Free Then No One Can Have Her by Caitlin Rother

house.
    Kennedy had also tracked a different set of shoe prints from the ones that started at the trailhead. These other prints had a pattern of “three Z ’s”—ultimately determined to be “similar” to Carol’s shoes—starting from the house, leading out to the trail and back again.
    Mascher found one area where the Glenshandra set of shoe prints tracked right over the three Z prints—indicating they came later in time—as the suspect’s outbound prints headed back toward the trailhead.
    The detectives rolled Steve’s front and rear bike tires, which had different tread patterns, in the sandy dirt next to the suspected killer’s tire tracks to compare them. They looked “identical,” at least to the naked eye, investigator Mike Sechez said.
    The defense, however, claimed that the tracks identified as Steve’s could have been older and left by any numerous hikers who had used the trail. The brand of tire and tread pattern—the VelociRaptor—was not uncommon; it was the number-one-selling mountain bike tire for a time.
    Criticizing law enforcement for failing to preserve these shoe prints and bike tracks before the subsequent rainstorm washed them away, the defense underscored this point by demonstrating that plaster castings could have been made.
    The court ultimately ruled that because dirt on the trail consisted of crushed granite, the sand was too coarse for investigators to properly recognize flaws in the tire tracks from photographs alone, and this prevented the prosecution from claiming that Steve’s and the killer’s tracks were an exact or “identical” match. They were only allowed to say that Steve’s tire tracks were “similar” to the killer’s.
    Regardless of the fact that the bicycle tires were a common brand, the shoes were not. As the judge stated rhetorically later in court, what was the chance of finding both the tire treads and shoe prints together—both similar to Steve’s—behind Carol’s house, where he had lived for many years?
    Â 
    Â 
    While one set of investigators was processing the Bridle Path crime scene, another team headed over to Steve’s UBS office on West Plaza Drive. There they executed a search warrant around eight in the morning, when Steve’s coworker John Farmer arrived and let them in.
    The team, which included Detective Brown and Sergeant Huante, looked around and photographed Steve’s office, bathrooms and common areas. But because the building had no security cameras, they couldn’t collect any video to determine whether Steve had come back to log off the night before, as he’d claimed.
    Steve had recruited John, whom he’d met at Prescott College in the late 1980s, to work at UBS. John was the one who had allegedly called to alert him about his computer.
    John said Steve usually started work at 6:30 or 7:30 A.M . and left between 2 and 3 P.M ., although he sometimes stayed late depending on client needs. UBS told them to shut down their terminals at the end of the day, he said, or they wouldn’t get daily updates.
    When investigators checked John’s computer, it was shut down and powered off. Steve’s computer, however, was still powered on, but it was logged off.
    John later told investigators that he’d made no such call to Steve, which was easily confirmed through Steve’s cell phone records. He said he never went into Steve’s office to look at his computer because it was none of his business. But even if he had, the computer goes to a blank screen and he wouldn’t have been able to tell if Steve had logged off or not.
    They also learned that Steve had not, in fact, logged off his computer since doing so at 4:38 P.M . on July 2, and he did not do so again until July 7.
    Â 
    Â 
    Around seven forty-five that same morning, another set of detectives served a search warrant at Steve’s condo, where they