CHAPTER 45
The defense began presenting its case after lunch that same day, September 11.
Starting with Carol Walden, the former area developer for the Maui Wowi franchise system, the defense proceeded to put on a parade of witnesses who testified about Jim Knapp’s oddities. The franchise executive discussed her correspondence with Jim concerning his interest in buying the Prescott store; his “fiancée,” Suzanna Wilson, described the fear she felt after he’d sent her the angry e-mails.
The defense also put on its own financial expert to counter the state’s characterization of Steve’s finances, as well as witnesses who challenged the state’s DNA, shoe print and tire track evidence, including Randy Anglin, a tracker and forensic photographer.
The testimony of Curtis James, the meteorology professor at Embry-Riddle, conflicted with Mascher’s definitive remarks about the timing and volume of the rainfall, which the state had argued made it easy to determine that Steve’s tracks were fresh.
As defense investigator Rich Robertson summed it up, “The sheriff said, ‘I’m the sheriff, it rained, I have a badge. Believe me, not the academic guy.’”
Forensic accountant Gregg Curry presented a very different picture of Steve’s fiscal health, listing a number of points in Davis’s report that differed from his own calculations. These included two significant double-counting errors totaling $280,000, he said, which represented about 40 percent of the amount that Davis put toward Steve’s excessive spending totals.
Curry’s bottom line: “I determined whether Mr. DeMocker had the ability to pay his debts as they came due with the resources that he had,” and concluded that “he had about seventy-four thousand dollars of available liquid assets on July 2, 2008.” This wasn’t all that far from Davis’s calculation, which was $64,000. However, Curry said, Davis also underestimated the retirement savings Steve “could have tapped into.”
As the defense tried to undermine Davis’s position that Steve was in “financial distress,” Curry contended that Steve “was not cash-flow insolvent . . . because he had enough resources to continue to pay his bills up until four or five months later.”
He said Steve could have further stretched his resources to seventeen months by reducing his discretionary spending and changing the withholding amount on his paychecks. He also had not maxed out his credit cards, nor was he in any imminent danger of bankruptcy or foreclosure.
But perhaps the most important discrepancy with Davis, Curry said, was that he didn’t count the $750,000 in insurance payouts as an asset on his balance sheet, because in his view Steve “didn’t actually receive the death benefits.”
This statement not only flew in the face of the prosecution’s entire case, it also reduced the quantitative improvement in Steve’s overall financial picture after Carol’s death to just $131,896 for the alimony he wouldn’t have to pay over the next eight years. This was a marked contrast to the prosecution’s claim that Steve’s picture had improved by $576,000 in unpaid alimony and the $750,000 in life insurance benefits.
“He had no chance of collecting that as long as he was a suspect and, obviously, he was arrested later,” Curry said.
On cross-examination Steve Young confronted the witness with one of Steve’s statements. “You don’t believe Mr. DeMocker’s own words are an appropriate gauge on financial distress?” Young asked, citing Steve’s “You get to start clean while I dig out of a staggering hole” e-mail to Carol.
“Not necessarily, no,” Curry said.
After Young pointed out several examples of Steve’s failure to cut his discretionary spending, Curry said, “I think that’s kind of argumentative. I think he’s taken some steps.”
“So instead of significantly reducing discretionary spending, he’s raiding his daughters’ investment accounts and borrowing tens of thousands of dollars from his parents?” Young asked.
As the prosecutor went over the options Steve had available for reducing his spending, Curry ultimately had to acknowledge that Steve had taken no action to “avail himself” of any of them after Carol’s murder, and continued to borrow money from his parents.
Curry also acknowledged that the suicide provision in Carol’s life insurance policies didn’t apply because it had been longer than two years since the issue date, which was important in the context of Steve’s computer searches.
Referring specifically to the Internet search for “how to make a homicide appear suicide,” Young said, “It’s fair to assume that he knew in June of 2008 that those life insurance policies would have paid out if Carol’s death was ever determined to be a suicide, correct?”
“I don’t know what he knew.”
In the end Young was able to get Curry to admit, albeit reluctantly, that the insurance checks from Steve’s parents to the two law firms ultimately did benefit Steve.
“Well, to the extent that they paid for his lawyers to stay on the case,” Curry said.
“Thank you, Mr. Curry,” Young said. “Nothing further.”
On the morning of September 26, the defense rested its case after eight days of live testimony from seventeen witnesses, and the reading of prior testimony from a law enforcement expert who had since died.
The prosecution’s single rebuttal witness was Sean Jeralds, a flight safety professor at Embry-Riddle and the close friend of Jim Knapp’s who had checked on him the night he was found dead.
Sean had come forward after reading a news article stating that the defense said Jim was not a pilot and had no license to fly. And having been Jim’s flight instructor, Sean wanted to correct the record.
Craig Williams objected to letting him testify, saying it could result in an “endless loop of witnesses,” but Donahoe allowed it.
“You’ve disparaged Mr. Knapp,” the judge said. “You’ve portrayed him as a murderer to this jury. This is the downside to the third-party culpability defense.”
Calling Jim “his brother from another mother,” Sean said Jim had earned a commercial pilot’s license in 1991. Jeff Paupore then led him through Jim’s résumé and the various health, drug-related and behavioral issues that had marked their relationship over the years, ending with Jim’s suicide when he believed he was dying.
“That’s how he was going to lose his life, cancer,” Sean said. “He thought that was a terrible way to go, because he saw what happened to his father and his mother, and so I wasn’t surprised he did that.”
During the cross-examination Williams produced Jim Knapp’s medical records from the Mayo Clinic from February 2008, underscoring the untruths they contained: Jim had written that he was still engaged to Suzanna Wilson, that he was working as a pilot and that he had “no history of recreational drug use.”
Under the section asking if he engaged in healing or alternative therapies, Williams noted that Jim had written “meditation and chronic random abuse to strangers.” And under the category of significant problems, he wrote in “sociopath.”
When Williams asked Sean Jeralds about these “inappropriate” answers on the questionnaire, Sean acknowledged that Jim had never actually worked as a pilot, but he could have if he’d taken and passed a physical.
Sean also said he couldn’t “judge the level of appropriateness Knapp had with the folks at Mayo,” but he didn’t seem surprised by Jim’s responses in the medical records. In fact, he said, he laughed when he saw them in Jim’s handwriting. “I could hear Jimmy saying that.”
Williams then asked if Jim had ever mentioned the possibility of a sexual relationship with Carol. Sean said yes, they had talked about it.
“He was wondering if that opportunity arose, should he take advantage of that or not,” Sean said. “What would that do to the relationship, and should he go down that path or not?”
Although Sean acknowledged that Jim had sent a number of angry e-mails to various people, such as the wealthy donor Steven Udvar-Hazy, Sean told the jury that his friend would not have purposely harmed anybody.
“Is Mr. Hazy still alive today?” Paupore asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“Did you ever know Jim Knapp to hurt or cause physical violence to anyone?”
“No, sir.”
After the lunch break Greg Parzych renewed his motions for acquittal and to sever the non-murder charges. He also told the judge that Katie DeMocker had e-mailed him, asking that closing arguments be held the following Tuesday, not the next day, so she could be there.
Steve Young said he didn’t know why Katie had the erroneous idea that closings would be on Tuesday. Carol’s mother, Ruth Kennedy, had already flown in and was ready to be there.
Judge Donahoe ruled again that closings would be the next day, Friday the twenty-seventh.
That night Jeff Paupore woke up at 3 A.M. with an idea. The prosecutor would conduct a dramatic reenactment to illustrate for the jury how Steve had brutally beat his wife to death with a golf club.
He got out of bed, went into the garage, found one of his wife’s golf clubs and started smacking a rolled-up rug with it. The thumping woke his son, who “sleeps like a dead person,” and came out to see what was going on.
Good. If it wakes him up, I know it’s going to work, Paupore thought.
Paupore’s wife, on the other hand, slept right through it, but he didn’t inform her of his plans. He wanted her to be surprised when she came to court that day to watch the closings. And that she was.
That morning Craig Williams renewed the defense’s objection to moving ahead with the closings. He also argued that the prosecution should be precluded from using the words “unique” to describe the shoe prints and “stashed” to refer to the bicycle. Donahoe granted the first request, but he denied the second.
Paupore began his two-hour closing by displaying a photograph of Carol for the jury. As he ran through the slides in his PowerPoint presentation, each representing a fact or puzzle piece of damning evidence in the case, he removed a piece of her portrait and replaced it with a portion of Steve’s face.
“This was not a bike ride,” Paupore said. “This was an alibi in case something went wrong.”
Referring to the anonymous e-mail, which had stated, “This wasn’t one crazed man with a golf club,” Paupore said, “Oh, yes, it was, ladies and gentlemen. It was the defendant with a golf club. Make no mistake about it.”
By the end of his argument, Carol’s portrait had been all but transformed by Steve’s features, leaving only Carol’s eyes.
Paupore told the jurors that he wished he could present them with every piece of the puzzle, but he couldn’t. What he did have, he said, was “a great, huge mountain of strong circumstantial evidence.”
“We don’t have a hundred percent of the pieces, but through Carol’s eyes up on the screen looking at us, you can see her killer,” he said, hoping that the jury would get the idea that in her last moments, this was what she saw, too: Steve’s face.
Afterward, Paupore’s wife told him that she was horrified to see all the dust flying out of their rug as he beat it with abandon.
“If I’d known you were going to do that, I would have vacuumed it,” she said.
Craig Williams began his closing argument after lunch, continuing for nearly three hours. Still not finished, he started up again after the weekend, on the following Tuesday, October 1.
Williams spent most of his time laying out every possible alternative scenario to reinterpret the state’s evidence, trying to persuade the jury that it was much more likely that Jim Knapp had killed Carol. He spent the rest arguing that the prosecution had made its whole case by twisting the ordinary into the nefarious and the suspicious.
Jim’s motive? After snooping in Carol’s financial papers, he was angry to learn that she had $130,000 in her bank account, but would not finance his Maui Wowi franchise. To hide his tracks, he tried to frame Steve, repeatedly telling the detectives and anyone else who would listen how and why Steve was to blame.
Williams offered a possible scenario for Carol’s last exclamation of “Oh, no.” She was heading down the hall after her dogs, who were constantly “peeing and puking in the house,” when she inadvertently disconnected her phone as she went to grab the bottle of stain remover to clean up after them.
When the cleaning crew pulled up the rug, he said, there was a stain right where the bottle had been. Following that logic, he said, the murder didn’t happen at 7:59 P.M.; it was later than that, because “she was cleaning up the dog pee.” This scenario gave Jim more time to drive back, kill her and run off when he saw the lights of Deputy Taintor’s cruiser pulling up to the house.
Although the state had dismissed alternative theories as “crazy defenses” to divert attention away from Steve, Williams said, “there really is factual evidence to back” up scenarios where other people, specifically Jim Knapp, could have killed Carol between his 7:58 and 9:37 P.M. cell phone calls.
In fact, when Jim went to Safeway to buy wine and then called Carol in front of the sheriff ’s deputies, he could have simply been creating a ruse and an alibi, when he knew she couldn’t answer the phone.
“Ask yourself this—if Steve had planned this awful, brutal murder, his alibi is to say, ‘I’m going to show up at the scene with a bunch of cuts on me and then I’m going to say I was a mile across the road on a bike ride that nobody saw me on?’ That’s idiotic. It just would not have happened,” Williams said. Especially if Steve was such a “criminal mastermind” that he left no DNA or blood evidence at the scene, in his car, office or condo. Steve exhibited a “consciousness of innocence,” he said, not of guilt.
The fingerprint on the lightbulb in the laundry room was not Steve’s. It was Jim Knapp’s fingerprint on the financial documents in the Body & Soul magazine, not Steve’s. And if Steve was so worried about the golf club head cover, why give it to his attorney rather than get rid of it altogether?
The detectives had “tunnel vision” from the get-go, he said, and conducted a shoddy investigation. They never properly explored Jim’s or any other possible suspects’ alibis other than half-baked moves, such as obtaining John Stoler’s bank records and Barb O’Non’s credit card receipt for the night of the murder.
The detectives didn’t think anything of flying all over the country to collect Ronald Birman’s DNA, Williams said, but they didn’t bother to fly to Maine to check out Carol’s boyfriend. Why? “Because they had Steve and they don’t want to look any further.”
Detectives also couldn’t “match” the shoes or bike tires with the tracks they found around Glenshandra. “If you can’t match them and you’re asking somebody to convict somebody of first-degree murder, that’s pretty doggone sloppy,” he said, reiterating the failure to designate one person to control the crime scene rather than let an army of sheriff ’s investigators “tromp” all over it.
The prosecution had no photos or evidence that Steve laid his bike down in the bushes behind Carol’s house, he said. And none of Steve’s computer searches, or the reportedly incriminating files in his “Book Research” folder, had anything to do with how Carol was actually killed.
Referring to Paupore’s “connect the dots” closing, Williams said it was not the jury’s constitutional duty to do that. Based on the severe injuries to Carol’s head, the killer had an emotional, not a financial, motive.
“Yeah, [Steve] spent some cash, but he’s not a murderer,” Williams said, repeatedly comparing the prosecution’s case to a board game of Clue. “It’s Mr. Plum in the study with a left-handed golf club,” he said, referring to the Clue character Professor Plum.
“I don’t have to prove [Knapp] guilty and I don’t have to tell you who absolutely murdered her, but there’s way more here on Jim Knapp, and it’s not a crazy defense theory,” he said. “It’s facts, way more than they had against Steve DeMocker.”
As for evidence to support the fraud charges related to the insurance money transfer, Williams said, there was none. Steve, just like his other family members, simply relied on their attorneys’ advice, which they discussed on recorded phone lines, with nothing to hide. And as Katie and Charlotte testified, no one forced them to put that money toward Steve’s defense.
“They can’t put him in the house because he wasn’t there,” Williams summed up for the jury. “You know why? Because he did not kill her. You’ve got to find him not guilty.”
The prosecution always gets to do its closing argument first and speak last with a rebuttal argument, because it has the burden of proof and defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty. Prosecutor Steve Young followed up Williams’s closing with a nearly hour-long statement, which went until 10:32 A.M.
Young disputed many of Williams’s points, starting by dismissing John Stoler, David Soule and Barb O’Non as viable murder suspects, along with Jim Knapp, whom the defense “hung their hat on,” and who, because he committed suicide, couldn’t be in court to refute or defend himself against evidence presented by the defense.
Jim Knapp, he said, had no motive to kill Carol. The Maui Wowi deal was dead in February, months before the murder; and even if he did know that Carol had money, he had no way to get it from her or her estate or her life insurance policies once she was dead.
“The defense cannot point to any credible evidence that has been presented in court to show by any stretch of the reasonable imagination that Jim Knapp had any reason whatsoever to kill Carol Kennedy,” he said, shrugging off Williams’s scenarios as “rank speculation” that stretched the timeline of events to fit the defense’s theory.
The stains on the carpet? There were many of them, and no way to measure their age. The rimless glasses on Carol’s desk that the defense claimed were Jim’s? Even one of the defense’s own exhibit photos, taken in the guesthouse on July 3, showed two pairs of rimless glasses. “Those are his glasses. They’re in his guesthouse,” Young said, adding that surely Jim would have retrieved the blood-specked pair from Carol’s desk if they were his.
If Carol’s landline was disconnected as Williams described, why didn’t Carol answer when Ruth called back? Because she was already dead, and it was Steve who killed her.
Steve was the one who had a motive—financial gain—and “750,000 reasons” to kill Carol, so he didn’t have to pay alimony and so he could collect on the life insurance policies, of which he was the owner and beneficiary, Young said.
Steve also had an emotional motive, which was clear from the disputes in the e-mails and texts between them, Young said. Steve had no alibi. His phone was mysteriously turned off, and he uncharacteristically didn’t answer his calls or texts.
Why, if he was bleeding from cuts on his arm and leg, would his bike and car be free of blood? “Doesn’t that prove to you that the defendant took measures both before and after the murder not to get any blood in his vehicle, and if there was any blood, to clean it up? . . . He had gloves on. He took measures that he wasn’t going to leave anything behind.”
Steve gave inconsistent accounts about where he was that night and what had happened with his cell phone—he turned it off; there was no signal; he had a dead battery.
Who had a reason to stage the crime scene? “The defendant, who did research on how to kill and collect on life insurance,” he said.
Steve’s behavior after the murder only served to further implicate him, Young said, noting that the defendant fabricated evidence with the voice-in-the-vent story and the anonymous e-mail, which was completely contrary to the defense’s “consciousness of innocence” claim.
“Hold Steven DeMocker responsible,” Young said. “Find him guilty of the murder of Carol Kennedy so justice can finally be done in this case.”
The jurors took a twenty-minute break and listened to their instructions. After the five remaining alternates were chosen by lot, the rest of the jury began deliberating at 11 A.M.
By this time counts six and seven, relating to the forgery charges, and count eight, involving the willful concealment of fraudulent schemes to defraud, had been dismissed.
After deliberating for the next three days, the jury reached a verdict late on the third day. Ruth Kennedy, who had stayed in town to hear the verdict, got the call just as she was heading out for her evening meal. However, the judge decided to hold off on announcing it until first thing the next morning at nine o’clock.
Before the proceedings began promptly on the morning of October 4, Charlotte and Katie made sure to hug and kiss their grandmother, who sat behind the prosecution table. Ruth felt numb, not knowing what to expect, as she waited with a box of tissues in her lap.
“I love you,” Charlotte whispered to Ruth before taking a seat with the rest of the DeMocker family on the opposite side of the gallery, where Steve sat stoically at the defense table.
As the clerk read the verdicts, count by count, the courtroom was packed and yet silent:
“‘We the jury, duly impaneled and sworn in the above-entitled action and upon our oaths, do find the defendant, Steven DeMocker, on the charge of first-degree murder on July 2, 2008, as the result of the death of Virginia Carol Kennedy as follows: Guilty.’”
Hearing this, Katie and Charlotte immediately burst into tears. One of the court officers leaned over to Ruth, grabbed a handful of tissues from the box in her lap and handed them to the girls.
Ruth was in shock. She had waited so long to hear those words. Five long years of waiting and hoping that Steve would be found guilty. As the clerk recited the verdicts for the other counts—guilty, guilty and guilty—Ruth sat back as a wave of relief settled over her.
Sentencing was set for November 13. After the reading was over, and everyone was walking out of the courtroom, Jan DeMocker grabbed Ruth’s hand.
“I’ll never believe that Steve killed Carol,” Jan said, handing Ruth a medallion with the word “peace” on it.
Ruth didn’t agree, of course, but as a mother, she thought she might feel the same way if she were in a similar situation. Steve was Jan’s firstborn, after all. But Ruth didn’t utter a peep in response. What was there to say? She was just glad she could finally put this horrible ordeal behind her and move on.
It’s over, Ruth thought. Thank the Lord for small things.