Then No One Can Have Her (17 page)

Steve's affair with Barb O'Non was his longest lasting romantic relationship outside his marriage.

Barb started working as his clerical assistant at A.G. Edwards in July 1998, shortly after she and her husband moved to Prescott. She answered phones and basic client questions while she studied for her Series 7 security and insurance licenses. She said their personal relationship began a couple of years later.

After earning her licenses in the spring of 2000, she was allowed to perform the duties of a stockbroker and financial advisor, and Steve gave her a 10 percent split of his commissions. At A.G. Edwards, Steve was in charge of $75.2 million in assets. In 2004, his last year there, he earned $816,000 in commissions, a chunk of which he gave to Barb, and a smaller sum of $5,000 to another member of his team.

Steve and Barb's personal and professional relationships continued to be intertwined after he took a job at UBS as a senior vice president of investment in September 2004. Barb and another team member went with him to UBS, where Barb's title became investment associate. Although she went into an investment training program, Barb was still working as his assistant.

Because she and Steve were trying to make their respective marriages work, she said, their relationship was “on-again, off-again, but it was always friendly.”

“It was as it always had been,” Barb recalled. “We worked very well together.”

By 2007, Steve's gross earnings at UBS had jumped to more than $1 million, of which he gave $350,723 to Barb, a 30 percent share of his “book of clients” value.

 

 

Soon after Barb got divorced in 2004, Steve asked her to marry him. They were sitting in his car at the time, and she responded to his proposal by flattening herself against the window with shock.

“Look how you reacted to that,” he joked, trying to make light of it.

“You're still married,” she said, trying to joke back and sidestep the question.

After Steve's own divorce battle began in March 2007, he often complained about how it was proceeding, that Carol should get a job and that he was frustrated with her “unwillingness to do that.”

Upset at how much he was going to have to pay Carol, he groused that his settlement offers had been “generous,” that she was being unfair by rejecting them and that it was difficult to support “all of the households.” Although he never told Barb directly that he was having a tough time, he did indicate at one point that he was a million dollars in debt.

Barb knew he was borrowing money from his parents, because she handled the transactions. It was around this time that he got angry with her a couple of times at the office and she began feeling afraid of his temper.

 

 

The relationship between Steve and Barb started coming apart in late 2006 and early 2007, when she announced that she wanted to dissolve their partnership and take her fair share of Steve's business, which she believed she'd helped him create.

“We tried to work out our differences,” she said, acknowledging that they continued to have sex and work together. “We were in dispute over money, primarily.”

As she tried to break away and go it alone as a broker, they were trying to divide up the client list in a way they both thought was equitable. But Steve wouldn't agree to her terms: Barb wanted a boost, to a 50 percent share.

“I felt that the [30 percent] split wasn't fair,” she said. “I felt as though I was doing more work than I was being paid for.”

So in October 2007, UBS management moved her to an office in the town of Surprise to ease tensions. Their partnership was set to dissolve in July 2008, but UBS didn't off icially end the arrangement until the fall, because Carol was found dead just as management was about to approve the deal.

After months of negotiations Barb finally buckled, agreeing to walk away with her same 30 percent share of the investment assets they'd managed together. They also split up their client list.

“We managed the assets together,” she said. “So if we had stayed in the partnership, it wouldn't have been that I handled half of the clients and he handled half. We handled them together.”

Barb described the two incidents when Steve lost his temper in 2007, saying she'd never seen this happen before. The first was triggered by an argument over “which clients were going where.”

She was standing in the doorway of his office when she said something that prompted him to jump out of his chair with such force that it went flying backward into the credenza. He came around his desk and got into her face aggressively until his nose was only a few inches from hers. He didn't raise his arm to hit her, but his demeanor communicated that he might do her physical harm.

“He was angry,” she testified during a pretrial hearing in 2010. “I don't even remember the words that were spoken, but he was angry with me.”

The second incident, which occurred several weeks later, also came during an argument over clients as she was sitting across the desk from him. This time he pounded his fists on his desk, flew out of his chair and left the office. They'd been angry with each other before, but they'd never argued like that, she said.

“For the most part we got along pretty well,” she said.

She admitted, however, that she didn't report the incidents to police or seek a restraining order. She simply confided in a close friend and asked to be transferred to another office. She said the move didn't stem from these incidents alone. Steve apologized, and they subsequently slept together again. They continued to negotiate their financial split through the first half of 2008, at the same time Steve was negotiating his marital division with Carol.

 

 

Barb wasn't enough for Steve, either, it seemed. As time went on, he appeared to be unsatisfied with just one woman on the side.

After being told that Steve had used escort and “adult dating” services—i.e., hookups for sex—investigators looked into his online dating habits and found that, sure enough, he was using Great Expectations Dating Service, as well as AdultFriendFinder.com. Carol had known about some of these services, because they'd shown up on his credit card bills, and she'd told Katherine about them.

Steve joined Great Expectations, which bills itself as “an upscale dating and matchmaking service,” on October 12, 2004, choosing a global membership that encompassed Los Angeles and New York City, because he traveled.

During his four-year on-and-off membership, he repeatedly switched the status from “separated” to “divorced” and back again, often listing himself as both on different parts of his profile. He selected 116 members from across the nation and downloaded numerous photos. One member complained to management in January 2007 that she was upset to learn that Steve was not actually divorced.

In May 2008, when he was already involved with several women, he paid $620 in membership fees. On July 6, four days after Carol's murder, he e-mailed the service again, asking to be placed on inactive status due to a death in the family. On October 17, he requested that his account be reactivated.

Jim DeMocker contacted the service on November 7 to cancel Steve's membership, stating that Steve was incapacitated.

 

 

In December 2006, as his relationship with Barb was disintegrating, he met Leslie Thomas (pseudonym) on AdultFriendFinder.com, a service that advertises itself in sexually explicit terms as the world's largest site to find “worldwide sex dates, adult matches, . . . [and] hookups.”

Launched in 1996, the site claims it has helped “millions of horny members” meet one another through “online chat, chatrooms, sex cams, member blogs, groups and emails.” It describes its mobile app as “A Party in Your Pocket.”

During a phone interview with Deputy Doug Brown in March 2009, Leslie said she and Steve mostly conducted a long-distance relationship by phone and saw each other only occasionally in Phoenix or in Southern California, where she lived.

However, she said, they saw each other twice in June 2008, just before Carol was murdered, once for dinner in Phoenix when she had a layover there, and once a few weeks later in Chicago when she was in town on business. Leslie said it was rare for them to see each other twice in three months, let alone twice in one month. They also had traveled together to St. Maarten.

In between visits, she said, they usually spoke by phone for about an hour at a time. But after Carol was murdered, their conversations typically lasted only five minutes, except for the two-hour discussion they had about his urge to leave town to escape arrest. Steve mentioned going to Bora Bora, where they'd previously discussed traveling for their next vacation.

[Leslie Thomas] explained to Steve that there is a truth to our lives and that is to tell the truth as you see it,
Brown wrote in his report.
She asked him if the best way to tell his truth is to live away (Bora Bora) as an innocent man and leave behind his life, or is it to stay and face what happens and to tell the truth in a court of law.

In his AdultFriendFinder profile, Steve described himself as divorced, and shortly after he met Leslie in person, he acknowledged that he was actually separated, but going through a divorce. Nonetheless, Leslie believed that they were in a monogamous relationship during the two years they were involved.

They met in person for the first time in January 2007. Told she was a fellow aspiring author, Leslie and Steve discussed the novel that he said he'd started working on. Noting that she'd already written three novels, she sent him information on National Novel Writing Month—known as NaNoWriMo—during which aspiring authors are encouraged to write a fifty-thousand-word draft of a novel in the month of November.

Steve told her about a couple of hero characters he was developing. In 2007, the character was similar to James Bond or Jason Bourne. By 2008,
[he was] a hitman who had not planned on being a hitman but by accident found out that he was good at doing it,
Brown wrote.

[Leslie Thomas] explained that the assassin would kill people in a very sophisticated/intelligent manner throughout his spy work. The hitman, however, is “kind of bumbling and kind of lame, but he discovers that he is good at killing people and having it look like an accident,”
Brown wrote.

But Leslie said that Steve never sent her any of his writings, not even an outline.

Asked if she knew of anyone who might have known about Steve's writings and then committed the murder in a way to frame him, she said Steve had never mentioned having a contentious relationship or that anyone was out to get him.

To her, Steve was kind and gentle, so she was in shock for a couple of days after learning that he'd also been seeing Barb and Renee during their relationship. She was so upset, in fact, that she called both of them to talk. And once Steve was arrested, Leslie never spoke to him again.

 

 

As if the two online dating services weren't enough, Steve started dating Renee Girard in November 2007, while he was still seeing Leslie and carrying on with Barb and who knows who else.

Renee, a massage therapist, first met Steve and Carol when their daughters were little. Renee, who was then thirty years old, about five years younger than Steve, worked at their doctor's office.

Steve was still the dean at Prescott College back then, and Prescott was such a small town that she'd already heard through the grapevine about Steve and his affairs.

“There was a general tarnish on his character in my eyes, and seemingly in the community . . . related to womanizing and having relationships outside of his marriage,” Renee said later.

Because she moved in the same circles with college faculty and staff, she'd also heard of Steve's power struggles there. “There were certainly people who were not fond of him because of that,” she said.

In the fall of 2007, when Renee was forty-eight, she and Steve ran into each other at Coffee Roasters, where they struck up a conversation. Learning that she was a massage therapist, Steve scheduled an appointment, saying that his regular masseuse was leaving her practice. At the time Renee got the sense that he was already divorced.

A couple of massages later, Steve asked her out. She accepted, not knowing that he was seeing other women. Everything she'd heard about him was rumor, and although she'd believed it, he now “sounded like someone who was moving on, moving through.”

Steve helped ease her concerns by offering to tell her which rumors were true and “which people he'd actually had affairs with. Then he insisted that other things were urban myth, and weren't true, and this is just what happens in a small town. So I frankly was liking the person that I was meeting.... I mean we had only had a few dates at that point so it wasn't like I was marrying him. I didn't know if . . . a tiger can change its stripes or not, and I didn't know how striped he was.”

When Carol learned Steve was dating Renee she told her friends that she really disliked Barb, but she had no problem with Renee. In fact, she told her daughters that Renee was “a good person.”

Throughout her ever-evolving relationship with Steve, Carol dug deep to find a place of healing and a way to move on, perhaps to handle all the struggles he threw at her, or to discover why she was putting herself through them. Nurturing the artist in herself, she created handmade cards, adorned with yarn and tassels, and wrote messages in beautiful calligraphy to family and friends. She also discovered Touch Drawing.

While Carol was still teaching at Prescott College, she found a couple of women whom she asked to come to town to give guest lectures or presentations, and with whom she formed lasting connections. One was Deborah Koff-Chapin, the founder of Touch Drawing, who conducted weeklong sessions on Whidbey Island, Washington.

Between 1997 and 2007, Carol traveled to the island for five of these retreats, which proved therapeutic and inspirational for her, as she and other spiritual women bonded through drawing, dancing and exchanging dreams to heal, get in touch with their inner selves, and achieve “wholeness.” The bonds were so strong that she was able to call on these women in times of need.

“Touch Drawing is a practice of creative, psychological and spiritual integration,” Deborah explained.

 

 

Carol found one of her most satisfying forms of creative expression in monoprinting. This medium involves making individual prints through the application of inks with brushes or rollers, known as brayers, on a flat hard surface like glass or Plexiglas, and running the plate through a press. After putting the ink design down, the artist lays a piece of paper over the surface, then runs it through a press to push the ink into the paper. More ink can be added to the design after the first run if desired. Multiple passes can be done on the same piece of paper, or a fresh piece can be placed over the ink that's already been used once, to make a lighter “ghost” print.

“They're so whimsical, you never know what you're going to get,” said monotype artist Joanne Frerking, who was a yoga teacher when she met Carol. Carol invited Joanne, who taught yoga in a therapeutic manner, to guest teach her class, “Yoga Psychology,” in which she focused on the spiritual side of the social science.

Carol had been working on her art for many years, but she'd always been “afraid of hanging out her shingle, declaring herself an artist,” Debbie Wren Hill recalled. So Carol started out small and worked her way up to have her first gallery opening.

As she approached her fiftieth birthday, which represented a significant milestone to her, she'd created enough pieces to hold a special birthday show at an art frame shop in Prescott, The Frame & I Gallery.

The start of the show was announced in the
Daily Courier
on September 24, 2004. The article stated:
Becoming a professional artist will be her last career and the best 50th birthday present she could ask for.
The show, which ran through October 15, displayed fifty of her best pieces.

“Instead of having a regular birthday, I wanted to do something more symbolic,” Carol told the
Courier.

As Debbie had described, Carol told the newspaper that she didn't allow herself to become a professional artist until she'd stopped teaching. Carol said she'd always felt she was an artist, but somehow couldn't give herself “permission” to be one. Explaining her approach in somewhat abstract terms, she said that when she was creating art, she felt vulnerable as she struggled to let herself acknowledge her feelings and stay in the moment. As such, her artwork represented images of healing, reflecting a parallel of sorts to the work she performed in other parts of her life.

The gallery opening, which featured live music and refreshments, was well attended. And although she and Steve were separated, Carol was thrilled that Steve not only came, but he bought a number of her pieces “because he loved it so much.”

“That's what I remember her telling me. It meant so much to her that he came,” Debbie recalled. “He wanted to support her work, didn't want it to get away.”

By that time, Joanne Frerking was working in the same medium, also adding collage to her monotypes. When she saw Carol's show, she was so taken that she approached Carol about selling her art at Van Gogh's Ear.

 

 

Prescott may be a small town, but quite a few local artists live there. And yet, only in recent years has it become a decent market for art. Carol's work stood out among the more typical southwestern cowboys-and-Indians fare.

“Her artwork wasn't the norm for the area,” said John Lutes, a blown-glass artist of thirty years and one of Van Gogh Ear's four co-owners. “It's very different for Prescott to see someone with such a sophisticated contemporary form.”

Starting in fall 2004, Carol began showing and selling her art at the gallery, where she worked as a lab assistant and also in sales as an art consultant, about fifteen hours a week for the next two years. She earned an hourly wage plus commission.

She dressed conservatively in flowing silk skirts, pants or dresses, with short heels or flats. Also, because the store sold jewelry, the sales people were encouraged to wear the wares, which Carol did in a tasteful way.

“She had a classy presentation of herself. She was very beautiful,” John said. “I think she was very, very pretty, myself, but not in a flashy sort of way.”

Carol's sales performance ranked reasonably well in the store. “It requires a lot of knowledge and finesse to sell art, and she was very good at it,” he said.

He added that she wasn't an exceptional saleswoman, however, because she had so much distraction in her life with Steve and the family problems he created for her by calling and stopping by the store while she was trying to work.

“Steve would come in all the time, sauntering in, bringing coffee. This was when they were separated. You would just feel it. He'd walk in and you could just feel the bad vibes,” Joanne recalled. “He was sucking up to her. . . . He had this way of ingratiating himself, just being the nice guy, and you just wanted to throw up. But she fell for it.”

While Steve acted magnanimously toward the women, John said, Steve never paid much attention to him, acting as if he were of “finer stock” than John. “He was just that sort of haughty kind of person, you know, arrogant.”

John tried not to listen to the discussions between Carol and her estranged husband, but he couldn't ignore the raised voices. Steve was more quietly firm and stern than loud, John recalled—and Carol seemed angry and vehement as well. Steve was still seeing Barb, but he would tell Carol it was over and then Carol would see them together. But more often than not, the conversations were about financial matters.

“I would never say Carol was a weak individual. I would see her as strong also,” John said, noting that she used to stand her ground with Steve, “with good reason.”

At this point Carol still had hope for her marriage. “She wanted it to work out. She always felt he was her soul mate and he'd learn,” Joanne said. “He had to learn to be on his own. In a sense he had to work his way back to her. He had to earn her trust back, which, of course, he never did, because he never stopped seeing other women. That was horrible. It was like a knife in her chest.... And then there were the girls. They'd see each other because of the girls.... In the beginning she allowed it. They just didn't really separate.”

Art—whether it was selling other artists' work or creating her own—seemed to make Carol happy, and so did her daughters.

“If her daughters were in town or visiting or came into the gallery, she always seemed very happy to be their mother and to work things out with them,” John said.

To John, Carol seemed like a lovely but troubled soul who was in a constant struggle to be happy, striving to help others and make herself a better person. But as her interactions with Steve became a festering sore in the workplace, the gallery owners finally had to talk with her about the tensions he was creating.

“It went on for months and months. It was a cumulative thing,” John said. At the time, he said, “We all really liked Carol. We wished things were working out better, but it seemed like her personal life was becoming too much of a distraction for her to be able to work. It wasn't like we felt anything negative about her as a person or even as an employee—it was just tumultuous.”

These issues led to her being let go from the gallery in 2007, which was ironic, given that Steve complained she wasn't working hard enough or earning enough money.

 

 

After she died, Carol's friends could see the spiritual healing she'd attempted to do through her artwork, pouring herself into producing a sizable collection with many, many pieces.

In August 2009, Van Gogh's Ear held a posthumous opening for her very best work, which hundreds of people attended. Ruth Kennedy and Debbie Wren Hill even flew in from Tennessee for it.

“I think we sold like thirteen thousand dollars that night,” John Lutes said. “That's a lot for us in Prescott.”

The framed art alone spanned one whole wall, starting from the front window back to the sales desk.

“Art is sort of worthless until someone buys it,” John said. “The most valuable piece of art in our gallery is the one that's sold.”

In late 2013, when Katherine Morris was in town, she and Joanne Frerking took two of Carol's unsigned prints and laid them side by side. As they compared their images in grays, burgundy, dark oranges and browns, they interpreted what Carol was trying to express with those forms. And one or both of them exclaimed, “Oh, my God!”

For Joanne these two pieces represented “the story of what Carol hoped would happen” between her and Steve.

It looked as if Carol had used an old X-ray as a stencil, cutting out two shapes: one appeared more male, and the other more female, but also otherworldly, with an angel-like shape—a round head and wings—that seemed very abstract to Joanne.

Carol had used the stencil to print the shapes once, then turned them over and used them again to make ghost prints, one following the other. In the first print, a heavy line connected the two. Their interpretations varied: Joanne saw the line as an arrow, while Katherine saw it as a phallic connection, or a link between their cores—a thread that extended from the angel's heart toward the male figure's center and his genitals. The male figure looked athletic to Katherine, and was leaning in a seductive stance against a shape that looked like a surfboard or warrior's shield.

In the second print Carol created two versions of each figure, one dominant and one ghost. The ghost male figure was right side up, while its darker dominant twin was flipped and heading down, as if subdued or dead. The ghost angel was right side up, and its dominant twin floated above, wings extended.

“In the first one—she was, like, stabbing at him, the part of him that was so awful to her, the sexual part, the addictions and women,” Joanne said. “In the next one he was vanquished and she was floating up—her spirit—she was free. It was angel-like.”

Judging by the second print, Katherine felt that Carol “was ready to leave that earthly body. She was so evolved. She was ready and she just went,” ascending to heaven even stronger than she was on earth.

“That's like the good and evil, the good prevailing up to the heavens, and the dark part of your stuff you don't ever work through, it just pulls you down and you don't get to experience the other realm,” she said.

Another more literal interpretation could be that Carol was portraying Steve killing her or her spirit, then sending her up to heaven.

The gallery was still selling Carol's art in 2014, with a tribute to her memory on the wall.

“We're down now to sort of the end of the stuff,” Joanne said. “We may have a hundred, maybe seventy-five pieces.... But we truly sold . . . at least one thousand or fifteen hundred pieces. I knew it would be thrown away otherwise and I couldn't bear that.”