Then No One Can Have Her (16 page)

“He would always blame it on [Carol],” Katherine recalled. “It was her fault.”

Carol's response was not to yell or scream, although Katherine did see her neck getting noticeably tight as she calmly disputed whatever excuse he'd given. “Steve, that is not what happened,” she would say.

“Carol was so tolerant,” Katherine recalled. “She wanted to believe the best in people. And that's why she stuck with Steve for so long. She fought for her marriage. Hard.”

Katherine never really liked Barb, especially the strange way Barb seemed to be trying to win her over. But Katherine never tattled on Steve to Carol, because she couldn't be sure what was going on between him and Barb, and she didn't want to cause trouble unnecessarily. Instead, she waited until Carol brought it up.

One day Carol got so upset by something Steve had done that she finally told Katherine that Steve was having an affair with Barb. When Katherine apologized for not having said anything sooner about her suspicions, Carol told her not to worry. She never rebuked Katherine for not reporting what she'd witnessed.

“It's so okay,” Carol told her. “It's fine.”

But after that initial disclosure, Carol and Katherine talked about Barb quite often.

Curiously, Sturgis said that Steve kept a lid on his emotions as well. He either hid his feelings or did not show an overt response to them, apparently keeping them bottled up inside.

“He was a very controlled person,” Sturgis said. “I never saw him angry. I would see him compress his lips and tighten his face and wrinkle his forehead. I never saw him shout or be angry that I can recall. At the very most he would get stern and contemptuous, say something cutting, but even that was fairly restrained.”

Sturgis never saw Steve get violent, either. “I never saw him hit anybody,” he said. “It would have been inconceivable for him to get into a fistfight with anybody. He was more subtle than that.”

Carol and Steve both doted on their daughters, being the best parents and educators they knew how to be. This came easy with Charlotte, but Katie was more of a challenge early on.

“Charlotte soaked up the information like a little sponge,” Ruth Kennedy said. “She could outspell Katie. She was a precocious little thing.”

Katie, Ruth said, is “really a smart person. She really is. They both are. But they're totally different personalities.”

When Katie was still in elementary school, she was having a difficult time staying engaged. In other words she was bored.

“At home Carol struggled with Katie because she was very stubborn and could be very oppositional with Carol and with Steve, but not at school,” Katherine said. “She is extremely intelligent. Her IQ is off the charts.”

Carol encouraged the girls to be creative by sending them to schools that used the Waldorf method of teaching, a philosophy that encourages children to use their imagination. She even set up a Waldorf-type school for them and some other kids in the guesthouse for a time, painting the interior with pastel colors.

Like her mother before her, Carol loved to have music in the house, turning on the stereo as soon as she walked in—usually something classical or a soft lilting CD by Enya, the New Age Irish singer-songwriter who was one of Carol's favorites.

By the time Katie got to junior high school, Carol tried to engage her by homeschooling her. But after a couple of years, Carol felt that wasn't best for Katie—for Carol to be her mother
and
teacher. Instead, they found an alternative that excited Katie: the Orme School, a private boarding prep school that she could attend as a day student.

Carol drove her forty-five minutes to an hour each way to Orme, which was down a long dirt road in the middle of ranch land. To pass the time on the long drive, she often called her friend Debbie to chat.

“I spend half of my life in the car,” Carol told her.

Katie loved Orme and excelled there. She played three seasons of sports and became a prefect in the dorm, where, by her junior and senior years, she was spending two or three nights a week. She went on to become class salutatorian and gave a speech at the graduation ceremony in 2006, making her parents proud.

From there she went away to Occidental College, with a goal of going to law school.

Charlotte attended a school closer to home, entered the Waldorf-inspired Mountain Oak School once it opened in 1999, then graduated from Prescott High School.

 

 

During these years Carol's mood often alternated between extremes, depending on whether her relationship with Steve was in a good or bad place. At one point, when Carol called to tell Debbie the latest, she sounded so down that Debbie was worried for her friend's emotional health.

“I feel like you are my best friend and I keep calling you when these things happen,” Carol said.

“Do you have anyone there you can confide in?” Debbie asked.

“No,” Carol said, “I'm never quite sure whether they've slept with my husband.”

Debbie didn't think she could've stayed with a man like Steve. “Do you still respect yourself ?” she asked Carol. “Because I'm worried you're losing respect for yourself. I've never loved a man the way you love Steve, and I hope I never do. I just don't get why you're still there. I just don't.”

Because Carol was so strong and so intuitive, Debbie and other close friends actually went to Carol for counsel, support and advice. But they could see how very difficult it was for her to heed
their
advice, to even think about letting go when Steve kept coming back to her with such emotional force. Despite all of his affairs, he just wouldn't let her go.

“I don't think he ever quit loving Carol. I think he just wanted everything that he wanted at the same time,” Debbie said. “And that's what we all really held against him. He was bringing this woman to her knees.”

Lots of couples have problems with infidelity, she said, that's not what was unusual or extraordinary about this relationship. It was the way that Steve kept toying with Carol's psyche.

“He just never could say, ‘We're done, I'm done.' He kept apologizing,” Debbie recalled. “He would tell Carol who the woman had been, [and] they would go back to treatment. It's like an alcoholic.... He really was addicted.”

One time Carol counted up the affairs that she knew of, that she had proof of and that Steve had confessed to. It came to fourteen.

Still, Steve stuck by Carol. Debbie called her friend one Valentine's Day to complain that her then-partner and soon-to-be husband had let her down. She'd asked him to get her a particular book as a gift, but he didn't come through.

“If we didn't live together, I'd leave his ass,” Debbie told Carol.

Carol sympathized, then told Debbie how Steve would have handled the situation. “Steve would never have done that,” Carol said. “He'd have gotten me that book. And there would have been roses, there would have been champagne . . . . But here's the deal, he might have been in bed with his secretary.”

“It was like pick your poison,” Debbie recalled. “I was, like, ‘I guess I'd rather have a boyfriend who didn't get me the book.' Steve always came through in a wonderful way for Carol. But not
just
for Carol.”

 

 

Some say that people who become therapists do so because they're trying to figure out their own issues, and along the way they become fascinated with the psychology of others as well.

“Carol had always been engaged in her own therapeutic process in one shape or form,” Katherine Morris recalled, noting that Carol saw a therapist in Prescott.

At Carol's urging, she and Steve went together for marital counseling. She also tried to persuade him to get therapy for love and sex addiction at an upscale rehab center known as The Meadows in Wickenburg, about forty-five minutes from Prescott.

The Meadows website describes the term “sexual addiction” as a condition in which a person has an “unusual fascination with or fixation on sex.” This can involve incessant fantasizing about sex, making it difficult to maintain healthy relationships, as well as indulging in reckless and risky behaviors that may result in serious consequences. All the while these individuals justify their actions to themselves, blame others, and deny that they have a problem.

Carol discussed Steve's pattern of behavior with Katherine and Debbie, given that they were all therapists.

“We knew there was some sort of sex and love addiction going on there that needed to be treated,” Katherine said.

To Debbie, Steve seemed somewhat aware that his behavior was wrong. He seemed genuinely remorseful when he came clean about his latest affair; he would say it had ended, and promise to stop cheating. Carol told Debbie that Steve admitted he needed help. The challenge was getting him to go to treatment, let alone comply with the changes he needed to make.

Originally, Carol proposed that Steve go for a thirty-day inpatient program, but Steve bucked that idea. “I can't with my work,” he said. “There's no way I can do that.”

Short of that, Carol tried to get him to go for some kind of treatment,
period.
She wanted him to get well. But even if he dabbled, such as attending a couple of group sessions, he never made any significant effort to deal with the problem.

“He always had a way of finagling himself out of it,” Katherine recalled. “If he did do anything, he didn't really
do
it. He did it for an extremely fleeting and sporadic time.”

 

 

Steve had a dark side that began to emerge, and having sex with other women was not the only troubling behavior he tried to hide from Carol.

Around 2002, Katherine and her future husband came to Bridle Path for a visit. Katherine had just finished working out on the treadmill in the guesthouse, where she and her boyfriend were talking to Steve about its shelving and structure.

Steve mentioned that a neighborhood cat used to come in and get into their stuff. He would try to shoo it away because it also tormented and scratched up their cat, but it kept coming back.

One day, Steve said, he decided to lure the cat in by leaving the back door open and trap it inside. His plan worked. After closing in the cat, he grabbed an object—a shovel, kayak paddle or baseball bat (Katherine couldn't remember)—and went after it. As he chased the cat around the guesthouse, the animal tried to escape by climbing and clawing at the walls, but Steve was determined not to let him get away.

Laughing as he told them the story, Steve said, “I just got my [kayak paddle or other object] and beat it to death. And from then on, Katherine, that cat was just gone.”

Katherine could not believe what she was hearing. She knew Carol would never approve of this animal control method.

“Surely, Carol does not know about this,” she said.

Steve acknowledged that no, Carol didn't.

When Katherine told this story to investigators after Carol was murdered, they told her that they had tried, but they couldn't find any neighbor who had lost a cat. Wondering if she had misremembered the story, Katherine called her then-ex-husband and asked him about it. He not only confirmed her recollection of the conversation, he remembered even more details about it than she did.

“No,” he told her, “that totally happened.”

Earlier in the marriage Carol executed her last will and testament on June 23, 1998, leaving assets of her estate to a trust and listing Katie and Charlotte as the two beneficiaries. Her wish, stated in supporting documents, was for the trustee to
be guided by my desire to provide for the education of my children and to encourage them to obtain a college degree, and to provide adequately for [their] health.

The will provided for the trust to be administered as a single trust until Katie reached the age of twenty-five, at which time the first shares would be distributed equally, one to Katie and the other to continue in trust until Charlotte reached twenty-five, or until the trust was otherwise spent for the purposes she'd specified.

Around this same time, Carol and Steve took out a couple of Hartford life insurance policies on her, naming Steve as the primary beneficiary. The first, issued July 24, 1998, was for $250,000, and listed the Virginia Carol Kennedy Trust as the secondary beneficiary. This policy's annual premium was scheduled to increase from $237 to $2,812 in July 2008, but due to the timing of Carol's murder, Steve never had to make the higher payment.

The second policy, issued January 2, 2001, was for $500,000 and named Steve as the owner and sole beneficiary. As a financial advisor and licensed insurance broker, Steve took both of those policies with him when he moved from A.G. Edwards to UBS. But he didn't get the paperwork in order, switching the official broker of record to UBS, until February 2008.

 

 

In 2003, Carol called Debbie to tell her that Steve wanted to move out and have his own space—a condo on the golf course.

“We're still married,” Carol said. “We're still in an exclusive relationship.”

Steve had told his wife that he needed his own place so he could get some sleep. He'd been working as a broker for some time now, going to bed around eight-thirty at night and getting up around four in the morning, before the stock market opened on the East Coast. The girls and the barking dogs kept waking him up, though.

“Carol, really?” Debbie asked, stunned by this flimsy excuse. “Are you serious?”

“Yes,” Carol said, “and I think it's going to be fine.”

Carol told Katherine the same thing, noting that Steve would now have a place to exercise his obsessive-compulsive urges to straighten and keep things orderly.

“He can have all his cans of soup lined up, and all the drawers organized,” Carol said, adding that she had no problem with him moving out. “There's nothing wrong with that. It just doesn't work for me. I'm not going to spend my life organizing cupboards.”

Katherine had noticed this tendency as well. Steve's car was always spotless and clean. “There was never any dirt in it,” she said.

He even acted like a perfectionist when he and Katherine played golf together. “He didn't get angry, but he was always critiquing himself,” she said. “What an awful way to lead your life. And I think he did that a lot.”

That said, he didn't pick at Carol until after the divorce battle started. “He praised her, put her up on a pedestal, because she was that phenomenal and because it made him look good,” Katherine said. Because that, she added, is what narcissists like Steve do.

Before he moved out, Steve always talked about building himself a “man hut” in the side yard at the Bridle Path house, someplace he could call his own to meditate, smoke a fine cigar with a good glass of wine or do whatever else he pleased. Today some might call it a “man cave.”

“He never built it, and then Carol would kind of laugh about it, say that the condo could be his man hut, his thousands-of-dollars man hut,” Katherine recalled.

It took Carol only a couple of weeks before she realized that Steve was still having an affair with Barb, and that the “need” for the condo was more likely a desire to have alone time with his mistress.

That point, it seems, was the beginning of the end of the marriage—when Carol began to realize that she was too codependent and had to get some help for herself to really let go of Steve. But, unfortunately, her psychological torture was far from over.

Steve did move out, but he didn't file for divorce for three years, and even then he withdrew the petition six weeks later. Carol had to be the one to make it stick when she filed in 2007.

When Katherine got remarried in 2004, Steve and Carol were separated, but still doing things together. They both came to the wedding in California, for example. He came on his own, and Carol with the girls. Katherine was surprised and yet overjoyed to see Steve, because Carol had said he had a lot going on and might not be able to make it. But there he was.