CHAPTER 34
On the evening of May 19, 2009, Steve was reading on his cell bunk when he heard a man call to him through the air vent, which inmates sometimes used to communicate with each other. He didn’t know who it was, but he thought he recognized the voice from the dorm.
“Your ex-wife was killed by two guys from Phoenix,” the voice said, instructing Steve to get something to write down the details he was about to impart.
Standing on the toilet seat to get closer to the vent, Steve quickly scribbled down notes as the voice talked: Carol Kennedy and Jim Knapp regularly drank wine together in the evening, during which time Jim told her about his illegal drug dealings. These two guys showed up at the house and beat Carol to death with an axe handle because of Jim.
At least that’s the account that Steve gave attorney John Sears, a tale that has since been dubbed “the voice-in-the-vent story.”
When Steve met with Sears on May 22 to tell him this story, he handed over his four pages of handwritten notes from his conversation with the “voice.” Ever since he and Carol had lived in Vermont, he said, they’d kept a splitting-maul handle in their bedroom for protection because Carol didn’t want guns in the house. Carol had continued the practice even after they split up.
Before the “voice” story, Steve said he’d heard a similar account about Jim and Carol’s murder from a friend in another jail dorm. That friend had heard the story from his cellmate and was asked to pass it on to an inmate in Steve’s dorm. The voice said he wasn’t allowed to relay the information to Steve until the original source had given him the okay.
At this point Steve was in cell #1 in dorm N at the Camp Verde Jail. Of the fifteen cells in that dorm, only those in certain “pods”—two on the floor above, and two on the ground floor—were connected by air vents. Following that logic, Steve said he thought the voice had to be coming from cell #2, 8 or 9.
On the evening of June 1, Steve called Renee, very intent on having her and Charlotte visit him the next day, saying he’d gotten some information from a fellow inmate. He’d already told Renee about the other inmate’s account of the killing some days or weeks earlier.
Steve told Renee to bring Charlotte early so they could get into the first group of visitors. Hopefully, they would be able to visit in a private booth with doors they could close on either side of the glass, rather than one of the more open cubbyholes. He also said he wanted to speak to Charlotte alone first for a few minutes.
As Renee and Charlotte were driving over the next morning, Steve called to confirm that his daughter had brought a piece of paper and a pencil, as he’d requested.
They were, in fact, able to get a private booth. After waiting outside for a few minutes while Steve talked to Charlotte, Renee went in and saw that they both seemed upset.
Sitting down, Renee looked up at the glass, where Steve was holding up a sheet of paper with tiny handwritten words for her to read. Without her glasses Renee couldn’t make out the print very well, and she was also worried that someone might walk by and see them, so she quickly skimmed the note to get the gist of it. While Renee was reading, Charlotte wrote down the note’s contents, as Steve had instructed.
The gist was, essentially, that two guys and a woman in a prescription-drug ring had come to Carol’s house to “whack” her, because Jim Knapp was involved in illegal drug activities and had shared incriminating information with her.
The note was not only confusing, but the story seemed suspicious, even fabricated, to Renee. When she’d finished reading it, Steve said he wanted to get this information out to the lawyers, where it “could make a difference,” but he knew they wouldn’t believe the story if it came from him or from the inmate who wouldn’t talk because he feared being labeled a “snitch.” What he needed, Steve said cryptically, was someone on the outside to write an e-mail and send it to the authorities, to John Sears and to the prosecution.
“Have you told John about this?” Renee asked.
“No,” Steve said.
“Well, wouldn’t that be the person to tell?”
Renee knew that Steve was really asking her and Charlotte to do this deed for him, a prospect that made her uncomfortable. She told herself she wasn’t going to have anything to do with sending the e-mail, and she could see that Charlotte was struggling with the notion as well.
Still, although it sounded dangerous for Charlotte to do, Renee developed an intricate web of rationalization. She decided that she shouldn’t try to stop Charlotte from fulfilling her father’s request in case the story really was true, or, at the very least, if it would help create reasonable doubt in the case against him. He’d convinced Charlotte that the prosecution wouldn’t believe him if he tried to go to the authorities himself, because he was the only suspect they’d ever investigated. His goal was to get law enforcement to investigate a different suspect, specifically Jim Knapp. Steve was facing a possible death sentence, and Charlotte didn’t want to see her father put to death.
“It felt to me like he was up to something. I had the same mixed feelings that I’ve had the whole way through, which is that my intuitive sense is telling me he made up the story,” Renee said later. “This other part of me wanted to believe that there was some hope, that there was some other answer out there that he wasn’t guilty, so I wanted to believe that he had gotten that story from someone else.”
Although Renee later acknowledged her gut feeling that Steve had totally fabricated the voice story, she said he never admitted that to her.
As Renee and Charlotte left the jail and drove back to the condo, the teenager was teary-eyed, partly because she thought she’d finally learned what had happened to her mother. Not surprisingly, she remained upset for the rest of the day.
Confused, Renee read over the notes Charlotte had taken at the jail. Steve called Renee a couple of hours later to check on his daughter’s mood.
“How does she seem to you—okay?”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“All right. I just wanted to impress upon her that it’s necessary that this project really needs to be you and her.”
“She’s fairly nervous about it,” Renee said.
“Yeah, that’s why I just thought it would be best for you and her to have somebody else to talk to about this project.”
He also told Charlotte not to talk to anyone else but Renee. “It really needs to be a project for you and Renee, and I wouldn’t even trouble Katie with it, and definitely not John [Sears] for right now,” he said.
Steve called back a few hours later to check on Charlotte again. “Of course you know that all I can think about is the letter I wrote you and the questions in it,” he said. “Do you feel okay about this?”
“Yeah,” she said.
“Good, just checking. I don’t want to, you know, I was really hoping you’d feel okay about it.... It means a lot to me that the trust goes both ways. . . . I’m just asking you to trust my judgment.... Finally feels like there’s something we can do to fight back.”
But Renee—and the investigators who later listened to these taped conversations—believed that neither she nor Charlotte was comfortable with doing what Steve had asked them to do, for which, at that point, there was no real plan to carry out.
Initially Renee was resistant to go any further. “I’m not doing it and I don’t think you should do it,” she told Charlotte.
Charlotte seemed to believe that her dad’s story was true, and wanted to do whatever she could to help him, even though the whole prospect terrified her. It soon became clear that Charlotte was the one who had to do the deed. She wanted her dad home, and she had her own car. Plus Renee didn’t think she could stop the teenager anyway.
“She was sixteen at this time. Why not say to her, ‘No, you’re not doing that, and here’s why’?” Steve’s attorney asked Renee in 2011.
“I wish I had,” Renee replied. “I wish I had been able to think more clearly and I had been a stronger guide at that time.... The fact is, I was in over my head with huge, unbelievable amounts of work that I was doing all by myself. Charlotte was being horrible at home, and, frankly, I thought I wanted her dad home, too. She needs her dad.”
And because Renee believed that she couldn’t challenge Steve on a taped jail call, she said she also wished that she’d listened to her inner voice, which told her to talk to John Sears about the scheme.
“But the bottom line is, people in Steve’s life don’t want to disappoint him,” she said. “He gets people to work for him.”
The specifics of the plan to send the e-mail, which Steve said had to be sent anonymously, developed in the coming days during more cryptic calls.
On June 4, he told Charlotte that he wanted to make her more comfortable with the task at hand, so he’d been doing some research with a new cellmate. “There’s a bit of an expert in here,” he said. “He’s talking all about the technology of it.”
Investigators later learned that an inmate who was serving time for identity theft, fraud and forgery had moved into Steve’s cell that day.
As the plan came together, Charlotte and Renee discussed their reservations and how it would work. Charlotte visited the Prescott Public Library to find an Internet café where no one would know her, and from which she could safely send the e-mail. Renee assumed that meant a café in Phoenix or Scottsdale.
Charlotte would take a temporary phone, only for emergencies, but leave her regular cell phone in Prescott, thereby preventing anyone from tracking her whereabouts later through triangulation of the signal from her phone as it pinged off the towers. She also would wear sunglasses to mask her face from any surveillance cameras, and avoid social interaction with anyone who might remember her.
Charlotte and Renee visited Steve on June 9. Four days later, when Steve called his daughter, Charlotte told him, “I’ll do anything it takes.... Whatever you were talking before . . . I’ll do whatever you want.”
“I want you to get the message real soon,” Steve said. “I sent it to you through Renee, and Renee left it at her house.”
After their conversation he called his girlfriend. “Did you get the message to Char?”
“Well, it’s imminent,” Renee replied.
The next day, Steve assured Renee, “You are going to do something that is pivotal to getting me out.”
Steve also told Renee that if she had anything to give him privately, she should come to court and hand it to Sears, who could pass it on to Steve in a stack of legal papers, and vice versa, because no one searched those papers.
On June 18, Renee took Charlotte for another visit. Afterward, Steve called to thank Renee “for what you did today.”
Then he called Charlotte. “You’re running some errands tomorrow?”
“Yeah, lots of errands tomorrow,” Charlotte confirmed in their not-so-secret code.
“Thanks, sweetheart, you’ve helped me today.”
“Good, I hope so.”
When Steve called Charlotte first thing the next morning, she reiterated that she was about “to go do some errands” and expected to be back by six o’clock. He said he would call her then. (Investigators noted that he typically called her all day and night on her cell phone, “with no regard to what she was doing,” so the only reason he wouldn’t call her that day was so no one could track her phone activity.)
Renee gave Charlotte gas money for the trip. The only time Charlotte used her debit or credit cards that day was to rent a video in town.
A few minutes after hanging up with Charlotte, Steve called Katie. And as they talked about an interview that 48 Hours had just done for its episode on the case, they joked about Lithuanian hit men and contract killings, and about Carol being involved in an international drug trafficking ring, as investigator Randy Schmidt described in his report.
This conversation takes place 4½ hours before the anonymous e-mail is sent to John Sears describing hit teams, contract killings, and international drug trafficking rings, he wrote.
Charlotte turned off her cell phone, then drove that afternoon to the Netlans Internet Café on East Thunderbird Road in Phoenix, the first café that came up in Google searches for Phoenix and Arizona, and one of the closest to Prescott. She paid several dollars in cash to use a terminal for an hour, signing in as a “guest” at two o’clock.
Her first task was to set up a Gmail account in the name of “Anonymous Anonymous,” with the address of anonymousa4b9c4d3@gmail.com.
Next she sent an e-mail to John Sears at the address she had for him through the state bar association. She spent about thirty minutes trying to find an e-mail address for prosecutor Joe Butner, then she attempted to find one for Deputy County Attorney Mark Ainley or County Attorney Sheila Polk. Unsuccessful, Charlotte settled on adapting Sears’s bar association address to send the e-mail to Butner, but it bounced back as undeliverable.
Six minutes later she re-sent the first e-mail anonymously to Sears, asking him to forward it to the prosecutors: I don’t have their email and they need to read it more than anyone.
This e-mail later raised eyebrows among prosecution investigators because few people knew that Butner had taken over the case from Ainley. The investigators also could tell that the anonymous sender didn’t search for Sears’s e-mail address that day, so he must have already known it.
The e-mail, into which Charlotte later said she purposely inserted typos and misspellings, read as follows:
I can’t tell you who I am, but I can tell you what really happened the night Kennedy was killed. Knapp was running his mouth to Kennedy about a prescription drug deal he was in. Two men and one woman were sent to do them both. It was going to be a home invasion gone bad. Knapp and Kenedy used to drink together at night in her house.
The 2 men would take them if they were together and the woman would be out front. If Knapp was in his apt, one man would take Kenedy and the woman would take Knapp and one man would be out front. the Two men thought Kennedy and knapp were together but when they went into the back bedroom they were wrong. Kennedy was on the phone not talking to Knapp. One man started to leave but they all ran into eachother in the hall outside her bedroom. She tried to run out a side door but one man got her with an asp. She didn’t stay down and there was a fight. The 2nd man had an axe handle he from her bedroom instead of his asp. When it was over he threw it over the fence. THey had to leave quickly because she had been on the phone. They couldn’t finish arranging the house. They also left behind one guys asp. They tried to go back for it but the cops were already there. 1 man left and the other man and woman stayed waiting for a decision about Knapp. word came to walk away from knapp but they stayed and the next night walked back into the house and got the asp. They also found the axe handle they used and got rid of it. Knapp was not killed by any of the men or woman. This wasn’t one crazed man with a golf club. The people you’re looking for are major prescription drug suppliers in phx connected to mexico canada and some other off shore operation. That’s all I can say.
When Steve called Renee at 5:50 P.M., she was still waiting for Charlotte to come home. When he called again five minutes later, Renee said Charlotte had gone clothes shopping. Asked how things went, Renee told him they’d gone well.
Renee later told investigators that Charlotte returned to the town house feeling exhausted and hot. She told Renee that she’d parked some distance from the café so no one would see her getting out of her car, and it was stifling outside.
Once Charlotte got home, Steve finally reached her on her cell phone at 7:16 P.M. and asked how her day went. Charlotte replied that it was stressful and she’d gotten lost.
“Don’t share anything outside the family,” he cautioned.
When he called Renee again at 8:42 P.M., she told him that Charlotte was very tired and Jake had gone home early.
The morning after the first jail visit when Steve had told them about this story, Renee had suggested she call Sears to better understand what was going on, but Steve had told her repeatedly to keep this “project” between her and Charlotte. So when Sears asked Renee a day or so after he received the anonymous e-mails if she knew where they’d come from, she feigned ignorance.
John Sears took the bait and called the county attorney’s office, saying he wanted to discuss some new information he’d received that pointed to his client’s innocence.
On July 7, he met with County Attorney Sheila Polk, her chief deputy, Dennis McGrane, and prosecutor Joe Butner at their office. Sears asked for a waiver before disclosing the information, but the prosecutors refused, so Sears proceeded to disclose details of Steve’s voice-in-the-vent story, noting that it dovetailed with, and was corroborated by, the anonymous e-mail.
Expressing concern that the prosecutors wouldn’t take this information seriously, Sears said he thought the stories told by the anonymous e-mailer and the voice at the jail were quite similar, but he believed they were authentic because they seemed to have originated from two different sources.
After the meeting Butner met with his lead investigator, Randy Schmidt, and asked him to look into the communications personally, but to keep it “in house.” Butner didn’t want anyone accusing them of failing to investigate these claims before the trial started.
Schmidt consulted with a Phoenix Police Department detective at the Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center. They were able to determine the date and time the e-mail had been sent to the bar association and also that it had come from a Gmail address, but nothing else.
On July 13, Schmidt met with Sears, who gave him copies of the e-mails and the notes Steve said he’d scribbled while the voice was talking. Sears recounted that when he’d first let Steve read the e-mails, Steve became very upset and started to cry.
Sears also recapped Steve’s voice story and described Steve’s ideas about who that inmate could be. Because Schmidt couldn’t read Steve’s handwriting and wanted to hear the voice story directly from him, Schmidt and Sears arranged for another meeting on July 21.
From there, Schmidt set out to track down more specific and incriminating information. Through subpoenas and good detective work, he was able to determine many more details about how and where the e-mail account had been set up, along with the sender’s browsing and search history.
Schmidt and fellow investigator Mike Sechez also went to the Internet café from which the e-mail had been sent. They talked to the owner, who showed them the actual terminal used, but, unfortunately, no surveillance video was available. And because the sender had paid in cash, he’d successfully left no electronic trail from debit or credit cards.
“We were pretty annoyed,” Sechez recalled.
When Schmidt showed Steve the e-mails at the meeting, Steve started to weep. In fact, he became so emotional they had to take a break in the interview.
Steve said he was disturbed that the sender seemed so familiar with the inside of Carol’s house, particularly with the axe handle she kept next to her bed. Schmidt agreed. Steve said he had no memory of whether that handle was still in the house when they cleaned it out for sale.
Steve noted that the sender also seemed to know what had gone on in the house before, during and after the murder, but he pointed out that the voice never mentioned a woman being involved in the killing.
As Steve recounted the voice story, he said he didn’t want Schmidt or any other investigator to question inmates to try to determine the identity of the voice, because Steve didn’t want to go into protective custody.
This surprised Schmidt. I found it very odd that a person who was facing the death penalty for a capital murder case would not want me to determine who had actually committed the murder, because he did not want to be placed in protective custody, he wrote in his report.
Steve said he’d talked to Sears about the voice and the e-mail, but not to his daughters, and not even to Renee, saying all he’d “intimated” to them was that investigators were “investigating something.”
When Schmidt went back and listened to the recorded calls between Steve, Renee and his daughters from June 1 through June 30, this was an easy lie to detect. Clearly, Schmidt wrote, [Those conversations] indicated that Mr. DeMocker had spoken to his daughters and to Renee Girard about both the voice in the vent and the “pending” plan to send the anonymous email to the prosecutor.
Steve told Schmidt that he’d discussed some details from the voice story and e-mail with a few inmates, whom he named. Of the thirty-seven inmates in dorm N, he said, he thought thirteen of them could be the voice. However, investigators checked the ones he named and found they’d been released before the voice reportedly talked to Steve.
As Schmidt set out to prove or disprove Steve’s story and the claims by the e-mailer and the voice, he systematically gathered booking photos and release dates for all of these inmates, diagrams of their jail cells, and intel about Steve’s relationships with them. He also checked with law enforcement off icials in Phoenix about Jim Knapp and the purported drug ring, but none of them, including the Drug Enforcement Agency task force, had heard of either one.
Investigator Mike Sechez was assigned to listen to Steve’s jail calls as part of Schmidt’s voice probe.
“[Steve] just thought he was so much brighter than the ‘stupid’ cops, so he would talk in code,” Sechez said in 2014. “I’ve never seen anybody call his family so much. I think at last count it was over two thousand [calls].”
Steve was only allowed to use the pay phone for fifteen minutes at a time, so he would stop a conversation partway through, hang up and call the person back.
During his time in the general population, he was allowed to mingle with others on his pod. And as long as he had credit on his account, he could make calls from eight in the morning until nine at night. At that time he often made a dozen calls a day.
“His ego is so dramatic, it’s mind-boggling,” Sechez said. “In most cases, even as an investigator, you don’t really get to have the total insights into your defendant.” But in this case, he said, “I listened to thousands of hours of conversation and so I know this guy.”
Renee’s friend Reverend Dan Spencer said that as smart as Steve may be, he made major mistakes by creating the voice story and the anonymous e-mail—errors that, in his view, stemmed “from a lack of emotional awareness of how other people will perceive things.”