Then No One Can Have Her (20 page)

On July 2, the day Carol was murdered, Barb O'Non spoke with Steve by phone. Their conversation, she recounted later, was “warm and friendly.”

She remembered this well, because that day was also her son's seventeenth birthday. After having her nails done, she and her son celebrated his special day at Buffalo Wild Wings restaurant in Phoenix before heading home to Anthem.

She texted Steve at 8:46
P.M
., as soon as she got home, but she could tell that he didn't open the message. Like Renee, she immediately thought he was “probably with another woman again somewhere,” because it wasn't like him not to respond to her text right away.

In her experience Steve was never without his cell phone. It was always on and he took it everywhere. “I don't recall a time ever in the years that I was with him, the many years, that the phone was ever left unattended or away from him. I remember once watching him take it into a shower,” she later testified.

Steve called her at 12:14
A.M
. on July 3, but she didn't answer because she was asleep. She didn't hear the phone ring or realize he'd called until later.

She learned of Carol's death later that morning, in a six forty-five call on her way to work. John Farmer, a coworker from the UBS office in Prescott, told her that sheriff's detectives were there, looking to talk to Steve. John called back moments later, informing her that “Carol had been found dead in her home.” Stunned, Barb pulled over to process the news.

Minutes later, Barb heard from an attorney friend who called to tease her that the police had descended on the UBS office, and had put up crime scene tape, because she and Steve had been arguing over the dissolution of their business partnership. Once she told him the true nature of the detectives' visit and asked if he thought she needed an attorney, he called back with the name of a Phoenix lawyer he'd contacted on her behalf.

“You need to call him now,” he said. “He's waiting to see you.”

When Steve called her that afternoon, she told him she was going to consult with an attorney.

“Why?” he asked.

“Because I could be seen as a suspect,” she said.

“You couldn't have murdered Carol any more than I could have,” he said. “Anyway, it was an accident. There was a ladder there and she fell. It was an accident.”

 

 

That same day, Barb hired attorney Michael Terribile, who advised her not to talk to law enforcement until they stated in writing that she was not a suspect. The county attorney's office initially refused to do this; Detective Doug Brown said they were trying to interview her to rule her out as a suspect because Steve or one of his family members had indicated that she might be involved somehow in the murder. But, ultimately, Brown was able to get the prosecution to write a letter saying that Barb was not a target of the investigation, which enabled him to schedule an interview with her for July 12.

The fact that Barb hired her own attorney raised a few eyebrows, including Katie DeMocker's. In talking with Renee and Katherine, who then relayed these conversations to investigators, Katie said that if her father had wanted to kill Carol, he would have done so before finalizing the divorce, and he also would have planned it better. Because of his imminent split with Barb over the client list and accounts, Katie suggested that Barb could have killed Carol because she'd always wanted to be with Steve. If Barb made it look like Steve did the murder, then she would also get to keep his entire $110 million portfolio.

Brown subsequently investigated Barb's alibi, confirming through her cell phone records her whereabouts on the night of the murder. Both her text to Steve and his call to her pinged off the cell tower near her house in Anthem.

Barb told Brown that Steve had tried to persuade her not to go through with their financial split, saying she wouldn't be able to make it on her own. She also recalled that Steve had been furious with Carol during the divorce proceedings and had said several times that he'd wished Carol were dead. Barb said she didn't think he was joking.

Two years later, when Barb testified at the pretrial hearing, she changed her story, saying that Steve had made comments several times that “he thought that they would all be better off if [Carol] were dead. I didn't take him seriously.” She couldn't remember the context, but she said, “There were instances where he was unhappy with Carol around the children, and he thought that they would be better off if the kids were just with him.”

She told Brown that Steve's habit of spending more than he earned, and specifically his frequent stays at the Phoenician, had been an issue in their personal relationship as well.

She also raised another curious tidbit. About six months earlier, she said, Steve had begun injecting himself daily with HGH (human growth hormone), and was also getting testosterone shots. He made an appointment for Barb to see his naturopathic doctor so she could get HGH injections, too, but she refused.

Because of tensions relating to their split, Barb tried to cut off most of her personal contact with Steve. But on June 27, 2008, as they were finalizing their settlement and division of clients, Steve wanted to meet for dinner at the Westin Kierland Resort.

“He wasn't happy about either [our business or personal] relationship ending, and I was trying to keep things on a friendly note,” she testified, adding that she really wanted to break personal and professional contact with Steve after that.

Instead, they ended up spending that Friday night together at a hotel. She blamed her lack of resolve on too much alcohol. The way Barb told the story in court later, it had an uncanny parallel to Steve's meeting with Carol and the girls at the airport that Saturday, and his subsequent coffee meeting with Carol that Sunday.

“The dinner was very friendly,” Barb said. “It was the way it used to be. It was warm.... It was the first time in many, many days, weeks and months that we'd had friendly conversation.”

The next morning when they woke up, Barb told him she was concerned to see him looking flushed, but he said he always looked like that. He told her,
[the HGH was] a miracle drug that helped with mental acuity, pains and made his workouts much better,
Brown wrote in his report.

Barb had been intent on talking to him that morning about breaking off contact for a while, but Steve was distracted, texting with Carol about going shopping with the family before heading to the airport for Katie's send-off. This, Barb said later, left her feeling “pretty disgusted” with herself.

“I felt as though I had been . . . fooled one more time,” she testified in 2013, that “all of the flirtatious, charming, seductive talk over the night before was really nothing but talk.”

She'd tried repeatedly to break up with him in the past, but he always managed to talk her out of it, telling her how important she was and that he was sorry.

“He would be in tears. He would tell me I was all that mattered, that it was a terrible mistake he had made. It meant nothing. He would spend the rest of his life making it up to me.”

The tears always seemed to work on her. Parting with Steve was so difficult that she started seeing a therapist to help her do it.

 

 

A couple of weeks after Carol's murder, Steve asked Barb to go hiking and camping with him near Durango, Colorado, but she declined.

“I was really trying to be done with the relationship,” she said later, but he was trying to save it, to “fix things between us. He wanted to talk. He wanted to go camping, and we never went camping. I thought it was odd.”

“You didn't think Steve was going to take you up in the mountains and kill you, did you?” defense attorney John Sears asked during the 2010 pretrial hearing.

“I didn't know what the purpose was. I wasn't going to go up into the mountains with Steve at that time.”

“You weren't afraid of Steve, then, were you?”

“I was. At that time I was.”

Prosecutor Joe Butner asked Barb why Steve's camping invitation was more worrisome in light of Carol's recent murder.

“Because I had no idea what happened, and I wasn't going to place myself at that time in a position where—we've already established . . . I am not an outdoors person. I wouldn't know how to take care of myself outside, out of doors.... I wasn't willing to go camping with him.”

Sears argued that much of Barb's testimony at the pretrial hearing should be inadmissible at trial because it was too prejudicial. Butner disagreed, arguing that “this is highly probative of the kind of pressure that he was experiencing when he cracked and killed his wife.”

 

 

Two weeks after the camping invitation, Barb went out to La Jolla, California, to get away from everything going on in Prescott. She was horrified by what had happened to Carol and wanted some quiet alone time.

Steve continued to insist that they really needed to talk; he just didn't want to do it in Arizona. He flew out to meet her at the hotel, where she'd been staying for the past week, arriving the day before she was planning to leave. They had dinner, then went back to her room.

Given that she'd turned down his camping offer, Barb could not explain later why she'd agreed to let him join her in La Jolla so soon afterward. “I don't understand it myself,” she said.

By now Steve was no longer able to claim that Carol's death was an accident. “It was obvious, at that point, that it was a homicide,” she said. Steve told her he didn't kill Carol and was worried about being falsely accused and arrested for her murder.

It was then that he told her where he'd been the night Carol was killed, recounting a story somewhat similar to what he'd told law enforcement, but also similar to the story Jake first told investigators, which Steve denied.

Steve told Barb that he was at the fitness center, intending to finish his workout that night after the aborted bike ride. He was going to use the club phone to call Charlotte when he realized he had a spare cell battery in the car. So he went out to his BMW, loaded the battery into the phone and called his daughter, who reminded him that they were supposed to have dinner together that night.

“He said he had forgotten that,” Barb said.

As Barb listened to his story, parts of it sounded fishy. She'd done regular workouts with him in the past and had never known him to let his phone go dead or to find himself without a spare battery. He rarely, if ever, had gone for a bike ride while he was living at Alpine Meadows. Plus he made such a big deal about the physical exertion it took to get the bike back to the car with a flat tire, it didn't make sense that he'd go for a workout after all that. She also doubted his forgotten-dinner explanation.

“Charlotte was very important to both of her parents, and at that time, in my opinion, there's no way that Steve would forget he had a dinner with Charlotte,” she said.

Steve had been with other women during the course of their relationship, including Carol. Barb had heard or suspected that he was involved with Renee, but he always claimed that she was simply his masseuse and friend. While Barb and Steve were talking in La Jolla, she asked him about Renee again. This time he acknowledged sleeping with her and apologized, just as he had more than half-a-dozen other times after having sex with other women.

“He told me that it was a huge mistake and that he had only slept with her once, and it was all an error, and that it was over, and that [Renee] was upset.” None of this turned out to be true, Barb said, but his apology was tearful, “warm and genuine.”

 

 

In early October 2008, just as UBS management was finalizing the split between them, Steve proposed to Barb one last time while they were on her back porch in Anthem.

“He said that he had learned a lot about what he wanted out of life, and that the business didn't matter, that none of it mattered, that he wanted to be together, and we could go wherever I wanted and do whatever I wanted, but that we could get married,” she said later. “I don't really recall how I answered him. I don't think I did.”

On October 8, 2008, a
Daily Courier
article ran a story with this headline:
POLICE HOPE TO MAKE ARREST IN KENNEDY MURDER SOON
.

The DeMocker family had been feeling the walls closing in on Steve because the detectives had never said they were looking at any other suspects. But after reading this article online, Steve's mother got excited, thinking that investigators had finally settled on another suspect to arrest.

They have found the right person,
she thought.

Then she talked to Steve. “So they are going to arrest somebody,” she said. “Have they found a suspect?”

Steve knew better. “I think they are planning to arrest me,” he said.

 

 

Two weeks later, Steve surprised Carol's mother with a call. Ruth had invited Katie and Charlotte down for Thanksgiving, and they were planning to come. But Steve told Ruth that he was concerned she might not be up to having the girls stay with her and cooking them a big meal.

Still miffed that he hadn't offered his condolences, Ruth did not take kindly to Steve's feigned “concern.”

“Of course I'm up for having them here,” she told him. “I love them and I want them to come.”

That remark sent Steve into a monologue about his struggles with his own grief, which Ruth did not believe. The whole call seemed entirely manipulative to her. It was the only time she could remember him calling her, other than when he was leaving A.G. Edwards for UBS and he asked if he could take her and her husband's account with him.

 

 

The next morning, on October 23, Lieutenant Dave Rhodes, Sergeant Luis Huante and Detective John McDormett showed up at the UBS office on Camelback Road in Phoenix to talk to Steve.

Announcing that they had search warrants for the office and Steve's condo, Huante read Steve his Miranda rights. They patted him down, then took him into a room to question him.

Their first query was about the golf club head cover. “It was laying on a shelf in the garage, and when we went there two hours later that golf club sock was gone,” Rhodes said.

“Right,” Steve said.

“We'd like to know where it is,” Rhodes said.

Steve contended that he didn't know the deputies were looking for it at the time. When he found it the next day, he gave it to his attorney. “I said, ‘John, what do I do at this point?' and he said, ‘Let me look into it,' but there is an explanation—”

“Yeah, we're very—our curiosity is very high about that.”

“He came back to me and he said, ‘Give it to me.'”

“Why did you give him the golf club sock?” Rhodes asked.

“Because he's my attorney, and I've been—I—I—because that seems wise.”

“I don't mean that, Steve. I'm kind of confused,” Rhodes said. “The detectives came back, and they were looking for it, and then it was gone, but what made that something that you—”

“Because I overheard them in my garage saying something about a golf thing,” Steve said, acknowledging that he'd heard the detectives talking in “hushed tone around the corner” about it, then made him sit on the stairway while they compared photos taken earlier in the day.

Huante said the golf sock was listed on the search warrant that he'd handed Steve that day. This issue became a matter of debate and interpretation later, because the defense contended that the warrant listed only golf clubs.

Rhodes told Steve that they'd been in contact with his attorney, John Sears, who told them that he'd gotten plenty of information from Steve “that made him confident that you weren't involved in the death of your wife, but we'd asked him and asked him and asked him to . . . provide that information, and it just never happened.”

Rhodes went on to say that the killer rode a mountain bike into the forest behind Carol's house, jumped the fence and went in the back door. “Mountain bike tires are kind of common, but they had the exact same kind of tires that you had on your mountain bike,” he said.

“I've always wondered what it was that made you guys so focused on me other than the fact that I'm an ex,” Steve said, admitting that he also “didn't have an alibi that night.”

“Well, that was a big deal,” Rhodes said. “Is there any way that you could have ridden behind her house that night?”

“My bike has not been at or near that property in I don't know how many years—not with
me
on it.... And I have been out in that area in days or weeks previous, once in a while, but not right there behind the house. I mean, if I were going to go over there, if I were going to enter that property, why would I go over the fence there? I mean, I built that gate.”

Since the day the detectives had searched his condo, Steve said, he'd learned that Jim Knapp had been making accusations that Steve had been physically abusive to Carol. But that, Steve said, “never, ever happened. Not ever.”

McDormett assured Steve that Jim Knapp and his comments had nothing to do with this. “No, it comes down to, you know, the time frame is huge, and the mountain bike tracks behind her house are big. I mean, it rained that day, earlier, and there's no other tracks out there except these . . . and most reasonable people are going to say, ‘Wow, that's extremely coincidental.' And so we've never had the benefit of hearing from you about it.”

“I've never had any experience like this,” Steve said, noting that he talked to them for hours at the station without an attorney, and had since been roundly scolded for it. “I've assumed that being innocent counted for something.... I loved Carol.”

Steve said they'd gotten together for coffee the day after Katie's send-off, and the tone between them had only grown warmer since they'd gotten past the roughest part of the divorce. “I asked her if she'd be interested in starting to see each other again, and she said, ‘I'm here. We'll take it from there.' I don't know that we would have reconciled. I don't know.”

Rhodes brought the interview back to the golf sock. When the detectives came back, he said, “Why would you have taken the sock at that point?”

“I didn't take the sock.”

“No, no, I mean—”

“I never touched it.”

“You moved it off the shelf.”

“I never moved it off the shelf. I haven't touched that thing. I told you, I have an explanation. I've given it to my attorney.”

From there Rhodes honed in on the books that Steve ordered on Amazon, about “basically hiding your identity and covering your tracks and that kind of stuff.”

“How to live abroad,” McDormett chimed in.

“Right. Stupid fear-based stuff,” Steve said. “My brother—”

“Your brother suggested it?”

“I don't want to get him in trouble,” Steve said. “If you guys arrest me, I'm going to face this down in trial. I'm not going anywhere.”

Rhodes said they needed to take him back to Prescott and ask him more questions. If he wanted to talk to his lawyer, that was fine, but he would be in custody until they got their questions answered.

“Am I under arrest?”

“Right now you're in investigative detention.”

“We've got serious questions about that night and about your involvement in your ex-wife's murder, and if they don't get resolved, you definitely could be facing charges.”

They drove Steve back to Prescott in the passenger seat of the cruiser without handcuffs. He was placed in an interview room at the Yavapai County Jail, but after his attorney told detectives that Steve didn't want to talk to them, they booked him on felony charges of first-degree homicide and burglary.

That same day the investigators served search warrants at Steve's office and condo, his storage facility in Prescott, Katie's apartment in Scottsdale, where he stayed sometimes, and for his rental car. They were looking for the books he ordered on Amazon and the golf club head cover.

During the searches they found a book,
How to Be Invisible,
some e-mails between Steve and Barb, as well as his handwritten notes about a pro-and-con competition involving Carol and Barb. On the last page he'd written,
games, sets, match, tournament,
and listed Barb as the winner. When she learned of this competition from detectives, she described it as “frightening.”

 

 

A couple of hours later, attorney John Sears turned over the golf club head cover to Detective Theresa Kennedy.

Steve had taken the head cover to Sears's office on July 5, where the attorney examined it for bloodstains or other biological evidence, then put it into his safe until he was specifically asked for it.

Some in law enforcement, including then-Sheriff Steve Waugh, believed that Sears was wrong to do this, viewing it as evidence tampering and obstructing the investigation. Waugh filed a complaint against Sears with the State Bar of Arizona, alleging that Sears acted improperly.

But the bar association, from which Sears had received a “pre-read” at the time on whether he was required to turn it over voluntarily, did not agree.

“They told him to preserve it and if he was ever asked for it by law enforcement, he should produce it, which is exactly what he did,” defense investigator Rich Robertson said. “It was in a paper bag on a shelf with a note attached. It sat there until [the detectives] asked for it and he gave it to them.” That's because a defendant has a Fifth Amendment right not to volunteer evidence that could be incriminating, he said.

The bar counsel dismissed Waugh's complaint, noting that Sears “safeguarded the item from damage, deterioration or destruction until the police agency obtained a more specific search warrant.” He noted that Sears did so based on advice from the bar's ethics counsel and another criminal defense attorney.

 

 

Later that day Detective McDormett, Sergeant Huante and Lieutenant Rhodes went to Steve's condo to interview Charlotte again.

Katie had just walked in the door after flying in from Los Angeles, where she was a senior at Occidental College, majoring in politics. In big-sister protective mode, she was not thrilled to see the officers through the peephole.

The officers tried to persuade Charlotte to come outside to talk to them alone, but Renee and Katie would not allow it. Renee asked if the officers could come inside to talk to Charlotte, then went to call John Sears. That's when Katie stepped in.

Huante tried to assure them that neither Charlotte nor Katie was in trouble. “My motive is I want to find out what happened to your mom,” he said.

“We all do,” Katie said.

“Okay, but based on that I want you guys to tell me the truth. That's all I'm asking.”

“Have we given you some reason to believe we have not told you the truth?” Katie asked.

“Yes,” Huante said. “You were asked a couple of questions and your answer was ‘I don't feel comfortable answering that.'”

“That was not lying to you,” Katie countered. She said it was a difficult night for all of them and she wanted to take care of her sister, who was upset. “Am I obligated to speak with you right now?”

“No, ma'am,” Huante said.

“Okay, then I think we're going to do this another time.”

“Yeah,” Charlotte agreed.

“I really do appreciate everything that you're doing, and I'm not trying to be difficult here, but I don't think you understand what it is we're going through,” Katie said.

Huante pressed on, trying to engage Charlotte right in front of Katie. “When can I speak with you?” he asked.

“That's not up to her,” Katie snapped.

Renee refused to talk to them as well, saying that she wanted to speak to a lawyer before doing so. “None of us are lying to you,” she said. “I know that you think we're trying to cover for Steve, but even if Steve did this . . . he would never compromise himself by telling any of us.”

Katie apologized for being short with them, but said she still had heard no reason why the interview needed to happen immediately, especially when she'd just finished telling them by phone that she would prefer to wait until the next day. Then she asked them to leave.

Trying to soften the impression left by Huante's confrontational approach, McDormett said, “Before I leave, you guys just have to understand we're working for your mom. We're not the enemy.”

Katie said she wasn't trying to prevent them from finding out what happened to her mother, but she was “a little bit insulted by you treating me like this.... It has nothing to do with wanting to hide anything about the investigation.”