Murder of Terry King
2001 murder
The murder of Terry King occurred on November 26, 2001. Terry Lee King, a resident of Cantonment, Florida, U.S., was bludgeoned to death by his two children, 13-year old Derek and 12-year old Alex King.
Murder
On November 26, 2001, Derek, accompanied by Alex, beat their father to death with an aluminum baseball bat. The boys then set fire to the family's home, in Cantonment, Florida (near Pensacola) in hopes of concealing their crime. Ricky Chavis, a family friend, was convicted of being an accessory to the murder after he hid the boys in his trailer home after the murder and washed the blood from their clothes. Chavis was also accused of molesting Alex King, but later acquitted. Terry King was 40 years old at the time of his death.
The boys claimed that they committed the murder to end "mental abuse" including being "stared down" and spanked. They would change their testimony several times, first claiming that they had murdered their father on their own, then that Chavis had convinced them to kill Terry, and finally that Chavis had killed Terry King and convinced them to take the fall. Alex also testified that he had been raped by Chavis.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Murder of Terry King” is 2001 murder. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Murder, Terry and King, not as a finished interpretation.
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This entry incorporates text from “Murder of Terry King” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.