Then No One Can Have Her (19 page)

The last time Carol saw her mother was Thanksgiving in 2007, when Ruth flew up to Prescott and stayed in the guesthouse. They drove out to Sedona for the day, where they had lunch and visited a little chapel together.

Carol took photos all day—handing over her camera at one point to someone they met on a trail to capture mother and daughter. She later sent Ruth an entire photo album of their adventure, which Ruth still cherishes today.

“[We] had a wonderful day together,” she said.

They had five for Thanksgiving dinner that year at Bridle Path, including Charlotte, Katie and her boyfriend.

During the visit Carol told her mother that Steve had been in the house when she wasn't there, even though he didn't have a key.

“I'll show you how he comes in,” she told Ruth as she led her to the back room that had been Charlotte's bedroom, which Carol was just starting to use as her office. At the time the room was bare, with nothing but a bookcase, computer and chair.

Carol pointed to the window, where she said Steve had been climbing in. “He's never taken anything,” she said.

“You can put a stick in that window and he wouldn't be able to open it,” Ruth suggested.

But to the best of Ruth's knowledge, her daughter never took her advice. “I don't think she thought that he was ever capable of doing something like that,” she said in 2014, referring to Carol's murder.

Based on her conversations with Carol in her last months, Ruth could see that her daughter was terribly anxious about her finances.

“She was not making enough money to keep that house up, even though she was working full-time,” she said.

Carol tried to get rehired at Prescott College, Ruth said, but she was told she couldn't rejoin the faculty without a Ph.D.

“Her whole focus in her life was, in those later years, to keep that house so Katie and Charlotte would have a place to come home to, because she'd had a place to come home to, and that was one of her guiding principles,” Ruth said. “She designed the house. She just wanted it for them. And that was such a sorrow to her, I know, that she couldn't do it.”

When Carol called her mother each night, she often cried. It was upsetting for Ruth to hear her daughter so unhappy and yet be too far away to be able to do anything more to comfort her.

 

 

Carol met up with her friend Katherine Morris for a spiritual retreat at La Casa de Maria in Santa Barbara, California, in late January 2008.

Just back from a break in the activities, Carol told Katherine about some bad news she'd just gotten from a friend she'd known for years.

“I just got an awful, awful call from Jim Knapp that he's got this cancer,” she said. “My heart is just so hurt for him.”

After further discussion Carol said, “He's going to move into the guesthouse. I need the money.”

Every morning of the retreat, Katherine drove into town to get a cup of strong coffee. One morning she saw Carol out walking so she stopped to see if she could pick up a cup for her, too. Carol asked for so many special ingredients in her double latte that Katherine had to write them down.

When Katherine delivered the latte, Carol thanked her effusively and tried to pay her for it, but Katherine said that wasn't necessary. Carol seemed so grateful, but it really wasn't that big a deal to Katherine.

Later that morning, February 2, when they were going around the circle and sharing with the others at the retreat, Katherine came to understand Carol's reaction.

Breaking down in tears, Carol said, “That's why, Katherine, when you bought me a latte this morning, I was overjoyed, overwhelmed, because I don't even have enough money to buy myself a coffee. Until Steve puts my money in the account, I don't even know how I'm going to get gas to drive back to Prescott.” Carol explained that the money was due the day before, but Steve was late making the deposit.

Katherine had no idea. She was floored. Infuriated, in fact. This outburst was a “big eye-opener.” She'd had no idea that Carol was so financially dependent on Steve.

Carol said she was going to have a garage sale and sell a golf club or set of clubs he'd given her, and had stacked the clubs with some other sale items in the back bedroom. Sometime later Katherine recalled Carol telling her that Steve had taken them back and Carol was upset that she couldn't sell them.

As they talked about how hard her life was and how difficult the divorce had been for her, Carol said, “And sometimes, Kat, I don't even feel safe in my own home.”

Looking back, Katherine inferred from that comment that Carol was referring to Steve, but she didn't press her. Today she wishes she had.

Carol went further in discussing these fears with her friend Sally Butler, who later recounted to investigators a similar conversation in which Carol said Steve had been sending her some very erratic e-mails—professing his love in one and saying horrible things to her in the next. To keep from feeling like she was going crazy, Carol read some of the e-mails to Sally.

 

 

Around this same time Carol found a close friend and confidant in Jim Knapp, who moved into the guesthouse around February. Carol liked having a man there, and although she needed help with her finances, it's unclear whether Jim ever paid her any rent, because he had financial troubles of his own.

“Carol, being the wonderful helper type, brought him in,” Debbie said. “She needed a friend, needed someone to commiserate with her. . . . They would have a glass of wine in the evenings and help each other through hard times. And if he had feelings for her, it didn't get in the way of a friendship.”

Jim and Carol had known each other since their kids were young; Charlotte and Jay, Jim's older boy, had attended the same school. More recently, Jim had done some house-sitting for Carol.

After a dozen years of marriage, Jim and his wife, Ann Saxerud, had divorced in January 2007, and were going through child custody battles in mediation. As Carol went through her own struggles, she and Jim had plenty of mutual woes to discuss.

In August 2007, he'd been exploring the purchase of a Maui Wowi Hawaiian Coffees & Smoothies franchise in Prescott. He and the owner had settled on a price of $260,000, and Jim said he was talking to his accountant and prospective investors to move forward. In discussions with corporate representatives, Jim mentioned Carol as a manager who would run the store and restaurant operations and also help expand the business.

The owner had to close the store in November 2007, because his employees quit after hearing it was already sold, but Jim said he was still enthusiastic about buying it. Shortly thereafter, however, Jim e-mailed the owner, informing him that he had skin cancer, saying that he was about to have surgery to “excise the tumor” and to “graft it to patch it.” He also mentioned that Carol's divorce settlement was coming in three weeks, as if she was going to be financially involved in the franchise deal.

But at the end of February 2008, right around the time that he moved into the guesthouse, Jim backed out of the sale.

I am still VERY INTERESTED, but I'm not healthy enough to do it,
he wrote to the franchise reps.
Maybe in a year or two after I bounce back.

Carol Walden, the area franchise developer, later concluded that Jim was more talk than money. “He was pretty bold in his assertions but he wasn't able to back them up,” she later testified.

Asked if Jim ever told her that Carol Kennedy was his financial backer, Carol Walden replied, “No, he did not.”

By the time Carol was killed, Jim had just lost his job as a fund-raiser for Project Insight, Inc., a nonprofit that provided services for people with special needs. He also had racked up nearly $50,000 in medical bills from the Mayo Clinic, where Carol often drove him for appointments.

 

 

When Jim Knapp moved in with Carol, it was right around the time he broke up with Suzanna Wilson (pseudonym), a physical therapist from Montana he'd met on eHarmony, the online dating site, in September 2007.

Jim and Suzanna met face-to-face for the first time that October, when she used her frequent-flyer miles to fly into Phoenix. He'd told her he had problems with his bowel, but his eHarmony photo and profile made him look and sound healthier than he really was. The very pale and out-of-shape man she met that weekend was not who or what she'd been expecting. Nonetheless, she spent three days with him in Prescott, where she met his sons and ex-wife at a football game. He seemed quite manic at times and she enjoyed his sense of humor.

“He was funny, bright, witty,” she later testified.

They saw each other again in November on her home turf in Montana, where she paid for him to fly in for a three-day weekend because he said he didn't have any money. This time he seemed lethargic and really out of it, but he surprised her with something else.

On the last day of the trip, as they were taking a walk to Glacier National Park, he announced his intentions. “I really, really want to marry you,” he said.

Suzanna was taken aback. “This is a bit premature,” she replied. “I need more time to get to know you.”

For their next rendezvous, they planned to meet in Kona, on the Big Island of Hawaii, a trip for which they both bought their own plane tickets.

Jim acted more mentally “with it” on this trip, and although Suzanna was exhausted after the flight, he insisted on taking her on a scavenger hunt. He led her along a path of white stones, laid out on a black lava sand beach, then excitedly took her to collect her prize: a handmade ring with a yellow topaz-colored stone.

The next day, when she met his brother, Jim introduced her as his fiancée. She'd been having gallbladder attacks before flying to Hawaii, and she ended up in the ER that night, vomiting.

After she recovered, they went to the beach, where she went swimming. And even though he seemed lethargic and out of it again that day, he still managed to be romantic. He drew a love note for her in the sand:
Jimmy James loves [Suzanna].

Jim told Suzanna he was taking medication for pain related to ulcers and his lower bowels, as well as for anxiety, depression and to help him sleep. She thought that he was overly self-medicating, and that it was strange the way he kept disappearing for hours during the day, but she never said anything to him about it. She decided to wait until she got home, then end the relationship.

Once she was back in Montana, she called his brother, Bobby, to talk about Jim's drug use. Bobby told her that Jim had been in rehab in the past.

The day after she had her gallbladder surgery, Jim called to report that a doctor had told him that a mole on his cheek was cancerous and he was dying.

“Because he told me that he was a PA, a physician's assistant, I believed him,” she testified later. “And he said he knew that this was really dangerous.”

When Jim found out that Suzanna had talked with his brother about his drug issues, he was very angry and accused her of going behind his back. When she told him she was breaking up with him, he got even more angry, accusing her of abandoning him when he needed her the most.

Then the angry e-mails started.
You're not getting off that easy,
he wrote in one of his last e-mails to her.

He didn't elaborate, which frightened her. “I didn't know what that meant,” she testified. “It just left me hanging. I felt scared. I didn't know if he was going to come up and shoot me. I didn't know if he was going to stalk me. I had no idea what was happening.”

Still, she wasn't so scared that she felt she needed to report the remark to police. She stopped responding to his e-mails, but he continued to write her and her family, asking for money to help with medical bills because he was dying of cancer.

In late May 2008, Carol called out to her closest friends for help. Right before her divorce trial she sent out a group message, asking them to please think of her on the Wednesday and Thursday of that week, when she expected to be in court. Steve had forced them to go to trial by not accepting her last two counterproposals.

Most of you know that I have lived in a kind of self-inflicted, unconscious relationship-hell for the past many years,
she wrote, noting that she'd filed for divorce after finally waking from this “trance state of self-torture.”

Underscoring that asking for help was something she'd only recently learned how to do, she requested that they think of her while they did what they loved most, then to write her passionate and enthusiastic descriptions about it. Her e-mail closed with the repeated exclamation of “thank you!” in multicolored fonts, followed by a string of capital
O
's and
X
's.

After the brief trial was over, Carol sent out an update, thanking them for the inspiring and overwhelming “outpouring of love” and joyous energy she'd received—more, in fact, than she'd felt in her entire life, which filled her with gratitude. Even her clients at Pia's surprised her with a plethora of gifts, from poems to drawings, flowers and hugs. All of this, she wrote, helped her through the settlement talks, feeling “held and guided.”

I got a clear vision of how it had taken me not only 25 years to position myself for this moment in time, it had taken lifetimes!
she wrote.

As she felt waves of fear and anxiety coming, she told them, she felt herself opening up to accept rather than resist the feelings as she asked for help to see what she hadn't been able to see before—what her part and responsibility had been in her own emotional pain. It had been a process, she said, but she felt as if she'd reached a new place.

This week, she wrote, was her time to win. She went on to describe her feelings of triumph—feelings that some close to Carol suggested could have been her downfall in the end: Carol had finally found the strength to say no to Steve. She would not continue this struggle, she said, and she would not prolong this relentless, torturous relationship anymore. And that, they say, may have been too much for Steve to bear.

On May 28, Carol described in a subsequent e-mail how she walked into court, strong, to face her old fears and old wounds, her “self-lies about unworthiness.” She found a way to make it up to her inner child for all the years she'd “abandoned and betrayed” her. Carol had learned how to love that inner child, to love herself and to stand up to her fears.

Haggling to the end, Steve made a concession he hadn't been willing to make before, and, in turn, he got Carol to agree to pay him child support. Within a couple of hours, they were able to reach a settlement without going to trial and calling witnesses.

As part of the agreement, Carol would have to pay off her credit card balance, which was $32,000 in June 2008, as well as the full $12,500 balance on one of Steve's cards, and $20,000 on another, the last of which she paid in June. She also assumed the liability for the Bridle Path mortgages as well as a home equity line that Steve had taken out in his “sole and separate name,” which she subsequently wrote to him that he'd “succeeded in sticking [her] with, rendering Bridle Path an unsalable albatross.”

Steve had refinanced the Bridle Path house in June 2003 for $408,000 and took out a second mortgage for $70,000 in January 2004. At some point he also took out a second mortgage on his condo for $59,000.

During a long series of e-mails, Steve wrote her back on June 15, 2008—Father's Day—that while he thought she was being “incredibly grasping and unreasonable” and “self-absorbed,” he viewed her actions from a position of compassion. He believed she was actually trying not to let go of him, that she was acting out of “some deeper fear of being finished with each other.” Despite his many years of acting to the contrary, he contended, he was just
as uninterested in hanging onto our old attachment as I remain open to the possibility of something new.

Either way, he was done arguing.
Please let this marriage be over,
he pleaded. He closed by saying that he'd tried calling her twice on Father's Day, during which he thought of her “with gratitude.”

As part of the settlement, Carol was to receive Steve's 401(k) payout, which turned out to be $197,367 before taxes and penalties for early withdrawal, and netted her $149,334 after they split the excess over $180,000. But Carol didn't see how she was going to make it after having to pay income tax on that sum on top of covering the credit card balances.

After their day in court, Carol drove out to Watson Lake. There, she told friends, she gazed at the water, the sky, the birds and the clouds, and she wept—“with deep sadness, huge grief, profound relief and uncontrollable joy.” She'd finally managed to step up and love herself. As she said in an e-mail,
It was huge!

Carol called Katherine from the lake, crying. “I love myself too much to lose myself to Steve,” she said.

It seemed, at last, that the prolonged dissolution was finally resolved. Or so she thought.

 

 

A few weeks later, on June 18, Carol dropped off a bundle of clothes to sell at a friend's resale clothing boutique, Whatever Was. Teary and depressed, she explained that she was worried about her finances and the credit card debt hanging over her, not to mention that her youngest daughter had chosen to live with Steve over her.

Whatever her friend Linda Harrison couldn't sell at the shop, Carol said, she would try to sell at her upcoming yard sale. The two women knew each other through the store, and also from Unity Church in Prescott.

Linda often saw Steve having coffee at least once a day at the Wild Iris, a coffee shop next door to her boutique.

Carol told friends she was surprised to learn that Steve had been able to take out the second mortgage on Bridle Path without her knowledge. The house was still in her name even though he'd been making the payments. It was basically underwater, she said, and she was going to have to move out because she couldn't afford to make the payments. Carol was unable to qualify to take over the mortgages and credit line because of her poor credit rating.

As Carol wrote her divorce accountant on June 30, 2008:
It's upside down, because of the second [mortgage] in Steve's name that got given to me as an encumbrance on the property, so I can't sell it in this market.

As Carol put it to Joanne Frerking, “I am going to have to just have a yard sale and walk away, and go do something somewhere. I don't know what.”

A couple of days before the murder, Joanne ran into Carol at Costco and was concerned by her appearance.

“She was just distraught and upset, and she didn't look good,” she recalled. “She looked sort of disheveled. She looked skinny. She looked worn. She didn't have the bright light Carol used to have.”

Just as Carol would tell Katherine, she told Joanne that she'd just seen Steve and he was trying to get back together with her.

“Steve was over last night,” she said. “He just doesn't get it.”

One of Carol's neighbors later told Joanne that within a day or two of the murder, she was walking her dogs when she heard someone crying. It was Carol, out for a run. Carol stopped and they chatted.

“He said he wants us to get married again,” Carol said. “He just doesn't get it.”

Soon after the family send-off at the airport for Katie, Carol told her mother that Steve had texted her, asking to meet for coffee.

“Carol, don't go,” Ruth pleaded. “Don't be a fool. He's going to try to sweet-talk you.”

Carol didn't bring up the coffee date again, so Ruth was surprised to learn years later that her daughter had actually met up with Steve. “What an insane—after the divorce went through? Oh, gosh. He never gave up on his charm, did he?”