Then No One Can Have Her Read online

Rhodes brought the interview back to the golf sock. When the detectives came back, he said, “Why would you have taken the sock at that point?”

  “I didn’t take the sock.”

  “No, no, I mean—”

  “I never touched it.”

  “You moved it off the shelf.”

  “I never moved it off the shelf. I haven’t touched that thing. I told you, I have an explanation. I’ve given it to my attorney.”

  From there Rhodes honed in on the books that Steve ordered on Amazon, about “basically hiding your identity and covering your tracks and that kind of stuff.”

  “How to live abroad,” McDormett chimed in.

  “Right. Stupid fear-based stuff,” Steve said. “My brother—”

  “Your brother suggested it?”

  “I don’t want to get him in trouble,” Steve said. “If you guys arrest me, I’m going to face this down in trial. I’m not going anywhere.”

  Rhodes said they needed to take him back to Prescott and ask him more questions. If he wanted to talk to his lawyer, that was fine, but he would be in custody until they got their questions answered.

  “Am I under arrest?”

  “Right now you’re in investigative detention.”

  “We’ve got serious questions about that night and about your involvement in your ex-wife’s murder, and if they don’t get resolved, you definitely could be facing charges.”

  They drove Steve back to Prescott in the passenger seat of the cruiser without handcuffs. He was placed in an interview room at the Yavapai County Jail, but after his attorney told detectives that Steve didn’t want to talk to them, they booked him on felony charges of first-degree homicide and burglary.

  That same day the investigators served search warrants at Steve’s office and condo, his storage facility in Prescott, Katie’s apartment in Scottsdale, where he stayed sometimes, and for his rental car. They were looking for the books he ordered on Amazon and the golf club head cover.

  During the searches they found a book, How to Be Invisible, some e-mails between Steve and Barb, as well as his handwritten notes about a pro-and-con competition involving Carol and Barb. On the last page he’d written, games, sets, match, tournament, and listed Barb as the winner. When she learned of this competition from detectives, she described it as “frightening.”

  A couple of hours later, attorney John Sears turned over the golf club head cover to Detective Theresa Kennedy.

  Steve had taken the head cover to Sears’s office on July 5, where the attorney examined it for bloodstains or other biological evidence, then put it into his safe until he was specifically asked for it.

  Some in law enforcement, including then-Sheriff Steve Waugh, believed that Sears was wrong to do this, viewing it as evidence tampering and obstructing the investigation. Waugh filed a complaint against Sears with the State Bar of Arizona, alleging that Sears acted improperly.

  But the bar association, from which Sears had received a “pre-read” at the time on whether he was required to turn it over voluntarily, did not agree.

  “They told him to preserve it and if he was ever asked for it by law enforcement, he should produce it, which is exactly what he did,” defense investigator Rich Robertson said. “It was in a paper bag on a shelf with a note attached. It sat there until [the detectives] asked for it and he gave it to them.” That’s because a defendant has a Fifth Amendment right not to volunteer evidence that could be incriminating, he said.

  The bar counsel dismissed Waugh’s complaint, noting that Sears “safeguarded the item from damage, deterioration or destruction until the police agency obtained a more specific search warrant.” He noted that Sears did so based on advice from the bar’s ethics counsel and another criminal defense attorney.

  Later that day Detective McDormett, Sergeant Huante and Lieutenant Rhodes went to Steve’s condo to interview Charlotte again.

  Katie had just walked in the door after flying in from Los Angeles, where she was a senior at Occidental College, majoring in politics. In big-sister protective mode, she was not thrilled to see the officers through the peephole.

  The officers tried to persuade Charlotte to come outside to talk to them alone, but Renee and Katie would not allow it. Renee asked if the officers could come inside to talk to Charlotte, then went to call John Sears. That’s when Katie stepped in.

  Huante tried to assure them that neither Charlotte nor Katie was in trouble. “My motive is I want to find out what happened to your mom,” he said.

  “We all do,” Katie said.

  “Okay, but based on that I want you guys to tell me the truth. That’s all I’m asking.”

  “Have we given you some reason to believe we have not told you the truth?” Katie asked.

  “Yes,” Huante said. “You were asked a couple of questions and your answer was ‘I don’t feel comfortable answering that.’”

  “That was not lying to you,” Katie countered. She said it was a difficult night for all of them and she wanted to take care of her sister, who was upset. “Am I obligated to speak with you right now?”

  “No, ma’am,” Huante said.

  “Okay, then I think we’re going to do this another time.”

  “Yeah,” Charlotte agreed.

  “I really do appreciate everything that you’re doing, and I’m not trying to be difficult here, but I don’t think you understand what it is we’re going through,” Katie said.

  Huante pressed on, trying to engage Charlotte right in front of Katie. “When can I speak with you?” he asked.

  “That’s not up to her,” Katie snapped.

  Renee refused to talk to them as well, saying that she wanted to speak to a lawyer before doing so. “None of us are lying to you,” she said. “I know that you think we’re trying to cover for Steve, but even if Steve did this . . . he would never compromise himself by telling any of us.”

  Katie apologized for being short with them, but said she still had heard no reason why the interview needed to happen immediately, especially when she’d just finished telling them by phone that she would prefer to wait until the next day. Then she asked them to leave.

  Trying to soften the impression left by Huante’s confrontational approach, McDormett said, “Before I leave, you guys just have to understand we’re working for your mom. We’re not the enemy.”

  Katie said she wasn’t trying to prevent them from finding out what happened to her mother, but she was “a little bit insulted by you treating me like this.... It has nothing to do with wanting to hide anything about the investigation.”

  CHAPTER 30

  When Detectives McDormett and Brown interviewed Renee several days later, they assured her that Jim Knapp’s stories had no bearing on Steve’s arrest. In fact, they said, the stories made Jim seem “like an idiot.”

  “You would have to think we were the biggest fools on the face of the earth and the most unprofessional Mayberry RFD Department if we were basing our investigation and taking our lead from Jim Knapp,” McDormett said. “I would find that to be very insulting.”

  Asked about the “mysterious golf club head-cover story,” Renee explained that Steve was using her car because investigators had seized his, so hers was parked in his condo garage. The windows were down, she said, and Steve told her that the wind must have blown the golf sock off the shelf and into her backseat, where he found it.

  “Do you really believe that?” McDormett asked. “I mean, just seriously, do you really—”

  “Well, it’s . . . I think it’s a stretch,” she said, but “it was monsoon season. There was some wind.”

  McDormett reminded her that the garage door was shut when the detectives had left a few hours earlier. When they returned, they discovered that the shelves in the garage had been straightened and the head cover was missing. They had photos to prove that a dramatic cleanup had taken place between the first and second searches.

  “I’m still trying to figure out how a monsoon can straighten out three gara
ge shelves,” McDormett quipped.

  Asked about Steve’s books and his plan to flee, Renee said she and Steve started discussing his escape plan in the weeks after the murder, and it became a joke between them. She said she might consider leaving, too, if she’d been in the same situation, “facing something where the entire community thinks that I did it. He’s got this reputation that proceeds him, not being violent or a murderer, but being, at the very least, a dog.”

  Although Steve seemed to seriously consider leaving town, she said, he usually reversed himself, concluding, “I just can’t leave my girls. I won’t leave my girls. I have to stay here and fight this.”

  Hearing Renee rationalize Steve’s behavior, McDormett tried a more direct approach, explaining that the killer slammed Carol’s skull so hard it broke into fifty pieces.

  “I believe Steven DeMocker did this,” he said. “This is a crime of rage and I know that you guys see one side of Steve, but rage indicates some type of personal relationship. Can you definitively say in your heart that you know he didn’t do it?”

  “No,” Renee said, quickly adding, “I’m not saying that he did.”

  Asked if the girls would talk to the detectives, Renee explained that Katie and Charlotte viewed both of their parents as victims and that they saw investigators as “the enemy,” especially aggressive ones like Sergeant Huante.

  Steve was a master manipulator, and Renee stuck by him for many months after he went to jail, even after finding letters on his laptop that showed he’d cut and pasted the same poems and descriptions of his romantic feelings—the language altered slightly, depending on the recipient—into missives to the various women in his life.

  Based on the way Steve went back and forth between them, insisting that he loved each and every one of them, it is difficult for an objective observer to ascertain whether he was sincere in any or all of these emotions. But he apparently came across persuasively enough to keep them on the line.

  Renee showed the letters to her friend and Unitarian minister, Dan Spencer. “There’s a part of me that’s sympathetic to Steve,” Reverend Spencer said in 2014. “I can see a man who was genuinely torn about who to love, and it was the weird thing, because it was also an indication of his emotional deficit.... He looked at things very mathematically.”

  Reverend Spencer said he never really knew Steve, but from talking with Renee and reading some of his e-mails, Steve sounded like a genius. When he was trying to reconcile with Carol, for example, he was poetic and convincing. He knew how to be vulnerable, he pretended to take responsibility and he talked about being soul mates. He would also tell stories about people who had helped him.

  But the people who weren’t sexually involved with Steve weren’t as receptive to his antics. “People who knew Steve either liked him or didn’t, and there wasn’t a lot of gray,” Reverend Spencer said. They thought he was “creepy at best and a sociopath at worst in pretty much everything he did.”

  Fairly early on, he said, Renee “started to put two and two together that Steve was probably a sociopath, and there were obvious deception and honesty issues, . . . but she wanted to overlook it.”

  CHAPTER 31

  The day of Steve’s first court appearance on October 24, 2008, Deputy County Counsel Bill Hughes asked that Steve be held without bail at the request of Carol’s mother.

  “It’s the state’s intention to seek the death penalty in this matter,” Hughes told the judge magistrate.

  Because of the way Arizona’s laws concerning victims’ rights work, Hughes requested that Steve not be allowed to have any contact with his two daughters or Carol’s mother, unless they actively requested such contact, which would involve waiving their victims’ rights under the law. The girls were considered victims because their mother had been murdered, but they were also the daughters of the man accused of killing her.

  Steve’s attorney, John Sears, countered that Katie and Charlotte “by no means consider themselves victims,” but they would also not want a “no-contact order with their father.... I think they are very much in support of their father, love their father, and want to participate in this case.”

  So, to continue to have contact with their father, Charlotte and Katie had to waive their victims’ rights. As Detective Brown stated during his interview with Katie, the detectives, and now prosecutors, were concerned that it would compromise the case against their father if the girls were given information about the investigation.

  Feeling they were being shut out, the girls later regretted that decision. With the help of an attorney, Christopher Dupont, they requested that the state comply with their constitutional rights to meet and confer with the prosecutor.

  One of the first steps in being more actively involved was a request to be heard at a hearing concerning conditions for Steve’s release in November 2009. Dupont sent numerous letters and made calls to prosecutor Joe Butner, seeking a meeting to confer around that time, but Butner did not respond.

  It got even more surreal after that. Later, during jury selection as the trial neared, county victim advocates who watched Charlotte hug Ruth Kennedy in the courtroom took the girls aside afterward and told them the jurors couldn’t see them having contact with their own grandmother.

  The prosecution filed its official notice on November 20, 2008, that it intended to seek the death penalty. To help John Sears defend Steve against these more serious charges, Steve hired the firm of Osborn Maledon. His parents covered the legal bills, and attorneys Larry Hammond and Anne Chapman joined the defense team.

  After several judge changes, based on requests from attorneys on both sides, Judge Thomas Lindberg was appointed to the case.

  With a bail hearing set for December 23, the DeMocker family hoped that Steve would be released on bail for Christmas. Testimony continued over two days, during which Sears said the defense aimed to prove that someone other than Steve killed Carol.

  With three more hours of testimony to go by day’s end on Christmas Eve, Lindberg continued the hearing until January 13, and Steve spent his first Christmas behind bars.

  The hearing spilled into two more days in January 2009.

  Knowing that the national media had cameras and producers from 48 Hours and 20/20 in the courtroom, Steve was allowed to change out of his previous attire of orange jumpsuit and shackles. Instead, he sported a dark suit, with a pale yellow tie, and his graying hair in a spiffy new haircut.

  Sears filed a motion asking to send the case back to the grand jury for a new determination of probable cause, arguing that the prosecution had misstated and mischaracterized evidence. But Judge Lindberg would set bond only if he was persuaded that the case lacked enough evidence to exceed the standard of probable cause that Steve had killed his ex-wife.

  Prosecutor Mark Ainley laid out his theory: Steve was deeply in debt, and he wanted to save himself $576,000 in alimony over the next eight years. So he conducted incriminating computer searches on how to kill someone and get away with it.

  “Somebody using Mr. DeMocker’s computer was sure thinking about someone dying,” Ainley said.

  On July 2, he said, Steve took a bike ride over to Carol’s house. Wearing a backpack containing overalls and gloves, he laid in wait in the house while she was out running, surprised her while she was on the phone, then beat her to death with a golf club. Afterward, he burned his bloody clothing in a bonfire somewhere. When authorities confiscated his passport, he claimed he lost his old one in order to obtain a new one fraudulently as part of a plan to flee.

  Defense attorney John Sears countered that the computer searches were part of Steve’s research for a novel, explaining that one of the searches led to a link for a joke site that said one way to kill someone, but make it look like an accident, was to give the victim a cigarette.

  The shoe prints didn’t match any of Steve’s shoes, Sears argued, and investigators’ photos were not only of poor quality, but they also lacked a scale from which to judge size. The same bike treads d
etectives said were made from Steve’s tire could have been virtually anyone’s because the brand was so popular. Detectives failed to properly investigate Steve’s claim that he’d been riding his bike on another trail, which eliminated his ability to prove his alibi. And the ME had never said definitively that the murder weapon was a golf club.

  But most important, Sears said, was the fact that the prosecution did not present specific exculpatory evidence to the grand jury that a complete profile had been compiled for the unknown male DNA under the fingernails of Carol’s left hand, and it specifically ruled out Steve.

  “The inference to be drawn from that is a powerful one and clearly exculpatory, that there was a struggle with an unknown man who is not the defendant in this case,” he said. “If you had to pick one place in the entire crime scene where that presence of that unknown would be relevant, it’s under the fingernails of the victim,” Sears said.

  “The police put the blinders on twenty minutes into this case and they are still there today. This was a terribly bloody event,” he said, noting that investigators found no blood on Steve or anywhere at his condo.

  Although Steve prepared to flee because he feared being falsely accused and arrested, Sears noted that his client Steve never actually left town.

  Nonetheless, Ainley stood by his theory that Steve burned his overalls. He also offered an explanation for why the trail running shoes that detectives found in Steve’s closet didn’t match the shoe prints.

  “It’s not a real big leap that he probably got rid of the pair of shoes because it’s going to be covered with blood.”

  Issuing two separate rulings, Judge Lindberg determined that the prosecution did not meet the required legal threshold to bind the defendant over for trial. That standard, which is higher than probable cause, must establish that “proof is evident or the presumption great” that a defendant committed capital murder.