Then No One Can Have Her Page 8

  She developed this theory without conferring with the ME, Dr. Keen, or any other investigator, and she did, in fact, determine that the injuries were “consistent” with a golf club. Given the Callaway Big Bertha Steelhead exemplar club to examine, Fulginiti confirmed that it was capable of creating Carol’s injuries. Although she couldn’t say for sure that this particular model of club created the trauma, she also said it couldn’t be “ruled out.”

  She suggested that other golf clubs and objects be tested to show the difference in impact damage, but said the left-handed club appeared to be consistent with the trauma, Detective Brown wrote in his report.

  By some accounts Steve didn’t offer much comfort to his daughters during this trying time. About a week after the murder, Renee saw one scene that disturbed her enough that she told her Unitarian minister friend, Dan Spencer, about it: Steve was busy doing something on his laptop when Katie started to cry on the living-room floor. She began sobbing, so upset that she went into the fetal position, and yet Steve continued to type. Charlotte’s boyfriend had to get down on the floor and hug her to try to calm her down.

  The first news brief about the case was posted on Prescott’s Daily Courier website the night of July 3, calling Carol’s murder an “apparent homicide.”

  Sandy Moss, a local radio and TV host on KPPV/KQNA and AZTV who has lived in town for more than two decades, said Carol’s death left the community at large in shock. Not much crime is committed in Prescott, and certainly not many homicides. But this particular murder victim, who was a “really decent, artistic, spiritually aware person,” seemed so unlikely.

  “I’ve never met a person who didn’t think Carol was the cream of the crop, the cat’s meow, a really fine and dear person,” Moss said. “To have someone like that who was so seemingly undeserving of being slaughtered” was such a shame.

  In fact, Moss couldn’t remember any murder like this one in at least twenty years. “It was horrendous,” she said. “It was even shocking for the parties who didn’t know Carol.”

  Later that month, when Courier columnist Randall Amster wrote about Carol’s death, he recalled that she’d been one of the first colleagues at Prescott College to welcome him seven years earlier:

  If you read about her in the newspaper and didn’t know her, you might have an impression of a New Age artist with a gentle, kind spirit. And she was this, yet she also possessed a strength of character that you might not suspect. She was forthright and outspoken, and will be sorely missed in this community.

  Some Prescott residents wondered if they were safe, if this was a random killing by a madman on the loose, or if this was someone who had set out specifically to kill Carol.

  By July 7, sheriff’s officials said publicly that they’d already identified “at least one person of interest,” and that area residents should not fear that a serial killer had committed the murder.

  As people learned more details of the homicide scene, “they thought this was likely someone she knew,” Moss said. “Generally a random slaughter wouldn’t make it so personal. The people I talked to were outraged and brokenhearted.”

  “Her artist friends believed from the beginning that it was [Steve],” Moss said. “They had no doubt in their mind.”

  Prescott is not only home to the alternative Prescott College, it also has drawn an unusual number of rehab facilities, homeless people, alcoholics and addicts, some of whom Carol was treating at Pia’s Place. That’s because buyers at one point streamed into town to purchase cheap property for rehab facilities in residential neighborhoods. The town also provides feeding care stations for the homeless.

  “It’s been a real bone of contention here,” Moss said.

  But at the same time, she explained, Prescott is also culturally alive. And although some small towns may be populated with small-minded or uneducated people, that’s not the case there. Prescott’s half-a-dozen higher-education institutions and its performing-arts venues have drawn big-name artists such as Anne Murray and Bill Cosby, during his earlier days before his reputation became tarnished with date rape allegations.

  “We have a much more sophisticated populace with opportunities for education, entertainment and growth,” Moss said, adding that Prescott is also known for being a spiritual community with “a higher consciousness in terms of social responsibility and awareness.”

  The town’s more temperate weather also draws residents from the valley or flatlands of Phoenix, especially during the hottest months of the year.

  The monsoons that start up at the end of June or beginning of July come at the best time of year. “It’s just so refreshing and such a nice break,” she said. “It rains for a couple of hours, then it goes away. The sun comes out, and there’s often a rainbow.”

  More than half of Prescott’s population is forty-five or older, and about a quarter of the town’s residents are sixty-five or older, although the town still has its share of kids and schools. But for a single person like Carol was, it’s hard to find someone to date, which is likely why she turned to online dating sites to find someone special.

  “I have single friends, and it’s really hard . . . to hook up with the right kind of single people or to find a variety of people that you might be interested in,” Moss said. “Singles always feel excluded here, I know.... It’s hard to find people who match up to other people.”

  A year or so before her murder, Carol had been seeing a man who lived in Malibu, California. Sometime after they broke up, she met David Soule on Match.com in April 2008. David was among the first people investigators interviewed.

  David had a home in nearby Jerome, but he primarily lived on the coast of southern Maine in Lincoln County, where he was fixing up a sailboat for a long trip.

  After they met, he and Carol got together ten times over the course of the next month before he left for Maine on May 6, and they communicated regularly by e-mail and phone until she died. Carol was preparing to fly east for a visit on July 12, to see his boat, and to spend some time together.

  On July 3, a friend of David’s saw the news brief about Carol’s murder in the Courier and called him. David immediately phoned the sheriff ’s office, asking to speak to Detective Doug Brown, who, busy writing and carrying out search warrants and attending the autopsy that day, didn’t get back to him until the next day.

  When they talked, David was clearly shaken by the news. “He was at a loss, I think, for the most part,” Brown recalled later.

  David wondered if Carol had told Steve about the upcoming trip and he’d become angry. As far as he knew, Steve was not to go to the Bridle Path house. Carol told David that she’d been upset when Steve had shown up unannounced that past week, supposedly to pick up the barbecue grill. Luckily, Jim Knapp had intercepted him.

  David had heard about the golf club being a possible murder weapon, noting that when Steve came over to pick up the grill, that may have been a good opportunity to plant a weapon. He didn’t know Jim all that well, but he didn’t think Carol’s tenant had anything to do with the murder.

  Asked about the golf shoes found in Carol’s car, David said she’d mentioned taking some lessons in her Match.com dating profile, but he’d never seen any clubs at the house.

  When Carol and David last spoke, on Tuesday, July 1, around 10 P.M., she told him she’d been crying after getting home from work that day. She wondered aloud whether she was sad about Katie leaving for South Africa.

  Carol had been under a tremendous financial strain lately, he said. She was making only $24,000 a year, but was going to have to pay $12,000 to the IRS because of the divorce settlement, presumably taxes on her share of Steve’s 401(k) account.

  David was aware that Steve had tried to get back together with Carol since the divorce, even after everything he’d put her through, with all his women.

  Carol had told Soule of a $300 Viagra bill that Steven got and she suspected that he was banging everything in sight, Brown wrote in his report. Soule thought that Steven
had some type of sexual addiction.

  Soule thought that Steven was the type that wanted what he couldn’t have and that he didn’t want what he could, Brown wrote. He thought that this may be the first time that someone has actually left him and refused him.

  In one of Carol’s last e-mails to her boyfriend, she said Steve had been “exceedingly nice” around the time of Katie’s airport send-off, which sent up red flags for her. [She felt she was] caught in a toxic net and did not know how she would be able to get out, Brown wrote.

  David agreed to give a DNA swab to his local law enforcement to rule him out as a suspect in case he’d left any DNA at the house, but he said he’d been in Maine at the time of the murder.

  Katie DeMocker flew home and arrived in Prescott on July 4. During dinner that night after Charlotte, Jake and Steve picked her up at the airport, they discussed Carol’s possible killers.

  Steve suggested that Barb O’Non—his former assistant, with whom he’d claimed to have been in love with for years and wanted to marry—could have hired someone to kill Carol. If he was arrested, he said, Barb could get his entire client book, worth $110 million, versus the 30 percent of the annual $750,000 she’d been earning before.

  With that seed planted, Katie mentioned Barb as a possible suspect to Detective Brown in an interview on July 7.

  But before they got to Barb, Brown asked her about the nasty e-mails Jim Knapp had been sending, spouting hateful allegations against Steve, the latest of which had come in just the night before. Brown asked if Katie could think of any scenario—“from what your mom said, from what your dad said, from what anyone said”—where Jim would intentionally cause her mother’s death.

  “I don’t know how to answer these questions because I can’t imagine anybody wanting to do this to anyone,” Katie said.

  Before she had a chance to elaborate, Brown reminded her that she’d mentioned Jim was “romantically kind of interested” in Carol.

  “Yeah, he was,” she said, explaining that one night he was drunk and the two of them had to put him to bed. He playfully grabbed at Carol’s clothes, but after they tucked him in, “that was the end of it.”

  Brown asked if she could see any reason why others, such as her sister or Jake, would want to hurt Carol. Katie said no.

  “Your dad?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Anytime that you’ve been alive that you’ve seen any type of physical abuse?”

  “No, and my parents didn’t even believe in spanking us,” she said. “Both of them are probably two of the most unviolent people. . . . I was a terror child and my dad never even hit me.”

  “No spanking at all?”

  “I mean my mom did it once and they both felt so bad about it when I was, like, three that they vowed never to do it again.”

  But when Brown tried to push harder on the nature of arguments between her parents, Katie shut down. “I don’t feel comfortable talking about this right now,” she said.

  Moving on, Brown asked about obsessive or violent clients and “unwarranted” phone calls to Carol, which prompted Katie to bring up Barb.

  “I mean, I suppose, of all people that I could think of, maybe, I mean she hated my mom. I think she had some sort of, like, thing. She lives down in Anthem or somewhere around there, but she had something at the guard gate thing that my mom wasn’t to be allowed anywhere near her. . . . It was kind of a combination of the fact that she just thought my mom was crazy, that she thought my mom hated her for having the affair,” she said. She added that Barb also wasn’t very friendly with Steve at the moment. “Their business is flamed. It got split up today.”

  Katie explained that the Barb affair was hidden from Carol for a while, but then she knew and then the girls knew, and then their parents “would say that it had stopped, but it didn’t . . . or it kept going back and forth.... It was kind of a confusing process, I think, for both my mom and Barb, but I think Barb was pretty convinced that, you know, if my dad got a divorce they would end up together, and they didn’t. But she wanted him to get a divorce for a really long time.”

  Asked what motive Barb would have to kill Carol, Katie said she didn’t want to say more for fear of saying the wrong thing. But she did say this: “I don’t trust her is the bottom line. She’s always been manipulative.”

  Overall, she said, her mom had “very, very few enemies.. . . Everyone that she met liked her. She was nice to almost every single person.”

  Brown asked how Charlotte was doing under the circumstances, and what her views were about all this.

  “She’s about the same place I am. She’s scared and stressed that this is how it happened because, you know, we can’t even really deal with the fact that we’re sad that she’s gone. We’re stressed about who did it and, you know, I mean, we’re just scared.”

  “Have you talked to your dad about all this?”

  “He’s really sad. When I first got home, he just broke down and was crying.... He’s been trying to be supportive of us and reassuring, but I think he’s stressed out.”

  Brown told Katie that the detectives were going to do everything they could “to find out the truth, not find out some made-up thing that we want just to fit. We want the truth, that’s all we want.”

  But in the meantime he asked her to keep to herself any information he’d told her about the investigation, a concern that ultimately became a major victims’ rights issue in this case.

  “The fact that it seemed accidental, but was not accidental, kind of puts this in position that somebody did this and for whatever reason tried to cover it up,” he said.

  As he cited evidence to support that conclusion, Brown drew a diagram of the room where Carol’s body was found, along with the position of the ladder and the bookshelves, one tipped over the other, almost propped up, “like it had been right there, pushed over.”

  “Someone set this up, okay, to make it look like she fell from the ladder and possibly hit her head on the desk,” he said. “It looks like someone staged all that stuff.”

  Last time she saw the ladder, Katie said, it wasn’t even in that bedroom, it was out in the hall. “I’ve come to the terms with the fact that somebody killed her,” she said, promising that if she knew anything or “thought that anyone, no matter how much I cared about them, knew anything about this, I swear to you I would tell you.”

  Brown asked Katie to think carefully, and if she had any information, to share it with the detectives. If she didn’t, she was “doing [her] mom a disservice, because what everyone has said . . . is she did not deserve to be killed.”

  “She didn’t at all,” Katie agreed.

  Brown said some “Joe Blow off the street” could have been “walking around in the backyard, came into your house, your mom’s house, killed your mom and then staged it to look like an accident.” And although that was a possible scenario, he said, “is it probable, or does it make sense for somebody to do that, is the question.”

  “Most likely not,” Katie agreed.

  Because Carol didn’t leave money lying around and no property was evidently missing or stolen, the probability of a stranger staging a scene in that situation “is so minute, it’s almost just not even worth looking at,” Brown said. “Someone, for whatever reason, killed your mom because of anger, frustration, whatever.”

  Brown asked if there was any reason she might have gotten blood on the passenger seat of her car, the black BMW that was parked in Carol’s garage.

  “Not that I can think of,” she said.

  “There was blood found in your car.”

  “Oh,” she said, surprised.

  “Is there any reason your mom’s blood would be in the passenger seat that you know about?”

  “Don’t think so. Wow,” she said. “That was a shock.”

  Walking a careful line to gain Katie’s help with the investigation and yet not give her too much graphic detail as to be insensitive, or to prompt her to share it with Steve, Brown tried to
help Katie understand that the killer had to be someone close to her, and that investigators needed her help to solve the crime.

  Carol couldn’t have hurt her head so severely in a fall, he said. The trauma showed that she was hit multiple times, and she had “defensive wounds, meaning she tried to protect herself.” The murder weapon, he said, would be “something similar to a golf club, something similar to a very skinny stick.”

  The trauma to her head was caused by enough force to fracture her skull, and her blood was not only in that room but tracked outside as well. “That was the first indication that this can’t be an accident,” he said. Given the multiple “hits to the head, it’s usually because of, they call it a passionate-type thing, you lose control for a brief moment. I believe that’s what happened here.”

  But every time Brown brought the interview back to Steve, noting, for example, that a block of his time was “lost” and that didn’t “make a lot of sense” given the rest of his bike-riding story, Katie backed away and said she didn’t want to talk about it.

  Shortly after the murder, Charlotte’s boyfriend, Jake, was working at Barbudos, a Mexican restaurant in the Safeway shopping center on Iron Springs, when Jim Knapp came in. Jake overheard Jim telling a woman that he thought Steve DeMocker was the only person who could have killed Carol and that he might have had financial motives for doing it.

  Jake immediately texted Charlotte, and she came right over, which seemed to catch Jim off guard. Jake went back to work while Jim and Charlotte went outside to talk. In Jake’s view, Jim seemed “a little shady” and had strong feelings for Carol.

  The DeMockers heard that Jim was also telling people that Steve had been violent with Carol in the past, dragging her around by the hair.

  The family asked Jim to vacate the guesthouse, which he didn’t want to do. After Steve’s brother Jim finally evicted Jim Knapp in August, the tenant asked for $5,000 in damages to his personal belongings—rust on his washer and dryer, which he said the DeMockers had left outside for several weeks.