By Ken Herman
Austin American-Statesman (Austin, Texas)
Sunday, Dec. 18, 2011
A reader led me to the mystery of the pickup truck parked at the airport for more than two years. And now readers have led me toward some answers about it. I feared the truth would be disappointingly mundane. It is not. Today, I have a lot more to report about the Chevy S-10 (with kids’ stuff in its bed) parked in section A-10 at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport since Nov. 20, 2009. We know its owner. We know his unusual history. And we know it’s highly unlikely he drove his truck to the airport. By sundown last Sunday, the day of my column about the truck, several readers provided information on its license plate number.
The data came from for-profit websites that, despite federal law restricting such things, provide vehicle registration data. The 1998 truck is registered to Michael R. Knight at a Longhorn Trail address in Temple. A Lexis search provided the first five digits of his Social Security number, his month of birth (July 1954), a 1993 bankruptcy filing, a 1996 DWI conviction, a list of possible relatives and a long list of past residences. And, under “additional personal information,” was an exclamation point inside a triangle next to a single word: Deceased.
A Michael Ray Knight, with birth date and Social Security number information that gibed with the Lexis data, showed up in an online list of deceased Michael Knights. He died Jan. 23, 2009, age 54. No details about the death were listed. Attached to the listing was this note, posted Jan. 24, 2011: “My name is Mallory Knight. I’m trying to nd any living relative of my father, if anyone can let me know anything, it would be greatly appreciated.” I called the Belton number of somebody listed by Lexis as a “potential relative.” The woman who answered declined to identify herself and sounded uncomfortable when I mentioned Knight’s name. She gave me another number to call. “You’re going to have to talk to her,” the woman told me. “Her” is Bettina Massar of Troy, Knight’s ex-wife.
Mallory Knight is the only child of Michael Knight and Bettina Massar. “I’m pretty sure I don’t know the details” about how the truck wound up at the airport, Massar told me. But she has a theory. It involves the Philippines. Sounds preposterous, I know, but stick with me and see how you feel at the end of this column.
On May 10, 2007, Michael R. Knight sold his Temple home on Longhorn Trail to Robert and Betty Street, retirees from College Station. The closing, Betty Street recalled, was “a mess.” “They had to go to prison and get the paperwork signed,” she told me, adding that Knight was in prison for “child pornography or something like that.”
Yes, something like that. Federal Bureau of Prisons records show Knight got 87 months for “possession of visual depictions of sexual activities by minors having been shipped or transported in interstate and foreign commerce and having been produced using materials that had been shipped and transported in interstate and foreign commerce.” Street says mail for Knight still occasionally shows up at the Longhorn Trail house. “We got a package of personal belongings from prison. I put it in the garage. It was a few pictures and some stuff,” she said.
“Finally, a few months ago, we were cleaning out and I just threw it away.” “We just took it that he got out of prison,” she said. “Or maybe he died in prison.” It was the latter, on Jan. 23, 2009, of natural causes, at the Federal Correctional Institution in Fort Worth, where Knight had been incarcerated since Feb. 27, 2007. “The house is just weird. At first it was really icky,” Street said. Icky? In what way? “It had all the locks on the inside doors put on backwards so people could be locked in the bedrooms,” she told me. Street never met Knight. “I’ve asked people around about him,” she said. “Some say he was really nice.
Some say he was really strange. It’s just gossip.” So here’s what we know. We know when the truck showed up at the airport. We know who owned it. We know what happened to him.
But — and if you’ve been paying attention you already know this — nothing we’ve learned tells us who parked the truck at the airport. Knight went to prison on Feb. 27, 2007. He died there on Jan. 23, 2009.
His truck showed up at the airport on Nov. 20, 2009, 10 months after he died and almost three years after he went to prison, putting us back at square one in guring out how we wound up with an abandoned S-10 in A-10. About all we know for sure is that Knight did not park his truck at the airport on Nov. 20, 2009. He was dead at the time.
And that’s how we get to a theory, shared by Knight’s ex-wife and daughter. Bettina Massar said her ex-husband married a Filipino woman (whose name Massar would not provide), possibly while in prison. Mallory Knight, who also would not disclose the name of her dad’s last wife, told me the woman had kids, possibly accounting for the kids’ items still in the truck. Massar and Mallory Knight — who knew nothing about the truck until I called — now share a theory about it: Michael Knight’s widow abandoned it there and returned to the Philippines, a theory perhaps supported by the fact that there seem to be car keys in a cupholder in the truck. “I’m just guessing that,” Massar said.
Mallory Knight guesses similarly. “I figured out what kind of happened,” she said, concurring with her mom’s theory. “After he died (the widow) drove it around for a little while and I guess she just up and left and she took her kids.” Anybody have a better theory? “Let me ask you a question,” Mallory Knight, a 19-year-old Harker Heights newlywed, said to me after espousing her theory. “Is there any possible way I can get that truck?” I put her in touch with airport offcials who, airport spokesman Jason Zielinski told me, are working to sort this out. “Legally,” Knight said, “I think I’m the rightful owner.
His wife’s not here. I’m the next of kin.” In addition to legal hurdles, there are financial ones. Records show Michael Knight owed money on the truck. And there’s more than $7,000 owed for airport parking. “I can’t be legally responsible for paying that,” Mallory Knight said.
“If they had contacted me sooner I would have picked it up sooner. It’s kind of their fault they let it sit there that long.”
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