Calling Denise Amber Lee’s murder “unquestionably cold and cruel,” the Florida Supreme Court on Thursday upheld Michael King’s death sentence.

The court concluded the heinousness of King’s January 2008 murder of the 21-year-old mother of two young boys warranted his conviction and the death penalty.

“We are in complete agreement with the trial court that the death sentence is proportionate in this case,” the Supreme Court opinion states.

Last fall, the court called the argument that Lee was killed by anyone other than King, now 40, “preposterous” during his initial appeal. Florida law provides an automatic appeal in all capital murder cases.

Attorneys for King tried to get his death sentence reduced to life without the possibility of parole after filing what they said were 21 flaws in the case against him. The defense argued someone else shot Lee, but investigators say she was abducted from her North Port home, raped and murdered by King on Jan. 17, 2008. Proof Lee was in King’s green Camaro included a ring given to her by her husband, Nathan, and hair strands and blood she left behind. King was captured later that night near where Lee’s body was found off of Toledo Blade Boulevard. He was found guilty following a trial in August 2009 at the Sarasota County Courthouse.

In December 2009, 12th Circuit Judge Deno Economou sentenced King to death. King’s attorneys filed an appeal in 2010, pointing to self-employed handyman Robert Salvador, an acquaintance of King’s, as another suspect. The pair had gone to a gun range in Nokomis together before the kidnapping. When investigators arrived at Salvador’s Venice home at 2 a.m., he initially wasn’t truthful about being with King that day for fear his wife would be angry with him because she didn’t like King.

King’s attorneys claimed although the shell casings at the gun range came from the same firearm used to kill Lee, King was not the shooter — instead, it could have been Salvador. The murder weapon was never found.

Within hours of his capture, King claimed a helicopter pilot shot at Lee and hit her in the head, killing her.

Assistant Public Defender Steven Bolotin of Bartow focused on Salvador as a possible shooter and how King’s defense was hampered in its efforts to show the jury how Salvador figured in the killing, but did not convince the state Supreme Court.

The court determined King “acted alone” in killing Lee, but that it’s permissible during closing arguments to emphasize uncontradicted evidence.

“What’s the better inference? That a person (Salvador) who doesn’t tell everything they know right away to police at
(2 a.m.) would randomly go shoot somebody?”
the opinion states.
“Or would a reasonable inference be the person that would abduct somebody and rape them and bring them in their car and do the things that Michael King did, that they are the one who would kill the person?”

King’s appeal also opposed the state using 911 calls as evidence during his trial.

“Rarely is a court able to experience firsthand what a deceased victim encountered,” the opinion states of Lee’s desperate 911 call from inside King’s Camaro when he left the car to borrow a gas can and shovel from his cousin. A bound and blindfolded Lee found King’s cell- phone and tried to tell a 911 dispatcher who she was and where she lived without King realizing it, but he quickly returned to the car. “In this case, anyone who listens to the 911 call placed by Denise Lee will hear the abject terror she was experiencing plus her panicked, frantic pleas to the 911 dispatcher (for help) and King (to be returned home).”

Lee’s family attended King’s initial appeal hearing in September in Tallahassee. They called his appeal as “ludicrous as the defense arguments in the original trial.”

“We are very pleased in the process to this point,” Denise Lee’s father-in-law, Mark Lee, said Thursday. “Judge Economou did an exemplary job in conducting this case, and obviously
the Supreme Court agreed.”

King can file another appeal. According to the State Attorney’s Office, a death penalty case can take approximately 12 years before an execution, but in some cases, the process has been sped up to about eight years.

Email: eallen@sun-herald.com