After spending more than 18 years on death row, Michael Lee King was executed with lethal injection at Florida State Prison on March 17th, 2026. In this video, we will talk about his crimes, last meal, and last words. But before we get into this one, do me a favor, drop a comment right now and tell us where you’re watching from.

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Now, let’s get into it. To understand what happened to Denise Amberlye, you have to understand the place where it happened. And more importantly, you have to understand just how ordinary everything was before it all fell apart. Northport, Florida, sits about an hour south of Tampa on the Gulf Coast. In 2008, it was a small, sprawling suburb, the kind of place where new developments kept popping up between stretches of empty land and drainage canals.

It wasn’t glamorous. It wasn’t dangerous. It was the kind of town young couples moved to because the houses were affordable, the schools were decent, and you could raise your kids without worrying too much about what was happening outside your front door. The streets were wide and mostly empty during the day.

Neighbors waved at each other, but mostly kept to themselves. Nothing ever really happened in Northport. On Lour Avenue in one of those modest singlestory Florida homes with a flat roof and a small backyard lived Nathan and Denise Lee. They were young. Nathan worked during the day. Denise stayed home with their two boys, Noah, who was 2 years old, and Adam, who had barely been on this earth 6 months.

They were building the kind of simple, steady life that doesn’t make headlines. The kind of life where the biggest decision on a Thursday afternoon is whether to leave the windows open because the weather is nice. Denise Amber Lee was born on August 6th, 1986 in Englewood, Florida. She was the daughter of Rick Goff, a sergeant and detective with the Charlotte County Sheriff’s Office and his wife Sue.

Growing up in a law enforcement family shaped Denise in ways that would would become painfully significant later. She understood how investigations worked. She understood evidence. She understood what mattered when seconds counted. But on that January afternoon, she was just a young mother trimming her toddler’s hair on the back porch, enjoying the Florida sun with no idea that a predator was already circling her neighborhood.

Not long after Nathan and Denise had started dating, back when they were still figuring out what they meant to each other, Nathan bought her a ring. It wasn’t expensive. $40. A small heart-shaped thing that most people wouldn’t look at twice, but Denise loved it. She put it on the day he gave it to her, and she never took it off.

Not once. It stayed on her finger through the wedding, through the pregnancy with Noah, through the birth of Adam, through every ordinary day of their young marriage. That ring meant everything to her. You need to remember that ring. It’s going to matter later in ways that will break your heart.

Now, let me tell you about the man who destroyed all of this. Michael Lee King was born on May 4th, 1971. He grew up in the Northport area and trained as a plumber. By most accounts, he was never someone who stood out. He wasn’t loud. He wasn’t charismatic. He moved through life without leaving much of an impression on anyone.

But beneath that unremarkable surface, there were cracks that had been forming since childhood. When King was young, he was involved in a sledding accident that left him with a serious head injury. During the trial, an expert witness would describe the damage as a divot in his brain, a physical indentation that affected his cognitive function for the rest of his life.

His IQ was later tested at 71, which placed him in the borderline range of intellectual disability. His family members would tell the court about a man who struggled with basic tasks, who could never quite keep up with the world around him, who drifted from one situation to the next without ever gaining real footing.

By January of 2008, King was 36 years old and everything around him was collapsing. His marriage had ended in divorce. He had been unemployed for months. His house in Northport was in foreclosure and he was about to lose it. He had no money, no partner, no direction, and no support system to speak of. He was a man with nothing left to lose, and that made him dangerous in a way that nobody in that quiet neighborhood saw coming.

King owned a dark green 1994 Chevrolet Camaro with a black leather bra across the front. One of those vinyl covers that wraps around the hood and bumper to protect against road debris. It was a distinctive car, the kind of car you would notice if it drove past your house once.

And on the afternoon of January 17th, 2008, it drove past the Lee residence far more than once. Thursday, January 17th, 2008. A warm day in Southwest Florida. The kind of day where you open the windows and let the breeze come through. Nathan Lee left for work that morning and Denise stayed home with the boys. She called Nathan at 11:21 a.m. Just a normal check-in call.

They talked about the weather. They talked about the kids. They agreed the windows should stay open. It was the last conversation they would ever have. Sometime between 1 and 2:00 that afternoon, a neighbor of the Lees was sitting in her living room watching television. She had a clear view of the street from where she sat and something caught her attention.

A green Camaro was moving through the neighborhood at an unnaturally slow pace. Creeping, the car circled the block four times, then five times, each pass slower than the last. The neighbor thought the driver looked lost, so she stepped outside to get a better look. That’s when the Camaro pulled into the Leis’s driveway. The neighbor made direct eye contact with the man behind the wheel.

She studied his face for a moment, but then, assuming he had simply found the house he was looking for, she turned around and went back inside. 10 to 15 minutes later, she stepped outside again. The Camaro was gone, and so was Denise. What happened inside that house during those 10 to 15 minutes has never been fully detailed in public testimony.

What investigators know is this. There were no signs of forced entry. No signs of a struggle. The doors were locked from the inside. Denise’s keys were on the couch as if she had set them down, expecting to pick them back up any moment. Her purse was still in the house. Her cell phone was still in the house.

Everything she would normally take with her if she were leaving voluntarily was still right where she left it. The only thing missing was Denise and her two boys, Noah and baby Adam, had been placed together in a single crib. That was not something Denise would do under normal circumstances. It was the kind of thing you do when something interrupts you suddenly when you need to put both children somewhere safe in a hurry.

When Nathan came home from work around 3:30 that afternoon and walked through the front door, he knew immediately that something was wrong. The house was too quiet. The arrangement was off. The boys were together in one crib. Denise was nowhere. He searched the house. He searched the yard. He called her name again and again. Nothing. At 3:29 p.m.

, Nathan Lee picked up the phone and called 911. He told the dispatcher that his wife was gone, his children had been left alone in the house, and he had no idea what had happened. That call set everything in motion. Nathan’s next call was to his father-in-law, Rick Goff. And because Rick was a seasoned detective with the Charlotte County Sheriff’s Office, the response escalated fast.

Within 30 minutes, K9 units were deployed. A helicopter was circling overhead and officers were going door to door through the neighborhood. When they reached the neighbor who had seen the Camaro, she told them everything. The green car, the black bra on the front, the man behind the wheel, the slow, deliberate circles through the neighborhood.

The car pulling into the leaves driveway and then leaving with someone who was not in it when it arrived. Now, the police had a vehicle description, but they didn’t have a name. They didn’t have a plate number, and they didn’t have Denise. Let me take you back now to what was happening on the other side of Northport during those lost hours.

After taking Denise from her home while her babies were still inside, Michael King drove her to his own residence. It was not far away, just across the same quiet town. Inside King’s house, investigators would later discover what prosecutors described as a rape room, a space that had been prepared. Duct tape restraints.

a Winnie the Pooh blanket on the bed. Evidence that told a story so disturbing that even the most experienced detectives on the case had difficulty processing it. King bound Denise with duct tape. He sexually assaulted her and he held her captive in that room for hours. The timeline constructed at trial indicates that Denise was abducted between 1 and 2 in the afternoon and her own 911 call was not placed until 6:14 p.m.

That means she was held by King for more than 4 hours. More than 4 hours of terror in a stranger’s home, not knowing if she would ever see her husband or her children again. The sentencing judge would later write in his order that rarely is a court able to experience what a deceased victim endured. But in this case, because of what Denise did next, the court experienced all of it.

Sometime between 5:30 and 6:00 p.m., King put Denise, still bound, into the backseat of his Camaro and drove to the home of his cousin, Harold Muklow, on Carl Street in Northport. He pulled up to the house like it was a casual visit. He knocked on the door. He was wearing a white shirt with a design on it.

When Harold answered, King told him he needed to borrow some tools. His lawn mower had broken down and was stuck in a ditch. He said he needed a flashlight, a gas can, and a shovel. Harold didn’t question it. He walked King out to the tool shed, handed him the items, and started heading back toward his front door.

And then he heard something that should have changed everything. A woman’s voice coming from the car. Call the cops. Harold stopped. He turned around and walked toward the Camaro. He yelled at his cousin, “What are you doing?” King lifted his head from beside the passenger side of the vehicle and said, “Don’t worry about it.

It’s nothing.” But Harold kept walking. He got closer to the car and that’s when he saw King crawling over the center console, pushing down the head of a woman with shoulderlength hair who was trying to get up from the back seat. Denise had freed herself. She had gotten out of the car. She was standing right there in Harold Muklo<unk>’s driveway, screaming for help, begging someone, anyone, to call the police.

And King grabbed her and shoved her back inside. Harold Muklo stood there. He watched all of this happen. a bound woman, terrified, fighting for her life in his own driveway, begging him for help, and he turned around. He walked back into his house. He did nothing. Denise’s father would later say he could never understand how Muklo did what he did, knowing he had a young daughter of his own.

What if it had been his daughter in that car? But here is what Denise did in those critical moments while King was outside the vehicle collecting tools from the shed. Something that would ultimately bring her killer to justice. Even though it could not save her life. While King’s back was turned, Denise reached for his cell phone.

She took it without him knowing. She hid it and she waited. At 6:14 p.m., Denise Lee dialed 911. The call lasted several agonizing minutes. Denise was bound. She could not see. Prosecutors believe she may have been blindfolded or had her vision obstructed. She did not know where she was. She did not know the name of the man who had taken her.

But she answered the dispatcher’s questions with extraordinary composure, feeding information to the operator while simultaneously pretending to have a conversation with King so he would not realize what she was doing. She gave them her name. She gave them her address. on Lour Avenue. She told them she didn’t know the man she was with.

She told them the color and make of the car. She begged to be taken home. She said she was married to a beautiful husband and she just wanted to see her kids again. She said please 17 times. The trial judge, Dino Econom, would later remark that it is almost unheard of in criminal law to hear a murder victim’s final words.

But in Denise Lee’s case, the entire courtroom heard her. The jury heard her terror. They heard her intelligence. They heard her fighting to survive with the only weapon she had left, information. When King realized the phone was missing, the call was disconnected. Investigators were able to trace the number to a cell phone registered to Michael Lee King.

Now they had a name. Now they had an address. Officers raced to King’s residence in Northport and forced entry, but neither King nor Denise was there. Meanwhile, the 911 calls kept coming. After King sped away from Mlo’s house, Harold went inside and told his 17-year-old daughter, Sabrina, what he had just witnessed.

And it was the teenager, not the grown man who had watched it happen with his own eyes, who picked up the phone and did the right thing. At 6:23 p.m., Sabrina Mlo called 911. She told the operator that her father’s cousin had kidnapped a woman. She gave them the address. She gave them the vehicle description. She did what her father could not bring himself to do.

7 minutes later, at 6:30 p.m., a woman named Jane Kowalsski was driving south on US Route 41 when she stopped at a red light. The car next to her was a Camaro. And from inside it came a sound that Kowalsski would later describe as the most horrific, terrified screaming she had ever heard in her life. Not a happy scream, not a child playing, a get me out of here scream.

A sound that came from somewhere beyond fear. With the sun going down, Kowalsski couldn’t make out the car’s exact color. She thought it was blue or black, and she thought the person screaming was a child, but she watched as the driver turned around and began pushing something down in the back seat.

Then a hand rose up from behind the seat and began banging on the passenger window. hard, desperate, slapping the glass with an open palm. Kowalsski tried to position herself to read the license plate, but King refused to drive forward. When she slowly rolled ahead, he changed lanes and pulled behind her. She couldn’t get the plate, but she called 911 immediately and described everything she had seen and heard.

And here is where the system failed Denise Lee in the most devastating way imaginable. Kowalsski’s cell phone was pinging just beyond the Sarasota County line. So, her call was routed not to Sarasota County’s 911 center, where the massive search for Denise was already underway, but to Charlotte County’s 911 center, a completely separate jurisdiction.

A completely different team of dispatchers who had no knowledge of the missing woman, no knowledge of the search, no knowledge of the green Camaro that every officer in Sarasota County was looking for. The Charlotte County operator took Kowalsski’s information and instead of entering it into the system, instead of flagging it as urgent, instead of forwarding it to the neighboring county that was tearing the city apart, looking for this exact car, the operator wrote it down on a piece of paper. That call was never dispatched.

The officers searching for Denise Lee never received it. Two dispatchers were later suspended over the mishandling of that call. And here is the detail that makes this failure unforgivable. At the exact moment Kowalsski was on the phone with Charlotte County 911, describing the Camaro and its location on US41, a Sarasota County deputy was stationed on the very road that King turned onto after passing Kowalsski at that traffic light.

If that call had been entered into the system, if someone had picked up a phone or typed a single line into a computer, that deputy would have intercepted King’s vehicle. He was right there, right on that road. Denise Lee would be alive today. The final 911 call came at 6:50 p.m. from Harold Mlo himself. After his daughter called, Harold apparently thought better of his inaction.

He drove to King’s house to check whether his cousin had returned and whether there really was a lawn mower stuck in the yard. There wasn’t no Camaro in the driveway, no lawn mower anywhere. Harold then went to a pay phone and placed an anonymous call to 911 describing King’s vehicle and telling the operator that a woman might be incited against her will.

Five calls, five different people over the span of 3 hours, and the system could not put the pieces together fast enough. After leaving the area where Kowalsski spotted him, Michael King drove Denise to a remote, undeveloped stretch of land near Plantation Boulevard in Northport. It was dark by then, isolated, nothing around but drainage canals and empty fields. He took her out of the car.

He shot her in the face, and he buried her in a shallow grave in the mud. Then he got back in the Camaro, changed his shirt from the white one he had been wearing at Mlo’s house into a camouflage t-shirt and drove away. At 9:15 p.m., roughly 6 hours after Nathan first reported Denise missing, a Florida State Trooper spotted a green 1994 Chevrolet Camaro with a black front braing on Interstate 75.

It matched every description from the 9/11 calls. The trooper pulled the car over. Michael King was behind the wheel. His blue jeans were soaking wet from the waist down. His black sneakers were caked with mud. In his pockets, officers found a wallet with his driver’s license, a container for earplugs, the kind used at firing ranges, and the cell phone that Denise had used to call 911, with the battery and SIM card removed.

Denise was not in the car. But the evidence she left behind was everywhere. On the front bra of the Camaro, officers found strands of hair with what appeared to be blood. Inside the vehicle, they found a gas can on the passenger seat, a cell phone battery on the floorboard, a blanket in the back seat, and a shovel with dirt caked on its underside.

The same shovel Harold Mlo had given King just hours earlier. And sitting in the back seat, as if placed there deliberately, was a small heart-shaped ring. Denise’s ring, the $40 ring Nathan had given her. The ring she had never once removed from her finger since the day he put it there. She had taken it off in the final hours of her life and left it in her killer’s car on purpose so that investigators would find it so that it would connect her to this vehicle so that even if she didn’t survive, the evidence would speak for her. Her father, Rick Goff, would

later tell the press that Denise basically prosecuted her own case. She left her ring. She pressed her hair into the duct tape so her DNA would be recoverable. She left her palm print on the outside of the driver’s side window. She called 911 from the killer’s own phone. Every single thing she did in those final hours was designed to ensure that Michael King would never be able to deny what he had done.

On January 19th, 2 days after the abduction, search teams found a patch of disturbed earth near Plantation Boulevard. They began to dig. Denise Amber Lee’s body was recovered from a shallow grave. She had been sexually assaulted and shot in the head. Pieces of duct tape were still tangled in her hair. She was 21 years old.

The forensic evidence assembled against Michael King was staggering. Hair found on duct tape inside his home matched Denise’s DNA to the exclusion of 110 trillion individuals. Duct tape from his master bedroom carried King’s DNA to the exclusion of one quadrillion people. A Winnie the Pooh blanket on his bed tested positive for his semen and her blood. Her palm print was on his car.

His fingerprint was on the cell phone battery. A shell casing was found near the burial site. Denise’s ring was in his back seat. The shovel from his cousin’s shed had dirt matching the grave. On February 6th, 2008, Michael Lee King was indicted on charges of firstdegree murder, sexual battery, and kidnapping. He pleaded not guilty.

His story to investigators was that both he and Denise had been kidnapped and blindfolded together by an unknown asalent and that he had nothing to do with her death. It was a story that contradicted every piece of physical evidence in the case. The trial of the state of Florida versus Michael L. King began on August 24th, 2009.

In Sarasota County, assistant state attorney Lon Aren led the prosecution. Public defender Carolyn Schurmer represented King. Judge Deno Economo presided. The prosecution’s case was methodical and devastating. They walked the jury through every piece of forensic evidence, every 911 call, every witness account.

Jane Kowolski took the stand and described the screaming she heard from King’s car. Horrific and terrified, she told the jury. She identified King as the driver. Harold Mlo testified about lending King the tools and hearing the woman yell for help from the car. Shawn Johnson, another motorist who had heard a woman screaming from King’s Camaro at a traffic light, identified King from a photo lineup and again during trial.

The neighbor from Lour Avenue described the Camaro circling the block. And then the prosecution played Denise’s 911 call. The courtroom went silent. The jury heard her voice, sometimes trembling, sometimes frantic, always deliberate. They heard her begging to go home. They heard her say she wanted to see her family.

They heard her say please again and again and again 17 times. The defense’s strategy was to create reasonable doubt by suggesting someone else had killed Denise. They pointed to King’s friend, Robert Salvador, a handyman who had been at a firing range with King earlier on January 17th. On cross-examination, Defense Council asked Salvador directly, “Did you arrange to meet King that afternoon? Did you go to his home? Did you fire the shot that killed Denise Lee? Salvador denied everything.

The prosecution objected to the entire line of questioning, arguing that defense council had no good faith basis for the accusations. The strategy collapsed. King’s attorneys presented no witnesses of their own. The jury deliberated for 2 hours. They returned with a verdict of guilty on all three counts, kidnapping, sexual battery, and first-degree murder.

In September 2009, they voted 12 to zero in favor of the death penalty. Not a single juror wavered. Michael Lee King was sent to Florida’s death row, and there he remained for more than 18 years. During those years, the Lee family transformed their grief into purpose. Nathan Lee founded the Denise Amber Lee Foundation and spent years traveling the country, visiting 911 call centers, training dispatchers, and sharing Denise’s story so that the failures that cost her life would never be repeated. Denise’s sister, Amanda,

became a 911 dispatcher herself, dedicating her career to the very system that had failed her sister. Their father, Rick Goff, continued speaking publicly about the case, never letting people forget what happened and what needed to change. In 2010, the Florida legislature passed the Denise Amber Lee Act.

The law required the Department of Health to establish certification criteria for 911 dispatchers, including a mandatory training program of at least 208 hours and a state examination. Before the act, some Florida call centers set their own standards, meaning some dispatchers trained for months, while others were directing emergency response within days of being hired.

The act changed that. And according to Denise’s father, the protocols established under the act have been credited with saving lives in other states, including a case in Colorado where a dispatch center credited the training with helping prevent a woman’s death. On February 13th, 2026, Florida Governor Ronda Santis signed the death warrant for Michael Lee King.

His execution was scheduled for 6:00 p.m. on March 17th, 2026, making him the fourth person executed in Florida that year following a record setting 2025 in which the state carried out 19 executions. King’s attorneys filed last ditch appeals challenging Florida’s lethal injection protocols. The Florida Supreme Court denied them on March 10th.

The United States Supreme Court rejected his final petition without comment on March 16th, the day before the execution. On the evening of March 17th, 2026, at Florida State Prison near Stark, 13 members of Denise Lee’s family gathered in the witness viewing room. Every single one of them wore pink. It was Denise’s favorite color.

The curtain to the death chamber went up at exactly 6:00 p.m. Michael King lay on the gurnie. A Catholic clergy member stood at the foot of the bed beside him. King delivered his final statement in a voice so quiet it was nearly inaudible. Prison staff had to relay the text to the media afterward through the governor’s office.

He spoke about finding Jesus in prison. He spoke about trying to live as a disciple. He spoke about the two great commandments. loving God with all his heart and loving his neighbor, which he said included everyone, his family, Denise Lee’s family, the people in the gallery, the Catholic volunteers who visited the prison, the officers, and even those on the team to end his life.

He closed with a Bible verse, Matthew 22:37-4. If you want true peace, he said, ask Jesus into your heart. He did not apologize. He did not ask for forgiveness. He did not look up from the gurnie. Not once. His last meal had been pizza, tater tots, ice cream, and a soda. The three drug lethal injection began.

First the seditive, then the paralytic, then the drug that stops the heart. King’s breathing grew heavy. His arms began to shake. His body twitched against the restraints. Then gradually all movements stopped. The warden stepped forward, shook King by the shoulder, and called out his name. No response. A medic was brought in. At 6:13 p.m.

, Michael Lee King was pronounced dead. He was 54 years old. Afterward, the Lee family held a press conference outside the prison. Nathan Lee spoke first. He said he was relieved the chapter was finally closed and that the family could continue focusing on improving the 911 system, the mission they had carried for 18 years.

He said he was blessed to have known Denise, to have married her, and to have had two amazing sons with her. Rick Goff, Denise’s father, was characteristically blunt. He said, “King’s speech from the gurnie did not impress him. It was a written statement.” Goff said, “He didn’t even write it himself.

If you can’t say something from your heart, don’t say it.” Goff added that King couldn’t even look up. Denise’s sister, Linda, echoed the sentiment, calling King a coward who refused to look the family in the eye. And then Noah Lee stepped to the microphone. Noah was 2 years old when his mother was taken from him.

He is now a grown man who has lived his entire life without her. He stood at the podium surrounded by his family, all of them still wearing pink, and said it had been a long time coming. He said he was happy to have closure. And then he said something that cut through everything else.

He said he unfortunately never got the opportunity to know her and be raised by her, but he knew his father picked a great mom. Denise Amber Lee was 21 years old when she was murdered. She had been a wife for a few short years and a mother for even less. She spent the final hours of her life in the hands of a stranger who had no connection to her, no reason to choose her, no motive beyond opportunity and cruelty.

And in those hours, bound and terrified, unable to see, not knowing if help would ever come, she did something remarkable. She fought, not with her fists, with her mind. She called 911 from her killer’s phone. She gave dispatchers every piece of information she could. She left her hair in the duct tape.

She left her palm print on the window. She left her ring in the back seat. She made sure that even if the system failed her, and it did, the evidence would not. Her father called her a hero. The prosecutor said she gave them their best evidence. The judge said he had never seen anything like it. But the question that still hangs over this case 18 years later is one that doesn’t have a comfortable answer.

Five 911 calls were made that afternoon. Five from five different people, including Denise herself. A teenager did what a grown man would not. A stranger on the highway did everything right. A deputy was sitting on the exact road King turned onto and never got the call because a dispatcher wrote the information on a piece of paper instead of entering it into the system.

So, let me ask you this. Who really failed Denise Lee? Was it Michael King, the man who took her life? Was it Harold Mlo, the man who watched her scream for help in his own driveway and turned his back? Was it the 911 system that took five calls and still couldn’t coordinate a response? Or was it all of them? Every person and every institution that had a chance to save a 21-year-old mother and let that chance slip away.