Jury begins deliberating case against King
Published 9:00 pm Wednesday, February 20, 2002
By Erin Van Bronkhorst
Associated Press
EVERETT – After a final word from prosecutors about their key witness, jurors today began deliberating the case of Indle G. King Jr., accusing of killing his mail-order bride and burying her in woods near Marysville.
On Wednesday, defense lawyer David Allen called the prosecution’s case a “house of cards” based on the doubtful word of Daniel K. Larson, a sex offender whose story is not supported by physical evidence.
This morning, prosecutors made one more appeal to the Snohomish County Superior Court jury, defending Larson’s story as “internally consistent.”
A full day of closing arguments ended late Wednesday in the five-week trial. King, 40, is charged with first-degree murder in the death of Anastasia King.
“In his own twisted mind, (King) was not going to be used and abused by another mail-order bride,” Deputy Prosecutor Jim 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.
He wanted to get rid of his second wife, 20-year-old Anastasia, who was working, going to school and limiting contact with him, so that he could continue to search for the perfect wife who would cook, clean and produce two or three children, Townsend said.
King had filed for divorce from Anastasia before she disappeared.
When the couple returned from a September 2000 visit to Anastasia’s home in Kyrgyzstan, in the former Soviet Union, she was killed a few minutes after leaving the airport bus at their home, Townsend said. She did not have time to telephone her mother or best friend, so King could claim that she was in Moscow, the prosecutor said. Her body was not found for several months.
The prosecutor did not ask the jury to believe Larson, a boarder in the King home whose credibility lay in shreds even before the defense began to speak.
At various times, Larson has said he performed in a movie, shared ice cream with actor Kevin Costner, has a government chip implanted in his brain and is a prophet.
But Townsend suggested that King, unlike Larson, was a careful planner – able to organize and carry out a murder scheme. And King had the motive, he said.
In more than two hours of defense arguments, Allen contended there was no physical evidence to support Larson’s account that the two men killed the woman together.
Larson, who pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in a deal with prosecutors, has said the 270-pound King sat on his wife while Larson strangled her with a necktie.
“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. But he said he did not know how Larson killed the young woman.
The defense contended that Larson killed Anastasia because she wanted him to leave the home.
Townsend said the murder could not have been committed by Larson alone.
He said Anastasia King would have fought back if Larson alone tried to strangle her, but there were no signs of that. Townsend also said two men would have been needed to move her body 261 feet from a roadway to a burial site on the Tulalip Indian Reservation.
Previously, King testified for 2 1/2days, breaking down several times in front of the jury as he read a long letter about his troubles and his marriage to “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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