Then No One Can Have Her Read online

  It turned out that Steve, with Renee’s help, had rented this house from her friend Cheryl Hatzopoulos as a place for his family to stay when they came to visit or as a “stay-cation” home.

  The titles were: How to Be Invisible: The Essential Guide to Protecting Your Personal Privacy, Your Assets, and Your Life; Cover Your Tracks Without Changing Your Identity: How to Disappear Until You WANT to be Found; The International Fugitive: Secrets of Clandestine Travel Overseas and Advanced Fugitive: Running, Hiding, Surviving and Thriving Forever.

  Concerning indeed.

  On August 20, the same day that these books were purchased, Steve also submitted his first death benefits claim to Hartford Insurance Company, trying to collect on Carol’s two life insurance policies for which he’d been paying for years. He provided a blank check to Hartford so the money—a total payout of $770,492 for the combined policies—could be transferred to his personal account at Bank of America.

  But every time he tried, Hartford denied his claims, citing the fact that he was a murder suspect in his ex-wife’s death. Hartford denied five such claims—on August 27, October 1, November 21 and December 16, 2008, and January 15, 2009.

  In the first denial letter on August 27, from claims analyst Debbie Dettman, she told him that Hartford couldn’t release the proceeds until he was cleared of involvement in Carol’s death.

  Steve e-mailed a response on September 3, copying his attorney, John Sears, asking how to disclaim the death benefits and to allow his daughters to collect on them, referring the matter to Sears and his daughters’ attorney.

  I am trying to determine if there is a way to disclaim the proceeds to our daughters, or failing that, to determine the most tax-efficient way of gifting the money to them for their sole benefit, he wrote.

  As investigators continued to build their case against Steve, they put together a timeline of his activities on the day of the murder based on forensic evidence they had collected, including his e-mails, text messages, phone records and the times his remote control was used to open the gate to his condo complex:

  Steve started his day at 6:32 A.M. by texting Renee, whom he usually met for coffee in the morning.

  At 6:47 a.m., he logged on to his UBS computer. A satellite office of the Phoenix location, the Prescott site had only a few employees, including Steve, John Farmer and a secretary.

  At 7:11 A.M., Steve called Renee, then called Carol at home at 7:41 A.M., and got her voice mail.

  At 7:59 A.M., Steve sent his first text to Carol about picking up Katie’s car.

  Steve and Renee texted about meeting for coffee until 9:27 A.M., when someone, most likely Steve, used his gate code to enter his complex.

  Around 10 A.M., Steve picked up Renee and took her to Wild Iris, a café they frequented together. As usual, he picked her up in his BMW, only this time, his bike was in the backseat, with the front wheel taken off to fit.

  Steve volunteered that he was planning to go for a ride after work. But in all the time they’d been together, she’d never seen him put the bike in the car, nor had he ever mentioned going for a bike ride. Given that he lived so close to his office, and headed home to change into workout clothes after work anyway, why didn’t he wait to put his bike into the car after work? Because, investigators figured, Steve was setting his alibi in motion.

  After Steve dropped off Renee at ten forty-five that morning, the detectives couldn’t determine what he did for the next few hours. However, forensics showed that he began texting Carol again at 1:42 P.M. about Katie’s car and exchanging checks.

  Steve received a text from Charlotte at three twenty-eight that afternoon—the last time he used the cell phone before turning it off—saying she was on her way to bring him some cookies.

  At 3:34 P.M., Steve sent an e-mail to Jennifer Rydzew-ski, who was filling in for his assistant in the Phoenix office, asking if she would mind closing his and Carol’s joint bank account: And then setting it on fire and burying it? Thanks!

  Jennifer didn’t read the message until she came into work the next morning, at which time she was informed of Carol’s death. She printed out the e-mail and immediately turned it over to her manager. The account had a zero balance.

  In early September, detectives sprayed the Bluestar blood-revealing agent on Steve’s clothing, his bicycle, its tires and rims, along with various other accessories they’d seized. They also obtained a search warrant allowing them to get back into his BMW and spray it as well. But after doing so, they found no traces of blood anywhere in the car. (The reddish brown substance in Katie’s car turned out to be chocolate.)

  Brown checked to see if they could determine through the BMW’s navigational device in Steve’s car where he’d been that night, but was told that the system didn’t store GPS points.

  Although they were gearing up to arrest Steve, investigators still had not found the murder weapon or any DNA linking him to the crime scene. They knew that Steve was a wily, smart and cunning man, so they kept investigating him and his background, hoping for that “aha” moment.

  CHAPTER 15

  Born in Rochester, New York, on January 7, 1954, Steven Carroll DeMocker was the first of Dr. John and Janice DeMocker’s nine children, the oldest of an educated and accomplished bunch, scattered all over the nation.

  Michael, Steve’s youngest sibling, works as a photographer at the Times-Picayune in New Orleans, where he was on the Pulitzer-winning team that covered Hurricane Katrina, and was a Pulitzer finalist in 2009. Mary is a harpist and harp teacher in Corvallis, Oregon. Sharon, a physician who specializes in integrated medicine and studied under the renowned Dr. Andrew Weil, lives in Hendersonville, North Carolina. Susan, who helped out the defense team early on as a legal assistant, lives in New York. Jim, an accountant who assisted with financial matters during the case, lives in Virginia. Information on the other siblings was not available.

  Growing up in the Rochester suburbs in upstate New York, the DeMocker children had quite the hardworking role models. Steve’s father earned his medical degree from the University of Rochester in the 1950s, the same graduate school that Steve and Carol attended years later.

  John DeMocker interned in general surgery at the University of Illinois Research Hospital, returning to Rochester in the early 1960s for a radiology residency at Strong Memorial Hospital. In 1964, he started his own practice in Rochester, home to major corporations such as Xerox, Bausch & Lomb and Kodak, then began working as a consultant in 1971.

  After Dr. DeMocker closed his radiology office in 1998, his wife hoped they could do some traveling, yet he continued to work thirty to sixty hours a week, “covering” other offices and consulting for years to come. When he finally decided to retire, he had to start up again to help pay for Steve’s legal bills. Jan testified at trial that he never really stopped working.

  Raising nine children wasn’t enough for Steve’s mother, either. She earned a master’s in nursing in the early 1960s, taught obstetrical nursing for several years, then went back to graduate school in 1984 to earn a doctorate in education with a focus on counseling. In 1990, she obtained a master’s in divinity and became a minister, presiding as pastor of the Hemlock United Methodist Church. She also worked part-time as a chaplain in a nursing home until she retired.

  Steve attended the Harley School, a private boarding school in Rochester, as a day student. After graduating in 1972, Steve persuaded a girlfriend and some other friends to join him at Prescott College, a small alternative liberal arts school in Arizona, on the other side of the country. Majoring in wilderness leadership, he started classes there in 1973.

  Prescott College opened in 1966, with its founder, Dr. Charles Franklin Parker, as its first president. Parker, a minister at the local First Congregational Church, had lofty aspirations to make it the “Harvard of the West.” His vision was to launch “a pioneering, even radical experiment in higher education,” aimed at producing leaders who could “solve the world’s growing environmental and social probl
ems,” according to the college website.

  But during Steve’s time there, the college went bankrupt and abruptly closed in 1974. Without funding, a group of stubborn faculty and students regrouped and moved the institution from an area a few miles north of town, which now houses the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, and into the run-down Hassayampa Hotel, where they held classes.

  Calling themselves the Prescott Center for Alternative Education (PCAE), the faculty and students—including Steve, apparently—stubbornly continued to operate without a campus. When Steve said he “graduated” with a bachelor’s degree in outdoor education in May 1977, it was from this very alternative college.

  “It’s the college that refused to die,” said Paul Burkhardt, who was provost and vice president of academic affairs there in 2014.

  Ultimately, a private nonprofit corporation was formed to run the institution, which includes a voting membership of faculty, staff, students and dues-paying alumni, to ensure the college never had to shut down again.

  Today, the college offers many areas of study that are similar to those of the late 1980s, when Steve returned as a sociology professor, and later when he joined the administration. As the college website states, the curriculum has evolved into subjects that include: environmental awareness, social justice and peace studies, sustainable communities . . . and agriculture, outdoor leadership, teacher preparation that includes multicultural education, and artistic and critical response to the issues of our world.

  The overall educational philosophy is designed to provide “experiential learning in natural and human communities,” Burkhardt said.

  “People come here because they believe in the power of this kind of education,” he said. The students “want to try to make a difference making a living” and “change the world in a positive way.”

  During Steve’s freshman year there, he met a sophomore named Sturgis Robinson, who had grown up in an affluent suburb of Springfield, Massachusetts. Although the two young men had come from similar socioeconomic backgrounds, the long-haired Sturgis took an immediate dislike to Steve, a tall, good-looking athlete who walked across their granola campus with a country-club attitude. The image of Steve, who appeared wealthy with his coiffed short hair, white tennis outfit and tennis racquet, not only stood out from the hippie crowd, but it also offended young Sturgis’s liberal sensibilities.

  Sturgis soon realized, however, that if he wanted to remain friends with an attractive fellow student named Josie (pseudonym), he had to make nice with Steve. This realization came after he stopped by Josie’s house, peered through the glass pane in the front door and saw Steve’s naked bottom bouncing in the living room. Shocked that Steve had seduced his good friend, Sturgis was not happy. And when he asked Josie about the coupling, she told him to mind his own business.

  Steve and Josie dated for several years, but in the context of that “free love” era, that didn’t mean they were seeing each other exclusively. “[Josie] was probably more exclusive than Steve,” Sturgis said. “Steve has never, ever been exclusive, even for a minute.”

  “We were young. It was the period where the fact that women could take the pill met the social revolutions of the late sixties and early seventies, so there was a lot of sex going on, and it was a big part of our college lives,” Sturgis recalled.

  Once Sturgis got to know Steve, he found he rather liked the charismatic young man, after all. The two became fast friends, forming a relationship that would last the next twenty-five years. In addition to enjoying extreme white-water rafting and other outdoor activities, they had one particular interest in common.

  “One of the things Steve and I really shared was an appreciation for women—being with women and chasing women,” Sturgis said.

  Years later, Sturgis went on to become the college’s interim president, from January 1999 through December 2000. One of his first acts was to reacquire the legal rights to the original college’s name from the successor PCAE institution, which had by then moved the campus to its contemporary location at 220 Grove Street.

  During college Steve spent a summer in Lincoln, Vermont, where one of his girlfriends’ families lived. Putting his outdoor training to use, he offered to help the girl’s younger brother, Alec, work on his beginner’s mountain-climbing skills.

  Steve’s mother, Jan DeMocker, later told the story of what happened on their outing: Steve and Alec had just parked near a cliff about five miles from Alec’s house, and were heading down the path leading to a rock wall they planned to climb, when they heard the scream of an ambulance siren approaching.

  The bus pulled up, two EMTs jumped out and came up behind them, carrying their medical supplies and equipment. Steve offered his assistance, recognizing that the female EMT was overweight, the man was middle-aged, both were wearing street shoes and neither had any climbing equipment.

  On the rock face about four hundred feet above them, they could see the young stranded woman, who had called out for help. She’d badly injured her ankle in a fall from above and was fearfully perched on a narrow ledge, clutching onto a few saplings nearby.

  Quickly assessing the woman’s dangerous situation, Steve sent Alec home for some more rope and equipment, then he climbed up to the ledge to make sure the woman didn’t fall in the meantime. After Alec returned, the muscular young man climbed up to join Steve and the woman. Using the additional gear to fashion a harness, Steve and Alec belayed the woman safely down the cliff to the base, where she was taken to the hospital by ambulance for treatment.

  “Would she have survived had Steve not been there?” Jan asked rhetorically years later. “Hopefully, someone with the needed skills would have been found in time, but with her precarious anchor to the side of the cliff, a long wait could have led to a much less desirable outcome.”

  After college Steve and Josie moved back east together to work at a ski resort in Stowe, Vermont, where Steve worked as a ski patrolman and Josie as a photographer for the resort. Sturgis, Josie, and Steve also worked as Outward Bound instructors. Carol was a rock climber as well, but the risky sport was not as big for her as it was for Steve.

  CHAPTER 16

  Virginia Carol Kennedy was born on July 25, 1954, the daughter of a secretary and a postal worker. Raised in Nashville, Tennessee, where her family still lives today, Carol and her brother, John, who is two years older, were very close as kids.

  After leaving the army as a staff sergeant, Carol’s father, Alvin “A.G.” Kennedy Jr., continued to serve in the reserves for twenty more years while working for the U.S. Postal Service, where he started as a mail carrier and retired as an auditor.

  While Carol was growing up, she and A.G. doted on each other. “I think she loved me, but I think she loved her dad more,” said Ruth Kennedy, Carol’s eighty-nine-year-old mother, in 2014. “I truly do. Because I was probably the disciplinarian.”

  Ruth worked the first half of her career for the Tennessee Department of Education, the state Department of Insurance and Banking and its Legislative Council Committee. She later moved to the private sector to work for the American Association for State and Local History.

  An avid fan of classical symphonic music and a pianist since she was nine years old, Ruth made sure to have music playing in the house from the time the children were born.

  A headstrong little girl, Carol knew what she wanted. Not liking her given name, Virginia, she began going by her middle name at the start of elementary school.

  The Kennedy family spent a lot of time together, taking extended vacations on Florida’s gulf coast. They also regularly attended the Church of Christ together. Spiritual from an early age, Carol was eager to be baptized at nine, sooner than Ruth would have liked.

  “I thought she was too young, but I wouldn’t have stopped her,” she recalled, noting that Carol had a wonderful Sunday school teacher. “She was a great influence on Carol.”

  A high academic achiever, young Carol was ambitious, respected and well liked by her peers.
She worked on the school paper, and in the eighth grade, she was elected to a board of teen representatives from all the high schools in Nashville. And with her lean build and contagious warm smile, Carol modeled for a couple of years in high school, working with a local agency and traveling for some jobs.

  At fifteen she was selected as the city’s representative in the Miss Ingenue contest, based on “beauty, personality, poise and presence.” And in 1971, when a white crepe jumpsuit with a “laced-and-fringed crop top” sold for $44, Carol was featured in the November issue of the national Ingenue magazine.

  “She was pretty popular in school with both her friends and her teachers,” Ruth said.

  Carol was also featured in a newspaper ad by the Cain-Sloan department store, billed as “the greatest store of the Central South,” which invited the public to the Miss Ingenue Fashion Show in Green Hills, an upscale area of Nashville. The big ad featured an illustration of a tall, leggy model with her long hair pulled into a side ponytail, wearing a white scoop-neck sleeveless jumpsuit that laced up the front, was lined around the torso with fringe, and flowed down into flared bell-bottom pants. Inset was a black-and-white head shot of Carol, with her brown hair styled the same way as the illustration, her usual curly ringlets straightened for a more sleek and chic look.

  Another photo shoot, for which Carol posed with the four top runner-ups in the competition, was full of horizontal stripes, grid patterns and generally loud fashion. Three of the losing contestants were blond. Carol, who went by “Caryl” as her modeling name, was the darkest brunette; her intelligence was clearly reflected in her facial expression.