Then No One Can Have Her (37 page)

“I haven't even seen one thing showing he was even on Carol's property,” she said, adding that she rejected the guilty verdict.

She, too, asked the judge to show leniency, to give Steve some hope he could do the things he loved before he died and to “take the least unjust action that you can take today in an utterly unjust situation.”

Sharon DeMocker, the physician, spoke less animatedly than her sister, as she described Steve as a “natural born leader” and “the creator of games, adventures and sometimes misadventures.” He'd taught his siblings how to play fair and take care of each other, opened up a world of possibilities and helped boost her confidence while climbing and kayaking. She had put her life in his hands before, and if she could, she would do so again.

She and Steve had talked about traveling with medical teams to Third World countries, which obviously wasn't going to happen now, but Steve had already helped keep “many people alive,” she said.

Switching to Carol, whom she described as a sister, confidante and “joyful, loving presence,” Sharon said her sister-in-law had inspired the big, close-knit DeMocker family.

“There's a giant hole that was ripped in our hearts more than five years ago with Carol's murder,” she said. The justice system only added to the injury when it not only failed Carol but her family and theirs by convicting the wrong man.

As Sharon walked back to her seat, she turned to Steve and mouthed, “I love you.”

 

 

After Craig Williams asked to take a break, Steve's daughters made their statements. Katie went first, describing her family home growing up as “balanced, beautiful and overwhelmingly loving.”

Her father skied down the most advanced slopes, carrying her as a two-year-old on his back, and her mother tucked her into bed. Their family danced together to loud music. Her mom worked in the garden and sprayed her with the hose; her dad bounced her and her sister on the trampoline. They all sat around the table after dinner and laughed till it hurt—memories that today are “both beautiful and sad.”

Her parents balanced each other out, she said. Describing Carol as “unconditional loving, openhearted, open-armed and open-minded,” she said Carol brought light into the room. She “loved people to a fault” and “forgave easily, sometimes too easily.” Saying she was a better person for knowing her mother, Katie's voice started breaking.

Describing Steve as a kind and “deeply devoted father” who taught her how to climb rocks, ski, and kayak, Katie said he also showed her how to value herself as a woman, to be strong and confident and to believe “that I was as good as any boy.”

As she acknowledged that this same man was accused of killing her mother, Katie said that, as a daughter of both the accused and the victim, she would rather talk about “healing and forgiveness,” because that's how she was raised. Noting that the judge had the ability to grant her father the possibility of parole in twenty-five years, she asked Donahoe to do so.

As she and Charlotte passed each other in the aisle, Katie kissed her younger sister.

Taking the family's final turn at the podium, Charlotte spoke of her “self-destructive path” during her parents' divorce. She described her father as “my protector, my teacher and my greatest advocate,” who gave her ice cream as an adolescent when she was feeling anxious. “He still remains someone I deeply respect and admire.”

Her mother's death has been “absolutely devastating,” she said. “I miss her joyful spirit.” And the fact that neither her father nor her mother would see her get married or watch her children being born constituted an “excruciating punishment.” In a soft voice she asked the judge not to “force the permanent loss of a second loved one.”

 

 

Finally, Steve DeMocker stood to make his own statement, shuffling up to the podium in his ankle and waist chains, flanked by his two attorneys. Firmly, strongly and yet calmly, he declared his innocence to the judge in a low, monotone voice.

“I did not kill Carol,” he said. “We loved each other for more than twenty years. Our marriage was over, but not our affection for each other. . . . I'm incapable of violence against her.”

To believe that he killed Carol was to doubt
her
judgment, he said. They were still a family, and still as “fiercely protective of our children as any parents. I would no more have harmed her than I would harm my daughters by taking her from them.”

He told the judge he had nothing more to ask than his siblings and daughters had been asking since the night of Carol's murder. Justice for her would not be accomplished by putting a falsely accused man in prison forever, he said, contending that the injustice to Carol was only compounded by taking him away from their children.

Steve turned to face his family, with his back to the court reporter, and thanked them for the faith they'd shown him. He told his daughters how proud he was of them, and “of the strength and the grace” they'd displayed when faced with the loss of both parents.

At that point the air-conditioning went on and the court reporter said she couldn't hear him, so Steve gave up and returned to the table. Katie started crying as she, Charlotte, Sharon and Mary circled their arms around each other for strength.

 

 

After another break Craig Williams gave a brief statement, noting that when he first started working on this case, the hefty files filled two giant trucks that had to be unloaded.

“I can tell you one thing for certain. It's not just that Steve DeMocker is not guilty. It's that Steve DeMocker is innocent of killing Carol Kennedy. This is a wrongly convicted man.”

Judge Donahoe started his comments by disagreeing with the family members who had dismissed the verdict and the justice system as unfair.

“It was a just verdict,” he declared.

The outcome, he said, could have been different depending on how the trier of fact determined the credibility of the witnesses and weight of the evidence, for which he had considered “some residual doubt.” But, he added, “The thing that I can't get past is this horrific crime scene. I saw these pictures, and I'm not sure I'm ever going to be able to erase those photos from my mind.”

“This was a premeditated murder,” he said. “It was a brutal murder. And from all appearances, the motive was money.” As a result the circumstances of the murder outweighed the call for a lenient sentence.

Noting that Steve had already spent 1,919 days in jail, the judge fulfilled most of the prosecution's requests for sentencing, making sure that Steve DeMocker would spend every last day he had in prison, plus twenty-one years for the other counts.

Donahoe also ordered that Steve pay restitution to Carol's trust—$150,000 with an additional eighty-four percent surcharge, as well as the $700,000 in the insurance payments. The monthly amount, to be determined by state corrections officials, should be paid to the court and then to an interest-bearing account.

“Mr. DeMocker, good luck to you, sir,” he said.

With that, the bailiffs walked Steve, whose expression remained stoic and unemotional, out of the courtroom with little fanfare.

I'd already called Craig Williams's office before the hearing to introduce myself. Now I approached him to ask if he would agree to an interview with me at some point. He said, rather abruptly, that he would have to get permission from his client, then promptly started talking to a couple of local reporters. I shrugged it off as a small-town snub.

To put someone in prison for life when detectives couldn't even put him at the crime scene “ought to shock the conscience,” Williams said. “The investigation in this case is unbelievable.”

Yes, what was done to Carol was terrible, he said, but “that doesn't mean that it's Steve. You can luminol the whole planet,” he said, and you still wouldn't be able to put Steve at the scene.

After months of subsequent calls and e-mails to Williams with no definitive response, I sent a three-page letter to Steve in prison describing my attempts and my reasons for wanting to interview him, his defense team and his family, all of whom had stonewalled me so far.

Steve responded to me once via an e-mail from his sister Sharon, saying he needed to consult with his attorneys before doing so. When I received no further response, I e-mailed Sharon to follow up. She politely replied that she was sure Steve would contact me if he was interested in talking. He never did.

 

 

During the hearing the DeMocker clan looked like a bunch of angry, wounded and wronged soldiers, banding together for the battle of a lifetime. With him being the firstborn of nine kids, how could they not look up to him? Their worlds must have felt like they were falling apart, especially the youngest siblings.

Just as I'd thought at the start, the whole hugging ritual after each victim impact statement looked choreographed, as if they were thinking,
The world is watching. Let's show them how together we are—that we are a force to contend with.

Months later, after reading Randy Schmidt's report about Steve's postverdict calls with his family, in which they discussed ways to influence the media, I'm guessing that my first impressions weren't too far-off.

But it's also possible that this resulted from being watched and filmed for the past five years, as
Dateline, 48 Hours, 20/20
and now
Inside Edition
covered this story for episodes that wouldn't run until after the sentencing. Somehow this story from this tiny mountain town had shown up on the national media radar.

After the sentencing the DeMockers appeared more exhausted than anything. Looking out the window in the hallway outside the courtroom, they huddled to discuss whether to make a statement and, if so, what to say to the few media, including the
Inside Edition
crew, standing outside with a TV camera.

Outside the courthouse the crew blocked the sidewalk, so Michael DeMocker, who, as a staff photographer for the New Orleans
Times-Picayune,
apparently felt more comfortable with the media than his siblings
,
stepped forward to make a statement.

“The family is obviously as disappointed in the sentence as they were in the verdict,” he said. “Steve has a lot of appeals available to him. We're just going to stand by him while he does.” In the meantime, he said, “we will wrap our arms around his daughters.”

“It was the wrong verdict and the wrong sentence,” Sharon DeMocker added.

Jan DeMocker said she'd been back in Prescott for weeks at a time, and expressed her thanks to the people who had been good to her and who, even after a “horrible, long five years,” still seemed to believe in her son's innocence.

The
Inside Edition
crew shouted out questions and followed the family members as they walked to their respective cars. To me this overly aggressive behavior seemed predatory and big-city insensitive. It was also the talk of the family's lunch afterward.

Craig Williams filed a notice of appeal on February 3, 2014, after which attorney David Goldberg, of Fort Collins, Colorado, was appointed by the Yavapai County Public Defender's Office to represent Steve through the appellate process. Because this was designated a complex case, Goldberg got an extension on the filing deadline.

The appeal was filed a little more than a year later, in March 2015. Goldberg cited multiple grounds for requesting to vacate Steve's convictions and dismiss the case with prejudice. Short of that, he requested a new trial—with a different prosecutorial agency—as “the only way to erase the appearance of impropriety that surrounds this case.”

Before he'd even read it, defense investigator Rich Robertson said he believed the appeal had a good chance of producing a new trial. “When cases get as screwed up as this one did—for all the twists and turns and sideshow stuff that happened—it's almost inevitable that there was some mistake that occurs,” he said.

But Mike Sechez, the retired prosecution investigator, said justice had already been served.

“I don't
think
Steve DeMocker did it and was convicted,” he said, “I
know
one hundred percent in my mind that he did it. So his standing up there and saying, ‘I didn't do it,' is him still hoping that his sentence will be overturned. He will never admit that he killed his ex-wife as long as his daughters are alive.”

 

 

The Arizona State Bar investigation into Sheila Polk's allegations against John Sears, Steve's first lead defense counsel, was delayed until after Steve was convicted. It was finally completed in January 2015, resulting in dismissal of the bar charge against Sears.

The State Bar does not believe that we have the “clear and convincing evidence” necessary to prove the alleged misconduct,
Craig Henley, senior bar counsel, wrote in a letter to Polk.

While Sears did notarize the documents in which Steve disclaimed the insurance proceeds, Henley wrote, it was a different law firm that negotiated those details with Hartford and secured the proceeds. Similarly, it was another attorney who represented Charlotte and Katie DeMocker concerning the transfer of money to Carol's estate, and also in the girls' decision to give that money to their grandparents and ultimately to fund Steve's defense. Although Henley described the nature, timing and ultimate use of those money transfers as “suspicious,” he said Steve's daughters' testimony about these issues supported Sears's account of the events.

As the ultimate recipients of the proceeds, Katie and Charlotte were authorized to use the insurance proceeds as they wanted,
Henley wrote.

Finally, Henley stated, although Sears did make an “incomplete” statement about the insurance payout during his opening statement, it didn't “appear to have been a knowingly false statement.” During the investigation, Henley said, Sears argued in his own defense that his statement was “technically ‘correct,'” noting that the parties were about to craft a stipulation about these issues when Judge Lindberg had to step down.

 

 

Jim Knapp's friends were upset by how he was portrayed by Steve's attorneys at the second trial, in the local newspaper and also on the
Dateline
episode, all of which painted Jim as an “odd duck,” said Ken Korn, Jim's childhood friend.

“He wasn't that odd. He was a great guy,” Ken said. “And I just get kind of annoyed that he was being portrayed as some kind of weirdo.”

Like Ann Saxerud, Ken was also irritated that the defense went after Jim, saying he was obsessed with Carol, when he couldn't defend himself.

“I don't think he was,” he said. “I think he just relied on her friendship. I think they had a natural bond that way.”

The Jim Knapp whom Ken Korn once knew was not violent and would never have hurt Carol. In fact, Ken laughed when asked whether he'd ever seen Jim do anything physically violent.

“No, not at all.... There's no way. He's just not a violent guy. That's not part of his [makeup], especially to a woman.”

When Ken heard the theories that Jim was killed because he was part of a drug ring that came after him and killed Carol, or that perhaps Jim had killed Carol himself, Ken couldn't believe any of it. He knew Jim was taking prescription drugs for his medical issues, “but to say the ‘prescription drug ring,' I mean, c'mon.”

“He got passionate, whatever he was into,” Ken said. “He was like all of us, searching. I know what he was, I know the truth. Whatever happened to him, it's just really sad. My wife and I, we just said, ‘Poor Jim.'”

 

 

For Carol's friend Debbie Wren Hill, it was obvious that her murder was a crime of passion, as if the killer was saying,
“I'm mad about this, and take this! I don't want to give you six thousand dollars, and I didn't want you to leave!”

“It all added up,” she said, citing the cuts on Steve's legs and the long hours that he admitted to biking near Carol's house while his phone was off. “It didn't take rocket science to convict this man.”

Sometime after the sentencing, Ruth Kennedy asked Debbie if she thought Steve had convinced himself that he didn't murder Carol. “Do you think that's how he keeps this up?” she asked.

Debbie didn't know how to answer that question. “Clinically, it's possible that he's deluded, that he really has convinced himself that he didn't do this,” she said. “More likely is that he knows he did it and just doesn't want to come clean.”

When Debbie asked how this whole tragedy hadn't destroyed Ruth, Carol's mother replied that she would forgive Steve if he asked her; she couldn't live out the rest of her life if she didn't.

“I have prayed for him this whole time and it's helped me a lot more than it's helped him,” she said.

“You are an incredible inspiration for me because I don't know if I could do this, as her mother,” Debbie told her.

“I felt kind of sorry for him,” Ruth said.

In the end, Debbie said, “I deemed this as such a tragedy for everyone, including Steve. I mean, Steve, where was your impulse control when you did that? What I think is that he just flipped out and went into a rage and lost the ability to consider what the ramifications of his actions were going to be.”

 

 

While I was researching this book, I learned from Katherine Morris and Joanne Frerking that Carol had told them about Steve coming to the house a couple of nights before she was killed, trying to get her to reconcile with him. When I told Ruth about this, she said the tone she heard in Carol's last two words, “Oh, no,” matched that scenario.

Katherine said she was positive about the timing of his visit. She said she never mentioned it to investigators because they never asked; she just answered the questions they posed, and this never came up. But even if she and Joanne were confused, Steve had shown up at the house recently, unannounced, to drop off the artwork the day that Jim stopped him from coming inside. Carol had also told friends that Steve had come into the house unexpectedly with Thai food, and that she thought he'd been entering when she wasn't home and hacking into her e-mail.

Ruth said this scenario made it “even more logical that Carol said, ‘Oh, no,'” as in,
“Oh, no, you're not showing up inside my house again”
or
“Oh, no, you're not coming here again to try to get me to get back together with you.”

 

 

Sturgis Robinson said he believes Steve carried out the murder wearing a full rain suit, which he discarded somewhere in the hills afterward.

For him, Steve's motivation grew out of a confluence of factors. First, he was completely stunned that Carol actually went through with the divorce, then refused to reconcile. “It was the one constant that he could always count on in his life, that he could have Carol under his thumb,” Sturgis said.

Second, the divorce carried severe financial ramifications for him, which were worsened by the stock market crash and his growing debt. This, coupled with Barb's simultaneous move to break free of his control, financially and personally, was just too much for him to bear.

“I'm sorry that there's not more direct evidence that it was him, but I cannot imagine any other scenarios where it wasn't him,” he said. “Nothing was stolen and [Carol] wasn't raped.”

Looking back, Sturgis said he now believes that the entire community of Prescott was complicit in what amounted to Steve's domestic abuse of Carol by letting him get away with his “deviant behavior” and womanizing for so many years.

“Steve wasn't ostracized” and no one rose up in indignation when he slept with the midwife, he said. “We failed Carol in a domestic-dispute situation. We should have recognized it as being abusive.”

Sturgis started writing a book about this case, but gave up after putting several chapters together and facing the harsh reality that his friendship with Steve was never what he'd thought it was.

My friendship with Steve began over a woman,
Sturgis wrote.
Over the next twenty years we would share others. We would revel in our narcissism, our physicality and our good fortune. What handsome boys we were. How badly we behaved. I would share my deepest feelings with him. I would find employment for him. I would stick up for him when he mistreated others and I allowed him to tryst with his lovers in my house. I lied to Carol for him.

 

 

Charlotte DeMocker graduated from Arizona State University with a finance degree in May 2014, with neither parent there to watch her accept her diploma.

Carol's friend Katherine Morris came as their proxy, while Ruth Kennedy sat at home in Nashville, sad to be missing her granddaughter's important rite of passage.

“I'm eighty-nine, and that trip for the closing arguments just about did me in. It was pretty grueling,” Ruth said. “I don't know, the older you get the harder it is to do something like that. But I do have the lines of communication open. We do talk, sporadically, not as much as I'd like. I did talk to Charlotte the day she graduated. Katie called me on Mother's Day.”

Two days after Charlotte's graduation ceremony, the DeMocker family had its first contact visit with Steve in five years at the state prison in Florence, Arizona, where, unless he wins his appeal, he will be spending the rest of his days.

In the beginning Katherine couldn't believe that Steve had killed Carol. Sure, she thought, he was having affairs, but he wasn't a premeditated killer.

But now that she's come to believe that Steve was responsible, she “mindfully chooses” to think of him the way he was when they first met.

“At his core authentic self, he's good people. He really was a good father and a good provider, and illness and addiction took over. His addiction is what contributed to her death. They say in the big book for AA that sex and love addicts end up in jail or dead. He used and abused women to fill himself up, and when he couldn't have her anymore, he killed her.”

Although she stays in close touch with Katie and Charlotte, she said they purposely steer away from this painful topic.

“Katie and Charlotte are strong, strong, strong women,” she said. “They're becoming more clear as they are getting older, in setting boundaries” for themselves.

In some of the taped calls from prison, those boundaries came across in their tone of voice, as the young women told their father that they hadn't answered his previous calls because they were trying to study, pass tests and get jobs. They needed to focus on themselves.

“They are obviously very dear to me, and we don't talk about [the case]. Plain and simple,” Katherine said. “They know my stance. They know what I think. They know what I feel. They've known that from the beginning.”

Katherine was initially hesitant to do an on-camera interview with
Dateline
for its two-hour episode. But after discussing this with others close to Carol, they decided that someone needed to represent her, so Katherine agreed.