CHAPTER 27
In late May 2008, Carol called out to her closest friends for help. Right before her divorce trial she sent out a group message, asking them to please think of her on the Wednesday and Thursday of that week, when she expected to be in court. Steve had forced them to go to trial by not accepting her last two counterproposals.
Most of you know that I have lived in a kind of self-inflicted, unconscious relationship-hell for the past many years, she wrote, noting that she’d filed for divorce after finally waking from this “trance state of self-torture.”
Steve is fighting me over the simplest of issues, and he is truly one of the smartest and most persuasive people I know, so I am more than a bit nervous about my ability to stay unwaveringly grounded in my own truth and integrity and not devolve into fear & anxiety.
Underscoring that asking for help was something she’d only recently learned how to do, she requested that they think of her while they did what they loved most, then to write her passionate and enthusiastic descriptions about it. Her e-mail closed with the repeated exclamation of “thank you!” in multicolored fonts, followed by a string of capital O’s and X’s.
After the brief trial was over, Carol sent out an update, thanking them for the inspiring and overwhelming “outpouring of love” and joyous energy she’d received—more, in fact, than she’d felt in her entire life, which filled her with gratitude. Even her clients at Pia’s surprised her with a plethora of gifts, from poems to drawings, flowers and hugs. All of this, she wrote, helped her through the settlement talks, feeling “held and guided.”
I got a clear vision of how it had taken me not only 25 years to position myself for this moment in time, it had taken lifetimes! she wrote.
As she felt waves of fear and anxiety coming, she told them, she felt herself opening up to accept rather than resist the feelings as she asked for help to see what she hadn’t been able to see before—what her part and responsibility had been in her own emotional pain. It had been a process, she said, but she felt as if she’d reached a new place.
This week, she wrote, was her time to win. She went on to describe her feelings of triumph—feelings that some close to Carol suggested could have been her downfall in the end: Carol had finally found the strength to say no to Steve. She would not continue this struggle, she said, and she would not prolong this relentless, torturous relationship anymore. And that, they say, may have been too much for Steve to bear.
On May 28, Carol described in a subsequent e-mail how she walked into court, strong, to face her old fears and old wounds, her “self-lies about unworthiness.” She found a way to make it up to her inner child for all the years she’d “abandoned and betrayed” her. Carol had learned how to love that inner child, to love herself and to stand up to her fears.
Haggling to the end, Steve made a concession he hadn’t been willing to make before, and, in turn, he got Carol to agree to pay him child support. Within a couple of hours, they were able to reach a settlement without going to trial and calling witnesses.
As part of the agreement, Carol would have to pay off her credit card balance, which was $32,000 in June 2008, as well as the full $12,500 balance on one of Steve’s cards, and $20,000 on another, the last of which she paid in June. She also assumed the liability for the Bridle Path mortgages as well as a home equity line that Steve had taken out in his “sole and separate name,” which she subsequently wrote to him that he’d “succeeded in sticking [her] with, rendering Bridle Path an unsalable albatross.”
Steve had refinanced the Bridle Path house in June 2003 for $408,000 and took out a second mortgage for $70,000 in January 2004. At some point he also took out a second mortgage on his condo for $59,000.
During a long series of e-mails, Steve wrote her back on June 15, 2008—Father’s Day—that while he thought she was being “incredibly grasping and unreasonable” and “self-absorbed,” he viewed her actions from a position of compassion. He believed she was actually trying not to let go of him, that she was acting out of “some deeper fear of being finished with each other.” Despite his many years of acting to the contrary, he contended, he was just as uninterested in hanging onto our old attachment as I remain open to the possibility of something new.
Either way, he was done arguing. Please let this marriage be over, he pleaded. He closed by saying that he’d tried calling her twice on Father’s Day, during which he thought of her “with gratitude.”
As part of the settlement, Carol was to receive Steve’s 401(k) payout, which turned out to be $197,367 before taxes and penalties for early withdrawal, and netted her $149,334 after they split the excess over $180,000. But Carol didn’t see how she was going to make it after having to pay income tax on that sum on top of covering the credit card balances.
After their day in court, Carol drove out to Watson Lake. There, she told friends, she gazed at the water, the sky, the birds and the clouds, and she wept—“with deep sadness, huge grief, profound relief and uncontrollable joy.” She’d finally managed to step up and love herself. As she said in an e-mail, It was huge!
Carol called Katherine from the lake, crying. “I love myself too much to lose myself to Steve,” she said.
It seemed, at last, that the prolonged dissolution was finally resolved. Or so she thought.
A few weeks later, on June 18, Carol dropped off a bundle of clothes to sell at a friend’s resale clothing boutique, Whatever Was. Teary and depressed, she explained that she was worried about her finances and the credit card debt hanging over her, not to mention that her youngest daughter had chosen to live with Steve over her.
Whatever her friend Linda Harrison couldn’t sell at the shop, Carol said, she would try to sell at her upcoming yard sale. The two women knew each other through the store, and also from Unity Church in Prescott.
Linda often saw Steve having coffee at least once a day at the Wild Iris, a coffee shop next door to her boutique.
Carol told friends she was surprised to learn that Steve had been able to take out the second mortgage on Bridle Path without her knowledge. The house was still in her name even though he’d been making the payments. It was basically underwater, she said, and she was going to have to move out because she couldn’t afford to make the payments. Carol was unable to qualify to take over the mortgages and credit line because of her poor credit rating.
As Carol wrote her divorce accountant on June 30, 2008: It’s upside down, because of the second [mortgage] in Steve’s name that got given to me as an encumbrance on the property, so I can’t sell it in this market.
As Carol put it to Joanne Frerking, “I am going to have to just have a yard sale and walk away, and go do something somewhere. I don’t know what.”
A couple of days before the murder, Joanne ran into Carol at Costco and was concerned by her appearance.
“She was just distraught and upset, and she didn’t look good,” she recalled. “She looked sort of disheveled. She looked skinny. She looked worn. She didn’t have the bright light Carol used to have.”
Just as Carol would tell Katherine, she told Joanne that she’d just seen Steve and he was trying to get back together with her.
“Steve was over last night,” she said. “He just doesn’t get it.”
One of Carol’s neighbors later told Joanne that within a day or two of the murder, she was walking her dogs when she heard someone crying. It was Carol, out for a run. Carol stopped and they chatted.
“He said he wants us to get married again,” Carol said. “He just doesn’t get it.”
Soon after the family send-off at the airport for Katie, Carol told her mother that Steve had texted her, asking to meet for coffee.
“Carol, don’t go,” Ruth pleaded. “Don’t be a fool. He’s going to try to sweet-talk you.”
Carol didn’t bring up the coffee date again, so Ruth was surprised to learn years later that her daughter had actually met up with Steve. “What an insane—after the divorce went through? Oh, gosh. He never gave up on his charm, did he?”