Then No One Can Have Her (26 page)

When Steve called Renee at 5:50
P.M
., she was still waiting for Charlotte to come home. When he called again five minutes later, Renee said Charlotte had gone clothes shopping. Asked how things went, Renee told him they'd gone well.

Renee later told investigators that Charlotte returned to the town house feeling exhausted and hot. She told Renee that she'd parked some distance from the café so no one would see her getting out of her car, and it was stifling outside.

Once Charlotte got home, Steve finally reached her on her cell phone at 7:16
P.M
. and asked how her day went. Charlotte replied that it was stressful and she'd gotten lost.

“Don't share anything outside the family,” he cautioned.

When he called Renee again at 8:42
P.M
., she told him that Charlotte was very tired and Jake had gone home early.

The morning after the first jail visit when Steve had told them about this story, Renee had suggested she call Sears to better understand what was going on, but Steve had told her repeatedly to keep this “project” between her and Charlotte. So when Sears asked Renee a day or so after he received the anonymous e-mails if she knew where they'd come from, she feigned ignorance.

 

 

John Sears took the bait and called the county attorney's office, saying he wanted to discuss some new information he'd received that pointed to his client's innocence.

On July 7, he met with County Attorney Sheila Polk, her chief deputy, Dennis McGrane, and prosecutor Joe Butner at their office. Sears asked for a waiver before disclosing the information, but the prosecutors refused, so Sears proceeded to disclose details of Steve's voice-in-the-vent story, noting that it dovetailed with, and was corroborated by, the anonymous e-mail.

Expressing concern that the prosecutors wouldn't take this information seriously, Sears said he thought the stories told by the anonymous e-mailer and the voice at the jail were quite similar, but he believed they were authentic because they seemed to have originated from two different sources.

After the meeting Butner met with his lead investigator, Randy Schmidt, and asked him to look into the communications personally, but to keep it “in house.” Butner didn't want anyone accusing them of failing to investigate these claims before the trial started.

Schmidt consulted with a Phoenix Police Department detective at the Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center. They were able to determine the date and time the e-mail had been sent to the bar association and also that it had come from a Gmail address, but nothing else.

On July 13, Schmidt met with Sears, who gave him copies of the e-mails and the notes Steve said he'd scribbled while the voice was talking. Sears recounted that when he'd first let Steve read the e-mails, Steve became very upset and started to cry.

Sears also recapped Steve's voice story and described Steve's ideas about who that inmate could be. Because Schmidt couldn't read Steve's handwriting and wanted to hear the voice story directly from him, Schmidt and Sears arranged for another meeting on July 21.

From there, Schmidt set out to track down more specific and incriminating information. Through subpoenas and good detective work, he was able to determine many more details about how and where the e-mail account had been set up, along with the sender's browsing and search history.

Schmidt and fellow investigator Mike Sechez also went to the Internet café from which the e-mail had been sent. They talked to the owner, who showed them the actual terminal used, but, unfortunately, no surveillance video was available. And because the sender had paid in cash, he'd successfully left no electronic trail from debit or credit cards.

“We were pretty annoyed,” Sechez recalled.

 

 

When Schmidt showed Steve the e-mails at the meeting, Steve started to weep. In fact, he became so emotional they had to take a break in the interview.

Steve said he was disturbed that the sender seemed so familiar with the inside of Carol's house, particularly with the axe handle she kept next to her bed. Schmidt agreed. Steve said he had no memory of whether that handle was still in the house when they cleaned it out for sale.

Steve noted that the sender also seemed to know what had gone on in the house before, during and after the murder, but he pointed out that the voice never mentioned a woman being involved in the killing.

As Steve recounted the voice story, he said he didn't want Schmidt or any other investigator to question inmates to try to determine the identity of the voice, because Steve didn't want to go into protective custody.

This surprised Schmidt.
I found it very odd that a person who was facing the death penalty for a capital murder case would not want me to determine who had actually committed the murder, because he did not want to be placed in protective custody,
he wrote in his report.

Steve said he'd talked to Sears about the voice and the e-mail, but not to his daughters, and not even to Renee, saying all he'd “intimated” to them was that investigators were “investigating something.”

When Schmidt went back and listened to the recorded calls between Steve, Renee and his daughters from June 1 through June 30, this was an easy lie to detect. Clearly, Schmidt wrote,
[Those conversations] indicated that Mr. DeMocker had spoken to his daughters and to Renee Girard about both the voice in the vent and the “pending” plan to send the anonymous email to the prosecutor.

Steve told Schmidt that he'd discussed some details from the voice story and e-mail with a few inmates, whom he named. Of the thirty-seven inmates in dorm N, he said, he thought thirteen of them could be the voice. However, investigators checked the ones he named and found they'd been released before the voice reportedly talked to Steve.

As Schmidt set out to prove or disprove Steve's story and the claims by the e-mailer and the voice, he systematically gathered booking photos and release dates for all of these inmates, diagrams of their jail cells, and intel about Steve's relationships with them. He also checked with law enforcement off icials in Phoenix about Jim Knapp and the purported drug ring, but none of them, including the Drug Enforcement Agency task force, had heard of either one.

 

 

Investigator Mike Sechez was assigned to listen to Steve's jail calls as part of Schmidt's voice probe.

“[Steve] just thought he was so much brighter than the ‘stupid' cops, so he would talk in code,” Sechez said in 2014. “I've never seen anybody call his family so much. I think at last count it was over two thousand [calls].”

Steve was only allowed to use the pay phone for fifteen minutes at a time, so he would stop a conversation partway through, hang up and call the person back.

During his time in the general population, he was allowed to mingle with others on his pod. And as long as he had credit on his account, he could make calls from eight in the morning until nine at night. At that time he often made a dozen calls a day.

“His ego is so dramatic, it's mind-boggling,” Sechez said. “In most cases, even as an investigator, you don't really get to have the total insights into your defendant.” But in this case, he said, “I listened to thousands of hours of conversation and so I know this guy.”

Renee's friend Reverend Dan Spencer said that as smart as Steve may be, he made major mistakes by creating the voice story and the anonymous e-mail—errors that, in his view, stemmed “from a lack of emotional awareness of how other people will perceive things.”

The defense team repeatedly tried to get the five death penalty “aggravators” against Steve dropped for lack of evidence and also to reduce his bail bond, which went as high as $2.5 million. The goal was to get him released with a GPS bracelet so he could help his attorneys prepare for trial.

Carol's killer is still walking free,
Steve's parents wrote in a letter to the judge in the fall of 2009.

That November, the prosecution, referred to as “the state,” listed the following aggravators, which made him eligible for a death sentence if he was found guilty of murder:
The state presented sufficient evidence to demonstrate probable cause to believe defendant brutally murdered Carol for pecuniary gain and to prevent her from reopening the divorce case and turning him in to the IRS. The state also presented sufficient evidence that the murder was committed in a cruel and depraved manner as well as a cold, calculated manner without pretense of moral or legal justification.

At a hearing on November 17, Steve's daughters pleaded with the judge to release him on bail until trial.

Charlotte testified that her father wouldn't even kill spiders when she was young, only catch and release them. “If there is one thing I just know, it is that my father is not capable of what he is accused of,” she said. “I am certain of my father's innocence and of his nonviolent nature.”

It had been “acutely painful” for her to go through the tragic loss of her mother, she said, “but the added loss of my dad was and is unbearable.”

Katie testified that both of her parents hated violence, and “despite the fact that I was a stubborn terror of a child sometimes,” they didn't even believe in spanking. The last time she was spanked, she was “very, very little,” and acting out in the backseat of the car. Carol did the deed and regretted it.

“It affected her and my dad so much that they decided from then on, I would only be given time-outs,” she said. “I've never seen my parents, really, or my dad, be violent toward my family or my mom, or anyone.... The most he would ever do is yell at me, when I was being . . . the very stubborn child that I definitely had the tendency to [be].”

Katie, who was twenty-two by now, described Steve as her best friend over the last four years, the one she called when she was walking home from class, upset about boys or school. He'd been willing to wake up early, even before 5
A.M
. if necessary, to edit a paper she'd just written, “just because he loved being our dad. He liked being there and being part of our lives.”

Charlotte was the one who really needed him the most as she prepared to apply for college, Katie said. And although she appreciated the time Renee had been spending with her younger sister, “I don't think anyone can really replace a parent, especially in such discombobulated circumstances that are currently taking place” and that were causing “confusion and instability” in Charlotte's life.

The girls' attorney, Chris Dupont, noted his “bewilderment” when he heard that the judge presiding over Steve's first court appearance in October 2008 had ruled that his daughters were required to waive their victims' rights in order to maintain a relationship with him.

Judge Lindberg agreed. “I thought that was a misinterpretation of the law,” he said.

As a result, Dupont said, he was joining the defense's motion to address this problem by asking the court to declare unconstitutional portions of the state Victims' Rights Act. This law had kept the girls from being advised of hearings, from being briefed by prosecutors and from speaking in court over the past year, Dupont said.

The defense also had been prohibited from contacting crime victims such as Ruth Kennedy for interviews unless they chose to talk, he said, and even then, such requests had to go through the county attorney's office. Attorney Anne Chapman explained that the defense team wanted to provide Ruth with information about “the lack of evidence, and about the state's failure to pursue other suspects who may still be out there.”

The defense's inability to contact Ruth and Carol's brother, John, was violating Steve's right to a fair trial, they said. Furthermore, all of these factors had strained the relationship between the girls and their grandmother, with whom they'd once been very close.

Prosecutor Joe Butner objected to Dupont's characterization of the issues, contending that state law was not to blame for the girls' strained relationship with their grandmother, but “rather, it's a function of the facts in this case.”

Chapman disagreed. “I know that they don't feel like the information has been free-flowing from that office,” she said.

Butner countered that the defense's arguments struck him “as being based upon false premises and concocted from the outset,” because he'd tried to reach out to the girls through their attorneys.

Lindberg denied the defense's motion, and Steve remained in jail.

 

 

Trying to be supportive of Carol's daughters, Katherine Morris flew out to Los Angeles in advance of the trial and had dinner with Katie. Steve happened to call from jail while Katherine was picking her up.

“He thanked me for looking in on Katie, taking her to dinner, and [said] what a great support I was to her, you know, pleasantries,” she recalled recently.

In one of the few conversations where she and Katie discussed the case, Katherine brought up a few points of contention in the evidence and posed some questions.

“What about the Internet searches?” she asked.

Katherine was skeptical of Steve's claims that these searches were done in the course of researching and writing a mystery novel. Looking back, Katherine recalled that she often saw Steve reading a book, but never writing one.

“I never heard that he was writing a book,” Katherine said recently. “Never in my life.”

But Katie said this was nothing new to her. “My dad always talked about writing a book,” she said.