By Jim Haley
Herald Writer
Indle King Jr. spent several weeks writing to a longtime friend unsuccessfully trying to manufacture an alibi for the day his wife was murdered in their Mountlake Terrace home, a jury was told Monday.
The letters, sent from the Snohomish County Jail, were to Jay A. Yanick, 40, who was asked by King to invent a story about the two spending the afternoon and evening together talking about his trip to Kyrgyzstan in the former Soviet Union.
The date in question was Sept. 22, 2000, the day King, 40, and 20-year-old Anastasia King returned from her homeland.
It’s also the date King is accused of participating in her strangulation death.
King is on trial accused of first-degree murder and witness tampering. Anastasia King, who met Indle King through a foreign matchmaking service, disappeared Sept. 22. Her body was found late in the afternoon of Dec. 28 of that year in a shallow grave near Marysville.
Yanick was a friend of King at Mercer Island High School, and the two played on the school’s championship tennis team at the time. Indle King repeatedly said that Yanick owed him some favors.
In court on Monday, Yanick slowly read a series of letters Mountlake Terrace officers confiscated from his Bellevue room April 25.
They depicted an elaborate plot to involve Yanick in a lie about King’s whereabouts on the day Anastasia King disappeared. They also purported to push the blame entirely on King’s codefendant, Daniel K. Larson, 21, who has already pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in Anastasia King’s death.
It’s Larson who has accused Indle King of ordering his wife’s death and sitting on her while Larson strangled her with a necktie.
According to the plan, Yanick was supposed to have written a statement saying he was with King soon after the couple returned to their Mountlake Terrace home. He was supposed to mail it to Cyrus Vance Jr. in Seattle, the attorney King had at the time.
In the statement, King was not supposed to have been surprised that his wife packed some clothes and jewelry and left. Their marriage had been on the rocks.
Yanick also was supposed to have refused to talk with police.
Did Yanick ever send the statement to the lawyer, chief criminal deputy prosecutor Jim Townsend asked.
"No," Yanick testified.
Why not?
"Because it was incorrect," Yanick told jurors.
Does he recall what he was doing on Sept. 22, 2000?
"I do not," the witness testified.
In other testimony, Mountlake Terrace Detective Sgt. Craig McCaul told jurors about the day Indle King was arrested for his wife’s murder on Dec. 29, 2000.
He was being questioned in an interview room and at times was "extremely emotional," McCaul testified.
At one point he asked to see McCaul alone. He told the officer he intended to reach for McCaul’s pistol, and McCaul could then shoot him in the head in self-defense.
McCaul said he couldn’t do that because he could never forget about killing someone.
"He told me he didn’t think he could handle the disgrace of going to trial," McCaul testified, because it would be embarrassing to him and his family.
You can call Herald Writer Jim Haley at 425-339-3447
or send e-mail to haley@heraldnet.com.
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