Then No One Can Have Her (9 page)

Subsequently the detectives also seized two more sets of the family's clubs, a right-handed set from one location and yet another set of clubs from a storage facility. But investigators were never able to find the club that went with the missing head cover.

 

 

The detectives returned to the Bridle Path house several times with new warrants that week, looking for additional evidence that came to light as the investigation progressed.

When Brown and his team came back on July 6, Jim Knapp was on the property, and they saw that he'd thrown a red blanket over the bloody area in the office. He told them he could see the red mess from the laundry room, and he couldn't stand to look at it. He didn't want Carol's daughters to see it, either.

As the investigators inspected the laundry room, they noticed that the lights still didn't go on, so Detective Jamarillo, wearing gloves, screwed two of the loose bulbs back in and they worked.

Jim asked if they'd put new bulbs in, noting that the lights usually functioned properly. Figuring this was no coincidence, investigators collected the bulbs to check them for prints and DNA, theorizing that the killer could have come into the house and unscrewed the bulbs while Carol was out running, then hidden in the dark laundry room, behind the door, while she was on the phone. Ultimately, the DNA results were inconclusive on two of the bulbs. The third had no DNA, but did have a fingerprint. However, it was not Steve's, whose prints were the only ones submitted for comparison.

The investigators noticed that a
Body & Soul
magazine, which had a stapled packet of paperwork tucked into it, had been moved from the kitchen counter since they'd last been there. The packet contained a UBS bank statement and a couple of very recent e-mails between Carol and Steve, pertaining to the divorce agreement and division of Steve's 401(k) account balance. Carol had apparently printed out the e-mails late on July 1 or early on July 2, highlighting some areas and scribbling notes about the math. She'd written
$186,667.31,
in the margin, for example, referring to their agreement that she would get the first $180,000 and they would split any additional amount.

The investigators collected this paperwork because Brown wanted to test a reddish substance for blood, but it came back negative. Jim handed the magazine to Brown, and the defense later made an issue of Jim's fingerprint being on one of the e-mail printouts.

Investigators checking the doors and other access points of the house that week found what appeared to be blood on the dead bolt to the door leading out of the den and into the garage. The detectives found no blood in the hallway proper, although they did find some spatters on plastic containers stored there. They also found a droplet on a section of the door frame near the wall, where ants were milling around, so they figured the killer had used that door to leave.

On the sidewalk outside that door, which was made mostly of glass and enabled someone to look inside, they found a single round drop of blood. They figured the drop had dripped down, off the suspect or murder weapon, as if he'd stopped to look through the glass at the body. The shape of the droplet indicated that the person or object was not moving.

“Both of those blood spots came back to Carol, so the suspect had [her] blood on his glove or hand,” said Mike Sechez, the prosecution investigator.

In addition, they found what they thought was some blood on the passenger seat and on a red flashlight in Katie's BMW in the garage. They had the car towed to an impound yard for processing.

They seized the ladder, which had been specially made to lock over wheels on the loft in that bedroom, to document the absence of blood on it. There were no fingerprints on it, either, which supported the theory that the killer was wearing gloves when he repositioned the objects in Carol's office.

With the help of the Gilbert Police Department on July 8, investigators processed the house with Bluestar, a revealing agent that turns blue when it reacts with blood.

They started at the front door and worked their way through the kitchen and down the hallway to the office, looking for any hidden traces that had been wiped or washed off or were invisible to the naked eye. They also used the agent in the bathroom, including the sinks. No area turned fluorescent until they got to the threshold of the office.

Despite all this searching, they still were unable to find any of Steve's blood or DNA at the house. And despite the fresh bleeding cuts on his arm and leg, the only bit of blood they found on his bicycle was a spot on his pump. They wondered whether he'd wiped it off, but had missed that one spot.

Later the defense questioned why Jim Knapp had been allowed into the main house to move items around—such as the magazine, financial paperwork, and Carol's purse, keys and day planner—when the investigators hadn't finished collecting evidence. Jim said he'd kept Carol's planner because it contained phone numbers for friends he wanted to call.

“I know he was looking over the search warrant supplement returns, so I think he was being nosey, and he was looking to see what we had seized and what was still around the house,” Brown testified later.

The defense also questioned how Jim came up with the theory that he told Brown during the July 6 search, that the killer “got a hold of her head and he smashed her head into the corner of that desk.”

Similarly, the defense criticized investigators for failing to do a DNA test on the blood-spattered rimless glasses found on Carol's desk, which the defense claimed were Jim's, as featured hanging around his neck in various photos. Furthermore, they took detectives to task for failing to ask Jim about the binoculars he kept in the guesthouse, where he had a clear view into the windows of the main house.

Katherine Morris's best friend called her about Carol's death on July 3. But that being the day of her own divorce, Katherine didn't even want to listen to voice mails, let alone talk to anyone.

After checking her voice mail the next morning, Katherine called her friend back around nine o'clock. When she learned that Carol had died, Katherine immediately visualized a car wreck. Her response was visceral, and unlike any she'd had before or since.

“No, no, no!” she screamed from the gut as she felt her knees go limp. After she composed herself, she asked how and when.

“They found her dead in her home,” her friend said.

“It looked like she was murdered.”

Katherine couldn't even comprehend how that could have happened to her peaceful, spiritual friend—someone who didn't have a violent bone in her body, had never hurt anyone and had shined light from every pore of her being.

She waited until a civilized hour—noon, her time in Georgia, three hours later than Prescott time—to call Carol's house, hoping that someone would answer. When no one did, she called Steve, knowing that Charlotte was living with him.

When he answered, his voice sounded raspy and tired. He said he was exhausted and that he was sorry for her loss, knowing “how close and dear Carol and you were,” a remark that struck her as odd. Not to compare losses, but he'd been married to Carol for twenty-five years and she was the mother of his children. Surely, his loss was worse than Katherine's.

The emotionless tone in which he talked about Carol's death was “stone cold and not grief-stricken at all,” she recalled. “I would have thought he would be in tears, crying, and there was none of that.” All of this raised a red flag for her. It also made her feel like he was trying to manipulate her and her perception of what had happened, as if he were grooming her to support him.

“When you have the loss of someone, you're not able to talk like he spoke. You're not talking about the details of how they were killed, or murdered, or who did it. For me, you're just in a great tidal wave of emotion. You're waiting to answer questions.” Instead, she said, “He was telling me what he wanted me to hear.”

Being a therapist, Katherine was trained to take notes during discussions like these. Also knowing she was feeling emotional, she wanted to make sure she remembered what she thought might later become an important discussion. So she wrote down all the details of their conversation.

As they discussed the circumstances of Carol's death, Steve said the detectives hadn't even categorized it as a homicide, noting that the ladder near the loft was upside down.

“My understanding is that they aren't certain it was murder,” Steve said. “They think it was an accident.”

“An accident?”

“Yeah, apparently, the ladder was toppled over and so were some other things in the room.”

 

 

Carol had made a phone date with her friend Debbie Wren Hill for noon, eastern time, on July 5, so she could tell Debbie all about her new boyfriend, David Soule. When the phone rang early that morning, Debbie groaned, wishing Carol hadn't called before she was really awake.

Oh, Carol,
she thought.

Debbie's husband answered the phone. “It's your mom,” he said.

Picking up, Debbie waited to hear whatever was so important that her mother needed to call so early.

“I have some really bad news for you,” her mom said.

Debbie wondered which family member had died. She was surprised and saddened to hear that it was not family, but her dear friend.

“Did she kill herself ?” Debbie said, asking the first question that came to mind.

“No, she was murdered.”

“Oh, my God,” she said. “Steve.”

Debbie immediately called Katherine and together they tried to piece together what might have happened.

 

 

Steve never returned Ruth Kennedy's phone messages from the night of the murder. They didn't talk until the following Tuesday, six days afterward, on July 8, and only because Ruth was on the phone with Katie.

Katie had planned to stop in Europe on her way to South Africa, where she'd planned to take political economics and an apartheid history class at the University of Cape Town, and also work at a child soldier rehabilitation center in Uganda. But she had to cut her trip short to fly home as soon as she got the news about her mother's murder.

“My dad wants to speak to you,” Katie told her grandmother.

Steve's mother, Janice “Jan” DeMocker, had been quick to send condolences and flowers to Ruth after both her sister and husband had died. Ruth was now wondering why she hadn't heard from her daughter's typically caring mother-in-law, who was a minister.

“Steve, have you told your mother about Carol?” Ruth asked, already guessing the answer. She was right.

“No,” he said, “I'm going to. I thought Jim [Steve's brother] told her.”

In the weeks after the murder, as the investigation into Carol's death proceeded, Ruth Kennedy received one call after another from investigators working the case. The worst one came from Dr. Laura Fulginiti, a forensic anthropologist who called to get permission to piece Carol's skull back together.

“At that time they were considering me next of kin,” Ruth recalled. The image of her daughter's skull, shattered into so many pieces that it needed to be reconstructed like a puzzle, had always stuck in her mind, a concept “just so horrible to even contemplate.”

Sheriff's Deputy Steve Surak had transported Carol's head from the medical examiner's office in Yavapai County to the one in Maricopa County, where it was to be delivered to Fulginiti for an expert examination, analysis and reconstruction.

Within two weeks Fulginiti concluded that it was one of the three worst cases she'd ever seen. The skull, which showed a minimum of seven blunt-force blows, and possibly many more, was broken into more than two hundred pieces, including at least fifty larger pieces that were held together only by tissue.

When she saw the curvilinear shape of the fracture line in the right cranial vault, with a flatness on top, she testified later, “I thought to myself, ‘Wow, that looks a lot like a golf club. Particularly a wood.'”

She developed this theory without conferring with the ME, Dr. Keen, or any other investigator, and she did, in fact, determine that the injuries were “consistent” with a golf club. Given the Callaway Big Bertha Steelhead exemplar club to examine, Fulginiti confirmed that it was capable of creating Carol's injuries. Although she couldn't say for sure that this particular model of club created the trauma, she also said it couldn't be “ruled out.”

She suggested that other golf clubs and objects be tested to show the difference in impact damage, but said the left-handed club appeared to be consistent with the trauma,
Detective Brown wrote in his report.

 

 

By some accounts Steve didn't offer much comfort to his daughters during this trying time. About a week after the murder, Renee saw one scene that disturbed her enough that she told her Unitarian minister friend, Dan Spencer, about it: Steve was busy doing something on his laptop when Katie started to cry on the living-room floor. She began sobbing, so upset that she went into the fetal position, and yet Steve continued to type. Charlotte's boyfriend had to get down on the floor and hug her to try to calm her down.

 

 

The first news brief about the case was posted on Prescott's
Daily Courier
website the night of July 3, calling Carol's murder an “apparent homicide.”

Sandy Moss, a local radio and TV host on KPPV/KQNA and AZTV who has lived in town for more than two decades, said Carol's death left the community at large in shock. Not much crime is committed in Prescott, and certainly not many homicides. But this particular murder victim, who was a “really decent, artistic, spiritually aware person,” seemed so unlikely.

“I've never met a person who didn't think Carol was the cream of the crop, the cat's meow, a really fine and dear person,” Moss said. “To have someone like that who was so seemingly undeserving of being slaughtered” was such a shame.

In fact, Moss couldn't remember any murder like this one in at least twenty years. “It was horrendous,” she said. “It was even shocking for the parties who didn't know Carol.”

Later that month, when
Courier
columnist Randall Amster wrote about Carol's death, he recalled that she'd been one of the first colleagues at Prescott College to welcome him seven years earlier:

Some Prescott residents wondered if they were safe, if this was a random killing by a madman on the loose, or if this was someone who had set out specifically to kill Carol.

By July 7, sheriff's officials said publicly that they'd already identified “at least one person of interest,” and that area residents should not fear that a serial killer had committed the murder.

As people learned more details of the homicide scene, “they thought this was likely someone she knew,” Moss said. “Generally a random slaughter wouldn't make it so personal. The people I talked to were outraged and brokenhearted.”

“Her artist friends believed from the beginning that it was [Steve],” Moss said. “They had no doubt in their mind.”

 

 

Prescott is not only home to the alternative Prescott College, it also has drawn an unusual number of rehab facilities, homeless people, alcoholics and addicts, some of whom Carol was treating at Pia's Place. That's because buyers at one point streamed into town to purchase cheap property for rehab facilities in residential neighborhoods. The town also provides feeding care stations for the homeless.

“It's been a real bone of contention here,” Moss said.

But at the same time, she explained, Prescott is also culturally alive. And although some small towns may be populated with small-minded or uneducated people, that's not the case there. Prescott's half-a-dozen higher-education institutions and its performing-arts venues have drawn big-name artists such as Anne Murray and Bill Cosby, during his earlier days before his reputation became tarnished with date rape allegations.

“We have a much more sophisticated populace with opportunities for education, entertainment and growth,” Moss said, adding that Prescott is also known for being a spiritual community with “a higher consciousness in terms of social responsibility and awareness.”

The town's more temperate weather also draws residents from the valley or flatlands of Phoenix, especially during the hottest months of the year.

The monsoons that start up at the end of June or beginning of July come at the best time of year. “It's just so refreshing and such a nice break,” she said. “It rains for a couple of hours, then it goes away. The sun comes out, and there's often a rainbow.”

More than half of Prescott's population is forty-five or older, and about a quarter of the town's residents are sixty-five or older, although the town still has its share of kids and schools. But for a single person like Carol was, it's hard to find someone to date, which is likely why she turned to online dating sites to find someone special.

“I have single friends, and it's really hard . . . to hook up with the right kind of single people or to find a variety of people that you might be interested in,” Moss said. “Singles always feel excluded here, I know.... It's hard to find people who match up to other people.”

 

 

A year or so before her murder, Carol had been seeing a man who lived in Malibu, California. Sometime after they broke up, she met David Soule on Match.com in April 2008. David was among the first people investigators interviewed.

David had a home in nearby Jerome, but he primarily lived on the coast of southern Maine in Lincoln County, where he was fixing up a sailboat for a long trip.

After they met, he and Carol got together ten times over the course of the next month before he left for Maine on May 6, and they communicated regularly by e-mail and phone until she died. Carol was preparing to fly east for a visit on July 12, to see his boat, and to spend some time together.

On July 3, a friend of David's saw the news brief about Carol's murder in the
Courier
and called him. David immediately phoned the sheriff 's office, asking to speak to Detective Doug Brown, who, busy writing and carrying out search warrants and attending the autopsy that day, didn't get back to him until the next day.

When they talked, David was clearly shaken by the news. “He was at a loss, I think, for the most part,” Brown recalled later.

David wondered if Carol had told Steve about the upcoming trip and he'd become angry. As far as he knew, Steve was not to go to the Bridle Path house. Carol told David that she'd been upset when Steve had shown up unannounced that past week, supposedly to pick up the barbecue grill. Luckily, Jim Knapp had intercepted him.

David had heard about the golf club being a possible murder weapon, noting that when Steve came over to pick up the grill, that may have been a good opportunity to plant a weapon. He didn't know Jim all that well, but he didn't think Carol's tenant had anything to do with the murder.

Asked about the golf shoes found in Carol's car, David said she'd mentioned taking some lessons in her Match.com dating profile, but he'd never seen any clubs at the house.

When Carol and David last spoke, on Tuesday, July 1, around 10
P.M
., she told him she'd been crying after getting home from work that day. She wondered aloud whether she was sad about Katie leaving for South Africa.

Carol had been under a tremendous financial strain lately, he said. She was making only $24,000 a year, but was going to have to pay $12,000 to the IRS because of the divorce settlement, presumably taxes on her share of Steve's 401(k) account.

David was aware that Steve had tried to get back together with Carol since the divorce, even after everything he'd put her through, with all his women.

Carol had told Soule of a $300 Viagra bill that Steven got and she suspected that he was banging everything in sight,
Brown wrote in his report.
Soule thought that Steven had some type of sexual addiction.

Soule thought that Steven was the type that wanted what he couldn't have and that he didn't want what he could,
Brown wrote.
He thought that this may be the first time that someone has actually left him and refused him.

In one of Carol's last e-mails to her boyfriend, she said Steve had been “exceedingly nice” around the time of Katie's airport send-off, which sent up red flags for her.
[She felt she was] caught in a toxic net and did not know how she would be able to get out,
Brown wrote.

David agreed to give a DNA swab to his local law enforcement to rule him out as a suspect in case he'd left any DNA at the house, but he said he'd been in Maine at the time of the murder.

 

 

Katie DeMocker flew home and arrived in Prescott on July 4. During dinner that night after Charlotte, Jake and Steve picked her up at the airport, they discussed Carol's possible killers.

Steve suggested that Barb O'Non—his former assistant, with whom he'd claimed to have been in love with for years and wanted to marry—could have hired someone to kill Carol. If he was arrested, he said, Barb could get his entire client book, worth $110 million, versus the 30 percent of the annual $750,000 she'd been earning before.

With that seed planted, Katie mentioned Barb as a possible suspect to Detective Brown in an interview on July 7.

But before they got to Barb, Brown asked her about the nasty e-mails Jim Knapp had been sending, spouting hateful allegations against Steve, the latest of which had come in just the night before. Brown asked if Katie could think of any scenario—“from what your mom said, from what your dad said, from what anyone said”—where Jim would intentionally cause her mother's death.

“I don't know how to answer these questions because I can't imagine anybody wanting to do this to anyone,” Katie said.

Before she had a chance to elaborate, Brown reminded her that she'd mentioned Jim was “romantically kind of interested” in Carol.

“Yeah, he was,” she said, explaining that one night he was drunk and the two of them had to put him to bed. He playfully grabbed at Carol's clothes, but after they tucked him in, “that was the end of it.”

Brown asked if she could see any reason why others, such as her sister or Jake, would want to hurt Carol. Katie said no.

“Your dad?”

“No,” she said.

“Anytime that you've been alive that you've seen any type of physical abuse?”

“No, and my parents didn't even believe in spanking us,” she said. “Both of them are probably two of the most unviolent people. . . . I was a terror child and my dad never even hit me.”

“No spanking at all?”

“I mean my mom did it once and they both felt so bad about it when I was, like, three that they vowed never to do it again.”

But when Brown tried to push harder on the nature of arguments between her parents, Katie shut down. “I don't feel comfortable talking about this right now,” she said.

Moving on, Brown asked about obsessive or violent clients and “unwarranted” phone calls to Carol, which prompted Katie to bring up Barb.

“I mean, I suppose, of all people that I could think of, maybe, I mean she hated my mom. I think she had some sort of, like, thing. She lives down in Anthem or somewhere around there, but she had something at the guard gate thing that my mom wasn't to be allowed anywhere near her. . . . It was kind of a combination of the fact that she just thought my mom was crazy, that she thought my mom hated her for having the affair,” she said. She added that Barb also wasn't very friendly with Steve at the moment. “Their business is flamed. It got split up today.”

Katie explained that the Barb affair was hidden from Carol for a while, but then she knew and then the girls knew, and then their parents “would say that it had stopped, but it didn't . . . or it kept going back and forth.... It was kind of a confusing process, I think, for both my mom and Barb, but I think Barb was pretty convinced that, you know, if my dad got a divorce they would end up together, and they didn't. But she wanted him to get a divorce for a really long time.”