Benton’s attorney calls visit by father of Katie Wilkins and detective “unusual.”
By Knowles Adkisson / Associate Editor
Following his arrest Thursday last week on felony charges of threatening his parents and possession of a loaded weapon, 27-year-old Chris Benton was visited at the Malibu/Lost Hills Sheriff’s Station by the father of Katie Wilkins, a 25-year-old woman who died in April of a heroin overdose, and a detective investigating her death.
The Wilkins family and Det. Tim O’Quinn of the L.A. County Sheriff’s homicide bureau, who has been investigating her death, believe Benton was the last person to see Wilkins alive after security footage recorded her picking Benton up in her car at a McDonald’s restaurant on Pacific Coast Highway on Friday,
April 28.
Wilkins’ body was found by her brother the next day in the garage of her parents’ residence at 23454 Moonshadows Drive in the hills above Las Flores Canyon. Her car was missing, and did not turn up until almost two weeks later in a residential neighborhood in Woodland Hills.
Since Wilkins’ death was ruled nonsuspicious, i.e. an overdose, Benton was not considered a suspect for a crime. Rob Wilkins, the father of Katie Wilkins, and O’Quinn both attempted to speak to Benton after Wilkins died but were unsuccessful.
After Benton was arrested last week, O’Quinn and Rob Wilkins visited Benton at the Malibu/Lost Hills Sheriff’s Station in order, they said, to begin the process of closure.
“We just want to know what happened,” Rob Wilkins said. “We don’t have a lot of facts. We still don’t know what happened.”
O’Quinn said Benton gave few specifics about what happened that night, but apologized for what happened to Katie Wilkins.
“He apologized several times essentially for the loss of Katie, without taking any admission for the cause of her death,” O’Quinn said. “He said he would never hurt Katie…There was a general acknowledgement he was there, which we already knew.”
The Los Angeles County Department of Coroner issued a final autopsy report last week confirming the cause of Wilkins’ death as “acute morphine (heroin) intoxication.”
The report noted that Wilkins’ clothing was partly removed and her body had two needle punctures on her right arm. In other media reports O’Quinn stated that Wilkins was right-handed, which has led to speculation that she may not have injected the drug herself. The coroner’s report also stated Wilkins had a history of cocaine, alcohol and heroin use but that she had been clean for approximately one year, according to her family.
“It is unknown whether Ms. Wilkins or another individual administered the fatal dose of heroin,” the report states. “For this reason, the manner of death could not be determined.”
O’Quinn told The Malibu Times in May that Benton and Wilkins had apparently been friends in the past but had lost touch before reconnecting about a week prior to her death.
In a telephone interview Tuesday with The Malibu Times, Benton’s attorney, Ronald J. Lewis of Woodland Hills, called the situation “a huge tragedy of heroin addiction affecting two wonderful families. It’s the devil incarnate involved in this. It’s tragic, it’s sad, it knows no boundaries between wealth and poverty, religions, or social status of people.”
Lewis said he did not know whether Benton’s struggles with heroin addiction played a part in his arrest last week on the Pepperdine campus. But Lewis called it “unusual” that O’Quinn would bring a family member from an unrelated case to interview a suspect charged with another crime.
“They didn’t bring in Ron Goldman to talk to O.J. Simpson when he was in custody,” Lewis said. “So why are they doing this?”
Lewis said he felt that the purpose of the visit was to elicit an incriminating statement from Benton stating that he personally injected Wilkins, whom her family maintained had been drug-free for more than one year.
“He’s been represented by an attorney and he’s not making statements, so they’re trying to come in the back door,” Lewis said. “If you don’t believe that, I’ve got a bridge for you.”
“If [Lewis] wanted to chastise me … he has my number, but I haven’t heard from him,” O’Quinn responded. “… If we had been able to obtain any kind of incriminating statement, certainly, we would run with that. But the hoped-for outcome was to get the beginning of some closure by getting a statement, any statement, from Chris.”
O’Quinn said the fact that Wilkins died of a drug overdose, coupled with her history of substance of abuse, made it impossible to tie Benton to a crime without an admission from Benton himself.
“We all live under this standard of ‘beyond reasonable doubt.’” O’Quinn said. “It’s a good standard, it keeps us all safe from false imprisonment from crimes we didn’t do. In this case, that standard applies to Chris Benton as well. Unless we can prove he administered the lethal dose of heroin, we don’t have a case.
“When you don’t have evidence to support a forcible injection, and you couple that with a victim who had a prior drug addiction, you have a real problem in prosecution.”
Lewis said it was not in his client’s best interest to speak during an ongoing investigation, but suggested there may at some point be “some kind of closure” for the Wilkins family.
“I can’t tell you when, where or how, but ultimately these things do have a way of resolving themselves in that regard,” Lewis said.
Rob Wilkins also said he looked forward to having another chance to speaking to Chris Benton about what happened on the night of April 27.
“Frankly we are still hoping to speak with Chris at some point when he’s not instructed by his lawyer not to say anything,” Wilkins said.