By LEVI PULKKINEN
SEATTLEPI.COM STAFF
After two days of deliberation, a King County jury convicted a Kent man of killing his wife, then attempting to fake a burglary gone bad to cover the crime.
Returning a verdict Thursday morning, jurors found Tracy Floren, 66, guilty of first-degree murder in the Sept. 2, 2007, death of his wife, Nancy Floren.
At trial, prosecutors described Nancy Floren's slaying as "an assassination" at the hand of a man who felt disrespected and controlled by his wife. Lacking a confession or a murder weapon, the prosecution's case instead turns on DNA collected from a pair of earplugs behind the couple's home, incongruities in the alibi offered by Tracy Floren, and his behavior in the days and months after the killing.
King County sheriff's deputies called to the couple's home by a silent alarm found Nancy Floren, 56, dead from two gunshot wounds to the head. A medical examiner later determined her killer shot her point-blank in the temple then, as she lay mortally wounded, lifted her head and fired a second .22 caliber round into her face.
Her blood, Senior Deputy Prosecutor Barbara Flemming told the jury during opening statements in early November, was already beginning to set by the time officers arrived.
About 90 minutes later, at 7:50 a.m., Tracy Floren returned to his home, in an upscale development east of Kent in unincorporated King County, to find a fleet of patrol cars parked in the cul-de-sac below the driveway. Floren was surprisingly unresponsive to the news of his wife's death, prosecutors claimed, and ready to claim he had been at an alcoholic support group the morning his wife was killed, an alibi that detectives later found lacking.
Floren had wanted out of his marriage for some time, the prosecutor said. Notes from Floren's most recent treatment stay showed his apparent frustration with his wife, and a search of his computer also found that Floren had been shopping for mail-order brides in the weeks before her death.
"Perhaps it was his desire to regain control that made him look outside his marriage," Flemming told the jury during opening statements. "He seemed to want a different life."
Floren's attorney claimed that, lacking sufficient evidence, the prosecution instead was attempting to falsely portray him as a man without love for his wife. Investigators, they claimed, deemed Floren guilty immediately and attempted to build a case to support that contention.
Having been found guilty of first-degree murder with a firearm, Floren faces 25 to 31 years in prison when he is sentenced Jan. 13. He remains in King County Jail.
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