Then No One Can Have Her Read online

  These issues led to her being let go from the gallery in 2007, which was ironic, given that Steve complained she wasn’t working hard enough or earning enough money.

  After she died, Carol’s friends could see the spiritual healing she’d attempted to do through her artwork, pouring herself into producing a sizable collection with many, many pieces.

  In August 2009, Van Gogh’s Ear held a posthumous opening for her very best work, which hundreds of people attended. Ruth Kennedy and Debbie Wren Hill even flew in from Tennessee for it.

  “I think we sold like thirteen thousand dollars that night,” John Lutes said. “That’s a lot for us in Prescott.”

  The framed art alone spanned one whole wall, starting from the front window back to the sales desk.

  “Art is sort of worthless until someone buys it,” John said. “The most valuable piece of art in our gallery is the one that’s sold.”

  In late 2013, when Katherine Morris was in town, she and Joanne Frerking took two of Carol’s unsigned prints and laid them side by side. As they compared their images in grays, burgundy, dark oranges and browns, they interpreted what Carol was trying to express with those forms. And one or both of them exclaimed, “Oh, my God!”

  For Joanne these two pieces represented “the story of what Carol hoped would happen” between her and Steve.

  It looked as if Carol had used an old X-ray as a stencil, cutting out two shapes: one appeared more male, and the other more female, but also otherworldly, with an angel-like shape—a round head and wings—that seemed very abstract to Joanne.

  Carol had used the stencil to print the shapes once, then turned them over and used them again to make ghost prints, one following the other. In the first print, a heavy line connected the two. Their interpretations varied: Joanne saw the line as an arrow, while Katherine saw it as a phallic connection, or a link between their cores—a thread that extended from the angel’s heart toward the male figure’s center and his genitals. The male figure looked athletic to Katherine, and was leaning in a seductive stance against a shape that looked like a surfboard or warrior’s shield.

  In the second print Carol created two versions of each figure, one dominant and one ghost. The ghost male figure was right side up, while its darker dominant twin was flipped and heading down, as if subdued or dead. The ghost angel was right side up, and its dominant twin floated above, wings extended.

  “In the first one—she was, like, stabbing at him, the part of him that was so awful to her, the sexual part, the addictions and women,” Joanne said. “In the next one he was vanquished and she was floating up—her spirit—she was free. It was angel-like.”

  Judging by the second print, Katherine felt that Carol “was ready to leave that earthly body. She was so evolved. She was ready and she just went,” ascending to heaven even stronger than she was on earth.

  “That’s like the good and evil, the good prevailing up to the heavens, and the dark part of your stuff you don’t ever work through, it just pulls you down and you don’t get to experience the other realm,” she said.

  Another more literal interpretation could be that Carol was portraying Steve killing her or her spirit, then sending her up to heaven.

  The gallery was still selling Carol’s art in 2014, with a tribute to her memory on the wall.

  “We’re down now to sort of the end of the stuff,” Joanne said. “We may have a hundred, maybe seventy-five pieces.... But we truly sold . . . at least one thousand or fifteen hundred pieces. I knew it would be thrown away otherwise and I couldn’t bear that.”

  CHAPTER 24

  While Carol and Steve were living apart, but still not truly separated, Carol’s friends encouraged her to stop seeing him altogether so she could move ahead on her own.

  “You have so much to lose, don’t do this,” they told her.

  And yet, she allowed herself to continue along the same downward trend, accepting Steve’s apologies and promises—like the time he came over with a couple dozen roses and the deed to the Bridle Path house.

  “I’m not going to [screw] up again, but if I do, here’s the deed to the house,” he told her. “I’m serious this time.”

  However, that, too, proved to be just another ruse to keep Carol tied to him.

  One night before Thanksgiving Day in 2005 or 2006, Carol called Debbie Wren Hill, sobbing. Steve was with some woman, she said, and she felt sad. She missed having her family around her.

  “It is so hard,” she said.

  Debbie was concerned about the level of despair she heard in Carol’s voice. She sounded suicidal. “I am really worried about your safety,” Debbie said. “I’m wondering if I need to call somebody.”

  Carol assured her that wasn’t necessary under the circumstances. “I would never make that my kids’ legacy,” she said. “But without them . . . I would probably do it.”

  Hearing that, Debbie wanted to castrate Steve. “I wanted revenge on this man. I was just so sickened,” she recalled. “But I knew that Carol was going to see her way through to the solution.”

  Debbie was right. In the last couple years leading up to her divorce, Carol did do the emotional work she needed to break free of Steve. But the years of conflict had taken a toll on her.

  She lost quite a bit of weight, and although it’s unclear when, Carol was diagnosed with Graves’ disease, an autoimmune condition exacerbated by stress that can lead to an overactive thyroid gland. In women Carol’s age, symptoms can include weakness and fatigue, rapid or irregular heartbeat, memory loss and chest pain. If it goes untreated, the condition can lead to depression.

  “She was not only emotionally distressed, she was physically falling apart from the stress of this relationship,” Debbie said.

  With this stress came a change in the mood and tone of her artwork, which became much darker. “She used to use vibrant colors, and she was doing really interesting introspective work. It just became muddier,” Joanne Frerking said.

  As did her mood. “She just became very depressed. She didn’t look good. She lost even more weight and she was thin. She was trying then to get past him and he would never leave her alone.”

  And that, Debbie said, is what she still holds against Steve to this day. “The fact that he would not let her go. It was just a travesty the way he messed with her mind.”

  When Carol finally realized that she had to permanently let go of Steve to save herself, she filed for divorce in March 2007. And this time it stuck.

  It was baby steps from there.

  As Carol began to move away from Steve emotionally, her friends encouraged her to start dating and try meeting men online. Steve had certainly been doing enough of that.

  So she did. According to Steve’s defense team, Carol engaged in “risky behavior” by being on seven dating websites, but Katherine Morris said she knew of only one that Carol had really used: Match.com.

  “I don’t believe she was an active member on seven,” Katherine said.

  As investigators tried to identify the male DNA under Carol’s fingernails, they went through her e-mails to find men she’d met online, and obtained DNA swabs from ten of them nationwide. In interviews with some of these men, they said that they, too, were using multiple dating sites so they often couldn’t be sure if, when or how they’d met Carol. It appears that Carol was enrolled with dharma-match. com, Match.com, thesoulmatenetwork.com and spiritualsingles.com, often using the moniker “Carolita.”

  In August 2011, the defense named one of these online friends—John Stoler, of Missouri—as a possible third-party culpability candidate for Carol’s murder, along with David Soule and Barb O’Non.

  Among the many men pulled into the investigative web of this case, John Stoler was asked to provide a DNA swab based on what one defense attorney called Carol’s “terse kiss-off ” by e-mail on May 14, 2008. Stoler, however, hired an attorney and stonewalled investigators by refusing several requests for a DNA sample. Detectives never got a search warrant to force the D
NA issue.

  Instead, they tried to determine where he was at the time of the murder through his bank and phone records. Those records showed that someone used his ATM or credit cards between July 1 and 3 in California, at a restaurant in Toluca Lake, a Holiday Inn in North Hollywood and a McDonald’s in Blythe, then someone used those cards on July 4 in Scottsdale, Arizona. The records also showed that this man called Carol’s house at eight-sixteen on July 2, the morning she was murdered, from a number with the Phoenix area prefix of 602.

  Another of Carol’s online friends, Edward McCollough, told investigators that he and Carol dated from October 2007 to February 2008, but they were never sexual. During that time they took two ten-day trips to Hawaii and New York on his dime. But when she hinted that it would be a good idea for her to move into his home, he told her he wasn’t ready for a serious relationship.

  They stayed in touch because he thought she was such a great person, and they were still e-mailing until the day she was killed. Carol never spoke to him about her tenant, Jim Knapp, in anything but positive terms, which was not the case with Steve.

  Edward told authorities that Carol had “disclosed more than one episode” in which Steve “ ‘went off’ in a way where Carol was afraid for her physical safety,” including one time a year earlier when she’d insisted on meeting Steve in a public place because of such concerns, Sergeant Tom Boelts wrote in his report.

  CHAPTER 25

  Once the divorce battle was fully under way, Carol kept closer track of Steve’s spending and expressed her frustrations by e-mail. She conveyed her particular disapproval on October 10, 2007, their wedding anniversary.

  Steve had e-mailed her to complain about the debt he was accruing by covering her bills, the girls’ expenses and his own. Despite his monthly take-home pay of $9,000 to $12,000, he wrote, he was still going into debt by $5,000 to $9,000 a month. These figures seemed to vary widely over time, depending on when and to whom he was speaking.

  In a financial affidavit he filed during the divorce, he claimed this amount was even higher—Steve contended that he was spending $17,000 more than he earned every month, and had amassed a total personal debt of $1.4 million.

  Listing his expenses, he said he had to pay income taxes, interest on their jointly acquired credit card debt, the principal and interest on a loan he’d borrowed against his 401 (k), Katie’s student loan and tuition payments, and the girls’ health insurance, car payments and other basic living costs. And after that, he still had to pay Carol’s mortgages, utilities, her car, health and life insurance policies, and $700 a month in “temporary ‘support.’”

  Carol came back with details backing up her argument that his discretionary spending was more the problem. Since they’d come to an interim financial agreement in April 2007, she wrote, Steve had traveled to St. Maarten (she assumed he went with Barb O’Non, but it may well have been with Leslie Thomas). He’d also taken a pleasure trip to Zurich and Italy, to which he’d added an expensive three-day stay in New York City, treating the girls to Broadway shows and dinners. And then he paid for a “pricey family reunion” at the Albedor, a seventeen-thousand-square-foot historic vacation rental home with fourteen bedrooms in the Adirondacks.

  Furthermore, she wrote, he leased a new BMW for Katie, who was a sophomore, treated his dad and brothers to a week of fun at the Hassayampa Golf Club and took the girls on numerous shopping trips in Phoenix. Steve was also buying himself all kinds of expensive athletic equipment, clothing and accessories. And he’d withdrawn so much cash in October that he’d pushed up the minimum payment on one credit card from $570 to $900 a month, only a month after driving up the interest rate from 9.29 percent to 24.24 percent.

  All of this sounds like the wonderful, richly blessed, privileged lifestyle that would naturally accrue to a man who makes the income you have made for the past seven or eight years, she wrote. You should be entitled to do all of these things—because you have earned it and you can.

  Nonetheless, she wrote, all of this “financial irresponsibility” would not exempt him from a reasonable settlement for spousal maintenance.

  Due to a confluence of factors, the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression began to hit the United States in mid-2007, resulting in huge stock market losses that led to the Great Recession, all of which significantly decreased Steve’s income.

  And yet, in the last two months of 2007, when Steve was borrowing $20,000 a month from his father to “pay bills,” he was still frequenting the same upscale hotels and resorts he loved and still spending $2,444 at a time to play golf.

  One of Steve’s favorite self-indulgences was to stay at the exclusive Phoenician resort in Phoenix, where he spent more than $1,250 in the first two weeks of December 1, 2007. He also enjoyed the Westin chain of resorts, where he spent an additional $787 later that month. In January 2008, he spent $4,465 more at a Westin resort and spa, and hundreds more on dinners at Olive & Ivy in Scottsdale.

  “He did that as a routine,” said Mike Sechez, the prosecution investigator. “His wife was never there.” Steve also didn’t keep his fancy hotel stays to just Arizona. He was flying around the country “just to have sex with women.”

  “He was one sick customer. He was trying to win the girls away, to get Carol, that way,” Joanne Frerking said. “Then it got ugly. They were going through arbitration, to try to save money . . . but did he stop spending? No.”

  All this time Carol was having problems making ends meet. She worked several jobs, but she was still struggling even with the “temporary support” Steve sent her before the divorce was finalized. She started the counseling gig at Pia’s Place in late February 2008, and she worked Fridays in the print lab at Yavapai College.

  “She knew she was in a very bad financial situation and he wasn’t giving,” Joanne said. “It was just getting so ugly and so awful, it was taking her down too, and Charlotte was sort of turning against her.”

  On November 19, 2007, Carol texted Steve that she was overwhelmed by the $500,000 of debt she was supposed to pay off, and also by knowing that she couldn’t make a living with her current work situation. And you don’t think it’s reasonable to help me for even as many years as you were having affairs and lying to me about it, she wrote. She added that she needed to stop arguing with him about this, because it was harming both of them.

  But those arguments only escalated. On February 25, 2008, Steve complained that he was out of money, and he blamed her. The sand has run out, Carol, he said in an email. Wake up. . . . At this point we’re here because of you. You alone.

  Noting that he’d borrowed $40,000 from his father in November and December, he said he was awaiting a tax refund check in April, but until then, all I have is whatever I can borrow. And yet, even when he was allegedly so cash strapped, he still spent at least two nights that month at the Phoenician, at $493 and $506 a night.

  In March and May 2008, Steve borrowed an additional $20,000 from his father, continuing to complain that Carol was coming out of the deal better than he was. I will not be pushed any further, Carol, he wrote on June 14, 2008, still fighting even after the divorce agreement had been finalized. You have extracted all you will extract from me.

  He claimed that his financial state was far worse than hers, because she got “to start clean,” living off a settlement based on his best income year ever in 2007, while he tried to “dig out of a staggering hole” and pay $400,000 to send their daughters to college.

  Steve’s trading performance at UBS reached more than $1 million that year, ranking at the highest or second-highest level among his fellow brokers, who earned, on average, $700,000 or $800,000 in commissions that year.

  But Steve’s gripes rang empty in the face of his continued hypocritical overspending. Although his income dropped significantly in the months of 2008 before Carol’s murder, Steve still spent $13,740 on stays at resort hotels, and $3,200 more in the subsequent four months. Between November 2007 and September 2008, he spent $9,4
40 on golf alone, as he fell deeper and deeper into debt.

  CHAPTER 26

  The last time Carol saw her mother was Thanksgiving in 2007, when Ruth flew up to Prescott and stayed in the guesthouse. They drove out to Sedona for the day, where they had lunch and visited a little chapel together.

  Carol took photos all day—handing over her camera at one point to someone they met on a trail to capture mother and daughter. She later sent Ruth an entire photo album of their adventure, which Ruth still cherishes today.

  “[We] had a wonderful day together,” she said.

  They had five for Thanksgiving dinner that year at Bridle Path, including Charlotte, Katie and her boyfriend.

  During the visit Carol told her mother that Steve had been in the house when she wasn’t there, even though he didn’t have a key.

  “I’ll show you how he comes in,” she told Ruth as she led her to the back room that had been Charlotte’s bedroom, which Carol was just starting to use as her office. At the time the room was bare, with nothing but a bookcase, computer and chair.

  Carol pointed to the window, where she said Steve had been climbing in. “He’s never taken anything,” she said.

  “You can put a stick in that window and he wouldn’t be able to open it,” Ruth suggested.

  But to the best of Ruth’s knowledge, her daughter never took her advice. “I don’t think she thought that he was ever capable of doing something like that,” she said in 2014, referring to Carol’s murder.

  Based on her conversations with Carol in her last months, Ruth could see that her daughter was terribly anxious about her finances.

  “She was not making enough money to keep that house up, even though she was working full-time,” she said.