Then No One Can Have Her Page 9

  In an e-mail to Katie, he noted that he was in a “very precarious financial situation,” living on unemployment, with possible surgery coming up. He said he wasn’t sharing that information to gain sympathy, only to inform her of his circumstances.

  Katie, I loved your mom deeply, he wrote. She was my coach, my confidante, and my friend. But he also noted that despite the rumors going around, they never had a romantic involvement. When Carol was killed, he wrote, he was really at a loss of what to do, where to go, and how I would manage, but he did his utmost to care for Carol’s two dogs and her cat, Max.

  As executor of Carol’s estate, Katie and her attorney worked out a percentage of Jim Knapp’s damage claim and paid him. Without waiting for her attorney’s advice, she also wrote a check for about $20,000 to her father, who pressured her to pay the claim he submitted for the professional cleanup team that removed the blood at Bridle Path so they could sell the house.

  CHAPTER 12

  Some of Carol’s closest longtime friends, including Debbie Wren Hill, Katherine Morris and Sally Butler, flew in to attend one or both of the celebrations of life that were held in Carol’s memory.

  Like Carol, Debbie and Katherine are both therapists. Debbie works with children, and Katherine with children and families. Sally, who had known Steve since college, also had worked with him in Outward Bound fifteen years before she met Carol in the late 1980s. The two women subsequently developed a close friendship.

  The first memorial service was open to the public, just before Carol’s birthday, on the afternoon of Thursday, July 24, at the Unity Church of Prescott, where Carol had sporadically attended services.

  The second was a private service for about fifty family members, neighbors and close friends on Sunday, July 27, outside the L’Auberge resort in Sedona. The Reverend Dan Spencer, a Unitarian minister and close friend of Renee Girard, facilitated the ceremony. Steve later submitted a claim for the service costs to Carol’s estate, which had assets valued around $284,000, including several bank accounts and furniture. Claims against the estate came in pretty close to that same amount.

  Debbie flew up from Nashville for the second service in Sedona, as did Ruth and John Kennedy, and John’s two kids. Steve’s father picked up Carol’s family at the airport and dropped them at a hotel. The Kennedy family rented a car, then drove to the service with Debbie.

  As the Kennedys pulled up to a red light, they looked over and saw Steve, Katie and Charlotte in the car next to them.

  Oh, God, I just don’t want to see him there, Debbie thought, dreading the inevitable interaction at the service.

  They pulled into the parking lot at the same time, and after getting out of their respective cars, Debbie hugged the girls.

  “I’m really sorry for your loss,” Steve told Debbie.

  “Thanks,” she replied, uttering the only words she could manage for the man she was already convinced had killed her dear friend.

  David Higgs, one of Carol’s college friends, showed up after saying he didn’t think he could make it. When Ruth saw him, she was so touched that he’d come, after all, that she hugged him and burst into tears.

  Katherine Morris and Ali Rappaport, another of Carol’s former students and friends, gave eulogies during the service, as did Ruth, Katie, Charlotte, Steve and his mother.

  Ali talked about “walking the labyrinth” with Carol—one of Carol’s specialties, involving a spiritual meditation to find inner peace, knowledge and healing—and described the strong connection they had formed.

  Charlotte mentioned that she’d gotten into a rollover car accident in Phoenix the day before in Carol’s Acura, and felt like her mother had been with her as a guardian angel, helping to keep her safe.

  Clearly in a lot of emotional pain, Katie and Charlotte’s heartfelt speeches were very difficult to listen to, but Steve’s speech was the one that some mourners found odd.

  During his daughters’ time at the microphone, Steve didn’t show any emotion. Yet, after only a minute or two into his own eulogy, he was pushing away tears. The minister noticed the marked contrast in Steve’s reactions and figured he was an emotional guy, after all.

  But after listening to Steve’s entire speech, Reverend Spencer was struck again. Rather than talking about Carol, “the whole thing was about him, and how much Carol still meant to him, and about their dating, and what their relationship was like, and how he’d gone to Colorado and put up some kind of reconciliation pin,” the minister recalled later. “He was suggesting that he and Carol had pulled things together, which wasn’t true.”

  “I think Renee’s dating a sociopath,” Reverend Spencer told his wife afterward, recalling that he’d also found it curious that Steve had made a point of telling him before the service that no one should be allowed to record the eulogies.

  Debbie and her group also listened to Steve’s speech with disbelief. First, they couldn’t believe that he wore his sunglasses through his entire remarks, and second, that he was able to speak so beautifully and eloquently about losing Carol, the woman with whom he’d spent half his life, after they thought he’d killed her.

  Debbie’s impression was different from Reverend Spencer’s, though it was still negative. “He seemed so smooth as he gave the eulogy,” Debbie said, “working the crowd, just being Steve, charismatic, charming Steve. . . . He painted this picture of a soul mate that he had loved dearly. He referenced the fact that they were no longer married, but made it sound like that didn’t affect the love that they still shared with each other.”

  As she listened, Debbie couldn’t understand how he could carry around what he’d done to Carol and yet say such wonderful things about her. It was confusing for her—not just as Carol’s friend, but also as a licensed therapist who had previously experienced such behavior only in objective or academic textbook terms. At one point she turned to David Higgs and shared her feelings of conflict and ambivalence.

  “Maybe he didn’t [do it],” she said. “How could he get up here and say those things if he’d just brutally murdered her?”

  Carol’s mother shared with Debbie that she, too, had been sitting in disbelief as she listened to Steve’s eulogy, wondering how he could stand six feet in front of her and say such things when they both knew that he’d killed her daughter. Where did he find such nerve?

  It wasn’t until later that Debbie realized, “This is what a narcissist can do. He wanted to get rid of Carol and he also wanted to create a favorable impression in front of her closest people and make himself look innocent.”

  At the reception in the shade by the creek afterward, Debbie was standing with David, expressing their common dread that Steve would come over to speak to them.

  “I don’t want to talk to him. I don’t want to shake that man’s hand. I hope he doesn’t try to,” David said just before Steve approached them and did just that. Not wanting to make a scene, David accepted the gesture and shook Steve’s hand.

  “I just really want to thank you guys for being with Carol after the divorce,” Steve told them. “Every divorce has two sides and I really appreciate you guys being there for her.”

  Debbie and David were dumbfounded and almost speechless.

  “It was just stupefying, having to interact with him, knowing what we thought we knew, to have that hand that we thought had brutally murdered Carol reach out to us,” Debbie recalled.

  Steve looked at Debbie as though he wasn’t sure—and maybe with some apprehension—about what she was going to say. Debbie and Carol used to discuss each other’s dreams, and Carol had inspired Debbie to chronicle them in a journal, a practice she continued for some thirty years.

  “I think I’m going to get a dream that will let me know what happened,” she told Steve.

  One of the most difficult concepts for Debbie to process was that she’d known Steve and Carol when things were so good between them, when Steve had seemed so benevolent.

  “There are some people you meet and you know, this is a
really devious person, but it wasn’t like that with Steve,” she said recently. “He seemed like a very nice guy, very attentive, and engaged with Carol.”

  Ruth Kennedy found it odd that Steve didn’t say a word to her, hug her or offer his sympathies to her at the service, or on any other occasion, frankly.

  Her son John had never come to Arizona to visit while his sister was alive, but being there now he wanted to find out more about what had happened to Carol.

  Steve’s girlfriend, Renee, introduced herself to John Kennedy at the reception, but every time he tried to talk to Steve about the murder, Steve moved away from him. John tried half-a-dozen times that day, but he could not get Steve’s ear.

  Right around the second service, Katie DeMocker arranged for some of her mother’s friends to visit the Bridle Path house, where a strange scene played out.

  When Katherine arrived with her sister and Sally Butler, she was stunned to see that Steve had brought Renee, which she saw as inappropriate. Steve’s brother Jim and sister Susan were there as well, along with Katie and Carol’s mother and brother.

  Carol’s office, where the murder had occurred, hadn’t been cleaned yet, and the desk and carpet were still covered with her blood. Jim DeMocker was trying to keep her friends out, but Katherine was determined. It’s not that she wanted to see the crime scene. She simply felt she needed to be in the place where Carol’s soul last was.

  “The door was shut and I went to go open it and Jim [DeMocker] intercepted me,” blocking her from going in, she recalled. “Jim walked away, I looked at Katie, Katie gave me the nod, and I opened it up and went in.”

  Because Carol had been cremated, Katherine wasn’t able to see her body, which is an important part of the grieving process—to fully realize and accept that a loved one is dead. As a result, viewing this room was something she felt she needed and wanted to do. Katherine also wanted to see if she could feel Carol or any part of her there, or if anything else came to her.

  But as she stood in that room and looked around, she didn’t feel her friend there. Carol was gone. Instead, what Katherine felt was deep grief as reality set in and a sense of shock at the gruesome nature of the scene—the pool of blood still on the floor, the blood spatters on the walls, the shelves and the desk, which still had strands of Carol’s hair stuck to the corner.

  “It became more real, the violence of her death,” Katherine said. “It became more apparent the brutality of it, the animalistic state that someone would have to be in to do that.”

  As Katherine emerged from the room, crying, Steve was standing in the hallway with Katie. As Katherine stood with her right side toward the kitchen and laundry room, Steve put his arm around her and gave her a sideways hug.

  “You just want to think that it was an accident,” he said. “Things would be so much easier if it was an accident.”

  Steve was usually gregarious, but not that day. He was a man of few words. His remark and hug sent shivers down Katherine’s body as she shook her head no.

  Katie agreed. “Dad, they ruled that it was not an accident,” she said.

  Based on that exchange, as well as her earlier conversations with Steve, Katherine again felt like he was trying to “groom” her to take his side, to believe his accident claim.

  Steve had been guarded with her at the service, and he still seemed so calm, detached and composed. But after seeing the crime scene, and talking with Carol’s mother about the details of Carol’s death, Katherine knew that it was a murder.

  “It was not an accident,” she told him.

  When Ruth walked into the house that afternoon, she noticed a vase of dead flowers on the dining-room table, where Carol had always kept fresh blooms.

  “Well, would you look at that, the dead flowers are still on the table,” Ruth said.

  Steve’s sister Susan promptly ran out of the room with the withered flowers, and Ruth subsequently felt bad about her remark because she knew Susan was under a lot of strain.

  Unlike Katherine, Ruth couldn’t bear to go into the room where her daughter was killed. Ruth noted once again that Steve didn’t try to comfort her at this difficult moment.

  “I don’t know why he didn’t, if he was so innocent, [why] wouldn’t he? Why wouldn’t he come up to me and hug me, say, ‘Ruth, I’m so sorry about this. I’m out of my mind about this’?” she said recently. “But to say nothing and to do nothing. I thought that was really strange.”

  That night Katie begged Ruth to come to dinner with the DeMockers, so she did, although her son, John, refused.

  On her way out the door afterward, Ruth put one arm around Katie to say good-bye. When Steve came up and put his arm around Ruth’s waist, she did the same to him, although it was more out of reflex than a purposeful hug on her part.

  Debbie Wren Hill had never seen the Bridle Path house. So while she was in town, she, too, made a trip over there with Ruth and John Kennedy after making arrangements by phone with Jim Knapp to show them around the property.

  As they walked the grounds, Debbie noticed the empty bird feeder and the untended garden.

  It’s all so overgrown. It never would have looked like this if Carol was here, Debbie thought.

  Before Carol had even had her morning coffee, she used to water her garden, which was surrounded by a stucco wall, and feed the horses, which she used to keep in the barn. The back area also had a trampoline, an outdoor shower, a hot tub, a fire pit, an old tree house and a maze made of stones that Carol had designed to “walk the labyrinth.”

  Jim took them into the guesthouse and showed them the artwork Carol had stored there, telling them to take their pick. Ruth was under the impression that this was not the good stuff in her portfolio, but the discards.

  “I feel free to give you any of this that you want,” he told them.

  Debbie, Ruth and John each chose several pieces. Debbie hung hers in her office and home, where she also displayed the dried wildflowers she’d picked from the pasture behind Carol’s house that day.

  “Jim just seemed like a sweetheart and talked about her with great sadness and great care for her, and like the rest of us, [he] was convinced that Steve did this,” Debbie recalled. “[He] felt like he knew a lot about the ins and outs of that marriage and I think he expressed some fear . . . some desire to get out of there pretty quickly. He as much as indicated there was no telling what Steve was capable of.”

  While they were standing outside the guesthouse, they saw some of Steve’s family pull up. Debbie felt as if they were being spied on.

  “It felt like they were giving us space, but keeping an eye on what was going on,” Debbie said.

  “We were afraid to walk out with [the artwork] in case someone was watching,” Ruth said, so Jim offered to mail the pieces to them.

  Debbie exchanged e-mails with David Soule for a couple of weeks after the murder.

  “He just said, ‘I’m devastated. I thought she was the one I was going to spend the rest of my life with,’” she recalled recently.

  The feeling was apparently mutual, because Carol had said the same thing. “I’m so incredibly happy,” she told Debbie. “He’s working on this sailboat, and when it’s finished, we’re going to go on this Caribbean cruise and it’s going to mark the start of the rest of my life.”

  David was about the same age as Carol. He had dark hair and a graying beard, and “looked like a really kind soul, [with a] great face,” Debbie said. “He had to lick his wounds and remove himself from” the situation in order to heal.

  In his e-mails to Debbie, he described the altar to Carol that he’d built on his kitchen table, with some pieces of her artwork and a lit candle. Debbie did the same thing, burning a candle for two weeks next to some of the jewelry and silk bags Carol had made for her.

  “She just filled my life and so many other lives with her touch and her efforts,” she said.

  Debbie wasn’t kidding when she told Steve that she thought Carol was going to come to her in a dream and
tell her what had happened. Debbie did dream about Carol a number of times, and Steve showed up as well.

  One of her most vivid dreams came after talking with Detective Brown in the weeks after Carol’s death. She was riding in a car with Steve and another person, who was driving, and they had to stop in a place that felt dangerous. Steve walked up to people and “was handing out crisp big bills. He was paying people off that killed Carol.”

  Debbie met a female psychic, who had been involved with solving crimes, and told her that a friend had been killed.

  “I’m just getting this sense that somebody was paid to kill her,” the psychic told Debbie, suggesting that she tell the detectives to check Steve’s bank records for a possible payment.

  Debbie’s husband didn’t think she should bother the police with her dreams or the psychic’s remarks, but Debbie wanted justice to be served, and to help however she could so the killer didn’t get away with this.

  “It’s not all about justice,” Debbie said. It was also about wanting Ruth, the girls and “Carol’s spirit to be okay.”

  Devastated by Carol’s death, Jim Knapp went on an e-mail blitz with his friends—and Carol’s—spreading his suspicions that Steve was to blame. In one e-mail he mentioned something about Steve grabbing Carol by the hair.

  Katherine, who spoke to him several times a day after Carol’s death, didn’t like that Jim was copying Katie and Charlotte on the e-mails, and told him so. Sally Butler told him the same thing.

  “He was blasting their father. I mean really, really blasting their father, and this was two days after their mom’s death,” Katherine recalled.

  When she e-mailed him back to say, Listen, take them off, these are children, Jim wrote back, sarcastically recounting how Carol had always spoken so highly of her, and he was so sorry he’d offended her. This time he copied dozens of other people, apparently trying to embarrass her. He subsequently apologized and Katherine wrote it off to his being distraught with grief.