Anthony Joseph Frederick was arrested around midnight last night, charged with murder of Natel King, aka Taylor Sumer, an aspiring porn starlet who had been missing since February 29. Frederick is being held without bail.
Frederick claims that he is innocent, sticking to his story that he last saw her when she left his photography studio after being paid $900. Frederick claims that when he last saw King, she was on her way to the Pub, a local restaurant on Feb. 29.
Montgomery County and Canadian authorities searched King's known cell phone, bank, and email records and were unable to find any evidence that suggested she was alive after 5:34p.m. on Sunday, Feb. 29, when her friend Curtis Shear called her.
Shear told the police that King was worried about Frederick and then "I asked if she was worried about not getting paid or getting killed and she said I don’t know. Both."
King had suffered multiple stab wounds in her chest, neck, and both hands. An autopsy report released today declared her death a homicide.
King’s body was found yesterday on an embankment after she had been missing for over three weeks. She was found with a ball gag in her mouth, and there were drapes near her body that police identified as backdrops in photos that Frederick has taken.
Besides the ball-gag, pieces of rope and a "chain with small clips that can be tightened with tension screws," described in the police report have led some to associate the murder with BDSM.
Susan Wright, spokesperson for the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom (NCSF), an organization to educates the public about the BDSM community, says that it's unlikely the murder had anything to do with responsible sex play.
“This sounds like someone who lured a woman in who didn’t know the industry, it doesn’t sound like SM,” Wright told AVN.com. “There’s nothing to indicate that this was in anyway consensual – this is simply a tragic murder.”
Frederick was also charged with the abuse of a corpse and possession of a knife and was in custody without bail, and lying to authorities.
The woman police say was his assistant, Jennifer Mitkus, was also charged with lying to authorities and as well as hindering apprehension. She was in jail in lieu of $100,000.
King, a Canadian who booked her own work for the most part, is said to have arrived in Conshohocken, a suburb of Philadelphia, on Febraury 28.
Frederick claims that he met King in the early hours of February 29 at the Hampton Inn in Oaks, Pennsylvania, where he completed two separate photo shoots with her, one of which he described to police as being “light bondage.”
Frederick and King then traveled to the Perkiomen Hotel, where they picked up Mitkus before traveling in seperate cars to 105 West 3rd Ave., where they began a photo shoot in the apartment's basement.
Frederick was known to have used the basement previously for bondage photo shoots, reportedly always at night. Police records document that Frederick had been brought to their attention once before - when one Tiana Hunter filed a complaint after Frederick failed to pay her for a bondage shoot on January 31 of this year.
Frederick claims to have erased the pictures he had taken at the 3rd Ave. address.
Police discovered an unattributed handwritten poem at the 3rd Ave. address that reads: “Cut with a knife/ Blood does flow/ You may bleed out/ Death coming on slow…”
Frederick was not only a photographer, he also dabbled in poetry, posting poems such as "Cut to the Soul," a poem about a man who has lost everything and now has only hate, at TopPoetry.com. In the aforementioned poem Frederick writes, "he shouts so cold and hard; from the soul god, forgive me vengence, but let us prey."
Frederick has reportedly contacted other women in the adult industry via email. He often posted his photography, including some macabre photographs such as "Serial K," on various Websites using the handle Anton762.
