Indle King Jr. convicted in mail-order bride’s death

Published 9:00 pm Wednesday, February 20, 2002

By Erin Van Bronkhorst

Associated Press

EVERETT – Indle G. King Jr. was convicted Thursday in the September 2000 death of his second mail-order bride, a young woman from the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan.

A Snohomish County Superior Court jury deliberated for five hours and 20 minutes before reaching its verdict.

King was convicted of first-degree murder and witness tampering.

Prosecutors had urged jurors in their deliberations to remember the words of Daniel Kristopher Larson, 21, a boarder at King’s house, who said the 270-pound King sat on his wife while Larson strangled her with a necktie.

Anastasia King’s body was found on the Tulalip Indian Reservation near Marysville in December 2000, about three months after she was last seen alive.

Larson, a convicted sex offender, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in a plea agreement with prosecutors.

Defense lawyer David Allen called the prosecution’s case a “house of cards” based on Larson’s word.

“He is a schemer, he is a manipulator, he is a conniver, and he is a person who would kill Anastasia on his own without any help from Indle King,” Allen said in closing arguments Wednesday. But he said he did not know how Larson killed the young woman.

Deputy Prosecutor Jim Townsend did not ask the jury to believe Larson, who undermined his credibility by changing his account of the killing several times.

Instead, Townsend suggested that King, unlike Larson, was a careful planner – able to organize and carry out a murder scheme.

King also had motive, Townsend said.

He filed for divorce from Anastasia before she disappeared after returning with him from a visit to her parents’ home in Kyrgyzstan in September 2000.

“In his own twisted mind, (King) was not going to be used and abused by another mail-order bride,” Townsend said Wednesday.

King’s divorce from his first mail-order bride had cost him $55,000 and the marriage did not produce the children he so desperately wanted, Townsend said.

In more than two hours of defense arguments Wednesday, Allen contended there was no physical evidence to support Larson’s account that the two men killed the woman together.

King’s lawyers contend Larson acted alone, motivated by King’s wife’s desire to get him out of the house.

Townsend countered that Larson could not have committed the murder alone. He also said two men would have been needed to move the body more than 260 feet from a roadway to its burial site in a wooded area.

King testified for 2 1/2 days during the five-week trial, breaking down several times in front of the jury as he read a long letter about his troubles and his marriage to Anastasia, whom he called “my princess.”

“If I am guilty of anything, it’s perhaps being an American male in search of a wife and mother,” King wrote in an April 2001 letter.

“All I wanted was love, respect and children.”

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