Then No One Can Have Her (31 page)

Once Steve's attorneys realized they could no longer use the DNA of the mystery man, Mr. 603, as their line of defense, they shifted their focus to other identifiable third-party suspects, zeroing in primarily on Jim Knapp.

His motive? “Jim Knapp—(a) was not psychologically stable, and (b) he was angry at Carol,” said defense investigator Rich Robertson. “He had kind of a romantic interest in her that appeared to be unreciprocated, and (c) he was telling people that she was going to fund his investment in this coffee franchise that he wanted to start and she was going to be his partner and fund it with the money from the divorce. He found out this wasn't going to happen right before she died.”

Attorney Craig Williams also came up with a theory to explain away Jim's 7:58
P.M
. call from his ex-wife's house: “Just because [Carol's] phone went dead at eight
P.M
. doesn't mean that's when Carol died,” Robertson said. “That just means the phone went dead. She was discovered dead well after ten o'clock, so she was killed sometime between when the phone went dead and the time when she was found, so there was time for Jim Knapp to get out there.”

Robertson noted that Jim was involved in a number of get-rich-quick scams, in which he ended up being a victim; he was also lying to people—including Robertson—about his cancer in an effort to get people to give him money.

“He told me that he had stage-four cancer that had been miraculously cured,” Robertson said, referring to meetings a week or two after Carol's murder. “He told me that doctors wanted to study him because he'd had this stage-four cancer that had suddenly gone into remission and there must have been something in his genetic makeup.”

Another theory being floated, which was more along the lines of the hit man tale and the voice-in-the-vent story, was that Carol had been killed by the drug ring with which Jim had allegedly been involved, but that was not part of the defense's case, Robertson said.

 

 

The defense's Jim Knapp theories held no water with Carol's friends. From what Katherine Morris knew, there was nothing romantic between him and Carol.

That said, Katherine wouldn't have been surprised if Jim had been in love with Carol, as Steve told her he suspected. Even so, in her view, Jim had no ill will toward Carol.

“I know he was devastated, absolutely,” she said. “He was the one with her in those final days and knew the most about what Steve was doing to her recently. I don't think he had anything to do with her death.”

Debbie Wren Hill agreed. “He might have been a little wacky, but they were very, very close friends. He might have had a crush on her, but you don't beat people mercifully if you have a crush on someone. This was a crime of passion. This wasn't someone slipping something into her drink.”

The prosecution wasn't bothered by the defense's new strategy, either.

“Once we figured out who Mr. 603 was, they said someone else did it, and it was Jim Knapp,” prosecutor Jeff Paupore recalled. “That was a mistake. Because we had cell phone evidence.”

Paupore looked at it this way: “The more they go after Jim Knapp, the stronger our case will be, because they've got nothing else. And they didn't.”

 

 

Nonetheless, the defense's new direction did force investigators for the prosecution to delve deeper into the evidence to prove more definitively that Jim was where he said he'd been and could not physically have been able to commit the murder. As such, they developed a timeline of his activity that day, based mostly on witness interviews and Jim's cell phone records:

By the time Jim got up the day of the murder, Carol was already at work. As was his routine, he went over to her house around noon and let the dogs out to run around. It was unclear when he left the house that afternoon, but he drove to Hastings Entertainment and rented two videos for his younger son at two fifty-three.

From there, he went to a doctor's appointment with Dr. Kent Ward, an osteopath, between 3:15 and 3:44
P.M
., during which he turned off his cell phone. The four calls he received from his ex-wife's landline during that time went straight to voice mail. Jim had complained of back discomfort.

At 3:44
P.M
., Jim checked his voice mail and returned the calls to his ex-wife's house.

His ex, Ann Saxerud, told investigators that he arrived at her house at five-ten in the evening. She and their older son, Jay, left the house for his hockey practice around six o'clock. She dropped off Jay half an hour later, then went hiking nearby with a friend.

At 7:58
P.M
., one minute before Carol's call to her mother was disconnected, Jim checked his voice mail on his cell phone.

While Ann and Jay were gone, Alex said he and his dad watched the movie
Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle,
until Alex got bored and went to play video games on the computer for a while. Alex later testified that his father did not leave the house until Ann returned.

After Jay's hockey practice ended at eight o'clock, Ann and her son left the rink around eight-fifteen, arriving home between eight-thirty and eight-forty. She estimated that Jim left her house at eight forty-five.

Jim put the videos into Hastings' drop box, and headed to Safeway, off Iron Springs and Willow Creek Road, which is six miles and eleven minutes from Carol's house. The security footage showed him entering the store just before 9
P.M
. And just as Jim told the deputies, records confirmed that he bought sweet red cherries for $8.46 and a bottle of Freixenet Cordon Negro Brut sparkling wine for $17.96, at 8:58
P.M
.

Jim arrived at Bridle Path around 9:15
P.M
., after which the deputies ran his driver's license through their database.

 

 

Meanwhile, the defense developed an explanation for the searches and files on Steve's computer that he claimed were for book research.

“He liked the idea of writing the book, and the actual writing is hard work, so he had a lot of stuff in that computer that was mentioned that had zero to do with the murder, that seemed to fit that whole spy-novel thing people are talking about,” Rich Robertson explained.

For example? “He had some stuff in there for gases. He was researching carbon monoxide. Even the book titles, the ones that seemed to be the most damaging, or portrayed to be the most damaging, or hit man, nothing about the murder fit that.... It was ‘how to make a homicide look like a suicide.' There was nothing in this scene, if it was staged, that even [given] the state testimony, was staged to look like a suicide.”

Within two weeks of being appointed in December 2011, Judge Gary Donahoe got down to business by ruling on the slew of pending motions that had backed up during the months of delays. In so doing, he rejected a defense motion to dismiss the case based on matters raised in the Docugate scandal.

The defense appealed, and three months later, the Arizona Court of Appeals poured water all over Donahoe's ruling. Finding that an intrusion into Steve's attorney-client privilege had been committed, the court ordered Donahoe to conduct a mini trial known as an evidentiary hearing.

Due to appeals and the highly sensitive issues involved, that hearing did not begin until December 12, 2012, and then lasted for several months. The proceedings featured testimony by the very passionate county attorney herself, Sheila Polk, who continued to defend the ethics and integrity of her office.

“I have tried and I believe I have successfully accomplished an office and a culture of ethics, a culture where everyone understands that it's not about some end out there,” she testified. “It's about at all times respecting and upholding our obligation of the Constitution to defend and protect the individual rights of citizens and of the defendant as we go through the process.”

Admitting that some mistakes by her office “will happen,” she also argued that the state had not impaired its ability to provide due process for Steve DeMocker. “If I thought for even an instant that Mr. DeMocker could not get a fair trial from my office, I would conflict off the case,” she said. “I have not seen a scintilla of evidence . . . that would deprive Mr. DeMocker of a fair trial.”

Aiming to finish the hearing in April, the judge issued a preliminary fifty-three-page ruling in the state's favor in March, which sent Craig Williams into fits once again.

With Donahoe's final ruling in April, the county attorney's office was allowed to move ahead as prosecutor, and the trial process started up again with motions and hearings.

 

 

Preparing for the second trial, the prosecution team made a conscious choice to reduce the number of witnesses it had planned to call during the first trial, especially now that there were additional charges to support. The team pared back and simplified its case to rely mostly on evidence and elements of the crime that carried the greatest weight.

“This is a murder trial where we could have gone for weeks on the money part of it,” prosecutor Jeff Paupore recalled later. “I made a decision, let's just get enough out there, on these other charges—I care about them, but I really care about getting the conviction on Carol's murder.”

The second trial took place in the same courthouse, but in a different courtroom, in which space and sound worked in no one's favor. The first courtroom felt cavernous, which made it easy to move around in; the second one was so cramped that members of the defense team felt as if they were sitting on top of each other.

The acoustics in the second room also frequently made it difficult for people to hear each other talk. Questions had to be repeated and witnesses had to wear microphones. Testimony also had to stop when the old steam radiators banged as they warmed up, and the air-conditioning was often so loud that the judge had to ask for it to be turned off, especially when badly recorded audiotapes were being played. Water dripping from the leaky ceiling had to be caught by pans when it rained.

 

 

Jury selection finally began on July 16, 2013, but without the death penalty it only took several days to impanel a jury.

With all the fraud charges at stake, the defense tried to preclude the state from admitting Steve's conversation with the prosecution team in July 2009 about his voice-in-the-vent story, contending that this had been a “free talk” and couldn't be used against him.

The judge, however, denied the motion, saying that the previous prosecutor and defense attorney admitted under oath that this was an “investigative interview.” Steve was no different than an ordinary citizen offering details of what he claimed was a crime committed.

“Of course he hoped it would exonerate him, but there were no promises, no coercion, no quid pro quo,” Judge Donahoe said.

 

 

When both sides delivered their opening statements on July 19, it had been nearly three years since the first trial ended with Detective Hoover's testimony.

In his ninety-minute opening, Deputy County Attorney Steve Young outlined all the state's evidence that pointed to Steve DeMocker as the killer of his very recent ex-wife, with whom he had been fighting about money up until the day he murdered her.

“The defendant has a financial motive to murder his ex-wife, Carol,” Young said, noting that Steve didn't want to pay her $6,000 in alimony monthly for the next eight years, totaling $576,000.

The state would present evidence, he said, of Steve's pattern of overspending, his losses related to the market crash, coupled with his personal and financial split with Barb O'Non, and how he, as the beneficiary, immediately tried to collect on Carol's two life insurance policies that would pay out the $750,000 he ultimately used to pay his first defense team.

Young covered evidence ranging from the staged crime scene to the blood spatter pattern, shoe prints, bike tracks, computer searches, “dead” cell phone, and golf club head cover that had gone missing by the second search. He noted that the pattern of injuries to Carol's skull was consistent with a left-handed golf club, that Steve was left-handed and he also lacked an alibi. All of this, he said, would persuade the jury beyond a reasonable doubt that Steve murdered Carol on the evening of July 2, 2008.

To support the other charges, he said, the state would illustrate Steve's manipulative and fraudulent moves to persuade his family members to help perpetuate the voice-in-the-vent story, to send the anonymous e-mail and to make the insurance money transfers, which led to the other charges and required his own relatives to obtain immunity before testifying.

And finally, anticipating that the defense was going to point to Jim Knapp as a homicide suspect involved in a prescription drug ring, Young said the state would prove that Jim couldn't have killed Carol.

“The only evidence in this case that's going to suggest that Jim Knapp is a seller of drugs or involved in some nefarious drug ring from Phoenix is the voice-in-the-vent [story] that cannot be corroborated and the anonymous e-mail that was produced by the defendant,” he said.

 

 

Before the defense made its opening statement, attorney Greg Parzych made one of many mistrial motions he would make, this one based on e-mails and other evidence precluded in previous rulings by other judges. Donahoe said he wasn't bound by these rulings, and he also believed that the e-mails “all seem to go to the financial motive.”

After lunch attorney Craig Williams countered the state's position in his brief twelve-minute opening. Williams stated, in essence, that with no physical evidence in Steve's car, house, or washing machine that tied him to the crime scene, he couldn't and shouldn't be found guilty.

“There's no murder weapon, there's no domestic violence in this case, and there's no motive,” Williams said in a statement that would come back to haunt him.

Williams faulted the state's investigation for being “conclusion-based” and inadequate, focusing unfairly and prematurely on Steve rather than exploring other leads and suspects, including Jim Knapp. It was sloppy as well, he said, noting that “contamination is the rule”—an allusion to the mystery DNA from Mr. 603, Ronald Birman, under Carol's fingernails.

Once Steve was arrested and in jail, he said, Steve acted out of fear, not guilt. He did the same when he put together his plan to flee, which he never carried out. Caring too much about his daughters, Steve decided to stay and fight the charges.

“We can place somebody in that [Bridle Path] house and we will,” Williams said. Asking the jurors to keep an open mind, Williams said the defense would firmly convince them that Steve did not kill Carol.

 

 

As the prosecution called its witnesses, Williams pounded them during cross-examination about professional protocol failures with regard to the photographing and preservation of the shoe and bike tracks.

Not allowed to argue until his closing argument, he still managed to put forth his theories, sometimes inserting misstatements of fact, which no one corrected, as he did when Scott Mascher, now the sheriff, took the stand, dressed in full uniform:

“So to recap, Mr. DeMocker, who is a very bright individual, comes out there. He has these cuts on his arm. He makes no attempt to hide them. He gives financial information. He gives voluntary statements. He talks about his divorce,” Williams said. “His alibi is he's across the street, basically riding his bike and he gets a flat, and he gets a very thorough investigation. Mr. Knapp, who says that he was at a hockey game with his kid, doesn't. Am I summing that up right?” (Jim Knapp never said he was at a hockey game; he said he was home babysitting his younger son while his ex-wife took his older son to hockey practice.)

After the jury left and Mascher had stepped down for the day, Donahoe chastised Williams for taking too long with his duplicative and pointless cross-examination, saying that he'd shown Mascher irrelevant photos and asked him too many of the wrong questions.

As Williams explained his line of argument, Donahoe told him to do it faster so as not to waste the jury's time. “That takes two questions. It doesn't take half an hour showing him [crime scene] pictures he doesn't know about.... If I see this continuing . . . I'm going to set some time limits. This is the second warning, and that's all the warnings I'm going to give.”

Despite the words of caution, Mascher ended up being on the stand for parts of three days.

 

 

The prosecution called Dr. Laura Fulginiti to discuss the nature of Carol's various injuries, and she never faltered from her position even when the defense tried to trip her up.

In March 2010, Fulginiti said, she was asked to examine Carol's desk and compare it to the curvilinear skull injuries to determine whether the desk could have caused them, rather than the golf club. As she later testified, “I felt that [the desk] was inconsistent with those patterns.”

But there were additional injured areas, she said, such as above Carol's eye on the left side of her forehead, that were apparently caused by an impact with a different object—where “something struck the skull, as opposed to the skull striking something.... It's a distinction that's very important.”

In this instance, she said, that “something” appeared to be the corner of the desk. (This comment, compounded with other testimony later in the trial, suggests that in additional to beating Carol's skull with a golf club, the killer also likely slammed her forehead into the desk, as opposed to her head passively hitting the desk as she fell to the ground.)

In total, she testified, “I'm saying that her head is impacted seven times minimum.”

Under cross-examination by the defense, Fulginiti testified that she wasn't aware that Dr. Keen had first transported Carol's body in the back of his pickup truck. She said she didn't think the trip would have caused further significant damage, although that factor couldn't be ruled out. If anything, the skull “would get jostled and the pieces would separate a little bit more, but I don't think it would create new pieces.”

Asked about other possible murder weapons, she said she couldn't rule out the end of a maul or an axe handle.

When Williams questioned why she'd changed her position on this point, Fulginiti went off on him, because she clearly didn't see it that way.

“You lawyers,” she said. “Okay, here's the deal. You cannot rule out a golf club, period. You cannot rule it out. So, is that opining that it is a golf club? No. What it is saying is that a golf club has all the characteristics that you need to create any one of those injuries on the skull. And it fits very nicely into one of those injuries.”

 

 

As a motive for the murder charges, the prosecution focused on Steve's spending habits, his financial troubles and his battles over money with Carol—up to the day she was killed. To support the fraud charges, they presented witnesses to show how Steve manipulated the people closest to him, even his daughters, for his own needs.

Peter Davis, a forensic accountant who examined Steve's financial records, said he issued an “objective” report of Steve's fiscal picture from September 1, 2004, through the day of the murder in July 2008. During this time, Davis said, Steve spent $900,000 more than he earned, and he earned quite a bit.

From 2005 to 2007, Steve's gross earnings went from $315,000 to $525,000, of which he netted $117,000 and $191,000, respectively. And in the first six months of 2008, he grossed $190,000 and netted only $67,000, partially due to the market crash, but also because of tax withholdings due to two forgivable loans totaling $557,000 he'd received when he joined UBS. In addition to his commissions, Steve had spent virtually all of the forgivable loan money by May 2007.

Steve received the first and larger forgivable loan as a sort of signing bonus when he joined the firm in 2004. UBS wrote him a check for $546,938, with no taxes withheld, to spend as he pleased. One-sixth of that amount, considered taxable income, was “forgiven” each year for the next six years. The idea was to help out the broker until he could build a client base.

But that still wasn't enough money to subsidize Steve's luxury tastes. Grabbing money wherever he could, Steve took out second mortgages on his condo
and
on Bridle Path, and borrowed against $129,000 in credit lines on both properties, Davis said. Steve also withdrew $7,000 from his daughters' bank accounts, took out loans against his 401(k), liquidated an IRA and borrowed tens of thousands from his parents, telling Carol it was to “pay
our
bills.” At times, his three credit cards were maxed out—on which he historically carried a balance of $70,000—and yet he never seemed to cut back or tighten his belt, even in the face of his ballooning debt.

“I never saw any sort of significant decline in the nature of his spending, even though Mr. DeMocker was overspending on these sorts of items,” Davis testified. “It never stopped.”

From May 2007 to July 2008, Steve spent a monthly average of $1,500 on clothing, $1,100 on cash withdrawals, $800 on meals out, $600 for the Hassayampa Golf Club, $500 on electronic equipment such as computers, $160 on haircuts, and $120 on spa treatments, Davis said. Steve was also leasing three BMWs for himself and his daughters, purchasing sporting equipment, taking trips and paying alimony to Carol.

At the time of Carol's murder, Davis said, Steve was personally insolvent, meaning that his total assets were less than his liabilities by nearly $400,000.

By Steve's own admission in the affidavits he submitted during the divorce, his personal debt totaled $1.4 million as of March 2007, which he called “crushing.” In his February 2008 amended affidavit, he listed his overall monthly expenses at $30,000, more than double his average net monthly paycheck of $12,860.

As a result of Carol's death, Davis said, Steve's financial condition improved dramatically. His worth escalated by $881,000, meaning that his assets were then $485,000 in the red. Of that, there was the nearly $576,000 in alimony he didn't have to pay; and as the beneficiary of Carol's life insurance, he also was set to receive $750,000 in benefits. The only drawback was that he was then obligated to pay for the Bridle Path mortgage.

DeMocker's emails and text messages demonstrated his financial desperation and stress,
Davis wrote in his report.
The day before Kennedy's death, DeMocker emails Kennedy that he is unable to float his alimony payment without her payment to him.

On cross-examination, Craig Williams got Davis to concede that Steve eventually waived his interest in the life insurance.

So on redirect Steve Young made sure to have Davis acknowledge that this waiver “only came after the life insurance company consistently said that they were not going to pay the benefits to Mr. DeMocker because he was suspected of a homicide in this case.” Young also got him to underscore Steve's “benefit” of receiving that $750,000, a point crucial to proving the prosecution's case.