CHAPTER 28
On July 2, the day Carol was murdered, Barb O’Non spoke with Steve by phone. Their conversation, she recounted later, was “warm and friendly.”
She remembered this well, because that day was also her son’s seventeenth birthday. After having her nails done, she and her son celebrated his special day at Buffalo Wild Wings restaurant in Phoenix before heading home to Anthem.
She texted Steve at 8:46 P.M., as soon as she got home, but she could tell that he didn’t open the message. Like Renee, she immediately thought he was “probably with another woman again somewhere,” because it wasn’t like him not to respond to her text right away.
In her experience Steve was never without his cell phone. It was always on and he took it everywhere. “I don’t recall a time ever in the years that I was with him, the many years, that the phone was ever left unattended or away from him. I remember once watching him take it into a shower,” she later testified.
Steve called her at 12:14 A.M. on July 3, but she didn’t answer because she was asleep. She didn’t hear the phone ring or realize he’d called until later.
She learned of Carol’s death later that morning, in a six forty-five call on her way to work. John Farmer, a coworker from the UBS office in Prescott, told her that sheriff’s detectives were there, looking to talk to Steve. John called back moments later, informing her that “Carol had been found dead in her home.” Stunned, Barb pulled over to process the news.
Minutes later, Barb heard from an attorney friend who called to tease her that the police had descended on the UBS office, and had put up crime scene tape, because she and Steve had been arguing over the dissolution of their business partnership. Once she told him the true nature of the detectives’ visit and asked if he thought she needed an attorney, he called back with the name of a Phoenix lawyer he’d contacted on her behalf.
“You need to call him now,” he said. “He’s waiting to see you.”
When Steve called her that afternoon, she told him she was going to consult with an attorney.
“Why?” he asked.
“Because I could be seen as a suspect,” she said.
“You couldn’t have murdered Carol any more than I could have,” he said. “Anyway, it was an accident. There was a ladder there and she fell. It was an accident.”
That same day, Barb hired attorney Michael Terribile, who advised her not to talk to law enforcement until they stated in writing that she was not a suspect. The county attorney’s office initially refused to do this; Detective Doug Brown said they were trying to interview her to rule her out as a suspect because Steve or one of his family members had indicated that she might be involved somehow in the murder. But, ultimately, Brown was able to get the prosecution to write a letter saying that Barb was not a target of the investigation, which enabled him to schedule an interview with her for July 12.
The fact that Barb hired her own attorney raised a few eyebrows, including Katie DeMocker’s. In talking with Renee and Katherine, who then relayed these conversations to investigators, Katie said that if her father had wanted to kill Carol, he would have done so before finalizing the divorce, and he also would have planned it better. Because of his imminent split with Barb over the client list and accounts, Katie suggested that Barb could have killed Carol because she’d always wanted to be with Steve. If Barb made it look like Steve did the murder, then she would also get to keep his entire $110 million portfolio.
Brown subsequently investigated Barb’s alibi, confirming through her cell phone records her whereabouts on the night of the murder. Both her text to Steve and his call to her pinged off the cell tower near her house in Anthem.
Barb told Brown that Steve had tried to persuade her not to go through with their financial split, saying she wouldn’t be able to make it on her own. She also recalled that Steve had been furious with Carol during the divorce proceedings and had said several times that he’d wished Carol were dead. Barb said she didn’t think he was joking.
Two years later, when Barb testified at the pretrial hearing, she changed her story, saying that Steve had made comments several times that “he thought that they would all be better off if [Carol] were dead. I didn’t take him seriously.” She couldn’t remember the context, but she said, “There were instances where he was unhappy with Carol around the children, and he thought that they would be better off if the kids were just with him.”
She told Brown that Steve’s habit of spending more than he earned, and specifically his frequent stays at the Phoenician, had been an issue in their personal relationship as well.
She also raised another curious tidbit. About six months earlier, she said, Steve had begun injecting himself daily with HGH (human growth hormone), and was also getting testosterone shots. He made an appointment for Barb to see his naturopathic doctor so she could get HGH injections, too, but she refused.
Because of tensions relating to their split, Barb tried to cut off most of her personal contact with Steve. But on June 27, 2008, as they were finalizing their settlement and division of clients, Steve wanted to meet for dinner at the Westin Kierland Resort.
“He wasn’t happy about either [our business or personal] relationship ending, and I was trying to keep things on a friendly note,” she testified, adding that she really wanted to break personal and professional contact with Steve after that.
Instead, they ended up spending that Friday night together at a hotel. She blamed her lack of resolve on too much alcohol. The way Barb told the story in court later, it had an uncanny parallel to Steve’s meeting with Carol and the girls at the airport that Saturday, and his subsequent coffee meeting with Carol that Sunday.
“The dinner was very friendly,” Barb said. “It was the way it used to be. It was warm.... It was the first time in many, many days, weeks and months that we’d had friendly conversation.”
The next morning when they woke up, Barb told him she was concerned to see him looking flushed, but he said he always looked like that. He told her, [the HGH was] a miracle drug that helped with mental acuity, pains and made his workouts much better, Brown wrote in his report.
Barb had been intent on talking to him that morning about breaking off contact for a while, but Steve was distracted, texting with Carol about going shopping with the family before heading to the airport for Katie’s send-off. This, Barb said later, left her feeling “pretty disgusted” with herself.
“I felt as though I had been . . . fooled one more time,” she testified in 2013, that “all of the flirtatious, charming, seductive talk over the night before was really nothing but talk.”
She’d tried repeatedly to break up with him in the past, but he always managed to talk her out of it, telling her how important she was and that he was sorry.
“He would be in tears. He would tell me I was all that mattered, that it was a terrible mistake he had made. It meant nothing. He would spend the rest of his life making it up to me.”
The tears always seemed to work on her. Parting with Steve was so difficult that she started seeing a therapist to help her do it.
A couple of weeks after Carol’s murder, Steve asked Barb to go hiking and camping with him near Durango, Colorado, but she declined.
“I was really trying to be done with the relationship,” she said later, but he was trying to save it, to “fix things between us. He wanted to talk. He wanted to go camping, and we never went camping. I thought it was odd.”
“You didn’t think Steve was going to take you up in the mountains and kill you, did you?” defense attorney John Sears asked during the 2010 pretrial hearing.
“I didn’t know what the purpose was. I wasn’t going to go up into the mountains with Steve at that time.”
“You weren’t afraid of Steve, then, were you?”
“I was. At that time I was.”
Prosecutor Joe Butner asked Barb why Steve’s camping invitation was more worrisome in light of Carol’s recent murder.
“Because I had no idea what happened, and I wasn’t going to place myself at that time in a position where—we’ve already established . . . I am not an outdoors person. I wouldn’t know how to take care of myself outside, out of doors.... I wasn’t willing to go camping with him.”
Sears argued that much of Barb’s testimony at the pretrial hearing should be inadmissible at trial because it was too prejudicial. Butner disagreed, arguing that “this is highly probative of the kind of pressure that he was experiencing when he cracked and killed his wife.”
Two weeks after the camping invitation, Barb went out to La Jolla, California, to get away from everything going on in Prescott. She was horrified by what had happened to Carol and wanted some quiet alone time.
Steve continued to insist that they really needed to talk; he just didn’t want to do it in Arizona. He flew out to meet her at the hotel, where she’d been staying for the past week, arriving the day before she was planning to leave. They had dinner, then went back to her room.
Given that she’d turned down his camping offer, Barb could not explain later why she’d agreed to let him join her in La Jolla so soon afterward. “I don’t understand it myself,” she said.
By now Steve was no longer able to claim that Carol’s death was an accident. “It was obvious, at that point, that it was a homicide,” she said. Steve told her he didn’t kill Carol and was worried about being falsely accused and arrested for her murder.
It was then that he told her where he’d been the night Carol was killed, recounting a story somewhat similar to what he’d told law enforcement, but also similar to the story Jake first told investigators, which Steve denied.
Steve told Barb that he was at the fitness center, intending to finish his workout that night after the aborted bike ride. He was going to use the club phone to call Charlotte when he realized he had a spare cell battery in the car. So he went out to his BMW, loaded the battery into the phone and called his daughter, who reminded him that they were supposed to have dinner together that night.
“He said he had forgotten that,” Barb said.
As Barb listened to his story, parts of it sounded fishy. She’d done regular workouts with him in the past and had never known him to let his phone go dead or to find himself without a spare battery. He rarely, if ever, had gone for a bike ride while he was living at Alpine Meadows. Plus he made such a big deal about the physical exertion it took to get the bike back to the car with a flat tire, it didn’t make sense that he’d go for a workout after all that. She also doubted his forgotten-dinner explanation.
“Charlotte was very important to both of her parents, and at that time, in my opinion, there’s no way that Steve would forget he had a dinner with Charlotte,” she said.
Steve had been with other women during the course of their relationship, including Carol. Barb had heard or suspected that he was involved with Renee, but he always claimed that she was simply his masseuse and friend. While Barb and Steve were talking in La Jolla, she asked him about Renee again. This time he acknowledged sleeping with her and apologized, just as he had more than half-a-dozen other times after having sex with other women.
“He told me that it was a huge mistake and that he had only slept with her once, and it was all an error, and that it was over, and that [Renee] was upset.” None of this turned out to be true, Barb said, but his apology was tearful, “warm and genuine.”
In early October 2008, just as UBS management was finalizing the split between them, Steve proposed to Barb one last time while they were on her back porch in Anthem.
“He said that he had learned a lot about what he wanted out of life, and that the business didn’t matter, that none of it mattered, that he wanted to be together, and we could go wherever I wanted and do whatever I wanted, but that we could get married,” she said later. “I don’t really recall how I answered him. I don’t think I did.”