By Jim Haley and Scott North
Herald Writers
Indle Gifford King Jr. and his wife, Anastasia S. King, returned to their Mountlake Terrace home from Seattle-Tacoma International Airport in the same Shuttle Express van the afternoon of Sept. 22, 2000, a driver testified Tuesday.
The testimony further bolsters the prosecution’s contention that Indle King consistently misled detectives while they were searching for the missing Anastasia King later that year.
In interviews with Mountlake Terrace detectives, Indle King maintained then that he and his wife argued in Moscow and she did not return to the United States with him following a visit with her parents in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, in the former Soviet Union.
One of several former tenants in the King household also testified that Indle King told him Anastasia King would not be returning to the United States because she didn’t have the money for her plane ticket and passport.
King also told the tenant that he intended to seek an uncontested divorce while his 20-year-old wife was away in order to protect his financial situation.
The testimony came at the start of the second week in the first-degree murder trial of King, 40, who is charged with the death of his wife and with witness tampering.
She was reported missing by friends and her parents in late September, and her body was discovered three months later in a shallow grave near Marysville.
Kathleen Herbst of Seattle, the Shuttle Express driver, told jurors that Indle King approached her at the airport and asked for a ride home. A few days after the body was discovered, she identified Indle King and Anastasia King as two of the seven passengers in the van after a detective showed her a photograph of the couple.
"I recognized her from the picture I was shown by the policeman" on Jan. 9, 2001, she said.
Saying she remembered most of the trips she drove over the three years she worked for Shuttle Express, Herbst gave jurors some detail of the 45-minute ride from the airport.
Indle King sat up front on the passenger side, and Anastasia King sat behind Herbst, she said. Anastasia King was quiet during the drive. Indle King gave the driver directions.
Also on board was a chatty older couple, she said. At one point, the older gentleman tapped Indle King on the shoulder to say something, and he "reacted strongly. It quieted the van down," Herbst testified.
She demonstrated how Indle King clenched his fists off to his side. "I would say generally he was uptight," she told the jurors.
Herbst, who dropped the couple off at their home in the 5200 block of 213th Street SW, was one of the last people to see Anastasia King alive.
Prosecutors maintain that a short time later, Indle King enlisted the help of one of the tenants, Daniel K. Larson, 21, a convicted sex offender, to help strangle his wife and dispose of her body in the shallow grave.
The defense said it will show the jury that it was Larson and not Indle King who killed Anastasia King, a mail-order bride who had been married to King a little more than two years.
But the state has alleged that Indle King was obsessed with having to share his property in a divorce settlement. It maintains that Indle King believed he learned that lesson earlier with a previous Russian mail-order bride who divorced him.
Former tenant Andre Vasquez said Indle King told him he was worried about Anastasia King going after his money. He told Vasquez "she wouldn’t be around," and that he left her in Russia without money or a passport. He planned to summon her via newspaper ad and go forward with an uncontested divorce, Vasquez said.
Indle King also told Vasquez to watch out for friends of Anastasia King coming by to pick up her belongings and not to let anyone in the house.
The slain woman’s father, Anatoliy Soloviev, took the witness stand late Tuesday. Although he spoke with the aid of an interpreter, some of his testimony required no translation.
When asked if he had a daughter named Anastasia King, Soloviev leveled a long, hard stare at his former son-in-law, who was seated with his attorneys at the defense table.
"Da," he said.
Soloviev testified life was hard in Kyrgyzstan after the collapse of the former Soviet Union, where he and his wife lived on about $30 a month pension, plus what they could earn through other jobs, including teaching music. One reason their daughter looked into becoming a mail-order bride was her desire to continue her education at a good university, something that wasn’t possible in her homeland, Soloviev testified.
He was expected to return to the witness stand today.
You can call Herald Writer Jim Haley at 425-339-3447
or send e-mail to haley@heraldnet.com.
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