Then No One Can Have Her (25 page)

“Okay.”

With business out of the way, it was back to sex talk. “We've made love numerous times, too, are you tired of it?”

“ No.”

“There you go.”

“Some things are not going to wear out.”

“Yeah, I'm glad about that.”

“And when they do, there's Vitamin Blue,” Steve said, using his own nickname for Viagra, the little blue pill.

Between the Viagra and his daily injections of testosterone and HGH, Steve seemed to have no shortage of sexual enhancers before he went to jail. Dwain Fuller, the forensic toxicologist, said the testosterone would have increased Steve's already overactive sexual drive, and it also could have caused more “aggressive and competitive behavior, including feelings of dominance and increased self-esteem.”

 

 

On June 5, Steve told Renee, “I have seven hundred and ten thousand dollars to play with . . . that's the hard truth.... I can come up with another forty thousand dollars, so tell John [Sears] that $1.1 million is the total amount.”

A week later, Steve told Renee that Sears had come up with the idea to put her in charge of the trust so she could help funnel the insurance payouts to the defense team. (But, in fact, as Renee later told prosecution investigators, Sears had told Renee that Steve was the one who suggested she take over the estate's trust, because Katie was “worn-out, tired of doing it, didn't want to be bothered.” So Renee agreed, without consulting an attorney of her own.)

“You don't have to do what anybody tells you to do,” Steve told Renee. “You can do anything you want with the money after you get in that position.”

Katie's attorney, Chris Kottke, told investigators that Sears called him and asked if the estate money could be used to pay for Steve's defense costs, but Kottke claimed that he didn't commit one way or another. Kottke also claimed that he and Sears spoke “hypothetically” and he told Sears he was not giving him official legal advice on the matter.

The price tag for Steve's defense costs soon rose to $1.25 million. In a series of calls, Steve gave explicit directions to Renee and various family members on how to move money around to cover most of that sum from the estate and trust accounts. He said an additional $20,000 to $25,000 could come from a personal-injury lawsuit his divorce attorney, Anna Young, was handling.

Meanwhile, on July 10, during a hearing under seal with Judge Lindberg, Steve and his attorneys filed a pleading to declare that he was indigent. This was the same day that he and Renee accepted Katie's resignation as trustee and installed Renee as the successor trustee.

Prosecutors later expressed indignation about not being notified of the indigency hearing, not receiving a copy of any indigency motion and not getting to object during an open public hearing process for the indigency claim. They argued that such a hearing should have occurred as a precursor to the hiring of taxpayer-subsidized expert witnesses to support this allegedly indigent defendant's case—especially given that he had facilitated the transfer of $750,000 of his ex-wife's insurance money to pay his private defense team.

In a public filing dated late November 2012, outside attorneys for the prosecution accused Steve's attorneys of holding improper secret communications with Judge Lindberg on “dozens of occasions,” both in motions and at secret meetings that were likely “multiple” in number, to discuss issues relating to the case that were not meant to be protected, including the indigency claim and names of expert witnesses with whom the defense wanted to consult. (By this time another judge had unsealed records concerning witnesses who had been discussed in those meetings.)

An indigency determination is a public process and, indeed, prosecutors have standing to appeal indigency determinations,
the attorneys wrote.

As a result County Attorney Sheila Polk testified in 2013, “I would say our position has been that Mr. DeMocker wrongfully received public funds [to hire these experts], that those funds assisted in the defense.”

But these allegations came long after the fact. At the time prosecutor Joe Butner simply put any motions labeled “ex parte” or appointments of defense experts and investigators into a pile on his desk “and didn't pay attention to them,” Polk testified. Butner intended to wait until the defense actually chose which witnesses were going to take the stand.

Once Steve was declared indigent in July 2010, he and his attorneys helped direct the insurance money transfer to the defense team. But it was not without some more bumps along the road. In August, Steve told Renee that Katie was still “not cooperating” with the plan.

Based on a series of Steve's recorded jail calls, prosecutors, their estate expert witness and even Renee concluded that Katie ultimately transferred the money under duress, allowing the estate account to be closed with a zero balance on August 12.

Nowhere do I see any indication that either Katie or Charlotte were advised to seek independent counsel or in fact consulted with independent counsel,
Marlene Appel, the prosecution's estate expert, wrote in her August 2010 opinion.
Nor do I see any indication that they were advised of any conflicts of interest any of the attorneys representing Steven DeMocker may have had. . . . It should also be pointed out that Attorney Kottke represented Katie as PR/Trustee and it would be a conflict of interest for him to also represent or advise Katie or Charlotte as beneficiaries, given the obvious adverse interests the facts disclose.

Although Katie later denied in her testimony that she made the transfer under duress, Renee told investigators that she didn't see it that way. “There was some pressure, because had there not been pressure, she never would have released the money,” she said.

The same day Katie resigned as trustee, she transferred $354,738 from her mother's trust account to her own personal checking account. On August 27, she transferred $350,000 to her grandparents' account at Pittsford Federal Credit Union in New York. And on August 28, Steve's mother, Jan DeMocker, transferred $250,000 to Osborn Maledon in Phoenix and $100,000 to Sears's office in Prescott.

“So it's all done?” Steve asked his mom on August 29.

“It was done on Friday afternoon. It came through Thursday evening, same day Katie shipped it out,” Jan said. “I kept it overnight, hoping to get some interest. Dad and I had a discussion about using it for a vacation in Aruba. I called John to tell him it had arrived.”

“Hang on to that information. You'll need it again in mid-October for the second part.”

“Yeah, we'll have to do it again,” Jan said.

Steve and his mother were referring to the second transfer of funds, due to Charlotte. He'd already set this transaction in motion by having Renee take over for Katie as the personal representative to Carol's trust so Renee, also acting under a parental power of attorney for Charlotte, could move the money from the trust to Charlotte. As soon as Charlotte turned eighteen on October 11, she would make that second transfer of money to Steve's parents, who would then send it to the defense team.

 

 

Renee also acted as Steve's spy and advocate in more personal matters, giving him a heads-up on September 15 that Katie had sent Charlotte a letter. As they discussed what the girls might be planning, Steve said they needed to make sure his daughters didn't “try to take anything into their own hands that departs from the commitments that everyone has made.”

“Uh-huh,” Renee agreed, noting that Charlotte was worried that she wouldn't have enough money to buy a car once her BMW lease ran out.

“Any initiatives outside of, you know, the existing, it's been sort of this interlocking network of commitments, and they need to stick to those,” Steve said.

“Uh-huh.”

“Do your best and let me know how it goes,” he said.

Just then Charlotte showed up, and Renee handed her the phone so Steve could explain his concerns directly. But when Steve tried to find out whether the letter had anything to do with some missing money, Charlotte said her car was running and she had to go to her Young Democrats meeting.

“You know that we're going to replace your car in other ways?” Steve asked rhetorically.

“Yeah, I know,” she said. “Can we talk about this later?”

“Well, we can . . . but this is something we have to straighten out,” Steve replied, grasping for control.

When Renee got back on the phone, Steve reassured her that all of this movement of money was “proper and has been planned out by the attorneys. It's just that we're trying to make sure that nothing goes anywhere, that the right paper trail is occurring.”

He said Charlotte's role and “fulfillment of her part” would occur in about three weeks.

When Renee said she felt “weird” that her name was on Carol's trust account, he assured her that it was entirely appropriate because she had the power of attorney.

“You are the current parent figure,” he said. He added that they shouldn't talk about it any further on the recorded line, and directed her to discuss her concerns with John Sears.

Instead, they talked about the other mechanics of his life, such as the size of his legal team, which now encompassed fourteen people all over the country. As such, he'd asked the jail commander for access to a private office at the jail, along with a laptop and an unmonitored phone line, so he could work up to ten hours a day consulting with his attorneys.

But, he said, the commander just laughed, shook his head and said, “We're not going to do any of that. We can't. There's just no way we can do that here for anybody.”

 

 

Two months later, Steve set the second set of transfers into motion. “You feel like moving three hundred fifty thousand around today?” he asked Renee on October 19.

“Sure, I think I can lift that,” she replied.

“The trust matures today, but I assume you and John, or you and Chris [Kottke], or somebody is on it.”

That same day Renee moved $350,000 from the trust account to Steve's joint account with Charlotte. And on October 23, Charlotte transferred that money to her grandparents' account in Pittsford, New York. Records indicate that Steve was the “ordering customer,” and Charlotte was listed as the “sender's correspondent.”

On October 27, Jan DeMocker signed a check payable to Osborn Maledon for $250,000. She also wrote a check to Sears the next day for $100,000.

A timeline and analysis the prosecution compiled of transactions and Steve's recorded phone conversations illustrated the familial friction, even with Charlotte, as Steve continued to try to spend every penny of Carol's trust money on his defense.

Concerning Steve's conversation with Charlotte on November 14, the prosecution's lead investigator Randy Schmidt wrote that Steve
has learned that they owe John Sears an additional $20, 000 plus the $5, 000 that Katie shorted him. . . . SD tells Char that he is trying to round up all the surplus money from the Kennedy Trust fund so he can give it to Sears.... Char refuses to call Katie and tells SD that if he wants to talk to Katie about money, he should call her himself.

“It was your money, too,” Steve told her.

Char says that she never got a say in how the trust money was spent, and she won't call Katie. SD accuses Char of getting pissy with him,
Schmidt wrote.

 

 

Marlene Appel, the prosecution's expert and trust attorney, characterized the transactions like this:

On the evening of May 19, 2009, Steve was reading on his cell bunk when he heard a man call to him through the air vent, which inmates sometimes used to communicate with each other. He didn't know who it was, but he thought he recognized the voice from the dorm.

“Your ex-wife was killed by two guys from Phoenix,” the voice said, instructing Steve to get something to write down the details he was about to impart.

Standing on the toilet seat to get closer to the vent, Steve quickly scribbled down notes as the voice talked: Carol Kennedy and Jim Knapp regularly drank wine together in the evening, during which time Jim told her about his illegal drug dealings. These two guys showed up at the house and beat Carol to death with an axe handle because of Jim.

At least that's the account that Steve gave attorney John Sears, a tale that has since been dubbed “the voice-in-the-vent story.”

When Steve met with Sears on May 22 to tell him this story, he handed over his four pages of handwritten notes from his conversation with the “voice.” Ever since he and Carol had lived in Vermont, he said, they'd kept a splitting-maul handle in their bedroom for protection because Carol didn't want guns in the house. Carol had continued the practice even after they split up.

Before the “voice” story, Steve said he'd heard a similar account about Jim and Carol's murder from a friend in another jail dorm. That friend had heard the story from his cellmate and was asked to pass it on to an inmate in Steve's dorm. The voice said he wasn't allowed to relay the information to Steve until the original source had given him the okay.

At this point Steve was in cell #1 in dorm N at the Camp Verde Jail. Of the fifteen cells in that dorm, only those in certain “pods”—two on the floor above, and two on the ground floor—were connected by air vents. Following that logic, Steve said he thought the voice had to be coming from cell #2, 8 or 9.

 

 

On the evening of June 1, Steve called Renee, very intent on having her and Charlotte visit him the next day, saying he'd gotten some information from a fellow inmate. He'd already told Renee about the other inmate's account of the killing some days or weeks earlier.

Steve told Renee to bring Charlotte early so they could get into the first group of visitors. Hopefully, they would be able to visit in a private booth with doors they could close on either side of the glass, rather than one of the more open cubbyholes. He also said he wanted to speak to Charlotte alone first for a few minutes.

As Renee and Charlotte were driving over the next morning, Steve called to confirm that his daughter had brought a piece of paper and a pencil, as he'd requested.

They were, in fact, able to get a private booth. After waiting outside for a few minutes while Steve talked to Charlotte, Renee went in and saw that they both seemed upset.

Sitting down, Renee looked up at the glass, where Steve was holding up a sheet of paper with tiny handwritten words for her to read. Without her glasses Renee couldn't make out the print very well, and she was also worried that someone might walk by and see them, so she quickly skimmed the note to get the gist of it. While Renee was reading, Charlotte wrote down the note's contents, as Steve had instructed.

The gist was, essentially, that two guys and a woman in a prescription-drug ring had come to Carol's house to “whack” her, because Jim Knapp was involved in illegal drug activities and had shared incriminating information with her.

The note was not only confusing, but the story seemed suspicious, even fabricated, to Renee. When she'd finished reading it, Steve said he wanted to get this information out to the lawyers, where it “could make a difference,” but he knew they wouldn't believe the story if it came from him or from the inmate who wouldn't talk because he feared being labeled a “snitch.” What he needed, Steve said cryptically, was someone on the outside to write an e-mail and send it to the authorities, to John Sears and to the prosecution.

“Have you told John about this?” Renee asked.

“No,” Steve said.

“Well, wouldn't that be the person to tell?”

Renee knew that Steve was really asking her and Charlotte to do this deed for him, a prospect that made her uncomfortable. She told herself she wasn't going to have anything to do with sending the e-mail, and she could see that Charlotte was struggling with the notion as well.

Still, although it sounded dangerous for Charlotte to do, Renee developed an intricate web of rationalization. She decided that she shouldn't try to stop Charlotte from fulfilling her father's request in case the story really was true, or, at the very least, if it would help create reasonable doubt in the case against him. He'd convinced Charlotte that the prosecution wouldn't believe him if he tried to go to the authorities himself, because he was the only suspect they'd ever investigated. His goal was to get law enforcement to investigate a different suspect, specifically Jim Knapp. Steve was facing a possible death sentence, and Charlotte didn't want to see her father put to death.

“It felt to me like he was up to something. I had the same mixed feelings that I've had the whole way through, which is that my intuitive sense is telling me he made up the story,” Renee said later. “This other part of me wanted to believe that there was some hope, that there was some other answer out there that he wasn't guilty, so I wanted to believe that he had gotten that story from someone else.”

Although Renee later acknowledged her gut feeling that Steve had totally fabricated the voice story, she said he never admitted that to her.

 

 

As Renee and Charlotte left the jail and drove back to the condo, the teenager was teary-eyed, partly because she thought she'd finally learned what had happened to her mother. Not surprisingly, she remained upset for the rest of the day.

Confused, Renee read over the notes Charlotte had taken at the jail. Steve called Renee a couple of hours later to check on his daughter's mood.

“How does she seem to you—okay?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“All right. I just wanted to impress upon her that it's necessary that this project really needs to be you and her.”

“She's fairly nervous about it,” Renee said.

“Yeah, that's why I just thought it would be best for you and her to have somebody else to talk to about this project.”

He also told Charlotte not to talk to anyone else but Renee. “It really needs to be a project for you and Renee, and I wouldn't even trouble Katie with it, and definitely not John [Sears] for right now,” he said.

Steve called back a few hours later to check on Charlotte again. “Of course you know that all I can think about is the letter I wrote you and the questions in it,” he said. “Do you feel okay about this?”

“Yeah,” she said.

“Good, just checking. I don't want to, you know, I was really hoping you'd feel okay about it.... It means a lot to me that the trust goes both ways. . . . I'm just asking you to trust my judgment.... Finally feels like there's something we can do to fight back.”

But Renee—and the investigators who later listened to these taped conversations—believed that neither she nor Charlotte was comfortable with doing what Steve had asked them to do, for which, at that point, there was no real plan to carry out.

Initially Renee was resistant to go any further. “I'm not doing it and I don't think you should do it,” she told Charlotte.

Charlotte seemed to believe that her dad's story was true, and wanted to do whatever she could to help him, even though the whole prospect terrified her. It soon became clear that Charlotte was the one who had to do the deed. She wanted her dad home, and she had her own car. Plus Renee didn't think she could stop the teenager anyway.

“She was sixteen at this time. Why not say to her, ‘No, you're not doing that, and here's why'?” Steve's attorney asked Renee in 2011.

“I wish I had,” Renee replied. “I wish I had been able to think more clearly and I had been a stronger guide at that time.... The fact is, I was in over my head with huge, unbelievable amounts of work that I was doing all by myself. Charlotte was being horrible at home, and, frankly, I thought I wanted her dad home, too. She needs her dad.”

And because Renee believed that she couldn't challenge Steve on a taped jail call, she said she also wished that she'd listened to her inner voice, which told her to talk to John Sears about the scheme.

“But the bottom line is, people in Steve's life don't want to disappoint him,” she said. “He gets people to work for him.”

 

 

The specifics of the plan to send the e-mail, which Steve said had to be sent anonymously, developed in the coming days during more cryptic calls.

On June 4, he told Charlotte that he wanted to make her more comfortable with the task at hand, so he'd been doing some research with a new cellmate. “There's a bit of an expert in here,” he said. “He's talking all about the technology of it.”

Investigators later learned that an inmate who was serving time for identity theft, fraud and forgery had moved into Steve's cell that day.

As the plan came together, Charlotte and Renee discussed their reservations and how it would work. Charlotte visited the Prescott Public Library to find an Internet café where no one would know her, and from which she could safely send the e-mail. Renee assumed that meant a café in Phoenix or Scottsdale.

Charlotte would take a temporary phone, only for emergencies, but leave her regular cell phone in Prescott, thereby preventing anyone from tracking her whereabouts later through triangulation of the signal from her phone as it pinged off the towers. She also would wear sunglasses to mask her face from any surveillance cameras, and avoid social interaction with anyone who might remember her.

 

 

Charlotte and Renee visited Steve on June 9. Four days later, when Steve called his daughter, Charlotte told him, “I'll do anything it takes.... Whatever you were talking before . . . I'll do whatever you want.”

“I want you to get the message real soon,” Steve said. “I sent it to you through Renee, and Renee left it at her house.”

After their conversation he called his girlfriend. “Did you get the message to Char?”

“Well, it's imminent,” Renee replied.

The next day, Steve assured Renee, “You are going to do something that is pivotal to getting me out.”

Steve also told Renee that if she had anything to give him privately, she should come to court and hand it to Sears, who could pass it on to Steve in a stack of legal papers, and vice versa, because no one searched those papers.

On June 18, Renee took Charlotte for another visit. Afterward, Steve called to thank Renee “for what you did today.”

Then he called Charlotte. “You're running some errands tomorrow?”

“Yeah, lots of errands tomorrow,” Charlotte confirmed in their not-so-secret code.

“Thanks, sweetheart, you've helped me today.”

“Good, I hope so.”

When Steve called Charlotte first thing the next morning, she reiterated that she was about “to go do some errands” and expected to be back by six o'clock. He said he would call her then. (Investigators noted that he typically called her all day and night on her cell phone, “with no regard to what she was doing,” so the only reason he wouldn't call her that day was so no one could track her phone activity.)

Renee gave Charlotte gas money for the trip. The only time Charlotte used her debit or credit cards that day was to rent a video in town.

A few minutes after hanging up with Charlotte, Steve called Katie. And as they talked about an interview that
48 Hours
had just done for its episode on the case, they joked about
Lithuanian hit men and contract killings, and about Carol being involved in an international drug trafficking ring,
as investigator Randy Schmidt described in his report.

This conversation takes place 4½ hours before the anonymous e-mail is sent to John Sears describing hit teams, contract killings, and international drug trafficking rings,
he wrote.

Charlotte turned off her cell phone, then drove that afternoon to the Netlans Internet Café on East Thunderbird Road in Phoenix, the first café that came up in Google searches for Phoenix and Arizona, and one of the closest to Prescott. She paid several dollars in cash to use a terminal for an hour, signing in as a “guest” at two o'clock.

Her first task was to set up a Gmail account in the name of “Anonymous Anonymous,” with the address of [email protected].

Next she sent an e-mail to John Sears at the address she had for him through the state bar association. She spent about thirty minutes trying to find an e-mail address for prosecutor Joe Butner, then she attempted to find one for Deputy County Attorney Mark Ainley or County Attorney Sheila Polk. Unsuccessful, Charlotte settled on adapting Sears's bar association address to send the e-mail to Butner, but it bounced back as undeliverable.

Six minutes later she re-sent the first e-mail anonymously to Sears, asking him to forward it to the prosecutors:
I don't have their email and they need to read it more than anyone.

This e-mail later raised eyebrows among prosecution investigators because few people knew that Butner had taken over the case from Ainley. The investigators also could tell that the anonymous sender didn't search for Sears's e-mail address that day, so he must have already known it.

The e-mail, into which Charlotte later said she purposely inserted typos and misspellings, read as follows: