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  When Deputy Taintor pulled into Carol’s driveway, the night sky was so dark he couldn’t see anything that wasn’t illuminated by the beam of his flashlight. No lights were on in the house, either, except for a tiny faint blue flashing light, which he assumed was the computer router.

  Approaching the front door, he knocked several times, but got no response other than the dogs barking inside. As he shined his flashlight through the front windows and doors, all he could see was darkness.

  As he walked around toward the rear of the house, he peered into the dining-room window. He could see the two small dogs now, which were looking back at him and yapping like crazy.

  Seeing a detached building in back, which he thought was a garage, he checked its front door and found it unlocked. Drawing his gun, he announced himself, then did a walk-though, realizing it was a guesthouse. No one home there, either.

  Returning to the main house, he checked the double French patio glass doors that led to the dining room, and found them unlocked as well. But not wanting to search the big house on his own, he continued walking around the perimeter, peering through windows. He saw nothing suspicious until he reached the last set of windows on the east side.

  That’s when he saw the woman inside—five feet eight inches tall, weighing 122 pounds, and lying with her feet toward him. Given the amount of blood pooled around her head, she appeared to be dead. Unsure whether the killer was still inside, waiting to jump him, Taintor didn’t feel safe going in alone with just a gun and a flashlight to protect him.

  As he retraced his steps to his patrol car, he heard the dispatcher checking on him over the radio. He also heard Sergeant Candice Acton requesting his location and saying she was heading his way.

  Taintor radioed in a “code four” to notify them that he was okay, then called Acton on her cell phone to report an apparent homicide, a pretty unusual crime in their picturesque little mountain town.

  Because homicides were so rare here, and the YCSO knew this was going to be a massive undertaking, it was all hands on deck. Investigators from the county attorney’s office, who were trained detectives, were called later that night to come to an early-morning briefing on the case.

  “It gets pretty intense and pretty chaotic at first, because there’s a million things to get done and you have to prioritize,” said Mike Sechez, the now-retired investigator, who left a detective’s job with the Phoenix Police Department to work in Prescott.

  The sheriff ’s deputies started to arrive at Bridle Path, one by one, Sergeant Acton being the first, at 9:10 P.M.

  As she and Taintor stood at the top of the driveway, waiting for their colleagues, a white Ford Ranger truck pulled up with a license plate that read STOKAGE. The driver, in his early fifties, introduced himself as Jim Knapp, and said he lived in Carol’s guesthouse.

  Asked if Carol had been home when he left earlier that day, Jim said no. She’d already left for work. “She should be home now,” he said. “I could call her and have her come out.”

  “No,” Acton said, choosing not to tell him about the woman’s body inside, given that they hadn’t entered the house yet to confirm her identity or condition. “What is your relationship with Carol Kennedy?”

  “Best friends,” Jim said, adding that they’d been commiserating as they’d both recently gone through nasty divorces; hers had only just been finalized.

  Acton asked Jim for his driver’s license, then ran his name through dispatch to see if he had any outstanding warrants. In the meantime Acton told him they didn’t know what was going on yet, and that he needed to stay in his truck and out of the crime scene.

  As other deputies began to arrive, they came up with a plan to determine if the killer was still on the property, then to enter the house. Deputy Mark Boan was assigned to stay with Jim and his truck.

  “What’s going on?” Jim asked.

  “We’re investigating a suspicious incident,” Boan replied.

  Understandably concerned and impatient, Jim ignored the sergeant’s instructions and took it upon himself to call Carol’s cell phone. He left her a message at 9:37 P.M., expressing concern for her welfare, saying something like, “Are you all right? The sheriff ’s office is here.” His tone indicated that he was concerned she wasn’t at home and might freak out if she pulled up to see all the police cars.

  While the other deputies went inside, Boan talked to Jim through his driver’s-side window, asking about his whereabouts earlier that day. Jim said he’d been at the Bridle Path house till about 1 or 2 P.M., when he went into town to meet with his sons, ages thirteen and eleven, at his ex-wife’s house.

  While his ex took their older son, Jay, to hockey practice, Jim stayed with Alex, their younger son, and watched a movie that he’d gotten at the Hastings Entertainment video store. Jim said he headed home once his ex-wife, Ann Saxerud, got back from practice around 8:30 or 8:45 P.M. On his way, he said, he stopped off at Safeway for some cherries and wine.

  Jim said he’d last seen Carol the night before, when she’d come to the guesthouse to say good night, around eight or nine o’clock. That morning she’d left him a sweet note on his truck window, which he retrieved from the vehicle to show investigators.

  Thinking of you all day, it said.

  Carol often left notes like this for him since he’d moved in about four or five months earlier, he said. The idea was to provide moral support to each other and for him to keep an eye out for her because she’d been living alone.

  “Carol has wanted a man on the property for years, ever since Steve, her husband, moved out,” Jim said, describing Steve “as a very sneaky, manipulative man.”

  “If anything happened to her, you should be looking at him.”

  The deputies cleared the guesthouse again, then proceeded on to the main house. As they stood on the back patio, the dogs continued to bark, jumping up and pawing the glass door. The glass patio door was unlocked, so the deputies entered the house there, walking into the dining room and kitchen as the dogs ran outside.

  Going from room to room, they approached Carol in the back bedroom, where she was lying facedown, her right arm under her body. To enter the room, they had to duck under a wooden ladder that was leaning against the wall above the doorway. A great deal of blood was spattered around the room, but it was primarily on and around the desk leg, and pooled around Carol’s head. A bookcase was toppled over next to her body. The side of the desk had blood on it as well, and someone had left a bloody smudge, maybe a handprint, on the beige carpet, where a bottle of stain remover was sitting nearby.

  Acton put on some gloves and checked Carol for a pulse, but found none. Her skin felt cool to the touch. Although she appeared to have been dead for a while, the deputies called for the paramedics. The ambulance crew arrived around 9:40 P.M., and assessed Carol’s condition to confirm that she’d passed away.

  When the paramedics left less than ten minutes later, it didn’t take long for Jim to figure out that something was seriously wrong.

  “Is she dead?” he asked Deputy Boan.

  “Yes,” said Boan, who had only just learned this fact himself.

  Jim, still sitting in his truck, broke down crying and remained visibly upset for quite some time.

  After this emotional scene, Boan’s superiors told him to record his conversation with Jim Knapp, going back over the same questions the deputy had asked earlier, to get the answers on tape. Boan put a small microcassette recorder into his shirt pocket, but as it rustled against the cloth it distorted the sound quality and the recording was later deemed “inaudible.”

  Once Jim recovered from the news and got out of his truck, Boan tried to casually look him over with a flashlight, searching for any injuries or sign of blood on his clothes, but saw none. He also peeked inside Jim’s truck and saw nothing overtly suspicious. Jim’s speech didn’t seem slurred; his eyes didn’t look bloodshot or watery, or his pupils dilated or constricted. Other than being very upset about the death of his best friend
, Jim didn’t seem impaired in any way.

  Later, when Boan was called to testify about that night, the defense asked him how Jim could have known enough about all the blood at the crime scene to describe it to a woman at Safeway the next day. Boan said he didn’t know. He didn’t talk to Jim about the blood, he said, nor did he recall Jim mentioning the bloody scene to him. They’d both been standing outside the house the entire time.

  Sheriff ’s Detective Doug Brown was at home brushing his teeth and getting ready for bed when he got a call from his supervisor, Sergeant Luis Huante, around 10 P.M., telling him to head over to the crime scene on Bridle Path.

  Brown had started working in the jails for the sheriff ’s department in 2001, then moved to patrol. He had only just transferred to the Prescott sheriff ’s station about ten days earlier, after a year and a half investigating child-related sex offenses for the Criminal Investigations Unit (CIU). This would be his first homicide investigation, of which he was about to become the case agent—without any homicide training.

  Brown was the first detective to arrive at the crime scene at 10:35 P.M. Walking through the house with Sergeant Huante he examined the position of Carol’s body, the ladder and the overturned bookcase, and the pattern of blood spattered around them.

  At first, Brown, Huante and Lieutenant Dave Rhodes thought Carol could have fallen off the ladder, injuring her head as a result. The cordless phone, on which she’d been speaking to her mother, lay on the carpet between the swivel desk chair and the north wall.

  But as they viewed the blood spatter pattern more closely, they realized pretty quickly that the killer had moved the bookshelf and ladder after the savage assault, staging the scene to look like an accident. The degree of trauma to Carol’s head, not to mention the dense collection of blood on the desk corner, was too severe to have come from a simple fall.

  The ladder was positioned with the rungs going the wrong way for her to have climbed it, and it had no fingerprints or blood on it, even though blood was spattered on the wall behind it. Blood had also dried on the bookshelf unit in a way that would have defied gravity if it had been at that angle during the attack.

  It wasn’t until they moved Carol into the body bag that Brown was able to see the trauma not only to the left side of her head, but to the right as well.

  “It was obvious, things that didn’t make sense,” Brown testified later. “So you’ve got the damage to her skull and then the [blood on the] desk. I thought at that time that, you know, she was slammed against the desk.”

  After checking the track lighting in the dark laundry room, they discovered that one of the bulbs was missing and three had been partially unscrewed. It seemed as if the killer wanted to keep Carol in the dark about his presence until he was ready to attack.

  CHAPTER 4

  After dating Charlotte DeMocker for six months, her boyfriend Jacob “Jake” Janusek moved in with her and her father the day before the murder—on Tuesday, July 1, 2008.

  Jake, who was also sixteen, had occasionally stayed the night with Charlotte at Steve’s condo at Alpine Meadows. And after Jake’s parents kicked him out, Steve agreed to let him stay there temporarily. Back in February, before Jim Knapp moved in at Bridle Path, Carol had also offered Jake the guesthouse.

  On Wednesday, July 2, Jake and Charlotte had lunch together, then stopped off at Safeway to pick up some cookies, which they delivered to Steve at his office in response to his plea for a sweet treat.

  Finished for the day at his investment broker job at UBS (formerly the United Bank of Switzerland) Financial Services in Prescott, Steve logged off his computer at 4:38 P.M. UBS was fanatical about having its employees log off—but not necessarily turn off—their computers before leaving the office, fearing that someone might break in and hack into the international system.

  Steve drove home from the office, which was about a half mile away, and used his remote control at 4:52 P.M. to open the gate to his condo complex, where Charlotte and Jake were hanging out.

  Dressed in his usual suit, Steve immediately changed into workout clothes, informing the teenagers that he was going to go for a long bike ride. Jake later told investigators that he thought Steve went on the loop trail around the nearby fitness center, where he often went running, followed by an upper-body workout with weights. They expected him to be gone a couple of hours.

  Steve left the condo just after five o’clock, and unbeknownst to Charlotte and Jake, he turned off his phone at 5:36 P.M.

  While he was gone, the teenagers played video games, then went for a swim at the fitness center pool around six o’clock, but they didn’t see Steve’s car there. As the sun was setting they came back to the condo to play more video games and wait for Steve to return so they could start dinner.

  In the meantime Charlotte texted with her mother about the rain, and let her grandmother’s subsequent call on the landline go to voice mail.

  When Steve still wasn’t home by dark, they started wondering where he was. Charlotte tried texting and calling him, but got no answer. She also tried calling his girlfriend, Renee Girard, to find out where he’d gone riding, however Renee was unsure. There was some confusion later about who said what, but Jake told investigators that Renee said she didn’t know whether Steve had gone to the Granite Basin Trail, the Granite Mountain Trail, or the trail by the fitness center, which was about six to eight miles long.

  Still waiting, Charlotte and Jake fell asleep, and woke up around 9:40 P.M.

  “Wow, your dad has been gone a really long time,” Jake said.

  Charlotte tried twice more to reach Steve on his cell, at 9:40 and 9:52 P.M., leaving him a voice mail. They tended to eat dinner later because of Steve’s summer evening workout schedule, but this seemed like a much longer workout than usual. He also had his phone with him virtually all the time, and it was unlike him to be out of reach for so many hours.

  By ten o’clock, the teenagers decided they were too hungry to wait any longer, so they drove to Safeway to buy ingredients for Chinese stir-fry. On the quick five-minute sprint over there, Jake thought he saw Steve’s car—a four-door silver BMW—as they stopped at an intersection.

  At 10:08 P.M., Steve DeMocker turned his phone back on. During the four and a half hours it had been off, he’d missed eleven calls and three text messages, but he never listened to the voice mails or responded to the texts. The forensic examiners who went through them later could tell that they were the first to hear the messages.

  Steve’s first call was to Charlotte, who was at the same Safeway where her mother and Jim Knapp had stopped in earlier—separately—that evening. Charlotte was captured on the store’s surveillance video, talking on her cell phone, presumably telling her father that she was buying food for dinner. He told her that he’d been on a bike ride, gotten a flat tire, and his cell phone had died. He was thinking of working out at the fitness center, which was about a half mile from the condo, but once he learned that she and Jake hadn’t eaten yet, he said he’d come home and join them.

  Within sixty seconds of the call to Charlotte, Steve used his remote control to enter the condo’s security gate at 10:09 P.M.

  A minute later he called Renee and proceeded to list all the reasons he couldn’t come over to her house. “I’m tired. I’m dehydrated. I just need a shower,” he said. “I just want to go home, get some food, and go to bed.”

  “Okay, great, go,” Renee said, feeling angry and annoyed that he was making excuses when she wasn’t even expecting him to come over that night. Her three-year-old grandson was staying with her and she’d been gearing up to break up with Steve anyway. She suspected that he’d been with another woman that night, because he hadn’t answered his phone.

  What he said next surprised her. “I’m bleeding,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Well, I scraped my leg on a branch and got a deep gash. I’ve got to get home,” he said, explaining that he’d run into a bush on his bike, snagging his leg on a twig that wa
s sticking out into the trail.

  A week or so later, he even took her to the trail to show her the twig. He said he also got scratches on his arm when he got off his bike, hiked down into a gulley and up on a hill to look down on the lot that he and Carol used to own. To Renee, Steve had always seemed like a pretty sentimental guy, so it didn’t seem strange to her that he would go back to that area to look around.

  At 10:16 P.M., seven minutes after Steve got home, Charlotte used her separate code to enter the security gate and pulled her white BMW into the condo garage next to Steve’s. The interior lights of his car were still on—the ones that stay on briefly after the ignition goes off, or if the door is accidentally left open.

  As she and Jake walked up the stairs and into the condo, they heard the shower running in Steve’s bedroom, which was just off the dining room.

  Carol’s brother, John Kennedy, finally reached Steve on his cell phone around 10:30 P.M. to personally relay his and Ruth’s concerns about Carol in a three-minute call. But John barely had a chance to say anything before Steve interrupted.

  “Hey, look, I’m standing here dripping wet. Just stepped out of the shower,” he said, adding that he’d been out on his mountain bike for a long ride.

  John tried to explain what had happened during Ruth’s call with Carol, and asked if Steve would please go out to the house and check on his ex-wife. But Steve refused without hesitation.