Then No One Can Have Her Page 21

  Lindberg said the prosecution failed to tie Steve DeMocker to the murder scene with conclusive physical evidence, and it also didn’t prove that he had a financial motive to kill his ex-wife.

  Though the actions and statements of the defendant have properly given rise to suspicion, more is required, Lindberg wrote, setting bail at $2.5 million.

  The judge sent the case back to the grand jury for a rehearing, saying that the prosecution had presented misleading, incomplete, prejudicial and erroneous evidence—some of which was based on “unsolicited” opinion, not on fact—to the panel.

  He cited the prosecution’s failure to mention, for example, the exculpatory evidence of the unknown male DNA under Carol’s fingernails, and that other unknown male DNA was found on her cordless phone, on several unscrewed lightbulbs in the laundry room and on a door handle. (Exculpatory evidence meaning it wasn’t Steve’s DNA.)

  During the hearing Steve turned around from the defense table and smiled like the Cheshire cat at his family behind him in the gallery.

  But that brief victory didn’t last. After the prosecution presented the case to the grand jury a second time, the panel indicted Steve once again with the same two murder and burglary charges, in February 2009. Sears’s attempt to get a third grand jury look was rejected.

  Representatives from both sides of this case agree now that it was a mess from the start. The shortfalls in the prosecution’s case that the defense identified in the beginning were still being challenged by the defense in the years to come.

  The problem with Ainley’s theory about Steve wearing a biohazard suit and gloves, then burning them in the ranch land behind the house, is that “there’s absolutely no evidence that Steve ever purchased anything like that or of any burn pile of paper suits,” defense investigator Rich Robertson said recently.

  If writing a book on this case, Robertson said, his working titles would be Even the Smallest Things Can Attack or Tunnel Vision.

  The first title references testimony early in the case by Detective Steve Page, who, Robertson said, had minimal computer forensics training and was being mentored by the state DPS.

  As Page was testifying about Steve’s Internet searches, he mentioned one for “even the smallest things can attack.” Asked what that phrase meant to him, Page replied something to the effect that “Steve was being very careful to the smallest details in planning this murder.”

  But as Robertson pointed out later, this phrase was actually an innocent message from a decal on Steve’s car, which detectives photographed on July 8, 2008, well before this hearing. Based on a family catchphrase, Steve’s daughters had made the decal as a Father’s Day gift before Carol died, in memory of a childhood adventure at the tide pools. When Steve told Charlotte to pick up a little hermit crab, she replied, “Dad, even the smallest things can attack.”

  Robertson cited this as a prime example of the prosecution’s confirmatory bias toward evil intent, “because there’s so much of the story that they don’t know.” As a result, he said, they ended up with accusatory misinterpretations like this one, when there could be a “completely benign explanation.”

  In this case the defense was able to counterbalance this claim by showing Page the decal photo. But other prosecution theories came up later—such as numerous possible scenarios for how the unidentified male DNA #603 ended up under Carol’s fingernails—and may have influenced the jury, he said.

  If you interpret evidence wrong, “you get the story wrong, and that’s how people are wrongly convicted,” Robertson said in 2014.

  Carol’s friend Katherine Morris has since offered another theory for why none of Steve’s DNA was found at the house, and none of Carol’s blood was found on Steve’s person, clothing or car. She said she’s always felt this in her gut, out of instinct, not from any particular hard evidence, but from the lack of it.

  “He went and jumped in the lake and then got on his bike and went home,” she said in 2014, noting that Watson Lake and Granite Basin Lake are both very near the Bridle Path house.

  But she added, “I don’t believe there wasn’t DNA all over the crime scene. I think the sheriff’s department did a horrible job, and I think he took the murder weapon up to Colorado.”

  That remark stemmed from Steve’s call to Katherine just a few days after the murder, when he mentioned that he was in the car, driving to Colorado alone.

  “They took my passport, but they didn’t tell me I couldn’t leave the state,” he told her.

  He even made note of that trip during Carol’s memorial service. “I think it was his narcissism that made him do that,” Katherine said.

  It wasn’t until Renee’s interview with detectives in April 2010 that other details came out about Steve’s trip to Colorado. Renee said she’d gone with him, and because they were both stressed out, they had lots of sex. They also went to some of his favorite areas, such as Durango, and his favorite restaurants, such as Ken & Sue’s. It wasn’t clear if this was a separate trip from the one Katherine described.

  CHAPTER 32

  Six months after Carol was killed, another death and a twist of fate sent the murder case against Steve into an entirely new direction, although it took some time for the shift to play out.

  At eight-thirty on the night of January 7, 2009, Jim Knapp’s ex-wife called one of his closest friends, concerned. Ann Saxerud hadn’t seen or heard from Jim since Monday, a day and a half ago. He’d said he was going to a meeting in Phoenix before moving there to take care of some property, and would watch their boys on Tuesday if he got back in time.

  But, Ann told Sean Jeralds, Jim never called, so he missed a visit with his sons, which was totally uncharacteristic of him. He also hadn’t returned any of her subsequent calls or e-mails.

  “Okay,” Sean told her, “I’ll go check.”

  Sean was celebrating his birthday with his family that night, but after Ann’s call he immediately alerted Dave Roy, another close friend of Jim’s.

  “We’ve got to go over to Jim’s,” he said. “Ann hasn’t heard from him. We need to go check on him.”

  They agreed to meet at Jim’s place, a mutual friend’s condo in the 3000 block of Peaks View Court, where Dave had also lived for a time.

  When they arrived, the lights were off in the condo, but the front door was three-quarters ajar. Pieces of broken glass were scattered on the porch, the screen door had some small holes blown through it and the front window frame was damaged.

  “Jim!” Sean called out.

  No one answered.

  Entering the condo cautiously, Dave and Sean turned on a light in the living room and noticed that it looked messier than usual. That’s when Dave saw a small metal object on the floor among more glass shards.

  “There’s an empty [bullet] casing right there,” he said.

  “Jim!” Sean called out again.

  Still, no response.

  Taking a step around the love seat and turning the corner, Sean saw a second bullet casing on the floor and started backing away. The bedroom door was closed, and despite his training as an EMT and reserve firefighter, he didn’t want to investigate on his own.

  “Dave, we need to call 911,” Sean said.

  The two men headed outside. As they stood in the parking area, waiting for the police to show up, they called their good friend and coworker, Bill Thompson, to join them. The three of them stayed at the condo all night, talking to police.

  At first glance the scene was confusing, even for Prescott Police Department detectives, who always investigated death scenes as homicides to ensure they didn’t overlook evidence that could be important later. And this scene did seem suspicious, at least initially.

  For one, they found five bullet casings, four bullet holes and several live rounds, but only one spent bullet in the condo. And it wasn’t the one that killed Jim Knapp.

  When the officers entered the master bedroom, they found his dead body lying halfway into the closet, barefoot and shot in the ches
t. A semiautomatic nine-millimeter gun lay by his left hip, with a bullet casing next to his right foot, and a live round between his legs. Still wearing a gold ring on his finger, he wore a white T-shirt and brown pajama pants. His arms were folded at the elbow, hands up by his chest.

  The officers saw what looked like gunshot residue on Jim’s shirt around the wound, and also on his chest underneath, but they found no suicide note. And although that was not unusual, the state of the condo didn’t look like one might expect for someone who had just killed himself.

  “It was a unique scene, and it was something that we looked at very carefully,” Sergeant Clayton Heath said.

  In the living room the base of the phone rested on the coffee table, but the receiver was on the floor. An open briefcase containing paperwork rested nearby, with more papers fanned out in front of it.

  They found a bullet casing in the hallway just outside the master bedroom, and another one inside, between an unmade bed and a dresser. On top of the bed was a kitchen chair on its side, with a bullet hole through its seat. Tracing the bullet’s projectile, detectives determined that Jim had shot through the chair and the common wall between the master and spare bedroom, sending the bullet into a pillow on a child’s daybed.

  As soon as Sergeant Heath realized that Jim was connected to the DeMocker case, he called the sheriff’s office to come over.

  “I knew it was going to be a big deal,” Heath recalled in 2014. “It was a critical thing in my mind that they got in on the front end of that investigation so that they weren’t blindsided by something that we found, because I knew that the defense was going to latch onto that, regardless of what we found.”

  The detectives determined that the bullet holes in the front window, blinds and screen door had come from the inside, because the holes in the metal screen protruded outward. The front door showed no marks or bullet holes, indicating that it had been open, with the screen door pulled to, when the gun went off. Tracing the trajectory, investigators determined that the shots were fired from the hallway outside the master bedroom.

  Examining the area outside the condo, the detectives saw no signs that an intruder had entered the unit, and they found no bullets or casings outdoors.

  “There was like a breezeway out to the side of the building, and it was full of dead leaves,” Heath said. “It didn’t appear that anybody had walked through those. It was all pristine.”

  Later, Steve’s attorneys drew parallels between the “very clumsy and hurried” staging at the Bridle Path crime scene and the same type of staging at Jim Knapp’s condo six months later. The two scenes, attorney Craig Williams contended, couldn’t be viewed in a vacuum.

  “You have to say to yourself, ‘What was building up to this? How did this happen? ’” Williams stated rhetorically at trial.

  Because Jim couldn’t answer for himself, Steve’s defense team was able to argue later that Jim’s anger could have killed Carol and perhaps had gotten him killed, too. Although none of Jim’s friends, including his ex-wife, believed that theory, they could not deny that he had led a troubled life toward the end.

  Sean Jeralds, Dave Roy and Bill Thompson had all been swabbed for DNA by investigators in the DeMocker case as they tried to match—and rule out—subjects for the unidentified male DNA under Carol’s fingernails. All three of them had been at Carol’s house, helping her move some heavy items about a week and a half before her murder. Dave had also helped Jim move into the guesthouse and to carry a refrigerator over there from the garage.

  Although Jim shared his struggles with his divorce, custody and health issues with Carol during their nightly chats, it’s unclear how much she knew of his prescription drug use. But his ex, Ann Saxerud, reported that he’d been resisting drug testing, a requirement of their mediation agreement, for months.

  That agreement, dated October 23, 2007, noted that Jim hadn’t complied with this requirement. It also stated that he’d transported his and Ann’s son Alex in his car in May 2007 while under the influence, but there was “no evidence of a plan for addiction treatment/recovery.”

  As a result, Ann later testified, Jim was allowed to visit their boys at her house, but not to take them anywhere in his car, or to keep them overnight at his house, because “he was struggling with prescription drug overuse.”

  On January 8, 2008, shortly before he moved into the guesthouse, Ann filed a restraining order against Jim, claiming that he was harassing her by phone and making disturbing remarks.

  She cited a series of calls on January 7: Yelling & swearing on the phone, threatening litigation related to child custody—unable to reason with him, and a disturbing phone call stating ‘Goodbye’—unsure if this was a suicidal gesture or threat, reported to PPD, check welfare, followed by two prank calls to YRMC (where she worked) recorded on voicemail. . . . One of the calls was about me and sexual & vulgar. Another call that was difficult to interpret, saying ‘Ann Saxerud, Fear!’ . . . Late message left on my cell phone threatening no more cooperation & swearing with abusive language.

  Jim e-mailed Ann two days later, asking why she kept hanging up on him—Just because I used profanity and shared anger? Why did you lie about the incident to both Jay and the police?

  He explained that when he said “good-bye,” he simply meant that he wasn’t going to call her again that night, not because he was going to harm her or himself. And when police showed up at his door that night, he added, they were there to check on his welfare, not because they were worried about hers.

  In handwritten notes he listed the points he apparently planned to make at the upcoming hearing: Strike the restraining order, seems too adversarial.... I NEVER threatened her w/ violence, or implied it—I have never been “physical” with her ever—my understanding (from the clerk) was there had to be minimum 2 threats or acts of violence.

  Jim Knapp was the only one to show up at the hearing on the protective order, so he was successful in getting it dismissed.

  At first, Sean Jeralds was angry at his longtime friend. He wasn’t entirely surprised, but he also hadn’t seen Jim’s death coming. Jim had only recently asked for Sean’s and Dave’s help to move him to Phoenix, nearly two hours away from his kids, after the condo owner had told him to be out by mid-January. It was time.

  Sean and Jim had been friends for nearly twenty years, and roommates a couple of times. They lived together for nearly a year when Jim split up with Ann, after which Jim moved to Hawaii for a while.

  “He was having a bad time in Hawaii, and I thought, that’s when he was hitting rock bottom,” Sean recalled.

  Jim had gone to visit a friend there who arranged an interview for a university fund-raising development job. “He really kind of blew it, and, unbeknownst to us, had started taking a lot of prescription drugs, which kind of sent him over the edge,” relapsing after he’d been “clean and sober for decades,” Dave said.

  While in Hawaii, Jim tried to get into bamboo housing, but that was “a lot tougher than he anticipated,” Sean said. Jim was always coming up with moneymaking ideas, such as hurricane-worthy coastal housing, known as “airplane on a stick.”

  Knowing that Jim missed his sons, Sean could sense how bad his friend’s depression was getting. “Hey, you want to come back here?” he asked.

  Jim accepted his friend’s offer to move back in with him in Prescott. “I owe you my life, because I was getting ready to kill myself in Hawaii,” he said. “If I couldn’t come back and live here, I probably would have done that.”

  “Oh, Jimmy, you can’t even be thinking that,” Sean told him.

  Jim said he was experiencing a lot of pain, but the medications he took for it caused problems in their friendship. One time Jim had Alex over, went downstairs while he was cooking and forgot to turn off the stove. Another time he wrecked the garage door by trying to drive out while it was closed. Jim paid to fix the damage, but these incidents began to add up. Finally, after Jim left the stove on again and lit a bunch of candles, Sean wo
rried that his roommate was going to burn down the house, and told him that he had to leave.

  “Jim, you can’t stay here anymore,” he said. “I don’t trust you in any way.”

  Jim said he understood, moved into a third-story walk-up apartment, and things were better for a time. He seemed upbeat, happy and full of ideas.

  After meeting Suzanna Wilson online, he fell head over heels in love, and took her to Hawaii for what Sean called the “whole circle-of-life thing,” bringing her together with his love of the ocean. But that relationship went bad right around when Jim was diagnosed with a malignant melanoma mole on his cheek, which doctors had to surgically remove.

  After Jim moved into Carol’s guesthouse, he told Sean he loved living there, that it felt as though he and Carol were like an old married couple, just like he and Sean had been when they were roommates.

  The morning after Carol was murdered, Jim called Dave Roy, who was in Tucson with his wife: “He was just in tears, just completely torn up over what had occurred. It was the beginning of a real downhill slide for him, and part of a relapse, that he felt it was just the last straw.”

  Describing Jim as very complex, interesting, compassionate and full of life, Dave said, “Carol was that way, too. The two of them were cut very much from the same cloth, just great individuals, which is really part of some of the tragedy here.”

  Jim went downhill in the coming weeks and months. “Everything changed,” Sean said, noting that Jim took Carol’s murder “very, very hard. It was the deepest sadness I’d ever seen out of Jimmy. And it stayed, that sadness . . . It was from climbing a hill and smiling to just going to the deepest, darkest spot and staying there.”

  Deep in that emotional darkness, Jim became convinced that Steve had killed Carol, and now Steve was going to kill him. No matter how Sean tried to talk him out of it, Jim was convinced. He even went so far as to borrow a gun for protection—the gun that ultimately killed him.