Then No One Can Have Her

In late October, the Yavapai County Public Defender’s Office, which had a conflict in this case, had to find a new defense team to represent Steve, because he’d been declared indigent.

Although this was no longer a death penalty case, it was still a very complex one, so Steve was allowed to have two taxpayer-subsidized lawyers. Craig Williams, a private attorney in Prescott who was the former chief public defender of La Paz County, and was on the county’s list of eligible contract attorneys, was designated lead counsel on October 28.

When no other local attorney would agree to be second chair, the public defender had to go outside the county to find Greg Parzych, who worked for the Maricopa County Office of the Legal Defender in Phoenix.

Williams and Parzych did not ask Judge Darrow for a mistrial, but they did say they would need months to get up to speed on the case before they could move forward.

Rich Robertson, who stayed on the team as investigator, now served as the fount of institutional knowledge. His first briefing about the already massive and complicated case—a PowerPoint presentation with photos—lasted eight hours.

That same month Steve was placed in a single “administrative segregation” cell, which spanned seven by eleven feet, at the county jail in Camp Verde. Otherwise known as solitary confinement, that meant Steve was kept in his cell for 23.5 hours a day, with just thirty minutes to shower, exercise or call his family.

According to defense court filings, jail officials said they placed Steve there for his own safety after an inmate reported that Steve was involved in the ordering of a “beat down” of that inmate.

Attorney Craig Williams maintained that this inmate was not credible, and that the inmate’s report about Steve’s participation in the fight “was simply NOT true.”

In a motion to modify Steve’s conditions, Williams contended that the defense had interviewed nine of the jurors after the mistrial was declared. Five of them told Rich Robertson that they had been “leaning toward an acquittal,” three toward a conviction and one undecided. This was before the state had finished presenting its case and before the defense had even started, but Robertson said the defense took that to mean that the first jury was headed toward a “possible acquittal or, at worst, a hung jury.”

And yet, Williams wrote in a sentence that forecasted the defense’s subsequent third-party culpability strategy, [Steve] remained the only suspect, despite the fact that the state documented some truly bizarre behavior by those close to Ms. Kennedy. Nonetheless, the request to release Steve on his own recognizance with a GPS bracelet or move him to a jail in Coconino County was rejected again.

In the legal back-and-forth, the defense claimed that the stint in solitary was negatively affecting Steve’s mental stability so much that they were concerned whether he would be able to assist in trial preparation.

Despite the state’s “hyperbole” that Steve’s defenses had been eliminated, attorney Greg Parzych wrote that the DNA under Carol’s fingernail was still not Steve DeMocker’s. . . . The most powerful facts remain intact. The state cannot place the defendant at the scene of the crime.... Importantly, these facts will never change—no new evidence will surface that will place him at the scene of the crime—because he was not there and did not kill Carol Kennedy. That is what is known as a defense.

Based upon a review of court filings, Steve was apparently still in a single cell as of March 2012. Sheriff ’s off icials cited “security concerns” as the reason.

In response to the defense’s claims that these conditions amounted to punishment, prosecutor Jeff Paupore countered that Steve had “continued to break the law even while incarcerated.”

Once the ruling came down that the first defense team was entirely off the case, Judge Darrow declared a mistrial on November 12, 2010.

It was an extremely emotional day when the jury was called back to court to be officially dismissed, and Judge Lindberg came to watch.

“He looked awful,” Robertson recalled. “He was gaunt, he’d been undergoing chemo and had lost a lot of hair, and he was certainly much thinner and paler. He just looked sickly and weak.”

Some of the jurors made some nice, sympathetic comments to Lindberg that day. Some months later, on April 3, 2011, the judge passed away. He was fifty-eight.