At the Florida trial of Michael King for abducting, raping, and murdering Denise Lee, her detective father commented that he was proud of his daughter for protecting her babies and for alerting authorities to what was happening so that King could never do it again. He also said something to the effect that King might even have done it before. And this is what I wonder, too.

King’s crime was so brazen that it cries out as an MO (modus operandi). Surely Florida authorities are at this moment combing through their cold-case files for similar abductions.

• Sidebar: The murder of Laci Peterson comes to mind, too. Since 2002 we’ve heard of many such abductions and also murders in which a fetus was cut from the mother’s womb. Frankly, that’s what worries me most about Scott Peterson’s death sentence.

As I understand it, King stalked his victim to her home in the middle of the afternoon, where she was caring for two infant children. Her husband returned home shortly after that to find his babies alone and his wife’s purse sitting in the kitchen or some other ordinary place. He called 9-1-1 and his police-detective father-in-law immediately.

• Sidebar: Also chilling to me was a remark by TruTV’s Jean Casarez that King was a plumber. With apologies to all good plumbers everywhere, I never like to be alone at home with a plumber. And now I have a rational explanation for my phobia: I wonder if King’s victim came to his attention during work he did in her home. I have heard no mention of this. Quite the opposite, I’ve heard his choice of victim called “random.” The randomness is what frightens most commentators.

The jury may be thinking the same thing (not about plumbers) about the way King seemed to have things well in hand, to be following a well-rehearsed script, to have no concerns that anyone would care that he had a woman held captive in the foot well of his car’s backseat—even when she screamed and pounded on the window.

My experience on a criminal jury also had me wondering if the defendant had done it before. In fact, I was convinced he had done it before.

During the trial it was proved to me beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant had been trolling for child victims in a neighborhood on Chicago’s south side (far from his own neighborhood). Like King, he was totally brazen. He was driving a pickup truck, which he left with its motor running in a busy street, while he chased a girl into a railroad viaduct. He didn’t have a chance to abduct the girl, though. Good Samaritans performed a citizen’s arrest.

This fact was incredibly puzzling to me and to my fellow jurors. We knew we were not supposed “to speculate” about such things, and we did not do so during deliberations. Unfortunately, we also understood the judge’s instructions to apply the law (as stated by the judge) to the charges, one of which was a kidnapping charge.

Had the defendant been charged with “attempted kidnapping,” we could have found him guilty because of that running motor. But he was not charged with attempted kidnapping, only aggravated kidnapping. After four hours of discussing whether it is kidnapping when a rapist pushes his victim off a sidewalk, we found him not guilty of that crime.

The judge later scolded us when one juror asked why the charge hadn’t been “attempted kidnapping.” She said, “There’s no such thing as attempted kidnapping.” Having studied the Illinois criminal statutes since then, I am puzzled by that statement. Surely kidnapping doesn’t have to be successful to be charged as a crime.

I suspect, instead, that the judge and prosecutor were simply being “too clever by half.” The judge intentionally misstated the kidnapping statute in her jury instructions to make it seem that pushing someone off a sidewalk constitutes kidnapping under the law, because she thought (mistakenly) that we wouldn’t understand the significance of the running motor. Or maybe she didn’t think a “dog that didn’t bark” was sufficient evidence for a conviction. But – let’s face it – the only reason a man would leave his motor running while he chased a victim was because he expected to snatch her off the street and throw her into the truck.

My point is that some sex crimes are never isolated instances. Sex-crime offenders seem to live lives of increasing violence. When a criminal reaches the point he feels free to commit his crime in broad daylight and in public, you just know he must have done it before.