Then No One Can Have Her (7 page)

One, she said he normally rode the loop trail around the Hassayampa workout center, from which he'd told her he was calling her after working out there that night. Jake said the same thing.

Two, she said Steve had been going for late three-hour trail runs recently, but this was nearly five hours and it was a bike ride.

And three, she said Steve told her that he had to “push his bike all the way back . . . through sand, he was telling us . . . 'cause you can't ride a flat tire through sand.” She added that the loop trail at Hassayampa “is probably like gravel or sand.”

But for that matter, so was the trail behind Carol's house. Decomposed granite sand, which, as Charlotte pointed out, would be pretty difficult terrain to ride—versus walk—a mountain bike.

 

 

Investigators kept Jake and Charlotte at the station until about five in the morning on July 3, when Renee Girard picked them up in her car and took them to her house. Detectives held Steve for questioning until ten o'clock, while they searched his office and condo.

The kids called in to their jobs to say they wouldn't be in, then they phoned Katie to break the bad news and tell her to come home. Katie heard the news just as her plane was taxiing into London's Heathrow Airport.

Jake spent the day consoling Charlotte, as Renee came in and out of the room to check on them. Steve came by later in the day, then left.

They stayed at Renee's until 4
P.M
., when they were told that the condo search was over and they could return there. After Renee drove them back, Charlotte and Jake stayed alone for a while and made a snack before Steve came back briefly, then said he was going for a walk.

 

 

After finishing his interviews early that morning, Commander Scott Mascher headed over to the Hassayampa fitness center to check out the loop trail that Steve and the teenagers had described, and to search for any signs that Steve had been there that night.

Heading into the darkness around 3
A.M
. with his flashlight, Mascher walked around the trailhead near the gym, searching for bike tracks or footprints, but found none. He also looked along the side of the roads for trash cans or discarded evidence. Coming up empty, he returned to the station to wait for sunrise. Once it was light enough, he made the same rounds with Lieutenant Rhodes before heading back to Bridle Path.

 

 

Meanwhile, around 4:30
A.M
., following the map that Steve had drawn, Detectives Brown and Alex Jamarillo drove out to Love Lane to try to find the trailhead and bike tracks Steve had described. Brown didn't know this area very well from a professional standpoint. Even though he'd hiked Granite Mountain many times, he'd only been working out of the sheriff's Prescott office a very short time.

They drove down Love Lane, which coursed through a residential area, and stopped at several sections. But not seeing where a trail would even start, let alone any trailhead or car and bicycle tracks, they headed back to the office.

By the time Brown returned with better directions on July 13 to look again for the trail where Steve said he'd been riding, it had already rained, wiping out any chance of proving—or disproving—Steve's story.

Assigned to canvass Carol's neighborhood in the hours after the murder, Deputy Taintor spoke with Ron and Jody Drake, who lived a few doors down on Bridle Path. Ron said he'd heard Carol coughing earlier that night and he'd also heard a male voice he didn't recognize near the trail to the east of their house.

Although that trail was on private ranch land, he explained, residents were allowed to use it. He said people sometimes walked through Carol's property to access the trail behind her house, using some wooden steps to climb over the barbed-wire fence.

Taintor and Sergeant Acton checked the map for a trailhead close to Carol's house, and noted that the nearest one was at the end of Glenshandra Drive. Taintor recalled seeing an entrance to the ranch land there during past patrols of the area.

Driving to the end of Glenshandra, they parked on the pavement near the turnaround, which was made of dirt and crushed rock and was a few hundred feet from the trailhead. There, they were able to identify fresh tracks that had been left by a car and a mountain bike.

The metal-pipe gate to the trail was closed, locked and surrounded by the barbed-wire fence that ran along the ranch land toward Carol's house, so Taintor had to climb over the east side of the fence. As he inspected the coarse, decomposed granite sand trail with his flashlight, he was able to make out some fresh tracks made by athletic shoes, horses and bike tires. Careful to step around them, he traced the bike tracks from the loose sandy trail to the dirt parking area and onto the road pavement.

After returning to Carol's house to report their findings, Taintor and Acton learned that Steve had mentioned riding his bike on a trail about a mile from the Bridle Path house earlier in the evening. So they wasted no time in heading back to the Glenshandra trailhead to string up crime scene tape and to take photos of the shoe prints and tire tracks they'd just found, using a flashlight and other techniques to illuminate the prints in the darkness.

“I tried several different things, and the photographs just didn't turn out very well,” Taintor testified later. “They were just blurry, fuzzy.”

 

 

The timing of the rainfall—and, as a result, the investigators' ability to identify and differentiate between fresh and preexisting shoe prints and bike tire tracks—became a matter of debate.

Carol and Charlotte's text messages referred to rainstorms in Prescott on Tuesday, July 1. And Curtis James, a meteorologist who testified as an expert for the defense, testified that a rain gauge at his home in Williamson Valley, about three-quarters of a mile from Carol's house, measured three-hundreds of an inch of rainfall between 5:00 and 5:20
P.M
. that same day.

Commander Scott Mascher, however, testified that he remembered having to use his windshield wipers when it started raining in the midafternoon of Wednesday, July 2, as he drove down Williamson Valley Road to his house in Chino Valley. And when he'd been called out around eleven o'clock that same night to Bridle Path, he brought an umbrella.

Because Mascher also testified that the monsoon showers he encountered fell as usual in isolated areas, both scenarios seem possible. Either way, Mascher said the recent rainfall allowed him to differentiate between the newer and older tracks at the Glenshandra trailhead, where he joined Detective Theresa Kennedy and Lieutenant Rhodes in the early afternoon of July 3 as they examined the tracks their fellow investigators had identified the night before.

As an experienced tracker, Mascher said he knew the rain would have made the newer tracks stand out from those left by previous hikers and bikers, which were not so clearly delineated, and looked older and more smoothed over than the fresh ones.

Mascher and Rhodes followed these bike tire tracks and shoe prints—which were side by side, as if someone were walking a bicycle—for about one hundred yards, where the bike tracks stopped at a bush. From there, the shoe prints continued toward Carol's house and milled around an area of brush behind it, a vantage point from which Mascher could see into the back window and into the curtainless room where Carol's body was found.

Inbound, those prints crossed over the barbed-wire fence at the back of Carol's property and headed onto her rear patio. Outbound, they went back in the other direction, over the fence, circled around the thick, heavy bush, where the bike tracks had stopped, and circled out toward the trailhead again. The detectives thought that these bushes could have caused the deep cuts on Steve's legs, as could have the barbed-wire fence.

Judging by the prints, the detectives believed that the killer had tried to find the least resistance between the thickest and scratchiest brush on the ranch-land side of the barbed wire on the way to and from the house. And coming and going, the killer had apparently lifted his bike over the locked gate at the Glenshandra trailhead.

Detective Kennedy had already gone over these same tracks that morning, starting at the back of Carol's house and working her way toward Glenshandra. Using her GPS, she recorded and marked the waypoints and directions of the inbound and outbound tracks, using orange triangle markers and pink flags. She also took photos using her flashlight as a reference to measure the size of the shoe prints.

The detectives were all surprised to learn what a short distance it was from the trailhead to the rear of Carol's property—only a few hundred yards, maybe a quarter mile—when a drive on the streets between the two points measured 3.1 miles. They figured that whoever had made those shoe and bike tracks must have had intimate knowledge of this shortcut, because Carol's house wasn't visible from the trail until a person got fairly close. The suspect also must have known the area well enough to know exactly where to turn in the thick brush to reach the house.

Kennedy had also tracked a different set of shoe prints from the ones that started at the trailhead. These other prints had a pattern of “three
Z
's”—ultimately determined to be “similar” to Carol's shoes—starting from the house, leading out to the trail and back again.

Mascher found one area where the Glenshandra set of shoe prints tracked right over the three
Z
prints—indicating they came later in time—as the suspect's outbound prints headed back toward the trailhead.

The detectives rolled Steve's front and rear bike tires, which had different tread patterns, in the sandy dirt next to the suspected killer's tire tracks to compare them. They looked “identical,” at least to the naked eye, investigator Mike Sechez said.

The defense, however, claimed that the tracks identified as Steve's could have been older and left by any numerous hikers who had used the trail. The brand of tire and tread pattern—the VelociRaptor—was not uncommon; it was the number-one-selling mountain bike tire for a time.

Criticizing law enforcement for failing to preserve these shoe prints and bike tracks before the subsequent rainstorm washed them away, the defense underscored this point by demonstrating that plaster castings could have been made.

The court ultimately ruled that because dirt on the trail consisted of crushed granite, the sand was too coarse for investigators to properly recognize flaws in the tire tracks from photographs alone, and this prevented the prosecution from claiming that Steve's and the killer's tracks were an exact or “identical” match. They were only allowed to say that Steve's tire tracks were “similar” to the killer's.

Regardless of the fact that the bicycle tires were a common brand, the shoes were not. As the judge stated rhetorically later in court, what was the chance of finding both the tire treads and shoe prints together—both similar to Steve's—behind Carol's house, where he had lived for many years?

 

 

While one set of investigators was processing the Bridle Path crime scene, another team headed over to Steve's UBS office on West Plaza Drive. There they executed a search warrant around eight in the morning, when Steve's coworker John Farmer arrived and let them in.

The team, which included Detective Brown and Sergeant Huante, looked around and photographed Steve's office, bathrooms and common areas. But because the building had no security cameras, they couldn't collect any video to determine whether Steve had come back to log off the night before, as he'd claimed.

Steve had recruited John, whom he'd met at Prescott College in the late 1980s, to work at UBS. John was the one who had allegedly called to alert him about his computer.

John said Steve usually started work at 6:30 or 7:30
A.M
. and left between 2 and 3
P.M
., although he sometimes stayed late depending on client needs. UBS told them to shut down their terminals at the end of the day, he said, or they wouldn't get daily updates.

When investigators checked John's computer, it was shut down and powered off. Steve's computer, however, was still powered on, but it was logged off.

John later told investigators that he'd made no such call to Steve, which was easily confirmed through Steve's cell phone records. He said he never went into Steve's office to look at his computer because it was none of his business. But even if he had, the computer goes to a blank screen and he wouldn't have been able to tell if Steve had logged off or not.

They also learned that Steve had not, in fact, logged off his computer since doing so at 4:38
P.M
. on July 2, and he did not do so again until July 7.

 

 

Around seven forty-five that same morning, another set of detectives served a search warrant at Steve's condo, where they photographed the clean and orderly two-story town house and seized a number of items, including his passport. They found a cell phone battery on the windowsill in Steve's office there, and another one in his computer bag. A third battery, in his cell phone, was working fine.

They also took photos in the garage, including a set of left-handed Cleveland golf clubs and a head cover for a Callaway Steelhead III #7 club, which was sitting on the third shelf from the bottom in a rolling unit of vertically stacked shelves. Steve typically stored his bike riding gear—such as his clip-in bike shoes, helmet and gloves—on the same unit.

Because Steve said he'd showered right after his bike ride and washed the clothes he'd been wearing, investigators seized the clothes he'd described, which were still in the dryer. Taking no chances, they dismantled the entire washer to check for any blood or DNA evidence tying him to Carol's murder. They also searched his drains and dryer as well. But in the end they found no blood or DNA there linking him to the crime scene.

They did, however, take note of a box of rubber gloves in the laundry room.

When investigators inspected Steve's mountain bike tires more closely, the rear flat tire's valve stem appeared to have been rotted for quite some time. This indicated to them that it probably couldn't have held any air, and was likely already flat the day Steve took that ride. It was as if he had walked in the bike, laid it down in the heavy brush and walked it out again.