Then No One Can Have Her Page 35

  Carol and Steve met when both were starting grad school, she said. They lived in a house on his parents’ property in New York and interacted with his parents quite a bit. The couple had a lot in common, she said, including a love of being outside. Writing their own wedding vows, they promised to support and nurture each other.

  “Both of them really, really wanted to make a difference,” she said.

  Jan proceeded to tell stories of how Steve had saved the lives of the rock climber and the kayaker, and had served as a leader among his siblings and others with his heroic, larger-than-life deeds.

  During the time she and Steve’s father spent with Carol and Steve every year, she said, she never saw any sign of their disagreements turning physical.

  “There isn’t any possibility of justice,” she said, which would be to see Carol sitting with her daughters in the courtroom.

  Because Carol lived her life with fairness and compassion, Jan said, she thought that even Carol “might very well be here with me asking for leniency and hoping for a sentence that would allow her grandchildren to have a chance to visit and to play with their grandfather sometime in the far future, when he was a free man again.”

  As Jan slipped along the front row of the gallery to return to her seat, Katie hugged her.

  Next up was Michael DeMocker, Steve’s youngest brother, who at forty-eight was twelve years younger.

  Saying he’d met Carol when he was a teenager, he recalled being so upset one day that she pulled the car over in the middle of Boston traffic to hug and comfort him. She had also posed for photo portraits, and he felt he owed her for encouraging him to pursue the avocation that ultimately became his career.

  Michael described Steve as even-tempered, noting that on a scuba-diving trip to Belize with all four DeMocker brothers, they headed out to sea with a group of strangers and lost their boat while the waves were high. Even though Steve was not a terribly experienced diver, “he kept his head,” and his first instinct was to save the lives of others, not his own.

  As a “very loving father,” Steve was a good role model for him and had made a positive impact on so many lives, Michael said. Steve and Carol had passed on their “strength, love and resiliency” to their daughters.

  Steve’s sister Mary, a self-described “stay-at-home mother,” related how she and her family had moved to Prescott in 1998. They used to play tag outside the courthouse, but never went inside until this case began.

  When Carol was killed, she said, “I lost a sister, I lost a friend, and I lost a mothering mentor.... I miss her. I miss her terribly.”

  Mary said she didn’t understand why the rules within the courthouse had been so different during this case than they were in the community at large, where mothers taught their kids to play fair and not to lie. Turning around to face the prosecution table, her voice dripping with disdain, she said that in this case she saw “an investigation seeking not truth, but the conviction at any cost of someone close to me. It succeeded.”

  “My question is, why are we here at all?”

  The scenario simply didn’t fit with the evidence, she said, or who her brother had been for the past fifty-three years of her life.

  “I haven’t even seen one thing showing he was even on Carol’s property,” she said, adding that she rejected the guilty verdict.

  She, too, asked the judge to show leniency, to give Steve some hope he could do the things he loved before he died and to “take the least unjust action that you can take today in an utterly unjust situation.”

  Sharon DeMocker, the physician, spoke less animatedly than her sister, as she described Steve as a “natural born leader” and “the creator of games, adventures and sometimes misadventures.” He’d taught his siblings how to play fair and take care of each other, opened up a world of possibilities and helped boost her confidence while climbing and kayaking. She had put her life in his hands before, and if she could, she would do so again.

  She and Steve had talked about traveling with medical teams to Third World countries, which obviously wasn’t going to happen now, but Steve had already helped keep “many people alive,” she said.

  Switching to Carol, whom she described as a sister, confidante and “joyful, loving presence,” Sharon said her sister-in-law had inspired the big, close-knit DeMocker family.

  “There’s a giant hole that was ripped in our hearts more than five years ago with Carol’s murder,” she said. The justice system only added to the injury when it not only failed Carol but her family and theirs by convicting the wrong man.

  As Sharon walked back to her seat, she turned to Steve and mouthed, “I love you.”

  After Craig Williams asked to take a break, Steve’s daughters made their statements. Katie went first, describing her family home growing up as “balanced, beautiful and overwhelmingly loving.”

  Her father skied down the most advanced slopes, carrying her as a two-year-old on his back, and her mother tucked her into bed. Their family danced together to loud music. Her mom worked in the garden and sprayed her with the hose; her dad bounced her and her sister on the trampoline. They all sat around the table after dinner and laughed till it hurt—memories that today are “both beautiful and sad.”

  Her parents balanced each other out, she said. Describing Carol as “unconditional loving, openhearted, open-armed and open-minded,” she said Carol brought light into the room. She “loved people to a fault” and “forgave easily, sometimes too easily.” Saying she was a better person for knowing her mother, Katie’s voice started breaking.

  Describing Steve as a kind and “deeply devoted father” who taught her how to climb rocks, ski, and kayak, Katie said he also showed her how to value herself as a woman, to be strong and confident and to believe “that I was as good as any boy.”

  As she acknowledged that this same man was accused of killing her mother, Katie said that, as a daughter of both the accused and the victim, she would rather talk about “healing and forgiveness,” because that’s how she was raised. Noting that the judge had the ability to grant her father the possibility of parole in twenty-five years, she asked Donahoe to do so.

  As she and Charlotte passed each other in the aisle, Katie kissed her younger sister.

  Taking the family’s final turn at the podium, Charlotte spoke of her “self-destructive path” during her parents’ divorce. She described her father as “my protector, my teacher and my greatest advocate,” who gave her ice cream as an adolescent when she was feeling anxious. “He still remains someone I deeply respect and admire.”

  Her mother’s death has been “absolutely devastating,” she said. “I miss her joyful spirit.” And the fact that neither her father nor her mother would see her get married or watch her children being born constituted an “excruciating punishment.” In a soft voice she asked the judge not to “force the permanent loss of a second loved one.”

  Finally, Steve DeMocker stood to make his own statement, shuffling up to the podium in his ankle and waist chains, flanked by his two attorneys. Firmly, strongly and yet calmly, he declared his innocence to the judge in a low, monotone voice.

  “I did not kill Carol,” he said. “We loved each other for more than twenty years. Our marriage was over, but not our affection for each other. . . . I’m incapable of violence against her.”

  To believe that he killed Carol was to doubt her judgment, he said. They were still a family, and still as “fiercely protective of our children as any parents. I would no more have harmed her than I would harm my daughters by taking her from them.”

  He told the judge he had nothing more to ask than his siblings and daughters had been asking since the night of Carol’s murder. Justice for her would not be accomplished by putting a falsely accused man in prison forever, he said, contending that the injustice to Carol was only compounded by taking him away from their children.

  Steve turned to face his family, with his back to the court reporter, and thanked them for the faith they’d shown hi
m. He told his daughters how proud he was of them, and “of the strength and the grace” they’d displayed when faced with the loss of both parents.

  At that point the air-conditioning went on and the court reporter said she couldn’t hear him, so Steve gave up and returned to the table. Katie started crying as she, Charlotte, Sharon and Mary circled their arms around each other for strength.

  After another break Craig Williams gave a brief statement, noting that when he first started working on this case, the hefty files filled two giant trucks that had to be unloaded.

  “I can tell you one thing for certain. It’s not just that Steve DeMocker is not guilty. It’s that Steve DeMocker is innocent of killing Carol Kennedy. This is a wrongly convicted man.”

  Judge Donahoe started his comments by disagreeing with the family members who had dismissed the verdict and the justice system as unfair.

  “It was a just verdict,” he declared.

  The outcome, he said, could have been different depending on how the trier of fact determined the credibility of the witnesses and weight of the evidence, for which he had considered “some residual doubt.” But, he added, “The thing that I can’t get past is this horrific crime scene. I saw these pictures, and I’m not sure I’m ever going to be able to erase those photos from my mind.”

  “This was a premeditated murder,” he said. “It was a brutal murder. And from all appearances, the motive was money.” As a result the circumstances of the murder outweighed the call for a lenient sentence.

  Noting that Steve had already spent 1,919 days in jail, the judge fulfilled most of the prosecution’s requests for sentencing, making sure that Steve DeMocker would spend every last day he had in prison, plus twenty-one years for the other counts.

  Donahoe also ordered that Steve pay restitution to Carol’s trust—$150,000 with an additional eighty-four percent surcharge, as well as the $700,000 in the insurance payments. The monthly amount, to be determined by state corrections officials, should be paid to the court and then to an interest-bearing account.

  “Mr. DeMocker, good luck to you, sir,” he said.

  With that, the bailiffs walked Steve, whose expression remained stoic and unemotional, out of the courtroom with little fanfare.

  I’d already called Craig Williams’s office before the hearing to introduce myself. Now I approached him to ask if he would agree to an interview with me at some point. He said, rather abruptly, that he would have to get permission from his client, then promptly started talking to a couple of local reporters. I shrugged it off as a small-town snub.

  To put someone in prison for life when detectives couldn’t even put him at the crime scene “ought to shock the conscience,” Williams said. “The investigation in this case is unbelievable.”

  Yes, what was done to Carol was terrible, he said, but “that doesn’t mean that it’s Steve. You can luminol the whole planet,” he said, and you still wouldn’t be able to put Steve at the scene.

  After months of subsequent calls and e-mails to Williams with no definitive response, I sent a three-page letter to Steve in prison describing my attempts and my reasons for wanting to interview him, his defense team and his family, all of whom had stonewalled me so far.

  Steve responded to me once via an e-mail from his sister Sharon, saying he needed to consult with his attorneys before doing so. When I received no further response, I e-mailed Sharon to follow up. She politely replied that she was sure Steve would contact me if he was interested in talking. He never did.

  During the hearing the DeMocker clan looked like a bunch of angry, wounded and wronged soldiers, banding together for the battle of a lifetime. With him being the firstborn of nine kids, how could they not look up to him? Their worlds must have felt like they were falling apart, especially the youngest siblings.

  Just as I’d thought at the start, the whole hugging ritual after each victim impact statement looked choreographed, as if they were thinking, The world is watching. Let’s show them how together we are—that we are a force to contend with.

  Months later, after reading Randy Schmidt’s report about Steve’s postverdict calls with his family, in which they discussed ways to influence the media, I’m guessing that my first impressions weren’t too far-off.

  But it’s also possible that this resulted from being watched and filmed for the past five years, as Dateline, 48 Hours, 20/20 and now Inside Edition covered this story for episodes that wouldn’t run until after the sentencing. Somehow this story from this tiny mountain town had shown up on the national media radar.

  After the sentencing the DeMockers appeared more exhausted than anything. Looking out the window in the hallway outside the courtroom, they huddled to discuss whether to make a statement and, if so, what to say to the few media, including the Inside Edition crew, standing outside with a TV camera.

  Outside the courthouse the crew blocked the sidewalk, so Michael DeMocker, who, as a staff photographer for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, apparently felt more comfortable with the media than his siblings, stepped forward to make a statement.

  “The family is obviously as disappointed in the sentence as they were in the verdict,” he said. “Steve has a lot of appeals available to him. We’re just going to stand by him while he does.” In the meantime, he said, “we will wrap our arms around his daughters.”

  “It was the wrong verdict and the wrong sentence,” Sharon DeMocker added.

  Jan DeMocker said she’d been back in Prescott for weeks at a time, and expressed her thanks to the people who had been good to her and who, even after a “horrible, long five years,” still seemed to believe in her son’s innocence.

  The Inside Edition crew shouted out questions and followed the family members as they walked to their respective cars. To me this overly aggressive behavior seemed predatory and big-city insensitive. It was also the talk of the family’s lunch afterward.

  CHAPTER 48

  Craig Williams filed a notice of appeal on February 3, 2014, after which attorney David Goldberg, of Fort Collins, Colorado, was appointed by the Yavapai County Public Defender’s Office to represent Steve through the appellate process. Because this was designated a complex case, Goldberg got an extension on the filing deadline.

  The appeal was filed a little more than a year later, in March 2015. Goldberg cited multiple grounds for requesting to vacate Steve’s convictions and dismiss the case with prejudice. Short of that, he requested a new trial—with a different prosecutorial agency—as “the only way to erase the appearance of impropriety that surrounds this case.”

  Before he’d even read it, defense investigator Rich Robertson said he believed the appeal had a good chance of producing a new trial. “When cases get as screwed up as this one did—for all the twists and turns and sideshow stuff that happened—it’s almost inevitable that there was some mistake that occurs,” he said.

  But Mike Sechez, the retired prosecution investigator, said justice had already been served.

  “I don’t think Steve DeMocker did it and was convicted,” he said, “I know one hundred percent in my mind that he did it. So his standing up there and saying, ‘I didn’t do it,’ is him still hoping that his sentence will be overturned. He will never admit that he killed his ex-wife as long as his daughters are alive.”

  The Arizona State Bar investigation into Sheila Polk’s allegations against John Sears, Steve’s first lead defense counsel, was delayed until after Steve was convicted. It was finally completed in January 2015, resulting in dismissal of the bar charge against Sears.

  The State Bar does not believe that we have the “clear and convincing evidence” necessary to prove the alleged misconduct, Craig Henley, senior bar counsel, wrote in a letter to Polk.

  While Sears did notarize the documents in which Steve disclaimed the insurance proceeds, Henley wrote, it was a different law firm that negotiated those details with Hartford and secured the proceeds. Similarly, it was another attorney who represented Charlotte and Katie DeMocker conc
erning the transfer of money to Carol’s estate, and also in the girls’ decision to give that money to their grandparents and ultimately to fund Steve’s defense. Although Henley described the nature, timing and ultimate use of those money transfers as “suspicious,” he said Steve’s daughters’ testimony about these issues supported Sears’s account of the events.

  As the ultimate recipients of the proceeds, Katie and Charlotte were authorized to use the insurance proceeds as they wanted, Henley wrote.

  Finally, Henley stated, although Sears did make an “incomplete” statement about the insurance payout during his opening statement, it didn’t “appear to have been a knowingly false statement.” During the investigation, Henley said, Sears argued in his own defense that his statement was “technically ‘correct,’” noting that the parties were about to craft a stipulation about these issues when Judge Lindberg had to step down.

  Jim Knapp’s friends were upset by how he was portrayed by Steve’s attorneys at the second trial, in the local newspaper and also on the Dateline episode, all of which painted Jim as an “odd duck,” said Ken Korn, Jim’s childhood friend.

  “He wasn’t that odd. He was a great guy,” Ken said. “And I just get kind of annoyed that he was being portrayed as some kind of weirdo.”

  Like Ann Saxerud, Ken was also irritated that the defense went after Jim, saying he was obsessed with Carol, when he couldn’t defend himself.

  “I don’t think he was,” he said. “I think he just relied on her friendship. I think they had a natural bond that way.”

  The Jim Knapp whom Ken Korn once knew was not violent and would never have hurt Carol. In fact, Ken laughed when asked whether he’d ever seen Jim do anything physically violent.

  “No, not at all.... There’s no way. He’s just not a violent guy. That’s not part of his [makeup], especially to a woman.”