CHAPTER 48
Craig Williams filed a notice of appeal on February 3, 2014, after which attorney David Goldberg, of Fort Collins, Colorado, was appointed by the Yavapai County Public Defender’s Office to represent Steve through the appellate process. Because this was designated a complex case, Goldberg got an extension on the filing deadline.
The appeal was filed a little more than a year later, in March 2015. Goldberg cited multiple grounds for requesting to vacate Steve’s convictions and dismiss the case with prejudice. Short of that, he requested a new trial—with a different prosecutorial agency—as “the only way to erase the appearance of impropriety that surrounds this case.”
Before he’d even read it, defense investigator Rich Robertson said he believed the appeal had a good chance of producing a new trial. “When cases get as screwed up as this one did—for all the twists and turns and sideshow stuff that happened—it’s almost inevitable that there was some mistake that occurs,” he said.
But Mike Sechez, the retired prosecution investigator, said justice had already been served.
“I don’t think Steve DeMocker did it and was convicted,” he said, “I know one hundred percent in my mind that he did it. So his standing up there and saying, ‘I didn’t do it,’ is him still hoping that his sentence will be overturned. He will never admit that he killed his ex-wife as long as his daughters are alive.”
The Arizona State Bar investigation into Sheila Polk’s allegations against John Sears, Steve’s first lead defense counsel, was delayed until after Steve was convicted. It was finally completed in January 2015, resulting in dismissal of the bar charge against Sears.
The State Bar does not believe that we have the “clear and convincing evidence” necessary to prove the alleged misconduct, Craig Henley, senior bar counsel, wrote in a letter to Polk.
While Sears did notarize the documents in which Steve disclaimed the insurance proceeds, Henley wrote, it was a different law firm that negotiated those details with Hartford and secured the proceeds. Similarly, it was another attorney who represented Charlotte and Katie DeMocker concerning the transfer of money to Carol’s estate, and also in the girls’ decision to give that money to their grandparents and ultimately to fund Steve’s defense. Although Henley described the nature, timing and ultimate use of those money transfers as “suspicious,” he said Steve’s daughters’ testimony about these issues supported Sears’s account of the events.
As the ultimate recipients of the proceeds, Katie and Charlotte were authorized to use the insurance proceeds as they wanted, Henley wrote.
Finally, Henley stated, although Sears did make an “incomplete” statement about the insurance payout during his opening statement, it didn’t “appear to have been a knowingly false statement.” During the investigation, Henley said, Sears argued in his own defense that his statement was “technically ‘correct,’” noting that the parties were about to craft a stipulation about these issues when Judge Lindberg had to step down.
Jim Knapp’s friends were upset by how he was portrayed by Steve’s attorneys at the second trial, in the local newspaper and also on the Dateline episode, all of which painted Jim as an “odd duck,” said Ken Korn, Jim’s childhood friend.
“He wasn’t that odd. He was a great guy,” Ken said. “And I just get kind of annoyed that he was being portrayed as some kind of weirdo.”
Like Ann Saxerud, Ken was also irritated that the defense went after Jim, saying he was obsessed with Carol, when he couldn’t defend himself.
“I don’t think he was,” he said. “I think he just relied on her friendship. I think they had a natural bond that way.”
The Jim Knapp whom Ken Korn once knew was not violent and would never have hurt Carol. In fact, Ken laughed when asked whether he’d ever seen Jim do anything physically violent.
“No, not at all.... There’s no way. He’s just not a violent guy. That’s not part of his [makeup], especially to a woman.”
When Ken heard the theories that Jim was killed because he was part of a drug ring that came after him and killed Carol, or that perhaps Jim had killed Carol himself, Ken couldn’t believe any of it. He knew Jim was taking prescription drugs for his medical issues, “but to say the ‘prescription drug ring,’ I mean, c’mon.”
“He got passionate, whatever he was into,” Ken said. “He was like all of us, searching. I know what he was, I know the truth. Whatever happened to him, it’s just really sad. My wife and I, we just said, ‘Poor Jim.’”
For Carol’s friend Debbie Wren Hill, it was obvious that her murder was a crime of passion, as if the killer was saying, “I’m mad about this, and take this! I don’t want to give you six thousand dollars, and I didn’t want you to leave!”
“It all added up,” she said, citing the cuts on Steve’s legs and the long hours that he admitted to biking near Carol’s house while his phone was off. “It didn’t take rocket science to convict this man.”
Sometime after the sentencing, Ruth Kennedy asked Debbie if she thought Steve had convinced himself that he didn’t murder Carol. “Do you think that’s how he keeps this up?” she asked.
Debbie didn’t know how to answer that question. “Clinically, it’s possible that he’s deluded, that he really has convinced himself that he didn’t do this,” she said. “More likely is that he knows he did it and just doesn’t want to come clean.”
When Debbie asked how this whole tragedy hadn’t destroyed Ruth, Carol’s mother replied that she would forgive Steve if he asked her; she couldn’t live out the rest of her life if she didn’t.
“I have prayed for him this whole time and it’s helped me a lot more than it’s helped him,” she said.
“You are an incredible inspiration for me because I don’t know if I could do this, as her mother,” Debbie told her.
“I felt kind of sorry for him,” Ruth said.
In the end, Debbie said, “I deemed this as such a tragedy for everyone, including Steve. I mean, Steve, where was your impulse control when you did that? What I think is that he just flipped out and went into a rage and lost the ability to consider what the ramifications of his actions were going to be.”
While I was researching this book, I learned from Katherine Morris and Joanne Frerking that Carol had told them about Steve coming to the house a couple of nights before she was killed, trying to get her to reconcile with him. When I told Ruth about this, she said the tone she heard in Carol’s last two words, “Oh, no,” matched that scenario.
Katherine said she was positive about the timing of his visit. She said she never mentioned it to investigators because they never asked; she just answered the questions they posed, and this never came up. But even if she and Joanne were confused, Steve had shown up at the house recently, unannounced, to drop off the artwork the day that Jim stopped him from coming inside. Carol had also told friends that Steve had come into the house unexpectedly with Thai food, and that she thought he’d been entering when she wasn’t home and hacking into her e-mail.
Ruth said this scenario made it “even more logical that Carol said, ‘Oh, no,’” as in, “Oh, no, you’re not showing up inside my house again” or “Oh, no, you’re not coming here again to try to get me to get back together with you.”
Sturgis Robinson said he believes Steve carried out the murder wearing a full rain suit, which he discarded somewhere in the hills afterward.
For him, Steve’s motivation grew out of a confluence of factors. First, he was completely stunned that Carol actually went through with the divorce, then refused to reconcile. “It was the one constant that he could always count on in his life, that he could have Carol under his thumb,” Sturgis said.
Second, the divorce carried severe financial ramifications for him, which were worsened by the stock market crash and his growing debt. This, coupled with Barb’s simultaneous move to break free of his control, financially and personally, was just too much for him to bear.
“I’m sorry that there’s not more direct evidence that it was him, but I cannot imagine any other scenarios where it wasn’t him,” he said. “Nothing was stolen and [Carol] wasn’t raped.”
Looking back, Sturgis said he now believes that the entire community of Prescott was complicit in what amounted to Steve’s domestic abuse of Carol by letting him get away with his “deviant behavior” and womanizing for so many years.
“Steve wasn’t ostracized” and no one rose up in indignation when he slept with the midwife, he said. “We failed Carol in a domestic-dispute situation. We should have recognized it as being abusive.”
Sturgis started writing a book about this case, but gave up after putting several chapters together and facing the harsh reality that his friendship with Steve was never what he’d thought it was.
My friendship with Steve began over a woman, Sturgis wrote. Over the next twenty years we would share others. We would revel in our narcissism, our physicality and our good fortune. What handsome boys we were. How badly we behaved. I would share my deepest feelings with him. I would find employment for him. I would stick up for him when he mistreated others and I allowed him to tryst with his lovers in my house. I lied to Carol for him.
Like a lover, I never questioned my passion. I called it loyalty and friendship. I loved him right up to the moment he [took] . . . millions of dollars [in client accounts from me] and then coldly denied it in the face of incontrovertible evidence. By the time he emerged as the primary suspect in the murder of Carol Kennedy a few years after our estrangement, I had come to believe, to fervently wish, that the man I had chosen as my best friend was not merely a shallow narcissist and a damaged man-child like myself, but a sociopath, a changeling, beautiful, beguiling and monstrous. That would explain all of it and I would not be such a heart-broken fool.
Charlotte DeMocker graduated from Arizona State University with a finance degree in May 2014, with neither parent there to watch her accept her diploma.
Carol’s friend Katherine Morris came as their proxy, while Ruth Kennedy sat at home in Nashville, sad to be missing her granddaughter’s important rite of passage.
“I’m eighty-nine, and that trip for the closing arguments just about did me in. It was pretty grueling,” Ruth said. “I don’t know, the older you get the harder it is to do something like that. But I do have the lines of communication open. We do talk, sporadically, not as much as I’d like. I did talk to Charlotte the day she graduated. Katie called me on Mother’s Day.”
Two days after Charlotte’s graduation ceremony, the DeMocker family had its first contact visit with Steve in five years at the state prison in Florence, Arizona, where, unless he wins his appeal, he will be spending the rest of his days.
In the beginning Katherine couldn’t believe that Steve had killed Carol. Sure, she thought, he was having affairs, but he wasn’t a premeditated killer.
But now that she’s come to believe that Steve was responsible, she “mindfully chooses” to think of him the way he was when they first met.
“At his core authentic self, he’s good people. He really was a good father and a good provider, and illness and addiction took over. His addiction is what contributed to her death. They say in the big book for AA that sex and love addicts end up in jail or dead. He used and abused women to fill himself up, and when he couldn’t have her anymore, he killed her.”
Although she stays in close touch with Katie and Charlotte, she said they purposely steer away from this painful topic.
“Katie and Charlotte are strong, strong, strong women,” she said. “They’re becoming more clear as they are getting older, in setting boundaries” for themselves.
In some of the taped calls from prison, those boundaries came across in their tone of voice, as the young women told their father that they hadn’t answered his previous calls because they were trying to study, pass tests and get jobs. They needed to focus on themselves.
“They are obviously very dear to me, and we don’t talk about [the case]. Plain and simple,” Katherine said. “They know my stance. They know what I think. They know what I feel. They’ve known that from the beginning.”
Katherine was initially hesitant to do an on-camera interview with Dateline for its two-hour episode. But after discussing this with others close to Carol, they decided that someone needed to represent her, so Katherine agreed.
When the episode aired, it included a segment from a video taken on Whidbey Island, featuring a recent interview with Carol about Touch Drawing and the work she did during these meditative sessions. I obtained the full video from Deborah Koff-Chapin, and as I watched it, I almost felt as if Carol were speaking presciently to this case.
As her curly hair blew softly in the breeze, Carol sat smiling, exuding earnestness and calm as she looked into the camera. I could see why people saw her as a guru. Asked what message she wanted to deliver to whoever might be watching, she spoke as if she had a spiritual wisdom and knowingness about her.
Carol said she hoped that people could appreciate the “sense of wonder” and “mystery” that live in the “quiet stillness” of their hearts, where they could “drop down in and tell the truth. At any moment any one of us can make a choice, but it’s a choice that has to be made, that I’m going to stop doing this other thing that I’ve been doing, and I’m going to choose to tell the truth now,” she said.
I was so struck by that last sentence that I posted it on my website.
Carol went on to suggest that some folks may tell “malicious falsehoods to get ahead,” but even when they try to live right and authentically, they can still “betray” something deeper in themselves.
Some might say these were apt messages for Steve, the man she called her soul mate, to get in touch with his “authentic” self, the one she’d fallen in love with so many years before. To finally stop with all the stories, such as the voice-in-the-vent tale and the anonymous e-mail, all the manipulation and all the lies. To tell the truth about what happened.
Katherine believes that if Carol could weigh in on this situation today, she would do so in the same manner in which she lived her whole life: with kindness and absolution.
“Whoever did this she would have had a great compassion for. She absolutely would have. I know that sounds absolutely insane to most people, but that’s who she was, and I don’t feel it’s my place or anybody else’s to judge that. Carol would forgive him. That sounds crazy, but I felt that from the start.”