The retrial of a murder case involved argument over the testimony of Steve King, a Colorado legislator convicted of embezzling money from Colorado Mesa University. The defense attorney in the case called King’s testimony into question-based upon the argument he lacked trustworthiness.
In the case original homicide case, it was discovered that Michael Blagg of the Grand Junction area murdered his wife and his daughter in 2001 and he was convicted of murder in 2004. King, one of the two lead investigators of the case, helped recover the body of Blagg’s wife in the landfill.
Later, King was convicted of embezzlement of nearly $5,000 from CMU and the Mesa County Sheriff’s Department.
According to Director of Media Relations Dana Nunn, CMU has a part-time legislature from January to May. Because of this, King worked part-time for CMU and part-time for the sheriff’s department simultaneously.
When King ran for sheriff, inconsistencies in his time cards were discovered. They indicated that King had impossibly been in two places at once. “Depending on whose version of the story one believes, he either was a really bad bookkeeper and just made a lot of mistakes, or he did it intentionally,” Nunn said.
In 2015, King was convicted of double-dipping between the sheriff’s department and CMU during an internal affairs case in 2013. He was given probation and had to pay CMU and the sheriff’s department back $2,400 each.
There is currently a retrial of Blagg due to one of the jurors, Marilyn Charlesworth, in the first trial having lied about never being a victim of domestic violence. In 2013, during a case of a councilman who had hit his girlfriend, Charlesworth spoke up about being abused in the past, despite the fact that she’d previously claimed that she had never been.
King was brought in to testify against Blagg, but public defender Tina Fang recalled King’s conviction for embezzlement and argued that King wasn’t qualified to testify because of his untrustworthiness. The argument was overturned, however, and King did testify at the trial.
