by Joe Kenda
We also know that he repeatedly told his in-laws that he did not want a divorce. But his position on that changed when little Tara let slip that Mona was spending nights at the home of another man.
A few days later, Raymond consulted with an attorney about obtaining a divorce and securing custody of Tara. His decision to throw in the towel may have been logical given his wife’s infidelity, but it did not bring closure for Ray, whose rage and despair made for a deadly mix.
sister-cide
Raymond King had another court-ordered visitation with his daughter on the weekend of March 23–24, 1985. After picking her up, however, he dropped the child off with his father, Cecil King.
“I need to talk to Mona about the divorce,” he told his dad.
Ray did not return on Sunday to pick up his daughter. He didn’t show up on Monday, either.
Cecil King tried calling both Ray and Mona. Neither responded.
He found a babysitter for Tara and went looking for Ray. His first stop was the Colorado Springs home where Mona had remained after the breakup.
Cecil rang the doorbell. No answer. He peered in through the front windows of the house but couldn’t see anything. He then walked around to the back of the house and looked into the windows there.
I wish I could tell you that he saw his son and Mona locked in a tearful and loving embrace as they pledged to renew their love and rebuild their marriage for the sake of their beautiful child.
Sorry. A homicide detective is not in the wish-fulfillment business, and this isn’t a Hollywood rom-com with a happily-ever-after ending. You knew that when you opened this book. I spent a long career bearing—and baring—the bad news. This case was no different.
I got the call after Ray’s father saw a body on the kitchen floor, surrounded by blood. Cecil King ran to a neighbor’s house and called 911.
I was at the station, talking with my homicide team about another investigation, when the call came in. I grabbed a couple of my guys and we headed to the Kings’ house.
Our patrolmen were already there, along with a pack of gawking neighbors. Our guys had forced entry into the locked house. Even before we arrived on the scene, the body count had doubled.
“Be advised, a second victim was found dead at the scene. Both with multiple gunshot wounds.”
The female in the kitchen was blond, wearing a halter top and shorts. She had at least five gunshot wounds to the head and chest.
The second victim was in the living room. She had been shot at least seven times, front and back. Her car keys were on the floor, by her hand. A purse strap was slung on her arm, and a jacket lay next to her body.
She had walked into a barrage of bullets. Her killer had dropped her before she could turn and run.
Cecil King identified the victims as his daughter-in-law, Mona, found in the living room, and her sister, Carla Cannon, found in the kitchen. There was no forced entry into the house. No sign of anything taken.
With two victims dispatched, the shooter had fled.
You know I hate it when murderers have a head start. They dump weapons, destroy evidence, and head for the hills while my team and I are still assessing the situation.
I don’t like playing catch-up, but I love a challenge. And this wasn’t my first rodeo.
At that point, none of my team knew the sad saga of the wayward sisters, the distraught and angry husband, and the marriage in tatters. But the crime scene talked to me, and it spoke volumes.
Since there was no forced entry and nothing missing, this was not an armed robbery or a burglary interrupted. Our runner had come to kill. The sheer number of shots taken screamed that these murders were personal. The triggers for these killings were clearly vengeance, jealousy, and rage.
The final shot to Mona’s head was a mob-style close-range bullet to the temple, a professional assassin’s coup de grâce death blow.
No guns were found at the scene, which did not bode well for anyone in the killer’s path of flight. We had to find this shooter before someone else went down.
The crime scene also presented us with a bloody shoe print of a pointed toe—most likely a cowboy boot. Even more interesting were the scattered bullet casings—twelve of them, likely from two pistols unless the killer paused to reload.
Our crime scene crew said the casings were from an older-model .22 revolver, one that had not been made since the 1960s. I found that information quite helpful.
tools of destruction
I am always grateful when a killer chooses a distinctive weapon instead of a run-of-the-mill Saturday night special or a steak knife from a kitchen drawer.
A unique weapon can help us narrow the field of suspects considerably. My favorite example of this occurred in my early days as a homicide detective. I had a case in which the male victim had been fatally beaten. His head was bashed in during a robbery in the parking lot of a Target store.
This poor guy was just a truck driver delivering Christmas ornaments to Target. He had an eighteen-wheeler full of holiday baubles. His only crime was tardiness.
He arrived after this particular Target had closed, so he did what tardy truckers do. He pulled into the parking lot, shut down the engine, and went to sleep in his little trucker nest behind the driver’s seat.
While the trucker slumbered all snug in his bed, some asshole broke in and bashed his head. (My apologies if I just desecrated your favorite Christmas poem.)
We figured the motive was robbery since the back door of the trailer had been forced open. The driver probably heard all the clatter and sprang from his cab to see what was the matter. (I’m on a roll.)
The crime scene didn’t give us much. An inventory of the truck turned up only about thirty-five dollars in missing Christmas ornaments. The autopsy gave us only a little more to work with.
The coroner shaved the victim’s head to get a better look at his wounds, which were unusual. The murder weapon appeared to be made of heavy metal and precisely engineered. There were deep gouges in his skull, each of them exactly ten millimeters apart.
Obviously, this wasn’t the usual baseball bat, crowbar, or billy club. The coroner speculated that maybe it was a forged tool of some kind.
My mind can be a vast and empty place at times, but every now and then a spark flares up. When the coroner said “forged tool,” just that sort of flash occurred. There was a Forge Road in an industrial area of Colorado Springs.
One of the companies on that road, not coincidentally, was Western Forge, which, at the time, made the Craftsman-brand tools for Sears Roebuck. It was kind of a local-pride thing that such a well-regarded American brand of tools was made in our town.
Fun fact with a twist: Western Forge has been known as the largest American manufacturer of screwdrivers. Impressive, right?
I figured the hometown company must have some pretty sharp engineers on staff, and maybe they could help identify the murder weapon used on our poor trucker’s head. It was worth a shot.
So I drove to their no-frills stucco-and-glass headquarters at the edge of the Rockies, introduced myself to the honchos, and told them about the case of the trucker beaten to death for a handful of Christmas ornaments.
“If I gave you the dimensions of the gouges in his head, do you think you could tell me what sort of tool might have been used to kill him?” I asked.
The tool guys aren’t often invited to help solve murder cases. They were all over it. Manufacturing engineers also love a challenge, especially one involving precise measurements. Bless their calculating little hearts.
They eagerly informed me that their international association of tool manufacturers keeps files on the dimensions of all tools to protect patents and licenses and all that stuff.
So we had a big database they could search.
Being engineers, they did not trust the measurements taken at the coroner’s of
fice. They wanted to see photos of the wounds.
“Are you sure?” I asked tactfully. “They are not pleasant to view.”
“No problem, man. I can handle it,” one of them said. “I was in the Army Reserve.”
I whipped out a large full-color photo of the trucker’s bashed head and put it on his drawing board.
Mr. Army Reserve went white and promptly lost his lunch in his wastebasket.
“Would you and your trash can of puke please leave the room before you make me and your entire team vomit?” I asked.
I’m always working for the greater good.
After reviewing the photos and taking measurements, the other engineers were looking a little pasty, too. They asked if I would give them a few days to do their own research and calculation.
“No problem, gents,” I said.
By that time, I was ready for some fresh mountain air myself.
They spent three days playing tool detectives. Then they had me return for their findings. I entered the conference room, where they were set up for a very professional presentation.
The engineers laid out their findings as if they were pitching a new set of wrenches for Mr. Sears and Mr. Roebuck. I was impressed!
“We’ve decided these wounds could have been made by three possible items. Number one would be a main support leg for a surveyor’s transit. (You’ve seen guys standing on the highway taking measurements with these telescope-looking things on a tripod.)
“Number two would be [some other weird type of machinery part that I can’t remember], and number three would be a bumper jack out of a 1972 General Motors product.”
Jackpot!
A bumper jack made perfect sense. The killer probably used it to pry open the back door of the truck trailer and then beat the trucker with the jack when confronted.
I congratulated the tool geeks on their detective work and may have promised them that they’d never have to pay a speeding ticket again. (Don’t hold me to that one.)
I left tool town with my first decent clue in the case. Within a few weeks, we identified a suspect who drove a 1972 Cadillac. His nickname was Big Red, and he was known as a violent guy with larceny in his heart.
We arrested him and seized his Caddie’s bumper jack. He had cleaned it with gasoline, very thoroughly. Lucky for us, he forgot that it was hollow inside. We found hairs that matched those of the bashed trucker, and took Big Red to jail on a murder charge.
And that, my friend, is my favorite example of a unique murder weapon leading us to the killer.
I hope you enjoyed this brief interlude. Now, back to our mystery of the twisted sisters and their tragic end.
the usual suspects
The bullet casings found at the crime scene gave us a fix on the murder weapon or weapons. We knew they were fired from 1960s vintage revolvers, but we still had to find guns and a suspect we could link to them.
In the meantime, Cecil King filled us in on the family drama involving his son, his son’s wife, and the older sister who stirred the pot. He told us about Carla’s bad influence on Mona and about Ray’s despair over his wayward wife and their impending divorce.
Ray was definitely our prime suspect, especially since he had disappeared shortly after his wife and sister-in-law were murdered in his former home.
I wondered if Ray might have gone off to commit suicide. While we looked for him, we also checked for other possible suspects lurking in the dive bars where the sisters had partied.
Everywhere we looked, lounge lizards slithered out from under rocks.
Carla and Mona were both well known in local honky-tonks, where they drank, danced, and dazzled male admirers. We took an interest in one particular Goodtime Charlie, a bar fixture who sported gold chains and a Members Only jacket.
He considered himself a smooth operator. I surmised that he probably drove a high-mileage muscle car with a red Naugahyde interior—made from the soft underbellies of baby Naugas.
We homed in on him because at first he had denied dating Mona, but then he admitted they had hooked up a time or two. Still, Charlie didn’t seem capable of commitment, let alone murder. He didn’t know much about Mona’s life beyond the bar.
Goodtime Charlie wasn’t into deep relationships. He was all touchy, no feely.
Since he had a decent alibi and didn’t seem emotionally involved with Mona or anyone else, we put Charlie on the back burner.
Besides, Raymond Lee King was clearly our front-runner for double homicide, especially after we talked to his brother, Bob, at the Pueblo house where they’d been staying.
Bob told us that on the Saturday before the dead sisters were found, Ray borrowed his silver-and-blue Ford Ranger pickup truck. Neighbors told us that on the weekend of the murders, they had seen a vehicle of that description in the driveway of Ray’s former home, where Mona and Carla lived.
Bob also connected us to the possible murder weapons.
“Ray sometimes borrows guns from the collection of the guy who owns this house,” the brother said. “He did some target shooting out back.”
We tracked down their absentee landlord, who said his collection included a pair of Smith & Wesson Model 17s—the .22-caliber six-shot revolvers that matched up with the twelve spent casings found at the murder scene.
The owner gave us permission to search his home and check out the collection. When we did an inventory with him, we found that those two revolvers were missing, along with fifty rounds of ammo, which meant Ray was likely still armed and dangerous.
When I asked his brother where Ray might have gone to hide out, he told us that our suspect owned a wooded seven-acre lot in a high-end residential development outside Colorado Springs. It seemed that Ray had planned on building a dream home there for his family, before that dream went sour.
I asked the sheriff’s department to send a deputy to that location, just in case Ray was hiding out there. It also occurred to me that he might have gone there to take his own life after killing Mona and Carla.
The deputies didn’t see any sign of Ray at his luxury lot, so the search continued. We put out a bulletin on the Ford Ranger borrowed from his brother. Every law enforcement officer in the region was on the lookout.
I figured that if Ray was still alive, we’d find him before long.
I figured right.
The next morning, the Colorado State Patrol notified us that they’d nabbed him after troopers spotted the pickup on Interstate Highway 25 and pulled it over between Pueblo and Colorado Springs.
Ray didn’t put up a fight even though he had two loaded revolvers and thirty rounds in the truck and his pants pockets. We confiscated his clothing and cowboy boots. Dried blood found on those items matched that of his murdered wife and sister-in-law.
We found you, Ray!
But we still had to make sure he paid for his crimes.
ray’s story
When I went out to interview Ray at one of our police substations, two defense attorneys were already trying to get to him. I had to explain to them—even though they already knew damned well—that while Ray had a right to an attorney, there is nothing that says every attorney has a right to a client.
In other words, I wasn’t about to let them talk to Ray unless our suspect demanded to talk to them.
Call me selfish, but I preferred to talk to Ray before they did.
Ray agreed with that plan. Our talk was very informative, though not at all engaging. He appeared to be in a zombie state.
We’d heard that Ray was a mellow, even dull dude, but when I talked to him, he was close to catatonic. This was understandable. Killing your wife and her sister might tend to have a deleterious impact on your state of mind.
Ray had not killed himself, as I’d feared, but he had killed off any feelings or fears. His tank was empty. He had been a salt-of-the-earth kind of guy,
who had never been violent in the past.
Then Carla came to town and recruited his wife as her wing woman. Ray lost his family, and then he lost control. Not that slaughtering two people is excusable under any circumstances. It’s just that these weren’t the sort of people you’d expect to be caught up in a violent crime. They were middle-class Americans living the dream until the trajectory of their lives changed dramatically.
For the worse.
When I interviewed Ray, I laid out our case: His brother’s borrowed pickup in the driveway. Blood on his boots. The murder weapons in his possession. The shell casings. The all-too-obvious motive.
Ray gave me the dead-man stare and proceeded to confess, with a lame-assed twist from a dime-store novel. He claimed he took the guns only to force Mona to sit down and listen to him as he begged her to come back.
His supposed plan went awry when she wasn’t home. He walked in and found Carla instead. So, he decided to wait for his wife.
Ray claimed that he had put the guns down but Carla grabbed one of them. He said he tried to take the pistol away from her, and during the struggle, she was shot.
“The damn thing went off,” he said.
Yeah, Ray, the damned gun went off. Five times, Ray?
His explanation for the multiple gunshots was this: “She was sitting on the floor bleeding and she said, “Shoot me more so I don’t suffer.”
Sure, Ray, I find that shooting victims do tend to beg for more.
When did Mona enter the picture, Ray?
“Well, I was gonna shoot myself, and then Mona walked in the door . . . and I don’t remember what happened after that.”
How convenient.
I’d had enough. Ray had confessed to the murder of his sister-in-law. The courts would sort out the rest of the case as presented to them in our reports.
making it stick
Murder cases can drag on for years, even after the killer has been caught. Everything homicide detectives do is under a microscope. You have to be extremely cautious you don’t overlook things or take shortcuts during an investigation.
