Then No One Can Have Her Page 34

  Steve testified that he felt manipulated by this exchange, as if the state and Sheila Polk were asking him to help them recover this money. “My feeling was then, as it had been all along, that my attorney—my daughters—did what they wanted to do with their money as adults,” he said.

  When Steve told Rhodes that he needed to discuss the matter with his attorneys, the captain replied, “We’re just putting it out there” as something for Steve to think about. “There’s no rush. Nothing is going to happen until after the sentencing.”

  By this point, Steve testified, he was feeling pretty anxious. The life insurance money would likely be a “live issue” at some point, probably as soon as the sentencing hearing. And his gut instinct and experience told him that without an attorney present, he shouldn’t make any statement to a law enforcement officer “who is asking me about something that had been alleged to be a crime.”

  “If you want to talk to me again, just put in a kite,” Rhodes said, referring to an inmate request form.

  “I can contact you through my attorneys, can’t I?”

  “Yes, of course, you can do that, too.”

  With that, Rhodes nodded to the officer through the glass to open the door, then left.

  As soon as Steve was back on the cell block, he immediately called his attorney’s office. Investigators noted later that he also called his sister Sharon, telling her that the jail captain had pulled him out of his cell “just to confirm that I indeed did want to do these interviews with [NBC and CBS] before they went ahead and tried to figure out how to do them.... I guess he just wanted to make sure I wasn’t being pressured by my publicity-hungry attorneys. He didn’t say that, but that was the implication.”

  Steve later learned that the TV networks’ requests to interview him had been denied. Rhodes had determined that they couldn’t accommodate that many people in the secure part of the jail.

  When it came time for prosecutor Steve Young to cross-examine Steve DeMocker at the hearing, Young queried the judge if he could ask questions about the murder. Judge Donahoe said any issues raised in the defense’s motion for a new trial were fair game.

  However, a few questions into Young’s cross-examination, in which he focused on the defendant’s “inconsistent answers” during statements to detectives in the hours after the murder, Craig Williams invoked Steve’s right to remain silent.

  Williams accused the state of inappropriately attempting to retry the case, arguing that the cross should be limited to whether Rhodes had violated Steve’s Sixth Amendment right to appeal his conviction.

  Donahoe didn’t see it that way, saying that Steve’s entire testimony would be stricken if he wouldn’t agree to be cross-examined.

  After a ten-minute recess, Williams objected to the judge’s move to strike the testimony, noting that Steve had chosen not to testify during the trial. This, Williams said, could just force Steve into “wide-open cross-examination” of all trial evidence, postconviction and at a time when his appeal was pending.

  Although the judge did not support the defense’s position, Donahoe made several more curious statements about the strength of the state’s case.

  “I’m not saying that I wouldn’t have been surprised if there was a not-guilty verdict, but I thought there was sufficient evidence viewed in a particular way that you could find beyond-a-reasonable-doubt guilt on all those counts, and that’s why I let it go to the jury,” he said.

  “I think this was a close case and it turned on credibility determinations,” Donahoe said, but the jury was attentive and showed no bias or misconduct. “Based on the totality of what went on for those thirty-seven days, I think Mr. DeMocker got a fair trial.”

  As such, the judge denied the defense’s motion for a new trial. He also rejected the request to disqualify the county attorney’s office.

  Williams tried unsuccessfully to seal a prosecution investigator’s report about Steve’s jail calls with family after the verdict, calling it “editorializing,” “incendiary” and “highly prejudicial.”

  Written by Randy Schmidt, the report summarized 113 of Steve’s 140 calls that weren’t protected under attorney-client privilege. The report lends some interesting insight into Steve’s and his family’s perspectives on their own intellects and their place, power and influence in the world around them.

  Judge Donahoe said he didn’t see anything “unusual or inflammatory” in the report, to which he wasn’t going to give any weight at sentencing anyway.

  During those calls Steve blamed the judge, Craig Williams, the jury and even the clerk of the court for the guilty verdict. Steve repeatedly described the judge and jury as biased, corrupt and stupid, often characterizing the jurors as idiots with low IQs. Acknowledging that the calls were being recorded, Steve contended that no one could get in trouble for complaining about the jury’s vote.

  Steve said numerous times that Williams was incompetent, refused to listen to members of the defense team and was too insecure to admit his own inability to provide a good defense. Steve . . . agreed with his daughter, Katie . . . that it was “shitty lawyering” for Craig . . . to use the third-party culpability defense and to blame Jim Knapp for the murder, when that entire concept was too difficult for a jury with a ninth grade education to grasp and comprehend, the report stated. Steve . . . not only agreed with Katie, but he told her that he didn’t even believe that Jim Knapp had killed Carol.

  On the day of the verdict, Steve told his mother that it was the worst day of his life. “Tell the girls that I am so sorry it turned out this way, but I’m okay,” he said.

  “This was not fair,” Jan DeMocker said. “I hope we get a better judge next time.”

  Steve agreed. “This guy was a nightmare,” he said. “He crammed that jury down our throats and the closing statements—the judge made biased and prejudicial statements.”

  Talking to his dad, Steve said, “The judge really hurt us, and that was not a very sophisticated jury.” The next time, he added, he hoped he’d have a better defense team as well.

  Steve told Charlotte that he’d been worried about the jurors because five of them had law enforcement officers in their families. “It was just the wrong jury.”

  The next night Steve reiterated to Katie what he’d already told Charlotte: “I didn’t take Mom from you. I didn’t do that.” He also told Katie that the domestic-violence blockbuster e-mail had no basis in truth, contending that Carol had made up the story for a guy she was dating in Las Vegas.

  On October 6, Steve told his mom that his relationship with Carol had been misrepresented during the trial. Regardless of the tension from the financial negotiations, he said, they still loved each other.

  Never mentioning that Carol was murdered, Steve’s calls were all about Steve. “Everything done to me and to my family is just huge,” he told Charlotte on October 7.

  During the three days he was on suicide watch, Steve constantly complained that he was being mistreated, forced to wear only a blanket designed to prevent self-harm. He urged his family members to inform the media of these wrongs as a way to influence public opinion, news coverage and the Arizona Court of Appeals.

  “I’m being tortured,” he told his mother on October 7. “It’s clear what’s happening. There is no other way to put it.”

  Schmidt’s analysis was that Steve wanted to create a groundswell of dismay and outrage to cause the news magazines and news media to alter their story lines.

  Steve DeMocker and his family seemed to be holding out hope for a third trial, which they strongly believed would take place sometime in the future.

  CHAPTER 47

  After persuading my editor that this compelling case was bookworthy, I drove to Prescott on a research trip the week of the sentencing hearing, hoping to meet in person Carol’s daughters, members of the extended DeMocker family and other key players.

  I sat in the second row on the left side of the courtroom, thinking I’d be behind the prosecution table. That’s wh
ere I usually sit in California courtrooms because it gives me the best vantage point to watch the speakers and to see the defendant’s face from the side, rather than the back of his head.

  As people started filling in the row in front of me, I realized, however, that I was sitting behind the defense table and Steve’s family—his mother, his daughters, two of his sisters and two of his brothers. At the time, the only ones I recognized from reading the Courier online were Charlotte and Katie. I initially mistook Steve’s mother for Carol’s, because they’re both small, white-haired women, and I figured Ruth would be there to watch.

  Watching the DeMockers interact before the hearing, my first impression was that their faces—Charlotte’s and Katie’s in particular—looked oddly devoid of emotion. As I’d never talked to them, I couldn’t tell whether their blank expressions stemmed from a heightened awareness that they were being observed, a general numbness because they knew what was coming or a desire to hide their feelings from the cameras.

  Many times a convicted killer’s family members look raw, vulnerable and red-eyed at times like these, and I didn’t see any of that. But like I said, I didn’t know them yet; I had only just started looking into this story.

  The county had recently spent $1 million to put a new roof on the one-hundred-year-old courthouse and replace the air-conditioning system. I was told later that the acoustics had been bad in the courtroom before, but the new cooling system only worsened matters. As soon as the air switched on, people sitting in the gallery couldn’t hear much of what was being said by speakers facing the judge, with their backs to the gallery. Even the Courier reporter, who was sitting closer to the action than I was, seemed to be straining to hear. The couple behind me got up and left in the middle of the sentencing, muttering that they couldn’t hear anything.

  The hearing began with arguments for and against the defense’s motion to delay sentencing based on new information Steve’s attorneys believed could vacate the judgment against him.

  “We’re getting new information every day,” attorney Greg Parzych said.

  The defense contended that it had discovered information indicating that Captain Dave Rhodes had lied. The prosecution should have disclosed these details, Parzych said, which the defense would have used to discredit Rhodes’s testimony at trial. At issue were his actions during an investigation into a fight among members of a motorcycle club of law enforcement officers known as the Iron Brotherhood. Mark Boan, the deputy who had been assigned to babysit Jim Knapp for four hours on the night of the murder, had lost his job after thirteen years because of his affiliation with this club.

  Judge Donahoe denied the motion, saying he would have had to call witnesses from the Iron Brotherhood, which “would have confused the jury and wasted a bunch of time.” The defense had ample time to cross-examine Rhodes, he said.

  “There’s nothing new here,” Donahoe said. “It’s all collateral. I wouldn’t have let it in anyway.”

  As the judge listed the seven counts against Steve for sentencing purposes, Charlotte smiled a little as the judge read the last one: “contributing to the delinquency of a minor.” I wasn’t sure why she would smile at that, and I never got a chance to ask her because, despite repeated requests to interview Steve’s family members, including his daughters, I was told no, they weren’t interested.

  Carol’s friend Debbie Wren Hill wrote a letter to the judge that included a “very likely” diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder for Steve, whom she described as “a dangerous man” and a sex addict who exhibited a “sociopathic behavior pattern.”

  I am thankful beyond measure that the jury found Steven DeMocker guilty of murdering my friend, Debbie wrote, noting that she supported a life sentence for him. I am grateful that Carol’s precious mother lived to see this day in court.

  Craig Williams asked to strike the letter, objecting to Debbie’s offering a psychological diagnosis of Steve without being a “neuropsychologist” and “without ever talking to” Steve. Perhaps Williams didn’t realize that Steve had known this woman since he and Carol were first dating. And although Debbie wasn’t hired to examine Steve in an official capacity in the case, she is, as she stated in her letter, “a mental health clinician.”

  Donahoe, however, saw no reason to grant Williams’s request. “I usually don’t give much weight to these types of personal opinions,” he said.

  Prosecutor Jeff Paupore noted that Carol’s mother was not at the hearing, but she’d requested that her letter be read into the record and that a photo of Carol be displayed. As such, Paupore put a blowup of Carol on an easel so she could be remembered during the hearing.

  Over Williams’s objection Paupore then read Ruth’s letter aloud. “I think it’s something that the defendant needs to hear,” he said.

  Ruth’s letter was short and emotional, saying, in essence, that Carol’s death had “left a hole in [her] heart and a vacant place in [her] life.” The loss of Carol was incalculable to everyone who loved her, including Charlotte and Katie, she said.

  All that can be done now is to seek to bring justice to the man who so violently, selfishly, and senselessly took her from us, Ruth wrote. She asked that Steve’s punishment fit his crime, and given that he’d robbed Carol’s life, she hoped the judge would give him a sentence in kind. Because she didn’t approve of the death penalty, she asked for a sentence of life without parole. Anything less would be neither appropriate nor reflective of his actions.

  Because Carol’s side of the family was not in the courtroom—other than her daughters—and Steve’s was there in force, Paupore made a point of reminding everyone that this case was not just about Steve DeMocker, it was about the victim, Carol Kennedy, and “the brutal murder of a very beautiful woman. She had a thirst for life and beautiful things.... Carol had a beautiful smile that still radiates today. She loved her art, her friends, Katie and Charlotte, and the moments daily when she could talk to her mother.”

  This case had been long, he said, as were the trial proceedings. Five years was “a long time to wait for justice.”

  Based on Carol’s work at women’s shelters and as a therapist, she was very familiar with domestic violence. She understood what it could do to someone’s ego and self-esteem. But Carol likely never considered that it would take her life in a way that no one deserved, he said, a way that “defines domestic violence at its extreme.”

  Although Carol battled with Steve till the end “over money, honesty and his fidelity,” he said, she’d finally found the strength to let go of the love of her life. She made it clear to her newly divorced ex-husband over coffee that last Sunday that their relationship was over and that she was moving on.

  Based on the text messages they exchanged in those last days and hours, he said, the evidence showed that Carol thought Steve was coming over to exchange checks the night she was murdered.

  “He set her up,” he said, noting that the violence that occurred in Carol’s home office “was fueled by hatred and rage,” and the nature of the crime was “overkill.” He couldn’t even describe what that experience must have been like for her.

  But as if that weren’t enough, he said, Steve then went after her trust account. By manipulating others, he took control of her estate.

  “He invaded Carol’s spirit, her will,” Paupore said, knowing that she’d wanted that money to go toward maintaining her daughters’ health, education and welfare. Never in the hundreds of cases he’d prosecuted had he seen the victim victimized again in her grave like this.

  “This case is about money, and it always has been.”

  Turning around to face the defense table, he looked directly at Steve and called him a “murdering, lying thief.” If the punishment was set to fit the crime, he said, Steve deserved the maximum sentence allowed.

  Paupore asked the judge to hand down a sentence that would keep Steve in prison for the rest of his natural life for the murder, compounded with consecutive five-year sentences for each of the four
counts relating to the anonymous e-mail and insurance money transfers. He also asked for a consecutive six-month term in jail for the misdemeanor delinquency charge, and that the credit for time served be applied only to the life sentence.

  In addition, the prosecutor asked that Steve be forced to pay $756,628 in restitution for $700,000 in insurance payouts that “unjustly enriched the lawyers,” the $6,000 in alimony that he didn’t pay in July 2008, the more than $20,000 in car insurance money he received after Charlotte totaled Carol’s Acura and the $28,500 he was reimbursed for cleanup of “the mess he made” at the house on Bridle Path.

  “Justice really cannot be served unless that money is put back into Carol’s trust,” he said.

  When the judge asked if any other victims wished to speak to the state’s case, Paupore said no. Till the end the Arizona law that prevented Charlotte and Katie from being called victims in this case still seemed very odd to me. I wondered if, in the end, that roadblock had helped inspire Katie to graduate magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Occidental, to enter Boalt Law School at the University of California, Berkeley, my alma mater, and to attain a clerkship at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in San Francisco.

  Speaking for the defense, the DeMocker clan made a series of statements, starting with Steve’s mother, whose quiet voice did not carry well back to the gallery. The gist of Jan’s long statement, which she sent me several months later, was that she wanted to tell the judge and reinforce for Steve that he’d done many positive things in his life. Turning around to face her son, she directed her preamble to him before speaking to the judge once again.

  Describing Carol as “an inspiring teacher,” Jan acknowledged that Carol had been repeatedly described as a victim who had finally done what she told her battered clients to do, which was to walk away.