Then No One Can Have Her Page 33

  Paupore began his two-hour closing by displaying a photograph of Carol for the jury. As he ran through the slides in his PowerPoint presentation, each representing a fact or puzzle piece of damning evidence in the case, he removed a piece of her portrait and replaced it with a portion of Steve’s face.

  “This was not a bike ride,” Paupore said. “This was an alibi in case something went wrong.”

  Referring to the anonymous e-mail, which had stated, “This wasn’t one crazed man with a golf club,” Paupore said, “Oh, yes, it was, ladies and gentlemen. It was the defendant with a golf club. Make no mistake about it.”

  By the end of his argument, Carol’s portrait had been all but transformed by Steve’s features, leaving only Carol’s eyes.

  Paupore told the jurors that he wished he could present them with every piece of the puzzle, but he couldn’t. What he did have, he said, was “a great, huge mountain of strong circumstantial evidence.”

  “We don’t have a hundred percent of the pieces, but through Carol’s eyes up on the screen looking at us, you can see her killer,” he said, hoping that the jury would get the idea that in her last moments, this was what she saw, too: Steve’s face.

  Afterward, Paupore’s wife told him that she was horrified to see all the dust flying out of their rug as he beat it with abandon.

  “If I’d known you were going to do that, I would have vacuumed it,” she said.

  Craig Williams began his closing argument after lunch, continuing for nearly three hours. Still not finished, he started up again after the weekend, on the following Tuesday, October 1.

  Williams spent most of his time laying out every possible alternative scenario to reinterpret the state’s evidence, trying to persuade the jury that it was much more likely that Jim Knapp had killed Carol. He spent the rest arguing that the prosecution had made its whole case by twisting the ordinary into the nefarious and the suspicious.

  Jim’s motive? After snooping in Carol’s financial papers, he was angry to learn that she had $130,000 in her bank account, but would not finance his Maui Wowi franchise. To hide his tracks, he tried to frame Steve, repeatedly telling the detectives and anyone else who would listen how and why Steve was to blame.

  Williams offered a possible scenario for Carol’s last exclamation of “Oh, no.” She was heading down the hall after her dogs, who were constantly “peeing and puking in the house,” when she inadvertently disconnected her phone as she went to grab the bottle of stain remover to clean up after them.

  When the cleaning crew pulled up the rug, he said, there was a stain right where the bottle had been. Following that logic, he said, the murder didn’t happen at 7:59 P.M.; it was later than that, because “she was cleaning up the dog pee.” This scenario gave Jim more time to drive back, kill her and run off when he saw the lights of Deputy Taintor’s cruiser pulling up to the house.

  Although the state had dismissed alternative theories as “crazy defenses” to divert attention away from Steve, Williams said, “there really is factual evidence to back” up scenarios where other people, specifically Jim Knapp, could have killed Carol between his 7:58 and 9:37 P.M. cell phone calls.

  In fact, when Jim went to Safeway to buy wine and then called Carol in front of the sheriff ’s deputies, he could have simply been creating a ruse and an alibi, when he knew she couldn’t answer the phone.

  “Ask yourself this—if Steve had planned this awful, brutal murder, his alibi is to say, ‘I’m going to show up at the scene with a bunch of cuts on me and then I’m going to say I was a mile across the road on a bike ride that nobody saw me on?’ That’s idiotic. It just would not have happened,” Williams said. Especially if Steve was such a “criminal mastermind” that he left no DNA or blood evidence at the scene, in his car, office or condo. Steve exhibited a “consciousness of innocence,” he said, not of guilt.

  The fingerprint on the lightbulb in the laundry room was not Steve’s. It was Jim Knapp’s fingerprint on the financial documents in the Body & Soul magazine, not Steve’s. And if Steve was so worried about the golf club head cover, why give it to his attorney rather than get rid of it altogether?

  The detectives had “tunnel vision” from the get-go, he said, and conducted a shoddy investigation. They never properly explored Jim’s or any other possible suspects’ alibis other than half-baked moves, such as obtaining John Stoler’s bank records and Barb O’Non’s credit card receipt for the night of the murder.

  The detectives didn’t think anything of flying all over the country to collect Ronald Birman’s DNA, Williams said, but they didn’t bother to fly to Maine to check out Carol’s boyfriend. Why? “Because they had Steve and they don’t want to look any further.”

  Detectives also couldn’t “match” the shoes or bike tires with the tracks they found around Glenshandra. “If you can’t match them and you’re asking somebody to convict somebody of first-degree murder, that’s pretty doggone sloppy,” he said, reiterating the failure to designate one person to control the crime scene rather than let an army of sheriff ’s investigators “tromp” all over it.

  The prosecution had no photos or evidence that Steve laid his bike down in the bushes behind Carol’s house, he said. And none of Steve’s computer searches, or the reportedly incriminating files in his “Book Research” folder, had anything to do with how Carol was actually killed.

  Referring to Paupore’s “connect the dots” closing, Williams said it was not the jury’s constitutional duty to do that. Based on the severe injuries to Carol’s head, the killer had an emotional, not a financial, motive.

  “Yeah, [Steve] spent some cash, but he’s not a murderer,” Williams said, repeatedly comparing the prosecution’s case to a board game of Clue. “It’s Mr. Plum in the study with a left-handed golf club,” he said, referring to the Clue character Professor Plum.

  “I don’t have to prove [Knapp] guilty and I don’t have to tell you who absolutely murdered her, but there’s way more here on Jim Knapp, and it’s not a crazy defense theory,” he said. “It’s facts, way more than they had against Steve DeMocker.”

  As for evidence to support the fraud charges related to the insurance money transfer, Williams said, there was none. Steve, just like his other family members, simply relied on their attorneys’ advice, which they discussed on recorded phone lines, with nothing to hide. And as Katie and Charlotte testified, no one forced them to put that money toward Steve’s defense.

  “They can’t put him in the house because he wasn’t there,” Williams summed up for the jury. “You know why? Because he did not kill her. You’ve got to find him not guilty.”

  The prosecution always gets to do its closing argument first and speak last with a rebuttal argument, because it has the burden of proof and defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty. Prosecutor Steve Young followed up Williams’s closing with a nearly hour-long statement, which went until 10:32 A.M.

  Young disputed many of Williams’s points, starting by dismissing John Stoler, David Soule and Barb O’Non as viable murder suspects, along with Jim Knapp, whom the defense “hung their hat on,” and who, because he committed suicide, couldn’t be in court to refute or defend himself against evidence presented by the defense.

  Jim Knapp, he said, had no motive to kill Carol. The Maui Wowi deal was dead in February, months before the murder; and even if he did know that Carol had money, he had no way to get it from her or her estate or her life insurance policies once she was dead.

  “The defense cannot point to any credible evidence that has been presented in court to show by any stretch of the reasonable imagination that Jim Knapp had any reason whatsoever to kill Carol Kennedy,” he said, shrugging off Williams’s scenarios as “rank speculation” that stretched the timeline of events to fit the defense’s theory.

  The stains on the carpet? There were many of them, and no way to measure their age. The rimless glasses on Carol’s desk that the defense claimed were Jim’s? Even one of the defense’s own e
xhibit photos, taken in the guesthouse on July 3, showed two pairs of rimless glasses. “Those are his glasses. They’re in his guesthouse,” Young said, adding that surely Jim would have retrieved the blood-specked pair from Carol’s desk if they were his.

  If Carol’s landline was disconnected as Williams described, why didn’t Carol answer when Ruth called back? Because she was already dead, and it was Steve who killed her.

  Steve was the one who had a motive—financial gain—and “750,000 reasons” to kill Carol, so he didn’t have to pay alimony and so he could collect on the life insurance policies, of which he was the owner and beneficiary, Young said.

  Steve also had an emotional motive, which was clear from the disputes in the e-mails and texts between them, Young said. Steve had no alibi. His phone was mysteriously turned off, and he uncharacteristically didn’t answer his calls or texts.

  Why, if he was bleeding from cuts on his arm and leg, would his bike and car be free of blood? “Doesn’t that prove to you that the defendant took measures both before and after the murder not to get any blood in his vehicle, and if there was any blood, to clean it up? . . . He had gloves on. He took measures that he wasn’t going to leave anything behind.”

  Steve gave inconsistent accounts about where he was that night and what had happened with his cell phone—he turned it off; there was no signal; he had a dead battery.

  Who had a reason to stage the crime scene? “The defendant, who did research on how to kill and collect on life insurance,” he said.

  Steve’s behavior after the murder only served to further implicate him, Young said, noting that the defendant fabricated evidence with the voice-in-the-vent story and the anonymous e-mail, which was completely contrary to the defense’s “consciousness of innocence” claim.

  “Hold Steven DeMocker responsible,” Young said. “Find him guilty of the murder of Carol Kennedy so justice can finally be done in this case.”

  The jurors took a twenty-minute break and listened to their instructions. After the five remaining alternates were chosen by lot, the rest of the jury began deliberating at 11 A.M.

  By this time counts six and seven, relating to the forgery charges, and count eight, involving the willful concealment of fraudulent schemes to defraud, had been dismissed.

  After deliberating for the next three days, the jury reached a verdict late on the third day. Ruth Kennedy, who had stayed in town to hear the verdict, got the call just as she was heading out for her evening meal. However, the judge decided to hold off on announcing it until first thing the next morning at nine o’clock.

  Before the proceedings began promptly on the morning of October 4, Charlotte and Katie made sure to hug and kiss their grandmother, who sat behind the prosecution table. Ruth felt numb, not knowing what to expect, as she waited with a box of tissues in her lap.

  “I love you,” Charlotte whispered to Ruth before taking a seat with the rest of the DeMocker family on the opposite side of the gallery, where Steve sat stoically at the defense table.

  As the clerk read the verdicts, count by count, the courtroom was packed and yet silent:

  “‘We the jury, duly impaneled and sworn in the above-entitled action and upon our oaths, do find the defendant, Steven DeMocker, on the charge of first-degree murder on July 2, 2008, as the result of the death of Virginia Carol Kennedy as follows: Guilty.’”

  Hearing this, Katie and Charlotte immediately burst into tears. One of the court officers leaned over to Ruth, grabbed a handful of tissues from the box in her lap and handed them to the girls.

  Ruth was in shock. She had waited so long to hear those words. Five long years of waiting and hoping that Steve would be found guilty. As the clerk recited the verdicts for the other counts—guilty, guilty and guilty—Ruth sat back as a wave of relief settled over her.

  Sentencing was set for November 13. After the reading was over, and everyone was walking out of the courtroom, Jan DeMocker grabbed Ruth’s hand.

  “I’ll never believe that Steve killed Carol,” Jan said, handing Ruth a medallion with the word “peace” on it.

  Ruth didn’t agree, of course, but as a mother, she thought she might feel the same way if she were in a similar situation. Steve was Jan’s firstborn, after all. But Ruth didn’t utter a peep in response. What was there to say? She was just glad she could finally put this horrible ordeal behind her and move on.

  It’s over, Ruth thought. Thank the Lord for small things.

  CHAPTER 46

  The defense filed the usual motion for a new trial and a separate motion for acquittal, which Judge Donahoe denied.

  And, as people are apt to do in a small town, the residents of Prescott talked about the case and whether the verdict was a just one. Although some had strong opinions, others still weren’t sure what to think.

  Some said that if Steve was guilty, he really was a heinous person, because the crime scene was so bloody. And if he did kill Carol, then the prosecutor’s office really messed up the case because it had to take the death penalty off the table after making so many screwups, not the least of which was the Docugate scandal.

  For some folks this was also a story about the hubris of County Attorney Sheila Polk, and her ambitions to make her career on this case, only for her office to mishandle it. Steve DeMocker, they said, was a former high-ranking college administrator before becoming a broker. He was a well-respected and moral financial advisor. And Carol Kennedy wasn’t a very nice person, dragging out the divorce and milking him.

  But there were others, including Carol’s friends, who believed that Steve got exactly what was coming to him. After all those years of adulterous affairs, which were known around town, he still managed to get women to sleep with him and continued to torture poor Carol’s psyche. He fought with her over finances, spent far more than he earned, then committed this horrible murder. He got what he deserved.

  Still, most everyone saw it as a tragedy all around. As gallery co-owner Joanne Frerking put it: “It just seemed like such a lovely family, and behind it all was this horror story, and just deep sadness.”

  But no matter how they felt about the trial’s outcome, the end of this long roller-coaster ride to justice couldn’t end soon enough for most residents, especially when it had cost the taxpayers in this small county so much money.

  Dean Trebesch, Yavapai County’s public defender, told the Daily Courier that the defense’s case for the second trial alone cost taxpayers $1.3 million, half of which went to the attorneys, the other half to expert witnesses and staff. Additional money, also paid by taxpayers, went to outside experts and investigators for the first trial, because Steve was declared indigent.

  In a memo dated April 2010, before the first trial even began, Trebesch stated that the DeMocker case had dealt the county “a major financial blow” from the “tremendously burdensome expenses.” Because of its unique and high-profile circumstances, the expenses have been frightful.

  But, of course, this case couldn’t end without some more drama.

  In mid-October, Dave Rhodes, now a sheriff’s captain, pulled Steve from his cell to talk to him without an attorney present, which created a flap that ultimately delayed the sentencing hearing. The defense turned this kerfuffle into yet another reason to ask for a new trial and to disqualify the Yavapai County Attorney’s Office from the case.

  The state noted, however, that the defense didn’t make much, if any, mention of Steve’s conversation with Detention Officer Steve Chavez on October 1, immediately after the closing arguments, in which Steve reportedly blamed his attorney for the insurance fraud charges.

  “I can’t believe that I am being charged with fraud when it was my lawyer’s idea,” he told Chavez, adding that this was the reason John Sears and his first defense team had to quit the case.

  At an evidentiary hearing on January 8, 2014, Craig Williams called his client to the stand for the first time to give his version of what happened.

  Steve DeMocker testified that after th
e verdict on October 4 he was moved to the infirmary for three days, where he was placed on suicide watch in an observation cell, then was sent back to the general population. The following is Steve’s version of events with regard to that meeting with Rhodes.

  On October 14, Steve said, he was pulled out of his dorm while he was playing chess with the other inmates, and was told that Rhodes, the jail commander, wanted to talk to him. A detention officer put restraints on him, after which he shuffled to a small room equipped with a camera and monitor, where inmates can talk to judges. Rhodes came in and told the officer to wait outside.

  Alone with Steve, Rhodes brought up the interview requests from producers for Dateline and 48 Hours, saying he wanted to hear from Steve—not his attorneys—whether he truly wanted to do the interviews. When Steve said yes, Rhodes asked if he was feeling pressured, because other people, not just the networks and their sponsors, would benefit from the publicity. Steve took that to mean that his attorneys would benefit as well.

  Switching gears to the insurance policies, Rhodes said he didn’t feel it was right that Steve’s daughters didn’t get any of their intended inheritance, and that it all went to attorneys who didn’t even finish the case.

  “They let you take all the blame for it,” Rhodes said.

  Steve told Rhodes that he was still represented by attorneys and wasn’t sure what, if anything, he should say other than his lawyers thought the money transfer was legal, and that no one was to blame.

  “We didn’t think any of us did anything wrong,” Steve said.

  “We know you were only acting on your attorneys’ advice,” Rhodes replied.

  “But I was the one you charged,” Steve said.

  “This is your chance to get some money back for your daughters,” Rhodes said, adding that the TV networks had the resources to make restitution to Katie and Charlotte, and now Steve had an “opportunity” to make that happen.