Then No One Can Have Her Page 12

  Headed to Acapulco on a free trip to the Miss Ingenue finals, she turned sixteen and lost the contest to one of the other twenty contestants. But her family’s bigger concern was that she got sidetracked on the trip home. Although she had a chaperone, she somehow missed her return connection in Dallas and ended up in New York City. “We were scared to death, but it didn’t seem to faze her,” Ruth said. “I think at that age you think you’re invincible.”

  Her interest in modeling didn’t last long before she’d moved on to other things. “It kind of lost its luster. She found out it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be,” Ruth said, noting that Carol didn’t much like standing at attention under hot lights for long stretches at a time, which was less glamorous than she’d anticipated. “It got to be more of a chore than fun.”

  As a teenager Carol got an allowance, but she was frugal with her money, so she always seemed to have cash available for the things she really wanted, such as the cute $13 green patterned Nehru jacket she saw while shopping with her mother one day.

  When Ruth told her daughter, “It’s not in my budget,” Carol promptly pulled out her wallet and bought the jacket for herself.

  Although she and her brother were not as close during high school, they still loved each other. One of Ruth’s favorite photos features the two siblings posing together at John’s graduation in 1970. But for many years after that, they drifted apart and didn’t have much contact.

  As John put it later, they became estranged for nearly twenty years because Carol didn’t approve of his lifestyle. Between 1969 and 1975, he was a heroin addict, he later testified, a “rogue” and a “worthless type of SOB for a lot of years.”

  Shortly after graduating from McGavock High School in 1972, Carol went straight to Peabody College, which is now part of Vanderbilt University. In just three years she finished her education degree at what is now known as one of the nation’s top schools in that field.

  Living at home during college, she wasn’t just in a hurry to get started on her working life, she was also in a rush to get married as well, perhaps as a way to get out of her parents’ house.

  Carol hadn’t been in college long before she got engaged to a young man named Tom, who came from a good family and had dropped out of college to work in pharmaceutical sales. Tom was originally from upstate New York, and his family moved to the Nashville area when his father was transferred.

  Ruth tried everything she could to dissuade her daughter from getting married so young. “You’ve just started at Vanderbilt, and the whole world is opening up,” Ruth told her. “Why would you want to get married?”

  Ruth had nothing in particular against Tom. He and his family seemed very nice, and well-off, too.

  “They were way above us in the social strata,” Ruth recalled. “He treated her well. They got along fine.”

  After waitressing in high school, Carol found a bartending job at a high-end restaurant. She befriended the hostess, Debbie Wren Hill, who was a year younger than Carol. Coincidentally, Debbie was engaged to one of Tom’s high-school friends, a rock-and-roll guitarist.

  The four of them hung out together, and Carol and Tom attended their wedding in October 1975. Carol and Tom, who moved away and broke up shortly thereafter, were married for only eighteen months.

  “It was an amicable separating, it wasn’t anything bad between them,” Ruth said. If there was a negative reason, she added, Carol “never told me because maybe I would have said, ‘I told you so.’”

  Carol spent a year at the Heartwood School in Washington, Massachusetts, where she learned carpentry, gardening and other homebuilding crafts, as well as how to use herbs.

  She also taught school in Richmond, Virginia, before she moved back to Nashville in 1981, intending to teach special education at her alma mater, McGavock High.

  During their time apart, Debbie’s four-year marriage imploded as well. The two now-divorced women found each other again through a mutual friend while Debbie was looking for a roommate. Answering her phone one day, Debbie was happy to hear her friend’s voice.

  “You’re not going to believe who this is,” Carol said. “I’m back in town, I have a dog named Rosie and we’re looking for a place to live.”

  Debbie’s roommate search ended at that moment, after which Carol and her beautiful Irish setter moved right in.

  Within the year Carol, who had also become a certified yoga instructor, took a trip to New York and came back in a state of euphoria.

  “I have just met the most amazing man,” she said.

  Carol and Mr. Amazing, Steve DeMocker, had quite a bit in common: “A love of the outdoors, an appreciation of the beauty and spirituality of mountain and river, a keen sense of the connectedness we have with one another,” as Steve’s mother, Jan, put it.

  They were also both highly intelligent. Steve was a doctoral candidate at the University of Rochester’s Warner School of Education. His focus was critical social theory, a rather complicated and esoteric interdisciplinary study of sociology and other social sciences, such as psychology, philosophy, history and anthropology, and how the key concepts of these areas affect us as a culture. According to Nick Crossley’s book Key Concepts in Critical Social Theory, such concepts—which became quite relevant in the context of Steve’s behavior in later years—include alienation, symbolic power/violence, power and knowledge, crisis, capital, body power and freedom.

  After taking off with Steve to Mexico for a week, Carol came back even more in love. Debbie would always remember the moment when Carol shared her feelings as she folded her clothes and put them back into her dresser.

  “Debbie, I know I have found my soul mate. I know it in my stomach,” she said. “There is just a knowingness and I feel it and I know it. He is my person that I’m supposed to go through my life with.”

  When Steve came to Nashville to visit, Debbie found herself crazy about him, too, partly because of the way he treated her dear friend. While she and Carol were at work, he stayed at the house making homemade coffee liqueur. When Carol came home, he acted “personable, friendly, engaged and loving toward her. Steve was everything every woman could want in a man,” Debbie recalled. “He was gorgeous. He was smart. He was working on a Ph.D. He was in Outward Bound, incredibly physically fit. Anyone would have fallen for him.”

  It was only a matter of months of long-distance dating before Carol moved to New York to live with Steve and join him in graduate school at the University of Rochester.

  Ruth, who didn’t approve of Carol’s unwed living situation, was relieved when her daughter soon announced that she was engaged. Because Ruth hadn’t met her daughter’s fiancé, she sent him a letter, saying, essentially, “Thank you for doing this right.” Steve didn’t write back.

  Carol’s parents flew to Rochester a couple of days before the wedding to meet Steve and his family and to have dinner with his parents, whom Ruth described as “lovely people.” That said, Ruth and A.G. felt a little overwhelmed by the whole affair.

  “The big family and the fact that the father was a doctor, and, of course, we were just working people,” Ruth recalled. “A.G. and I were a bit intimidated, although A.G. never would have admitted it.”

  Now that Carol was older, Ruth felt much better about this marriage than she had about Carol’s first one. “At that time I had no misgivings about it,” she recalled recently.

  The couple was married on October 10, 1982, at Steve’s parents’ house in Webster, New York. They had a big potluck reception near the shore of Lake Ontario afterward.

  This being her second wedding, Carol wore a dark skirt with a corduroy vest over a pink blouse with puffy sleeves and a pink rose boutonniere. Her hair was down, with the front strands pulled back. Steve wore dark dress pants and an earth-toned blazer. Carol also kept her maiden name.

  “It was just perfect for them,” said Debbie, who couldn’t attend but later wished she had, because for some years afterward, Debbie mostly saw Carol when she came home to v
isit her parents in Nashville.

  Most of Steve’s rather large immediate family came to the ceremony, along with Carol’s parents, aunt and grandmother. The service, conducted by a minister, was informal and low-key, but meaningful and intimate.

  “They wrote their own vows, promising to support and nurture one another as they each sought the path that would allow them to create a meaningful life,” Jan DeMocker recalled. “They wanted to live their lives in ways that would make a difference to others.”

  Sturgis Robinson came up from Washington, D.C., and met Steve’s family for the first time. The DeMocker family, with Steve’s numerous siblings, seemed “crushingly normal, with one exception,” he recalled.

  As Steve introduced his best friend to his parents, Jan and John DeMocker barely looked at Sturgis, who felt that they treated him like he was part of the staff.

  “I really expected Steve’s parents to be warm,” he said, explaining that his own parents were always gracious when meeting his friends. “I was really struck by how cold his parents were, particularly his mother.”

  He had a much more positive impression of Carol, whom he was eager to meet after hearing such glowing reports from Steve.

  “He was completely in love with her,” Sturgis said. Steve had described her as “really powerful and focused, and she was a carpenter, really strong and really spiritual. But then he always described the women he was with in terms like that.”

  Sturgis hit it off with Steve’s new wife, sneaking off to the woods with her and a bottle of wine to chat during the reception.

  “I was fascinated to meet Carol, and she was fascinated to meet me,” he recalled.

  As they were getting to know one another, Sturgis felt compelled to ask whether she was aware of Steve’s serial womanizing, which he’d watched since before the start of their own friendship.

  “Do you know what you’re getting yourself in for?” he asked.

  But Carol just laughed. “Oh, don’t worry,” she said. “I can take care of him.”

  She was right—for a time. Looking back later, Sturgis deemed Steve’s courtship of Carol and their early years of their marriage as probably the purest of times for Steve.

  While Steve worked on his doctorate in education, known as an Ed.D., from 1982 to 1986, Carol earned her master’s in education in 1983, focusing on counseling and human development.

  During that time the couple lived in a guesthouse on Steve’s parents’ property and helped take care of Steve’s younger siblings. Wanting to do something for her in-laws, Carol built a garden on the front circle of their house. In her mother-in-law’s eyes, Carol became part of the extended DeMocker family, even going on vacation with them.

  After Steve finished grad school, Sturgis helped him get his first job at Patagonia, the manufacturer of outdoor clothing and equipment, which is headquartered in Ventura, California.

  Climber Yvon Chouinard, Patagonia’s founder and CEO, wanted to put together a program for employees to participate in activities that required the use of the company’s products. The CEO said, half jokingly, that they needed to hire a “director of fun” to run the program.

  Sturgis, the company’s public relations director, suggested that Steve apply for the job, which, with his outdoor experience, he landed in April 1985. His official title was personnel coordinator, a job he kept until July 1986.

  “The company wanted their employees to know how the equipment they made was actually used in the field, so it was one of Steve’s tasks to run outdoor programs for Patagonia personnel,” Jan DeMocker said.

  Meanwhile, Carol took a counseling position at a local hospital. She also volunteered at a shelter for battered women and at a crisis center hotline, working with survivors of sexual assault.

  While Steve was at Patagonia, he took a group of employees on a kayaking trip in white-water rapids with a coleader who was a “world-class boater,” Jan DeMocker said.

  During a run down a pretty difficult stretch, Steve watched as a young woman was sucked into a class-four vortex of swirling water, losing her boat and paddle, as her body churned over and over in the current.

  Feeling responsible for her, Steve immediately went into action to save her. Steering his kayak directly into the vortex, he flipped it upside down so he could spin around in sync with her. Reaching out for her, he grabbed her limp body and got her up and across the bow of his boat, which was still upside down. Then he righted his kayak, maneuvered her into it, steered them out of the whirlpool and headed down the river to a safer area, where the rest of the group was anxiously waiting.

  “Steve saw her eyes flick open at last—another instance when Steve’s presence made a significant difference in the life of another,” Jan recalled.

  Instead of living in Ventura, near the coast, Carol and Steve rented a house in the hills, about thirty minutes east, in the bucolic but sophisticated town of Ojai, where the air is filled with the scent of lavender, sage and orange blossoms and a legendary “pink moment” as the sun sets.

  Similar to Prescott, Ojai is surrounded by mountain ranges, ranch land and hiking trails. And being so close to Hollywood, it also has become a haven for New Age and spiritual people, artists and actors, such as Mary Steenbur-gen, her husband Ted Danson, Reese Witherspoon and Robert Pattinson.

  Debbie Wren Hill visited the couple in this peaceful burb, where Steve and Carol’s home was surrounded with pecan and fragrant orange trees. She and Carol relaxed in the backyard and took in the scenery as they listened to Steely Dan and ate homemade orange-pecan muffins.

  After Carol came home from work, she and Debbie jogged up to an area that had been ravaged by fire, where they could still see embers burning. As they breathed in the even stronger scent of flowering orange groves there, Carol explained that these trees had kept the fire from spreading any farther, perhaps because they were so green or wet with irrigation.

  “That was still a happy time for them,” Debbie said. “They were largely a happy couple. They had a really good connection. They were just really devoted to each other. I was envious. I felt she had really lucked out.”

  Eight months after Steve arrived at Patagonia, Sturgis Robinson left to enter the foreign service. Steve told him later that he’d had an affair with at least one Patagonia coworker. And that, Sturgis said, not only went against the company’s internal culture, but also the personal philosophy of the owner’s powerful wife, who had helped found and run the company.

  “That was not considered cool at Patagonia to cheat on your wife with other Patagonia employees,” Sturgis said.

  It was unclear to him whether Carol knew about this particular affair. “I think she was in denial,” Sturgis said in 2014. “I think it was very likely that she did not know about some of [his affairs].”

  Sturgis said that this affair likely contributed to Steve’s parting ways with the company. It also may explain why he didn’t include the position on his LinkedIn page, which was still up in 2014.

  After leaving California in the summer of 1986, Steve and Carol moved to the tiny town of Lincoln, Vermont, where Steve had stayed that one summer during college. During the 1980s, Lincoln had a population of about 870 people.

  With her credentials Carol landed a job as a teacher and counselor at the Ticonderoga branch of the North Country Community College in New York in the fall of 1986. She had to commute to work, often through the snow, more than an hour each way.

  Carol told the Post-Star in Glens Falls, New York, which wrote about her hiring, that she and Steve were lured back to the East Coast by the beauty of the Adirondacks.

  Whatever the reason, the couple had already bought ten acres in Lincoln in November 1984, and with the help of a loan from Carol’s parents, they started building a house. Carol told the newspaper that Steve planned to look for a job as an educator as soon as he was done building the wooden home, which was a two-story A-frame, with an upper-level balcony looking down on the living room below.

  “It was a re
ally neat house,” Ruth recalled.

  In addition to counseling Ticonderoga students on how to handle the fear of failure, Carol taught three psychology courses: human development, group dynamics and a general survey course. She told the Post-Star that community colleges were geared toward making higher education accessible to working adults with families, who had not been able to attend or finish college earlier.

  Using the analogy of athletes who use their muscles to attain goals, Carol said, “The mind, too, must be exercised. Sometimes we have to push ourselves past what is comfortable to reach the prize we seek.”

  The news article, which underscored Carol’s past experience and interest in preventing domestic violence, stated that Carol wanted to organize a women’s backcountry wilderness trip to help them build self-confidence.

  Carol and Steve had already been organizing such weekend outings of rock climbing and cross-country skiing for the damaged women she’d been working with in Ventura. Jan DeMocker said this was Carol’s special strength, to “teach survival skills with the deeper lessons of nature and spirit.”

  When a person faces a new, perhaps scary situation, and is given the skills to succeed, it’s empowering, and this is what she and Steve offered to women who had, too often, been powerless, Jan wrote in 2014.

  Carol also told the newspaper that she’d set her sights on a goal of her own: to write a book about domestic violence.

  From July 1987 until Katie was born in May 1988, Carol worked as a psychological counselor at Middlebury College, a small private liberal arts college in Middlebury, Vermont, which is home to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the nation’s oldest literary writing conference. But the draw for Carol was that the college was only half an hour from Lincoln, which cut her commute in half.