Then No One Can Have Her (34 page)

“ ‘Fake cancer'?” Young asked incredulously. “The autopsy report says he has melanoma. I don't know why you keep saying ‘fake cancer.'”

Williams continued during another bench conference: “If you get down to the end where he's telling people in the world that Carol Kennedy was penniless, right, and that Steven DeMocker robbed her of everything, but then we have a deposit slip of one hundred thirty thousand dollars, we have [Jim's] thumbprint on the financial documents that list out how much money she's got. So our theory is that he found out, felt double-crossed, and that's what happened.”

“There's no evidence,” Jeff Paupore countered. “You asked for the evidence, Your Honor, about Carol Kennedy going into a joint venture [for the Maui Wowi franchise].... There's no evidence that she was going to fund anything. Other than in Knapp's mind, and we've been in there.... We know it's an empty shell.”

Williams proceeded to hammer his points in front of the jury. While Deputy Brown was still on the stand on September 10, Williams noted that law enforcement admitted to a lack of crucial physical evidence in this case the day before they arrested Steve.

Quoting Brown's search warrant, Williams said: “‘We have not been able to locate a murder weapon, the shoes that created the shoe tracks, or any physical evidence tying Steven DeMocker directly to the house . . . from the night of the murder.' Correct?”

“Yes, that's correct,” Brown replied, “that's what I wrote.”

“And he was arrested the next day, wasn't he?”

“Correct.”

“Okay, no more questions.”

As the prosecution finished up with Brown, the deputy countered that he and the other detectives did, in fact, investigate the alibis and whereabouts at the time of the murder of all four suspects Williams suggested in his third-party culpability defense, including Jim Knapp. And that the physical evidence—the staged crime scene, the blood spatter heading out the back door and the nasty e-mail exchanges between Carol and Steve—still pointed to Steve as the killer, who bludgeoned her to death, ran out to his bike in the bushes behind the house and back to his car.

Brown noted that investigators also collected a DNA specimen and fingerprints from Jim Knapp, and had them tested and compared with other evidence at the crime lab. Even though Jim gave inconsistent statements, his memory wasn't good and he offered various theories about how Carol was killed, Brown said he and the other investigators retraced Jim's steps, interviewed his ex-wife and son, examined his bank, cell phone and other records, and, in the end, simply did not see him as the killer. As a result they put together a “Knapp-exonerating timeline,” as Young put it.

Brown said he and other detectives did the same type of investigation into Steve's story to try to prove that he, too, was where he said he was. Based on the timing of Carol's last messages to Steve and her handwritten notes on the financial documents in her home office, Brown agreed that it seemed Carol was prepared to talk with Steve that night about the check dispute when he came to collect Katie's car. But even Steve admitted to investigators that he couldn't prove where he was during those missing hours, and he had no alibi.

“‘I don't really have proof where I was,'” Brown said, quoting Steve's statement on the night of the murder.

And that was that.

“No further questions,” Young said.

 

 

During the jury's Q&A with Brown, the former detective touched on his theory on how and when the killer entered the house. Based on the shoe tracks, the timing of Carol's run, her text messages, the phone call with her mom, the unscrewed lightbulbs and the fact that she didn't generally lock the back door while she was out running, he said, “I think it's while she was on a run.”

With that, the state rested. The jury was dismissed for lunch and the defense immediately moved for judgment of acquittal for a lack of evidence.

On the murder charge the defense argued once again that there was no evidence of premeditation, because the killer was clearly in a rage. And there was no evidence—“blood, hair, fiber, eyewitness, confession”—tying Steve to the crime scene.

Jeff Paupore countered that Steve showed premeditation as early as February 2008, when he installed the Anonymizer software on his computer to hide his Web-surfing history. But investigators found his incriminating searches anyway.

After the defense went through each count and argued why it should be dismissed, the judge responded by reiterating the state's evidence supporting each count, stating that he believed there was “substantial evidence” to support counts one and two, for first-degree murder and burglary. Curiously, though, Donahoe said he had some doubts about the merits of the state's case on those two primary counts.

“I'm not saying this is the strongest case, and it wouldn't surprise me if there was a not-guilty verdict or a hung jury on count one and count two or both,” he said, “but I think there's enough here to go to the jury on both of those counts.”

He said he saw enough evidence to support all the other charges, except count six, which he described as “e-mail forgery.” For that count he entered a judgment for acquittal, explaining that Charlotte was “the only one that created or committed forgery regarding the e-mail,” but she was not charged and had been granted immunity.

The defense began presenting its case after lunch that same day, September 11.

Starting with Carol Walden, the former area developer for the Maui Wowi franchise system, the defense proceeded to put on a parade of witnesses who testified about Jim Knapp's oddities. The franchise executive discussed her correspondence with Jim concerning his interest in buying the Prescott store; his “fiancée,” Suzanna Wilson, described the fear she felt after he'd sent her the angry e-mails.

The defense also put on its own financial expert to counter the state's characterization of Steve's finances, as well as witnesses who challenged the state's DNA, shoe print and tire track evidence, including Randy Anglin, a tracker and forensic photographer.

The testimony of Curtis James, the meteorology professor at Embry-Riddle, conflicted with Mascher's definitive remarks about the timing and volume of the rainfall, which the state had argued made it easy to determine that Steve's tracks were fresh.

As defense investigator Rich Robertson summed it up, “The sheriff said, ‘I'm the sheriff, it rained, I have a badge. Believe me, not the academic guy.'”

 

 

Forensic accountant Gregg Curry presented a very different picture of Steve's fiscal health, listing a number of points in Davis's report that differed from his own calculations. These included two significant double-counting errors totaling $280,000, he said, which represented about 40 percent of the amount that Davis put toward Steve's excessive spending totals.

Curry's bottom line: “I determined whether Mr. DeMocker had the ability to pay his debts as they came due with the resources that he had,” and concluded that “he had about seventy-four thousand dollars of available liquid assets on July 2, 2008.” This wasn't all that far from Davis's calculation, which was $64,000. However, Curry said, Davis also underestimated the retirement savings Steve “could have tapped into.”

As the defense tried to undermine Davis's position that Steve was in “financial distress,” Curry contended that Steve “was not cash-flow insolvent . . . because he had enough resources to continue to pay his bills up until four or five months later.”

He said Steve could have further stretched his resources to seventeen months by reducing his discretionary spending and changing the withholding amount on his paychecks. He also had not maxed out his credit cards, nor was he in any imminent danger of bankruptcy or foreclosure.

But perhaps the most important discrepancy with Davis, Curry said, was that he didn't count the $750,000 in insurance payouts as an asset on his balance sheet, because in his view Steve “didn't actually receive the death benefits.”

This statement not only flew in the face of the prosecution's entire case, it also reduced the quantitative improvement in Steve's overall financial picture after Carol's death to just $131,896 for the alimony he wouldn't have to pay over the next eight years. This was a marked contrast to the prosecution's claim that Steve's picture had improved by $576,000 in unpaid alimony
and
the $750,000 in life insurance benefits.

“He had no chance of collecting that as long as he was a suspect and, obviously, he was arrested later,” Curry said.

On cross-examination Steve Young confronted the witness with one of Steve's statements. “You don't believe Mr. DeMocker's own words are an appropriate gauge on financial distress?” Young asked, citing Steve's “You get to start clean while I dig out of a staggering hole” e-mail to Carol.

“Not necessarily, no,” Curry said.

After Young pointed out several examples of Steve's failure to cut his discretionary spending, Curry said, “I think that's kind of argumentative. I think he's taken some steps.”

“So instead of significantly reducing discretionary spending, he's raiding his daughters' investment accounts and borrowing tens of thousands of dollars from his parents?” Young asked.

As the prosecutor went over the options Steve had available for reducing his spending, Curry ultimately had to acknowledge that Steve had taken no action to “avail himself” of any of them after Carol's murder, and continued to borrow money from his parents.

Curry also acknowledged that the suicide provision in Carol's life insurance policies didn't apply because it had been longer than two years since the issue date, which was important in the context of Steve's computer searches.

Referring specifically to the Internet search for “how to make a homicide appear suicide,” Young said, “It's fair to assume that he knew in June of 2008 that those life insurance policies would have paid out if Carol's death was ever determined to be a suicide, correct?”

“I don't know what he knew.”

In the end Young was able to get Curry to admit, albeit reluctantly, that the insurance checks from Steve's parents to the two law firms ultimately did benefit Steve.

“Well, to the extent that they paid for his lawyers to stay on the case,” Curry said.

“Thank you, Mr. Curry,” Young said. “Nothing further.”

 

 

On the morning of September 26, the defense rested its case after eight days of live testimony from seventeen witnesses, and the reading of prior testimony from a law enforcement expert who had since died.

The prosecution's single rebuttal witness was Sean Jeralds, a flight safety professor at Embry-Riddle and the close friend of Jim Knapp's who had checked on him the night he was found dead.

Sean had come forward after reading a news article stating that the defense said Jim was not a pilot and had no license to fly. And having been Jim's flight instructor, Sean wanted to correct the record.

Craig Williams objected to letting him testify, saying it could result in an “endless loop of witnesses,” but Donahoe allowed it.

“You've disparaged Mr. Knapp,” the judge said. “You've portrayed him as a murderer to this jury. This is the downside to the third-party culpability defense.”

Calling Jim “his brother from another mother,” Sean said Jim had earned a commercial pilot's license in 1991. Jeff Paupore then led him through Jim's résumé and the various health, drug-related and behavioral issues that had marked their relationship over the years, ending with Jim's suicide when he believed he was dying.

“That's how he was going to lose his life, cancer,” Sean said. “He thought that was a terrible way to go, because he saw what happened to his father and his mother, and so I wasn't surprised he did that.”

During the cross-examination Williams produced Jim Knapp's medical records from the Mayo Clinic from February 2008, underscoring the untruths they contained: Jim had written that he was still engaged to Suzanna Wilson, that he was working as a pilot and that he had “no history of recreational drug use.”

Under the section asking if he engaged in healing or alternative therapies, Williams noted that Jim had written “meditation and chronic random abuse to strangers.” And under the category of significant problems, he wrote in “sociopath.”

When Williams asked Sean Jeralds about these “inappropriate” answers on the questionnaire, Sean acknowledged that Jim had never actually worked as a pilot, but he could have if he'd taken and passed a physical.

Sean also said he couldn't “judge the level of appropriateness Knapp had with the folks at Mayo,” but he didn't seem surprised by Jim's responses in the medical records. In fact, he said, he laughed when he saw them in Jim's handwriting. “I could hear Jimmy saying that.”

Williams then asked if Jim had ever mentioned the possibility of a sexual relationship with Carol. Sean said yes, they had talked about it.

“He was wondering if that opportunity arose, should he take advantage of that or not,” Sean said. “What would that do to the relationship, and should he go down that path or not?”

Although Sean acknowledged that Jim had sent a number of angry e-mails to various people, such as the wealthy donor Steven Udvar-Hazy, Sean told the jury that his friend would not have purposely harmed anybody.

“Is Mr. Hazy still alive today?” Paupore asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“Did you ever know Jim Knapp to hurt or cause physical violence to anyone?”

“No, sir.”

 

 

After the lunch break Greg Parzych renewed his motions for acquittal and to sever the non-murder charges. He also told the judge that Katie DeMocker had e-mailed him, asking that closing arguments be held the following Tuesday, not the next day, so she could be there.

Steve Young said he didn't know why Katie had the erroneous idea that closings would be on Tuesday. Carol's mother, Ruth Kennedy, had already flown in and was ready to be there.

Judge Donahoe ruled again that closings would be the next day, Friday the twenty-seventh.

 

 

That night Jeff Paupore woke up at 3
A.M
. with an idea. The prosecutor would conduct a dramatic reenactment to illustrate for the jury how Steve had brutally beat his wife to death with a golf club.

He got out of bed, went into the garage, found one of his wife's golf clubs and started smacking a rolled-up rug with it. The thumping woke his son, who “sleeps like a dead person,” and came out to see what was going on.

Good. If it wakes him up, I know it's going to work,
Paupore thought.

Paupore's wife, on the other hand, slept right through it, but he didn't inform her of his plans. He wanted her to be surprised when she came to court that day to watch the closings. And that she was.

 

 

That morning Craig Williams renewed the defense's objection to moving ahead with the closings. He also argued that the prosecution should be precluded from using the words “unique” to describe the shoe prints and “stashed” to refer to the bicycle. Donahoe granted the first request, but he denied the second.

Paupore began his two-hour closing by displaying a photograph of Carol for the jury. As he ran through the slides in his PowerPoint presentation, each representing a fact or puzzle piece of damning evidence in the case, he removed a piece of her portrait and replaced it with a portion of Steve's face.

“This was not a bike ride,” Paupore said. “This was an alibi in case something went wrong.”

Referring to the anonymous e-mail, which had stated, “This wasn't one crazed man with a golf club,” Paupore said, “Oh, yes, it was, ladies and gentlemen. It was the defendant with a golf club. Make no mistake about it.”

By the end of his argument, Carol's portrait had been all but transformed by Steve's features, leaving only Carol's eyes.

Paupore told the jurors that he wished he could present them with every piece of the puzzle, but he couldn't. What he did have, he said, was “a great, huge mountain of strong circumstantial evidence.”

“We don't have a hundred percent of the pieces, but through Carol's eyes up on the screen looking at us, you can see her killer,” he said, hoping that the jury would get the idea that in her last moments, this was what she saw, too: Steve's face.

Afterward, Paupore's wife told him that she was horrified to see all the dust flying out of their rug as he beat it with abandon.

“If I'd known you were going to do that, I would have vacuumed it,” she said.

 

 

Craig Williams began his closing argument after lunch, continuing for nearly three hours. Still not finished, he started up again after the weekend, on the following Tuesday, October 1.

Williams spent most of his time laying out every possible alternative scenario to reinterpret the state's evidence, trying to persuade the jury that it was much more likely that Jim Knapp had killed Carol. He spent the rest arguing that the prosecution had made its whole case by twisting the ordinary into the nefarious and the suspicious.

Jim's motive? After snooping in Carol's financial papers, he was angry to learn that she had $130,000 in her bank account, but would not finance his Maui Wowi franchise. To hide his tracks, he tried to frame Steve, repeatedly telling the detectives and anyone else who would listen how and why Steve was to blame.

Williams offered a possible scenario for Carol's last exclamation of “Oh, no.” She was heading down the hall after her dogs, who were constantly “peeing and puking in the house,” when she inadvertently disconnected her phone as she went to grab the bottle of stain remover to clean up after them.

When the cleaning crew pulled up the rug, he said, there was a stain right where the bottle had been. Following that logic, he said, the murder didn't happen at 7:59
P.M
.; it was later than that, because “she was cleaning up the dog pee.” This scenario gave Jim more time to drive back, kill her and run off when he saw the lights of Deputy Taintor's cruiser pulling up to the house.

Although the state had dismissed alternative theories as “crazy defenses” to divert attention away from Steve, Williams said, “there really is factual evidence to back” up scenarios where other people, specifically Jim Knapp, could have killed Carol between his 7:58 and 9:37
P.M
. cell phone calls.

In fact, when Jim went to Safeway to buy wine and then called Carol in front of the sheriff 's deputies, he could have simply been creating a ruse and an alibi, when he knew she couldn't answer the phone.

“Ask yourself this—if Steve had planned this awful, brutal murder, his alibi is to say, ‘I'm going to show up at the scene with a bunch of cuts on me and then I'm going to say I was a mile across the road on a bike ride that nobody saw me on?' That's idiotic. It just would not have happened,” Williams said. Especially if Steve was such a “criminal mastermind” that he left no DNA or blood evidence at the scene, in his car, office or condo. Steve exhibited a “consciousness of innocence,” he said, not of guilt.