‘Everyone Is a Suspect’
A distraught King called 911 around 6:50 p.m. “Why did this have to happen?” he asked a dispatcher, Cauffiel recounts in Eye of the Beholder.
As paramedics triaged Newton King, her 45-year-old husband watched from the porch, leaving his children, Marler and Kateri, in the car.
King told authorities he’d taken a walk at dusk that day and hadn’t heard anything out of the ordinary. Sheriff’s investigators found a spent .22 caliber casing in the loft of the Victorian-era barn, an ideal hiding place for a sniper. A police dog named Travis tracked a scent near the barn that led to a rifle stashed in a creek, but despite initial breakthroughs, the killer remained elusive.
Adding to the mystery: a series of unnerving phone calls made to Newton King starting in spring 1990 at her television station in Battle Creek from a purported fan. A note with cut-out letters threatening, “you should have gone to lunch with me,” left in the family’s mailbox on October 30, 1990, terrified her.
National media flocked to Marshall to cover the high-profile killing and the likelihood of a lethal stalker.
‘They Did It All Wrong’
King, who spent 14 years on the police force in Pontiac, Mich., ripped the probe.
“They did it all wrong. They forgot all the rules,” Cauffiel quoted King saying in Eye of the Beholder.
Veteran detective and criminologist Stephen Jones tells A&E Crime + Investigation “there were opportunities missed in the investigation.” For example, “there were no swabs taken of [King’s] hands for gunfire residue—that’s something you do at shooting scenes,” he says.
Other missteps included police failing to photograph boot prints identified by Travis and returning King’s boots instead of keeping them as evidence, according to Eye of the Beholder.
As Newton King’s family demanded answers, Calhoun County State’s Attorney Jon Sahli assembled a task force of sheriff’s detectives, a CCSAO investigator and a Michigan State Police expert in June 1991 to crack the case.
A Fraught Marriage
As task force members delved into documents and conducted interviews, they learned that King and King Newton’s relationship was fraught and that they’d been in marital counseling.
Finances and spiraling credit card debts, as well as in-laws who found King aloof, caused tension for the couple, Cauffiel recounts.
“It’s no secret that I never cared for Brad,” Diane’s mother, Freida Newton, told police. “And I don’t think he cared for us.”
King’s affairs with local women and students, chronicled in Eye of the Beholder, led to added dysfunction.
The crisis point may have come when Newton King sought to leave her job and become a stay-at-home mom. She expected her husband to take over as the full-time breadwinner, but the plan rankled King, who wanted to get a PhD and would lose the celebrity status he craved as the well-known anchorwoman’s spouse, Cauffiel explains.
‘A Revenge Shot’
By January 1992, the task force had conducted myriad interviews with King’s relatives, friends, lovers and witnesses like teenager Christopher Sly, who matched the rifle from the swamp with one he’d spotted on the family’s porch.
Detectives meticulously charted King’s whereabouts and actions leading up to the murder, building a sturdy framework for a case largely based on circumstantial evidence.
Sahli obtained a warrant and Colorado authorities arrested King on January 31, 1992, in Denver where he’d moved with his children. A brief and bitter custody battle over the Kings’ two children ensued between the King and Newton families. Maternal grandparents Royal and Freida Newton were eventually granted temporary custody.
At the trial, Sahli told the jurors to ignore the theory that an outsider killed King Newton. “I submit it was not a stranger or an obsessed fan, that it was the defendant,” he said.
Prosecutors emphasized that whoever left the anonymous note in the mailbox had to know the couple’s schedules to avoid detection.
In the same vein, “Who knew when Diane King was coming home? The defendant and no one else,” Sahli argued.
The first shot was the fatal one, he contended. The second “was not the shot of an obsessed fan. But the shot of someone who was close to Diane King,” Shali said. “The shot of someone who was enraged with Diane King. A revenge shot, if you will.”
The jury found King guilty on December 14, 1992.
“We didn’t know how it could be someone else,” juror Tamra Enriques said in a Battle Creek Enquirer article the next day. She was disturbed by King leaving his children in the car and his attitude toward his wife. “He wasn’t a concerned husband,” Enriques claimed.
At the sentencing, King was defiant, blaming the media and a rigged justice system. His message to jurors was: “I have nothing but contempt for you,” according to Eye of the Beholder.
He later added, “I stand here a proud man. I did not kill my wife.” King was sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole.
The Perfect Crime?
“I really think [King] thought that he could beat this because he believed he was smarter,” Jones, a Willistown Township Police Department detective sergeant and adjunct professor at Rosemont College near Philadelphia, tells A&E Crime + Investigation. “He would have known who was going to be handling that investigation and their limitations.”
For criminals like King, “it’s a game,” Cauffiel says. “They have that kind of thinking, like you’ve got to catch them.”
In Eye of the Beholder, King is quoted describing how he gave his students an assignment to create the perfect crime.
But “nobody could,” King said. “Everybody says there’s a perfect crime. But there is no perfect crime. A perfect crime has no evidence to be gathered. I don’t think anyone is capable of that.”
