The Mystery on Bridle Path

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Speaker 5 She was family. A giant hole was ripped in our hearts.
The first thing you want is, well, the police are going to go get the bad guys, right?

Speaker 5 I was not prepared for

Speaker 5 what happened.

Speaker 8 Professor, artist, mom, murdered.

Speaker 3 A primal scream came out of me.

Speaker 10 She just immediately broke down, started crying pretty hard.

Speaker 13 Police were quick to question the ex.

Speaker 15 Maybe too quick.

Speaker 16 They focused in right from the very beginning.

Speaker 17 Husband always does it, right?

Speaker 14 But what if the husband didn't?

Speaker 18 You don't find any DNA, fingerprints, blood, anything of his in the house.

Speaker 12 Could someone else be the real killer?

Speaker 6 I'm wondering what was this man capable of?

Speaker 3 So much tragedy, so much heartbreak.

Speaker 20 It was very emotional for me.

Speaker 5 We just kept waiting for them to figure out that they had it wrong.

Speaker 21 It was the 2nd of July, 2008.

Speaker 22 Early evening in a fine old town called Prescott, Arizona.

Speaker 15 Sun going down, air cooling down to a fine evening warmth.

Speaker 28 Good time out here so far.

Speaker 29 Here at the town's historic rodeo grounds, refugees from the summer heat in Phoenix, two hours and 25 degrees away, settled into the stands to enjoy the annual exploits of the cowboys.

Speaker 25 For the very same time, a few miles away on the edge of town, a woman named Carol Kennedy, jogged along a well-worn path at the base of Granite Mountain.

Speaker 37 Sometime after seven, she turned in at her big backyard here on a street called Bridal Path, trotted past the stone labyrinth she'd laid out here years earlier to mark the turn of the millennium, and arrived at the back door of the house she intended to inhabit for the rest of her natural days.

Speaker 24 But of course, Carol Kennedy had no idea that this was going to be her last day.

Speaker 38 And no, it would not be natural at all.

Speaker 3 It's the biggest loss of my life to to this day.

Speaker 3 It's profound, it's piercing, it's constant.

Speaker 44 Carol Kennedy was in, as they say, a good place in her life.

Speaker 46 This is her friend, Catherine Morris.

Speaker 3 Carol was the epitome of kindness and living a life from a perspective of having an open heart and being loving.

Speaker 43 Before she became a close friend, Catherine Morris was Carol's student at Prescott College.

Speaker 3 She was very well respected and admired. Her classes were always full, very difficult to get into.
What was she like?

Speaker 3 She was magnetic and she was always sort of searching for the truth and you just were gravitated to her.

Speaker 48 The charisma that kind of pulled her students in, especially maybe you.

Speaker 3 She was soft and inviting.

Speaker 49 I'm Carol Kennedy. I live in Prescott, Arizona.

Speaker 50 You get a sense of her personality in this 2006 interview in which she was asked about her passion for teaching.

Speaker 53 Such a gift to feel like you get to give seeds to this first row here, and then they turn around and give it to rows behind them.

Speaker 25 And in fact, she shared those passions with the man who was her husband for 25 years.

Speaker 56 Love of her life, really.

Speaker 25 Steve DeMacher.

Speaker 5 They were crazy for each other.

Speaker 21 Sharon DeMacher is Steve's sister.

Speaker 5 Carol was really easy to love. She was kind of a natural fit in the family.
She was just immediately a sister to all of us.

Speaker 24 All of us being the DeMacher family, high achievers, all of them.

Speaker 46 Sharon is a doctor.

Speaker 5 It's an accomplished bunch. As one of my friends said, there's not a weak link in this group.

Speaker 59 Carol and Steve got married in his parents' backyard overlooking Lake Ontario.

Speaker 61 near Rochester, New York.

Speaker 15 An outdoor wedding for a couple who loved adventure.

Speaker 5 Steve was the one that kind of started the adventuring side of things. First there was hiking and skiing and mountain climbing and kayaking.

Speaker 64 They moved around a bit, as people do, and wound up eventually in Prescott, which proved to be the perfect place to raise their two bright attractive daughters, Katie and Charlotte.

Speaker 5 They're amazing. I think that it's really a testimony to the kind of parents that Steve and Carol were.

Speaker 5 The girls were their first priority.

Speaker 29 Steve became the dean of Prescott College.

Speaker 58 Carol taught psychology there.

Speaker 56 But life is a river, never the same for long.

Speaker 65 Steve decided to change careers, left the academic life, became a financial advisor, very successful too.

Speaker 27 And there were other changes, more difficult ones.

Speaker 5 Nobody knows all of what goes on inside a marriage, but I did talk with both of them about it.

Speaker 5 They both struggled because their lives were moving in different directions.

Speaker 32 And much as they still cared for each other, there were infidelities.

Speaker 44 Steve had an affair.

Speaker 4 They decided to separate.

Speaker 3 Carol loved Steve fiercely. She fought hard for her marriage until the end.

Speaker 58 But in 2008, after more than 25 years of marriage, five living apart, Steve and Carol divorced.

Speaker 25 It was a long, painful process, and after it was final, Carol went to a nearby lake where she called Catherine.

Speaker 3 She was sobbing, and at first when she called me it was like, oh, oh no.

Speaker 3 And then I realized that

Speaker 3 the sobbing and the wailing on the phone

Speaker 3 it was a mixture of things. Yeah, absolutely.
Open my heart.

Speaker 26 Time for a fresh start.

Speaker 46 Carol had left teaching by that time, was focused on a new passion, painting.

Speaker 5 Her art was developing. She was really doing well with that and taking off of that.

Speaker 29 of course she remained close to her daughters but she also stayed close to steve

Speaker 4 and in fact just a few days before that july morning the whole family went to the airport together to see katie off on a study abroad trip to south africa charlotte was staying with her dad in prescott nothing ahead now but the long easy days of summer As she jogged the last few yards to her house, Carol passed by the guest cottage she'd rented out as a way to help pay her expenses.

Speaker 3 It's 50 feet away from the main house, and it has all of its own

Speaker 3 kitchen, bath, and shower, and rooms.

Speaker 29 It was comforting, in a way, to have someone else with her on the property out here at the edge of things.

Speaker 29 Man's name was Jim Knapp, divorced father, bit of an odd duck, some people said, but easy to get along with.

Speaker 31 At least that's what Carol told her friends.

Speaker 36 The man didn't cause any trouble.

Speaker 3 Jim Knapp was just sort of this free-spirited surfer dude from Hawaii who

Speaker 3 hanged in.

Speaker 78 But she took him in as a boarder?

Speaker 3 It was my understanding that he had been diagnosed with cancer. And I think they sort of co-supported each other through a lot of the painful times that they were both experiencing.

Speaker 31 Once inside her house, Carol put together a salad for dinner.

Speaker 52 answered a few emails, settled in for an evening alone.

Speaker 65 She picked up the phone and called her mother Ruth, who lived way off in Nashville, Tennessee.

Speaker 3 She was an amazing daughter who still called her mom every day.

Speaker 44 Ruth was 83.

Speaker 65 The call, a nightly ritual, and then at 8 p.m.,

Speaker 63 oddest thing.

Speaker 14 The line went dead, but not before Ruth heard something rather terrifying.

Speaker 37 Ruth tried to call back.

Speaker 14 Nothing.

Speaker 30 And there she was so far away and now worried.

Speaker 46 So So she decided to call the Sheriff's Department, whose headquarters is here in downtown Prescott.

Speaker 82 Sheriff's Office Brand, how's it going to help you? Oh, yes, my name is Ruth Kennedy, and I'm calling from Nashville, Tennessee.

Speaker 82 I was on the phone with my daughter, and she screamed and said, oh, no, and the phone's gone dead.

Speaker 82 And is there anything you can do to can you go check?

Speaker 83 Oh, no.

Speaker 44 Those two words played back again and again in Ruth's worried brain.

Speaker 60 And so began a mystery, and a story too unbelievable, even for some of its most intimate participants.

Speaker 8 What happened to Carol Kennedy?

Speaker 65 That question would take years to answer.

Speaker 13 Not just what happened to Carol, but who was behind it.

Speaker 24 She didn't have any enemies.

Speaker 85 None.

Speaker 3 None.

Speaker 5 We were just stunned.

Speaker 72 Carol Kennedy and her mother Ruth were having their nightly phone call.

Speaker 25 Suddenly, the phone line went dead.

Speaker 44 Ruth tried back, couldn't reach Carol.

Speaker 31 Then she called the sheriff's department.

Speaker 82 She's out there and she screamed and said, oh no, and then the phone was dropped and I'm just at my wit's end. Now, did you call her or did she call you and this occurred?

Speaker 82 She called me tonight and she calls me every night because I'm 83 and she worries about me.

Speaker 82 And so we were just having our conversation and then all of a sudden she just screamed and said oh no

Speaker 82 and then I haven't been able to get her to answer the phone back. So you know I'm afraid something bad's happened.
Okay Ruth. And who does your daughter live with?

Speaker 82 She's recently divorced. She's alone.
What's your daughter's name? Carol Kennedy.

Speaker 86 Did you notice what she said? Recently divorced?

Speaker 59 Certainly the operator heard it.

Speaker 82 Do you believe that there's any reason that she would be concerned if her husband, ex-husband came back? Oh, I don't think so. Okay.
No, I don't think it's that kind of a thing, you know.

Speaker 87 Okay.

Speaker 46 Family and friends all knew that even after their divorce, Steve and Carol still cared deeply for each other and their two daughters.

Speaker 48 That connection between the two of them interests me.

Speaker 3 They took time to nurture their relationship and to spend time together and to do things that they enjoyed doing and bringing up Katie and Charlotte.

Speaker 74 But this was hardly the time for reminiscing.

Speaker 29 Carol wasn't answering her phone and Ruth was frantic.

Speaker 82 All right, we will send somebody out to

Speaker 82 check on her and we'll have them give you a call.

Speaker 44 You can imagine what that was like for Ruth, so far away, waiting for a phone call.

Speaker 37 She knew Carol had a boarder, that offbeat guy, Jim Knapp, but Ruth didn't know how to reach him.

Speaker 29 Steve would know what to do, so she called him on his cell phone, and when he didn't pick up, she left him this message. Steve, this is Ruth Kennedy and Nice Hook.

Speaker 29 I was on the phone with Carol, and she screamed and said, oh no, and I can't get her to answer me back.

Speaker 29 One day she could

Speaker 88 see what you can find out and let me

Speaker 25 By that time, it was dark.

Speaker 26 Steve and Carol's daughter, Charlotte, and her then-boyfriend, Jacob Janusek, were at that moment at Steve's house, waiting for him to come home.

Speaker 21 Jacob was actually living there while he tried to sort out a few issues with his parents.

Speaker 12 What was your relationship like with him, and what was Charlotte's relationship like?

Speaker 58 Charlotte was very close with Steve.

Speaker 10 He had offered me to stay with him before, you know, tried to figure something out just to make my situation with my parents better.

Speaker 10 So I had a lot of respect for him.

Speaker 10 Definitely looked up to him.

Speaker 72 But that evening, Steve, an avid outdoorsman, was overdue from a mountain bike ride.

Speaker 89 And it was getting late.

Speaker 23 Really late, actually.

Speaker 10 Yeah, it was very, very odd.

Speaker 10 You know, he would usually, we'd usually have dinner pretty late there. It was, you know, normal to have dinner at 9 o'clock, 9.30.

Speaker 10 When he hadn't come home around that time was when we kind of started to get a little worried

Speaker 10 that maybe he had crashed or gotten hurt or something.

Speaker 24 What'd you do?

Speaker 10 Charlotte called

Speaker 10 his cell phone and

Speaker 10 no answer.

Speaker 78 Did it go straight to voicemail?

Speaker 27 Yeah.

Speaker 29 Anyway, hungry for dinner, they went to the store for groceries.

Speaker 10 While we were at the store, it was probably around

Speaker 10 10.15 was when we got a call from Steve and he told us that he got a flat tire, and he was at the workout center and was going to finish up his workout there.

Speaker 52 And, what, his phone had been off or something?

Speaker 15 Or what happened to his phone?

Speaker 10 He said his phone had died.

Speaker 91 Well, he was out there having a flat tire.

Speaker 27 Right.

Speaker 89 Steve was in the shower when Charlotte and Jake arrived back at the condo.

Speaker 91 They made a quick dinner, vegetable stir-fry.

Speaker 34 It was late, but then again, it was a mild summer night.

Speaker 39 Not a care in the world, it seemed.

Speaker 43 No idea what was happening at the house on Bridal Path.

Speaker 28 I'm kind of getting worried about you.

Speaker 24 Panic begins.

Speaker 86 A daughter rushes to the scene. What would she find?

Speaker 10 She just immediately broke down and started crying pretty hard.

Speaker 21 July 2nd, 2008, about 11 p.m., Steve DeMacher, his daughter Charlotte, and Charlotte's boyfriend Jake were eating a very late dinner.

Speaker 10 He had taken a few more bites of his dinner, and then by that point, Charlotte and I were pretty close to being finished.

Speaker 14 That's when Steve told them about a strange phone call he received from Carol's brother, who told him that apparently Carol's home phone suddenly cut out when she was talking to her mother, Ruth, and nobody could reach her.

Speaker 27 How did Charlotte react to that?

Speaker 10 She was worried.

Speaker 89 Charlotte said she texted her mom earlier that evening.

Speaker 72 Everything seemed fine then.

Speaker 88 But now she called her mother.

Speaker 12 Voicemail.

Speaker 28 Hey mom, it's Char. Um, I heard from grandmother that something happened while you guys were on the phone and she was kind of worried about you.
So I wanted to text you and see if everything was okay.

Speaker 28 And now I'm kind of getting worried about you.

Speaker 28 So if you want to text me back or call me or something, just let me know that you're okay and that everything's okay.

Speaker 43 The beginnings of panic bubbled up in Charlotte's brain.

Speaker 72 She and her boyfriend called around to local hospitals, but nobody named Carol Kennedy had been admitted to any of them.

Speaker 48 So this is nighttime. Is there any thought of going over there?

Speaker 10 Yeah, we talked about it.

Speaker 50 Steve was concerned about Carol, of course, but as her now ex-husband, he had another concern, too.

Speaker 10 Steve had expressed that he wasn't really comfortable with it because, you know, they had just finalized their divorce and, you know, he didn't feel comfortable invading her privacy if she was with

Speaker 10 another guy on a date or something like that. So we had decided that Charlotte and I would go out there and check on her, just kind of see if anything was out of the ordinary.

Speaker 47 It was around midnight when they drove out to Carol's place on Bridal Path, having promised to call Steve the minute they got there.

Speaker 95 Do you remember what it was like driving over there?

Speaker 10 It was very quiet. I don't really think we spoke

Speaker 10 very much at all on the way there.

Speaker 96 Because?

Speaker 10 Just nerves.

Speaker 10 You know.

Speaker 13 A little anxious. Right.

Speaker 57 Do you remember pulling up to the house?

Speaker 5 Yes, very vividly.

Speaker 14 At that moment, Charlotte was on the phone with her dad.

Speaker 10 As soon as we got to the top of the hill, you could see the police, you know, the sheriff's lights and all the cars and,

Speaker 10 you know, just the worst thoughts are kind of going through you know my mind at that point yeah that almost the kind of thing that hits you here before it hits you here right yeah kind of feel it in your stomach first for sure and we got closer to the house and you saw caution tape and and all the you know people running around and everything and

Speaker 10 we had pulled up and stopped on the side of the road and two sheriffs walked up on either side of the car and

Speaker 10 We rolled the windows down.

Speaker 38 Did this person know who you were?

Speaker 10 Yeah, I think he had asked, you know, were you guys just passing through and Charlotte said, no, this is my mom's house. And he said, well, I'm sorry to tell you, but, you know,

Speaker 10 you know, Carol passed away. At that point, she just immediately broke down,

Speaker 10 started crying pretty hard.

Speaker 79 Charlotte dropped the phone, fell to pieces.

Speaker 58 Were you frightened?

Speaker 10 Scared.

Speaker 94 A little bit.

Speaker 10 Really more so for Charlotte, just, you know, not really.

Speaker 10 I mean, even now, I don't think

Speaker 10 I could

Speaker 10 figure out how to console someone in that situation.

Speaker 75 Maybe Steve would know what to do.

Speaker 10 I picked up the cell phone and told Steve what had happened. He needed to come down

Speaker 10 and be with Charlotte.

Speaker 44 And Steve?

Speaker 10 He was taken aback. You know, it was almost kind of disbelief, like he didn't really know what to say, really.

Speaker 10 Kind of hear him choking back some tears a little bit, and that was, you know, that was hard.

Speaker 31 Right away, Steve rushed over to Carol's house.

Speaker 37 A detective had a recorder rolling.

Speaker 54 You can hear Charlotte sobbing,

Speaker 57 and Steve talking.

Speaker 16 The last time I saw here was,

Speaker 16 I don't know, I'm sorry, I don't know, it's been a while.

Speaker 98 Someone else talked to the detectives, too.

Speaker 21 A man who showed up just minutes after the deputies got there.

Speaker 14 Jim Knapp, Carol's boarder, the man who'd been living in the guest house.

Speaker 99 I can't remember the month it may have been.

Speaker 61 And Jim Knapp had a lot to say about Carol, but he didn't stop there.

Speaker 77 It was certainly a gruesome scene.

Speaker 14 Blood drops, shoe prints, the clues tell a story.

Speaker 43 And the man in the guest cottage has a story too.

Speaker 99 I warn you guys, it's just my thing too to take.

Speaker 38 Just before 9 p.m., July 2nd,

Speaker 31 just around the time Carol Kennedy's worried family members were recording phone messages to each other,

Speaker 46 a Yavapai County Sheriff's Deputy was dispatched to Carol's house on Bridal Path.

Speaker 39 Found the home dark, drearily quiet.

Speaker 25 He shone a flashlight through a window.

Speaker 100 Saw a bookcase toppled over, and blood everywhere.

Speaker 41 That's when investigator Mike Sachet was pulled into the strangest case of his career.

Speaker 29 The kind of thing he had moved to Prescott to avoid.

Speaker 85 It's a quaint little community nestled in the pines and

Speaker 85 not a whole lot of crime, especially from what I was used to.

Speaker 80 Sachet put in 27 years in the Phoenix police.

Speaker 71 This job with the Yavapai County Attorney's Office was supposed to be an escape from big city crime.

Speaker 60 And here he was, middle of a July night, looking at one very brutal homicide.

Speaker 11 What did it look like?

Speaker 85 It was

Speaker 77 certainly a gruesome scene.

Speaker 85 Not only a large amount of blood on Carol's body, but also on the furniture that was nearby, blood spatter that had been

Speaker 85 cast off onto the walls and other items as well.

Speaker 78 So, that tells you something about how she died?

Speaker 85 She certainly died a violent death.

Speaker 57 Something else.

Speaker 75 As he surveyed the room, he could plainly see whoever did this was trying to fool them.

Speaker 26 How did he know?

Speaker 23 When he looked past the obvious gore, he couldn't help but notice things had been moved around after Carol was dead.

Speaker 85 There was a ladder that was placed over top of her body.

Speaker 85 That along with some of the blood that had splattered onto a bookshelf, and then the shelf was knocked over, obviously several minutes after the blood hit it.

Speaker 78 Unlikely that it was just tottering and eventually collapsed.

Speaker 85 That could not have happened.

Speaker 78 So that's a pretty significant little detail, then.

Speaker 85 Yes, absolutely.

Speaker 65 Stagy.

Speaker 14 Clear as day, said the detective.

Speaker 98 There were even some drops of blood just outside the door.

Speaker 44 The blood trail led detectives to another discovery.

Speaker 98 Shoe prints outside the house.

Speaker 85 There was a lot of tracks out there.

Speaker 29 The house was next door to ranch land.

Speaker 83 Lots of people went running and riding there.

Speaker 40 Carol, too.

Speaker 85 Horses, animals,

Speaker 85 people used that area, and there were a lot of tracks. These tracks were unique.
They were fresh.

Speaker 47 They found Carol's footprints from her jog that very evening, but there were others.

Speaker 85 Her track, as it went out,

Speaker 85 the suspect's track,

Speaker 85 then stepped right on one of hers. So she went out and then the suspect came into her house.

Speaker 52 You had sequence of tracks.

Speaker 25 Yes.

Speaker 47 About 50 feet from the main house, you remember, was a guest cottage which Carol had rented out to that tenant, Jim Knapp.

Speaker 85 Jim Knapp was one of the first ones to arrive at the scene after the deputies had arrived.

Speaker 14 Of course, the detectives asked him, where was he that night?

Speaker 83 And Knapp was ready with a story.

Speaker 85 He had been babysitting one of his

Speaker 85 boys at his ex-wife's house when this incident actually occurred.

Speaker 78 You'd have to pin him down on that, make sure he had proof of it, right?

Speaker 40 That's correct.

Speaker 43 Another detective turned on his recorder as Snapp rambled on about his relationship with Carol.

Speaker 99 She and I sort of committed to one another to be co-coaches

Speaker 103 to push each other through

Speaker 103 both our divorces.

Speaker 88 But Nap didn't stop there.

Speaker 62 Oh no, he seemed very eager to tell them about Carol's ex-husband, Steve DeMacher.

Speaker 99 I warn you guys, it's just my intuitive take. The guy comes off to me as a very sneaky, manipulative man.

Speaker 14 So, by the time Steve arrived, detectives were already suspicious.

Speaker 44 And they asked him to come to the sheriff's department, where he told them the same thing he had told his daughter.

Speaker 74 He was riding his mountain bike when he got a flat tire.

Speaker 104 I don't really mountain bike very often. Okay, I mean, I'm starting to, so

Speaker 104 I do some on and off. I say I don't have a trail on me, so I don't have a routine.

Speaker 50 He drew them a map of the trail he followed.

Speaker 25 At one point, the trail got to within a mile of Carol's house.

Speaker 15 The detective's ears perked up.

Speaker 58 But Steve insisted, he never went to Carol's house.

Speaker 104 I'm happy to give you blood, saliva. I'm happy to give you anything you need.

Speaker 10 So there's nothing we're going to find that's going to tell you that

Speaker 87 I wasn't there.

Speaker 104 I wouldn't do that.

Speaker 64 Steve told the detective he was tired, dehydrated.

Speaker 105 We can fix that. If you give me more water, I'll be glad to get you water.
If you need some food, I'll give you food. We'll get you some food.
Tell me what you want.

Speaker 105 I'm just asking you to be a little bit patient with us and

Speaker 51 help us through this matter.

Speaker 104 Of course, I want to do that. I'm happy to give you DNA.

Speaker 9 I wasn't there so I assume that will be good for me.

Speaker 105 That's true. If anything like me say then

Speaker 105 once we do our live work and I'm just I'm cold and I'm tired.

Speaker 43 Steve asked them.

Speaker 14 What were they thinking about him?

Speaker 66 Was he a suspect?

Speaker 104 I don't know what looking suspicious looks like. I know you didn't mean to ask to stick off tired.

Speaker 24 No, and like here's

Speaker 63 the whole thing with it.

Speaker 105 There's certain situations certain things in what's going on. Just like I said,

Speaker 105 we've got a suspicious death.

Speaker 105 And right now we don't have any, and there's some other person meeting. Well, we have no other person right now.

Speaker 62 And so it was a long night in that little room.

Speaker 52 The detective gave Steve a blanket, asked again about that trail.

Speaker 105 The proximity of where the trail is, I know, where you're riding.

Speaker 105 Wish I'd chosen a different trail. I wish you were chosen a different trail also.

Speaker 104 Because, and here's the thing, right now, if I, of course, if I had done it, I probably wouldn't have chosen to be right near

Speaker 104 the scene of what sounded like maybe a crime.

Speaker 98 Maybe so, but wherever he was, he picked up something the detectives simply couldn't ignore.

Speaker 85 Very fresh, multiple scratches on his arms and legs.

Speaker 59 Steve said he got those riding a rough mountain trail on his bike.

Speaker 54 Detectives photographed them before letting him go home.

Speaker 44 Meanwhile, overnight, other detectives searched Steve's office and his home and his garage.

Speaker 42 They took pictures, lots of pictures.

Speaker 29 After the autopsy next afternoon, the medical examiner reported that Carol died from blows to the head administered by some blunt object seven times per killer-hitter.

Speaker 14 With what?

Speaker 24 The medical examiner offered an opinion that looked like might have been a golf club.

Speaker 83 And one more thing:

Speaker 33 Carol herself might already be telling them who killed her.

Speaker 85 It's one of those moments that you go, oh my goodness.

Speaker 14 The clue that police almost missed.

Speaker 38 Will it help them crack the case?

Speaker 24 There is, as Catherine Morris can tell you, no good way to find out your close friend has been murdered, especially a friend as incandescent as Carol Kennedy.

Speaker 3 It's the biggest loss of my life to this day.

Speaker 3 It's profound. It's piercing.
It's constant.

Speaker 24 She didn't have any enemies.

Speaker 85 None.

Speaker 3 None.

Speaker 47 Catherine, who by this time lived in Atlanta, flew across the country to Prescott.

Speaker 3 I needed to see it.

Speaker 3 I needed to be in her home where she last was.

Speaker 83 She joined other members of Carol's family at Bridal Path in the very room where Carol died.

Speaker 25 Blood still spattered on the furniture.

Speaker 14 The mess of what happened everywhere in that room.

Speaker 3 You just, you can't imagine.

Speaker 76 Painful.

Speaker 27 Did it help?

Speaker 3 It helped greatly to put it into perspective of the absolute horrendous brutality, animalistic violence.

Speaker 48 Evidence of that was still in the room.

Speaker 3 Oh, yes. Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.

Speaker 64 Steve was there too, said Catherine.

Speaker 41 And she remembers him saying something that to her didn't make much sense.

Speaker 3 When he put his arm around me and said, you just want to think it was an accident, don't you? Then I looked at him and I said, this is not an accident. What I'm looking at is not an accident.

Speaker 73 By then, so soon after the murder, Steve was the only real suspect under investigation.

Speaker 46 And in the following weeks, as friends and family mourned, detectives peeled back the layers of Steve and Carol's relationship and soon found evidence that their recent divorce was...

Speaker 46 Well, no divorce is pleasant, but.

Speaker 85 We looked heavily into emails and we learned that Carol was very unhappy with the outcome of the divorce. They argued heavily back and forth

Speaker 85 up until the day of her murder.

Speaker 56 Steve made good money as a financial advisor, had agreed to pay $6,000 a month in spousal support.

Speaker 85 When you say somebody makes over $500,000,

Speaker 85 you would assume that a $6,000 monthly payment is not a big deal. But he was spending way more than he was making.
He was having to borrow money from his parents almost monthly.

Speaker 62 But he's making a half a million a year?

Speaker 56 That's correct.

Speaker 85 And the $6,000,

Speaker 85 he was going to be unable to sustain his lifestyle.

Speaker 47 Mind you, those numbers were for 2008, a year when, like a lot of people, Steve hemorrhaged money because of the financial crisis.

Speaker 98 Still, to the detective, that $6,000 a month sounded like motive.

Speaker 72 It might even explain why the murder occurred when it did, at the beginning of July.

Speaker 85 And that payment started June 1st. The second payment was due July 1st.
She was murdered July 2nd, and that payment was never made.

Speaker 42 I wasn't there.

Speaker 104 I wouldn't do that.

Speaker 60 Again and again, he denied killing his ex-wife, said he was out mountain biking the evening she died.

Speaker 68 But along with shoe prints near Carol's house after the murder, police also found tire tracks, bike tires.

Speaker 85 We then were able to see that the bike had been stashed and then the individual walked right to the back of her house.

Speaker 14 They did not take direct impressions of those shoe and tire tracks as investigators frequently do, but they did take pictures of the tracks.

Speaker 55 Looked a lot like the treads on Steve's tires, they felt.

Speaker 44 And while no matching shoes turned up, they discovered that Steve once bought a pair that might match.

Speaker 46 And then there was the curious business of the the murder weapon, or possible murder weapon.

Speaker 60 Remember the coroner's report suggesting Carol may have been hit with a golf club?

Speaker 51 When investigators learned that, something clicked in their memories from their first search through Steve's house.

Speaker 85 There were golf clubs in his garage.

Speaker 4 So let's go back and seize them, right?

Speaker 85 Yeah, seize them and examine them to see if we can determine that these golf clubs were used as the murder weapon.

Speaker 95 So it sounds like kind of

Speaker 83 a ha moment, right?

Speaker 85 It's one of those moments that you go, oh my goodness, we may have overlooked something.

Speaker 63 So they returned to Steve's condo, seized the golf clubs from the garage, and tested them, but could find no evidence that any of them was the murder weapon.

Speaker 50 But there was something else.

Speaker 81 In the first search of the condo, a detective remembered seeing a golf club cover or golf sock on a shelf.

Speaker 31 They looked at the photos.

Speaker 14 There it was.

Speaker 46 But when they searched the garage a second time, it was gone.

Speaker 85 And the shelf itself had apparently been sort of rearranged.

Speaker 26 Was it possible that now missing golf sock belonged to a different golf club?

Speaker 72 When there was no longer around one used to kill Carol Kennedy?

Speaker 71 Did Steve, knowing he was a suspect, get rid of that golf sock because it was incriminating evidence?

Speaker 47 Seemed like every investigative trail they followed led right back to to the same person they had suspected all along.

Speaker 83 Carol's friend Catherine knew who that was.

Speaker 3 I didn't believe that Steve did it, but I couldn't think of anyone else that would possibly do any harm to Carol.

Speaker 60 And so, three months after Carol was killed, they arrested Steve DeMacher on a charge of first-degree murder.

Speaker 54 Steve's sister, Sharon.

Speaker 13 I'm trying to imagine what it was like for the family.

Speaker 13 This amazing, accomplished, interesting, intelligent family, when the leader child was charged with murdering his wife, a woman who you all loved.

Speaker 76 It was

Speaker 5 a total shock. You're going, they don't understand.

Speaker 5 If they knew him, they would see how wrong and impossible this was.

Speaker 44 Even worse, prosecutors filed for the death penalty.

Speaker 32 Any chance for bail for Steve, given the charge, was remote.

Speaker 80 Still, Still, the whole DeMacher family gathered in court for the hearing, which, coincidence, had been scheduled for Christmas Eve, 2008.

Speaker 43 And then it was delayed.

Speaker 5 It was this crushing blow, seeing that

Speaker 5 the wheels turn painfully slowly in this process.

Speaker 5 So we left and were standing out in the corridor. Then they were just starting to bring Steve out.
And we said, you know what?

Speaker 17 Let's just sing him a Christmas carol.

Speaker 76 So

Speaker 5 we started singing, We Wish You a Merry Christmas, and we could see that, you know, there were tears streaming down Steve's face.

Speaker 88 Steve's family wept too.

Speaker 55 They believed he was innocent, that someone else killed Carol.

Speaker 29 And their belief only grew stronger after. 911, what is the emergency?

Speaker 62 A 911 call,

Speaker 14 this time to the Prescott Police Department. The door is open.

Speaker 108 It looks like a gunshot hold in the window, and there's a shelf casing inside, and the bedroom door is closed.

Speaker 17 Husband always does it.

Speaker 16 They focused in on one person right from the very beginning: a thumbprint, a smear of blood, and here's the bombshell.

Speaker 38 Neither one belonged to Steve DeMacher.

Speaker 5 There were a lot of red flags.

Speaker 31 Steve DeMacher was in jail, charged with first-degree murder for his ex-wife Carol Kennedy's violent death.

Speaker 47 He pleaded not guilty.

Speaker 73 Private investigator Rich Robertson joined Steve's defense team and right away saw what he believed was an elemental mistake.

Speaker 43 by detectives.

Speaker 16 They put together their story, their version of events, almost immediately.

Speaker 17 Husband always does it, right?

Speaker 16 But yeah, they focused in on one person and they had a story and that's what they worked on. They zeroed in on Steve DeMacher right from the very beginning.

Speaker 29 Robertson said detectives should have taken a much closer look at another man in Carol's life, Jim Knapp.

Speaker 72 The man who lived in the guesthouse and showed up at the crime scene within minutes of the officers and who was the first person to point the finger at Steve.

Speaker 16 The fact that law enforcement viewed him in a different way that they viewed Steve DeMacher, that they saw Jim Knapp as a friendly witness and they see Steve DeMacher as a suspect frames the way that they investigate.

Speaker 16 So anything having to do with Jim Knapp

Speaker 96 becomes excusable,

Speaker 16 explained.

Speaker 16 It's just not something you have to worry about because he's not our guy.

Speaker 93 And yet, crime scene photos show a magazine sitting on Carol's kitchen counter and slipped inside between the pages were some financial documents that were printed the very day Carol was murdered.

Speaker 16 That became really important because his thumbprint is on those financial documents.

Speaker 65 What was Jim Knapp doing with those documents?

Speaker 50 And something else.

Speaker 12 Perhaps very significant.

Speaker 16 There was blood on the doorknob of the door that led from the main house into the backyard garage.

Speaker 73 The blood became evidence item number 805, collected days after Carol's death.

Speaker 29 And whose DNA was mixed with Carol's blood?

Speaker 43 Jim Knapp's DNA.

Speaker 16 Just like the thumbprint, the question becomes, when did Jim Knapp's DNA get put on that door handle?

Speaker 29 Robertson clearly had his suspicions.

Speaker 41 And Steve's sister, Sharon, did too.

Speaker 35 So you felt all along that Jim Knapp should have been a suspect and wasn't?

Speaker 5 He should have been investigated. There were a lot of red flags that were concerning.

Speaker 62 Knapp told sheriff's deputies he was nowhere near Carol's house when the murder happened.

Speaker 50 He was at his ex-wife's place, miles away, babysitting his son.

Speaker 48 Didn't they find out the alibi, in fact, was pretty solid?

Speaker 14 No.

Speaker 76 Actually, it wasn't.

Speaker 5 What the son said was that, yeah, they'd gotten a video and the son was watching it. He doesn't know where dad was.

Speaker 78 Dad wasn't sitting beside him in the room?

Speaker 5 No, dad was not watching with him, so he doesn't know where dad was. The son got bored watching this movie, and I believe he went and got on his computer.

Speaker 5 So there's a period of time that we don't really know. He might have been in the house, but nobody saw him.

Speaker 62 So maybe Knapp's solid alibi wasn't.

Speaker 29 And remember how he told everyone he had cancer?

Speaker 14 Sharon, a doctor, discovered something about that.

Speaker 5 I've seen the medical records. And he had a superficial type of skin cancer at one point, and it had been removed.
So, no.

Speaker 5 He didn't.

Speaker 52 Steve's family even recorded a video after the murder in which Jim Knapp said things about Carol they found deeply disturbing.

Speaker 109 He says, Carol and I had lived a life like an old married couple.

Speaker 5 He was actually rather obsessed with Carol.

Speaker 5 I have emails that he's written about how what he and Carol share is more than anyone could picture, that no one will understand the bond that they have and how close they are to each other.

Speaker 5 And he referred to her to some people as his girlfriend, but she never had any romantic interest in him and no one.

Speaker 13 And he had tremendous romantic interest in her.

Speaker 76 Very much so.

Speaker 13 Thus, in your mind, a reason to be angry one night?

Speaker 5 Certainly.

Speaker 23 Was it possible Carol rebuffed him, that he got angry?

Speaker 39 The detectives didn't ask those questions, said Steve's family.

Speaker 63 And soon, it was too late.

Speaker 47 Six months after Carol's murder, a 911 call from a condo where Jim Knapp went to live after Carol was killed.

Speaker 108 We came for a welfare check of our friend of mine.

Speaker 42 The door is open.

Speaker 108 It looks like a gunshot hole in the window, and there's a shelf casing inside, and the bedroom door is closed. You know what you did in the know if I check on Jim Knapp.

Speaker 24 Jim Knapp was dead.

Speaker 38 Gunshot wound.

Speaker 59 The medical examiner ruled it a suicide.

Speaker 16 I was stunned.

Speaker 16 It was one of those moments where it just sort of took my breath away.

Speaker 16 And then when I found out there was no note,

Speaker 16 And as I learned about the details of what the scene looked like,

Speaker 9 it's still

Speaker 9 a baffling death.

Speaker 14 Baffling because it simply did not look like a suicide.

Speaker 16 There was multiple gunshots fired in that room. There was furniture in disarray.
There were drawers pulled out.

Speaker 55 Staging, in other words, just as the investigators believed someone staged the scene of Carol's murder.

Speaker 61 Was Jim Knapp Carol's killer or another victim of an unknown killer?

Speaker 17 Or maybe both?

Speaker 86 Couldn't have been Steve. He was in jail.

Speaker 69 And then the questions multiplied.

Speaker 31 In June 2009, almost a year after Carol's death, Steve's attorney received an email, the sender, anonymous.

Speaker 37 The email read, I can tell you what really happened the night Kennedy was killed.

Speaker 29 The email said Jim Knapp was running his mouth to Kennedy about a prescription drug deal he was in.

Speaker 55 It said the murder was meant to look like home invasion robbery gone bad.

Speaker 93 This wasn't one crazed man with a golf club.

Speaker 68 When Steve's attorneys told him about the email, Steve replied with a startling story.

Speaker 50 He had heard the same thing just a month earlier in jail.

Speaker 16 Steve said that

Speaker 16 somebody was communicating to him through the ventilation system in the jails and told him a story about how a drug ring out of Phoenix had been

Speaker 16 trying to

Speaker 16 collect money or seek some retribution against Jim Knapp for involvement in a prescription drug ring.

Speaker 47 The attorneys arranged for a meeting, an opportunity for Steve to tell law enforcement what he heard so they could investigate it.

Speaker 21 They showed him the mysterious email.

Speaker 14 Listen to his reaction.

Speaker 14 Sorry.

Speaker 14 I almost hate to ask you this, but can you explain why you're more sure of people?

Speaker 110 Because I spent a year

Speaker 110 not knowing what happened

Speaker 110 to Carol

Speaker 110 and being accused of it.

Speaker 110 That's what's happening right now.

Speaker 71 There was more than the email to go on.

Speaker 29 Remember the DNA the medical examiner found under Carol's fingernails?

Speaker 63 Turned out, it wasn't Steve's or Jim Knapp's.

Speaker 71 Police called the DNA Evidence Item 603.

Speaker 73 But to defense investigator Rich Robertson, it represented much more.

Speaker 16 Evidence item 603 became Mr. 603.
It was a male DNA that was found mixed in with Carol's blood under the fingernails of her left hand. And this wasn't a small amount of DNA.

Speaker 16 A reasonable person, I think, would think this probably could have gotten there during an attack.

Speaker 21 Jim Knapp, the anonymous email, Mr.

Speaker 65 603.

Speaker 70 Steve's family and attorneys thought investigators should focus more on all of those things.

Speaker 47 Instead, it seemed to them, prosecutors had already made up their minds, and Steve would go on trial for murder.

Speaker 64 A daughter called to the stand.

Speaker 109 Did you ask him about those scratches?

Speaker 20 I did.

Speaker 81 And a girlfriend gets a call, too.

Speaker 61 Is she keeping a secret?

Speaker 85 We were pretty convinced that she knew more than she was telling us.

Speaker 111 Some stories never make national headlines, but stories from small towns and coastal communities deserve recognition too.

Speaker 111 I'm Kylie Lowe, host of Dark Down East, a true crime podcast that gives voice to victims through investigative journalism and powerful storytelling.

Speaker 111 Set in my home state of Maine and the greater New England area, it's my goal to dig through the archives to bring the stories of the people at the heart of these cases to light.

Speaker 111 Listen to Dark Down East, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Speaker 43 Summer 2010.

Speaker 25 Two years after Carol Kennedy's murder, American flags were once again draped up around the Prescott Town Square in anticipation of the annual rodeo.

Speaker 34 And on June 3rd, inside the square's historic courthouse, County Attorney Joe Buttner opened his case against Steve DeMacher by ticking off the reasons why, in his view, Steve deserved to spend the rest of his natural life behind bars.

Speaker 91 By this time, pretrial legal rulings had taken the death penalty off the table.

Speaker 34 Though Attorney Butner told the jury, the case was no less condemning.

Speaker 113 I will ask you to find the defendant guilty of the first-degree premeditated murder.

Speaker 46 First, he said Steve had motives and not just that $6,000 a month in alimony.

Speaker 21 No, Carroll said the prosecutor was worth a lot of money, dead.

Speaker 109 The evidence will show that at the time of

Speaker 109 her death, that Stephen DeMacher was the owner and beneficiary of two life insurance policies. The total value of those life insurance policies was $750,000.

Speaker 68 Stephen Carroll's daughters, Katie and Charlotte, were in court sitting behind and supporting their father.

Speaker 46 Defense investigator Rich Robertson.

Speaker 16 To have your father accused of killing

Speaker 16 your mother and for them to not believe it, you can't imagine what that must have done to how they view things.

Speaker 7 It's just got to be a horrible experience.

Speaker 25 In his opening statement, Defense Attorney John Sears was quick to address that life insurance money.

Speaker 102 And you will hear from Katie and Charlotte that their father told them from the beginning, this is your money from your mother. This isn't mine.

Speaker 102 He disclaimed, he signed over any interest to the girls, and the money was paid out for the girls. That's what happened in this case.

Speaker 60 Prosecutor Butner called his first witness, Katie DeMocker, Steve and Carroll's elder daughter.

Speaker 109 Did she have a habit of things that she did when she came home from work?

Speaker 114 She did. She typically went for a run, maybe four days a week out on the backland.

Speaker 109 And to your recollection, did she leave the door unlocked when she would do that?

Speaker 11 Yes.

Speaker 56 An unlocked door, opportunity for her killer to enter and wait.

Speaker 37 On the stand, Carol's mother, Ruth Kennedy, had to relive that very last phone call with her daughter.

Speaker 56 How exactly did it end so abruptly? She told the Sheriff's Department operator that Carol had screamed, oh no.

Speaker 109 And you just said that, oh no, a certain way with a certain emphasis. Was that the way that she said it, to your recollection?

Speaker 5 She said, oh no.

Speaker 115 Basically, that's the way it came out.

Speaker 109 Did she scream that?

Speaker 5 It really was not a scream.

Speaker 5 I'm sure it was because I was so rattled myself.

Speaker 3 She just said, oh, no.

Speaker 115 That's all she said. And basically, in that tone of voice, like,

Speaker 115 it was more

Speaker 115 dismay.

Speaker 41 This was very difficult for Ruth, as you can imagine.

Speaker 3 She was everything

Speaker 11 a model would want in a daughter.

Speaker 5 She was a good mother.

Speaker 47 Charlotte, the younger DeMocker daughter, was living with Steve that summer, was in Steve's house the night of the murder when he was unreachable for five hours and said his cell phone was dead.

Speaker 109 Your father, did he

Speaker 109 normally have spare batteries with him?

Speaker 20 Sometimes in his car.

Speaker 109 Did he carry them in the car and also in his briefcase?

Speaker 20 It's possible. I don't know.

Speaker 109 Normally he was reachable by way of his cell phone, right?

Speaker 3 Yes.

Speaker 24 And when he finally got home that night, she saw those scratches.

Speaker 43 Suspicious, according to the prosecution.

Speaker 109 Did you ask him about those scratches?

Speaker 76 I did.

Speaker 109 What did he tell you?

Speaker 20 He explained they were from branches from riding his bike.

Speaker 24 And then the prosecutor asked Charlotte's, by then former boyfriend, Jacob, about the weird business of the golf club cover.

Speaker 43 The golf sock that appeared in a photo in Steve's garage night of the murder, but was gone when detectives returned with another search warrant.

Speaker 25 The implication, of course, was that the cover fit the club never found that killed Carol.

Speaker 66 Jacob said that after the detectives left, he talked to Steve.

Speaker 109 What was that conversation?

Speaker 10 The golf head sock cover was found after they had left.

Speaker 18 He said he had found it?

Speaker 61 Yes.

Speaker 109 Did he say what he was going to do with it?

Speaker 40 He

Speaker 10 didn't know whether or not to turn it it into the police or give it to his lawyer.

Speaker 56 Implying, said the prosecution, that Steve knew the golf sock could incriminate him and didn't know what to do with it.

Speaker 91 But just as the case seemed to be building momentum, two weeks into the trial, Judge Thomas Lindberg left the bench at lunch break and suddenly collapsed.

Speaker 46 It was a brain tumor.

Speaker 47 And everybody waited for five weeks.

Speaker 29 until a brand new judge was appointed so they could pick up with testimony right where they left off.

Speaker 47 And that's when the jurors finally got to hear what became of the missing golf cover.

Speaker 109 Go ahead and open your evidence bag, please.

Speaker 31 Detective Teresa Kennedy showed it to the jurors and the judge explained a stipulation made by the attorneys.

Speaker 39 On July 5th, 2008.

Speaker 21 Turned out, days after Carroll's murder, Steve gave the golf sock to his attorney, John Sears, who kept it in his locked office until Steve's arrest.

Speaker 55 That's when Sears turned it over to law enforcement.

Speaker 47 So, was the curious case of the migrating club salk an attempt to cover up a murder or a bit of confusion?

Speaker 89 An investigative dead end.

Speaker 23 Prosecutors weren't done, mind you.

Speaker 46 They next tried to tie Steve to the crime scene.

Speaker 66 Didn't find any of Steve's DNA or fingerprints at Carol's house, but they did see those tire tracks.

Speaker 25 A criminalist compared them with the tires on Steve's bike.

Speaker 113 The tread on this tire is similar to the tread you observe of this tire truck.

Speaker 109 And did you find any discernible differences between them?

Speaker 46 No, I did not.

Speaker 86 And those shoe prints.

Speaker 60 They brought in an expert from the FBI.

Speaker 109 Did you find any shoes that seemed to be comparable to the impressions that you observed in these photos from the crime scene?

Speaker 45 Yes, I found one shoe that could have made those impressions.

Speaker 64 A La Sportiva Pikes Peak.

Speaker 75 Records showed that Steve bought a pair of those shoes two years before the murder.

Speaker 32 But when detectives searched his house, they didn't find any such shoes.

Speaker 24 So, intriguing but hardly proof.

Speaker 46 Prosecutors knew they had a big problem.

Speaker 50 That anonymous email linking the murder not to Steve, but to Jim Knapp and illegal drugs.

Speaker 60 So even as the trial went on, investigator Mike Sachet was interviewing and re-interviewing witnesses, including Steve's girlfriend, Renee Girard.

Speaker 85 It was obvious to me that she was very protective of Mr. DeMacher.

Speaker 60 Steve began dating Renee when he was separated from Carol.

Speaker 52 They were together during that tumultuous time.

Speaker 106 Steve's divorce, Carol's murder, his arrest.

Speaker 47 Renee had always stood by Steve and his family.

Speaker 14 But Sashay had the feeling.

Speaker 85 We were pretty convinced that she knew more than she was telling us.

Speaker 47 Sache knew something else, too.

Speaker 23 During the trial, Renee broke up with Steve.

Speaker 35 So...

Speaker 57 On the eve of her testimony, Sashay interviewed Renee again about that anonymous email.

Speaker 43 What he discovered, explosive is not too big a word.

Speaker 5 Steve was terrified. We were terrified.

Speaker 22 The email trail, the money trail, a winding trail of surprises was about to change this case.

Speaker 97 That was a doozy of a mistake.

Speaker 33 Mornings dawned cooler in the Arizona mountains.

Speaker 31 The summer flags in the town square were stored away for another year.

Speaker 60 And the murder trial of Steve DeMacher ticked into its fifth fitful month.

Speaker 17 The prosecution had amounted to circumstantial bits and pieces to that point.

Speaker 74 And investigator Mike Sachet knew that Steve was likely to mount a strong defense.

Speaker 85 Mr. DeMacher is a very intelligent individual, but he's also a very narcissistic person.

Speaker 61 Narcissistic?

Speaker 29 That's what it seemed like to the detective.

Speaker 43 Also seemed to him like Steve's girlfriend, Renee Girard, was protecting him, knew more than she was telling.

Speaker 44 Then Renee broke it off with Steve, and Sache interviewed her one more time.

Speaker 38 And remember the anonymous email that claimed Carol's murder was linked to an an illegal drug ring?

Speaker 63 Oh, boy.

Speaker 85 She told me that Mr. DeMacher had informed them during one of their in-person visits at the jail to bring some pencil and paper.
There was a glass between them. Mr.

Speaker 85 DeMacher had brought a document with him that he placed on the glass so that they could view it.

Speaker 55 According to Renee, Steve himself wrote that document, then asked his daughter Charlotte, just 17 at the time, to copy it down.

Speaker 85 Mr. DeMacher then asked them to

Speaker 85 send that document, which became known as the anonymous email, to Mr. Sears and to the prosecutor's office.

Speaker 41 Mr.

Speaker 47 Sears was John Sears, one of Steve's defense attorneys.

Speaker 62 Steve's reasoning, according to Steve's sister Sheriff, he'd heard that story from an inmate in that air vent conversation and desperately wanted to get the story out and investigate it.

Speaker 5 The death penalty was still on the table, so

Speaker 5 Steve was terrified. We were terrified.
I can certainly appreciate when you're terrified,

Speaker 5 maybe you do some stupid things.

Speaker 97 Well, it's when you start making mistakes, and that was a doozy of a mistake.

Speaker 89 And uncovering that fraud led investigators to what they thought was another even bigger one.

Speaker 69 Remember Carol's life insurance money, $750,000 worth.

Speaker 34 Steve's defense attorney talked about it during his opening statement.

Speaker 102 He disclaimed he signed over any interest to the girls and the money was paid out to the divorce. That's what happened in this case.

Speaker 73 That statement caught investigator Mike Sachet by surprise.

Speaker 85 We had made contact with the life insurance company several times throughout the investigation. And we had been informed that the life insurance had not been paid out to anyone.

Speaker 44 So, had the insurance paid out or hadn't it?

Speaker 72 So, Shea took another look, much harder look at the money trail.

Speaker 85 Not only was the insurance paid out, but it was paid to the two daughters, who then transferred it to several accounts, including wired transfers to Mr.

Speaker 85 DeMacher's parents' account in New York, who then wired transferred it back to Mr. DeMacher's defense team.

Speaker 29 Remember, Steve DeMacher was a highly paid financial advisor.

Speaker 31 The prosecutors now believed he was using that expertise to try to get away with murder.

Speaker 85 Here's a person that murdered his ex-wife, then

Speaker 85 collected her life insurance of over $750,000 and is using that life insurance to pay his defense team.

Speaker 85 in the murder prosecution.

Speaker 81 So then, prosecutors added fraud to the charges Steve was facing.

Speaker 57 But fraud is certainly not what it was, said defense investigator Rich Robertson.

Speaker 16 These girls, voluntarily on their own, believing in their father's innocence, dedicated money that they inherited to defend him. How can that be wrong?

Speaker 5 The girls decided to use that money for their dad's defense.

Speaker 5 There was no

Speaker 5 fraud, or the insurance company would have been the first one to say, hey, we got a problem here.

Speaker 4 So is that just piling on on the part of the prosecution?

Speaker 29 The much bigger issue for the defense at Investigator Robertson was that phony email, an email the attorneys presented in court as real because they said they too were duped by Steve.

Speaker 16 Suddenly, the attorneys are

Speaker 16 in an awkward legal, ethical kind of posture and in relationship to their client. And so it created an untenable situation for the first offense

Speaker 9 team.

Speaker 62 So untenable for these highly respected defense attorneys that they, no option, they said, withdrew from the case.

Speaker 31 And so seven months in, the judge was forced to declare a mistrial.

Speaker 5 We thought we were sprinting to the finish line. We thought that Steve was going to be home in time for Thanksgiving.

Speaker 5 And suddenly the finish line just kind of moved off into the horizon.

Speaker 29 Gut-wrenching, said Carol's friend, Catherine.

Speaker 3 It was so emotional of not even a roller coaster, just the intensity of the emotion.

Speaker 63 They'd have to start all over again.

Speaker 89 The money the girls received from their mother's insurance was gone now.

Speaker 80 Gone to pay for the first team of attorneys.

Speaker 4 So, since Steve was pretty much destitute, court-appointed attorneys stepped in.

Speaker 54 And right away, Craig Williams and Greg Parzik were impressed by how Steve's family supported him.

Speaker 101 It's a large family,

Speaker 85 very educated, very tight-knit group.

Speaker 12 How uniformly did they support Steve through this process?

Speaker 9 I'd say very uniformly.

Speaker 77 They're all behind him.

Speaker 35 Yes.

Speaker 47 But one thing after another.

Speaker 12 As Steve's second trial approached, there was another huge surprise.

Speaker 75 The source of the DNA found under Carol's fingernails was finally identified.

Speaker 14 That would be Mr.

Speaker 17 603.

Speaker 61 The mysterious Mr. 603.

Speaker 62 Not who anyone expected.

Speaker 78 How could you trust anything after that?

Speaker 43 Exactly.

Speaker 65 It had always been an issue in the case against Steve DeMacher.

Speaker 26 That one fascinating clue that could break the case wide open.

Speaker 54 Who was Mr.

Speaker 17 603?

Speaker 93 That's what people were calling the mysterious DNA found under Carol's fingernails after she was murdered.

Speaker 39 One thing for sure: it was not Steve.

Speaker 85 We exhausted so many man-hours and looked at any and all alternatives.

Speaker 35 And And then, it was during the long months of waiting for a new trial to begin, the prosecution had an idea.

Speaker 95 What if that 603 sample was a simple mistake?

Speaker 21 What if something just got mixed up in the lab?

Speaker 14 So investigator Mike Sachet looked up the autopsy done just before Carol's and submitted a sample from that for retesting.

Speaker 67 And?

Speaker 31 Nearly three years after Carol's murder, a call from the crime lab.

Speaker 85 The sample DNA DNA that we sent had matched the DNA under Carol Kennedy's fingernails. We finally were able to discover and verify who Mr.
603 is.

Speaker 41 Mr.

Speaker 12 603, it turned out, was another dead soul, the man lying on the autopsy table before Carol got there.

Speaker 88 It was his DNA.

Speaker 75 Maybe on one of the coroner's instruments that ended up under Carol's fingernails.

Speaker 41 Mystery solved.

Speaker 23 One more doubt removed, said the prosecution.

Speaker 64 But for Steve's defense team, it was further proof of a shoddy investigation.

Speaker 101 Contamination. And we found out not only potential contamination, there was actual contamination in this case.

Speaker 78 How could you trust anything after that?

Speaker 2 Exactly.

Speaker 89 Defense Attorney Craig Williams said the case against Steve had an even bigger flaw.

Speaker 18 You cannot put Steve DeMacher in that house where there was a horrific murder, a bloody murder. You can't put him in the house.

Speaker 75 No DNA at all?

Speaker 97 No DNA, no blood.

Speaker 18 You don't find any DNA of Carol's on him anywhere. You don't find any DNA, fingerprints, blood, anything of his in the house.

Speaker 39 How can you convict him of murder?

Speaker 31 But in July 2013, by this time a full five years after Carol's death, Steve was still in jail.

Speaker 44 And the case finally went to trial again.

Speaker 72 New defense attorneys, a new prosecution team, who, it soon became clear, had during the long delay, spent some quality time honing their argument against Steve.

Speaker 11 Carol Kennedy had no enemies.

Speaker 116 This was not a burglary or a robbery. No valuables are missing.
The overwhelming evidence in this case points to the defendant.

Speaker 17 And at the close of that evidence, we will ask you to return verdicts of guilty on all charges, and especially the first-degree murder.

Speaker 44 And now the prosecution had more evidence, like Steve's Google searches during the months before Carol's death.

Speaker 37 Damaging, to say the least.

Speaker 117 There was some information for the term how to kill and make it look like suicide, and there was some information on

Speaker 117 the term how to make a homicide appear suicide.

Speaker 56 Those emails and text messages, Carol and Steve arguing in the days before her death, were read to the jury.

Speaker 31 Crime scene analysts claimed the blood spatter indicated the killer was left-handed.

Speaker 91 With the position that I think is the most comfortable position, I would think that they're swinging from the left.

Speaker 21 And Steve was left-handed.

Speaker 80 Remember the golf sock in the garage?

Speaker 72 It was made, said the prosecution, for a now-missing left-handed club.

Speaker 31 So here at last was the state's theory about how Steve killed his ex-wife.

Speaker 106 Days before the murder, said the state, he dropped off that club at Carol's house, supposedly for her to sell in an upcoming garage sale, but left the golf sock in his garage.

Speaker 65 And then, night of the murder, he sneaked into her house and used that club to kill her.

Speaker 98 Though such a club was never found, the golf sock was evidence it existed, said the prosecution, and the shape of Carol's wounds confirmed it.

Speaker 47 Then, to bolster an alibi, as his ex-girlfriend Renee Girard testified for the prosecution, Steve allowed his cell phone battery to die, something he never normally did.

Speaker 40 In general,

Speaker 118 there was usually a battery in his phone and an extra battery either charged or being charged.

Speaker 103 Did you ever know him to be

Speaker 83 to

Speaker 35 not have a phone at the ready if he needed to use it?

Speaker 40 I didn't.

Speaker 91 Renee also revealed that a month after the murder, Steve told her something that in hindsight seemed very significant.

Speaker 118 In the evening, we'd take a walk on the golf course and he picked up a bag on the way out the door one evening and as we were walking told me about the bag and what he was going to do with it.

Speaker 17 A getaway bag which she said he buried on a golf course

Speaker 91 and sure enough with Renee's help detectives found the bag on the golf course.

Speaker 79 Inside were cash and clothing and a cell phone and a pen light.

Speaker 31 Also, after Steve was arrested, they conducted more searches.

Speaker 43 In his storage unit, they they found books about how to cover your tracks and live as a fugitive.

Speaker 79 At an apartment he rented in Scottsdale, Arizona, they found something interesting in the parking garage.

Speaker 84 I believe it was a BMW motorcycle that the detective showed me that was in the parking garage. They believed that he had recently purchased it.

Speaker 30 And inside locked cases, they later learned Steve had maps, clothing, hair dye, makeup, and $15,000 in cash.

Speaker 44 Charlotte, who still believed her father was innocent,

Speaker 70 reluctantly testified for the prosecution.

Speaker 29 Put on the spot, she had to agree she knew he was thinking of running.

Speaker 26 And under a grant of immunity, she admitted that she wrote the so-called anonymous email that claimed Carol was killed by drug dealers, an email dictated by her father.

Speaker 103 At one point, Your dad held up a piece of paper to that glass window and wanted you to write down what was on that paper.

Speaker 42 Yes.

Speaker 103 And

Speaker 103 you did?

Speaker 76 Yes.

Speaker 103 What were you supposed to do with that piece of paper?

Speaker 20 I was supposed to

Speaker 20 write an email with the same substance that I had copied down, I believe,

Speaker 20 in the hopes that it would be investigated further.

Speaker 103 What did that mean to you? I mean, d did you believe it?

Speaker 20 I did. I believed

Speaker 20 that that was what he had been told by someone in the jail and

Speaker 11 that,

Speaker 20 you know, it was very emotional for me

Speaker 20 and I wanted it to be investigated.

Speaker 103 So how did she get the information out?

Speaker 20 I sent an

Speaker 20 anonymous email.

Speaker 62 Anonymous?

Speaker 91 So that it could not be traced back to her or her father.

Speaker 89 Her older sister Katie wasn't aware the email had come from Charlotte, but she was at the center of the story about life insurance.

Speaker 29 Steve had signed a disclaimer saying he would not benefit from the proceeds of Carol's life insurance.

Speaker 46 But Katie was forced to testify.

Speaker 27 Yes. That wasn't true.

Speaker 83 My father was

Speaker 114 asking me for various things related to that money.

Speaker 89 Once Carol's life insurance paid out, Katie transferred her share to her grandparents.

Speaker 103 But you knew that your grandparents were going to use that money for attorney's fees.

Speaker 19 That was my understanding, some or all of it.

Speaker 21 The prosecution called close to 50 witnesses to portray Steve DeMacher as a man who plotted to kill his wife, plotted his escape, and used his own children to fund his defense and even hoodwink his lawyers in the court.

Speaker 25 The case looked strong.

Speaker 41 The prosecution rested.

Speaker 102 Your Honor, the state would rest.

Speaker 25 Now, it was time to hear from the defense.

Speaker 60 And no surprise, it had a quite different theory about about Carol Kennedy's murder.

Speaker 68 A theory that had nothing whatsoever to do with Steve DeMacher.

Speaker 62 That man in the guest cottage.

Speaker 18 It wasn't a little bit of evidence that we had on Mr. Knapp.
It was a mountain of evidence.

Speaker 6 I'm wondering if what was this man capable of? Was he going to hurt me or hurt my family? I was scared.

Speaker 111 Some stories never make national headlines, headlines, but stories from small towns and coastal communities deserve recognition too.

Speaker 111 I'm Kylie Lowe, host of Dark Down East, a true crime podcast that gives voice to victims through investigative journalism and powerful storytelling.

Speaker 111 Set in my home state of Maine and the greater New England area, it's my goal to dig through the archives to bring the stories of the people at the heart of these cases to light.

Speaker 111 Listen to Dark Down East, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Speaker 45 Five years.

Speaker 18 The state has had five years

Speaker 18 to put Steve DeMacher at the scene of the crime.

Speaker 13 But they cannot.

Speaker 70 Anybody paying attention to the bizarre murder case playing out in Fitch and Starts here in Prescott was apt to be a little suspicious of Steve DeMacher's behavior after the killing.

Speaker 23 Getaway bag?

Speaker 30 Fake email?

Speaker 29 Defense attorneys Craig Williams and Greg Parsik could see that as well as anyone.

Speaker 12 But was he guilty of murder?

Speaker 61 No, they said.

Speaker 29 Rather, he was the victim of some detectives' tunnel vision, beginning with a sloppy investigation.

Speaker 18 It was kind of a cavalcade of people roaming through this scene that they didn't lock down, tromping through footprints and tromping through the house, and they didn't seal it off correctly.

Speaker 18 To me, when somebody shows up on the scene and immediately points the finger at the ex-husband, and then that's all they ever did.

Speaker 97 It's always, boom, right on him. It was always on him.

Speaker 61 The jurors listened to Steve's interview with the detectives, conducted the night Carol was killed.

Speaker 105 We've got a suspicious death, and right now we don't have any, and there's other person.

Speaker 105 Well, we have no other person right now.

Speaker 39 In which you can hear the suspicion, said the defense.

Speaker 31 And Steve, said the attorneys, felt a cold fear overcoming him.

Speaker 101 He's afraid of what's happening, that the investigation is all on him. They're not focusing on anybody else, anything else.
It focuses on him, and he's afraid that nobody will believe him.

Speaker 31 That's why he buried the getaway bag, they said.

Speaker 93 It wasn't a sign of guilt, but of terror.

Speaker 39 In fact, it didn't turn up until months after Steve was arrested.

Speaker 18 You never had any evidence that Mr. DeMacher tried to use that bag to flee, correct?

Speaker 84 That he tried to to use the bag to flee?

Speaker 56 Yes.

Speaker 84 I believe that's precisely what he did. He never fled.
We arrested him before he could flee, yes.

Speaker 18 Well, you're using a term of art there, before he could flee. My question to you is very direct.

Speaker 18 He did not flee, did he?

Speaker 84 He was not able to, no.

Speaker 18 Okay, there's another term of art.

Speaker 18 It's a very simple question. Did Mr.
DeMacher flee? or not. That's a yes or no question.

Speaker 84 No, he did not flee.

Speaker 29 And Steve's sister Sharon had a simple explanation for those coincidences the night of the murder, the circumstantial evidence, like his dead cell phone battery.

Speaker 5 I think most of us with cell phones can appreciate that later in the day, it's not uncommon for the battery to go.

Speaker 13 But their ears perked up when he drew the route and part of it came within a mile of the house on Bridal Path.

Speaker 5 Well, he lived out there for many years, so that was a favorite trail.

Speaker 34 They also made a great deal of the tracks that they found in the property.

Speaker 45 The shoe prints that must have been his, the tire tracks that must have been his.

Speaker 5 Nobody knows whose those are. He did buy a pair at one point, but he doesn't know if he kept them.
He said, I never keep any shoes for more than six months. He ran all the time.

Speaker 5 No shoes lasted more than six months.

Speaker 17 And he bought them a couple of years earlier. Yeah.

Speaker 76 The bicycle tire, that's the tire that's on 80%

Speaker 5 of all the mountain bikes in the U.S.

Speaker 14 It's the most common tire.

Speaker 5 So there's nothing very distinctive about that. They wanted to be able to tell the jury that it was a match.

Speaker 5 They were not allowed to do that because, as the experts said, we have no idea if it's a match or not.

Speaker 19 Something that has more or less.

Speaker 47 The defense called its own forensic pathologist to ask if the medical examiner was correct in his conclusion that the murder weapon was a golf club.

Speaker 19 With regards to saying, ah, specifically this weapon, I can't.

Speaker 18 I think the golf club is a,

Speaker 18 as Albert Hitchcock used to say, it's the MacGuffin.

Speaker 35 Okay.

Speaker 18 It's the magic device to

Speaker 18 tie it to Steve DeMacher.

Speaker 96 The golfer, the elitist, the rich guy who was pissed off.

Speaker 55 Fine, but isn't there scientific evidence to say that's a golf club head that he?

Speaker 27 No.

Speaker 18 I don't agree with any of that. And nobody, not a single person could say that that was a golf club.

Speaker 18 They all said it could have been a golf club, but they also said it could have been an other weapon.

Speaker 66 The defense argued detectives should have looked into other suspects, too.

Speaker 21 One person in particular, Jim Knapp, the man who rented Carol's guesthouse and arrived at the scene almost immediately after deputies.

Speaker 61 Why was he a potential suspect, in your view?

Speaker 18 Well, it's like the guy who lights the fire that comes back to watch it burn. And that was our feeling about Mr.
Knapp because it wasn't a little bit of evidence that we had on Mr. Knapp.

Speaker 18 It was a mountain of evidence on him.

Speaker 29 Knapp said the defense attorneys was in serious financial trouble and cooked up a shameless lie to persuade friends to lend him money.

Speaker 59 They told the jury how Knapp faked cancer.

Speaker 101 He got to the point where he was lying about having active cancer and asking people for financial help so that he could take care of this cancer, which he actually did have.

Speaker 65 They said Knapp desperately wanted to buy a franchise business, a smoothie store, with Carol's divorce money.

Speaker 29 At one point, even introducing Carol as his business partner.

Speaker 66 So, was he obsessed with Carol?

Speaker 47 His behavior with his former girlfriend when she tried to break up with him certainly seemed obsessive to her, she said.

Speaker 60 He wouldn't leave her alone, kept sending her emails.

Speaker 6 I'm wondering what was this man capable of? Was he going to come up and stock? Was he going to do something mean?

Speaker 6 Was he going to hurt me or hurt my family? I felt threatened, is what it felt like and I was scared.

Speaker 80 More defense questions?

Speaker 62 How did Jim Knapp's fingerprints wind up on those financial documents that were printed the day of the murder and found slipped inside a magazine sitting on Carol's kitchen counter?

Speaker 71 And how did Knapp's DNA get mixed with Carol's blood in a sample taken from a doorknob leaving the house?

Speaker 47 That was evidence number 805. They called it DNA expert.

Speaker 19 So you can see that all the way across that top line, the numbers are the same as James Knapp, and there are many points of difference with Steve DeMacher.

Speaker 17 Your point was that

Speaker 102 on each of these analyses,

Speaker 102 James Knapp matches each one of these,

Speaker 102 and Steve DeMacher doesn't.

Speaker 17 That's right.

Speaker 47 In fact, neither Steve DeMarker's DNA nor his fingerprints were ever found at the crime scene.

Speaker 69 So, had police focused on the wrong man all along? And because Steve DeMarker knew that, did he make a foolish mistake like a frightened man would?

Speaker 101 The anonymous email, the voice in the bed, all of that occurs once he's placed in custody, loses hope, and becomes desperate.

Speaker 101 That should not, in our opinion, should not have been introduced in this trial.

Speaker 9 That's a whole separate trial, whole separate issue.

Speaker 91 The defense tried to keep all that out of the trial.

Speaker 17 Did not succeed.

Speaker 41 Yeah, because it makes him look like a bad, evil guy who forced his daughters to use their inheritance money to pay for his attorneys.

Speaker 55 A low, scummy thing to do.

Speaker 18 But none of that put him in the house. None of that put any DNA on him in his house, car, person, anything along those lines.
Judge, at this time, the defense rests with you.

Speaker 25 All along, Steve's family remained rock-solid in his corner.

Speaker 51 As Sister Sharon said,

Speaker 5 I want to think the best of my brother. The other part of it is that no one showed me anything that changes my mind.
There is no evidence to say, well, you know, you're not thinking about this.

Speaker 5 Show me something.

Speaker 78 But do you see your own kind of understandable family bias affecting your judgment about these things?

Speaker 5 If you can prove to me that this is what happened,

Speaker 5 then that's different. But I'm missing the big evidence that

Speaker 5 says that he was there.

Speaker 35 And now, five years after the brutal murder on Bridal Path, a jury would finally get to decide.

Speaker 47 And Steve would finally get his say.

Speaker 9 You can't sleep.

Speaker 18 It was rough on everybody.

Speaker 5 You really are in pins and needles.

Speaker 59 The wait for a verdict and a long-awaited interview with Steve the Macher.

Speaker 17 There may be nothing else in life to compare to the agonizing hours and days the family waits, endures, as 12 strangers sit in a locked room and prepare to dictate fate.

Speaker 5 Well,

Speaker 5 as anyone who's watched a TV show, I can tell you, unfortunately, the reality is really similar. You really are in pins and needles waiting for that verdict that you don't know what it is.

Speaker 13 Yeah, and you have no control over it.

Speaker 24 Strangers, who are going to decide.

Speaker 13 Who don't know your brother?

Speaker 52 This family of highly educated professionals knew the case for and against Steve as intimately as any attorney.

Speaker 25 On the third day of deliberations, there was nothing for them to do but sit together, watch their phones, and then, as they prepared to leave a coffee shop in Prescott, news.

Speaker 14 The jury had reached a verdict.

Speaker 26 But it was four in the afternoon, apparently quitting time.

Speaker 38 And the judge decided they'd all have to wait until morning to hear what the verdict was.

Speaker 43 Katie and Charlotte, comforted by Steve's parents, his siblings, had another night to wait and wonder.

Speaker 12 What did the jury decide?

Speaker 18 It was rough on everybody.

Speaker 101 It is. And it's just horrible.
That nervous energy then is to the, you can't sleep.

Speaker 5 We were thinking, well, are they just stretching this out?

Speaker 61 Was it torture?

Speaker 76 Well, sure.

Speaker 5 I mean,

Speaker 5 we just want them to go ahead and let him go now.

Speaker 34 Then, the next morning, the clock struck nine.

Speaker 24 It was time.

Speaker 48 When they came back into the room, could you tell?

Speaker 76 Yeah.

Speaker 5 Didn't have a good feeling. It's never good when they come back in the room and they won't look at the family.

Speaker 119 We, the jury, you and Camel and sworn that we find the defendant Steve and Walker guilty. On the verdict of count two, guilty on count three,

Speaker 119 guilty.

Speaker 67 Guilty.

Speaker 90 On all counts.

Speaker 24 How'd it feel?

Speaker 5 We were just stunned.

Speaker 40 It wasn't the right verdict.

Speaker 5 The law didn't support that verdict.

Speaker 106 Defense investigator Rich Robertson didn't think so either.

Speaker 16 The biggest shock to me was that they came back unanimous and came back unanimous fairly quickly. It was disappointing and still is.

Speaker 11 How did Steve take it?

Speaker 101 Devastated.

Speaker 18 Steve's innocent. And Steve wants to continue to fight and prove his innocence.
That's what his mission is now.

Speaker 23 But is he innocent?

Speaker 25 Investigator Mike Sachet.

Speaker 85 I believe in my heart and soul that Steve DeMacher killed Carol Kennedy.

Speaker 24 He thinks often, he said, about the daughters, about the impact on them.

Speaker 85 While my heart goes out to them, you know, you have to recognize that this is all because of one man's actions.

Speaker 54 Carol's friend, Catherine.

Speaker 3 I never wanted to believe that Steve was capable of doing this, and the jury has made their decision. I accept their decision.
I agree with their decision. I'm so glad it's over.

Speaker 3 I'm so relieved because so many of us have been dragged through it for the last five and a half years.

Speaker 65 Katie and Charlotte were back in court at their father's sentencing and in spite of everything, the state's case against Steve, how Steve used Charlotte to create that phony email evidence, then paid for his defense with life insurance money Carol intended for her daughters.

Speaker 80 In spite of all that, at their father's sentencing, they asked the judge for leniency.

Speaker 114 I ask because I would like the opportunity to someday walk again with my father, freely and outside,

Speaker 114 to speak openly and honestly with him, and find ways to heal the pain of this prolonged nightmare. I believe in healing and forgiveness because that is the way that I was raised.

Speaker 114 As for me, I can promise that I will never forget the memory of my mother. She lives in me every day and will for the rest of my life.

Speaker 20 The additional pain of the reality that we now face is very difficult for me to grasp.

Speaker 20 The knowledge that, like my mother, my father may never attend my wedding or see my children born or even watch me graduate. It feels like losing a parent all over again.

Speaker 20 This excruciating punishment is almost as difficult for me as I know it must be for him.

Speaker 89 Steve professed his innocence.

Speaker 39 I did not kill Carol.

Speaker 12 We loved each other for more than 20 years. Our marriage was over, but

Speaker 39 not our affection for each other.

Speaker 16 I would no more have harmed her than I would harm my daughters by taking her from them.

Speaker 75 Leniency was not forthcoming.

Speaker 29 The judge sentenced Steve DeMarker to natural life plus 20 years.

Speaker 56 No parole, no hope of a life ever outside prison walls.

Speaker 94 All along, we'd been asking for an interview with Steve.

Speaker 106 He was willing.

Speaker 54 The sheriff wasn't.

Speaker 47 But finally, after the sentencing, we were allowed a brief telephone interview from state prison.

Speaker 42 The length that they went to to string,

Speaker 42 to amplify, to exaggerate the evidence, to even misrepresent it. That was the only way they were able to achieve this.
conviction and it's just wrong.

Speaker 62 Well

Speaker 62 it's just wrong.

Speaker 25 You're looking ahead here to an appeal process that will take quite some time at the minimum.

Speaker 89 You know, appeals are hard to win.

Speaker 47 You could be, in fact, in prison for the rest of your life.

Speaker 56 Are you prepared for that? I'm as prepared as anyone can be. I mean, the part that's really hard is you become nothing but a burden.

Speaker 56 And so I guess if I wind up here for the rest of my life, I will try to find some way to be of use in the world.

Speaker 29 Interesting thing about Steve DeMacher, he's an extremely articulate man.

Speaker 64 Can he possibly be sincere, too?

Speaker 91 All we can know with certainty is that Carol will never again have the chance to be useful.

Speaker 61 Although, scratch that.

Speaker 61 Maybe she will.

Speaker 3 One thing that she always sort of said to us, as long as I'm living in this world,

Speaker 3 I am always here for you and with you.

Speaker 3 And I think she should have rephrased that too. No matter if I'm here living or in heaven, I'm always with you because I feel her in my heart.

Speaker 3 I feel her when I'm doing certain things and her presence certainly lives on.

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