Then No One Can Have Her (4 page)

At first, Brown, Huante and Lieutenant Dave Rhodes thought Carol could have fallen off the ladder, injuring her head as a result. The cordless phone, on which she'd been speaking to her mother, lay on the carpet between the swivel desk chair and the north wall.

But as they viewed the blood spatter pattern more closely, they realized pretty quickly that the killer had moved the bookshelf and ladder
after
the savage assault, staging the scene to look like an accident. The degree of trauma to Carol's head, not to mention the dense collection of blood on the desk corner, was too severe to have come from a simple fall.

The ladder was positioned with the rungs going the wrong way for her to have climbed it, and it had no fingerprints or blood on it, even though blood was spattered on the wall behind it. Blood had also dried on the bookshelf unit in a way that would have defied gravity if it had been at that angle during the attack.

It wasn't until they moved Carol into the body bag that Brown was able to see the trauma not only to the left side of her head, but to the right as well.

“It was obvious, things that didn't make sense,” Brown testified later. “So you've got the damage to her skull and then the [blood on the] desk. I thought at that time that, you know, she was slammed against the desk.”

After checking the track lighting in the dark laundry room, they discovered that one of the bulbs was missing and three had been partially unscrewed. It seemed as if the killer wanted to keep Carol in the dark about his presence until he was ready to attack.

After dating Charlotte DeMocker for six months, her boyfriend Jacob “Jake” Janusek moved in with her and her father the day before the murder—on Tuesday, July 1, 2008.

Jake, who was also sixteen, had occasionally stayed the night with Charlotte at Steve's condo at Alpine Meadows. And after Jake's parents kicked him out, Steve agreed to let him stay there temporarily. Back in February, before Jim Knapp moved in at Bridle Path, Carol had also offered Jake the guesthouse.

On Wednesday, July 2, Jake and Charlotte had lunch together, then stopped off at Safeway to pick up some cookies, which they delivered to Steve at his office in response to his plea for a sweet treat.

 

 

Finished for the day at his investment broker job at UBS (formerly the United Bank of Switzerland) Financial Services in Prescott, Steve logged off his computer at 4:38
P.M
. UBS was fanatical about having its employees log off—but not necessarily turn off—their computers before leaving the office, fearing that someone might break in and hack into the international system.

Steve drove home from the office, which was about a half mile away, and used his remote control at 4:52
P.M
. to open the gate to his condo complex, where Charlotte and Jake were hanging out.

Dressed in his usual suit, Steve immediately changed into workout clothes, informing the teenagers that he was going to go for a long bike ride. Jake later told investigators that he thought Steve went on the loop trail around the nearby fitness center, where he often went running, followed by an upper-body workout with weights. They expected him to be gone a couple of hours.

Steve left the condo just after five o'clock, and unbeknownst to Charlotte and Jake, he turned off his phone at 5:36
P.M
.

While he was gone, the teenagers played video games, then went for a swim at the fitness center pool around six o'clock, but they didn't see Steve's car there. As the sun was setting they came back to the condo to play more video games and wait for Steve to return so they could start dinner.

In the meantime Charlotte texted with her mother about the rain, and let her grandmother's subsequent call on the landline go to voice mail.

When Steve still wasn't home by dark, they started wondering where he was. Charlotte tried texting and calling him, but got no answer. She also tried calling his girlfriend, Renee Girard, to find out where he'd gone riding, however Renee was unsure. There was some confusion later about who said what, but Jake told investigators that Renee said she didn't know whether Steve had gone to the Granite Basin Trail, the Granite Mountain Trail, or the trail by the fitness center, which was about six to eight miles long.

Still waiting, Charlotte and Jake fell asleep, and woke up around 9:40
P.M
.

“Wow, your dad has been gone a really long time,” Jake said.

Charlotte tried twice more to reach Steve on his cell, at 9:40 and 9:52
P.M
., leaving him a voice mail. They tended to eat dinner later because of Steve's summer evening workout schedule, but this seemed like a much longer workout than usual. He also had his phone with him virtually all the time, and it was unlike him to be out of reach for so many hours.

By ten o'clock, the teenagers decided they were too hungry to wait any longer, so they drove to Safeway to buy ingredients for Chinese stir-fry. On the quick five-minute sprint over there, Jake thought he saw Steve's car—a four-door silver BMW—as they stopped at an intersection.

 

 

At 10:08
P.M
., Steve DeMocker turned his phone back on. During the four and a half hours it had been off, he'd missed eleven calls and three text messages, but he never listened to the voice mails or responded to the texts. The forensic examiners who went through them later could tell that they were the first to hear the messages.

Steve's first call was to Charlotte, who was at the same Safeway where her mother and Jim Knapp had stopped in earlier—separately—that evening. Charlotte was captured on the store's surveillance video, talking on her cell phone, presumably telling her father that she was buying food for dinner. He told her that he'd been on a bike ride, gotten a flat tire, and his cell phone had died. He was thinking of working out at the fitness center, which was about a half mile from the condo, but once he learned that she and Jake hadn't eaten yet, he said he'd come home and join them.

Within sixty seconds of the call to Charlotte, Steve used his remote control to enter the condo's security gate at 10:09
P.M
.

A minute later he called Renee and proceeded to list all the reasons he couldn't come over to her house. “I'm tired. I'm dehydrated. I just need a shower,” he said. “I just want to go home, get some food, and go to bed.”

“Okay, great, go,” Renee said, feeling angry and annoyed that he was making excuses when she wasn't even expecting him to come over that night. Her three-year-old grandson was staying with her and she'd been gearing up to break up with Steve anyway. She suspected that he'd been with another woman that night, because he hadn't answered his phone.

What he said next surprised her. “I'm bleeding,” he said.

“What?”

“Well, I scraped my leg on a branch and got a deep gash. I've got to get home,” he said, explaining that he'd run into a bush on his bike, snagging his leg on a twig that was sticking out into the trail.

A week or so later, he even took her to the trail to show her the twig. He said he also got scratches on his arm when he got off his bike, hiked down into a gulley and up on a hill to look down on the lot that he and Carol used to own. To Renee, Steve had always seemed like a pretty sentimental guy, so it didn't seem strange to her that he would go back to that area to look around.

 

 

At 10:16
P.M
., seven minutes after Steve got home, Charlotte used her separate code to enter the security gate and pulled her white BMW into the condo garage next to Steve's. The interior lights of his car were still on—the ones that stay on briefly after the ignition goes off, or if the door is accidentally left open.

As she and Jake walked up the stairs and into the condo, they heard the shower running in Steve's bedroom, which was just off the dining room.

 

 

Carol's brother, John Kennedy, finally reached Steve on his cell phone around 10:30
P.M
. to personally relay his and Ruth's concerns about Carol in a three-minute call. But John barely had a chance to say anything before Steve interrupted.

“Hey, look, I'm standing here dripping wet. Just stepped out of the shower,” he said, adding that he'd been out on his mountain bike for a long ride.

John tried to explain what had happened during Ruth's call with Carol, and asked if Steve would please go out to the house and check on his ex-wife. But Steve refused without hesitation.

“No, I will not,” he said.

John tried modifying his request, explaining that he and Ruth thought something bad might have happened to Carol. “Why don't you just drive by and see if everything looks okay?” he suggested.

It didn't make any difference. Steve said no, absolutely not, because she might have a date over. He didn't feel comfortable stopping by at this late hour and infringing on her privacy.

As soon as they hung up, Steve sent Carol a text at 10:35
P.M
., then called her cell phone three minutes later to leave a voice mail with essentially the same message: “Carol, I just left a message on your—out at Bridle Path. Would you give us a call? Your brother called me and he was worried because your mom was talking to you and all of a sudden you guys got disconnected. She said that you exclaimed something and hung up and then they haven't been able to get a hold of you. So people are a little worried, and they just want to know you are okay. Would you call,” he said, pausing, “excuse me, call us, call your mom. Bye.”

 

 

As Steve emerged from his bedroom wearing a towel, he asked what Charlotte and Jake were making for dinner.

“Stir fry, rice and vegetables,” his daughter replied as she was cooking.

Steve asked if they had anything for the laundry, then started the washing machine. It was a small load—just Steve's workout socks, underwear, shorts and shirt. He told investigators later that he normally did a load of clothes every day.

Noticing some fresh scratches on Steve's left arm and leg, which were bleeding, Jake commented that the wounds looked pretty bad. “Are you okay?” he asked.

“I'm fine,” Steve said, “just really tired. It was a really long ride.” He mentioned that because of the flat tire, he'd had to walk his bike four miles back to the car and had gotten scratched by some bushes on the trail.

After Steve finished getting dressed, he came out of his bedroom wearing shorts and a T-shirt. He joined the kids at the table, where he talked about the stock market and made general conversation as they ate.

“When was the last time you heard from your mother?” he asked.

Charlotte replied that they'd been texting earlier in the evening. Steve mentioned that he'd gotten a call from Carol's brother about the line suddenly going dead while she was on the phone with Ruth, and that Ruth was worried about her.

That comment concerned Charlotte as well, so she texted her mother at 10:48
P.M
., asking if she was okay:
I'm worried about you
.

She also tried calling Carol's cell and home phones, around 11
P.M
., and left a message: “If you want to text me back or call me or something just to let me know that you're okay and that everything is okay—otherwise I might drive out to your house to see if you are all right. I love you very much. Bye, Mom.”

But there was still no response. Charlotte thought that maybe her mother had fallen asleep and just wasn't answering her cell. However, she also knew that the ringer on the landline was so loud that Carol usually answered it.

Steve wasn't sitting down long before he told them that he'd gotten a call from a coworker, alerting him that he'd left his computer logged on at the office, and he needed to go back and log off. Besides, he said, he also realized that he'd left something that he needed. He put on his flip-flops and left the condo. It seemed to Jake that Steve was gone for no more than five minutes.

Curiously, Steve used his security code to come back through the gate and into the condo three times between 11
P.M
. and midnight: first at 11:04, then at 11:21 and finally at 11:51
P.M
. (The gate opened on its own when cars leaving the complex approached, so a code or remote activation was only needed to open it when entering the complex.)

After dinner, Jake and Charlotte started up the video games again while Steve made some calls, pacing back and forth between the living room and his bedroom. To Jake, Steve seemed unusually restless that night, moving around, and getting up and down. Typically, Steve was pretty calm.

As Charlotte grew increasingly worried about her mom, she and Jake started calling emergency rooms in Prescott and Prescott Valley to see if any patients had come in under the name of Carol Kennedy or Jim Knapp. Maybe something had happened to Carol's tenant, they thought, and she'd had to take him to the hospital. But there was no trace of either one of them.

Charlotte and Jake thought someone should go to Carol's house to check on her, but Steve told them the same thing he'd already told Carol's brother. Steve felt uncomfortable going there because they'd only just gotten divorced. He'd been dating, so she might be, too, and he didn't want to intrude. Everything was probably fine, he said. She was either out with someone, didn't hear the phone, or wasn't able to get to it in time.

Steve did come up with a plan for Charlotte to go, however. She could go to the house with Jake, but a half mile before she got there, she had to call Steve and stay on the phone with him as she was pulling up. If the house was dark, if she saw an unfamiliar car in the driveway or if one of the doors was open, they were not to go inside to look for Carol. The implication was that a robbery or home invasion could be under way. Once she got there, they would decide what she should do.

Charlotte agreed, but Jake was worried. One, they were heading to a remote area that was not well lit at night, and two, he was concerned that he might not be able to prevent his strong-willed girlfriend from going into her mother's house if she sensed something was wrong. As she and Jake were about to head out, Steve reiterated that he didn't want them going inside Carol's house.

Jake overheard Steve leaving Carol a message as they walked out the door: “People are really worried. If you wouldn't mind calling . . . I mean, if you're on a date or whatever, it is totally okay. I just—we don't want to intrude, but you're not answering anybody's calls.... I'm sure everything is fine, but if you could just even text us and let us know that you are okay, that would be great. I think your mom and John are up, back east, worried and waiting to hear. So please call somebody. Bye.”

 

 

Carol's brother, John, heard back from Steve briefly around 11:30
P.M
., which was 1:30
A.M
., Nashville time, probably right after Charlotte and Jake had left for Carol's house.

“Have you heard anything?” Steve asked.

John said no. He and Ruth had called the sheriff 's office again to check in, but were told, “We're kind of busy.”