Then No One Can Have Her (8 page)

Around eleven o'clock that morning, Deputy Pam Edgerton was assigned to examine Carol's dogs, which had been taken to her neighbor Janet Drake's house, around the corner on Jockey Path.

Edgerton was able to pick up Daisy, the white dog, but Ike wouldn't let her. The deputy didn't see any sign of blood or stains on Daisy, which matched with the evidence—a lack of bloody paw prints—in Carol's house.

Janet said she hadn't washed the dogs, although Daisy had run through the sprinkler. Between the peeing and puking dogs, Carol often had to treat the rugs with spot cleaner, she said, and also had to put up gates around the house to keep them off the carpets.

Telling Janet that they were investigating Carol's death as a homicide, Edgerton asked if anyone might want to hurt Carol.

“Her ex-husband,” Janet said immediately.

“Why do you think he might have done something like this?”

“He is the biggest creep ever,” Janet replied, noting that he'd had at least thirteen affairs during the marriage.

Asked if she suspected Steve just because he was a creep, Janet admitted that certainly was part of it, but she also thought that he was capable of doing the deed. Carol was a very sweet person with no enemies, she said, but Steve might have been so used to women giving in to him that he couldn't handle it when Carol had rejected him this last time.

“He took everything else from her,” she said, adding that during the protracted divorce period “he wouldn't give her a red cent” toward her bills.

Janet said Carol told her that Steve had asked her within the past week to try to work on their relationship and to get back together again. Aghast, Carol said no, and reminded him that he was already dating Renee.

“She means nothing to me,” Steve told Carol, and continued to try to persuade her to reconcile.

But Carol, Janet said, told him she wasn't interested.

 

 

At three forty-five that afternoon, the county ME, Dr. Philip Keen, began the autopsy of Carol's body. He determined that she'd been struck at least ten times with a blunt-force object, including seven or more times in the head.

When Keen testified about his findings at a hearing on November 12, 2008, he explained that any one of the head blows would have rendered her unconscious and helpless. Calling it an “exceptionally vicious attack,” he said the later blows were “beyond what was necessary to render one unconscious or even deceased.”

Keen noted several of what appeared to be defensive contusions on her right hand and forearm, two of which were long, thin and parallel to each other. She also had a broken nose and a bruised lip.

Based on the linear nature of her arm bruises, the curved scalp lacerations and the skull fractures beneath them, he thought a golf club, probably a wooden driver, not an iron, was the most likely murder weapon. A club's rodlike shaft and contoured head could cause both types of injuries he saw, and the club's head was dense enough to wield the force and momentum necessary to cause such deep skull fractures.

In addition to the defensive injuries on her right forearm, Keen also found that a fingernail on her right hand was fractured down to the quick, all indications of a struggle. He noted some brown material under the fingernails of her left hand, which was tagged and labeled as evidence number 603, and was later determined to contain male DNA. That unknown mystery man came to be known as “Mr. 603.” Noting that her right hand was thick with blood, Keen also retrieved some hair from it, but it proved not to be human.

One of the detectives observing the autopsy remembered seeing a set of golf clubs and an empty golf head cover in Steve's condo garage, so they decided to run back and get it. However, because the first team had already finished its search there at 3:55
P.M
., and they'd called Steve to let him know he could return, they had to obtain a second warrant.

Meanwhile, Steve reentered the gate to his condo complex at 4:06
P.M
., and immediately began to clean up the garage.

When the detectives returned to the condo with the second warrant at 6:40
P.M
., they were looking to seize the set of golf clubs and a pair of athletic shoes that might match the shoe prints they found at the end of Glenshandra. They were able to seize the left-handed set of Cleveland clubs, but the Callaway head cover, which was featured in the photos taken during the earlier search, was nowhere to be found.

Renee's white Toyota Camry was in the garage. Noting the windows were rolled up, Detective Ross Diskin searched the car for shoes and golf clubs, but found none. He looked through the glove box and in and around the child's car seat in the back, but saw nothing unusual, and specifically not the missing golf club head cover. However, Diskin did not complete his report about this search until five months later, on December 16.

 

 

While the kids were in Steve's dining room, they heard noise in the garage and Jake went downstairs to see what was going on. He saw the garage door open and sheriff 's deputies doing another search.

Jake recognized a couple of them from the sheriff's station the night before. He told them that Steve had gone for a walk after cleaning up the garage and before the investigators returned with the new warrant.

When they asked to speak to Steve, Jake went back upstairs to relay the message, then stayed with Charlotte while Steve talked with the investigators.

Steve came back inside and sat on the stairs while the detectives asked him, Charlotte and Jake some more questions, specifically if they had seen a golf head sock cover.

“No,” Jake and Charlotte replied.

But Sergeant Huante didn't believe them. He kept asking the teenagers questions in an aggressive manner, yelling at them, in fact, as he accused them of knowing where the head cover was and keeping that information from the deputies.

Inside, the detectives went through Steve's rather extensive, but neatly organized, collection of shoes. His many pairs of dress shoes were stacked next to each other in a section of rectangular compartments, and the athletic shoes were stored in a separate vertical row of square compartments, each housing a single pair. They seized all of his athletic shoes, including a pair of La Sportiva Rajas.

After the sheriff's team left the condo again, Renee came back. Steve told her, Charlotte and Jake that he'd known the investigators were looking for the head cover, which he said he'd found in the backseat of Renee's car. It could have been blown there by the wind from somewhere in the garage, he said.

Once attorney John Sears arrived, Renee took the kids to Bridle Path to pick up Charlotte's car, leaving Sears alone with his client.

But Steve didn't turn over the head cover to authorities or to his attorney that day. Instead, he gave it to Sears for safekeeping two days later. His defense team later said that although Steve knew the investigators were looking for the head cover, it wasn't on the search warrant, and he didn't know why they wanted it. Not knowing what to do, Steve discussed the issue with Sears, who then called the bar association hotline for advice on how to proceed.

“It is important to know that suspects (and their attorneys) are not required by the Constitution to help law enforcement investigate, particularly when the investigation is targeting you,” Rich Robertson, the defense's investigator, said later. “The burden is on the government. People should not be put in the position of having to guess what law enforcement is looking for or why.”

 

 

When detectives interviewed Jake again, he told them that the last time he'd been to Carol's house was that last Sunday, the day after Katie had left on her trip. He and Charlotte had spent a couple of hours picking through Katie's clothes for those that Charlotte wanted to wear. Carol, who was happy to see them, was getting ready for her garage sale, for which Steve said he'd given her some artwork and a golf club.

Steve also had offered Jake's father a set of left-handed mixed-matched clubs that he didn't use, but like Jake, his dad was right-handed and couldn't use them, either.

 

 

Believing they had collected all the evidence they needed from the Bridal Path house, the team of investigators cleared the crime scene around 5:30
P.M
. on July 3. Within ten minutes Detective Brown called Jim Knapp to tell him that he could return. In Brown's mind it was Jim's residence, he was the caretaker of the house and Carol's pets, and no one knew what else to do with the animals.

That's when Brown, who had been assigned to be the case agent by then, also gave Jim a heads-up about the large amount of blood in Carol's office.

Around six o'clock, right after this conversation, Jim mentioned this bit of information to the cashier at the Safeway on Willow Road, where he was buying some wine. A woman who knew Carol through Van Gogh's Ear, the art gallery where she'd worked, was nearby and overheard him say that his roommate had been murdered and there was “blood all around.” Concerned, she reported this to Detective Brown and faxed him a copy of her Safeway receipt as documentation.

Later, when Brown was confronted on the stand about why the detectives hadn't brought Jim down to the station for questioning the night of the murder, let alone why he told Jim about all the blood and let him back into the crime scene on July 3, Brown responded that he wasn't truly in charge of the case.

“I was not delegating or directing people to make decisions,” he testified. “My supervisors were doing that.”

In the view of Steve's attorneys, authorities should have considered Jim Knapp as a suspect or person of interest, but they didn't.

“You chose to believe Mr. Knapp's alibi and chose to disbelieve Mr. DeMocker's alibi,” defense attorney Craig Williams said.

Brown countered that Steve was the one who drew attention to himself at the crime scene the night of the murder by asking several times whether he was a suspect, which raised Commander Mascher's suspicions as well. Charlotte, Jake and Jim, on the other hand, did not raise the investigators' suspicions in the same way, and they also did not ask whether they were suspects. Jim
was
a person of interest, Brown said, he just wasn't taken down to the station.

For the next five years, Brown continued to work the investigation, but he traded his detective title for deputy because he was mostly working patrol as the case dragged on. Detective John McDormett, who typically worked homicides, replaced him as the lead detective and case agent in September 2008, followed by Lieutenant Dave Rhodes, who took over because of concerns over a personality clash between McDormett and prosecutor Joe Butner.

On July 8, after a case briefing at the Prescott sheriff's station, Sergeant Dan Winslow, who was a golfer, was asked to look through the seized assortment of Steve's left-handed clubs. Winslow compared the photo of the now-missing head cover with the Mizuno bag that contained two metal drivers, two fairway woods, four irons and a sixty-degree wedge, but saw no matching club.

Winslow then went to the High Desert Golf shop in Prescott and looked through its selection of used clubs. Learning that the staff kept no record of when or who had brought them in, he purchased a used left-handed Callaway club, because it was the same make and model as the missing head cover—a Big Bertha Steelhead III #7 wood, which investigators believed was the likely murder weapon. Winslow gave the used club to Detective Brown.

This used club was the same model as Steve's except that it was one inch shorter. Steve, they later learned, had had his club custom made by Callaway, which shipped it to him in October 2003. The club Winslow purchased was later known as the “exemplar” club, and was admitted in court as an example of the alleged murder weapon.