Then No One Can Have Her (24 page)

 

 

The Northern Arizona Department of Public Safety crime lab conducted DNA and other tests on the nine-millimeter gun, bullets and casings found in Jim Knapp's condo. The results all came back to Jim, not to an unknown intruder.

This lab found that James Knapp's DNA was located on this firearm,
Officer Ryan Hobbs of the PPD wrote in his report.
They also tested the spent casings located at this scene as well as several unspent rounds [which] . . . matched this firearm.

 

 

After Jim Knapp's death, the Embry-Riddle alumni website posted a blurb about him, which was similar to an obituary that ran in the
Courier
:
Jim will always be remembered as a deep emotional person with a tireless entrepreneurial spirit and endless enthusiasm for fresh new ideas.
The notice described him as someone who could share deep philosophical insights, then immediately break into a joke. The writer also noted Jim's deep love for his two sons, his affinity for the ocean, his easygoing surfer sensibility and his “constant quest for knowledge, friends and fun.”

A celebration of life for him was held January 17, 2009, at the Watson Lake Ramada. Recommended dress was aloha shirts, shorts and sandals. Organizers asked that donations be made to the Surfrider Foundation in lieu of flowers.

 

 

Interviewed by prosecution investigator Mike Sechez, Bobby Knapp said his brother had talked about committing suicide at least once during phone calls in his last months. Once Jim was diagnosed with melanoma, he told Bobby he would rather kill himself than go through the same ordeal as their mother had. Jim's struggle with prescription drug and alcohol abuse dated back to his twenties. For this and other reasons, Bobby was certain his brother had taken his own life.

Bobby told Sechez that he'd gone over to Jim's condo a week after his death to retrieve his belongings, accompanied by Sean Jeralds, Dave Roy, Ann Saxerud and her sons. Among Jim's things they found a diary, with a note asking Bobby to give it to Alex and Jay once they were old enough. On the kitchen counter they found a camera, which Jay asked if he could have as a keepsake. Dave took the camera to his car to check the photos on his laptop and make sure they were appropriate.

Three photos featured Jim wearing a Santa's hat and holding a black semiautomatic handgun, the same one that was found next to his body. One, time-stamped December 25, 2008, at 10:01
P.M
., showed him pointing the gun across his chest. A second, taken a minute later, had him pointing the gun into the air. And a third, taken a minute later, showed him holding the gun in his right hand and a knife in his left. Roy deleted the images before giving the camera to Jay.

When Sechez retrieved the camera from Jay, he couldn't find the deleted photos on it, so he collected the memory card and adapter from Prescott police and sent them to the DPS Computer Forensic Unit. The unit was able to recover the deleted images, which were necessary for the prosecution to illustrate Jim's state of mind around the time he shot himself.

Jim was truly in dire financial straits. When Bobby looked through his brother's bank statements, his accounts showed that he had $5 in his saving account and $172.51 in his checking, as of November 30, 2008. After closing those accounts six months later, Bobby received a check for a whopping $241.

 

 

In January 2012, Detective Norman Peterson of the PPD met with Steve's attorney to discuss evidence found at the condo.

A month later, Peterson went there with prosecution investigator Sechez and sheriff's Deputy Doug Brown to follow up on a photo Peterson had snapped of a bullet hole through the master bedroom ceiling the day Jim's death was reported. Climbing on the roof, Peterson found a bullet hole in the shingles above the bedroom, but he was unable to find the actual bullet. Brown also crawled into the attic space to track the bullet's course, and photographed the hole in the ceiling and where it had exited through the roof. The bullet that killed Jim Knapp was never found, even after investigators ran a metal detector through the crawl space under the condo floor.

After his arrest, Steve stayed busy behind bars, making phone calls, and writing letters to the Hartford Insurance Company, trying to collect on Carol's policies. He also took steps to ensure that his daughter Charlotte was being cared for, and that Renee stayed on his side.

On November 9, 2008, Steve wrote Renee a six-page letter, explaining his affair with Leslie Thomas, and asked for Renee's forgiveness. Renee hung in there.

Charlotte started off staying with her aunt Susan DeMocker at the condo. However, after they butted heads, the very upset teenager called Steve to complain, and he subsequently called Renee.

“Charlotte is coming over. She needs to talk to somebody,” he said. “How would you feel about her staying with you for a few days?”

“That's fine,” Renee said.

Within a week Susan had packed her bags and left town. Renee later learned that Susan was upset about this chain of events, but Renee never found out exactly why. Apparently, Susan had a falling-out with Steve over parenting issues and decided to return to New York.

At this point Renee's caregiver relationship with Charlotte became a more long-term and more serious arrangement. And because Renee's house was old and had no closets, she thought it best that she move into Steve's condo with Charlotte.

 

 

As the personal representative of her mother's estate, Katie DeMocker had hired attorney Chris Kottke on July 11, 2008. And on October 14, the probate court officially made her the trustee of Carol's trust.

On January 2, 2009, Steve called his parents to tell them he'd just met with attorney John Sears and had gotten some good financial news.

“The news is definite and will happen soon,” Steve told his mother.

“It was seven-five-oh?” Steve's father asked, referring to the $750,000 value of Carol's insurance policies.

“Yeah.”

“Makes life a little easier,” John DeMocker said.

As Steve called Renee and his brother Jim to share the news, little was said on the recorded line, but all would soon be revealed.

When he talked with Katie the next day about the cost of their car leases and worries about his credit rating, she said, “I don't know what this new pile of money is, and I don't know that I want to spend it on cars.”

In conversations that day with Charlotte and his siblings Jim and Susan, Steve discussed how this new money should be enough to cover his debts. He also told Susan that Katie would need to be “managed” on this.

Steve's money situation, coupled with his escalating legal bills, had placed an escalating stress on him and his parents. On January 20, Steve told Jim that he'd met with Sears that day and was told that the cost of his defense was now twice the initial quote of $400,000 to $500,000. In the three months after Carol's death, Steve had borrowed an additional $40,000 from his parents, bringing the total they'd loaned him in the past year to $100,000.

In a call with his mother, Steve learned that his father had not only had to go back to work to cover Steve's legal bills, but he'd also taken out a $50,000 line of credit on their home, and applied for a second line of $150,000.

 

 

Steve's lawyers ultimately agreed to cap the fees if they could get the money in a lump sum, but the question remained where those funds would come from. The legal firm of Murphy, Schmitt, Hathaway & Wilson, which specialized in estate planning, was hired to help Steve with “
securing payment and disposition of the proceeds under the two Hartford life insurance policies . . . owned by Mr. DeMocker and insuring Carol V. Kennedy, deceased,”
according to a letter the firm wrote to Hartford on February 4, 2009. Within a couple of months, Steve and his team of attorneys had worked out a solution.

In March, after his attempts to collect on the life insurance failed, Steve submitted to Hartford signed disclaimers of any interests in Carol's will and payouts from her insurance policies. This cleared the way for the $750,000 to be paid to the contingent beneficiaries—Carol's trust and estate, which were under Katie's control.

At this point Steve brought all of his persuasive powers to bear on his older daughter to convince her that this money needed to go toward his legal costs—not the girls' education, health and welfare, as their mother had intended and stated in her trust.

Katie had apparently learned about this new estate plan just before Steve called her on March 17, but she clearly had other ideas in mind. Exercising her stubborn streak, she asserted herself as Charlotte's protector during an antagonistic discussion with Steve, who then applied countermeasures by asserting himself as Katie's father. These were apparently supplemented later by pressure from other family members, to convince her that this plan was, essentially, her familial duty.

In two back-to-back recorded calls that morning, Steve told Katie that “these are resources that, you know, for reasons you understand need to be set aside under your control for now, but . . . these are resources I have to be pretty sure you know . . . that I am going to make the decisions about how they're deployed.”

After Katie replied that she was holding on to some of the insurance money to ensure that she could send Charlotte to college, Steve said, “I understand your concern, but . . . that, unfortunately, at this point has to be down the scale of priorities below bond first, defense second.... We may need every penny of it for defense and I need to make certain that you understand that there will be no impediment to that.”

“And I need to make sure you understand that I'm trying to take care of my little sister,” she countered.

“I understand that you're trying to do that, but we're going to get an acquittal here, and if we don't—”

“You don't know that. I'm really sorry to be that harsh . . . but you cannot say beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is what is going to happen.... I'm setting aside money that I'm not just going to hand over.”

“How? What are you talking about doing?”

“Maybe you should get your lawyer to explain it to you a little better—”

“Hey, hey, hey.”

“—before criticizing me in my decision.”

“Sweetie, the only reason those resources will come under your control will be if I give them up,” he said.

“If you can take them yourself, go for it.”

“These are resources that, otherwise, wouldn't come until this is all over and we need them now for the defense. And so, this is a completely legal and appropriate way that the attorneys have constructed, but we need your cooperation, and if you're going to exert control here,” he said, “I'm asking you simply to step aside and don't exert this sort of—”

“I'm not going to do that,” she said.

“Oh, pumpkin, I'm counting on you,” Steve said, trying to soften his approach. “My life is in the balance.”

“Stop saying that.”

“It's the truth.”

“It's not true,” she said. “I have some decisions to make now, and you can't always play the daddy card.”

“Sweetie, I will make certain, first of all, ninety-nine percent probability here, that if we can get me out and . . . back to work, whether or not there's a civil suit against the county that succeeds, as long as I'm acquitted and back to work, I will take care of both of you, as I always have. And if for some reason I am not able to, my family will. But the resources we have at our disposal right now have to go to this without any interference and I need to know that from you. . . . As long as we're clear that, if we need it, it comes to my defense or my bond. I have to be out and I have to be acquitted. The two go hand in hand. I need to get out so I can raise money so that I can help with my defense.”

When Steve pressed Katie on her plans to do something different, she said they hadn't been drawn up yet. Asking how she had come to a point of not trusting him, he said, “Laughing at me is incredibly hurtful and insulting right now.”

“That kind of question is completely irrelevant, how it is I've come to trust you won't handle it, because you can't handle it,” Katie replied, saying she needed to take care of her “little family right now.”

Tensions heightened as they argued over who was really trying to care for their family and Steve increased the pressure to comply with his wishes. “I need you to stop, to not be part of the problem here, Kate,” he said. “On top of everything else we're battling here, don't you enter here and become something—”

“I am not the problem. How dare you?” Katie said, telling her father to stop trying to dictate what she needed to do. “There are some things that I'm not your daughter about anymore. When I'm the executor of this estate, I'm Mom, I'm not Katie.”

Turning to a victim ploy, Steve replied that he didn't know why she was being so “harsh” with him, “as though I was somehow asking you to do something inappropriate.”

Katie countered that she would talk to her lawyer, family members and some friends “to cool off from this infuriating conversation.” Then she would call Renee, Charlotte and even Steve's lawyer “if that is what you would like, Father. Anything else?”

“I don't deserve any of what you just dished out to me,” Steve said, playing the guilt card now. “You do whatever you have to do, sweetheart.”

“I don't deserve what you said to me, either.”

“You don't deserve the pain that has been inflicted on you anytime recently,” he said. “None of us do, and I'm sorry. I want to get out of here so that I can do what I can to resume taking care of all of you guys, first of all emotionally, and second of all in every other way. But don't make me the enemy here.”

Steve said he wasn't trying to take away anything that belonged to her. “We are a family,” he said.

With that, they told each other, “I love you,” and hung up.

 

 

The following month Steve's accountant brother, Jim DeMocker, created a spreadsheet totaling up all of Steve's family financial obligations, including loans from their parents, outstanding student loans for the girls, $309,000 in legal fees and more than $70,000 in credit card debt. The financial picture, as he put it in an e-mail to attorney John Sears, was “sobering.”

Hopefully this will help Steve see the depth of his obligation to Mom and Dad and the need to move away from fantasies about vacations to Bora Bora, at least anytime soon, and will keep the girls' feet planted on the ground too as they ponder big checks from Hartford,
he wrote.

Behind the scenes it had been decided that Katie would
resign as trustee in favor of [Renee] Girard
, who
was not only Steven DeMocker's girlfriend, she was also Charlotte's custodian under a parental power of attorney given to her by Steven as Charlotte's father,
Marlene Appel, an estate and trust attorney and a licensed fiduciary, later stated in a written analysis for the prosecution.

On April 13, 2009, Hartford issued two checks, one for $256,831 to the Virginia C. Kennedy Testamentary Trust, and one for $513,661 to Katie as the estate representative. Both checks arrived at her attorney's office in Prescott on April 14. Within a week or two, those checks were deposited into the respective Bank of America accounts for the trust and the estate.

The Bridle Path house sold at a foreclosure auction for $398,654 that same month, according to Zillow, a real estate website.

 

 

Looking back in retrospect, the next few months represented a frenzied period during which Steve later claimed his behavior was motivated by fear, not guilt. Prosecutors saw it the other way around.

Whatever the motivation was, prosecutors said, Steve used this time to perpetrate a chaotic fury of emotional manipulations, financial machinations and fraudulent schemes from behind bars. In doing so, he involved his girlfriend, daughters and family members to the point that four of them had to obtain immunity before testifying in court or face criminal charges. These schemes also resulted in additional charges being filed against Steve down the road and placed his defense attorneys into an unworkable position of conflict.

Within a month of the Hartford checks being issued in April, Steve had put the insurance scheme into play. Confident that he would get control over the money eventually, Steve told Renee he had it covered.

Using his sexual and intellectual wiles, Steve made sure to keep Renee on the line by having her act not only as his advocate and proxy, but also as a guardian to Charlotte when it came to the steps necessary for Carol's insurance proceeds to pay his legal costs.

Their recorded jail conversations illustrated such tactics during calls like this one on May 26, 2009:

“Hey, baby,” Steve said.

“Hey,” Renee said.

“Got a minute?”

“Yeah.”

“God, you sound good. Let's make love.”

“Yeah, so do you.”

After these pleasantries Steve went right into the trouble he was having with Katie and his brother Jim following through on his plan for the money.

“Katie is not getting it done, because Jim is just—”

“Shopping for a car.”

“No, it's just that Jim won't sit Katie down and say, ‘Look, we really need this done here, while you're here, here, sign these things. Let's get this estate closed and let's get this, you know, other thing, this trust thing going,' and blah blah blah.”

“Yeah.”

“And so, John is going to see if, in addition to being my POA (power of attorney), you'll take over as, well, he'll explain it to you. . . . It is not actually any genuine discretionary responsibility. It's just a matter of, you know, doing that—well, you do have discretionary responsibility.”