CHAPTER 24
While Carol and Steve were living apart, but still not truly separated, Carol’s friends encouraged her to stop seeing him altogether so she could move ahead on her own.
“You have so much to lose, don’t do this,” they told her.
And yet, she allowed herself to continue along the same downward trend, accepting Steve’s apologies and promises—like the time he came over with a couple dozen roses and the deed to the Bridle Path house.
“I’m not going to [screw] up again, but if I do, here’s the deed to the house,” he told her. “I’m serious this time.”
However, that, too, proved to be just another ruse to keep Carol tied to him.
One night before Thanksgiving Day in 2005 or 2006, Carol called Debbie Wren Hill, sobbing. Steve was with some woman, she said, and she felt sad. She missed having her family around her.
“It is so hard,” she said.
Debbie was concerned about the level of despair she heard in Carol’s voice. She sounded suicidal. “I am really worried about your safety,” Debbie said. “I’m wondering if I need to call somebody.”
Carol assured her that wasn’t necessary under the circumstances. “I would never make that my kids’ legacy,” she said. “But without them . . . I would probably do it.”
Hearing that, Debbie wanted to castrate Steve. “I wanted revenge on this man. I was just so sickened,” she recalled. “But I knew that Carol was going to see her way through to the solution.”
Debbie was right. In the last couple years leading up to her divorce, Carol did do the emotional work she needed to break free of Steve. But the years of conflict had taken a toll on her.
She lost quite a bit of weight, and although it’s unclear when, Carol was diagnosed with Graves’ disease, an autoimmune condition exacerbated by stress that can lead to an overactive thyroid gland. In women Carol’s age, symptoms can include weakness and fatigue, rapid or irregular heartbeat, memory loss and chest pain. If it goes untreated, the condition can lead to depression.
“She was not only emotionally distressed, she was physically falling apart from the stress of this relationship,” Debbie said.
With this stress came a change in the mood and tone of her artwork, which became much darker. “She used to use vibrant colors, and she was doing really interesting introspective work. It just became muddier,” Joanne Frerking said.
As did her mood. “She just became very depressed. She didn’t look good. She lost even more weight and she was thin. She was trying then to get past him and he would never leave her alone.”
And that, Debbie said, is what she still holds against Steve to this day. “The fact that he would not let her go. It was just a travesty the way he messed with her mind.”
When Carol finally realized that she had to permanently let go of Steve to save herself, she filed for divorce in March 2007. And this time it stuck.
It was baby steps from there.
As Carol began to move away from Steve emotionally, her friends encouraged her to start dating and try meeting men online. Steve had certainly been doing enough of that.
So she did. According to Steve’s defense team, Carol engaged in “risky behavior” by being on seven dating websites, but Katherine Morris said she knew of only one that Carol had really used: Match.com.
“I don’t believe she was an active member on seven,” Katherine said.
As investigators tried to identify the male DNA under Carol’s fingernails, they went through her e-mails to find men she’d met online, and obtained DNA swabs from ten of them nationwide. In interviews with some of these men, they said that they, too, were using multiple dating sites so they often couldn’t be sure if, when or how they’d met Carol. It appears that Carol was enrolled with dharma-match. com, Match.com, thesoulmatenetwork.com and spiritualsingles.com, often using the moniker “Carolita.”
In August 2011, the defense named one of these online friends—John Stoler, of Missouri—as a possible third-party culpability candidate for Carol’s murder, along with David Soule and Barb O’Non.
Among the many men pulled into the investigative web of this case, John Stoler was asked to provide a DNA swab based on what one defense attorney called Carol’s “terse kiss-off ” by e-mail on May 14, 2008. Stoler, however, hired an attorney and stonewalled investigators by refusing several requests for a DNA sample. Detectives never got a search warrant to force the DNA issue.
Instead, they tried to determine where he was at the time of the murder through his bank and phone records. Those records showed that someone used his ATM or credit cards between July 1 and 3 in California, at a restaurant in Toluca Lake, a Holiday Inn in North Hollywood and a McDonald’s in Blythe, then someone used those cards on July 4 in Scottsdale, Arizona. The records also showed that this man called Carol’s house at eight-sixteen on July 2, the morning she was murdered, from a number with the Phoenix area prefix of 602.
Another of Carol’s online friends, Edward McCollough, told investigators that he and Carol dated from October 2007 to February 2008, but they were never sexual. During that time they took two ten-day trips to Hawaii and New York on his dime. But when she hinted that it would be a good idea for her to move into his home, he told her he wasn’t ready for a serious relationship.
They stayed in touch because he thought she was such a great person, and they were still e-mailing until the day she was killed. Carol never spoke to him about her tenant, Jim Knapp, in anything but positive terms, which was not the case with Steve.
Edward told authorities that Carol had “disclosed more than one episode” in which Steve “ ‘went off’ in a way where Carol was afraid for her physical safety,” including one time a year earlier when she’d insisted on meeting Steve in a public place because of such concerns, Sergeant Tom Boelts wrote in his report.