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It seemed that the Broward Sheriff's Office had neatly arranged Keith King's future date with the State of Florida's electric chair. Detectives had built a case against the teenager for the murder of one of their own, Deputy Patrick Behan, who was gunned down in 1990. Homicide-unit investigators had a witness who identified King as being at the scene of the crime. Others swore that King and his then-14-year-old codefendant, Tim Brown, had boasted of shooting the cop. And, in the coup de grâce, BSO detectives extracted a confession from King.

The King indictment was the culmination of one of the most intense investigations in Broward history, with as many as 50 deputies and thousands of man-hours involved. Brown, the first to be tried, was convicted and sentenced to life in prison without parole. During Brown's trial, assistant state attorney Chuck Morton declared in court that it was King who had coldly pulled the trigger on Behan, whom the prosecutor declared had been killed on a random, drug-addled dare.

But King would never make it to Death Row. Instead, as potential jurors were being chosen to try him in March 1994, Morton decided to cut King a deal. The prosecutor didn't want a trial; he conceded publicly at the time that his case wasn't very strong. That admission was a gross understatement. In fact, the case was in a shambles.

Morton's offer to King confirmed just how sorry the BSO investigation had been: 15 years. And that prison sentence would also cover four other, unrelated felonies -- three sexual batteries and an armed robbery -- King faced at the time that could have put him away for life. In effect, the cop-killing was erased from the board, and King was assured that, with time off for good behavior, he would be a free man before his 25th birthday.

King accepted the offer as a plea of convenience, refusing to admit he murdered Behan. And, with that remarkable deal, the Behan murder case was officially closed.

Until last year, that is, when a former BSO detention deputy named Andrew Hughray Johnson boasted to undercover agents that he had killed the deputy. An extensive BSO investigation that ended this April found insufficient evidence to file charges against Johnson, who now denies any involvement. The new claims prompted Gov. Jeb Bush last week to order the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to review the entire case.

If FDLE does at least a serviceable job, the agency will find its way to the heretofore confidential file of private investigator Randy MacCoy, who worked on King's defense for two years. While evidence contained in public court archives casts considerable doubt on King's guilt, MacCoy's investigation virtually exonerates his former client and completely discredits the BSO investigation.

Deputies' work on the case played out like a movie about bad cops. Several witnesses complained that detectives shackled them to the floor, promised leniency in their own crimes, and coerced them into implicating King in the murder. By the time the trial was set to begin, everyone who had accused King had recanted. King himself claims he was physically abused and manipulated into his confession -- which was full of untenable contradictions. Ultimately, the case against King not only lacks evidence; it also makes no sense.

Some witnesses held fast to their contention that Brown, who is still in prison, had boasted of the murder; MacCoy privately concluded that Brown was likely involved in the killing. In his estimation, another man was much more likely to have been with Brown that night: Keith Maddox, a violent felon now 35 years old and in prison. Maddox, who has never before been publicly named as a suspect, may well be innocent of the murder, but, as MacCoy puts it, "everything kept pointing at him as the perpetrator."

The private investigator's intriguing theory is that detectives didn't just get the wrong man.

They got the wrong Keith.

At 1:42 a.m. on November 13, 1990, while Patrick Behan was sitting in his patrol car in the parking lot of a Circle K store at 3990 W. Hallandale Blvd. in Pembroke Park, someone fired a .38-caliber bullet into his skull. The deputy's blood splattered onto the report he was writing on a theft of cigarettes. There are no known witnesses, but forensic evidence shows that he was shot at near point-blank range through his partially open driver's-side window. The bullet pierced Behan's left hand, which was raised in defense, before it struck his face.

The slain deputy was by all accounts an upstanding and decent person. An extensive investigation into Behan's life found that he was a clean-living man whose chief goal was to start a family with his new wife.

The death of a good cop, however, exposed a nest of bad ones. One of the first tipsters to come forward was a Circle K clerk named Jackie Bain, who said she gave sexual favors to several deputies in exchange for protection. Though Bain had a history of mental illness, an investigation not only substantiated her claim but found evidence that deputies were engaging in further criminal activity at a warehouse near the Circle K.

Bain's most explosive allegation, however, was never borne out: that a jealous boyfriend of hers, Curtis McGill, had killed Behan. McGill, who had a lengthy criminal record, was excluded as a suspect after an interrogation. In a deposition, he complained that BSO detectives tried to force him to confess. "If I wasn't strong, I might have would have had a nervous breakdown," McGill said of his experiences with the BSO homicide squad.

If history is any guide, McGill had good reason to believe he was in peril. In at least four cases filed since 1979, BSO has coerced confessions or partial admissions to murder -- from Jerry Townsend, Frank Lee Smith, John Wood, and Peter Dallas -- that were later proven false. Because of revelations in the Townsend and Smith cases, BSO is now reviewing all its death-penalty cases.

During the first three months of the Behan investigation, then-Sgt. Richard Scheff (who was deeply involved in the false conviction of Smith) coordinated an unwieldy task force to find Behan's killer. Some deputies followed the Bain angle, while others worked with a man named Eddie Lopez, who lived in a house behind the Circle K. Lopez said he had seen a black man wearing only blue jeans running from the store at the time of the shooting. He told detectives the man he saw was five feet, eight inches tall, weighed about 185 pounds, and had a muscular build. Detectives showed Lopez hundreds of photographs of potential suspects, to no avail.  NEXT »

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