Then No One Can Have Her (13 page)

Virginia Carol Kennedy was born on July 25, 1954, the daughter of a secretary and a postal worker. Raised in Nashville, Tennessee, where her family still lives today, Carol and her brother, John, who is two years older, were very close as kids.

After leaving the army as a staff sergeant, Carol's father, Alvin “A.G.” Kennedy Jr., continued to serve in the reserves for twenty more years while working for the U.S. Postal Service, where he started as a mail carrier and retired as an auditor.

While Carol was growing up, she and A.G. doted on each other. “I think she loved me, but I think she loved her dad more,” said Ruth Kennedy, Carol's eighty-nine-year-old mother, in 2014. “I truly do. Because I was probably the disciplinarian.”

Ruth worked the first half of her career for the Tennessee Department of Education, the state Department of Insurance and Banking and its Legislative Council Committee. She later moved to the private sector to work for the American Association for State and Local History.

An avid fan of classical symphonic music and a pianist since she was nine years old, Ruth made sure to have music playing in the house from the time the children were born.

A headstrong little girl, Carol knew what she wanted. Not liking her given name, Virginia, she began going by her middle name at the start of elementary school.

The Kennedy family spent a lot of time together, taking extended vacations on Florida's gulf coast. They also regularly attended the Church of Christ together. Spiritual from an early age, Carol was eager to be baptized at nine, sooner than Ruth would have liked.

“I thought she was too young, but I wouldn't have stopped her,” she recalled, noting that Carol had a wonderful Sunday school teacher. “She was a great influence on Carol.”

A high academic achiever, young Carol was ambitious, respected and well liked by her peers. She worked on the school paper, and in the eighth grade, she was elected to a board of teen representatives from all the high schools in Nashville. And with her lean build and contagious warm smile, Carol modeled for a couple of years in high school, working with a local agency and traveling for some jobs.

At fifteen she was selected as the city's representative in the Miss Ingenue contest, based on “beauty, personality, poise and presence.” And in 1971, when a white crepe jumpsuit with a “laced-and-fringed crop top” sold for $44, Carol was featured in the November issue of the national
Ingenue
magazine.

“She was pretty popular in school with both her friends and her teachers,” Ruth said.

Carol was also featured in a newspaper ad by the Cain-Sloan department store, billed as “the greatest store of the Central South,” which invited the public to the Miss Ingenue Fashion Show in Green Hills, an upscale area of Nashville. The big ad featured an illustration of a tall, leggy model with her long hair pulled into a side ponytail, wearing a white scoop-neck sleeveless jumpsuit that laced up the front, was lined around the torso with fringe, and flowed down into flared bell-bottom pants. Inset was a black-and-white head shot of Carol, with her brown hair styled the same way as the illustration, her usual curly ringlets straightened for a more sleek and chic look.

Another photo shoot, for which Carol posed with the four top runner-ups in the competition, was full of horizontal stripes, grid patterns and generally loud fashion. Three of the losing contestants were blond. Carol, who went by “Caryl” as her modeling name, was the darkest brunette; her intelligence was clearly reflected in her facial expression.

Headed to Acapulco on a free trip to the Miss Ingenue finals, she turned sixteen and lost the contest to one of the other twenty contestants. But her family's bigger concern was that she got sidetracked on the trip home. Although she had a chaperone, she somehow missed her return connection in Dallas and ended up in New York City. “We were scared to death, but it didn't seem to faze her,” Ruth said. “I think at that age you think you're invincible.”

Her interest in modeling didn't last long before she'd moved on to other things. “It kind of lost its luster. She found out it wasn't all it was cracked up to be,” Ruth said, noting that Carol didn't much like standing at attention under hot lights for long stretches at a time, which was less glamorous than she'd anticipated. “It got to be more of a chore than fun.”

 

 

As a teenager Carol got an allowance, but she was frugal with her money, so she always seemed to have cash available for the things she really wanted, such as the cute $13 green patterned Nehru jacket she saw while shopping with her mother one day.

When Ruth told her daughter, “It's not in my budget,” Carol promptly pulled out her wallet and bought the jacket for herself.

Although she and her brother were not as close during high school, they still loved each other. One of Ruth's favorite photos features the two siblings posing together at John's graduation in 1970. But for many years after that, they drifted apart and didn't have much contact.

As John put it later, they became estranged for nearly twenty years because Carol didn't approve of his lifestyle. Between 1969 and 1975, he was a heroin addict, he later testified, a “rogue” and a “worthless type of SOB for a lot of years.”

 

 

Shortly after graduating from McGavock High School in 1972, Carol went straight to Peabody College, which is now part of Vanderbilt University. In just three years she finished her education degree at what is now known as one of the nation's top schools in that field.

Living at home during college, she wasn't just in a hurry to get started on her working life, she was also in a rush to get married as well, perhaps as a way to get out of her parents' house.

Carol hadn't been in college long before she got engaged to a young man named Tom, who came from a good family and had dropped out of college to work in pharmaceutical sales. Tom was originally from upstate New York, and his family moved to the Nashville area when his father was transferred.

Ruth tried everything she could to dissuade her daughter from getting married so young. “You've just started at Vanderbilt, and the whole world is opening up,” Ruth told her. “Why would you want to get married?”

Ruth had nothing in particular against Tom. He and his family seemed very nice, and well-off, too.

“They were way above us in the social strata,” Ruth recalled. “He treated her well. They got along fine.”

After waitressing in high school, Carol found a bartending job at a high-end restaurant. She befriended the hostess, Debbie Wren Hill, who was a year younger than Carol. Coincidentally, Debbie was engaged to one of Tom's high-school friends, a rock-and-roll guitarist.

The four of them hung out together, and Carol and Tom attended their wedding in October 1975. Carol and Tom, who moved away and broke up shortly thereafter, were married for only eighteen months.

“It was an amicable separating, it wasn't anything bad between them,” Ruth said. If there was a negative reason, she added, Carol “never told me because maybe I would have said, ‘I told you so.'”

 

 

Carol spent a year at the Heartwood School in Washington, Massachusetts, where she learned carpentry, gardening and other homebuilding crafts, as well as how to use herbs.

She also taught school in Richmond, Virginia, before she moved back to Nashville in 1981, intending to teach special education at her alma mater, McGavock High.

During their time apart, Debbie's four-year marriage imploded as well. The two now-divorced women found each other again through a mutual friend while Debbie was looking for a roommate. Answering her phone one day, Debbie was happy to hear her friend's voice.

“You're not going to believe who this is,” Carol said. “I'm back in town, I have a dog named Rosie and we're looking for a place to live.”

Debbie's roommate search ended at that moment, after which Carol and her beautiful Irish setter moved right in.

 

 

Within the year Carol, who had also become a certified yoga instructor, took a trip to New York and came back in a state of euphoria.

“I have just met the most amazing man,” she said.

Carol and Mr. Amazing, Steve DeMocker, had quite a bit in common: “A love of the outdoors, an appreciation of the beauty and spirituality of mountain and river, a keen sense of the connectedness we have with one another,” as Steve's mother, Jan, put it.

They were also both highly intelligent. Steve was a doctoral candidate at the University of Rochester's Warner School of Education. His focus was critical social theory, a rather complicated and esoteric interdisciplinary study of sociology and other social sciences, such as psychology, philosophy, history and anthropology, and how the key concepts of these areas affect us as a culture. According to Nick Crossley's book
Key Concepts in Critical Social Theory,
such concepts—which became quite relevant in the context of Steve's behavior in later years—include alienation, symbolic power/violence, power and knowledge, crisis, capital, body power and freedom.

 

 

After taking off with Steve to Mexico for a week, Carol came back even more in love. Debbie would always remember the moment when Carol shared her feelings as she folded her clothes and put them back into her dresser.

“Debbie, I know I have found my soul mate. I know it in my stomach,” she said. “There is just a knowingness and I feel it and I know it. He is my person that I'm supposed to go through my life with.”

When Steve came to Nashville to visit, Debbie found herself crazy about him, too, partly because of the way he treated her dear friend. While she and Carol were at work, he stayed at the house making homemade coffee liqueur. When Carol came home, he acted “personable, friendly, engaged and loving toward her. Steve was everything every woman could want in a man,” Debbie recalled. “He was gorgeous. He was smart. He was working on a Ph.D. He was in Outward Bound, incredibly physically fit. Anyone would have fallen for him.”

 

 

It was only a matter of months of long-distance dating before Carol moved to New York to live with Steve and join him in graduate school at the University of Rochester.

Ruth, who didn't approve of Carol's unwed living situation, was relieved when her daughter soon announced that she was engaged. Because Ruth hadn't met her daughter's fiancé, she sent him a letter, saying, essentially, “Thank you for doing this right.” Steve didn't write back.

Carol's parents flew to Rochester a couple of days before the wedding to meet Steve and his family and to have dinner with his parents, whom Ruth described as “lovely people.” That said, Ruth and A.G. felt a little overwhelmed by the whole affair.

“The big family and the fact that the father was a doctor, and, of course, we were just working people,” Ruth recalled. “A.G. and I were a bit intimidated, although A.G. never would have admitted it.”

Now that Carol was older, Ruth felt much better about this marriage than she had about Carol's first one. “At that time I had no misgivings about it,” she recalled recently.

 

 

The couple was married on October 10, 1982, at Steve's parents' house in Webster, New York. They had a big potluck reception near the shore of Lake Ontario afterward.

This being her second wedding, Carol wore a dark skirt with a corduroy vest over a pink blouse with puffy sleeves and a pink rose boutonniere. Her hair was down, with the front strands pulled back. Steve wore dark dress pants and an earth-toned blazer. Carol also kept her maiden name.

“It was just perfect for them,” said Debbie, who couldn't attend but later wished she had, because for some years afterward, Debbie mostly saw Carol when she came home to visit her parents in Nashville.

Most of Steve's rather large immediate family came to the ceremony, along with Carol's parents, aunt and grandmother. The service, conducted by a minister, was informal and low-key, but meaningful and intimate.

“They wrote their own vows, promising to support and nurture one another as they each sought the path that would allow them to create a meaningful life,” Jan DeMocker recalled. “They wanted to live their lives in ways that would make a difference to others.”

Sturgis Robinson came up from Washington, D.C., and met Steve's family for the first time. The DeMocker family, with Steve's numerous siblings, seemed “crushingly normal, with one exception,” he recalled.

As Steve introduced his best friend to his parents, Jan and John DeMocker barely looked at Sturgis, who felt that they treated him like he was part of the staff.

“I really expected Steve's parents to be warm,” he said, explaining that his own parents were always gracious when meeting his friends. “I was really struck by how cold his parents were, particularly his mother.”

He had a much more positive impression of Carol, whom he was eager to meet after hearing such glowing reports from Steve.

“He was completely in love with her,” Sturgis said. Steve had described her as “really powerful and focused, and she was a carpenter, really strong and really spiritual. But then he always described the women he was with in terms like that.”

Sturgis hit it off with Steve's new wife, sneaking off to the woods with her and a bottle of wine to chat during the reception.

“I was fascinated to meet Carol, and she was fascinated to meet me,” he recalled.

As they were getting to know one another, Sturgis felt compelled to ask whether she was aware of Steve's serial womanizing, which he'd watched since before the start of their own friendship.