Then No One Can Have Her (14 page)

“Do you know what you're getting yourself in for?” he asked.

But Carol just laughed. “Oh, don't worry,” she said. “I can take care of him.”

She was right—for a time. Looking back later, Sturgis deemed Steve's courtship of Carol and their early years of their marriage as probably the purest of times for Steve.

 

 

While Steve worked on his doctorate in education, known as an Ed.D., from 1982 to 1986, Carol earned her master's in education in 1983, focusing on counseling and human development.

During that time the couple lived in a guesthouse on Steve's parents' property and helped take care of Steve's younger siblings. Wanting to do something for her in-laws, Carol built a garden on the front circle of their house. In her mother-in-law's eyes, Carol became part of the extended DeMocker family, even going on vacation with them.

After Steve finished grad school, Sturgis helped him get his first job at Patagonia, the manufacturer of outdoor clothing and equipment, which is headquartered in Ventura, California.

Climber Yvon Chouinard, Patagonia's founder and CEO, wanted to put together a program for employees to participate in activities that required the use of the company's products. The CEO said, half jokingly, that they needed to hire a “director of fun” to run the program.

Sturgis, the company's public relations director, suggested that Steve apply for the job, which, with his outdoor experience, he landed in April 1985. His official title was personnel coordinator, a job he kept until July 1986.

“The company wanted their employees to know how the equipment they made was actually used in the field, so it was one of Steve's tasks to run outdoor programs for Patagonia personnel,” Jan DeMocker said.

Meanwhile, Carol took a counseling position at a local hospital. She also volunteered at a shelter for battered women and at a crisis center hotline, working with survivors of sexual assault.

 

 

While Steve was at Patagonia, he took a group of employees on a kayaking trip in white-water rapids with a coleader who was a “world-class boater,” Jan DeMocker said.

During a run down a pretty difficult stretch, Steve watched as a young woman was sucked into a class-four vortex of swirling water, losing her boat and paddle, as her body churned over and over in the current.

Feeling responsible for her, Steve immediately went into action to save her. Steering his kayak directly into the vortex, he flipped it upside down so he could spin around in sync with her. Reaching out for her, he grabbed her limp body and got her up and across the bow of his boat, which was still upside down. Then he righted his kayak, maneuvered her into it, steered them out of the whirlpool and headed down the river to a safer area, where the rest of the group was anxiously waiting.

“Steve saw her eyes flick open at last—another instance when Steve's presence made a significant difference in the life of another,” Jan recalled.

 

 

Instead of living in Ventura, near the coast, Carol and Steve rented a house in the hills, about thirty minutes east, in the bucolic but sophisticated town of Ojai, where the air is filled with the scent of lavender, sage and orange blossoms and a legendary “pink moment” as the sun sets.

Similar to Prescott, Ojai is surrounded by mountain ranges, ranch land and hiking trails. And being so close to Hollywood, it also has become a haven for New Age and spiritual people, artists and actors, such as Mary Steenbur-gen, her husband Ted Danson, Reese Witherspoon and Robert Pattinson.

Debbie Wren Hill visited the couple in this peaceful burb, where Steve and Carol's home was surrounded with pecan and fragrant orange trees. She and Carol relaxed in the backyard and took in the scenery as they listened to Steely Dan and ate homemade orange-pecan muffins.

After Carol came home from work, she and Debbie jogged up to an area that had been ravaged by fire, where they could still see embers burning. As they breathed in the even stronger scent of flowering orange groves there, Carol explained that these trees had kept the fire from spreading any farther, perhaps because they were so green or wet with irrigation.

“That was still a happy time for them,” Debbie said. “They were largely a happy couple. They had a really good connection. They were just really devoted to each other. I was envious. I felt she had really lucked out.”

 

 

Eight months after Steve arrived at Patagonia, Sturgis Robinson left to enter the foreign service. Steve told him later that he'd had an affair with at least one Patagonia coworker. And that, Sturgis said, not only went against the company's internal culture, but also the personal philosophy of the owner's powerful wife, who had helped found and run the company.

“That was not considered cool at Patagonia to cheat on your wife with other Patagonia employees,” Sturgis said.

It was unclear to him whether Carol knew about this particular affair. “I think she was in denial,” Sturgis said in 2014. “I think it was very likely that she did not know about some of [his affairs].”

Sturgis said that this affair likely contributed to Steve's parting ways with the company. It also may explain why he didn't include the position on his LinkedIn page, which was still up in 2014.

 

 

After leaving California in the summer of 1986, Steve and Carol moved to the tiny town of Lincoln, Vermont, where Steve had stayed that one summer during college. During the 1980s, Lincoln had a population of about 870 people.

With her credentials Carol landed a job as a teacher and counselor at the Ticonderoga branch of the North Country Community College in New York in the fall of 1986. She had to commute to work, often through the snow, more than an hour each way.

Carol told the
Post-Star
in Glens Falls, New York, which wrote about her hiring, that she and Steve were lured back to the East Coast by the beauty of the Adirondacks.

Whatever the reason, the couple had already bought ten acres in Lincoln in November 1984, and with the help of a loan from Carol's parents, they started building a house. Carol told the newspaper that Steve planned to look for a job as an educator as soon as he was done building the wooden home, which was a two-story A-frame, with an upper-level balcony looking down on the living room below.

“It was a really neat house,” Ruth recalled.

In addition to counseling Ticonderoga students on how to handle the fear of failure, Carol taught three psychology courses: human development, group dynamics and a general survey course. She told the
Post-Star
that community colleges were geared toward making higher education accessible to working adults with families, who had not been able to attend or finish college earlier.

Using the analogy of athletes who use their muscles to attain goals, Carol said, “The mind, too, must be exercised. Sometimes we have to push ourselves past what is comfortable to reach the prize we seek.”

The news article, which underscored Carol's past experience and interest in preventing domestic violence, stated that Carol wanted to organize a women's backcountry wilderness trip to help them build self-confidence.

Carol and Steve had already been organizing such weekend outings of rock climbing and cross-country skiing for the damaged women she'd been working with in Ventura. Jan DeMocker said this was Carol's special strength, to “teach survival skills with the deeper lessons of nature and spirit.”

When a person faces a new, perhaps scary situation, and is given the skills to succeed, it's empowering, and this is what she and Steve offered to women who had, too often, been powerless,
Jan wrote in 2014.

Carol also told the newspaper that she'd set her sights on a goal of her own: to write a book about domestic violence.

 

 

From July 1987 until Katie was born in May 1988, Carol worked as a psychological counselor at Middlebury College, a small private liberal arts college in Middlebury, Vermont, which is home to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the nation's oldest literary writing conference. But the draw for Carol was that the college was only half an hour from Lincoln, which cut her commute in half.

Carol gave birth to Katie at their home in Lincoln on May 19, using a midwife. And when Katie was only a few months old, Carol and Steve picked up and moved across the country to Prescott, repaying the loan from Carol's parents when they sold the house in 1988.

The next thing Sturgis Robinson knew, his buddy Steve had landed back at their alma mater, Prescott College, teaching classes as a sociology professor.

When Katie was still a baby, Debbie Wren Hill visited them in Prescott and snapped some family photos: Steve holding little Katie up in the air; Carol breast-feeding and giving the baby mini massages.

In between visits, Debbie and Carol talked on the phone and wrote each other long letters to stay in touch. Life was still good for the couple in those days. But those happy times were not to last.

As Katie grew older, but before Charlotte was born, Carol started telling Debbie that Steve was being unfaithful. And then it got worse.

Debbie isn't positive about the timing, but recalls that it was a few nights before Carol gave birth to Charlotte that Carol called her, bed-bound, sobbing and beside herself.

Carol said she'd learned that Steve was having an affair with the midwife who was about to deliver her baby, a disturbing fact that Steve had just revealed to her.

Carol really had no good answer for why Steve would commit such an insensitive act, but it was clear to Debbie that Carol had decided to stay in the marriage nonetheless. She loved him, and he loved her.

Over the years, as this pattern continued, “he kept apologizing,” Debbie recalled. “The apologies were romantic—champagne, roses and great sex—and oh, my gosh, how can you turn that away? And then it would happen again. It was just a cycle.”

It wasn't that Carol was weak. Just the opposite. She felt Steve was the man she was supposed to be with. He was just sick, and she was going to stick by him in sickness and in health. She believed it was her “life's work” to help him get better. She wanted to be the one there with him after he had conquered this problem and came out on the other side.

“She was a really strong, amazing, confident woman that men would have lined up on the street to have,” Debbie said. “She could have had anyone. She just adored Steve and felt this incredible connection to stay with him and see him through to wellness.”

 

 

As a professor at Prescott College, Steve taught a course he named, aptly and ironically, “Mass Media: The Serpent in the Garden,” in which he discussed sexual imagery in advertising. He also taught a course about the politics of food, during which he took his students to a slaughterhouse to witness how animals were treated during the meat-making process. Steve and Carol were both vegetarians and healthy eaters.

“If you weren't vegetarian before that class, you probably were afterward,” one student recalled.

Carol joined the faculty in 1989, and also served as coordinator of the college's Human Development Program. Both she and Steve were popular among the students.

Continuing his extracurricular outdoor activities, Steve took students on kayaking and white-water rafting trips to such destinations as the Grand Canyon, where students still visit today, as they combine rafting with water-quality monitoring.

During this period, he hung out and played poker with a group of male friends. One of them was Gareth Richards, who later launched an online athletic equipment business known as Outdoor Prolink, which sold Steve a couple pairs of trail running shoes that would become important evidence in this case.

Within a couple of years, in June 1990, Steve was promoted to dean of the Resident Degree Program, the heavyweight of the college's two dean positions.

“He is a very charismatic, attractive man, so people fell under his sway and elected him dean,” Sturgis recalled, explaining that electing the dean was one of the college's unique characteristics, “a holdover from the idealistic Hassayampa [Hotel] days.”

At the time Steve contended that he was the nation's youngest university dean, quite an accomplishment and an honor for such a bright and ambitious young man.

 

 

During the years they worked at the college, it was still quite a bit smaller than it is today, and was operating out of a single building on Grove Street. Enrollment jumped at the end of that decade, but was still far below its present attendance, which is slightly less than one thousand students.

Back then, graduating classes could be as small as twenty-five students. Many students were older than the norm, varying in age from recent high-school graduates to “mature” middle-aged students, who were often drawn to the “distance learning” programs.

Students tended to discover the college in offbeat ways, such as recruiting ads in the back of
Outside
magazine. The college also accepted students who might have flunked out of a traditional university. When one such student called to inquire about the ad, a college representative invited her to apply.

“Come!” the rep said.

Prescott College, this student said, “was extremely alternative, especially at the time,” but it was also “very cutting-edge.” Now that more of the general population is sensitive to being green, “everything that they did has become much more mainstream.”

 

 

Katherine Morris, who went by her maiden name of Dean at the time, was a typical Prescott College student. After graduating from a Rochester area high school near where Steve grew up, she spent a year in Europe, then a year making her way across Central America.

Still not ready to start college, she was working at the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve in Costa Rica, and teaching in the neighboring community of Cerro Plano, when a dozen Prescott College students came through for a tour as part of their class.

One of her close friends and coworkers subsequently left to attend the college, and after applying and being accepted a few months later, Katherine did the same.

How she learned about the college, she said, says a lot about the school and its teaching approach. “They're out there viewing things,” she said. “The universe is truly their classroom.”

When Katherine first arrived at the college in 1994, she lived in a VW bus and went rock climbing every day, which was not an entirely unusual routine for a Prescott student back then. Her peers were a like-minded eclectic bunch who grew into a tight community with shared interests in activities such as leading ecotours through South America, going on white-water rafting trips, working out “in the field” and eating vegetarian meals. Some thought nothing of swimming naked together in the stream.

“We were a hippie college,” said Marilyn Walters (pseudonym), a former student who attended the college around the same time. “We were all such peace lovers. No one had a gun. We were just hippies. We weren't sixties radicals, but we were the next set of them.”

There were other contingents of students as well, such as the radical athletes who were more concerned about “shredding” rocks on climbing excursions and “bagging” mountain peaks.

Student orientation consisted of a monthlong backpacking trip with eight to ten students in the wilderness. Instructors developed relationships with their students, had them for multiple classes and gave them written reports on their progress. Grades were not awarded unless they were specifically requested. These were youths who wanted to carve their own way in the world after rejecting or withdrawing from big universities.

“We were all in a very small circle and saw each other daily,” Marilyn said.

Before the time of cell phones, students had open mailboxes on campus, where they left notes, poems or trinkets for each other. Passions ran high and students had sex with each other. Some swapped partners as part of the culture, while others had serious relationships.

Because it was such a small campus, drama could develop and escalate quickly. Such was a controversy in the early 1990s when Steve wanted to fire a poetry teacher and librarian, Fern Dayve, who has since died. He thought—and Carol supported his position—that it was inappropriate for Fern to have poetry nights, during which she read erotica to students and drank wine with them.

“There was a protest to try to get Steve not to fire Fern,” Marilyn said, noting that some students rebelled because Fern had a following. “They were trying to kick her out of our community, and you can't really do that when the community is so small.”

This controversy was considered rather ironic because it was no secret that Steve had slept with two students, who had worked as nannies for him and Carol, and one of those affairs had reportedly lasted for several months. There was also talk that he'd been involved with a couple of coworkers, and word had gotten around that Steve had slept with the midwife.

“The midwife was the first one that we, as students, had heard about,” Marilyn said.

Sturgis took his best friend's side in this affair, because he harbored the perception—fueled by Steve's complaints and stories about his wife—that Carol was nagging him and acting “like an incredible harpy.”

But more than that, Sturgis, who was away in 1991 while working as a white-water river guide in the Grand Canyon, actually abetted Steve by allowing him to use Sturgis's vacant house for trysts with the midwife. Sturgis was gone between April and the end of October, came back for a month, then went off to Costa Rica for the winter. He couldn't be sure exactly when the affair started, but he, too, thought it was while Carol was still pregnant with Charlotte.

“The fact that he was having this affair with the midwife had no impact on me at all,” he said, noting that this feeling has since changed dramatically.

At the time, Steve told Sturgis that this woman was “so powerful and strong and so spiritual,” this outweighed the fact that she wasn't as attractive as some of his other lovers. The midwife was considered a “paragon” in Prescott, Sturgis said, and likely remains so even today.

 

 

The midwife, who was interviewed years later by Detective John McDormett, said she met Carol first and then Steve in April 1991. She told investigators, however, that her affair with Steve didn't start until June 1992, around the time that she was having her own marital troubles and had separated from her husband. (Charlotte was born in October 1991.)

The woman said Steve asked her to marry him “on a number of occasions” in the early 1990s, but she always said no because she knew Carol would always be in his life. He didn't ask her again after he'd moved into the financial industry, she said, because their relationship had changed by then as he came to care more about money and appearances. He told her that she no longer fit the standard for the type of woman he wanted to be seen with in public, but that Carol did, which “amused” her.

As McDormett wrote in his report, the midwife told him that like
Steve, a lot of people want to stay within their class and she appreciated his honesty.
Steve still tried to get her into bed occasionally, she said, but she declined and he didn't push it.

Whatever the timing of this particular affair, Sturgis said it was apparently what “cracked Carol” in terms of seeing Steve's womanizing for the problem it really was.

Steve held the dean's job for five years and five months. But the popularity he'd so enjoyed as a faculty member began to decline as word of his womanizing spread and festered.

“He would talk dirty all the time. So if he was working with a secretary, a female, sexualized banter would just be part of the day,” Sturgis recalled, noting that Steve did this with two staff members, and also had a brief affair with one of them. Sturgis was not aware of Steve sleeping with any professors.

“He became a very polarizing figure on campus,” Sturgis said, explaining that several complaints were filed against Steve for sexual harassment and abuse of power amid criticism that he tried to manipulate members of the faculty and administration.

“My impression is that Steve did a lot of bad-mouthing of people behind their back, starting rumors [and using] very underhanded approaches to getting what he wanted to get done,” Sturgis said.

Steve, of course, didn't see it this way. In his own defense, he summed up these various controversies as “he was being pestered by bitchy, crazy people.”

The practice of faculty members sleeping with students was known to happen at Prescott College until 2000, when Dan Garvey became president and took steps to curtail this behavior, Sturgis said, so “there was also a lot of forgiveness on the Prescott campus at that time.”

 

 

Most likely as a result of Steve's transgressions, Carol was instrumental in putting a policy into place to prohibit faculty and staff from having intimate relationships with students. For some people on campus, this seemed ironic, because she went on to have what one female student complained to the administration was inappropriate contact with a male student by showing up at his house unannounced one evening.

This student, Richard Stevenson (pseudonym), who was questioned years later during the murder investigation, was told that his name had come to their attention during an interview with Steve's girlfriend, presumably Renee Girard.