Witness: King mutilated dead wife

By Jim Haley

Herald Writer

A first-degree murder defendant cut his dead wife’s ring finger off so he could reclaim her wedding ring, a former Snohomish County Jail inmate told a Snohomish County Superior Court jury Wednesday.

The testimony came as the inmate recounted statements Indle Gifford King Jr. made to him last year, including reported admissions that he participated in the strangulation death of his wife.

The inmate, who was convicted of an unrelated murder, told jurors substantially the same story as Daniel K. Larson, 21, who has admitted strangling Anastasia King at the behest of her husband.

Although there was testimony that Anastasia King’s body was missing a finger, this is the first time in the trial someone has said her finger was cut off.

The identification of the inmate who made the allegation is being withheld by The Herald because he has been threatened with death for testifying in the case. He is now in a state prison and was brought to Everett Wednesday to testify in King’s first-degree murder trial.

The possibility of threats followed the prisoner into the courtroom. He sat in the witness chair for a lengthy period while attorneys conferred with Superior Court Judge George Bowden in chambers. When the lawyers emerged, deputy prosecutor Coleen St. Clair accused King of making threatening gestures and glances at the witness while the lawyers were out of the room.

Bowden said he did not witness anything of the kind, but he cautioned King and his attorneys to make sure that nothing like that happens.

King, 40, is accused of killing a 20-year-old woman from Kyrgyzstan, formerly part of the Soviet Union. Anastasia King had been married to him for 1/2years after he picked her out of a catalog for a foreign matchmaking service.

There’s been considerable evidence in the trial that the marriage was in serious trouble.

Larson, who pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in her death, told the jury earlier that he strangled the young woman with a necktie while Indle King held her down.

On Wednesday, the unnamed inmate said both Larson and Indle King told him roughly the same story at different times while they shared space in the county jail.

At first, he and Larson had been friends and hung out together in the jail. The day Larson moved to another part of the jail, Indle King moved in and confronted the inmate, demanding to know what Larson had told him, he testified.

"Are you sure you want to hear?" the inmate said he asked King.

When he was through telling him, King just stared at him.

"He said, ‘Now that you know the truth, what are you going to do?’ " the inmate told the jurors. "I said, ‘Don’t worry about it.’ "

At another time, the inmate said he and Indle King talked at length about what happened to Anastasia King and how King and Larson wrapped her body in a blanket and buried it on the Tulalip Indian Reservation.

Among other things, he repeated details of having to stop to get gas while en route to the Marysville area, and Indle King becoming nervous when a Washington State Patrol trooper drove alongside the car that contained the body in the back seat.

St. Clair asked the inmate if Indle King told him why he killed his wife.

She and Larson used to fight, he said, and "he didn’t want to lose everything he had in a divorce," the inmate said.

He also said Larson and Indle King had a very good relationship.

"His exact words were, ‘Daniel was like a son to me,’ " he testified.

Indle King and Larson also had a sexual relationship, the inmate testified, and Anastasia King once caught them at it.

You can call Herald Writer Jim Haley at 425-339-3447 or send e-mail to haley@heraldnet.com.

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