Then No One Can Have Her Page 31

  Priest noted that the ladder had no blood on it, but should have, based on the radiating pattern of blood on objects around it.

  “So the fact that I have zero evidence of blood on the ladder leads me to the conclusion the ladder was placed there after the bloodletting event,” Priest said.

  On cross-examination by Williams, Priest conceded that he could have done a more thorough and accurate crime scene analysis if the detectives had taken such procedural steps as measuring how far Carol’s body was from the wall, for example. And just because there were left-sided swings, he said, didn’t mean the attacker had to be left-handed. He also acknowledged that visiting the original crime scene would have been better than basing his conclusions primarily on photos, which, being two-dimensional, could be deceiving.

  “There is a lot you can do at a crime scene that wasn’t done here,” Priest said. He added, however, that with 1,280 photos, he had enough information to render an opinion.

  As a murder weapon, he said, he couldn’t rule out rebar, which was found on Carol’s property, but “any cylindrical object” could have produced marks similar to those found on her arm, just not the ones on her back.

  The attack happened fast, he said, “less than a few minutes,” but he saw “no evidence in there of two people” attacking her. He also added that “somebody could move her and not get blood on them,” as he had done hundreds of times at homicide scenes.

  In the end Priest did not move from his opinion that a golf club was the likeliest murder weapon to have produced most of the injuries on Carol’s body.

  On day nineteen, Jim Knapp’s ex-wife, Ann Saxerud, testified that she’d been concerned about his prescription drug use. On the day of Carol’s murder, however, he didn’t appear to be under the influence of any drugs when he showed up at her house to spend the evening with their son Alex.

  She confirmed that Jim was wearing the same clothes that evening that he was wearing in the Safeway video the prosecution showed her while she was on the stand.

  “Did Jim keep his visitation up with Alex and Jay after that time?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “And was there any real change, as you could see, in his behavior?”

  “No.”

  Under cross-examination by Williams, Ann seemed angry that the defense was pointing fingers at her late ex-husband for Carol’s murder. She also acknowledged that she didn’t appreciate her privacy being violated by having to testify about her divorce. All of this was hurtful to her and her sons, she said.

  “I thought it was inaccurate and inappropriate,” she said. “I don’t think Jim has anything to do with Carol’s murder.”

  Williams reminded her that when she first talked to law enforcement, she said she got home between eight and eight-thirty that night, and that Jim had left her house “shortly after that.” But after she talked repeatedly with Detective Doug Brown, they moved the times she left and got home to be later and later. She even told Brown that she didn’t “remember Jim coming [to her house] that night,” Williams said. All of this, he later argued, helped illustrate that she and law enforcement were unfairly trying to reshape their timelines to fit their theory that Steve DeMocker, not Jim Knapp, had killed Carol.

  “I think at the time I didn’t understand how far this would go, and didn’t put the effort into remembering [the exact times]” Ann countered. “But since then, I’ve changed my mind.” She added that it was “very unclear” to her at the time that she needed to be more precise, because she’d never been involved in a murder investigation before.

  When the prosecution called Katie DeMocker to the stand, prosecutor Jeff Paupore created some high drama in the courtroom by playing a recording of the young woman battling with her father over the insurance money transfers in March 2009.

  Although it was clear on the recording that she didn’t want to go along with the plan, she would not concede to Paupore’s implication that Steve had pressured her into accepting the “agreement of how the money was going to be spent,” specifically for his defense.

  “I wouldn’t phrase it like that,” she said, contending that she wasn’t initially comfortable transferring the money, but she did agree after “lengthy discussions” in which her family provided her with assurances that Charlotte would have enough money for college “and be taken care of, like I was, in that process.”

  As trustee, Katie testified, she was empowered to move all that money out of Carol’s trust, thus exhausting it, even though she was still five years from being twenty-five, as her mother’s will dictated. At this point, Judge Donahoe interrupted and told the jury to take a break.

  Calling a bench conference, Donahoe, who had spent seven years on the probate bench, told the attorneys that the jury was receiving inaccurate information from the witness.

  “I can understand why criminal lawyers don’t practice probate, because you’ve got the law all confused,” he said, adding that he wasn’t criticizing Katie, but she didn’t understand what she was saying.

  “Despite what she’s saying from the stand, she had no right to dissolve this estate at the age—whenever she wanted to—or the trust. . . . She’s mixing the two, and she’s telling the jury wrong things.”

  Donahoe said they needed to find a way to remedy this so the jury got the correct probate law information. Greg Parzych piped up, renewing his motion to sever count three, “fraudulent schemes and artifices.”

  Donahoe snapped back that this was not the solution. “Don’t even bother me with that again. I’m tired of hearing that severance,” he retorted, noting that he’d already ruled on it several times.

  Back on the record once more, Jeff Paupore restated the wishes in Carol’s will to Katie, saying that “it was very clear that there would be no distributions until you reached the age of twenty-five.”

  Asked if she had discussed that issue with her attorney, Katie said she didn’t recall specifically, but it was her understanding that she, as trustee, “was in charge of administering the money as I saw fit . . . that it was mine to do whatever I wanted with.”

  Saying she “frankly didn’t want anything to do with” transferring her half of the insurance money, she came to believe that it was appropriate to hand over her share to her grandparents after a family meeting and getting those written assurances. She then left the other half for Charlotte “in the account until she turned eighteen.”

  “But you knew that your grandparents were going to use that money for attorneys’ fees?”

  “That was my understanding,” she said. “Some or all of it. I didn’t really care at that point.”

  As Paupore questioned Steve’s eighty-three-year-old mother, Jan DeMocker, he played a couple of taped conversations between her and Steve in jail, talking about the money transfers. He also pointed out for the jury that just the day before testifying, she’d received immunity from being charged with a crime.

  “Do you know why you were in the middle of this?” he asked.

  “I guess I was handy,” she said.

  Pushing past the flip answer, Paupore asked if she could think of any reason why the girls didn’t send all that money directly to Steve’s attorneys.

  “I don’t really know,” she said. “There was an issue of quite a bit of money that . . . my husband and I already spent, that they owed us, Steve owed us, probably close to that amount of money.” She and her husband had been paying Steve’s legal fees for more than a year, she said, so “it allowed them to give us a gift, to pay us back. It gave us the freedom of using that money in whatever way we wanted. Although I think they were very aware at that time that our burning concern was for Steve’s safety at that point.”

  Jan said that Steve and Carol owed them that money, which had been spent on their lawyers and lawyers for the girls. “Our output at that point had totaled somewhere between five hundred thousand and seven hundred thousand dollars,” she said. “I don’t know exactly what it was. My husband was keeping track of accounts.”<
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  “Okay, is it your testimony, then, that you decided to take that seven hundred thousand dollars and then pay Steven’s attorneys’ fees with it?”

  “That was a decision my husband and I made with input from other members of the family, yes,” she said.

  “Was your son Jim part of that discussion?”

  “Yes.”

  After another audiotape was played for the jury, Jan explained that Katie was supposed to transfer the first $355,000, but only transferred $350,000. Jan said the $5,000 difference went to pay the second attorney named Chris—referring to Chris Dupont—to help the girls get their victims’ rights back.

  On cross-examination, Craig Williams had Jan explain the motivation behind the insurance transfers, painting the transactions as innocent and noting that the planning for them occurred on phone lines they knew were being recorded.

  Jan said she wanted to make sure the girls “would be taken care of,” in terms of college and future support. “I knew we could support both of them, but I didn’t know how long we could do it. And there was always that horrible chance, way out at the end, that, even though we were very positive that Steve was innocent, and we thought there was a ninety-nine percent chance that he would be acquitted, there was still the possibility—he was facing the death penalty then—that he would spend his life in prison or that we could see him executed. And we had to consider that also, what would happen to the girls if their father is never freed. And that’s where the family came from. And we had other people in the family say, ‘We have your back and we will take over if we need to.’”

  After Jan acknowledged that Katie was stubborn, Williams asked, “In your mind, do you think that Steve could get Katie to do something that she didn’t want to do?”

  “I can imagine he would try,” Jan said. “I can’t imagine he would succeed.”

  Moving on, Williams asked Jan the same question he asked several witnesses during the trial: “In the entire time that you were around Steve and Carol, did you ever see any physical violence at all?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  Jan added that she never heard Steve threaten Carol, nor did she ever sense any fear on her part. Carol never came to her to say he’d been violent, either.

  Steve’s daughter Charlotte was called to the stand next, but her memory still wasn’t very clear, despite the prosecution telling her that she needed to be more cooperative than she was during the first trial or she could lose her immunity. Nonetheless, she didn’t have much to add.

  Barb O’Non testified as well. However, her comments weren’t nearly as detailed as they were during her previous interviews with investigators or at the pretrial hearing in 2010.

  Renee Girard also testified, going over much of the same ground about the anonymous e-mail and the insurance money transfers that she’d discussed with investigators.

  “I trusted what I was being told [by John Sears and the DeMocker family] . . . that it was legitimate,” she said, referring to the money transfers. “I trusted that Steve was not asking me to do something illegal.”

  Doug Brown, the former lead detective on the case who was back to working as a patrol deputy, was the last of the prosecution’s forty-six witnesses. Brown was on the stand for six days—longer than any other witness.

  On Brown’s second day, September 4, the prosecution tried to introduce into evidence an e-mail that could change the whole landscape of the case. Carol had sent the e-mail, dated May 7, 2007, to Steve. It described a violent incident in which he came into her house while she was on the phone, grabbed it from her hand, threw it against the wall and shoved her.

  The defense immediately objected, arguing in a bench conference that the prosecution should have announced this late and surprising disclosure earlier in the trial.

  Prosecutor Steve Young countered that the state had properly disclosed the e-mail long ago, but acknowledged that it was part of the case’s massive 33,000 pages of discovery. The e-mail, as it turned out, had been part of the prosecution’s court filing on August 12, 2012, one of dozens of supplemental evidence disclosures.

  “This particular e-mail has been disclosed for over a year, whether he remembers it or not,” Young said, referring to Craig Williams.

  Williams admitted that he had missed the e-mail, but he argued that the state still should have highlighted the document prior to the trial as evidence it intended to produce.

  “I would have approached it a little different if I knew that e-mail was going to be admitted in this trial, an e-mail I didn’t even know about, so what we have now is we have an irrevocable tainting in this trial,” Williams said, questioning whether the e-mail was even real, given that it never came up during the divorce. “I question the veracity of this e-mail.”

  Williams complained that the state waited until its last witness to present the document, not while several of Steve’s family members were testifying, when the defense could have questioned them in more detail about their knowledge of domestic violence between Carol and Steve. Williams even went so far as to ask for sanctions against the state.

  Judge Donahoe, however, pointed out that so far the defense was the only party to have brought up domestic violence by saying there was none in this couple’s relationship.

  “And this is the voice from the grave saying that isn’t true,” the judge said. “This is rebutting the defense’s assertion that Mr. DeMocker has a peaceful character and that there was no domestic violence.”

  Young pointed out that the defense had been questioning witnesses all along if they knew of any instances of domestic violence between Steve and Carol, which had opened the door to the e-mail. Furthermore, he said, the state had already notified the defense a week in advance of its plans to introduce the e-mail in court.

  Williams referenced a “comeback” e-mail from Steve, saying it “calls her a liar and says that’s all incorrect,” but the state didn’t submit it for admission.

  “Is that the one that he’s in the shower and thinking about she’s coming to kill him, and the one where he admits they shoved each other?” Young asked.

  “No,” Williams answered curtly.

  “That one should be brought up,” Young said, underscoring the existence of additional e-mails from Steve to Carol, indicating “that they had shoved each other in arguments before.” He said Steve also mentioned in a recorded jail call that “he would have arguments with Carol and they would both end up shaking.”

  Donahoe noted that there was more at issue here than just the domestic violence. “This almost goes to the murder. Well, almost—it does go to the murder, because it’s the same thing that happened.”

  Reading Carol’s e-mail aloud, Donahoe said, “‘You had Ashley come over to the house and come in against my will, and once you grabbed the phone out of my hands and threw it so violently against the wall.’ So when she says, ‘Oh, no,’ or ‘Not again’ . . . the jury could conclude, this is exactly what happened the night of the murder. That he came in unannounced, like she’s accusing him of doing before, grabs the phone out of her hand and bludgeons her to death.... It’s not only domestic violence, it’s what happened on the evening in question.”

  Calling the e-mail “a dynamite bombshell in this case,” Donahoe said he needed some time to do research. He would announce his decision on whether to allow the e-mail the following day.

  The next day Judge Donahoe faulted Craig Williams for failing to recognize the importance of this e-mail during his trial preparation, especially when the county was paying for a four-person defense team, which included two attorneys, experts, paralegals and other staff. Williams said he took responsibility for that oversight.

  Donahoe said the state shared some fault, too, and should have “fired a shot across the bow” to say, “‘If you’re going to go down this road, here’s what we’ve got. You might want to change your tactic here.’ But again, there’s not much I can do to unring the bell. I think the situation the defendant finds himself in at
this stage of the trial is entirely the defendant’s own making.”

  Although the judge acknowledged that domestic violence “is generally a very secret matter between couples,” and the victim “is often silent because they are embarrassed or intimidated,” he wasn’t surprised that family members didn’t know about this or other incidents.

  Nonetheless, Donahoe said, he believed parts of the e-mail were “unfairly prejudicial.” The e-mail not only drew “parallels to the circumstances of the murder,” but also had Carol talking about being “frightened and concerned about disappearing,” and mentioned that Steve owned guns and had some weapons training. Donahoe suggested redacting those parts of the e-mail so it could be admitted.

  But as prosecutor Jeff Paupore watched this play out in court, he’d become concerned that he could jeopardize the case on appeal if he pushed the e-mail into evidence at this point. He didn’t want to create an opportunity for Steve’s appellate attorney to make a claim of ineffective trial counsel.

  So, after a long bench conference, both sides agreed to a stipulation: The prosecution would withdraw the e-mail as long as the defense didn’t present any more “evidence” or question witnesses about Steve’s supposedly nonviolent nature and good character. The defense also wouldn’t point to a lack of domestic violence in the marriage, or mention the topic in its closing argument.

  With that defense crisis averted, Williams kept Deputy Brown on the stand with an extended cross-examination that continued to wear on the judge’s patience.

  “In the bigger picture, is there an end to this endless cross-examination?” Donahoe asked during Brown’s fifth day on the stand.