Then No One Can Have Her Page 32

  Williams had already run through a long list of people who were asked to give DNA swabs, including three named in the defense’s third-party culpability paperwork—David Soule, John Stoler and Barb O’Non—noting that they were never subjected to the same level of interrogation or investigation as Steve. But the list of potential murder suspects seemed to go on ad infinitum.

  “How many people committed that murder?” Donahoe asked.

  “Well, you know, Judge, you will recall when you told me that I shouldn’t put all my ducks in one pond,” Williams said.

  When Donahoe said he didn’t remember saying that, Williams conceded that he might be mixing his colloquialisms. However, he said, he believed he had “to open up the Japanese van here and say there was more than one possibility” of how Carol was murdered.

  Prosecutor Steve Young added his objections to the judge’s. “There’s got to be some reasonable link between third-party culpability so that doesn’t open the floodgates to anything and everything,” he said.

  Donahoe agreed. “I’m getting more and more skeptical as the net widens here on this third-party culpability.”

  Still, back on cross-examination, Williams continued pounding Brown on this point: “Do you know what tunnel vision is?”

  “‘Tunnel vision’?” Brown echoed. “Yes.”

  “The focus had narrowed down on Mr. DeMocker. Would you agree?”

  “It did at a certain time, yes.”

  “I’d say it happened pretty early in this case.”

  “During the investigation in the early-morning hours of the third [of July], yes.”

  Williams spent the rest of his time focusing on Jim Knapp, trying to persuade the jury that it was Carol’s tenant, not her ex-husband, who had the motive to kill her and could have done the deed.

  Numerous times during bench conferences, out of the jury’s earshot, the defense attorney detailed his theories extrapolating on how and why this could have happened. In one instance he tried to persuade the judge to let him present evidence of Jim’s victimization in several get-rich-quick schemes, while Young argued that it lacked relevancy.

  “There’s a series of disastrous events in his life and the fact that he’s going through one thing after another to get rich,” Williams said, referring to the Maui Wowi franchise and Jim’s other moneymaking ideas. “And I think it shows state of mind that leads up to the dam burst and he actually killed Carol Kennedy. So I think we have to be able to demonstrate state of mind through disastrous financial decisions.”

  “I may buy a lottery ticket after this, Judge, and I don’t know, I hope that doesn’t go to my state of mind,” Young quipped.

  “Our whole argument is this guy is a con man. He cons a lot of people,” Williams said. “He had an ongoing con trying to set up e-mails trying to pay for his fake cancer.”

  “ ‘Fake cancer’?” Young asked incredulously. “The autopsy report says he has melanoma. I don’t know why you keep saying ‘fake cancer.’”

  Williams continued during another bench conference: “If you get down to the end where he’s telling people in the world that Carol Kennedy was penniless, right, and that Steven DeMocker robbed her of everything, but then we have a deposit slip of one hundred thirty thousand dollars, we have [Jim’s] thumbprint on the financial documents that list out how much money she’s got. So our theory is that he found out, felt double-crossed, and that’s what happened.”

  “There’s no evidence,” Jeff Paupore countered. “You asked for the evidence, Your Honor, about Carol Kennedy going into a joint venture [for the Maui Wowi franchise].... There’s no evidence that she was going to fund anything. Other than in Knapp’s mind, and we’ve been in there.... We know it’s an empty shell.”

  Williams proceeded to hammer his points in front of the jury. While Deputy Brown was still on the stand on September 10, Williams noted that law enforcement admitted to a lack of crucial physical evidence in this case the day before they arrested Steve.

  Quoting Brown’s search warrant, Williams said: “‘We have not been able to locate a murder weapon, the shoes that created the shoe tracks, or any physical evidence tying Steven DeMocker directly to the house . . . from the night of the murder.’ Correct?”

  “Yes, that’s correct,” Brown replied, “that’s what I wrote.”

  “And he was arrested the next day, wasn’t he?”

  “Correct.”

  “Okay, no more questions.”

  As the prosecution finished up with Brown, the deputy countered that he and the other detectives did, in fact, investigate the alibis and whereabouts at the time of the murder of all four suspects Williams suggested in his third-party culpability defense, including Jim Knapp. And that the physical evidence—the staged crime scene, the blood spatter heading out the back door and the nasty e-mail exchanges between Carol and Steve—still pointed to Steve as the killer, who bludgeoned her to death, ran out to his bike in the bushes behind the house and back to his car.

  Brown noted that investigators also collected a DNA specimen and fingerprints from Jim Knapp, and had them tested and compared with other evidence at the crime lab. Even though Jim gave inconsistent statements, his memory wasn’t good and he offered various theories about how Carol was killed, Brown said he and the other investigators retraced Jim’s steps, interviewed his ex-wife and son, examined his bank, cell phone and other records, and, in the end, simply did not see him as the killer. As a result they put together a “Knapp-exonerating timeline,” as Young put it.

  Brown said he and other detectives did the same type of investigation into Steve’s story to try to prove that he, too, was where he said he was. Based on the timing of Carol’s last messages to Steve and her handwritten notes on the financial documents in her home office, Brown agreed that it seemed Carol was prepared to talk with Steve that night about the check dispute when he came to collect Katie’s car. But even Steve admitted to investigators that he couldn’t prove where he was during those missing hours, and he had no alibi.

  “‘I don’t really have proof where I was,’” Brown said, quoting Steve’s statement on the night of the murder.

  And that was that.

  “No further questions,” Young said.

  During the jury’s Q&A with Brown, the former detective touched on his theory on how and when the killer entered the house. Based on the shoe tracks, the timing of Carol’s run, her text messages, the phone call with her mom, the unscrewed lightbulbs and the fact that she didn’t generally lock the back door while she was out running, he said, “I think it’s while she was on a run.”

  With that, the state rested. The jury was dismissed for lunch and the defense immediately moved for judgment of acquittal for a lack of evidence.

  On the murder charge the defense argued once again that there was no evidence of premeditation, because the killer was clearly in a rage. And there was no evidence—“blood, hair, fiber, eyewitness, confession”—tying Steve to the crime scene.

  Jeff Paupore countered that Steve showed premeditation as early as February 2008, when he installed the Anonymizer software on his computer to hide his Web-surfing history. But investigators found his incriminating searches anyway.

  After the defense went through each count and argued why it should be dismissed, the judge responded by reiterating the state’s evidence supporting each count, stating that he believed there was “substantial evidence” to support counts one and two, for first-degree murder and burglary. Curiously, though, Donahoe said he had some doubts about the merits of the state’s case on those two primary counts.

  “I’m not saying this is the strongest case, and it wouldn’t surprise me if there was a not-guilty verdict or a hung jury on count one and count two or both,” he said, “but I think there’s enough here to go to the jury on both of those counts.”

  He said he saw enough evidence to support all the other charges, except count six, which he described as “e-mail forgery.” For that count he entered a judgment fo
r acquittal, explaining that Charlotte was “the only one that created or committed forgery regarding the e-mail,” but she was not charged and had been granted immunity.

  CHAPTER 45

  The defense began presenting its case after lunch that same day, September 11.

  Starting with Carol Walden, the former area developer for the Maui Wowi franchise system, the defense proceeded to put on a parade of witnesses who testified about Jim Knapp’s oddities. The franchise executive discussed her correspondence with Jim concerning his interest in buying the Prescott store; his “fiancée,” Suzanna Wilson, described the fear she felt after he’d sent her the angry e-mails.

  The defense also put on its own financial expert to counter the state’s characterization of Steve’s finances, as well as witnesses who challenged the state’s DNA, shoe print and tire track evidence, including Randy Anglin, a tracker and forensic photographer.

  The testimony of Curtis James, the meteorology professor at Embry-Riddle, conflicted with Mascher’s definitive remarks about the timing and volume of the rainfall, which the state had argued made it easy to determine that Steve’s tracks were fresh.

  As defense investigator Rich Robertson summed it up, “The sheriff said, ‘I’m the sheriff, it rained, I have a badge. Believe me, not the academic guy.’”

  Forensic accountant Gregg Curry presented a very different picture of Steve’s fiscal health, listing a number of points in Davis’s report that differed from his own calculations. These included two significant double-counting errors totaling $280,000, he said, which represented about 40 percent of the amount that Davis put toward Steve’s excessive spending totals.

  Curry’s bottom line: “I determined whether Mr. DeMocker had the ability to pay his debts as they came due with the resources that he had,” and concluded that “he had about seventy-four thousand dollars of available liquid assets on July 2, 2008.” This wasn’t all that far from Davis’s calculation, which was $64,000. However, Curry said, Davis also underestimated the retirement savings Steve “could have tapped into.”

  As the defense tried to undermine Davis’s position that Steve was in “financial distress,” Curry contended that Steve “was not cash-flow insolvent . . . because he had enough resources to continue to pay his bills up until four or five months later.”

  He said Steve could have further stretched his resources to seventeen months by reducing his discretionary spending and changing the withholding amount on his paychecks. He also had not maxed out his credit cards, nor was he in any imminent danger of bankruptcy or foreclosure.

  But perhaps the most important discrepancy with Davis, Curry said, was that he didn’t count the $750,000 in insurance payouts as an asset on his balance sheet, because in his view Steve “didn’t actually receive the death benefits.”

  This statement not only flew in the face of the prosecution’s entire case, it also reduced the quantitative improvement in Steve’s overall financial picture after Carol’s death to just $131,896 for the alimony he wouldn’t have to pay over the next eight years. This was a marked contrast to the prosecution’s claim that Steve’s picture had improved by $576,000 in unpaid alimony and the $750,000 in life insurance benefits.

  “He had no chance of collecting that as long as he was a suspect and, obviously, he was arrested later,” Curry said.

  On cross-examination Steve Young confronted the witness with one of Steve’s statements. “You don’t believe Mr. DeMocker’s own words are an appropriate gauge on financial distress?” Young asked, citing Steve’s “You get to start clean while I dig out of a staggering hole” e-mail to Carol.

  “Not necessarily, no,” Curry said.

  After Young pointed out several examples of Steve’s failure to cut his discretionary spending, Curry said, “I think that’s kind of argumentative. I think he’s taken some steps.”

  “So instead of significantly reducing discretionary spending, he’s raiding his daughters’ investment accounts and borrowing tens of thousands of dollars from his parents?” Young asked.

  As the prosecutor went over the options Steve had available for reducing his spending, Curry ultimately had to acknowledge that Steve had taken no action to “avail himself” of any of them after Carol’s murder, and continued to borrow money from his parents.

  Curry also acknowledged that the suicide provision in Carol’s life insurance policies didn’t apply because it had been longer than two years since the issue date, which was important in the context of Steve’s computer searches.

  Referring specifically to the Internet search for “how to make a homicide appear suicide,” Young said, “It’s fair to assume that he knew in June of 2008 that those life insurance policies would have paid out if Carol’s death was ever determined to be a suicide, correct?”

  “I don’t know what he knew.”

  In the end Young was able to get Curry to admit, albeit reluctantly, that the insurance checks from Steve’s parents to the two law firms ultimately did benefit Steve.

  “Well, to the extent that they paid for his lawyers to stay on the case,” Curry said.

  “Thank you, Mr. Curry,” Young said. “Nothing further.”

  On the morning of September 26, the defense rested its case after eight days of live testimony from seventeen witnesses, and the reading of prior testimony from a law enforcement expert who had since died.

  The prosecution’s single rebuttal witness was Sean Jeralds, a flight safety professor at Embry-Riddle and the close friend of Jim Knapp’s who had checked on him the night he was found dead.

  Sean had come forward after reading a news article stating that the defense said Jim was not a pilot and had no license to fly. And having been Jim’s flight instructor, Sean wanted to correct the record.

  Craig Williams objected to letting him testify, saying it could result in an “endless loop of witnesses,” but Donahoe allowed it.

  “You’ve disparaged Mr. Knapp,” the judge said. “You’ve portrayed him as a murderer to this jury. This is the downside to the third-party culpability defense.”

  Calling Jim “his brother from another mother,” Sean said Jim had earned a commercial pilot’s license in 1991. Jeff Paupore then led him through Jim’s résumé and the various health, drug-related and behavioral issues that had marked their relationship over the years, ending with Jim’s suicide when he believed he was dying.

  “That’s how he was going to lose his life, cancer,” Sean said. “He thought that was a terrible way to go, because he saw what happened to his father and his mother, and so I wasn’t surprised he did that.”

  During the cross-examination Williams produced Jim Knapp’s medical records from the Mayo Clinic from February 2008, underscoring the untruths they contained: Jim had written that he was still engaged to Suzanna Wilson, that he was working as a pilot and that he had “no history of recreational drug use.”

  Under the section asking if he engaged in healing or alternative therapies, Williams noted that Jim had written “meditation and chronic random abuse to strangers.” And under the category of significant problems, he wrote in “sociopath.”

  When Williams asked Sean Jeralds about these “inappropriate” answers on the questionnaire, Sean acknowledged that Jim had never actually worked as a pilot, but he could have if he’d taken and passed a physical.

  Sean also said he couldn’t “judge the level of appropriateness Knapp had with the folks at Mayo,” but he didn’t seem surprised by Jim’s responses in the medical records. In fact, he said, he laughed when he saw them in Jim’s handwriting. “I could hear Jimmy saying that.”

  Williams then asked if Jim had ever mentioned the possibility of a sexual relationship with Carol. Sean said yes, they had talked about it.

  “He was wondering if that opportunity arose, should he take advantage of that or not,” Sean said. “What would that do to the relationship, and should he go down that path or not?”

  Although Sean acknowledged that Jim had sent a number of angry
e-mails to various people, such as the wealthy donor Steven Udvar-Hazy, Sean told the jury that his friend would not have purposely harmed anybody.

  “Is Mr. Hazy still alive today?” Paupore asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Did you ever know Jim Knapp to hurt or cause physical violence to anyone?”

  “No, sir.”

  After the lunch break Greg Parzych renewed his motions for acquittal and to sever the non-murder charges. He also told the judge that Katie DeMocker had e-mailed him, asking that closing arguments be held the following Tuesday, not the next day, so she could be there.

  Steve Young said he didn’t know why Katie had the erroneous idea that closings would be on Tuesday. Carol’s mother, Ruth Kennedy, had already flown in and was ready to be there.

  Judge Donahoe ruled again that closings would be the next day, Friday the twenty-seventh.

  That night Jeff Paupore woke up at 3 A.M. with an idea. The prosecutor would conduct a dramatic reenactment to illustrate for the jury how Steve had brutally beat his wife to death with a golf club.

  He got out of bed, went into the garage, found one of his wife’s golf clubs and started smacking a rolled-up rug with it. The thumping woke his son, who “sleeps like a dead person,” and came out to see what was going on.

  Good. If it wakes him up, I know it’s going to work, Paupore thought.

  Paupore’s wife, on the other hand, slept right through it, but he didn’t inform her of his plans. He wanted her to be surprised when she came to court that day to watch the closings. And that she was.

  That morning Craig Williams renewed the defense’s objection to moving ahead with the closings. He also argued that the prosecution should be precluded from using the words “unique” to describe the shoe prints and “stashed” to refer to the bicycle. Donahoe granted the first request, but he denied the second.