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Breaking the code

Tanner King takes the witness stand in his double murder trial

-Messenger photo by Elijah Decious
Taking the witness stand at his attorneys’ direction, defendant Tanner King showed the jury Thursday how he would hold his marijuana blunt during his “blunt walks.” He contends that Margaret Seiler, the state’s first witness who claimed to see King running with a gun moments after hearing gunshots, mistook the way he was holding his blunt in the dark for the murder weapon, which has not been found. The state asserts the murder weapon was a .40-caliber handgun.

NEVADA — Tanner King doesn’t deny that he’s a compulsive liar. But on the witness stand Thursday, the defendant walked the jury through some of the evidence it’s seen from the state, his own criminal past, why he has been mistaken as a suspect and, most importantly, why he wasn’t the one who killed El Dominic and Marion Rhodes on Oct. 22, 2018.

“Why are you going to break the code today?” asked his attorney, Paul Rounds, after the defense team’s second witness took the stand. The state had rested its case Thursday morning.

“The code,” is the street code King, who is charged with two counts of first degree murder, said he adheres to.

“They deserve to know the truth, and only I can tell them,” King said under oath, glancing at some of the family members seated in the court’s gallery, including the victims’ fiancees, sister and the woman who would’ve been El Dominic Rhodes’ mother-in-law.

Some of them left in tears at the end of the trial’s eighth day, after Assistant Attorney General Susan Krisco briefly started her cross-examination of the defendant.

-Messenger photo by Elijah Decious
Double murder defendant Tanner King showed the jury Thursday the typical route he takes for his "blunt walks," and the route he took the night that El Dominic and Marion Rhodes were shot.

“So you didn’t prefer (the family) to know the truth the first time you talked to the police?” she asked.

“No,” King responded.

“The second time?” she asked.

“No,” King said.

“The third time?” Krisco asked.

-Messenger photo by Elijah Decious
Tanner King, the Fort Dodge man charged with two counts of first-degree murder in the shooting of El Dominic and Marion Rhodes in October 2018, took the witness stand Thursday, telling the jury what he says is the truth of who killed the victims. Assistant Attorney General Susan Krisco began her cross-examination and is anticipated to finish today.

“No,” the defendant replied.

“The fourth time?” the state attorney continued.

“No,” King obliged.

“The fifth time?” she asked.

King didn’t talk to the police a fifth time, he said.

It was perhaps one of the most emotionally sensitive days in court for those who knew the victims. The last time some of them were seen crying in court was when they testified in the same seat King sat in and the day they listened to the state medical examiner explain the bullet wounds in the Rhodes brothers’ bodies, displayed on a flat-screen TV.

“Are you asking the jury to make their decision based on what you’ve said?” Rounds asked King.

“No,” he responded.

“Why is that?” Rounds asked.

“Because I’m a liar,” King said.

The defense brought to the surface another time he was called a liar publicly, by Chief Judge Kurt Wilke, of the 2nd Judicial District.

That was the result of the last time he “broke the code,” under advice from his court-appointed attorney to turn against another person facing charges to help him with his case.

This time, it’s to turn on Cletio Clark, described as a high-ranking gang member in Vice Lords, who King said he saw in the alley the night of the murders during his blunt walk, which is a walk he took while smoking a hollowed-out cigar filled with marijuana, called a blunt. The 29-year-old defendant said he’s known Clark since age 6.

“Cletio Clark broke the code and used me for cover for the crime he did,” King said, later detailing what he claims Clark confessed to him.

The Rhodes brothers’ bodies were found in an alley behind King’s former apartment building near Ninth Street and Second Avenue North.

The day after the shooting, King said Clark confessed to him in his own apartment while sipping on a Dr. Pepper in his daughter’s bean bag chair.

“What happened?” King said he asked Clark.

“Dudes were snitches and fake-ass gangsters,” King said he replied.

“Why didn’t you call the police?” Rounds asked.

“Why would I?” King retorted.

The constantly changing stories he told to police were laced with “bread crumbs,” he said, in which he tried to give police hints that would lead them to Clark without breaking the street code: mention of Meggin White, Clark’s girlfriend and a red car owned by Clark.

King led the jury through his walk that night using the same visual map that eye witness Margaret Seiler pointed at last week to testify she saw King running with a gun in one hand and a phone in the other.

He said it started with the sight of a person he recognized, Clark, whose face was fully visible.

“There’s no doubt,” King said, recalling a verbal altercation in the alley as he passed. “I know Cletio.”

Taking a slightly modified path from his usual blunt walk, he stopped on the street Seiler lives on to light up, parallel to the track and football field south of the old Phillips Middle School.

That’s when King said he heard the shots and started to move faster — but not run.

“He was sprinting like he was trying to win a damn race,” Seiler told the police after the shooting, describing the man she saw and believed to be King.

King said that his injury in September 2012, when he jumped off the roof of the four-story Webster County Law Enforcement Center, has left him unable to run or move too quickly without his hip locking up.

The jump broke his hip, crushed two vertebrae in his spine, broke one wrist and shattered the other.

King filed a lawsuit against the county for not protecting him from what he continues to assert was more of a suicide attempt than a jail break.

“I just wanted out,” he said to his attorney, who asked if he thought he would make it out with the 40-foot jump. “I had two options: die or get put away.”

Besides discrepancies between Seiler’s description of his clothes and what King said he was actually wearing, the defendant made another claim: Seiler mistook the way he held his blunt for a gun.

The only gun King conceded to handling was one he bought to plan a robbery out of town with Clark, he revealed. Both Clark and King have previous convictions for robbery. Clark is serving a sentence for robbing Fort Dodge’s Applebees before the murders occurred.

“He needed a white guy,” King said.. “The person opens (the door) for a white guy more easily.”

The Tulammo bullets he purchased at Walmart, he said, were for only that robbery — noting that he accidentally purchased a brand Clark didn’t want, which was why they were in the garbage.

Clark previously handled those bullets in King’s apartment with black disposable gloves, King said, which have been seen in photos of the search warrant conducted.

“Why were the bullets in the garbage? Why didn’t you get rid of them?” Rounds asked.

“I didn’t feel like I had a reason to get rid of them,” King replied.

The holster that has been cited as evidence in the case wasn’t something Clark requested, but a gift King said he bought for his friend who kept complaining about his gun falling out of his pocket. He said he attempted to modify the holster to fit Clark, described as much taller and thinner than the 5-foot-4, 150-pound King.

A prior state’s witness, Amber Bonewitz, said King was wearing the holster while she was with him in his apartment. He claims it was on the table that night, not on him. He also rebuts her claim that there was a handgun in it.

But King does still use guns for target practice with Clark, he noted — a violation of his parole — at Skelly Mines, where he claims his gun use now is strictly for target practice, since he is barred from legally hunting. Clark is better at using handguns, he says.

The defendant is no stranger to run-ins with the law.

King described his criminal record as “bad,” with multiple burglaries, criminal mischief, felony possession of a firearm and arson.

In 2014, King pleaded guilty to his role in a fire and burglary at Bemrich Electric & Telephone Inc., for which he was sentenced to 30 years in prison.

He was placed on work release and paroled in March last year after serving time for those charges.

And though King claims fear for his own safety and now his daughter’s from a man who has threatened his life before, he said he had no choice but to testify for the sake of the truth, telling the jury with his own voice that he did not kill El Dominic and Marion Rhodes.

“The jury would have to be pretty gullible to believe anything you said, right?” Krisco asked.

Krisco is anticipated to complete her cross-examination today.

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