Then No One Can Have Her Read online

  Although Katie later denied in her testimony that she made the transfer under duress, Renee told investigators that she didn’t see it that way. “There was some pressure, because had there not been pressure, she never would have released the money,” she said.

  The same day Katie resigned as trustee, she transferred $354,738 from her mother’s trust account to her own personal checking account. On August 27, she transferred $350,000 to her grandparents’ account at Pittsford Federal Credit Union in New York. And on August 28, Steve’s mother, Jan DeMocker, transferred $250,000 to Osborn Maledon in Phoenix and $100,000 to Sears’s office in Prescott.

  “So it’s all done?” Steve asked his mom on August 29.

  “It was done on Friday afternoon. It came through Thursday evening, same day Katie shipped it out,” Jan said. “I kept it overnight, hoping to get some interest. Dad and I had a discussion about using it for a vacation in Aruba. I called John to tell him it had arrived.”

  “Hang on to that information. You’ll need it again in mid-October for the second part.”

  “Yeah, we’ll have to do it again,” Jan said.

  Steve and his mother were referring to the second transfer of funds, due to Charlotte. He’d already set this transaction in motion by having Renee take over for Katie as the personal representative to Carol’s trust so Renee, also acting under a parental power of attorney for Charlotte, could move the money from the trust to Charlotte. As soon as Charlotte turned eighteen on October 11, she would make that second transfer of money to Steve’s parents, who would then send it to the defense team.

  Renee also acted as Steve’s spy and advocate in more personal matters, giving him a heads-up on September 15 that Katie had sent Charlotte a letter. As they discussed what the girls might be planning, Steve said they needed to make sure his daughters didn’t “try to take anything into their own hands that departs from the commitments that everyone has made.”

  “Uh-huh,” Renee agreed, noting that Charlotte was worried that she wouldn’t have enough money to buy a car once her BMW lease ran out.

  “Any initiatives outside of, you know, the existing, it’s been sort of this interlocking network of commitments, and they need to stick to those,” Steve said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Do your best and let me know how it goes,” he said.

  Just then Charlotte showed up, and Renee handed her the phone so Steve could explain his concerns directly. But when Steve tried to find out whether the letter had anything to do with some missing money, Charlotte said her car was running and she had to go to her Young Democrats meeting.

  “You know that we’re going to replace your car in other ways?” Steve asked rhetorically.

  “Yeah, I know,” she said. “Can we talk about this later?”

  “Well, we can . . . but this is something we have to straighten out,” Steve replied, grasping for control.

  When Renee got back on the phone, Steve reassured her that all of this movement of money was “proper and has been planned out by the attorneys. It’s just that we’re trying to make sure that nothing goes anywhere, that the right paper trail is occurring.”

  He said Charlotte’s role and “fulfillment of her part” would occur in about three weeks.

  When Renee said she felt “weird” that her name was on Carol’s trust account, he assured her that it was entirely appropriate because she had the power of attorney.

  “You are the current parent figure,” he said. He added that they shouldn’t talk about it any further on the recorded line, and directed her to discuss her concerns with John Sears.

  Instead, they talked about the other mechanics of his life, such as the size of his legal team, which now encompassed fourteen people all over the country. As such, he’d asked the jail commander for access to a private office at the jail, along with a laptop and an unmonitored phone line, so he could work up to ten hours a day consulting with his attorneys.

  But, he said, the commander just laughed, shook his head and said, “We’re not going to do any of that. We can’t. There’s just no way we can do that here for anybody.”

  Two months later, Steve set the second set of transfers into motion. “You feel like moving three hundred fifty thousand around today?” he asked Renee on October 19.

  “Sure, I think I can lift that,” she replied.

  “The trust matures today, but I assume you and John, or you and Chris [Kottke], or somebody is on it.”

  That same day Renee moved $350,000 from the trust account to Steve’s joint account with Charlotte. And on October 23, Charlotte transferred that money to her grandparents’ account in Pittsford, New York. Records indicate that Steve was the “ordering customer,” and Charlotte was listed as the “sender’s correspondent.”

  On October 27, Jan DeMocker signed a check payable to Osborn Maledon for $250,000. She also wrote a check to Sears the next day for $100,000.

  A timeline and analysis the prosecution compiled of transactions and Steve’s recorded phone conversations illustrated the familial friction, even with Charlotte, as Steve continued to try to spend every penny of Carol’s trust money on his defense.

  Concerning Steve’s conversation with Charlotte on November 14, the prosecution’s lead investigator Randy Schmidt wrote that Steve has learned that they owe John Sears an additional $20, 000 plus the $5, 000 that Katie shorted him. . . . SD tells Char that he is trying to round up all the surplus money from the Kennedy Trust fund so he can give it to Sears.... Char refuses to call Katie and tells SD that if he wants to talk to Katie about money, he should call her himself.

  “It was your money, too,” Steve told her.

  Char says that she never got a say in how the trust money was spent, and she won’t call Katie. SD accuses Char of getting pissy with him, Schmidt wrote.

  Marlene Appel, the prosecution’s expert and trust attorney, characterized the transactions like this:

  • Katie, as the PR/trustee, and Renee, as successor trustee, “breached their duties owed to the beneficiaries of Carol Kennedy’s trust.”

  • Attorney Chris Kottke appeared to have “disappeared on the records. To the extent that he knew or participated in the plan to divert the funds, he breached the professional and ethical duties he owed to his fiduciary client.”

  • Renee, as successor trustee, and also the agent under the parental power of attorney, “breached her duties as well,” for the same reasons as Katie.

  • The claim by Steve and his attorneys that “the trust funds belonged to Katie and Charlotte and they could do what they wanted with the monies” was a “misstatement of fact and of the law.” Those funds belonged to the estate and “were supposed to be administered by the trustee in accordance with the terms of the trust.” Furthermore, “It wouldn’t matter what crime Steven DeMocker was charged with or who his alleged victim was. Paying for his criminal defense was not, is not, and could never be a material purpose of Carol Kennedy’s trust.”

  • The pressure that was put upon these two young women was severe, Appel wrote. It would have been very difficult for most people to defy the combined pressure of Steven DeMocker, his attorneys, the probate attorney, Steven’s girlfriend and perhaps the grandparents. I believe these two young women were unduly influenced and matters were made worse by the fact that they had no one advising them who was not also working for or in the interests of Steven DeMocker.

  CHAPTER 34

  On the evening of May 19, 2009, Steve was reading on his cell bunk when he heard a man call to him through the air vent, which inmates sometimes used to communicate with each other. He didn’t know who it was, but he thought he recognized the voice from the dorm.

  “Your ex-wife was killed by two guys from Phoenix,” the voice said, instructing Steve to get something to write down the details he was about to impart.

  Standing on the toilet seat to get closer to the vent, Steve quickly scribbled down notes as the voice talked: Carol Kennedy and Jim Knapp regularly drank wine toge
ther in the evening, during which time Jim told her about his illegal drug dealings. These two guys showed up at the house and beat Carol to death with an axe handle because of Jim.

  At least that’s the account that Steve gave attorney John Sears, a tale that has since been dubbed “the voice-in-the-vent story.”

  When Steve met with Sears on May 22 to tell him this story, he handed over his four pages of handwritten notes from his conversation with the “voice.” Ever since he and Carol had lived in Vermont, he said, they’d kept a splitting-maul handle in their bedroom for protection because Carol didn’t want guns in the house. Carol had continued the practice even after they split up.

  Before the “voice” story, Steve said he’d heard a similar account about Jim and Carol’s murder from a friend in another jail dorm. That friend had heard the story from his cellmate and was asked to pass it on to an inmate in Steve’s dorm. The voice said he wasn’t allowed to relay the information to Steve until the original source had given him the okay.

  At this point Steve was in cell #1 in dorm N at the Camp Verde Jail. Of the fifteen cells in that dorm, only those in certain “pods”—two on the floor above, and two on the ground floor—were connected by air vents. Following that logic, Steve said he thought the voice had to be coming from cell #2, 8 or 9.

  On the evening of June 1, Steve called Renee, very intent on having her and Charlotte visit him the next day, saying he’d gotten some information from a fellow inmate. He’d already told Renee about the other inmate’s account of the killing some days or weeks earlier.

  Steve told Renee to bring Charlotte early so they could get into the first group of visitors. Hopefully, they would be able to visit in a private booth with doors they could close on either side of the glass, rather than one of the more open cubbyholes. He also said he wanted to speak to Charlotte alone first for a few minutes.

  As Renee and Charlotte were driving over the next morning, Steve called to confirm that his daughter had brought a piece of paper and a pencil, as he’d requested.

  They were, in fact, able to get a private booth. After waiting outside for a few minutes while Steve talked to Charlotte, Renee went in and saw that they both seemed upset.

  Sitting down, Renee looked up at the glass, where Steve was holding up a sheet of paper with tiny handwritten words for her to read. Without her glasses Renee couldn’t make out the print very well, and she was also worried that someone might walk by and see them, so she quickly skimmed the note to get the gist of it. While Renee was reading, Charlotte wrote down the note’s contents, as Steve had instructed.

  The gist was, essentially, that two guys and a woman in a prescription-drug ring had come to Carol’s house to “whack” her, because Jim Knapp was involved in illegal drug activities and had shared incriminating information with her.

  The note was not only confusing, but the story seemed suspicious, even fabricated, to Renee. When she’d finished reading it, Steve said he wanted to get this information out to the lawyers, where it “could make a difference,” but he knew they wouldn’t believe the story if it came from him or from the inmate who wouldn’t talk because he feared being labeled a “snitch.” What he needed, Steve said cryptically, was someone on the outside to write an e-mail and send it to the authorities, to John Sears and to the prosecution.

  “Have you told John about this?” Renee asked.

  “No,” Steve said.

  “Well, wouldn’t that be the person to tell?”

  Renee knew that Steve was really asking her and Charlotte to do this deed for him, a prospect that made her uncomfortable. She told herself she wasn’t going to have anything to do with sending the e-mail, and she could see that Charlotte was struggling with the notion as well.

  Still, although it sounded dangerous for Charlotte to do, Renee developed an intricate web of rationalization. She decided that she shouldn’t try to stop Charlotte from fulfilling her father’s request in case the story really was true, or, at the very least, if it would help create reasonable doubt in the case against him. He’d convinced Charlotte that the prosecution wouldn’t believe him if he tried to go to the authorities himself, because he was the only suspect they’d ever investigated. His goal was to get law enforcement to investigate a different suspect, specifically Jim Knapp. Steve was facing a possible death sentence, and Charlotte didn’t want to see her father put to death.

  “It felt to me like he was up to something. I had the same mixed feelings that I’ve had the whole way through, which is that my intuitive sense is telling me he made up the story,” Renee said later. “This other part of me wanted to believe that there was some hope, that there was some other answer out there that he wasn’t guilty, so I wanted to believe that he had gotten that story from someone else.”

  Although Renee later acknowledged her gut feeling that Steve had totally fabricated the voice story, she said he never admitted that to her.

  As Renee and Charlotte left the jail and drove back to the condo, the teenager was teary-eyed, partly because she thought she’d finally learned what had happened to her mother. Not surprisingly, she remained upset for the rest of the day.

  Confused, Renee read over the notes Charlotte had taken at the jail. Steve called Renee a couple of hours later to check on his daughter’s mood.

  “How does she seem to you—okay?”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  “All right. I just wanted to impress upon her that it’s necessary that this project really needs to be you and her.”

  “She’s fairly nervous about it,” Renee said.

  “Yeah, that’s why I just thought it would be best for you and her to have somebody else to talk to about this project.”

  He also told Charlotte not to talk to anyone else but Renee. “It really needs to be a project for you and Renee, and I wouldn’t even trouble Katie with it, and definitely not John [Sears] for right now,” he said.

  Steve called back a few hours later to check on Charlotte again. “Of course you know that all I can think about is the letter I wrote you and the questions in it,” he said. “Do you feel okay about this?”

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “Good, just checking. I don’t want to, you know, I was really hoping you’d feel okay about it.... It means a lot to me that the trust goes both ways. . . . I’m just asking you to trust my judgment.... Finally feels like there’s something we can do to fight back.”

  But Renee—and the investigators who later listened to these taped conversations—believed that neither she nor Charlotte was comfortable with doing what Steve had asked them to do, for which, at that point, there was no real plan to carry out.

  Initially Renee was resistant to go any further. “I’m not doing it and I don’t think you should do it,” she told Charlotte.

  Charlotte seemed to believe that her dad’s story was true, and wanted to do whatever she could to help him, even though the whole prospect terrified her. It soon became clear that Charlotte was the one who had to do the deed. She wanted her dad home, and she had her own car. Plus Renee didn’t think she could stop the teenager anyway.

  “She was sixteen at this time. Why not say to her, ‘No, you’re not doing that, and here’s why’?” Steve’s attorney asked Renee in 2011.

  “I wish I had,” Renee replied. “I wish I had been able to think more clearly and I had been a stronger guide at that time.... The fact is, I was in over my head with huge, unbelievable amounts of work that I was doing all by myself. Charlotte was being horrible at home, and, frankly, I thought I wanted her dad home, too. She needs her dad.”

  And because Renee believed that she couldn’t challenge Steve on a taped jail call, she said she also wished that she’d listened to her inner voice, which told her to talk to John Sears about the scheme.

  “But the bottom line is, people in Steve’s life don’t want to disappoint him,” she said. “He gets people to work for him.”

  The specifics of the plan to send the e-mail, which Steve said had to be
sent anonymously, developed in the coming days during more cryptic calls.

  On June 4, he told Charlotte that he wanted to make her more comfortable with the task at hand, so he’d been doing some research with a new cellmate. “There’s a bit of an expert in here,” he said. “He’s talking all about the technology of it.”

  Investigators later learned that an inmate who was serving time for identity theft, fraud and forgery had moved into Steve’s cell that day.

  As the plan came together, Charlotte and Renee discussed their reservations and how it would work. Charlotte visited the Prescott Public Library to find an Internet café where no one would know her, and from which she could safely send the e-mail. Renee assumed that meant a café in Phoenix or Scottsdale.

  Charlotte would take a temporary phone, only for emergencies, but leave her regular cell phone in Prescott, thereby preventing anyone from tracking her whereabouts later through triangulation of the signal from her phone as it pinged off the towers. She also would wear sunglasses to mask her face from any surveillance cameras, and avoid social interaction with anyone who might remember her.

  Charlotte and Renee visited Steve on June 9. Four days later, when Steve called his daughter, Charlotte told him, “I’ll do anything it takes.... Whatever you were talking before . . . I’ll do whatever you want.”

  “I want you to get the message real soon,” Steve said. “I sent it to you through Renee, and Renee left it at her house.”