Then No One Can Have Her (21 page)

When Detectives McDormett and Brown interviewed Renee several days later, they assured her that Jim Knapp's stories had no bearing on Steve's arrest. In fact, they said, the stories made Jim seem “like an idiot.”

“You would have to think we were the biggest fools on the face of the earth and the most unprofessional Mayberry RFD Department if we were basing our investigation and taking our lead from Jim Knapp,” McDormett said. “I would find that to be very insulting.”

Asked about the “mysterious golf club head-cover story,” Renee explained that Steve was using her car because investigators had seized his, so hers was parked in his condo garage. The windows were down, she said, and Steve told her that the wind must have blown the golf sock off the shelf and into her backseat, where he found it.

“Do you really believe that?” McDormett asked. “I mean, just seriously, do you really—”

“Well, it's . . . I think it's a stretch,” she said, but “it was monsoon season. There was some wind.”

McDormett reminded her that the garage door was shut when the detectives had left a few hours earlier. When they returned, they discovered that the shelves in the garage had been straightened and the head cover was missing. They had photos to prove that a dramatic cleanup had taken place between the first and second searches.

“I'm still trying to figure out how a monsoon can straighten out three garage shelves,” McDormett quipped.

Asked about Steve's books and his plan to flee, Renee said she and Steve started discussing his escape plan in the weeks after the murder, and it became a joke between them. She said she might consider leaving, too, if she'd been in the same situation, “facing something where the entire community thinks that I did it. He's got this reputation that proceeds him, not being violent or a murderer, but being, at the very least, a dog.”

Although Steve seemed to seriously consider leaving town, she said, he usually reversed himself, concluding, “I just can't leave my girls. I won't leave my girls. I have to stay here and fight this.”

Hearing Renee rationalize Steve's behavior, McDormett tried a more direct approach, explaining that the killer slammed Carol's skull so hard it broke into fifty pieces.

“I believe Steven DeMocker did this,” he said. “This is a crime of rage and I know that you guys see one side of Steve, but rage indicates some type of personal relationship. Can you definitively say in your heart that you know he didn't do it?”

“No,” Renee said, quickly adding, “I'm not saying that he did.”

Asked if the girls would talk to the detectives, Renee explained that Katie and Charlotte viewed both of their parents as victims and that they saw investigators as “the enemy,” especially aggressive ones like Sergeant Huante.

Steve was a master manipulator, and Renee stuck by him for many months after he went to jail, even after finding letters on his laptop that showed he'd cut and pasted the same poems and descriptions of his romantic feelings—the language altered slightly, depending on the recipient—into missives to the various women in his life.

Based on the way Steve went back and forth between them, insisting that he loved each and every one of them, it is difficult for an objective observer to ascertain whether he was sincere in any or all of these emotions. But he apparently came across persuasively enough to keep them on the line.

Renee showed the letters to her friend and Unitarian minister, Dan Spencer. “There's a part of me that's sympathetic to Steve,” Reverend Spencer said in 2014. “I can see a man who was genuinely torn about who to love, and it was the weird thing, because it was also an indication of his emotional deficit.... He looked at things very mathematically.”

Reverend Spencer said he never really knew Steve, but from talking with Renee and reading some of his e-mails, Steve sounded like a genius. When he was trying to reconcile with Carol, for example, he was poetic and convincing. He knew how to be vulnerable, he pretended to take responsibility and he talked about being soul mates. He would also tell stories about people who had helped him.

But the people who weren't sexually involved with Steve weren't as receptive to his antics. “People who knew Steve either liked him or didn't, and there wasn't a lot of gray,” Reverend Spencer said. They thought he was “creepy at best and a sociopath at worst in pretty much everything he did.”

Fairly early on, he said, Renee “started to put two and two together that Steve was probably a sociopath, and there were obvious deception and honesty issues, . . . but she wanted to overlook it.”

The day of Steve's first court appearance on October 24, 2008, Deputy County Counsel Bill Hughes asked that Steve be held without bail at the request of Carol's mother.

“It's the state's intention to seek the death penalty in this matter,” Hughes told the judge magistrate.

Because of the way Arizona's laws concerning victims' rights work, Hughes requested that Steve not be allowed to have any contact with his two daughters or Carol's mother, unless they actively requested such contact, which would involve waiving their victims' rights under the law. The girls were considered victims because their mother had been murdered, but they were also the daughters of the man accused of killing her.

Steve's attorney, John Sears, countered that Katie and Charlotte “by no means consider themselves victims,” but they would also not want a “no-contact order with their father.... I think they are very much in support of their father, love their father, and want to participate in this case.”

So, to continue to have contact with their father, Charlotte and Katie had to waive their victims' rights. As Detective Brown stated during his interview with Katie, the detectives, and now prosecutors, were concerned that it would compromise the case against their father if the girls were given information about the investigation.

Feeling they were being shut out, the girls later regretted that decision. With the help of an attorney, Christopher Dupont, they requested that the state comply with their constitutional rights to meet and confer with the prosecutor.

One of the first steps in being more actively involved was a request to be heard at a hearing concerning conditions for Steve's release in November 2009. Dupont sent numerous letters and made calls to prosecutor Joe Butner, seeking a meeting to confer around that time, but Butner did not respond.

It got even more surreal after that. Later, during jury selection as the trial neared, county victim advocates who watched Charlotte hug Ruth Kennedy in the courtroom took the girls aside afterward and told them the jurors couldn't see them having contact with their own grandmother.

 

 

The prosecution filed its official notice on November 20, 2008, that it intended to seek the death penalty. To help John Sears defend Steve against these more serious charges, Steve hired the firm of Osborn Maledon. His parents covered the legal bills, and attorneys Larry Hammond and Anne Chapman joined the defense team.

After several judge changes, based on requests from attorneys on both sides, Judge Thomas Lindberg was appointed to the case.

With a bail hearing set for December 23, the DeMocker family hoped that Steve would be released on bail for Christmas. Testimony continued over two days, during which Sears said the defense aimed to prove that someone other than Steve killed Carol.

With three more hours of testimony to go by day's end on Christmas Eve, Lindberg continued the hearing until January 13, and Steve spent his first Christmas behind bars.

 

 

The hearing spilled into two more days in January 2009.

Knowing that the national media had cameras and producers from
48 Hours
and
20/20
in the courtroom, Steve was allowed to change out of his previous attire of orange jumpsuit and shackles. Instead, he sported a dark suit, with a pale yellow tie, and his graying hair in a spiffy new haircut.

Sears filed a motion asking to send the case back to the grand jury for a new determination of probable cause, arguing that the prosecution had misstated and mischaracterized evidence. But Judge Lindberg would set bond only if he was persuaded that the case lacked enough evidence to exceed the standard of probable cause that Steve had killed his ex-wife.

Prosecutor Mark Ainley laid out his theory: Steve was deeply in debt, and he wanted to save himself $576,000 in alimony over the next eight years. So he conducted incriminating computer searches on how to kill someone and get away with it.

“Somebody using Mr. DeMocker's computer was sure thinking about someone dying,” Ainley said.

On July 2, he said, Steve took a bike ride over to Carol's house. Wearing a backpack containing overalls and gloves, he laid in wait in the house while she was out running, surprised her while she was on the phone, then beat her to death with a golf club. Afterward, he burned his bloody clothing in a bonfire somewhere. When authorities confiscated his passport, he claimed he lost his old one in order to obtain a new one fraudulently as part of a plan to flee.

Defense attorney John Sears countered that the computer searches were part of Steve's research for a novel, explaining that one of the searches led to a link for a joke site that said one way to kill someone, but make it look like an accident, was to give the victim a cigarette.

The shoe prints didn't match any of Steve's shoes, Sears argued, and investigators' photos were not only of poor quality, but they also lacked a scale from which to judge size. The same bike treads detectives said were made from Steve's tire could have been virtually anyone's because the brand was so popular. Detectives failed to properly investigate Steve's claim that he'd been riding his bike on another trail, which eliminated his ability to prove his alibi. And the ME had never said definitively that the murder weapon was a golf club.

But most important, Sears said, was the fact that the prosecution did not present specific exculpatory evidence to the grand jury that a complete profile had been compiled for the unknown male DNA under the fingernails of Carol's left hand, and it specifically ruled out Steve.

“The inference to be drawn from that is a powerful one and clearly exculpatory, that there was a struggle with an unknown man who is
not
the defendant in this case,” he said. “If you had to pick one place in the entire crime scene where that presence of that unknown would be relevant, it's under the fingernails of the victim,” Sears said.

“The police put the blinders on twenty minutes into this case and they are still there today. This was a terribly bloody event,” he said, noting that investigators found no blood on Steve or anywhere at his condo.

Although Steve prepared to flee because he feared being falsely accused and arrested, Sears noted that his client Steve never actually left town.

Nonetheless, Ainley stood by his theory that Steve burned his overalls. He also offered an explanation for why the trail running shoes that detectives found in Steve's closet didn't match the shoe prints.

“It's not a real big leap that he probably got rid of the pair of shoes because it's going to be covered with blood.”

 

 

Issuing two separate rulings, Judge Lindberg determined that the prosecution did not meet the required legal threshold to bind the defendant over for trial. That standard, which is higher than probable cause, must establish that “proof is evident or the presumption great” that a defendant committed capital murder.

Lindberg said the prosecution failed to tie Steve DeMocker to the murder scene with conclusive physical evidence, and it also didn't prove that he had a financial motive to kill his ex-wife.

Though the actions and statements of the defendant have properly given rise to suspicion, more is required,
Lindberg wrote, setting bail at $2.5 million.

The judge sent the case back to the grand jury for a rehearing, saying that the prosecution had presented misleading, incomplete, prejudicial and erroneous evidence—some of which was based on “unsolicited” opinion, not on fact—to the panel.

He cited the prosecution's failure to mention, for example, the exculpatory evidence of the unknown male DNA under Carol's fingernails, and that other unknown male DNA was found on her cordless phone, on several unscrewed lightbulbs in the laundry room and on a door handle. (Exculpatory evidence meaning it wasn't Steve's DNA.)

During the hearing Steve turned around from the defense table and smiled like the Cheshire cat at his family behind him in the gallery.

But that brief victory didn't last. After the prosecution presented the case to the grand jury a second time, the panel indicted Steve once again with the same two murder and burglary charges, in February 2009. Sears's attempt to get a third grand jury look was rejected.

 

 

Representatives from both sides of this case agree now that it was a mess from the start. The shortfalls in the prosecution's case that the defense identified in the beginning were still being challenged by the defense in the years to come.

The problem with Ainley's theory about Steve wearing a biohazard suit and gloves, then burning them in the ranch land behind the house, is that “there's absolutely no evidence that Steve ever purchased anything like that or of any burn pile of paper suits,” defense investigator Rich Robertson said recently.

If writing a book on this case, Robertson said, his working titles would be
Even the Smallest Things Can Attack
or
Tunnel Vision.

The first title references testimony early in the case by Detective Steve Page, who, Robertson said, had minimal computer forensics training and was being mentored by the state DPS.

As Page was testifying about Steve's Internet searches, he mentioned one for “even the smallest things can attack.” Asked what that phrase meant to him, Page replied something to the effect that “Steve was being very careful to the smallest details in planning this murder.”

But as Robertson pointed out later, this phrase was actually an innocent message from a decal on Steve's car, which detectives photographed on July 8, 2008, well before this hearing. Based on a family catchphrase, Steve's daughters had made the decal as a Father's Day gift before Carol died, in memory of a childhood adventure at the tide pools. When Steve told Charlotte to pick up a little hermit crab, she replied, “Dad, even the smallest things can attack.”

Robertson cited this as a prime example of the prosecution's confirmatory bias toward evil intent, “because there's so much of the story that they don't know.” As a result, he said, they ended up with accusatory misinterpretations like this one, when there could be a “completely benign explanation.”

In this case the defense was able to counterbalance this claim by showing Page the decal photo. But other prosecution theories came up later—such as numerous possible scenarios for how the unidentified male DNA #603 ended up under Carol's fingernails—and may have influenced the jury, he said.

If you interpret evidence wrong, “you get the story wrong, and that's how people are wrongly convicted,” Robertson said in 2014.

 

 

Carol's friend Katherine Morris has since offered another theory for why none of Steve's DNA was found at the house, and none of Carol's blood was found on Steve's person, clothing or car. She said she's always felt this in her gut, out of instinct, not from any particular hard evidence, but from the lack of it.

“He went and jumped in the lake and then got on his bike and went home,” she said in 2014, noting that Watson Lake and Granite Basin Lake are both very near the Bridle Path house.

But she added, “I don't believe there wasn't DNA all over the crime scene. I think the sheriff's department did a horrible job, and I think he took the murder weapon up to Colorado.”

That remark stemmed from Steve's call to Katherine just a few days after the murder, when he mentioned that he was in the car, driving to Colorado alone.

“They took my passport, but they didn't tell me I couldn't leave the state,” he told her.

He even made note of that trip during Carol's memorial service. “I think it was his narcissism that made him do that,” Katherine said.

It wasn't until Renee's interview with detectives in April 2010 that other details came out about Steve's trip to Colorado. Renee said she'd gone with him, and because they were both stressed out, they had lots of sex. They also went to some of his favorite areas, such as Durango, and his favorite restaurants, such as Ken & Sue's. It wasn't clear if this was a separate trip from the one Katherine described.