When baby-faced brothers Alex and Derek King, 12-and-13-years-old, respectively, killed their father in his Cantonment, Florida home on the Sunday after Thanksgiving 2001 with a baseball bat and then set the house afire to conceal evidence of the slaying, the story made national headlines. The case became one of the most notorious killings in the state’s history. Six years later Alex, now 18, is a free man. He was released on Wednesday morning, April 9, 2008 at 9:45 a.m. after serving six years for his part in his father’s death.
To recap the story, the boys’ father, Terry King, was sitting in a living room chair with his feet propped up on a sofa, asleep, when he was bludgeoned to death with an aluminum baseball bat. Firefighters working feverishly to extinguish the blaze that had been deliberately set, discovered his body. Closer examination revealed that the left side of his head had been bashed in, making it easy to determine that he hadn’t died from smoke inhalation. His two sons, Alex and Derek, were nowhere to be found. At first authorities considered the possibility that they might have been abducted, but the following day they showed up at the Escambia County Sheriff’s Office after being driven there by a family friend, 40-year-old Rick Chavis.
The two boys soon confessed that they had killed their father. Alex claimed that he had thought up the bizarre plan, and Derek said that he had been the one who had swung the bat. They were worried, they said, that their father was going to punish them for having ran away from home 10 days earlier. It turned out that they had been staying at the home of their dad’s friend, Chavis, a convicted sex-offender, for many of those ten days. It was later shown that Chavis had allowed them to hide in a back room of his trailer home when their father had come looking for them. Chavis had been convicted in 1984 of molesting three boys of varying ages. According to Alex’s testimony before a grand jury and to letters that he had written, he and Chavis had entered into a sexual relationship.
“My ultimate goal in life now is (to be) what he is,” Alex wrote. “It is about sharing your life with someone else. Before I met Rick, I was straight, but now I am gay.”
