Then No One Can Have Her (5 page)

 

 

As Charlotte and Jake drove toward Williamson Valley, she continued to try to reach her mother on her cell phone. Once they reached Carol's neighborhood at 11:55
P.M
., Charlotte called Steve, as instructed, and told him they were down the street, approaching the house. Staying on the phone with him, she described what she saw as they got closer: a whole slew of red and blue lights moving against the darkness.

“I see flashing lights,” she said.

“Oh, no,” Steve said.

Closer still, they saw a number of sheriff's cruisers and yellow crime scene tape blocking the driveway, all signs that something was very, very wrong. Even the driveway, which they would normally pull into, was blocked off with yellow tape.

Several detectives from the CIU were standing in the road, discussing whom to contact next, when one of them stuck out his hand to stop Charlotte's approaching car. As she pulled up, still holding the phone with her dad on the line, the officers walked over to stand on each side of the car.

Rolling down her window to talk to Lieutenant Dave Rhodes, Charlotte said, “This is my mom's house. What's going on?” Speaking quickly, she said she was worried because her mother hadn't been answering the phone.

When Rhodes told Charlotte that her mother had passed away, she dropped her phone onto the car floor and burst into tears.

Jake immediately grabbed the phone, got out of the car, relayed to Steve what the lieutenant had just said, and told him that he needed to come down and be with Charlotte.

Hearing the news, Steve started breathing heavily and sounded like he was crying. He paused, then asked to speak to an officer.

Jake handed the phone to Detective Doug Brown, who was standing next to the car, while Sergeant Luis Huante pulled Jake aside to talk to him.

In all the commotion Jake tried to figure out what was going on. “What I've been told is possibly an accident, possible foul play,” he said to Huante, who confirmed that they were investigating Carol's death and foul play was, indeed, a possibility.

Asked if Charlotte had mentioned Carol being in fear, Jake answered, “To my knowledge, no,” although Carol had invited him and Charlotte to stay at the house that coming Saturday.

On the phone with Brown, Steve asked to whom he was speaking. “What's happened?” Steve asked after Brown identified himself.

“Carol, uh, I'm not really sure what's going on,” Brown replied. “She's passed away.”

After Steve sighed heavily again, the detective said, “I guess she had spoken with her mom and—”

“Yeah, we've been trying to call her. What happened?” Steve asked again.

“I'm not really sure, and I really don't have any information right now, so we're just kind of playing everything by ear. Some kind of possible fall or something. That's all we know right now.”

“She's dead?” Steve asked, explaining that she was his ex-wife.

Brown said he'd been talking to the man who lived on the property, and had been about to try to contact Steve, but they didn't know how to get hold of him.

“Can I come out? I—I mean, my daughter—” Steve said. “She hasn't—she hasn't—what kind of state is the body in? She hasn't seen Carol, has she?”

“No, no, no,” Brown said.

“Can I come out?”

“Yeah, if you'd like to,” Brown said. “That'd be fine. I can talk to you outside or—”

“Well, I want to be with Charlotte,” Steve said, explaining that her boyfriend didn't have a license and his daughter would be in no condition to drive home. “I'll be right out.”

 

 

Steve called Charlotte right back, but she told him she was talking to the deputies and had to go.

Immediately calling Renee, Steve talked to her for about four minutes. “Carol is dead, Charlotte is out there and I need to get out there. Will you go with me?”

But Renee was still watching her grandson. “No, I can't go,” she said. “I can't leave him.”

Steve described the voice mail Carol's mother had left on his answering machine, which he'd checked just before leaving the house. Charlotte had gotten upset hearing it, he said, and wanted to go out right away. After pleading with him for an hour to go, he said, he'd finally let her.

 

 

Between calls to and from Steve that night, John Kennedy continued to call his sister's house, hoping she would pick up. But there was still no answer.

John got the last call back from Steve at 2:11
A.M
., or 12:11
A.M
., Prescott time. He thought he could hear gravel crunching, as if Steve was walking and talking.

Steve's tone was flat. Monotone. Emotionless. He offered no preamble or lead-in to soften the news. “John, you need to call your mom and tell her that Carol is gone,” he said abruptly.

Not injured, not dead, just
gone.
John thought Steve's tone was so casual that he could have been informing him that Albertsons had some good ripe melons on sale.

Although John tried to press his brother-in-law for more information, Steve gave him very little. “She's gone,” Steve repeated. “She's dead.”

“What happened?” John asked.

“Apparently, she suffered a fall.”

As soon as they hung up, John woke his wife, told her what was going on, and said they needed to make the short drive over to his mother's house to deliver the news in person.

When they arrived at Ruth's house and knocked on her back door, she was just hanging up with the chaplain from the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department, who was on his way over. The chaplain didn't say why, but Ruth knew what was coming.

After John confirmed Ruth's fears about what had happened to Carol, Ruth's knees collapsed out from under her. Her body crumpled, but John caught her and helped her into a chair before she could fall to the floor. Still in shock, she didn't cry. Not yet anyway.

The chaplain arrived shortly thereafter to deliver the bad news again. After he left, John stayed the rest of the night with his mother as they tried to console each other.

Steve tried calling his longtime assistant, Barbara “Barb” O'Non, at 12:14
A.M
., but she didn't answer, already asleep for the night.

Renee called Steve back a few minutes later and they talked briefly before he pulled up to Carol's house at 12:23
A.M
. Seeing Charlotte talking to one of the detectives, he immediately went to hug and comfort his sobbing daughter.

 

 

Scott Mascher, one of two commanders who worked directly under the sheriff, had only just arrived a couple of minutes earlier. He'd been home in bed when he'd gotten the call of a possible homicide from Lieutenant Rhodes, who said they were short-handed.

“I'll be happy to come out and help,” said Mascher, who didn't wear his three-star uniform that night—just a T-shirt and jeans.

Touring the house briefly with Rhodes, Mascher agreed that the crime scene seemed very suspicious. “Yeah, that just doesn't seem right,” he said.

Heading back outside, Mascher waited until Steve had finished consoling Charlotte, then introduced himself. As they were talking, Mascher shined a flashlight on Steve's legs, illuminating the cuts and scratches on his left arm and leg. They were so fresh they glistened in the light. The cut on his left leg, just above his ankle, was bleeding quite a bit. He also had two thin, horizontal and parallel scratches above his left knee. The scratches and cuts on his forearm varied in length, depth and severity—a tiny one and two medium, deep but narrow gashes. They looked as if they could have been made at different times, maybe in different places.

“What happened?” Steve asked again.

Mascher explained that they wouldn't be sure until the medical examiner (ME) was able to examine Carol's body sometime in the morning.

“Am I a suspect?” Steve asked.

Surprised by the question and knowing that Steve's comments might be important later, Mascher led him over to Sergeant Huante and Detective Brown, indicating that they should record the conversation.

Brown took the opportunity to probe Steve, who said he'd been planning to come pick up Katie's car earlier that evening, but had decided that he would just have Charlotte come get it, instead. He said the divorce had been tense, but things had gotten better between him and Carol since it was finalized. In fact, he said, they'd just met for coffee on Sunday.

“We were talking about starting to date again,” he said.

It had been quite a while since he'd been at the house—long enough that he couldn't recall when, he said. Within a few minutes, however, he mentioned that he'd come over a week or so earlier to drop off some art and pick up a grill. He said he'd spoken with the tenant, Jim Knapp, while he was there, but then left without the grill. He claimed he hadn't been inside the house in probably six months.

After he got home from his bike ride that night, he said, he checked his messages and that's when he saw the voice mails from Ruth and John Kennedy and learned what was going on. (He later said he didn't listen to them and that the call from John was his first knowledge of what had happened. He also said later, as he'd told Renee, that he listened to Ruth's message on his home answering machine when he saw the red light blinking—after Charlotte and Jake had left, and just before he left for Carol's house.)

Because of poor cell reception in the Granite Mountain area, Steve said, he'd left his phone in the car during his long bike ride, which would have been two to two and a half hours, but had turned into four because of a flat tire. He didn't turn the cell phone back on until he finished his ride.

As Brown continued to probe him about his phone and the text messages he and Carol had exchanged that day, Steve asked if they really had to go through this now. Brown explained that they were trying to find out when she'd sent the messages to build a timeline for the night. Steve conceded, saying he realized why they might be questioning him, given that he and Carol hadn't been on great terms.

Sergeant Huante asked if they could go down to the sheriff 's station to ask Steve some more questions and take a closer look at his phone.

“So I'm a suspect?” Steve asked rhetorically this time.

“No, no, no, no,” Huante said, reiterating Brown's comments about the need to build a timeline. “It's kind of hard to read in the dark out here.”

Steve started to tell them about the garage sale Carol had been planning, then stopped midsentence. “I'm sorry,” he said. “This is just not real.”

When Brown questioned him about the neighborhood area, Steve said the girls claimed that Carol's house, where both daughters had been living during the separation, had been broken into twice. “That's one of the reasons why Charlotte was so worried,” he said.

About a year ago, he added, some money was taken from Katie's room, and they found the rear bedroom door ajar. “That happened another time, stuff was out of place. There was no evidence of anything being taken, but the girls were convinced somebody had been there. I don't know.”

Steve expressed regret for allowing Charlotte to go to the house that night, given what John Kennedy had told him about Carol's aborted call with Ruth. “I shouldn't have let her come out here.”

But Carol tended to screen her calls and didn't pick up sometimes, he said, especially when he was calling, and he didn't think he should show up there at midnight.

Mascher reiterated that it would be best if they took these questions down to the station to gather some more basic information. Afterward, they could bring Steve, Charlotte and Jake back for their cars.

“Pardon me, but, you know, I mean, if I'm—am I being questioned as a suspect?” Steve asked again. He said he wanted to cooperate, but wondered if he should have an attorney present.

“Well, right now, we don't really know what's going on, so you're free to leave at any time,” Mascher said. “We just need to ask questions.”

Mascher added that they would be talking to neighbors, family and friends, including Jim Knapp.

In fact, Detective Brown had interviewed Jim outside the house that night, and the sound quality of their taped conversation was much clearer than Deputy Boan's. Brown and other detectives subsequently conducted several other taped interviews with Carol's tenant.

At 1:05
A.M
., Lieutenant Rhodes took Charlotte in his car, Mascher took Jake and Steve got into Detective Brown's car.

After Brown pulled away from the house, Steve asked if it was necessary for them to drive together, because it would be easier for him to get some sleep before work if he could drive himself to the sheriff 's office. Brown said that would be okay, turned around, dropped Steve at his car and let Steve follow him to the station.

 

 

Renee's son came back to her house after a night out and picked up her grandson, so she was eventually able to drive to the crime scene as Steve had requested, albeit a little late. By the time she got there, she saw several sheriff 's vehicles pulling out, and was told that Steve, Charlotte and Jake were heading down to the station.

That said, at 1:07
A.M
., Renee was surprised to get yet another call from Steve as he was driving behind Brown and she was following behind the cruisers, hoping to bring Charlotte home from the station. Renee and Steve spoke several more times over the next forty minutes.

When she arrived at the station, she saw Charlotte and Jake going inside. She went in after them and gave Charlotte a hug just before the teenager was whisked into an interview room.

The deputies told Renee to go home and wait, but instead she headed over to Steve's condo, where she tried to sleep on the couch between his calls during breaks in the interrogation. Steve arrived at the station at one-thirty in the morning, and his calls stopped once his cell phone was confiscated, sometime after 3:20
A.M
.

 

 

Later that night Jim Knapp asked Deputy Boan if he could go into the crime scene. He was going to find a hotel room, but first he needed to get his medications. Boan told him he could only go into the guesthouse, into which the deputy escorted Jim, signing the crime scene log at 1:04
A.M
.

When Jim started walking toward the kitchen area, Boan asked him what he was doing. Jim replied that he wanted to get a plastic grocery bag to carry his medications.

“Do you need anything else?” Boan asked, thinking he might need toiletries, a shaving kit or something from the bathroom.

Jim said no, he would be fine, and they signed out eight minutes later.

Boan told Jim not to talk to anyone about the case and asked him where he was staying, in case they needed to reach him. Jim said he was going to try the Marriott in Prescott.

At 1:19
A.M
., Jim called his brother, Bobby, in Hawaii and told him the devastating news that Carol was dead.

Boan didn't bother to mention in his initial investigative reports that he'd searched Jim's truck that night. It wasn't until August that he did so, after another investigator pointed out the omission.

The delay in including these details didn't look too good—as if the officers had made a mistake—but this sort of thing happened a number of times, and they figured it was better to include the information late than not at all. However, it was these types of mistakes and omissions that became fodder for defense attorneys later as they accused the sheriff 's department of failing to thoroughly investigate Jim as a suspect, especially when they had interrogated Steve all night and even photographed him in his underwear.

The defense questioned, for example, why investigators didn't ask why it took Jim Knapp so long to settle in for the night—it was ninety minutes before he finally checked into the Marriott Springhill Suites at 2:42
A.M
. And how did he know about all the blood in the house if he wasn't allowed into the crime scene that night?

Responding to these criticisms, Mike Sechez, the former prosecution investigator, countered that the sheriff 's team did look at Jim that night. They “searched his guesthouse, just like it was part of the crime scene, and they searched his truck and they interviewed him.”

And the blood? Brown later testified that when Jim called him the next day to ask if he could return to the guesthouse, Brown warned him about all the blood in the house. “I didn't want to have anybody walk into it and not to be expecting something that wasn't pretty,” Brown said.