Then No One Can Have Her (3 page)

Ruth could hear the water running in the background as Carol washed her salad ingredients and they discussed the companies Carol could use to send Katie her belongings. Rather than pay for extra bags on the flight, Carol was going to pack some boxes, then ship the items to her daughter. In fact, just ten minutes before she'd called Ruth, she texted Steve to follow up on the DHL shipping information. But again, no response.

The sun set at 7:46
P.M
., as Carol told her mother that she and Steve were still arguing about money. Typically, Carol didn't complain about her problems to Ruth, she usually tried to solve them on her own. But this time she seemed extremely worried.

“You know, Mom, this is July second, and there's been no [alimony] payment made into my account,” she said.

Because Ruth stopped hearing the water running, she later wondered if her daughter might have walked with the cordless phone down the hallway near the laundry room, where she kept the dogs' crates and food, and toward the back bedroom. Carol had been using that room as her office since Charlotte had moved out. Had Carol heard a noise?

After Ike's javelina incident he was still barking at wild animals—and strangers, when they came to the door. But as Ruth thought about it later, she didn't recall hearing any barking in the background that night.

“I suppose I will call my lawyer tomorrow,” Carol said, sighing.
“Welllll,”
she said, drawing out the word, as if she had run out of things to say.

It was 7:59
P.M
., when Ruth heard her daughter utter these last two words: “Oh, no.”

Although Ruth reported to police that night that Carol had screamed these words, Ruth said later that she'd misspoken because she was anxious, and that she was referring to her own emotions. The tone Carol used, she said, was not one of fear but of surprise and dismay, as if she were saying,
“Oh, no, not again.”

Then there was no sound at all. Ruth didn't hear the phone drop on the floor. Not even a click. Nothing but raw silence on the other end.

Carol had never hung up on her mother before. She always said, “I love you, Mama,” and Ruth responded in kind before they hung up simultaneously.

“Carol, are you okay?” Ruth asked. “What's the matter?”

But the line had gone dead.

Carol's number was programmed into Ruth's phone, so she tried calling back several times, but the line just rang and rang. The answering machine didn't pick up, either. Ruth knew something was wrong, but she felt helpless, being so far away. Still, she had to do something, try to reach someone, to find out what had happened.

Ruth called Steve DeMocker's condo and left a message on his answering machine, asking him to check on Carol. Charlotte heard the phone ring and looked at the caller ID, but she and her boyfriend were too busy playing video games to pick up, so she let it go to voice mail.

After getting no answer on Steve's landline, Ruth tried his cell phone. When the call went straight to voice mail, she left a message as her anxiety escalated.

“Steve, this is Ruth Kennedy in Nashville. I was on the phone with Carol and she screamed and said, ‘Oh, no,' and I can't get her to answer me back. I—I wonder if you could see what . . . you can find out, and let me know something.”

Ruth had chatted briefly by phone with Carol's tenant, Jim Knapp, and thought she would try to reach him next, but directory assistance had no listing for him. She didn't know that Jim shared Carol's landline.

By this point Ruth didn't know what else to do but call the police for help. However, because Carol's house was outside the jurisdiction of the Prescott Police Department (PPD), the dispatcher said Ruth needed to call the Yavapai County Sheriff 's Office (YCSO) and gave her the number.

“How can I help you?” the dispatcher said when Ruth called on the recorded emergency line at 8:14
P.M
.

Explaining that she was calling from Nashville, Ruth recounted what had happened during her aborted call with Carol. “Is there anything you can do? Can you go check?” she asked. “I'm just at my wit's end.”

“Now, did you call her, or did she call you and this occurred?” the dispatcher asked.

“She called me tonight and we—she calls me every night because I'm eighty-three and she worries about me.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I haven't been able to get her to answer the phone back. So I'm, you know, afraid that something bad's happened.”

“Who does your daughter live with?”

“She's recently divorced. She's alone.”

“Do you believe that there's any reason that she would be concerned if her husband—ex-husband—came back?”

“Oh, I don't think so,” Ruth said. “I don't think it's that kind of a thing.”

“All right, we will send somebody out to check on her. And we'll have them give you a call.”

Clearly anxious, Ruth encouraged the dispatcher to send someone out right away. “If you happen to get a hold of her and she is okay, could you call us back and let us know?”

“I sure will.”

Ruth then called Carol's brother, John, who lived seven miles away in the town of Old Hickory, Tennessee. Although he and Carol weren't close after high school, they'd been writing letters to each other and talking more often lately, every six weeks or so, in the past five years.

Figuring they could get further if they both made calls, John and Ruth each kept trying Carol and Steve, leaving messages to call them as soon as possible. They tried the sheriff 's office again as well.

“The deputy in charge is not here” was the standard reply.

They heard nothing that evening from Carol, and nothing from the sheriff 's office as they sat, waiting and worrying. Why wasn't she answering her phone?

Something really bad has happened. I don't know what, and I can't do anything about it,
Ruth thought.
I'm trying to do what I can, but it's not enough.

The call for a welfare check at Carol Kennedy's house in the 7400 block of Bridle Path went out on the police radio just after her mother's emergency call. The sheriff 's deputies on duty heard Matthew Taintor get dispatched, and they also heard him arrive at the house thirty-eight minutes later, at 8:52
P.M
.

“They have a huge, huge area to cover. For a simple ‘check welfare,' thirty-eight minutes is actually a decent [response] time,” said Mike Sechez, who retired as an investigator for the Yavapai County Attorney's Office in 2014, after working this case for nearly five years.

However, as defense attorney Craig Williams noted later, Deputy Taintor's arrival was delayed because he'd pulled over a car in front of him, which was traveling the same direction on Williamson Valley Road toward Carol's house, and ran a check on the two occupants' driver's licenses.

In terms of square miles, Yavapai County spans about the same area as the state of Massachusetts, although Yavapai's population of 211,000 is much more geographically dispersed across its vast expanses of open land. At one time the capital of the Arizona Territory, Prescott is now the county seat, with nearly forty thousand residents. Carol's neighborhood, which is on the outskirts of town in an unincorporated area, is home to many horse owners.

The week of July 4 has always been a hectic one for Prescott area residents, because every year since 1888, Prescott has spent this week hosting the “World's Oldest Rodeo.” People come from all over to participate in these annual festivities, drawing nearly fifty thousand to this small town, where celebrations spill into the streets with water fights breaking out between giant squirt guns on trucks. The event in 2008 was even bigger than usual because it marked the volunteer organizing committee's induction into the Pro Rodeo Hall of Fame in Colorado.

“The whole vibe of the community changes from the sleepy town to just madness, total madness,” said Carol's friend Katherine, who goes by her married name of Morris today. Katherine wondered whether Carol's killer chose this particular weekend on purpose, knowing that it would be rife with the usual chaos on Whiskey Row, the line of bars across from the courthouse that gets “lit up with all kinds of gunslinging cowboys.”

 

 

When Deputy Taintor pulled into Carol's driveway, the night sky was so dark he couldn't see anything that wasn't illuminated by the beam of his flashlight. No lights were on in the house, either, except for a tiny faint blue flashing light, which he assumed was the computer router.

Approaching the front door, he knocked several times, but got no response other than the dogs barking inside. As he shined his flashlight through the front windows and doors, all he could see was darkness.

As he walked around toward the rear of the house, he peered into the dining-room window. He could see the two small dogs now, which were looking back at him and yapping like crazy.

Seeing a detached building in back, which he thought was a garage, he checked its front door and found it unlocked. Drawing his gun, he announced himself, then did a walk-though, realizing it was a guesthouse. No one home there, either.

Returning to the main house, he checked the double French patio glass doors that led to the dining room, and found them unlocked as well. But not wanting to search the big house on his own, he continued walking around the perimeter, peering through windows. He saw nothing suspicious until he reached the last set of windows on the east side.

That's when he saw the woman inside—five feet eight inches tall, weighing 122 pounds, and lying with her feet toward him. Given the amount of blood pooled around her head, she appeared to be dead. Unsure whether the killer was still inside, waiting to jump him, Taintor didn't feel safe going in alone with just a gun and a flashlight to protect him.

As he retraced his steps to his patrol car, he heard the dispatcher checking on him over the radio. He also heard Sergeant Candice Acton requesting his location and saying she was heading his way.

Taintor radioed in a “code four” to notify them that he was okay, then called Acton on her cell phone to report an apparent homicide, a pretty unusual crime in their picturesque little mountain town.

Because homicides were so rare here, and the YCSO knew this was going to be a massive undertaking, it was all hands on deck. Investigators from the county attorney's office, who were trained detectives, were called later that night to come to an early-morning briefing on the case.

“It gets pretty intense and pretty chaotic at first, because there's a million things to get done and you have to prioritize,” said Mike Sechez, the now-retired investigator, who left a detective's job with the Phoenix Police Department to work in Prescott.

 

 

The sheriff 's deputies started to arrive at Bridle Path, one by one, Sergeant Acton being the first, at 9:10
P.M
.

As she and Taintor stood at the top of the driveway, waiting for their colleagues, a white Ford Ranger truck pulled up with a license plate that read
STOKAGE.
The driver, in his early fifties, introduced himself as Jim Knapp, and said he lived in Carol's guesthouse.

Asked if Carol had been home when he left earlier that day, Jim said no. She'd already left for work. “She should be home now,” he said. “I could call her and have her come out.”

“No,” Acton said, choosing not to tell him about the woman's body inside, given that they hadn't entered the house yet to confirm her identity or condition. “What is your relationship with Carol Kennedy?”

“Best friends,” Jim said, adding that they'd been commiserating as they'd both recently gone through nasty divorces; hers had only just been finalized.

Acton asked Jim for his driver's license, then ran his name through dispatch to see if he had any outstanding warrants. In the meantime Acton told him they didn't know what was going on yet, and that he needed to stay in his truck and out of the crime scene.

As other deputies began to arrive, they came up with a plan to determine if the killer was still on the property, then to enter the house. Deputy Mark Boan was assigned to stay with Jim and his truck.

“What's going on?” Jim asked.

“We're investigating a suspicious incident,” Boan replied.

Understandably concerned and impatient, Jim ignored the sergeant's instructions and took it upon himself to call Carol's cell phone. He left her a message at 9:37
P.M
., expressing concern for her welfare, saying something like, “Are you all right? The sheriff 's office is here.” His tone indicated that he was concerned she wasn't at home and might freak out if she pulled up to see all the police cars.

While the other deputies went inside, Boan talked to Jim through his driver's-side window, asking about his whereabouts earlier that day. Jim said he'd been at the Bridle Path house till about 1 or 2
P.M
., when he went into town to meet with his sons, ages thirteen and eleven, at his ex-wife's house.

While his ex took their older son, Jay, to hockey practice, Jim stayed with Alex, their younger son, and watched a movie that he'd gotten at the Hastings Entertainment video store. Jim said he headed home once his ex-wife, Ann Saxerud, got back from practice around 8:30 or 8:45
P.M
. On his way, he said, he stopped off at Safeway for some cherries and wine.

Jim said he'd last seen Carol the night before, when she'd come to the guesthouse to say good night, around eight or nine o'clock. That morning she'd left him a sweet note on his truck window, which he retrieved from the vehicle to show investigators.

Thinking of you all day,
it said.

Carol often left notes like this for him since he'd moved in about four or five months earlier, he said. The idea was to provide moral support to each other and for him to keep an eye out for her because she'd been living alone.

“Carol has wanted a man on the property for years, ever since Steve, her husband, moved out,” Jim said, describing Steve “as a very sneaky, manipulative man.”

“If anything happened to her, you should be looking at him.”

 

 

The deputies cleared the guesthouse again, then proceeded on to the main house. As they stood on the back patio, the dogs continued to bark, jumping up and pawing the glass door. The glass patio door was unlocked, so the deputies entered the house there, walking into the dining room and kitchen as the dogs ran outside.

Going from room to room, they approached Carol in the back bedroom, where she was lying facedown, her right arm under her body. To enter the room, they had to duck under a wooden ladder that was leaning against the wall above the doorway. A great deal of blood was spattered around the room, but it was primarily on and around the desk leg, and pooled around Carol's head. A bookcase was toppled over next to her body. The side of the desk had blood on it as well, and someone had left a bloody smudge, maybe a handprint, on the beige carpet, where a bottle of stain remover was sitting nearby.

Acton put on some gloves and checked Carol for a pulse, but found none. Her skin felt cool to the touch. Although she appeared to have been dead for a while, the deputies called for the paramedics. The ambulance crew arrived around 9:40
P.M
., and assessed Carol's condition to confirm that she'd passed away.

When the paramedics left less than ten minutes later, it didn't take long for Jim to figure out that something was seriously wrong.

“Is she dead?” he asked Deputy Boan.

“Yes,” said Boan, who had only just learned this fact himself.

Jim, still sitting in his truck, broke down crying and remained visibly upset for quite some time.

After this emotional scene, Boan's superiors told him to record his conversation with Jim Knapp, going back over the same questions the deputy had asked earlier, to get the answers on tape. Boan put a small microcassette recorder into his shirt pocket, but as it rustled against the cloth it distorted the sound quality and the recording was later deemed “inaudible.”

Once Jim recovered from the news and got out of his truck, Boan tried to casually look him over with a flashlight, searching for any injuries or sign of blood on his clothes, but saw none. He also peeked inside Jim's truck and saw nothing overtly suspicious. Jim's speech didn't seem slurred; his eyes didn't look bloodshot or watery, or his pupils dilated or constricted. Other than being very upset about the death of his best friend, Jim didn't seem impaired in any way.

Later, when Boan was called to testify about that night, the defense asked him how Jim could have known enough about all the blood at the crime scene to describe it to a woman at Safeway the next day. Boan said he didn't know. He didn't talk to Jim about the blood, he said, nor did he recall Jim mentioning the bloody scene to him. They'd both been standing outside the house the entire time.

Sheriff 's Detective Doug Brown was at home brushing his teeth and getting ready for bed when he got a call from his supervisor, Sergeant Luis Huante, around 10
P.M
., telling him to head over to the crime scene on Bridle Path.

Brown had started working in the jails for the sheriff 's department in 2001, then moved to patrol. He had only just transferred to the Prescott sheriff 's station about ten days earlier, after a year and a half investigating child-related sex offenses for the Criminal Investigations Unit (CIU). This would be his first homicide investigation, of which he was about to become the case agent—without any homicide training.

Brown was the first detective to arrive at the crime scene at 10:35
P.M
. Walking through the house with Sergeant Huante he examined the position of Carol's body, the ladder and the overturned bookcase, and the pattern of blood spattered around them.