A Killer's Touch. Michael Benson
helicopters. This was not a domestic squabble that would work itself out. This was a genuine emergency. He wanted immediate action. As is true when police feel one of their own is in trouble, the call to action went out without hesitation.
“Anything you need,” Goff was told.
Rick Goff, like Nate before him, ran through the possibilities in his head, and didn’t like the conclusions he was coming to.
“I knew right away something happened to her bad,” he later said.
Among the officers who reported to the scene of the apparent abduction was a criminalistics specialist, Cortnie Lynn Watts, who thoroughly photographed the house inside and out. Not knowing what was evidence and what wasn’t, she photographed everything, every room from every angle. The keys that the missing woman had left behind, the contents of her purse carelessly spilled out. The most heartbreaking of those photos were of the high chair on the back patio and the little clumps of hair on the floor.
The missing woman had been giving her son a haircut not long before she disappeared.
In response to Nate’s 911 call, two units were dispatched to the Latour Avenue home. They arrived at 3:44 P.M. Nate gave a statement to Officer Scott Smith. He told Smith the same things he’d mentioned to the dispatcher: wife gone, two babies left behind, left her car, purse, key, cell phone, all behind. It was just past three-thirty. A neighborhood canvass was instituted to gather info regarding the lost woman.
Jenifer-Marie Eckert next door volunteered the information she had regarding the green Camaro she saw creepy-crawling the street at two-thirty. The neighbor now told her story with fear in her voice. The woman next door had been snatched, and there she was, all alone, only a few feet away. It could have been her.
The first detectives reached the scene of the possible abduction at four-sixteen. There were two cars in the driveway, a 2006 Toyota Corolla (the missing woman’s) and a 1994 Dodge Avenger (her husband’s). At four thirty-three, a request came into the CCSO from North Port for a “K-9 search team”—that is, a bloodhound and trainer. Deputy First Class (DFC) Deryk Alexander and his dog responded to the call.
Both Charlotte and Sarasota sheriff’s departments were sent requests for search helicopters.
Road Patrol sergeant Pamela Jernigan was the first officer to report to the Lee home. The missing woman’s husband, Nate, and father, Rick, were there.
“Can you think of anyplace Denise might have gone? Someplace nearby where she could walk on foot? A neighbor’s?”
Jernigan was well aware of police philosophy based on years and years of experiences. When a wife disappeared or—heaven forbid—was killed, it was her duty to take a long look at the husband before considering other options. Despite the fact that the man’s father-in-law was a cop and the husband was not sending up any red flags whatsoever, there were a few questions she needed to ask.
“When was the last time you spoke with her?” Jernigan asked.
“Um, a little after eleven o’clock this morning,” Nate Lee replied. Phone records would later reveal that the call was placed from him to her at 11:09 A.M. The call had lasted approximately five minutes.
“What was said?” In other words, was there a fight?
The conversation couldn’t have been more normal. Since it was cool, he advised her to open the windows and kill the air-conditioning, and Denise said she’d already done so.
“She told me she planned on giving our oldest son a haircut today.” Again, no red flag.
The first note of concern came at three o’clock when he got off work. He called her cell phone as he left work, to see if there was anything she needed him to pick up on the way home. No answer. That was odd—but there were plenty of reasons why she might not answer. Maybe she was changing a diaper. She would call back. It was a twenty-five-minute drive from his job to his home. He expected her to call back, but she did not.
Phone records would indicate that Nate was growing worried already. He called Denise’s cell eight times during the twenty-five-minute drive.
That worry grew to out-and-out concern as he pulled his car onto their street. Even before he pulled into the driveway, he could see that the windows—the ones she’d said she’d opened—were now shut.
“What time did you get home?”
“About three-thirty. The boys were in the crib together, and Denise was gone.” He tried to stay calm, not to freak, but he couldn’t help it. She’d never left the boys alone before, and there was no good scenario that explained the facts.
No red flags, but procedures still needed to be followed. Nate had to wait outside while the house was searched.
Inside the house, it was hot. With the windows closed, and the air turned off, the place had heated up. The windows had been pushed down but not latched, as if someone had closed them in a hurry.
A high chair had been moved onto the back patio and there were wispy tufts of blond hair on the floor in front of it, a sign that Denise had been playing barber just as she said she would.
Then the husband saw that she’d left her purse, keys, and cell phone behind; he immediately called 911.
Sergeant Jernigan noted that the front door had two locks. The top one was a dead bolt, the bottom one a regular lock. The bottom lock could be locked from the inside by turning a latch. The dead bolt could be locked only from the outside and required a key.
When Nate Lee had arrived home, the front door had been locked from the inside and pulled shut from the outside. Denise’s key had not been used. Jernigan then looked at Denise’s cell phone, checking for outgoing and incoming calls, to see which people Denise had been in touch with that day. There were several calls back and forth with her husband. She had called one friend, Natalie Mink, that morning. (It turned out Denise left a message and never got through to Natalie.)
Having determined that Denise was no longer there, and that she was gone under suspicious circumstances, Jernigan called a criminal investigator to the scene. He turned out to be Detective Christopher Morales, who would become the case’s lead detective.
At 4:38 p.m., the following message went out over law enforcement’s computer system: MISSING 21 YRO FEMALE DENISE AMBER LEE THIN BUILD BLUE EYES DIRTY BLONDE HAIR 5-2 UNK CLOTHING HER HUSB ARRIVED HOME AT 1530 HRS FOUND THEIR 2 TODDLER CHILDREN ALONE, VEH AND KEYS PURSE STILL AT HOUSE CANNOT LOCATE HER REQUESTING BLOODHOUND.
Morales took a look around the house. No signs of a struggle. No indications of a sex crime. The woman was simply gone. He spoke briefly to the woman next door, and took a look behind the Lee house, where there was a heavily wooded area. There was a lot of scrub, palmetto brushes looking like Oriental fans. There were few nearby houses. The area was kind of desolate.
Morales then returned to the North Port police station, where he organized the search for that Camaro.
At 5:02 P.M., a BOLO (be on the lookout) was dispatched for the late 1990s-model green Camaro and Denise Lee, a twenty-one-year-old white female. The BOLO also included a description of a “possible suspect,” a white male, thirty to forty years old, tall, with light brown hair.
The possibility that the crawling Camaro and the woman’s disappearance were separate and unrelated had to be taken into consideration. Eyewitnesses had been wrong before, and some became overzealous when relating their memories, caught up in the drama of the moment. So, four minutes later, all Sarasota County all-terrain vehicle (ATV) operators were requested to report for duty because of the vast wooded areas surrounding the missing woman’s house. There was still a chance that she’d merely wandered off.
A Charlotte County bloodhound-and-handler team arrived on Latour Avenue at 5:21 P.M. DFC Deryk Alexander’s dog started his search at the front of the house. Finding no trail, he circled the house and sat down in the driveway—very close to the spot where Jenifer-Marie Eckert saw the green Camaro park.
With all of the police