Jury Finds Henriqson Guilty On All 11 Child Sex Abuse Counts; Judge Sentences Him to 9 Life Terms

A 12-member jury today found former Palm Coast resident Krystopher Henriqson, 48, guilty on all 11 counts of raping and molesting his former stepdaughter from the time she was 9 until she was 12, the last assault taking place 14 months ago, the night before the girl disclosed the history to one of her middle school teachers. 

Henriqson, standing next to Assistant Public Defender Spencer O’Neal, maintained the same placid expression he’s had all trial and through innumerable pretrial hearings. He looked in front of him. 

His ex-girlfriend, the girl’s mother, sat in the front row of the gallery, opposite the defendant’s table and next to a victim advocate, looking ahead of her sternly as the clerk read the verdict and spoke the words “guilty 11 times. 

The verdict on the third day of trial before Circuit Judge Dawn Nichols–and 14 months after Henriqson was jailed on the charges–was not as much of a surprise as the number of questions and requests by the jury to re-hear lengthy calls. The jury deliberated three hours and 47 minutes, including a break for lunch.

The judge almost immediately sentenced him to life in prison after brief arguments from the lawyers: nine life terms and two 15-year terms.

“Life in prison is not enough,” the prosecutor said.

The prosecution had Henriqson’s admissions in two phone calls to vaginal and oral sex, but not to anal sex. (The victim said he had started with anal sex, then vaginal sex when she was older). It had DNA evidence of his sperm collected from the girl’s chest the day after he’d ejaculated there. It had the girl’s testimony and descriptions to a therapist in a Child Protection Team forensic interview. 

The defense attempted to sow doubt. But it could not convince the jury that the doubt was reasonable–that the girl was an outright liar lashing out at her parents, that the DNA evidence was not as presented, that Henriqson’s confessions were merely to placate the girl’s mother and not true confessions. 

“The facts in this case are awful. They’re awful to listen to, but they needed to be heard,” Assistant State Attorney Melissa Clark told the jury, “and the truth is that the defendant’s stepfather had been manipulating her from a very young age in order to satisfy his perverse desires. He used her trust and he did horrible sexual acts to her from the age of 9 to 12.” 

Henriqson’s fate was in the hands of a jury of six men and six women–a school custodian, a couple of municipal workers, a waitress, a fireman, a human resources manager, a heating and air technician, a batch plant operator, an automotive parts distributor, a couple of women living on disability, and a couple of educators. Henriqson during jury selection had struck out a second grade teacher, a woman with past experience with the Department of Children and Families and two mechanics, one of them married to an educator. Fifteen members of the jury pool of 50 who had disclosed past experience with sexual abuse, either–as victims or as close relatives of victims–had all been excused. 

The defense called its only witness this morning, Rhiannon Gross, who had been a close friend of Henriqson’s and his girlfriend’s for many years. She testified by zoom, to the displeasure of the prosecution. O’Neal first proffered her outside of the jury’s presence–asking her all the questions Henriqson had drafted for the occasion. 

Every issue Henriqson wanted her to address–the victim’s mental health issues, a supposed suicide attempt after disclosing the allegations, her supposedly liking to be Baker Acted, her violent fantasies about blowing up buildings and killing people, her occasional confusions between dreams and reality–were all deemed hearsay, irrelevant, and inadmissible as testimony. She was left to briefly testify to the closeness of Henriqson and his then-girlfriend. It did nothing to hurt the credibility of the girl or undermine her claims. 

As the judge ruled inadmissible one statement after another, O’Neal eventually stopped making arguments for each statement, as if Henriqson had given up. It was possibly during that sequence of rulings, as the judge upheld every one of the prosecution’s objections to allowing Gross’s statements, that Henriqson realized his case was beyond salvaging. It probably should not have taken him that long to realize it. 

Clark in her closing argument had to go through every one of the 11 counts for the jury to understand the charges, the difference between charges applying to abuse when the victim  was less than 12 as opposed to over 12, and how the prosecution proved the elements of each charge. The two capital charges and a life felony charge of rape result from assaults when the victim was younger than 12. All but one of the molestation charges are first degree felonies, each of which carry a 30-year prison sentence. 

There were also “lesser-included offenses,” enabling the jury to convict but on lesser charges. The jury has the option, for example, to charge “battery” instead of “molestation.” The difference is whether the jury believes the “battery,” or touching, is sexually motivated or not. If not, then it’s battery. If it is sexually motivated, it’s molestation. With one exception that does not change the outcome, the jury did not check off any lesser-included option. 

Only after explaining the mechanics of the charges, Clark turned to summing up how she proved each, at certain points playing brief excerpts from the recorded confessions or the Child Protection Team video interview. 

“Is it possible at all that this miscarriage has your DNA on it?” Henriqson’s ex had asked him, when she was pretending, in the recorded call, that her daughter had just had a miscarriage. 

“Yes, babe, it’s possible,” Henriqson said. He called her “babe” throughout the calls. 

“So now we have him admitting to sexual intercourse,” Clark told the jury. The girl “turned 12 August 18, 2024, she’d only been 12 for a few months, and he’s telling us this has been going on for the past year.” That proved he had been assaulting her when she was younger than 12, the prosecutor told the jury, which meant the capital charges applied. 

Clark replayed clips showing Henriqson blaming the girl: “Your daughter is so mature when it comes to all of this,” he had told his ex and explaining why he’d engaged in sexual acts with her. “I don’t know. She’s very fresh with me,” Henriqson says. 

“Describing having sex with a 12-year-old as if there’s nothing wrong with it,” Clark says, “as if he’s just having an affair.” 

Clark then moved on to the DNA evidence. 

O’Neal, the defense attorney Henriqson called back into service on the second day of trial after representing himself for months, with disastrous results, went through the evidence, undermining the prosecution’s conclusion at every turn, starting with the DNA. To do that, he portrayed the DNA analyst as “a professional witness” who “stated an opinion,” as if science had nothing to do with her conclusions. He said her opinions went against her own report’s “official policy” (albeit not her conclusions.) The DNA profile, he said, “cannot be confirmed to be seminal fluid.” It could be skin cells. The girl slept in her parents’ bed. So it can’t be confirmed that “what was on her chest was, in fact, seminal fluid.” But that’s not what the analyst had said. 

Clark in her second closing (the State always gets two closings) immediately dismissed the defense’s doubts about the DNA. “This isn’t from [the victim] laying in her parents bed. It’s not from her putting on his clothing. She explained all of that,” Clark said of the DNA analyst. “If it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, it’s a duck. There’s no doubt whatsoever his sperm is on her chest. And the explanation for that is what [the girl] told us happened: he ejaculated on her chest.”

O’Neal argued the points Henriqson wanted to argue when he represented himself: that the girl’s hymen was intact, and found to be so even by the nurse who examined the girl. The nurse practitioner’s report, he said, “neither confirms nor negates” evidence of sexual abuse. As for the girl herself, when she testified, O’Neal stressed the fact that she repeatedly said she did not know when a number of specific incidents happened. “That’s inconsistent with her prior statements,” O’Neal said. That, he said, puts her credibility in doubt. 

Clark was equally dismissive of the claim that absence of injury in the girl’s genitals meant that nothing happened. The nurse practitioner who testified “explained to us, it’s extremely rare that you find injuries, even on young, small children, that have been penetrated by adults, and that’s what we have here.” 

“Why would someone confess to something they did not do?” O’Neal asked the jury, addressing the phone call confessions. His explanation: Henriqson did deny the claims, denied them repeatedly, but continued to be questioned. He would then change his answer. “Every time he would deny it, and deny it, and then he would change,” O’Neal said. “I ask you to use your common sense and understand that sometimes people do admit to things they didn’t do. They make statements that are false.”

Clark retorted as if stunned by that line of argument. “What reasonable person under those circumstances is going to say, ‘You’re right, I’ve been raping your 11 year old daughter,’ versus are they going to say, ‘What the hell are you talking about? No, I didn’t do this. This is insane.’ That’s not working out of his mouth,” Clark argued. “Yeah, I’m going to confess to having raped your 11 year old, 10 year old daughter, and that’s going to get you to love me more, especially when she’s accusing you, saying I’m going to kill you, this and that. It just doesn’t make any sense. That’s just not reasonable.” 

The girl, O’Neal said, is “lashing out” at her mother in the Child Protection Team interview, which points to her resentment and the reason why she was “acting out” and making accusations against Henriqson–the discipline enforcer. And she couldn’t be specific about when alleged assaults took place despite repeated questions. 

Why couldn’t the girl be more specific? “You have to keep in mind this wasn’t a one time occurrence,” Clark told the jury. “She wasn’t just brutalized by this man one time. This is happening over the course of years. Years.”

Henriqson was a twice-before convicted felon, once in the federal system, and once in the state system. His life as a free man ended on February 12, 2025, when he was arrested on the charges and held since without bond at the Flagler County jail. Within days he will be sent to a state prison “reception center,” where he will spend a few weeks, then assigned to the prison where he is likely to spend the rest of his life. His predilection for filing legal motions is not expected to stop.

The counts’ breakdown as the judge sentenced Hendriqson were as follows (see the counts enumerated in the indictment here):
1: Life.
2: Life.
3: 15 years. Consecutive to other 15-year-term, but consurrent with life terms.
4: Lesser included lewd and lascivious battery, 15 years. Consecutive to life sentences.
5. Life.
6. Life.
7. Life.
8. Life.
9. Life.
10. Life.
11. Life.