DNA and fingerprints found at a January 2013 homicide scene led to the arrest last month of a 28-year-old suspect nicknamed "Hit Man."
Antwoin King surrendered to Little Rock cold-case squad detectives on June 25 and was charged with capital murder, more than five years after 38-year-old Joseph McCardell was shot to death. King is being held without bail at the Pulaski County jail.
Although King told police he didn't know McCardell and had never been to his West 18th Street home, detectives say King's DNA was on a cigarette butt found outside an open bathroom window at McCardell's house and that his fingerprints were on the window.
King's fingerprints and DNA were available to police because he's a seven-time convicted felon, court records show.
A significant cause of delay in making an arrest was that King disappeared from the area shortly after McCardell was killed, a Police Department spokesman said.
Steve Moore, a longtime homicide detective who contributed to the slaying investigation before moving into the department's public affairs division, said King has been a suspect since the early days of the case.
"King was a person of interest all along," Moore said Thursday. "With the case being reassigned several times and how busy several of those years were for the homicide squad, I think it was good that it got a fresh set of eyes that could focus on that case specifically."
King's girlfriend at the time of McCardell's death, Candayce Tabron, was the last person known to have seen the victim alive, according to police.
Coincidentally, the youngest of King's four children, 3-year-old Acen King, died about a week before Christmas in 2016. Acen was killed by a bullet fired in what police have described as a road-rage episode by a motorist who didn't like the way Antwoin King's mother was driving.
King's criminal record begins in June 2005 in Kansas. He was living in Pittsburg, about halfway between Kansas City, Mo., and Tulsa.
Prison records show he has felony convictions for drugs, forgery, theft and firearm possession, which led to a five-year prison sentence in December 2007, according to the Kansas Department of Corrections. The records show the nickname "Hit Man" among his aliases.
King also has misdemeanor drug, drunken-driving and domestic battery convictions in Kansas. The offense dates range from June 2005 to November 2008.
He was paroled in September 2011 and returned to Arkansas, where he was arrested about a year later in Little Rock. His Kansas sentence expired in June 2013.
Court records show that King was arrested on Sept. 13, 2012, just before 11 p.m. at 2701 S. Elm St., where he had crashed his mother's bronze 2004 Nissan Maxima into a fence.
Police reported finding both King and his passenger speaking incoherently. King was chewing on his braids and arguing with emergency medical personnel. The men also smelled of chemicals, so they were arrested for public intoxication. Inside the car, police found a small vanilla-extract bottle containing phencyclidine, also known as PCP.
King pleaded guilty about seven months later in exchange for a sentence of three years on probation. But he was arrested for violating his probation in March 2015 after prosecutors said he had failed to report to his probation officer upon release from prison.
King, who was then living in Duncanville, Texas, pleaded guilty in Little Rock the following month, and his probation was extended by 15 months.
His next arrest in Little Rock came on Aug. 20, 2016, about the time his probation expired. Police, called to the family home on Bishop Street by King's mother, found King in the backyard, bleeding from the head with bloodstains on his shorts.
King would not tell officers what had happened, but his mother and stepfather, 56-year-old Marvin Edward Macon, said that King had accused Macon of slapping King's girlfriend on the butt and had taken a swing at the older man.
Macon told police he got his gun to defend himself and "pistol-whipped" King.
King subsequently paid a fine of $140 and pleaded no contest to a reduced charge of misdemeanor assault, about the equivalent of a speeding ticket, and the charge was dismissed six months later.
ACEN KING
King's mother, Kim King-Macon, was driving a red 2005 Dodge Charger on Dec. 17, 2016, when her grandson Acen was hit in the back by a bullet fired into the car from behind while he sat in his car seat.
The little boy never cried out, King-Macon said, and she didn't realize that the bullet had struck the car or that Acen had been hit until she got where she was heading, the J.C. Penney store at the Shackleford Crossing shopping center on Shackleford Road, and saw the bullet hole in the back of her car.
The slaying came at a time when Little Rock residents were particularly on edge about a rise in gang violence.
Just weeks before Acen was killed -- two days before Thanksgiving 2016 -- a 2-year-old girl sitting in her mother's lap had been shot and killed while riding through a southwest Little Rock neighborhood.
Ramiya Reed was one of five children in the car that was traveling in the 2000 block of South Harrison Street about 10:30 p.m. on Nov. 22, 2016, when someone fired a gun into the rented car driven by an adult cousin.
[HOMICIDE MAP: Interactive map of Little Rock's 2016 killings]
Her family's gang connections were well-known to police, court records show, but detectives would be unable to make any arrests in her death for another six months, despite a reward from the city that grew from $10,000 to $50,000.
Only after Ramiya's mother came forward in May 2017 and identified two suspects were police able to close the case. One of the defendants has pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and accepted a 30-year prison sentence, while the second is scheduled to stand trial next year.
But Acen's slaying was different, and detectives made an arrest five days later. Gary Eugene Holmes was charged with first-degree murder, committing a terroristic act and being a felon in possession of a firearm, charges that could send the 34-year-old Little Rock man to prison for life.
Acen was sitting next to his infant cousin when that round hit his grandmother's Charger at Mabelvale Cutoff and Warren Drive. King-Macon, 48, was taking her grandchildren to meet other family members at the shopping center.
The .40-caliber bullet left a hole in the car's sheet metal about the width of a finger and passed through Christmas decorations in the trunk to hit the boy in the back.
King-Macon told police she had been driving on Warren Drive when she stopped at the Mabelvale Cutoff intersection to turn left. The driver behind her started honking at her, so she honked back. She said she saw a man get out of the car and fire a gun, but she thought he was firing up in the air.
A tip that Holmes was the gunman led to detectives tracking down his girlfriend, who eventually told detectives she had been with Holmes on Warren Drive and had seen him shoot a gun at a red Charger. She said he was angry because the driver had cut him off.
Holmes, nicknamed "Lil Bam," was a known quantity for Little Rock police with convictions for fourth-degree sexual assault, robbery and first-degree battery.
He is a convicted sex offender who has twice been to the penitentiary, the first time when he was 18 for the drug-related robbery and shooting of a man who was thrown out of a car and run over by his assailants. His second prison stint was for seducing a troubled 14-year-old neighbor in Little Rock when he was 23.
When Acen was killed, Holmes was on probation for domestic battering for an August 2014 attack on his then-girlfriend in Jacksonville. He surrendered to police, on the same day Acen was buried, after hearing detectives were looking to arrest him. Holmes has been jailed since, with his trial set for next month.
JOSEPH McCARDELL
The last time any of McCardell's friends and family heard from him was when he made a late-night phone call about 10 hours before his body was found.
According to police reports, his teenage daughter found McCardell dead in his bedroom shortly after noon on Jan. 27, 2013. He had been shot in the back.
McCardell's face was bruised and marked as though he'd been pistol-whipped, and he was lying on top of his driver's license. Someone had obviously searched him, pulling his pants pockets inside-out, but no one could say immediately if anything had been taken.
McCardell's bed had been pulled away from the wall, and his armoire had been rifled by a searcher who had left its doors open and drawers pulled out, investigators said.
The night he was killed, McCardell and a friend had gone to Jazzy's nightclub on Asher Avenue about 11 p.m. where McCardell talked to several women, King's arrest affidavit states.
The friend told police that McCardell got a phone call from a woman and left the club with her. McCardell called the friend about 2:28 a.m., saying he was in a car somewhere in a South End neighborhood waiting for a woman who was trying to buy some cocaine.
McCardell said he wanted the friend to pick him up, but he didn't know where he was. The friend said he didn't know McCardell to use drugs, so he figured the man was going to have sex with the woman. The friend told police he overheard a woman talking to McCardell, but that he had to cut the call short.
When he tried later to call McCardell back, no one answered, he said.
The last person police know saw McCardell alive was Candayce Tabron, who was Antwoin King's girlfriend at the time. McCardell's truck was found at 2201 S. Scott St., which is about a block away from the woman's Cumberland Street home, according to the affidavit.
McCardell had been seen with a woman named Candayce at the club, and McCardell's cellphone records sent police searching for the 31-year-old Little Rock woman.
Tabron told detectives that she knew McCardell and confirmed that she spoke with him several times by phone, including while he was at Jazzy's.
The mother of two told police that she picked him up in the club's parking lot and that they ended up driving to a home in Sunset Terrace where she tried to buy drugs, court documents show.
She told police she dropped McCardell off at his house and went home to bed, but investigators say they can confirm she didn't go home right away, as she told detectives.
CANDAYCE TABRON
Tabron is also known to Little Rock police, court records show. In October 2005, Tabron's older sister shot and killed 33-year-old Vincent Todd "J.J." Lowe of Little Rock at the intersection of 19th and Cross streets.
Lowe had just been in an altercation with Candayce Tabron after the woman and some friends accused Lowe of breaking into Candayce Tabron's home on South Cross Street.
Officers, called to investigate a complaint about shots being fired during some kind of ruckus among a group of people, found the fatally wounded Lowe in the middle of the street about two hours before sunrise. He'd been shot in the chest.
Police arrested Tabron's sister, Porshia Deshon Tabron, 33, on a charge of first-degree murder five days later, saying she had shot Lowe in cold blood, without legal justification. But a Pulaski County jury rejected the murder charge at her trial, instead finding her guilty of manslaughter and sentencing her to probation.
Candayce Tabron did not testify at her sister's trial. Porshia Tabron told jurors that she had been called to the scene by someone who said Lowe was beating up her sister.
When she arrived, Lowe was choking the younger woman and banging her head against the ground, she said.
Porshia Tabron told jurors that she pulled her gun and yelled at Lowe to leave her sister and go away, but that he then started moving toward her with his hands outstretched.
She cocked the gun to scare Lowe off, and the pistol fired accidentally, she said. Tabron told jurors that she and her sister left before police arrived because she didn't think officers would believe that she was protecting herself.
Candayce Tabron was arrested in 2014 after the owner of Beauty Sensations, 3410 W. Roosevelt Road, caught her shoplifting hair extensions and tried to stop her. During a struggle in the parking lot, Tabron bit Yong Jin Song on the arm and hit him with something. Song gave up the fight after Tabron threatened to get a gun out of her Jeep and shoot him, according to police reports.
Tabron returned to the shop about a week later with an unidentified man who shoplifted some items, but the pair left before officers arrived. She was arrested two days later after police recognized her. She subsequently pleaded guilty to robbery in exchange for five years on probation, court records show.
Tabron also has been a victim of crime, court records show.
In August 2016, police say her ex-boyfriend, 30-year-old Oliver Clint Williams of North Little Rock, attacked her in Crump Park in front of her children during an argument.
She said he dragged her into an abandoned house on 33rd street, with her children, ages 7 and 5, following.
He beat her, choked her and threatened her with a gun. Tabron said she was able to get away when she talked Williams into letting her kids leave. She called a cousin to pick them up and was able to jump in the car with them.
Williams was arrested four days later by police who'd been called to the Motel 6 at 7501 Interstate 30 to investigate a report of an assault in progress.
Officers found Tabron and Williams together, and police found a gun in Williams' pocket.
She told officers that Williams, who was on parole at the time for first-degree battery, had beaten, kicked and choked her. Police found a witness to the attack and collected surveillance video of the assault, court records show.
Williams pleaded guilty to two counts each of being a felon in possession of a firearm and aggravated assault on a family member in February 2017 in exchange for a 10-year prison sentence.
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