Then No One Can Have Her Read online

  Later, these last healing moments would seem so poignant and yet so bittersweet, exchanged just before a far more tumultuous storm—that no one saw coming—tore this family apart forever.

  Carol was a gentle, loving and openhearted soul, a devoted mother, a gifted teacher, therapist and artist, a role model and a mentor. Often described as lighting up a room with her benevolent life force, she was a spiritual being who emanated compassion. Carol taught courses such as “Yoga Psychology,” “Painting From the Heart,” and “Dream Work” for eleven years at Prescott College, where many students saw her as a guru who not only changed their lives, but also became a faithful friend.

  These days she was working as a therapist at Pia’s Place, an extended-care treatment facility run by women for women in the outskirts of downtown Prescott. Pia’s billed its services as “empowering” women in recovery, treating them also for depression, PTSD, sexual trauma, codependence, and love/sex addiction. The goal was to help them get in touch with the issues that had caused them to turn to drugs and booze.

  Although Carol had no personal problems with drugs or alcohol, she did have extensive counseling and life experience with love and sex addiction from which to draw. She’d met Steve, her charming, intelligent and athletic husband-to-be, in her late twenties after a short-lived, failed first marriage. Deeming each other a soul mate, they were married in 1982. But after a promising start, their marriage devolved into a bumpy roller-coaster ride of Steve’s multiplying affairs. In 2003, the couple separated and, reaching her limit, Carol finally filed for divorce in March 2007.

  As the oldest of nine children, Steve was also a mentor and role model, especially among his siblings. In his educated and accomplished family, Steve stood out for his ability and willingness to perform death-defying rescues—scaling a steep cliff to save one injured woman and flipping his own kayak to pull another woman out of churning white-water rapids.

  In 1995, he switched careers from academics to investment brokering, saying he wanted to continue to help people, just in a different way. The more money he made, however, the more friends he lost as he became more materialistic and manipulative, his personality, tastes and spending habits changing as his annual income shot up to $500,000.

  After Carol and Steve separated, the couple fought over who could and should spend what, how to divide their assets and sizable credit card debt. Nonetheless, Steve continued to spend and take out loans, even borrowing tens of thousands of dollars from his elderly parents to pay bills. As the battle grew more contentious and stressful for Carol, some of her friends worried she might take her own life.

  But now that the divorce papers had been signed and she had a new boyfriend—whom she was flying to Maine to visit in just a few days—Carol was doing much better. Finally feeling free of Steve’s hold over her, she was optimistic, as if she could really move on with her life.

  That relief was bolstered by the fact that she’d been tested recently and had managed to hang tough. Carol said as much in a call after work that Wednesday to her longtime friend Katherine Dean Warnett, who, coincidentally, was about to go through her own divorce the next morning.

  Carol said she’d declined Steve’s offer to drive together to see Katie off at the airport in Phoenix on Saturday, so they went separately, which made her feel even stronger. During a family dinner Steve and Carol took snapshots of each other with the girls. Then, as they were waving good-bye to Katie at the terminal, Steve put his hand on Carol’s shoulder.

  “For the first time in a really long time, I didn’t get totally creeped out,” Carol told Katherine on the phone as she was driving home Wednesday evening. “It was okay. It was just okay.”

  And then in the next sentence, Carol said, “Of course he had to ruin it. He asked if I wanted to meet him for coffee. We just got divorced. Why is he asking to have coffee?” But it wasn’t just that, she said. “He had the audacity to come over.”

  Carol said Steve came to the house to plead with her to get back together. Katherine could visualize Carol shaking her head as she said, “That he would have the audacity to even propose that we should start dating again and then get married—”

  “Whaaat?” Katherine asked, dumbfounded.

  “Yes, yes,” Carol said insistently. “And for him to think that I would actually do that.”

  In the past Carol had received some rather erratic push-pull e-mails from Steve, first accusing her of being a terrible mother and then expressing his love for her. More recently, Carol had told friends that Steve had broken into her house, that she was convinced he’d been hacking into her e-mails, and that she feared for her personal safety. And even though she still considered him the love of her life, she told a coworker at Pia’s that she’d refused his most recent offer to “forget this whole thing” and get back together.

  The sunshine returned that Wednesday, reaching a searing high of ninety-six degrees. A couple of hours before she left work, Carol and Steve exchanged texts about Katie’s BMW, which was parked in Carol’s garage: I need to come pick up the X3, he texted, asking when he could collect the keys.

  You may come out to pick up katies car this evening if ud like, Carol replied, adding that she assumed he had a spare key to get into the car, where Katie had left her set.

  As Carol and a coworker closed the Pia’s office around 4:30 P.M., her financial struggles were nagging at her. Although she’d agreed to the final settlement with Steve, she’d come to realize that the agreement would likely cost her the dream home she and her now–ex-husband had custom built. The home where they’d raised their girls together, the four of them sleeping in the same bed or at least in the same room, back in the days when their future had seemed more hopeful.

  Given the lopsided share of liabilities she’d inherited in the split, she realized she couldn’t afford the mortgage payments on her own, especially after Steve had taken out a second mortgage and equity line without her knowledge. The annual $24,000 she earned from her counseling, odd jobs and selling her artwork, just wasn’t enough. She still had to cover taxes on the chunk of money she’d gotten in the divorce, and pay off Steve’s credit card debts. Soon she would be completely underwater.

  While she was talking to Katherine on the drive home, Carol stopped at the animal hospital to buy special food for her two dogs. Ike, a Boston terrier, had urinary problems after being disemboweled by a wild boar, known as a javelina, and Daisy, a fluffy bichon frise that looked like a white teddy bear, kept throwing up. Carol also stopped at Safeway to buy some groceries for herself. A vegetarian for most of her life, she frequently ate salads for dinner.

  After pulling up to her sage-green house, she went inside and checked her e-mails from her home office, forwarding one to her tenant and close friend, Jim Knapp, who was living in the guesthouse out back. The two of them had known each other for years—from when their kids had gone to school together. For the past several months, they’d been supporting each other through their respective divorces, often sharing wine and conversation in the evenings before they went to their separate bedrooms.

  Next, Carol chatted briefly with her accountant about the horribly bad, upside-down deal she felt she’d gotten in the divorce. She’d been talking about reporting Steve to the IRS for tax fraud, and she was stressed from arguing with him over some loose ends, which she thought she might go back to court to tie up.

  Perhaps inspired by that conversation, Carol e-mailed Steve to dispute his claim that she owed him $8,300, refusing to give him a check so he could cover his $6,000 overdue alimony payment to her. Steve had suggested they trade checks that night.

  Your assertion and information here is inaccurate and incorrect, she wrote to Steve at 6:30 P.M.

  Done with that unpleasant bit of business, she put on a lavender tank top, blue shorts and a pair of running shoes and went on her usual half-hour, three-mile stint on the trails through the ranch land behind her house. During her run Carol usually left the side door unlocked, which led out to th
e backyard and down some steps to the garage, where she parked her car.

  As she was heading east on the trail, she bumped into two neighbors, Lila Farr and Marge Powell, on horseback. Carol stopped for five minutes to chat and pet Lila’s horse before heading on. It was warm that evening, not as warm as some days, but the horses, just like Carol, preferred to exercise when it was cooler.

  Back at the house, Carol texted Steve again, at 7:06 P.M., after seeing no response to her message about Katie’s car.

  You never replied to let me know if u were coming to get it, she texted.

  It was unlike Steve not to respond quickly. He always had his cell phone with him, and a spare battery or two as well.

  Carol switched gears and texted Charlotte at 7:12 P.M. How was ur day darlin? she wrote, asking Charlotte if she’d started her new job yet.

  Charlotte replied that she still had to finish training, but was set to start work the next day.

  At 7:36 P.M., Carol used her cordless landline to make her usual call to her eighty-three-year-old mother, Ruth Kennedy, in Nashville, Tennessee. Carol had checked in with her mother most every night since her father had died in March 2006. With the two-hour time difference, Carol always called before 8 P.M., her time, before she ate dinner and her mother went to bed. As she chatted with Ruth, Carol also texted Charlotte about the rain.

  “Mom, the dogs are fed and the doors are locked,” Carol told Ruth, proactively answering her mother’s usual questions.

  Ruth worried about her daughter, living in a relatively isolated area known as Williamson Valley, about half an hour’s drive from downtown Prescott. Carol’s mother found it odd that she never seemed concerned or scared about leaving her doors unlocked. To Ruth, locking doors always “seemed paramount to safety.” But when she questioned her daughter about it, Carol would say, “Oh, Mom.”

  Still, it wasn’t a complete nonissue. Carol did change the locks after filing for divorce; she also suspected that Steve had been climbing in through a back window. Steve’s name was still on the title, and he’d been paying the mortgage during the separation, but she gave spare keys only to her daughters.

  Ruth could hear the water running in the background as Carol washed her salad ingredients and they discussed the companies Carol could use to send Katie her belongings. Rather than pay for extra bags on the flight, Carol was going to pack some boxes, then ship the items to her daughter. In fact, just ten minutes before she’d called Ruth, she texted Steve to follow up on the DHL shipping information. But again, no response.

  The sun set at 7:46 P.M., as Carol told her mother that she and Steve were still arguing about money. Typically, Carol didn’t complain about her problems to Ruth, she usually tried to solve them on her own. But this time she seemed extremely worried.

  “You know, Mom, this is July second, and there’s been no [alimony] payment made into my account,” she said.

  Because Ruth stopped hearing the water running, she later wondered if her daughter might have walked with the cordless phone down the hallway near the laundry room, where she kept the dogs’ crates and food, and toward the back bedroom. Carol had been using that room as her office since Charlotte had moved out. Had Carol heard a noise?

  After Ike’s javelina incident he was still barking at wild animals—and strangers, when they came to the door. But as Ruth thought about it later, she didn’t recall hearing any barking in the background that night.

  “I suppose I will call my lawyer tomorrow,” Carol said, sighing. “Welllll,” she said, drawing out the word, as if she had run out of things to say.

  It was 7:59 P.M., when Ruth heard her daughter utter these last two words: “Oh, no.”

  Although Ruth reported to police that night that Carol had screamed these words, Ruth said later that she’d misspoken because she was anxious, and that she was referring to her own emotions. The tone Carol used, she said, was not one of fear but of surprise and dismay, as if she were saying, “Oh, no, not again.”

  Then there was no sound at all. Ruth didn’t hear the phone drop on the floor. Not even a click. Nothing but raw silence on the other end.

  Carol had never hung up on her mother before. She always said, “I love you, Mama,” and Ruth responded in kind before they hung up simultaneously.

  “Carol, are you okay?” Ruth asked. “What’s the matter?”

  But the line had gone dead.

  CHAPTER 2

  Carol’s number was programmed into Ruth’s phone, so she tried calling back several times, but the line just rang and rang. The answering machine didn’t pick up, either. Ruth knew something was wrong, but she felt helpless, being so far away. Still, she had to do something, try to reach someone, to find out what had happened.

  Ruth called Steve DeMocker’s condo and left a message on his answering machine, asking him to check on Carol. Charlotte heard the phone ring and looked at the caller ID, but she and her boyfriend were too busy playing video games to pick up, so she let it go to voice mail.

  After getting no answer on Steve’s landline, Ruth tried his cell phone. When the call went straight to voice mail, she left a message as her anxiety escalated.

  “Steve, this is Ruth Kennedy in Nashville. I was on the phone with Carol and she screamed and said, ‘Oh, no,’ and I can’t get her to answer me back. I—I wonder if you could see what . . . you can find out, and let me know something.”

  Ruth had chatted briefly by phone with Carol’s tenant, Jim Knapp, and thought she would try to reach him next, but directory assistance had no listing for him. She didn’t know that Jim shared Carol’s landline.

  By this point Ruth didn’t know what else to do but call the police for help. However, because Carol’s house was outside the jurisdiction of the Prescott Police Department (PPD), the dispatcher said Ruth needed to call the Yavapai County Sheriff ’s Office (YCSO) and gave her the number.

  “How can I help you?” the dispatcher said when Ruth called on the recorded emergency line at 8:14 P.M.

  Explaining that she was calling from Nashville, Ruth recounted what had happened during her aborted call with Carol. “Is there anything you can do? Can you go check?” she asked. “I’m just at my wit’s end.”

  “Now, did you call her, or did she call you and this occurred?” the dispatcher asked.

  “She called me tonight and we—she calls me every night because I’m eighty-three and she worries about me.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I haven’t been able to get her to answer the phone back. So I’m, you know, afraid that something bad’s happened.”

  “Who does your daughter live with?”

  “She’s recently divorced. She’s alone.”

  “Do you believe that there’s any reason that she would be concerned if her husband—ex-husband—came back?”

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” Ruth said. “I don’t think it’s that kind of a thing.”

  “All right, we will send somebody out to check on her. And we’ll have them give you a call.”

  Clearly anxious, Ruth encouraged the dispatcher to send someone out right away. “If you happen to get a hold of her and she is okay, could you call us back and let us know?”

  “I sure will.”

  Ruth then called Carol’s brother, John, who lived seven miles away in the town of Old Hickory, Tennessee. Although he and Carol weren’t close after high school, they’d been writing letters to each other and talking more often lately, every six weeks or so, in the past five years.

  Figuring they could get further if they both made calls, John and Ruth each kept trying Carol and Steve, leaving messages to call them as soon as possible. They tried the sheriff ’s office again as well.

  “The deputy in charge is not here” was the standard reply.

  They heard nothing that evening from Carol, and nothing from the sheriff ’s office as they sat, waiting and worrying. Why wasn’t she answering her phone?

  Something really bad has happened. I don’t know what, and I can’t do
anything about it, Ruth thought. I’m trying to do what I can, but it’s not enough.

  CHAPTER 3

  The call for a welfare check at Carol Kennedy’s house in the 7400 block of Bridle Path went out on the police radio just after her mother’s emergency call. The sheriff ’s deputies on duty heard Matthew Taintor get dispatched, and they also heard him arrive at the house thirty-eight minutes later, at 8:52 P.M.

  “They have a huge, huge area to cover. For a simple ‘check welfare,’ thirty-eight minutes is actually a decent [response] time,” said Mike Sechez, who retired as an investigator for the Yavapai County Attorney’s Office in 2014, after working this case for nearly five years.

  However, as defense attorney Craig Williams noted later, Deputy Taintor’s arrival was delayed because he’d pulled over a car in front of him, which was traveling the same direction on Williamson Valley Road toward Carol’s house, and ran a check on the two occupants’ driver’s licenses.

  In terms of square miles, Yavapai County spans about the same area as the state of Massachusetts, although Yavapai’s population of 211,000 is much more geographically dispersed across its vast expanses of open land. At one time the capital of the Arizona Territory, Prescott is now the county seat, with nearly forty thousand residents. Carol’s neighborhood, which is on the outskirts of town in an unincorporated area, is home to many horse owners.

  The week of July 4 has always been a hectic one for Prescott area residents, because every year since 1888, Prescott has spent this week hosting the “World’s Oldest Rodeo.” People come from all over to participate in these annual festivities, drawing nearly fifty thousand to this small town, where celebrations spill into the streets with water fights breaking out between giant squirt guns on trucks. The event in 2008 was even bigger than usual because it marked the volunteer organizing committee’s induction into the Pro Rodeo Hall of Fame in Colorado.

  “The whole vibe of the community changes from the sleepy town to just madness, total madness,” said Carol’s friend Katherine, who goes by her married name of Morris today. Katherine wondered whether Carol’s killer chose this particular weekend on purpose, knowing that it would be rife with the usual chaos on Whiskey Row, the line of bars across from the courthouse that gets “lit up with all kinds of gunslinging cowboys.”