Then No One Can Have Her Page 7

  Inside, the detectives went through Steve’s rather extensive, but neatly organized, collection of shoes. His many pairs of dress shoes were stacked next to each other in a section of rectangular compartments, and the athletic shoes were stored in a separate vertical row of square compartments, each housing a single pair. They seized all of his athletic shoes, including a pair of La Sportiva Rajas.

  After the sheriff’s team left the condo again, Renee came back. Steve told her, Charlotte and Jake that he’d known the investigators were looking for the head cover, which he said he’d found in the backseat of Renee’s car. It could have been blown there by the wind from somewhere in the garage, he said.

  Once attorney John Sears arrived, Renee took the kids to Bridle Path to pick up Charlotte’s car, leaving Sears alone with his client.

  But Steve didn’t turn over the head cover to authorities or to his attorney that day. Instead, he gave it to Sears for safekeeping two days later. His defense team later said that although Steve knew the investigators were looking for the head cover, it wasn’t on the search warrant, and he didn’t know why they wanted it. Not knowing what to do, Steve discussed the issue with Sears, who then called the bar association hotline for advice on how to proceed.

  “It is important to know that suspects (and their attorneys) are not required by the Constitution to help law enforcement investigate, particularly when the investigation is targeting you,” Rich Robertson, the defense’s investigator, said later. “The burden is on the government. People should not be put in the position of having to guess what law enforcement is looking for or why.”

  When detectives interviewed Jake again, he told them that the last time he’d been to Carol’s house was that last Sunday, the day after Katie had left on her trip. He and Charlotte had spent a couple of hours picking through Katie’s clothes for those that Charlotte wanted to wear. Carol, who was happy to see them, was getting ready for her garage sale, for which Steve said he’d given her some artwork and a golf club.

  Steve also had offered Jake’s father a set of left-handed mixed-matched clubs that he didn’t use, but like Jake, his dad was right-handed and couldn’t use them, either.

  Believing they had collected all the evidence they needed from the Bridal Path house, the team of investigators cleared the crime scene around 5:30 P.M. on July 3. Within ten minutes Detective Brown called Jim Knapp to tell him that he could return. In Brown’s mind it was Jim’s residence, he was the caretaker of the house and Carol’s pets, and no one knew what else to do with the animals.

  That’s when Brown, who had been assigned to be the case agent by then, also gave Jim a heads-up about the large amount of blood in Carol’s office.

  Around six o’clock, right after this conversation, Jim mentioned this bit of information to the cashier at the Safeway on Willow Road, where he was buying some wine. A woman who knew Carol through Van Gogh’s Ear, the art gallery where she’d worked, was nearby and overheard him say that his roommate had been murdered and there was “blood all around.” Concerned, she reported this to Detective Brown and faxed him a copy of her Safeway receipt as documentation.

  Later, when Brown was confronted on the stand about why the detectives hadn’t brought Jim down to the station for questioning the night of the murder, let alone why he told Jim about all the blood and let him back into the crime scene on July 3, Brown responded that he wasn’t truly in charge of the case.

  “I was not delegating or directing people to make decisions,” he testified. “My supervisors were doing that.”

  In the view of Steve’s attorneys, authorities should have considered Jim Knapp as a suspect or person of interest, but they didn’t.

  “You chose to believe Mr. Knapp’s alibi and chose to disbelieve Mr. DeMocker’s alibi,” defense attorney Craig Williams said.

  Brown countered that Steve was the one who drew attention to himself at the crime scene the night of the murder by asking several times whether he was a suspect, which raised Commander Mascher’s suspicions as well. Charlotte, Jake and Jim, on the other hand, did not raise the investigators’ suspicions in the same way, and they also did not ask whether they were suspects. Jim was a person of interest, Brown said, he just wasn’t taken down to the station.

  For the next five years, Brown continued to work the investigation, but he traded his detective title for deputy because he was mostly working patrol as the case dragged on. Detective John McDormett, who typically worked homicides, replaced him as the lead detective and case agent in September 2008, followed by Lieutenant Dave Rhodes, who took over because of concerns over a personality clash between McDormett and prosecutor Joe Butner.

  On July 8, after a case briefing at the Prescott sheriff’s station, Sergeant Dan Winslow, who was a golfer, was asked to look through the seized assortment of Steve’s left-handed clubs. Winslow compared the photo of the now-missing head cover with the Mizuno bag that contained two metal drivers, two fairway woods, four irons and a sixty-degree wedge, but saw no matching club.

  Winslow then went to the High Desert Golf shop in Prescott and looked through its selection of used clubs. Learning that the staff kept no record of when or who had brought them in, he purchased a used left-handed Callaway club, because it was the same make and model as the missing head cover—a Big Bertha Steelhead III #7 wood, which investigators believed was the likely murder weapon. Winslow gave the used club to Detective Brown.

  This used club was the same model as Steve’s except that it was one inch shorter. Steve, they later learned, had had his club custom made by Callaway, which shipped it to him in October 2003. The club Winslow purchased was later known as the “exemplar” club, and was admitted in court as an example of the alleged murder weapon.

  Subsequently the detectives also seized two more sets of the family’s clubs, a right-handed set from one location and yet another set of clubs from a storage facility. But investigators were never able to find the club that went with the missing head cover.

  The detectives returned to the Bridle Path house several times with new warrants that week, looking for additional evidence that came to light as the investigation progressed.

  When Brown and his team came back on July 6, Jim Knapp was on the property, and they saw that he’d thrown a red blanket over the bloody area in the office. He told them he could see the red mess from the laundry room, and he couldn’t stand to look at it. He didn’t want Carol’s daughters to see it, either.

  As the investigators inspected the laundry room, they noticed that the lights still didn’t go on, so Detective Jamarillo, wearing gloves, screwed two of the loose bulbs back in and they worked.

  Jim asked if they’d put new bulbs in, noting that the lights usually functioned properly. Figuring this was no coincidence, investigators collected the bulbs to check them for prints and DNA, theorizing that the killer could have come into the house and unscrewed the bulbs while Carol was out running, then hidden in the dark laundry room, behind the door, while she was on the phone. Ultimately, the DNA results were inconclusive on two of the bulbs. The third had no DNA, but did have a fingerprint. However, it was not Steve’s, whose prints were the only ones submitted for comparison.

  The investigators noticed that a Body & Soul magazine, which had a stapled packet of paperwork tucked into it, had been moved from the kitchen counter since they’d last been there. The packet contained a UBS bank statement and a couple of very recent e-mails between Carol and Steve, pertaining to the divorce agreement and division of Steve’s 401(k) account balance. Carol had apparently printed out the e-mails late on July 1 or early on July 2, highlighting some areas and scribbling notes about the math. She’d written $186,667.31, in the margin, for example, referring to their agreement that she would get the first $180,000 and they would split any additional amount.

  The investigators collected this paperwork because Brown wanted to test a reddish substance for blood, but it came back negative. Jim handed the magazine to Brown, and the defense later mad
e an issue of Jim’s fingerprint being on one of the e-mail printouts.

  Investigators checking the doors and other access points of the house that week found what appeared to be blood on the dead bolt to the door leading out of the den and into the garage. The detectives found no blood in the hallway proper, although they did find some spatters on plastic containers stored there. They also found a droplet on a section of the door frame near the wall, where ants were milling around, so they figured the killer had used that door to leave.

  On the sidewalk outside that door, which was made mostly of glass and enabled someone to look inside, they found a single round drop of blood. They figured the drop had dripped down, off the suspect or murder weapon, as if he’d stopped to look through the glass at the body. The shape of the droplet indicated that the person or object was not moving.

  “Both of those blood spots came back to Carol, so the suspect had [her] blood on his glove or hand,” said Mike Sechez, the prosecution investigator.

  In addition, they found what they thought was some blood on the passenger seat and on a red flashlight in Katie’s BMW in the garage. They had the car towed to an impound yard for processing.

  They seized the ladder, which had been specially made to lock over wheels on the loft in that bedroom, to document the absence of blood on it. There were no fingerprints on it, either, which supported the theory that the killer was wearing gloves when he repositioned the objects in Carol’s office.

  With the help of the Gilbert Police Department on July 8, investigators processed the house with Bluestar, a revealing agent that turns blue when it reacts with blood.

  They started at the front door and worked their way through the kitchen and down the hallway to the office, looking for any hidden traces that had been wiped or washed off or were invisible to the naked eye. They also used the agent in the bathroom, including the sinks. No area turned fluorescent until they got to the threshold of the office.

  Despite all this searching, they still were unable to find any of Steve’s blood or DNA at the house. And despite the fresh bleeding cuts on his arm and leg, the only bit of blood they found on his bicycle was a spot on his pump. They wondered whether he’d wiped it off, but had missed that one spot.

  Later the defense questioned why Jim Knapp had been allowed into the main house to move items around—such as the magazine, financial paperwork, and Carol’s purse, keys and day planner—when the investigators hadn’t finished collecting evidence. Jim said he’d kept Carol’s planner because it contained phone numbers for friends he wanted to call.

  “I know he was looking over the search warrant supplement returns, so I think he was being nosey, and he was looking to see what we had seized and what was still around the house,” Brown testified later.

  The defense also questioned how Jim came up with the theory that he told Brown during the July 6 search, that the killer “got a hold of her head and he smashed her head into the corner of that desk.”

  Similarly, the defense criticized investigators for failing to do a DNA test on the blood-spattered rimless glasses found on Carol’s desk, which the defense claimed were Jim’s, as featured hanging around his neck in various photos. Furthermore, they took detectives to task for failing to ask Jim about the binoculars he kept in the guesthouse, where he had a clear view into the windows of the main house.

  CHAPTER 10

  Katherine Morris’s best friend called her about Carol’s death on July 3. But that being the day of her own divorce, Katherine didn’t even want to listen to voice mails, let alone talk to anyone.

  After checking her voice mail the next morning, Katherine called her friend back around nine o’clock. When she learned that Carol had died, Katherine immediately visualized a car wreck. Her response was visceral, and unlike any she’d had before or since.

  “No, no, no!” she screamed from the gut as she felt her knees go limp. After she composed herself, she asked how and when.

  “They found her dead in her home,” her friend said.

  “Whaat?”

  “It looked like she was murdered.”

  Katherine couldn’t even comprehend how that could have happened to her peaceful, spiritual friend—someone who didn’t have a violent bone in her body, had never hurt anyone and had shined light from every pore of her being.

  She waited until a civilized hour—noon, her time in Georgia, three hours later than Prescott time—to call Carol’s house, hoping that someone would answer. When no one did, she called Steve, knowing that Charlotte was living with him.

  When he answered, his voice sounded raspy and tired. He said he was exhausted and that he was sorry for her loss, knowing “how close and dear Carol and you were,” a remark that struck her as odd. Not to compare losses, but he’d been married to Carol for twenty-five years and she was the mother of his children. Surely, his loss was worse than Katherine’s.

  The emotionless tone in which he talked about Carol’s death was “stone cold and not grief-stricken at all,” she recalled. “I would have thought he would be in tears, crying, and there was none of that.” All of this raised a red flag for her. It also made her feel like he was trying to manipulate her and her perception of what had happened, as if he were grooming her to support him.

  “When you have the loss of someone, you’re not able to talk like he spoke. You’re not talking about the details of how they were killed, or murdered, or who did it. For me, you’re just in a great tidal wave of emotion. You’re waiting to answer questions.” Instead, she said, “He was telling me what he wanted me to hear.”

  Being a therapist, Katherine was trained to take notes during discussions like these. Also knowing she was feeling emotional, she wanted to make sure she remembered what she thought might later become an important discussion. So she wrote down all the details of their conversation.

  As they discussed the circumstances of Carol’s death, Steve said the detectives hadn’t even categorized it as a homicide, noting that the ladder near the loft was upside down.

  “My understanding is that they aren’t certain it was murder,” Steve said. “They think it was an accident.”

  “An accident?”

  “Yeah, apparently, the ladder was toppled over and so were some other things in the room.”

  Carol had made a phone date with her friend Debbie Wren Hill for noon, eastern time, on July 5, so she could tell Debbie all about her new boyfriend, David Soule. When the phone rang early that morning, Debbie groaned, wishing Carol hadn’t called before she was really awake.

  Oh, Carol, she thought.

  Debbie’s husband answered the phone. “It’s your mom,” he said.

  Picking up, Debbie waited to hear whatever was so important that her mother needed to call so early.

  “I have some really bad news for you,” her mom said.

  Debbie wondered which family member had died. She was surprised and saddened to hear that it was not family, but her dear friend.

  “Did she kill herself ?” Debbie said, asking the first question that came to mind.

  “No, she was murdered.”

  “Oh, my God,” she said. “Steve.”

  Debbie immediately called Katherine and together they tried to piece together what might have happened.

  Steve never returned Ruth Kennedy’s phone messages from the night of the murder. They didn’t talk until the following Tuesday, six days afterward, on July 8, and only because Ruth was on the phone with Katie.

  Katie had planned to stop in Europe on her way to South Africa, where she’d planned to take political economics and an apartheid history class at the University of Cape Town, and also work at a child soldier rehabilitation center in Uganda. But she had to cut her trip short to fly home as soon as she got the news about her mother’s murder.

  “My dad wants to speak to you,” Katie told her grandmother.

  Steve’s mother, Janice “Jan” DeMocker, had been quick to send condolences and flowers to Ruth after both her sister and husba
nd had died. Ruth was now wondering why she hadn’t heard from her daughter’s typically caring mother-in-law, who was a minister.

  “Steve, have you told your mother about Carol?” Ruth asked, already guessing the answer. She was right.

  “No,” he said, “I’m going to. I thought Jim [Steve’s brother] told her.”

  CHAPTER 11

  In the weeks after the murder, as the investigation into Carol’s death proceeded, Ruth Kennedy received one call after another from investigators working the case. The worst one came from Dr. Laura Fulginiti, a forensic anthropologist who called to get permission to piece Carol’s skull back together.

  “At that time they were considering me next of kin,” Ruth recalled. The image of her daughter’s skull, shattered into so many pieces that it needed to be reconstructed like a puzzle, had always stuck in her mind, a concept “just so horrible to even contemplate.”

  Sheriff’s Deputy Steve Surak had transported Carol’s head from the medical examiner’s office in Yavapai County to the one in Maricopa County, where it was to be delivered to Fulginiti for an expert examination, analysis and reconstruction.

  Within two weeks Fulginiti concluded that it was one of the three worst cases she’d ever seen. The skull, which showed a minimum of seven blunt-force blows, and possibly many more, was broken into more than two hundred pieces, including at least fifty larger pieces that were held together only by tissue.

  When she saw the curvilinear shape of the fracture line in the right cranial vault, with a flatness on top, she testified later, “I thought to myself, ‘Wow, that looks a lot like a golf club. Particularly a wood.’”