CHAPTER 42
Once Steve’s attorneys realized they could no longer use the DNA of the mystery man, Mr. 603, as their line of defense, they shifted their focus to other identifiable third-party suspects, zeroing in primarily on Jim Knapp.
His motive? “Jim Knapp—(a) was not psychologically stable, and (b) he was angry at Carol,” said defense investigator Rich Robertson. “He had kind of a romantic interest in her that appeared to be unreciprocated, and (c) he was telling people that she was going to fund his investment in this coffee franchise that he wanted to start and she was going to be his partner and fund it with the money from the divorce. He found out this wasn’t going to happen right before she died.”
Attorney Craig Williams also came up with a theory to explain away Jim’s 7:58 P.M. call from his ex-wife’s house: “Just because [Carol’s] phone went dead at eight P.M. doesn’t mean that’s when Carol died,” Robertson said. “That just means the phone went dead. She was discovered dead well after ten o’clock, so she was killed sometime between when the phone went dead and the time when she was found, so there was time for Jim Knapp to get out there.”
Robertson noted that Jim was involved in a number of get-rich-quick scams, in which he ended up being a victim; he was also lying to people—including Robertson—about his cancer in an effort to get people to give him money.
“He told me that he had stage-four cancer that had been miraculously cured,” Robertson said, referring to meetings a week or two after Carol’s murder. “He told me that doctors wanted to study him because he’d had this stage-four cancer that had suddenly gone into remission and there must have been something in his genetic makeup.”
Another theory being floated, which was more along the lines of the hit man tale and the voice-in-the-vent story, was that Carol had been killed by the drug ring with which Jim had allegedly been involved, but that was not part of the defense’s case, Robertson said.
The defense’s Jim Knapp theories held no water with Carol’s friends. From what Katherine Morris knew, there was nothing romantic between him and Carol.
That said, Katherine wouldn’t have been surprised if Jim had been in love with Carol, as Steve told her he suspected. Even so, in her view, Jim had no ill will toward Carol.
“I know he was devastated, absolutely,” she said. “He was the one with her in those final days and knew the most about what Steve was doing to her recently. I don’t think he had anything to do with her death.”
Debbie Wren Hill agreed. “He might have been a little wacky, but they were very, very close friends. He might have had a crush on her, but you don’t beat people mercifully if you have a crush on someone. This was a crime of passion. This wasn’t someone slipping something into her drink.”
The prosecution wasn’t bothered by the defense’s new strategy, either.
“Once we figured out who Mr. 603 was, they said someone else did it, and it was Jim Knapp,” prosecutor Jeff Paupore recalled. “That was a mistake. Because we had cell phone evidence.”
Paupore looked at it this way: “The more they go after Jim Knapp, the stronger our case will be, because they’ve got nothing else. And they didn’t.”
Nonetheless, the defense’s new direction did force investigators for the prosecution to delve deeper into the evidence to prove more definitively that Jim was where he said he’d been and could not physically have been able to commit the murder. As such, they developed a timeline of his activity that day, based mostly on witness interviews and Jim’s cell phone records:
By the time Jim got up the day of the murder, Carol was already at work. As was his routine, he went over to her house around noon and let the dogs out to run around. It was unclear when he left the house that afternoon, but he drove to Hastings Entertainment and rented two videos for his younger son at two fifty-three.
From there, he went to a doctor’s appointment with Dr. Kent Ward, an osteopath, between 3:15 and 3:44 P.M., during which he turned off his cell phone. The four calls he received from his ex-wife’s landline during that time went straight to voice mail. Jim had complained of back discomfort.
At 3:44 P.M., Jim checked his voice mail and returned the calls to his ex-wife’s house.
His ex, Ann Saxerud, told investigators that he arrived at her house at five-ten in the evening. She and their older son, Jay, left the house for his hockey practice around six o’clock. She dropped off Jay half an hour later, then went hiking nearby with a friend.
At 7:58 P.M., one minute before Carol’s call to her mother was disconnected, Jim checked his voice mail on his cell phone.
While Ann and Jay were gone, Alex said he and his dad watched the movie Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, until Alex got bored and went to play video games on the computer for a while. Alex later testified that his father did not leave the house until Ann returned.
After Jay’s hockey practice ended at eight o’clock, Ann and her son left the rink around eight-fifteen, arriving home between eight-thirty and eight-forty. She estimated that Jim left her house at eight forty-five.
Jim put the videos into Hastings’ drop box, and headed to Safeway, off Iron Springs and Willow Creek Road, which is six miles and eleven minutes from Carol’s house. The security footage showed him entering the store just before 9 P.M. And just as Jim told the deputies, records confirmed that he bought sweet red cherries for $8.46 and a bottle of Freixenet Cordon Negro Brut sparkling wine for $17.96, at 8:58 P.M.
Jim arrived at Bridle Path around 9:15 P.M., after which the deputies ran his driver’s license through their database.
Meanwhile, the defense developed an explanation for the searches and files on Steve’s computer that he claimed were for book research.
“He liked the idea of writing the book, and the actual writing is hard work, so he had a lot of stuff in that computer that was mentioned that had zero to do with the murder, that seemed to fit that whole spy-novel thing people are talking about,” Rich Robertson explained.
For example? “He had some stuff in there for gases. He was researching carbon monoxide. Even the book titles, the ones that seemed to be the most damaging, or portrayed to be the most damaging, or hit man, nothing about the murder fit that.... It was ‘how to make a homicide look like a suicide.’ There was nothing in this scene, if it was staged, that even [given] the state testimony, was staged to look like a suicide.”