CHAPTER 29
On October 8, 2008, a Daily Courier article ran a story with this headline: POLICE HOPE TO MAKE ARREST IN KENNEDY MURDER SOON.
The DeMocker family had been feeling the walls closing in on Steve because the detectives had never said they were looking at any other suspects. But after reading this article online, Steve’s mother got excited, thinking that investigators had finally settled on another suspect to arrest.
They have found the right person, she thought.
Then she talked to Steve. “So they are going to arrest somebody,” she said. “Have they found a suspect?”
Steve knew better. “I think they are planning to arrest me,” he said.
Two weeks later, Steve surprised Carol’s mother with a call. Ruth had invited Katie and Charlotte down for Thanksgiving, and they were planning to come. But Steve told Ruth that he was concerned she might not be up to having the girls stay with her and cooking them a big meal.
Still miffed that he hadn’t offered his condolences, Ruth did not take kindly to Steve’s feigned “concern.”
“Of course I’m up for having them here,” she told him. “I love them and I want them to come.”
That remark sent Steve into a monologue about his struggles with his own grief, which Ruth did not believe. The whole call seemed entirely manipulative to her. It was the only time she could remember him calling her, other than when he was leaving A.G. Edwards for UBS and he asked if he could take her and her husband’s account with him.
The next morning, on October 23, Lieutenant Dave Rhodes, Sergeant Luis Huante and Detective John McDormett showed up at the UBS office on Camelback Road in Phoenix to talk to Steve.
Announcing that they had search warrants for the office and Steve’s condo, Huante read Steve his Miranda rights. They patted him down, then took him into a room to question him.
Their first query was about the golf club head cover. “It was laying on a shelf in the garage, and when we went there two hours later that golf club sock was gone,” Rhodes said.
“Right,” Steve said.
“We’d like to know where it is,” Rhodes said.
Steve contended that he didn’t know the deputies were looking for it at the time. When he found it the next day, he gave it to his attorney. “I said, ‘John, what do I do at this point?’ and he said, ‘Let me look into it,’ but there is an explanation—”
“Yeah, we’re very—our curiosity is very high about that.”
“He came back to me and he said, ‘Give it to me.’”
“Why did you give him the golf club sock?” Rhodes asked.
“Because he’s my attorney, and I’ve been—I—I—because that seems wise.”
“I don’t mean that, Steve. I’m kind of confused,” Rhodes said. “The detectives came back, and they were looking for it, and then it was gone, but what made that something that you—”
“Because I overheard them in my garage saying something about a golf thing,” Steve said, acknowledging that he’d heard the detectives talking in “hushed tone around the corner” about it, then made him sit on the stairway while they compared photos taken earlier in the day.
Huante said the golf sock was listed on the search warrant that he’d handed Steve that day. This issue became a matter of debate and interpretation later, because the defense contended that the warrant listed only golf clubs.
Rhodes told Steve that they’d been in contact with his attorney, John Sears, who told them that he’d gotten plenty of information from Steve “that made him confident that you weren’t involved in the death of your wife, but we’d asked him and asked him and asked him to . . . provide that information, and it just never happened.”
Rhodes went on to say that the killer rode a mountain bike into the forest behind Carol’s house, jumped the fence and went in the back door. “Mountain bike tires are kind of common, but they had the exact same kind of tires that you had on your mountain bike,” he said.
“I’ve always wondered what it was that made you guys so focused on me other than the fact that I’m an ex,” Steve said, admitting that he also “didn’t have an alibi that night.”
“Well, that was a big deal,” Rhodes said. “Is there any way that you could have ridden behind her house that night?”
“My bike has not been at or near that property in I don’t know how many years—not with me on it.... And I have been out in that area in days or weeks previous, once in a while, but not right there behind the house. I mean, if I were going to go over there, if I were going to enter that property, why would I go over the fence there? I mean, I built that gate.”
Since the day the detectives had searched his condo, Steve said, he’d learned that Jim Knapp had been making accusations that Steve had been physically abusive to Carol. But that, Steve said, “never, ever happened. Not ever.”
McDormett assured Steve that Jim Knapp and his comments had nothing to do with this. “No, it comes down to, you know, the time frame is huge, and the mountain bike tracks behind her house are big. I mean, it rained that day, earlier, and there’s no other tracks out there except these . . . and most reasonable people are going to say, ‘Wow, that’s extremely coincidental.’ And so we’ve never had the benefit of hearing from you about it.”
“I’ve never had any experience like this,” Steve said, noting that he talked to them for hours at the station without an attorney, and had since been roundly scolded for it. “I’ve assumed that being innocent counted for something.... I loved Carol.”
Steve said they’d gotten together for coffee the day after Katie’s send-off, and the tone between them had only grown warmer since they’d gotten past the roughest part of the divorce. “I asked her if she’d be interested in starting to see each other again, and she said, ‘I’m here. We’ll take it from there.’ I don’t know that we would have reconciled. I don’t know.”
Rhodes brought the interview back to the golf sock. When the detectives came back, he said, “Why would you have taken the sock at that point?”
“I didn’t take the sock.”
“No, no, I mean—”
“I never touched it.”
“You moved it off the shelf.”
“I never moved it off the shelf. I haven’t touched that thing. I told you, I have an explanation. I’ve given it to my attorney.”
From there Rhodes honed in on the books that Steve ordered on Amazon, about “basically hiding your identity and covering your tracks and that kind of stuff.”
“How to live abroad,” McDormett chimed in.
“Right. Stupid fear-based stuff,” Steve said. “My brother—”
“Your brother suggested it?”
“I don’t want to get him in trouble,” Steve said. “If you guys arrest me, I’m going to face this down in trial. I’m not going anywhere.”
Rhodes said they needed to take him back to Prescott and ask him more questions. If he wanted to talk to his lawyer, that was fine, but he would be in custody until they got their questions answered.
“Am I under arrest?”
“Right now you’re in investigative detention.”
“We’ve got serious questions about that night and about your involvement in your ex-wife’s murder, and if they don’t get resolved, you definitely could be facing charges.”
They drove Steve back to Prescott in the passenger seat of the cruiser without handcuffs. He was placed in an interview room at the Yavapai County Jail, but after his attorney told detectives that Steve didn’t want to talk to them, they booked him on felony charges of first-degree homicide and burglary.
That same day the investigators served search warrants at Steve’s office and condo, his storage facility in Prescott, Katie’s apartment in Scottsdale, where he stayed sometimes, and for his rental car. They were looking for the books he ordered on Amazon and the golf club head cover.
During the searches they found a book, How to Be Invisible, some e-mails between Steve and Barb, as well as his handwritten notes about a pro-and-con competition involving Carol and Barb. On the last page he’d written, games, sets, match, tournament, and listed Barb as the winner. When she learned of this competition from detectives, she described it as “frightening.”
A couple of hours later, attorney John Sears turned over the golf club head cover to Detective Theresa Kennedy.
Steve had taken the head cover to Sears’s office on July 5, where the attorney examined it for bloodstains or other biological evidence, then put it into his safe until he was specifically asked for it.
Some in law enforcement, including then-Sheriff Steve Waugh, believed that Sears was wrong to do this, viewing it as evidence tampering and obstructing the investigation. Waugh filed a complaint against Sears with the State Bar of Arizona, alleging that Sears acted improperly.
But the bar association, from which Sears had received a “pre-read” at the time on whether he was required to turn it over voluntarily, did not agree.
“They told him to preserve it and if he was ever asked for it by law enforcement, he should produce it, which is exactly what he did,” defense investigator Rich Robertson said. “It was in a paper bag on a shelf with a note attached. It sat there until [the detectives] asked for it and he gave it to them.” That’s because a defendant has a Fifth Amendment right not to volunteer evidence that could be incriminating, he said.
The bar counsel dismissed Waugh’s complaint, noting that Sears “safeguarded the item from damage, deterioration or destruction until the police agency obtained a more specific search warrant.” He noted that Sears did so based on advice from the bar’s ethics counsel and another criminal defense attorney.
Later that day Detective McDormett, Sergeant Huante and Lieutenant Rhodes went to Steve’s condo to interview Charlotte again.
Katie had just walked in the door after flying in from Los Angeles, where she was a senior at Occidental College, majoring in politics. In big-sister protective mode, she was not thrilled to see the officers through the peephole.
The officers tried to persuade Charlotte to come outside to talk to them alone, but Renee and Katie would not allow it. Renee asked if the officers could come inside to talk to Charlotte, then went to call John Sears. That’s when Katie stepped in.
Huante tried to assure them that neither Charlotte nor Katie was in trouble. “My motive is I want to find out what happened to your mom,” he said.
“We all do,” Katie said.
“Okay, but based on that I want you guys to tell me the truth. That’s all I’m asking.”
“Have we given you some reason to believe we have not told you the truth?” Katie asked.
“Yes,” Huante said. “You were asked a couple of questions and your answer was ‘I don’t feel comfortable answering that.’”
“That was not lying to you,” Katie countered. She said it was a difficult night for all of them and she wanted to take care of her sister, who was upset. “Am I obligated to speak with you right now?”
“No, ma’am,” Huante said.
“Okay, then I think we’re going to do this another time.”
“Yeah,” Charlotte agreed.
“I really do appreciate everything that you’re doing, and I’m not trying to be difficult here, but I don’t think you understand what it is we’re going through,” Katie said.
Huante pressed on, trying to engage Charlotte right in front of Katie. “When can I speak with you?” he asked.
“That’s not up to her,” Katie snapped.
Renee refused to talk to them as well, saying that she wanted to speak to a lawyer before doing so. “None of us are lying to you,” she said. “I know that you think we’re trying to cover for Steve, but even if Steve did this . . . he would never compromise himself by telling any of us.”
Katie apologized for being short with them, but said she still had heard no reason why the interview needed to happen immediately, especially when she’d just finished telling them by phone that she would prefer to wait until the next day. Then she asked them to leave.
Trying to soften the impression left by Huante’s confrontational approach, McDormett said, “Before I leave, you guys just have to understand we’re working for your mom. We’re not the enemy.”
Katie said she wasn’t trying to prevent them from finding out what happened to her mother, but she was “a little bit insulted by you treating me like this.... It has nothing to do with wanting to hide anything about the investigation.”