Then No One Can Have Her (32 page)

“Based on your evaluation, Mr. DeMocker ultimately got the benefit of those life insurance proceeds?” Young asked.

“Correct,” Davis testified. “Mr. DeMocker coordinated that the monies from the life insurance company be paid.”

 

 

The last page of Steve's UBS personnel file shows the firm put him on unpaid administrative leave on October 24, 2008, the day after he was arrested. A “stop draw” was placed on his salary on November 20, apparently ending his relationship with the company. However, his former boss, Jim Van Steenhuyse, testified that Steve wasn't officially terminated by the company until April 24, 2009, when he failed to return from leave. Steve's “book of clients” went to Barb O'Non, with another advisor working as backup.

 

 

The prosecution laid out the forensics of Jim Knapp's cell phone calls the night of the murder, based on the cell tower testimony of Detective Sy Ray. The prosecution also presented evidence linking the shoe and bike tracks behind Carol's house to Steve through testimony of witnesses, including FBI forensic examiner Eric Gilkerson.

As Gilkerson had conceded at trial in 2010, he reiterated that the detectives who photographed the shoe prints did not use a ruler to show scale, although some included a flashlight, apparently for that purpose. They also didn't use identifying techniques, such as labeling shots with corresponding evidence numbers to show the tracks traveling in different directions, for example, or adding a date and case number. Gilkerson recommended that castings be made of shoe prints in soil to make three-dimensional impressions because it is difficult to capture uneven surfaces in a photograph.

Holding up a Pikes Peak shoe and photos of the prints left at the crime scene, defense attorney Greg Parzych asked Gilkerson if it was “possible that this shoe created the image” prosecutors said was Steve's shoe print.

“It's possible that a make and model of that shoe could have made the impression, yes,” Gilkerson testified.

“But it's also possible that the make and model did not make that impression?”

Yes, Gilkerson said. “The Ultranord and the Imogene could also have made the impression.”

On day nine, forensic analyst Jonathyn Priest, a former major-crimes commander in Denver, testified about Carol's injuries and the corresponding blood spatter patterns at the crime scene.

The two marks on her back, Priest said, were similar to those he'd seen in another murder case in which investigators found a golf club at the scene in 1995. The killer later admitted using the club to beat his victim to death.

Specifically, he said, the elliptical marks, shaped like teardrops, on Carol's back looked like they were made by the hosel, the area where the club shaft joins the head in an inverted
V.
The two parallel linear marks on her forearm, he added, were consistent with the long thin metal shaft, and six of her head injuries were consistent with the head of the club.

Asked whether the injuries could have been caused by an ASP baton, a baseball bat or a maul handle, Priest said he didn't think so, based on the corresponding nature and curvilinear shape of both the club head and Carol's injuries. He said he came to that conclusion independently, not from reading reports from the medical examiner or anyone else.

As for the blood, he said, the “radiating” patterns emanating from Carol's head were typical of blunt-force trauma incidents, while other marks and patterns showed that her body had been moved. That's because some blood spots had dried before others were made, and others were made by transferring blood from one place to another.

“The victim is either moving or being moved or a combination of both,” he said, adding that Carol had to be “upright or semi-upright to cause a number of the stain patterns.”

Asked for his conclusion about where and how the killer delivered the blows, Priest said the killer was likely standing over Carol, swinging the club from left to right, and pivoting.

In his opinion, Priest testified, six of the seven lacerations on her head were created by a similar object, the golf club, and the last one, over her left eye, “was created by her head striking the corner of the desk.”

After the beating, he said, he could tell that the bookcase was moved, because the elliptical stains had a “downward flow appearance,” meaning that the bookcase was standing upright during the beating, but was then moved so it was tilting down. The direction of blood flow didn't change because the blood had already dried.

Priest noted that the ladder had no blood on it, but should have, based on the radiating pattern of blood on objects around it.

“So the fact that I have zero evidence of blood on the ladder leads me to the conclusion the ladder was placed there after the bloodletting event,” Priest said.

On cross-examination by Williams, Priest conceded that he could have done a more thorough and accurate crime scene analysis if the detectives had taken such procedural steps as measuring how far Carol's body was from the wall, for example. And just because there were left-sided swings, he said, didn't mean the attacker had to be left-handed. He also acknowledged that visiting the original crime scene would have been better than basing his conclusions primarily on photos, which, being two-dimensional, could be deceiving.

“There is a lot you can do at a crime scene that wasn't done here,” Priest said. He added, however, that with 1,280 photos, he had enough information to render an opinion.

As a murder weapon, he said, he couldn't rule out rebar, which was found on Carol's property, but “any cylindrical object” could have produced marks similar to those found on her arm, just not the ones on her back.

The attack happened fast, he said, “less than a few minutes,” but he saw “no evidence in there of two people” attacking her. He also added that “somebody could move her and not get blood on them,” as he had done hundreds of times at homicide scenes.

In the end Priest did not move from his opinion that a golf club was the likeliest murder weapon to have produced most of the injuries on Carol's body.

 

 

On day nineteen, Jim Knapp's ex-wife, Ann Saxerud, testified that she'd been concerned about his prescription drug use. On the day of Carol's murder, however, he didn't appear to be under the influence of any drugs when he showed up at her house to spend the evening with their son Alex.

She confirmed that Jim was wearing the same clothes that evening that he was wearing in the Safeway video the prosecution showed her while she was on the stand.

“Did Jim keep his visitation up with Alex and Jay after that time?”

“Yes,” she said.

“And was there any real change, as you could see, in his behavior?”

“No.”

Under cross-examination by Williams, Ann seemed angry that the defense was pointing fingers at her late ex-husband for Carol's murder. She also acknowledged that she didn't appreciate her privacy being violated by having to testify about her divorce. All of this was hurtful to her and her sons, she said.

“I thought it was inaccurate and inappropriate,” she said. “I don't think Jim has anything to do with Carol's murder.”

Williams reminded her that when she first talked to law enforcement, she said she got home between eight and eight-thirty that night, and that Jim had left her house “shortly after that.” But after she talked repeatedly with Detective Doug Brown, they moved the times she left and got home to be later and later. She even told Brown that she didn't “remember Jim coming [to her house] that night,” Williams said. All of this, he later argued, helped illustrate that she and law enforcement were unfairly trying to reshape their timelines to fit their theory that Steve DeMocker, not Jim Knapp, had killed Carol.

“I think at the time I didn't understand how far this would go, and didn't put the effort into remembering [the exact times]” Ann countered. “But since then, I've changed my mind.” She added that it was “very unclear” to her at the time that she needed to be more precise, because she'd never been involved in a murder investigation before.

 

 

When the prosecution called Katie DeMocker to the stand, prosecutor Jeff Paupore created some high drama in the courtroom by playing a recording of the young woman battling with her father over the insurance money transfers in March 2009.

Although it was clear on the recording that she didn't want to go along with the plan, she would not concede to Paupore's implication that Steve had pressured her into accepting the “agreement of how the money was going to be spent,” specifically for his defense.

“I wouldn't phrase it like that,” she said, contending that she wasn't initially comfortable transferring the money, but she did agree after “lengthy discussions” in which her family provided her with assurances that Charlotte would have enough money for college “and be taken care of, like I was, in that process.”

As trustee, Katie testified, she was empowered to move all that money out of Carol's trust, thus exhausting it, even though she was still five years from being twenty-five, as her mother's will dictated. At this point, Judge Donahoe interrupted and told the jury to take a break.

Calling a bench conference, Donahoe, who had spent seven years on the probate bench, told the attorneys that the jury was receiving inaccurate information from the witness.

“I can understand why criminal lawyers don't practice probate, because you've got the law all confused,” he said, adding that he wasn't criticizing Katie, but she didn't understand what she was saying.

“Despite what she's saying from the stand, she had no right to dissolve this estate at the age—whenever she wanted to—or the trust. . . . She's mixing the two, and she's telling the jury wrong things.”

Donahoe said they needed to find a way to remedy this so the jury got the correct probate law information. Greg Parzych piped up, renewing his motion to sever count three, “fraudulent schemes and artifices.”

Donahoe snapped back that this was not the solution. “Don't even bother me with that again. I'm tired of hearing that severance,” he retorted, noting that he'd already ruled on it several times.

Back on the record once more, Jeff Paupore restated the wishes in Carol's will to Katie, saying that “it was very clear that there would be no distributions until you reached the age of twenty-five.”

Asked if she had discussed that issue with her attorney, Katie said she didn't recall specifically, but it was her understanding that she, as trustee, “was in charge of administering the money as I saw fit . . . that it was mine to do whatever I wanted with.”

Saying she “frankly didn't want anything to do with” transferring her half of the insurance money, she came to believe that it was appropriate to hand over her share to her grandparents after a family meeting and getting those written assurances. She then left the other half for Charlotte “in the account until she turned eighteen.”

“But you knew that your grandparents were going to use that money for attorneys' fees?”

“That was my understanding,” she said. “Some or all of it. I didn't really care at that point.”

 

 

As Paupore questioned Steve's eighty-three-year-old mother, Jan DeMocker, he played a couple of taped conversations between her and Steve in jail, talking about the money transfers. He also pointed out for the jury that just the day before testifying, she'd received immunity from being charged with a crime.

“Do you know why you were in the middle of this?” he asked.

“I guess I was handy,” she said.

Pushing past the flip answer, Paupore asked if she could think of any reason why the girls didn't send all that money directly to Steve's attorneys.

“I don't really know,” she said. “There was an issue of quite a bit of money that . . . my husband and I already spent, that they owed us, Steve owed us, probably close to that amount of money.” She and her husband had been paying Steve's legal fees for more than a year, she said, so “it allowed them to give us a gift, to pay us back. It gave us the freedom of using that money in whatever way we wanted. Although I think they were very aware at that time that our burning concern was for Steve's safety at that point.”

Jan said that Steve
and
Carol owed them that money, which had been spent on their lawyers and lawyers for the girls. “Our output at that point had totaled somewhere between five hundred thousand and seven hundred thousand dollars,” she said. “I don't know exactly what it was. My husband was keeping track of accounts.”