Then No One Can Have Her Read online

  Schmidt ultimately determined that Steve had made up both stories from the voice and in the e-mail.

  In late May 2010, the state filed a motion to preclude the defense from being able to use the anonymous e-mail as evidence. The defense argued to keep it in, saying, “There are inherent details inside this e-mail that even the investigator conceded that the person had some familiarity with the inside of the victim’s home beyond what was available in the public record. There are aspects of the allegations in this e-mail that are consistent with our investigation of the physical injuries suffered by Carol Kennedy.”

  During a hearing on June 3, prosecutor Joe Butner argued that the e-mail was “clearly a hearsay document,” and they still couldn’t prove who sent it.

  “We investigated Mr. DeMocker’s statements of how it may have originated from somebody in the jail that he had conversation with through the jail vents. We were never able to find out that kind of information or validate this e-mail from any source,” Butner said.

  Asked by the judge how he planned to handle this in court, Sears said he would call prosecution investigator Randy Schmidt to testify about his fifteen-page investigative report, which had traced the e-mail to an Internet café in Phoenix. Butner rightly noted that no one could be cross-examined about the e-mail, though, because they only knew where and when it was sent, not the identity of its author or the truth of its contents.

  The judge denied the state’s motion.

  Riled up, Schmidt and his fellow investigators got back to work, and submitted a supplemental investigative report on September 3, pointing to Steve, Charlotte and Renee as conspirators in sending what amounted to a fraudulent anonymous e-mail.

  The sheriff’s office, which was doing its own investigation, sent the anonymous e-mails, along with Schmidt’s investigative report, to the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU) in Quantico.

  Overall, the FBI BAU team indicated that the anonymous email was nonsense and was created specifically to remove suspicion from Steven DeMocker and not direct investigators to the ‘real’ killers, Schmidt later wrote.

  FBI analysts noted that the e-mail described the crime scene staging in a way that was inconsistent with a “hit man” scenario. The analysts noted that killers would only stage a scene if they had ties to the victim, not if they were total strangers. Specifically, the analysts deemed it implausible that a hit team of two men and one woman would come to a house without a weapon and use one they found there. They also didn’t believe that the e-mail was written by a male inmate, but rather a female family member or close friend of Steve’s, partly because the female member of the hit team was characterized as the heroine. Furthermore, if Jim Knapp was the implied target of this hit team, why kill Carol and leave without killing Jim? This scenario was not only implausible, they said, it was absurd, noting that the fact Carol and Jim drank wine together at night was never publicized.

  After gathering all of this information, Schmidt concluded it was either Katie, Charlotte or Renee who had sent the e-mail. He compared the two e-mails sent to John Sears with those Charlotte had sent her mother. And after determining that the second anonymous e-mail was similar in style to the short e-mails Charlotte had sent to Carol just before the murder—starting sentences with lower-case letters and running sentences together, using commas to separate the phrases—Schmidt determined that she was the most likely author.

  Around this same time Renee’s minister friend Dan Spencer, with whom she’d been discussing her feelings for months, gave investigator Mike Sechez a copy of the notes that Renee had taken from the scribblings Steve had held up to the glass at the jail. The minister also told Sechez that Renee was getting ready to break up with Steve and wanted to tell the truth.

  Sechez was skeptical, describing Renee as “a pure follower” and Steve’s puppet. Up until this point he and other investigators had interviewed Renee several times, but she’d never been willing to say anything that truly incriminated Steve.

  Sechez put a packet together with all the evidence investigators had gathered, pointing to Charlotte as the e-mail’s author and to Renee as a willing participant, and gave it to Renee’s attorney, John Napper, on Thursday, September 16, 2010.

  In court that same day, sheriff ’s Detective Roger Hoover was on the stand testifying about the various text messages investigators had collected. The jury was excused in the early afternoon to allow the lawyers to argue the admissibility of some other e-mails, and was then dismissed at three-forty while the court dealt with possible juror-misconduct issues that were not publicly disclosed.

  Tensions between the lawyers and Judge Darrow were so high that day that the judge actually “stood up, stormed off the bench and went into his chambers, leaving all of us just sitting, staring at each other,” defense investigator Rich Robertson recalled. “He came back to the bench twenty minutes later and was still hot, lashing out at all parties.”

  Those tensions spilled over into discussions the next day, when the jury was not present. The panel wasn’t called back until the following week, not knowing that all hell had broken loose behind the scenes.

  Now that the prosecution’s investigators had figured out who was behind the anonymous e-mail, Renee was finally ready to talk. Facing criminal charges for conspiracy and tampering with evidence if she didn’t, Renee agreed to testify as long as she received immunity against any charges.

  The prosecution team quickly arranged an interview for that Sunday afternoon, September 19, where Renee came clean about the origins of the anonymous e-mail. Ultimately, Renee’s immunity agreement was extended to three issues: one for the getaway bag, one for the insurance money transfers and one for the e-mail. Renee said she had only one more jail-recorded conversation with Steve after this interview.

  Asked about attorney John Sears’s knowledge of how this e-mail came to be sent to him, Renee said, “My belief has always been that John Sears did not know about this e-mail, about who authored it or who sent it.”

  Once Renee had revealed these details, the prosecution team arranged for Charlotte to be interviewed on September 25, telling her attorney that Renee had talked, and they now had proof that Charlotte had sent the e-mail. They offered to give her immunity from charges as well, if she would tell the truth about what had happened.

  “She was a victim of her dad, too,” Mike Sechez said. “We didn’t want to hurt her. We just wanted the truth. She’s just a young kid, manipulated by her dad.”

  Charlotte’s attorney, Chris Dupont, called the day before the interview to cancel it, saying that based on his advice, his client refused to be questioned. Eventually, though, she had to accept the immunity agreement and agree to testify about the e-mail or face criminal fraud charges.

  As it turned out, Detective Hoover was the last witness to testify in this trial. When the jury came back on September 21 and 28, it was dismissed once again as the parties continued to assess the situation behind the scenes.

  Although Renee said she’d never discussed this matter with anyone else, Reverend Dan Spencer told the prosecution team that she’d confessed the whole story to him several months earlier.

  In his view Renee didn’t “buckle” because of pressure from the prosecution. “Renee was conflicted from day one, and this is something the detectives never understood,” he said.

  She felt a lot of shame and regret about being involved and complicit in the creation and distribution of the anonymous e-mail, he said. She’d felt torn about what to do because she was taking care of Charlotte, who thought her father was innocent, and yet Renee was also worried what might happen to Charlotte if she followed her father’s wishes.

  “She didn’t want to be the first and last woman to say no to Steve,” the minister said, “but she was burdened with it, and I knew that she didn’t like not being able to cooperate and be more forthcoming about how she felt.”

  As soon as Renee delivered her confession bombshell, she effectively stopped the trial in its tracks. And
once word of this got out, the wheels came off the defense’s case.

  “It resulted in the attorneys and the legal team trying to figure out what the implication of all that was, and that was not an easy process,” defense investigator Rich Robertson said.

  His reaction? “I was clearly disappointed in everybody that was involved” in sending that e-mail, he said.

  This series of events set off a flurry of phone calls and meetings, resulting in a superseding grand jury indictment, a whole new conflict-of-interest situation for the defense and a new set of charges being filed against Steve on September 29. In addition to the original first-degree murder and burglary counts, the state added one count of tampering with physical evidence, two of forgery, two of fraudulent schemes and artifices, one of fraudulent schemes and practices, one of conspiracy and one of contributing to the delinquency of a minor.

  Yet another indictment, with ten charges against Steve DeMocker, was issued on December 10, 2010. Steve pleaded not guilty and was held on a $2 million bond.

  During this time Steve’s defense attorneys petitioned the court to withdraw from the case, citing a conflict of interest. This move, which the prosecution opposed in filings under seal, sparked what investigator Rich Robertson described as a “weird transition period.”

  Not only had the defense team been placed in an immediate ethical quandary over the e-mail and voice-in-the-vent story, but the team still faced the threat of a future criminal investigation into the insurance money transaction that had paid Steve’s legal costs.

  “I suspect the team could have weathered one or the other of those,” Robertson said, “but the cumulative effects made this extremely difficult for the team going forward.”

  None of this was made public until some court filings were unsealed later and County Attorney Sheila Polk testified in another matter related to this case in 2013.

  Polk testified that she’d contacted the state bar association twice, “seeking guidance,” when she felt she needed to report possible criminal conduct and ethics violations by attorney John Sears concerning the insurance money transfer.

  “I believe that there was a conflict” by Sears, she testified, adding that she also believed that he’d lied in his opening statement when he indicated that the insurance money was paid out, but not in a way that benefited Steve, when it had, in fact, paid off his defense attorneys.

  Polk said she filed a bar complaint “as information was emerging about additional criminal conduct committed by the defendant and the role of Mr. Sears in facilitating, aiding and abetting the conduct.” She denied filing the complaint because she was in the “heat of the battle,” saying rather that she felt obligated to file it.

  The bar investigation was stayed until the DeMocker case was resolved in court, after which Sears was cleared of Polk’s allegations by the State Bar of Arizona.

  The trial stalled in 2010 because the defense attorneys believed they couldn’t continue to represent Steve until the courts decided whether they “could or should continue with this case” after the anonymous e-mail’s origins were revealed, Robertson said. This paralysis finally stopped the trial altogether, because Judge Darrow, mired in pleadings and motions, “kind of threw up his hands and said, ‘We can’t do anything more.’”

  Defense attorneys’ interests need to be in line with the defendant’s and when those interests conflict, “then the attorneys need to withdraw,” Robertson said. “That can happen when the client, the defendant, isn’t forthright about things, or creates a situation where the attorneys have to defend themselves rather than their client.”

  Sears declined to comment on these matters or on the DeMocker case in general for this book, saying this was his usual practice, but Steve also didn’t give him permission to do so.

  The bottom line is this: At the end of the conflict-of-interest skirmish over the anonymous e-mail, which went all the way to the state supreme court in filings under seal, the defense team was allowed to withdraw from the case.

  In December 2014, the county attorney’s office refused to comment on whether any investigation was still pending against Sears. However, no charges had been filed against him or any other member of the defense team as of that date. A knowledgeable source said the U.S. Attorney’s Office had looked at the state’s allegations against the defense attorneys, and Sears in particular, and declined to prosecute.

  Although defense investigator Rich Robertson denied doing anything wrong in the ethical mess of the anonymous e-mail and voice story, he was sucked in by implication.

  In September 2007, a man and his girlfriend were attacked in his home in Williamson Valley, bound with duct tape and robbed of money, a laptop and video games. The man, who was hit in the head with a crowbar, was seriously injured but recovered.

  Prosecutors viewed it as no coincidence that Robertson had requested a copy of the sheriff’s investigative report about the incident, and three months later, Steve DeMocker came up with his voice-in-the-vent story.

  “It’s like a blueprint for the voice in the vent and the anonymous e-mail,” prosecutor Jeff Paupore said in early 2014, recalling the chain of events before being appointed to the bench later that year.

  This inference became the basis for a defense motion for a mistrial during the second trial, which the judge denied.

  Robertson characterized this imbroglio as another example of the prosecution twisting the facts around to match its wild speculative theories, because he never gave the report to Steve. “There was no reason to,” he said, although he acknowledged that he did tell Steve about the incident and it also came up during the trial in 2010.

  Robertson said he asked for an investigative report on this incident in the Hootenanny Holler neighborhood as part of his own investigation into similar home-invasion crimes in the Williamson Valley area.

  The assault victim “was hit in the head with a blunt-force object and left there,” he said. “Our point there was . . . whether [the sheriff’s detectives] knew where that guy wound up, and where did the guy who was attacked go, because they never arrested anyone.”

  What infuriated Robertson was that prosecutors left the jury with the inference that he provided the report to Steve “so he could then come up with this information. After I raised hell about it, they came back after a break and said, ‘We aren’t saying they had anything to do with this, but Steve somehow ended up with this report and used it as the blueprint for the voice-in-the-vent story.’ It’s absolute bullshit.”

  Sadly, he said, all of this just hurt the case, and was used against Steve to show that he’d lied about the e-mail.

  “Ultimately, it probably was true that people would believe that if he was willing to lie about that, then maybe he’s lying about not committing the murder,” he said. But, he added, “those things are not mutually exclusive.”

  Even though Robertson acknowledged that Steve’s actions were “not appropriate” and were “not something that we can tolerate, frankly, in the criminal justice system,” he said people should consider the context in which they occurred.

  “He was facing the death penalty at that time and he was in fear of his life, and I guess people sort of need to look at themselves and say, ‘What would [I] do to save [myself]?’ Just because he did something in a panic doesn’t mean that he killed Carol.”

  CHAPTER 40

  In late October, the Yavapai County Public Defender’s Office, which had a conflict in this case, had to find a new defense team to represent Steve, because he’d been declared indigent.

  Although this was no longer a death penalty case, it was still a very complex one, so Steve was allowed to have two taxpayer-subsidized lawyers. Craig Williams, a private attorney in Prescott who was the former chief public defender of La Paz County, and was on the county’s list of eligible contract attorneys, was designated lead counsel on October 28.

  When no other local attorney would agree to be second chair, the public defender had to go outside the county to f
ind Greg Parzych, who worked for the Maricopa County Office of the Legal Defender in Phoenix.

  Williams and Parzych did not ask Judge Darrow for a mistrial, but they did say they would need months to get up to speed on the case before they could move forward.

  Rich Robertson, who stayed on the team as investigator, now served as the fount of institutional knowledge. His first briefing about the already massive and complicated case—a PowerPoint presentation with photos—lasted eight hours.

  That same month Steve was placed in a single “administrative segregation” cell, which spanned seven by eleven feet, at the county jail in Camp Verde. Otherwise known as solitary confinement, that meant Steve was kept in his cell for 23.5 hours a day, with just thirty minutes to shower, exercise or call his family.

  According to defense court filings, jail officials said they placed Steve there for his own safety after an inmate reported that Steve was involved in the ordering of a “beat down” of that inmate.

  Attorney Craig Williams maintained that this inmate was not credible, and that the inmate’s report about Steve’s participation in the fight “was simply NOT true.”

  In a motion to modify Steve’s conditions, Williams contended that the defense had interviewed nine of the jurors after the mistrial was declared. Five of them told Rich Robertson that they had been “leaning toward an acquittal,” three toward a conviction and one undecided. This was before the state had finished presenting its case and before the defense had even started, but Robertson said the defense took that to mean that the first jury was headed toward a “possible acquittal or, at worst, a hung jury.”