drove in stop-and-go traffic in the middle of the day to the Tulalip Reservation, where they buried her at an illegal dump.
King's sentencing was set for March 27. He faces a standard range of about 21 to 28 years, on the combined charges, according to prosecutors.