Sex offender found guilty in murder of Monroe woman

Published 7:01 pm Wednesday, September 28, 2011

EVERETT — A convicted sex offender was found guilty of second-degree murder Wednesday for a 2010 attack on a Monroe woman that began with him breaking a large bottle of hot sauce over her head.

Michael Noel Benjamin, 46, was stone-faced when the verdict was announced in Snohomish County Supe

rior Court.

Family and friends of his victim, Angela Pettifer, greeted the news with tears of relief.

“I was so confident that he was the one,” Pettifer’s younger sister, Cindy Hartzell, said after Benjamin was led away to his cell. “I was afraid that he’d get off” and somebody else would be hurt.

Judge David Kurtz scheduled sentencing for Nov. 2. Under state sentencing guidelines, Benjamin faces a prison sentence between 10 and 18 years.

A jury listened to a week of testimony and deliberated for a full day before finding Benjamin guilty.

He’d maintained that police and prosecutors had rushed to connect him to the killing, overlooking clues that he claimed pointed to other suspects.

Pettifer was struck on the head with a 23-ounce bottle of Frank’s Red Hot hot sauce then choked to death. Her partially clothed body was found in the bedroom of her third-floor Monroe apartment on Aug. 15, 2010.

Benjamin was a handyman who lived in Pettifer’s apartment building on the second floor. Tests indicated DNA consistent with the defendant’s genetic profile was found on Pettifer’s left breast. Since they weren’t a couple, the DNA clearly got there through the homicidal attack, deputy prosecutor Craig Matheson told jurors.

The case also hinged in part on Benjamin’s fondness for the same brand of hot sauce found splattered at the crime scene.

Detectives found a largely empty 23-ounce bottle of Frank’s Red Hot hot sauce in Benjamin’s apartment. The glass bottle matched shards recovered in Pettifer’s bedroom.

A check of records from Benjamin’s grocery club card showed that he bought one of those 23-ounce bottles of hot sauce about once a month, and the most recent was four days before the killing.

Investigators believe that Benjamin attacked Pettifer with a full bottle.

Benjamin’s attorney, public defender Natalie Tarantino had told jurors that the hot sauce was “a false clue” and that genetic tests weren’t as conclusive as prosecutors argued.

It’s true that her client couldn’t be excluded as a possible source of the DNA, but neither could 1 in 1,300 men in the U.S. population, she said in closing arguments. In addition, DNA from other men was found on Pettifer’s clothing and under her fingernails, including from her boyfriend and her father.

Pettifer had spent her final night drinking with her dad. She was so intoxicated that she needed help getting to her apartment.

Benjamin volunteered, along with two women. The women said Pettifer made it to her apartment, went inside and the latch clicked shut. Another witness said she later spotted Benjamin, soaked in sweat, leaving the building’s third floor, where Pettifer lived, apparently heading back to his second-floor apartment.

Benjamin is a registered sex offender and was convicted in 2006 of three counts of communicating with a minor for immoral purposes. That history wasn’t shared with jurors during the murder trial.

Scott North: 425-339-3431, north@heraldnet.com