“If you don’t get in my car,” King alleges Harwood told her, “I will take away your crutches, handcuff you, and drag you across that gravel driveway and put you in my car.” King went for that drive. King alleges the detective then told her she had to go for a drive with him while other officers searched her home. Like the fact that the bullets that killed Breeden had not exited his skull (which meant they could not also have made any bullet holes in Susan King’s floor).Īnother critical omission in that 2006 affidavit was the fact that King had one leg at the time (she now has a prosthetic leg) and weighed 100 pounds, which made it (as the 6th Circuit later wrote) “less probable than otherwise” that she killed the 187-pound Breeden “in her kitchen, tied up his body, dragged him to her car, drove forty miles north, and dumped his body into the Kentucky River.” These details are contained in the court records and briefs in the case. His affidavit mirrored the first affidavit, but this time, according to court records, the police strengthened the force of the affidavit by omitting several key facts. Then a new detective, Todd Harwood, was assigned to it and tried again to get a search warrant for King’s house. Without a warrant, and with no other suspects, the case went cold for nearly seven years. Given how typically easy it is for the police to get a search warrant, that failure, in retrospect, was an early red flag that the investigation into King was flawed. But they weren’t able to get her consent to a search and, notably, they weren’t able to get a judicial search warrant, either. The cops first came to search King’s home in October 1999 because they had heard there were bullet holes in the floor and because King played guitar. Nothing came easy for the officers involved. The police also suspected King because during the period between Breeden’s disappearance and the discovery of his body - after 10 frantic days of searching and speculation - King had shared with her friends and neighbors a premonition that Breeden would be found “in water.” Once the body was located, this premonition suggested to police that King had inside knowledge of the circumstances of Breeden’s murder.īut the investigation took time. It’s a story with a good cop and a bad cop, plenty of gunplay, good forensic work, a missing prosecutor, a serial killer, and a confession, all of them evaluated a decade later by judges who say perhaps a jury of King’s peers should decide precisely how the story ends. 22-caliber gunshot wounds to his head and guitar-amplifier cord around his legs. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Danny Boggs bristles with evocative details of a case that began 19 years ago, when a man named Kyle Breeden was found dead in the Kentucky River with two. She then sued Kentucky police officers for malicious prosecution in a case a federal appeals court late last month unanimously allowed to proceed toward trial.Įven the dry recitation of facts by 6th U.S. She’s a gun-toting, hard-charging, possibly clairvoyant, one-legged woman who was convicted of murder and effectively exonerated. If Hollywood is looking for a script about a murder case with a series of memorable characters and surprising plot twists it could do far worse than consider the travails of Susan King. An audio version of Case in Point is broadcast with The Takeaway, a public radio show from WNYC, Public Radio International, The New York Times and WGBH-Boston Public Radio. In “Case in Point,” The Marshall Project examines a single case or character that sheds light on the criminal justice system.
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