Then No One Can Have Her Read online

  Carol gave birth to Katie at their home in Lincoln on May 19, using a midwife. And when Katie was only a few months old, Carol and Steve picked up and moved across the country to Prescott, repaying the loan from Carol’s parents when they sold the house in 1988.

  The next thing Sturgis Robinson knew, his buddy Steve had landed back at their alma mater, Prescott College, teaching classes as a sociology professor.

  CHAPTER 17

  When Katie was still a baby, Debbie Wren Hill visited them in Prescott and snapped some family photos: Steve holding little Katie up in the air; Carol breast-feeding and giving the baby mini massages.

  In between visits, Debbie and Carol talked on the phone and wrote each other long letters to stay in touch. Life was still good for the couple in those days. But those happy times were not to last.

  As Katie grew older, but before Charlotte was born, Carol started telling Debbie that Steve was being unfaithful. And then it got worse.

  Debbie isn’t positive about the timing, but recalls that it was a few nights before Carol gave birth to Charlotte that Carol called her, bed-bound, sobbing and beside herself.

  Carol said she’d learned that Steve was having an affair with the midwife who was about to deliver her baby, a disturbing fact that Steve had just revealed to her.

  Carol really had no good answer for why Steve would commit such an insensitive act, but it was clear to Debbie that Carol had decided to stay in the marriage nonetheless. She loved him, and he loved her.

  Over the years, as this pattern continued, “he kept apologizing,” Debbie recalled. “The apologies were romantic—champagne, roses and great sex—and oh, my gosh, how can you turn that away? And then it would happen again. It was just a cycle.”

  It wasn’t that Carol was weak. Just the opposite. She felt Steve was the man she was supposed to be with. He was just sick, and she was going to stick by him in sickness and in health. She believed it was her “life’s work” to help him get better. She wanted to be the one there with him after he had conquered this problem and came out on the other side.

  “She was a really strong, amazing, confident woman that men would have lined up on the street to have,” Debbie said. “She could have had anyone. She just adored Steve and felt this incredible connection to stay with him and see him through to wellness.”

  As a professor at Prescott College, Steve taught a course he named, aptly and ironically, “Mass Media: The Serpent in the Garden,” in which he discussed sexual imagery in advertising. He also taught a course about the politics of food, during which he took his students to a slaughterhouse to witness how animals were treated during the meat-making process. Steve and Carol were both vegetarians and healthy eaters.

  “If you weren’t vegetarian before that class, you probably were afterward,” one student recalled.

  Carol joined the faculty in 1989, and also served as coordinator of the college’s Human Development Program. Both she and Steve were popular among the students.

  Continuing his extracurricular outdoor activities, Steve took students on kayaking and white-water rafting trips to such destinations as the Grand Canyon, where students still visit today, as they combine rafting with water-quality monitoring.

  During this period, he hung out and played poker with a group of male friends. One of them was Gareth Richards, who later launched an online athletic equipment business known as Outdoor Prolink, which sold Steve a couple pairs of trail running shoes that would become important evidence in this case.

  Within a couple of years, in June 1990, Steve was promoted to dean of the Resident Degree Program, the heavyweight of the college’s two dean positions.

  “He is a very charismatic, attractive man, so people fell under his sway and elected him dean,” Sturgis recalled, explaining that electing the dean was one of the college’s unique characteristics, “a holdover from the idealistic Hassayampa [Hotel] days.”

  At the time Steve contended that he was the nation’s youngest university dean, quite an accomplishment and an honor for such a bright and ambitious young man.

  During the years they worked at the college, it was still quite a bit smaller than it is today, and was operating out of a single building on Grove Street. Enrollment jumped at the end of that decade, but was still far below its present attendance, which is slightly less than one thousand students.

  Back then, graduating classes could be as small as twenty-five students. Many students were older than the norm, varying in age from recent high-school graduates to “mature” middle-aged students, who were often drawn to the “distance learning” programs.

  Students tended to discover the college in offbeat ways, such as recruiting ads in the back of Outside magazine. The college also accepted students who might have flunked out of a traditional university. When one such student called to inquire about the ad, a college representative invited her to apply.

  “Come!” the rep said.

  Prescott College, this student said, “was extremely alternative, especially at the time,” but it was also “very cutting-edge.” Now that more of the general population is sensitive to being green, “everything that they did has become much more mainstream.”

  Katherine Morris, who went by her maiden name of Dean at the time, was a typical Prescott College student. After graduating from a Rochester area high school near where Steve grew up, she spent a year in Europe, then a year making her way across Central America.

  Still not ready to start college, she was working at the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve in Costa Rica, and teaching in the neighboring community of Cerro Plano, when a dozen Prescott College students came through for a tour as part of their class.

  One of her close friends and coworkers subsequently left to attend the college, and after applying and being accepted a few months later, Katherine did the same.

  How she learned about the college, she said, says a lot about the school and its teaching approach. “They’re out there viewing things,” she said. “The universe is truly their classroom.”

  When Katherine first arrived at the college in 1994, she lived in a VW bus and went rock climbing every day, which was not an entirely unusual routine for a Prescott student back then. Her peers were a like-minded eclectic bunch who grew into a tight community with shared interests in activities such as leading ecotours through South America, going on white-water rafting trips, working out “in the field” and eating vegetarian meals. Some thought nothing of swimming naked together in the stream.

  “We were a hippie college,” said Marilyn Walters (pseudonym), a former student who attended the college around the same time. “We were all such peace lovers. No one had a gun. We were just hippies. We weren’t sixties radicals, but we were the next set of them.”

  There were other contingents of students as well, such as the radical athletes who were more concerned about “shredding” rocks on climbing excursions and “bagging” mountain peaks.

  Student orientation consisted of a monthlong backpacking trip with eight to ten students in the wilderness. Instructors developed relationships with their students, had them for multiple classes and gave them written reports on their progress. Grades were not awarded unless they were specifically requested. These were youths who wanted to carve their own way in the world after rejecting or withdrawing from big universities.

  “We were all in a very small circle and saw each other daily,” Marilyn said.

  Before the time of cell phones, students had open mailboxes on campus, where they left notes, poems or trinkets for each other. Passions ran high and students had sex with each other. Some swapped partners as part of the culture, while others had serious relationships.

  Because it was such a small campus, drama could develop and escalate quickly. Such was a controversy in the early 1990s when Steve wanted to fire a poetry teacher and librarian, Fern Dayve, who has since died. He thought—and Carol supported his position—that it was inappropriate for Fern to have poetry nights, during which she read
erotica to students and drank wine with them.

  “There was a protest to try to get Steve not to fire Fern,” Marilyn said, noting that some students rebelled because Fern had a following. “They were trying to kick her out of our community, and you can’t really do that when the community is so small.”

  This controversy was considered rather ironic because it was no secret that Steve had slept with two students, who had worked as nannies for him and Carol, and one of those affairs had reportedly lasted for several months. There was also talk that he’d been involved with a couple of coworkers, and word had gotten around that Steve had slept with the midwife.

  “The midwife was the first one that we, as students, had heard about,” Marilyn said.

  Sturgis took his best friend’s side in this affair, because he harbored the perception—fueled by Steve’s complaints and stories about his wife—that Carol was nagging him and acting “like an incredible harpy.”

  But more than that, Sturgis, who was away in 1991 while working as a white-water river guide in the Grand Canyon, actually abetted Steve by allowing him to use Sturgis’s vacant house for trysts with the midwife. Sturgis was gone between April and the end of October, came back for a month, then went off to Costa Rica for the winter. He couldn’t be sure exactly when the affair started, but he, too, thought it was while Carol was still pregnant with Charlotte.

  “The fact that he was having this affair with the midwife had no impact on me at all,” he said, noting that this feeling has since changed dramatically.

  At the time, Steve told Sturgis that this woman was “so powerful and strong and so spiritual,” this outweighed the fact that she wasn’t as attractive as some of his other lovers. The midwife was considered a “paragon” in Prescott, Sturgis said, and likely remains so even today.

  The midwife, who was interviewed years later by Detective John McDormett, said she met Carol first and then Steve in April 1991. She told investigators, however, that her affair with Steve didn’t start until June 1992, around the time that she was having her own marital troubles and had separated from her husband. (Charlotte was born in October 1991.)

  The woman said Steve asked her to marry him “on a number of occasions” in the early 1990s, but she always said no because she knew Carol would always be in his life. He didn’t ask her again after he’d moved into the financial industry, she said, because their relationship had changed by then as he came to care more about money and appearances. He told her that she no longer fit the standard for the type of woman he wanted to be seen with in public, but that Carol did, which “amused” her.

  As McDormett wrote in his report, the midwife told him that like Steve, a lot of people want to stay within their class and she appreciated his honesty. Steve still tried to get her into bed occasionally, she said, but she declined and he didn’t push it.

  Whatever the timing of this particular affair, Sturgis said it was apparently what “cracked Carol” in terms of seeing Steve’s womanizing for the problem it really was.

  Steve held the dean’s job for five years and five months. But the popularity he’d so enjoyed as a faculty member began to decline as word of his womanizing spread and festered.

  “He would talk dirty all the time. So if he was working with a secretary, a female, sexualized banter would just be part of the day,” Sturgis recalled, noting that Steve did this with two staff members, and also had a brief affair with one of them. Sturgis was not aware of Steve sleeping with any professors.

  “He became a very polarizing figure on campus,” Sturgis said, explaining that several complaints were filed against Steve for sexual harassment and abuse of power amid criticism that he tried to manipulate members of the faculty and administration.

  “My impression is that Steve did a lot of bad-mouthing of people behind their back, starting rumors [and using] very underhanded approaches to getting what he wanted to get done,” Sturgis said.

  Steve, of course, didn’t see it this way. In his own defense, he summed up these various controversies as “he was being pestered by bitchy, crazy people.”

  The practice of faculty members sleeping with students was known to happen at Prescott College until 2000, when Dan Garvey became president and took steps to curtail this behavior, Sturgis said, so “there was also a lot of forgiveness on the Prescott campus at that time.”

  Most likely as a result of Steve’s transgressions, Carol was instrumental in putting a policy into place to prohibit faculty and staff from having intimate relationships with students. For some people on campus, this seemed ironic, because she went on to have what one female student complained to the administration was inappropriate contact with a male student by showing up at his house unannounced one evening.

  This student, Richard Stevenson (pseudonym), who was questioned years later during the murder investigation, was told that his name had come to their attention during an interview with Steve’s girlfriend, presumably Renee Girard.

  Richard, who went on to become a sociology professor himself at a small college, and is writing a book about meditation, acknowledged that he and Carol had a “powerful, powerful relationship” and a “deep connection” while he was a student.

  “Carol was a profound, profound influence on my life. As a teacher and a student, we had a deep connection, but it wasn’t sexual,” he said in 2014.

  He and other students often hung out with their professors, he said, just as he and Carol did. And like many of her students, Richard looked up to her as an amazing and charismatic teacher, who also happened to be gorgeous and intelligent. He knew she had kids and was married to Steve, who was still a dean at the time, but they never discussed Carol’s marital problems.

  “Of course I was smitten with her. She was smart. She was an amazing yogi. She transformed my life,” he said. “She introduced me to a world that had a depth I didn’t know. In other words, it was far beyond the world of superficial meditation and yoga.”

  If Carol had ever made sexual overtures toward him, he said, he would have accepted them gladly and reciprocated, but she never crossed that line.

  “She was a catalyst and I think that’s what she was for a lot of people. She put me on a trajectory. . . . I met her at the right place, at the right time, and she had the right skill set of a really good teacher who knew what the student needed and directed them. It’s really amazing and it’s rare.”

  Hearing about her murder was tragic, he said, and talking about it was difficult for him. “To me, it was just like she was incredible. It’s just so sad, dredging it up. . . . It’s heartbreaking that she was killed.”

  Carol really enjoyed the adoration she received from students like Richard Stevenson, but to Sturgis, Carol almost enjoyed it too much, as if she fed off it. (That is not all that unusual for a teacher, this author included.)

  “When she was a teacher, her students tended to completely love her,” Sturgis said. However, from his perspective she was not viewed with such admiration by her peers.

  Among her peer group, he said, “Carol was a little harder to work with. She was kind of rigid. She was a little bit of a fanatic. She was very judgmental.” He said she acted like “a small-town girl in a lot of ways.” When Steve was dean, “she really threw her weight around as the wife of the dean.”

  Katherine Morris didn’t see it that way. Rather, she said, it was more that Carol’s peers were jealous of her beauty and intellect. “Not that they truly didn’t like her, but that they wanted to be more like her,” she said. And even if she was not the perfect wife, “who could fault her if she did become a little bit ‘do this or do that’ or controlling after she found out about all of her husband’s infidelities?”

  Sturgis admitted that his perceptions were filtered through Steve, who made it sound as if Carol was always nagging him to do something or other. But Sturgis did notice that she and Steve shared one key characteristic: they exhibited “really strange boundaries” with other people.

  “They were constantl
y talking about sex—sex between themselves, sex with others,” he said, recalling one night they made a dramatic entrance at a party at Gareth Richards’s house in the early 1990s.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry we’re late. We were screwing in the parking lot,” Carol said when they walked in.

  Carol did this in private as well, confiding in her friends what a great sex partner she had in Steve, her lover and soul mate for life. It was clearly part of the glue that held them together, and one of the tactics he employed to keep her in their volatile relationship.

  CHAPTER 18

  In April 1992, six months after Charlotte was born, Carol and Steve decided to move their growing family to a 1.4-acre parcel on the 7400 block of Bridle Path in Williamson Valley, which they bought for $78,000. The plan was to live there in a temporary home while they built their dream house, which Carol and Steve were going to design with an architect’s help.

  Both of them knew carpentry well, and Steve often did woodworking in his workshop, especially when he was upset or frustrated. Steve had already built their Vermont home, he “made a bed and he made a sofa. He could do anything. He was really, really smart,” Ruth recalled.

  While they were designing the main house, Steve and some friends from the college quickly built interim lodging—out of hay bales to be eco-friendly and energy-efficient—for the family. During the building phase Charlotte gleefully played with the straw bales that covered the property.

  By 1997, the family had transitioned into their new four-bedroom, four-bathroom house, complete with vaulted ceilings. Carol had even designed a little loft area in the house. Charlotte used to climb up and play with her stuffed animals there, using the same wooden ladder that was found near Carol’s body.