Then No One Can Have Her (6 page)

Around 1:30
A.M
. on July 3, the detectives began a series of recorded interviews in separate rooms at the sheriff 's station. Detective Brown and Sergeant Huante talked to Steve; Lieutenant Rhodes took Charlotte; and Commander Mascher spoke with Jake, trying to establish a timeline of everyone's whereabouts and activities that day.

At the start of Steve's interview, he said he would really rather talk to the detectives the next day. “I want to help you—”

“Right, I know, and—”

“Charlotte—we just—it's kind of a shock. I'd prefer not to be up all night.”

“I'd prefer not to be up all night, either,” Brown said, proceeding with his questions.

Steve asked for some water, then Brown started going through the text messages that had come into Steve's cell phone while it was turned off. The first was one from Barb at 8:46
P.M
.

“Who is Barb?”

“Barb is a—a former partner.... She and I have been working together for a long, long time.... We were really involved for years and we are both business partners, and, uh, um—”

“Here's one from Carol,” Steve said, referring to the one she sent at 7:27
P.M
. about shipping Katie's things. Steve said it had gotten stored on his phone while it was off, and it didn't come in until 10:08
P.M
.

“Is that when you turned it on, then?”

“That's when I—I remembered I had a, um, spare battery.”

“So your phone was dead?”

“It was, yeah.”

Throughout the course of the night, Steve's story about his cell phone changed. There wasn't a good signal where he'd been riding. His phone battery died and he didn't remember he had a spare until he got back to town. He didn't get a chance to put it in until 10
P.M
.

From there, Brown moved on to the details of Steve's bike ride.

“I don't really mountain bike very often,” Steve said, adding that he'd been mostly trail running lately.

But that night, Steve said, he drove to the top of a hill near Granite Mountain to ride on a trail off Love Lane, near where he and Carol had once owned property, off Rainmaker. He said he parked near there and rode down the hill to the trailhead. The trail is relatively flat, he said, which made it popular with mountain bikers and horse riders. However, he didn't see anyone else on the trail that night, and he didn't think anyone could prove where he was.

He was right. As Mike Sechez, the prosecution investigator, said later, “We never found a single person who saw his car parked anywhere.” Sechez added that Steve also never gave the detectives a reason why he picked that particular trail other than he wanted some exercise.

The trail area that Steve described was about a mile from Carol's house, across Williamson Valley Road, about a twenty- or twenty-five-minute drive from Steve's condo. Asked to draw a map on the dry-erase board and to show detectives where he'd parked his car and ridden his bike, Steve did so, indicating that the trail was on the south side of Love Lane.

“Did you happen to get those scratches there?” Huante asked.

“Up higher in the basin, where it starts to get—”

“You've got a lot of scratches. I was watching your legs—”

“—brushed by something on the left,” Steve finished, agreeing with Huante that the bushes can be thorny and scratchy if you ride too close to them.

Steve said he started his ride around six-thirty, and thought he got back to the car around 9
P.M
. He then had to break down the bike to get it to fit into his car. He'd driven back into town before he realized that he had a spare battery to put into his phone.

Moving on to Steve's relationship with Carol, Brown asked if she was a “confrontational person.”

“She's not a diplomat. She doesn't connect particularly well,” Steve replied. “She doesn't have a lot of—she doesn't socialize a lot. She can have some sort of rough edges.”

“Has she ever been aggressive or violent toward you or her daughters?”

“Not violent, but she was pretty inappropriate,” Steve said. “She got a little angry at Charlotte. She's gotten really angry enough to be very dramatic with me during the worst of the divorce process.” But he added that he didn't think Carol would ever get physical during a confrontation. “She just argues or, you know, gets verbal.”

Asked if his daughters ever mentioned Jim Knapp and Carol arguing, Steve started yawning and apologized, which, looking back later, seemed like a telling response, as if he didn't perceive Jim as posing any danger.

“I'm really tired,” Steve said. “I'm really sorry.”

At this point, when Steve said more forcefully that he wanted to leave, Brown said they weren't finished asking questions. He then read Steve his Miranda rights, saying they still weren't clear on some points and needed him to go over them again.

Asked what he'd been wearing on his bike ride, Steve said he'd had on some gray Patagonia shorts, a white Lycra Nike top, ankle socks, a helmet and red Lake clip-in shoes. No gloves that day.

“Is there any reason why your blood or anything would be at the residence?” Brown asked.

“No. I haven't been at the house.”

“Or DNA or your fingerprints?”

“No, okay, well, I mean, I don't know how long fingerprints are around.”

“Any reason why your bicycle tracks would be on the property?” Brown asked.

“Or on the trail behind the property?” Huante chimed in.

“I haven't been there.”

The detectives told Steve that although they'd initially thought Carol might have accidentally fallen and hit her head, other evidence had now contradicted that theory. They told him they'd found blood in the house and, noting Steve's bleeding scratches, gave him a chance to admit that he'd been there. They were going to serve a search warrant and collect blood, fingerprints and DNA samples, they said, and they would eventually find out anyway.

“I'm happy to give you blood, saliva,” Steve said, “anything you need.... I wasn't there. I wouldn't do that.... What do you need from me? I mean, so now I get an attorney?”

“There's nothing in there at all that's going to tie you to this at all?”

“There is nothing that I'm aware of, 'cause I know what I was doing,” Steve replied in yet another curious answer.

Brown and Huante tried to give Steve another chance to confess. “Now would be the time to say, ‘You know what? I went over and we argued, and she threw this at me and I got upset, and I—'”

But Steve remained firm. “No,” he said. “I was not there.”

Told Jake's story that Steve had mentioned going riding on the trail around the fitness center, Steve said that was wrong, he'd never said such a thing. Asked to go over the information again about the trail he
had
taken off Love Lane, given its close proximity to the murder scene, Steve said, “Wish I'd chosen a different trail.”

“I wish you had chosen a different trail also,” Brown said.

“Of course if I had done it, I probably would have chosen something—I wouldn't have chosen to be right near the scene of what sounds like [it] may be a crime.”

Steve asked why the detectives initially thought Carol had died from a fall. Brown told him that at first the ladder's position made it look as if she'd fallen from it, and that all the other stuff in the room had come “tumbling down.” But the blood patterns and the position of Carol's body did not fit with that theory.

“There's blood in the room and, like I said, a very traumatic injury to her head. Very traumatic . . . It looks like something was possibly covered up after the fact.”

During one of the breaks during that long night of questioning, Steve called his divorce attorney, Anna Young, and asked her to come down to the station. Young showed up and stayed with Steve until the search warrants had been written and executed. But knowing she did not have the experience necessary to defend a homicide suspect, Young referred him to criminal defense attorney John Sears.

Sears, in turn, called in private investigator Rich Robertson, a former investigative journalist and editor at the
Arizona Republic,
who had edited three separate stories that were Pulitzer Prize finalists.

Steve's sister Susan DeMocker was subsequently brought in as Sears's legal assistant for a time, which kept costs down and also allowed her to brief Steve's parents on the case regularly.

 

 

Outside Steve's interview room, Huante and Brown conferred.

“He thinks he's smart,” Huante said. “That gouge he has on his leg—”

“A barbed-wire fence,” Brown added.

“We got to check that area really good,” Huante said, adding that as they'd already told Charlotte that “there were inconsistencies with her father's story and we're going to be doing a search on the house.”

That's when they learned that Renee Girard had already arrived at Steve's condo—before the deputy who had been sent there to secure it and keep people from entering and moving or discarding evidence. In fact, one of the deputies noted, Renee had also been at the crime scene.

“Then we really need to search her and search her car. She might have taken shit to the car already. Her car.”

Sheriff's investigators asked Steve to remove his shirt and shorts so they could photograph the numerous cuts on his body. In addition to the ones they'd seen earlier on his left arm and leg, they also found some that had been hidden under his clothes: a horizontal abrasion along his left side at the bottom of his rib cage, along with two narrow thin scratches under his underwear. They also found blood on the left side of his underwear's waistband.

Some of the scratches were very thin and some were deeper gashes. Several looked as if they could have been gouged by the barbed-wire fence that ran along the ranch land behind Carol's house. Investigators took DNA swab samples along that fence later in the week, and although Sorenson Forensics did find a mix of human DNA there, the results were inconclusive.

 

 

Meanwhile, as Commander Scott Mascher talked with Jake, and Rhodes spoke with Charlotte, neither teenager was very precise with times. For example, Charlotte first said that she and Jake had gone to the pool around sixish, coming back a half hour later, as the sun was setting. However, the sun didn't set until seven forty-six that night.

Charlotte was very emotional, speaking so softly at times that her words were unintelligible on the tape. She had just lost her mother, after all.

As she recounted how she'd dropped the phone when she learned that her mother was dead, Rhodes said gently, “Well, it's hard. It's hard for everybody.”

Charlotte wasn't too precise on specific details, either. She said that once he got home, her father didn't go out again, while both Jake and Steve said that he went to the office for about five minutes.

After the teenagers were interviewed separately, Mascher and Rhodes talked to them together for about fifteen more minutes, starting around 2:30
A.M
.

Asked if Steve would go riding on the trails behind the Bridle Path house, Charlotte said no, that wouldn't be very good bike riding, and Jake agreed. As far as trails go, he said, they were really short and narrow. Besides, Charlotte added, she didn't think Steve had even been out to the house since last year to get some tools.

During these sessions Charlotte said a few things that were interesting on their own or conflicted with what Steve told investigators.