While the car underwent its examination, Sergeant Jones and Detective McGuire traveled out to the Davidsons’ place and spoke to Lloyd, who admitted seeing the blue-handled knife and the pistol at Wendi’s apartment. He believed that Marshall had the pistol, and possibly the knife as well. This news alarmed McGuire and Jones. Marshall was not playing a role in the investigation of his sister, but he was a law enforcement officer and, as such, had certain responsibilities that went beyond family loyalty. If he had these items and was concealing them from the detectives, it was a serious obstruction—one that could cost him his job.
TWENTY-FIVE
At a quarter till 4 on March 8, Wendi picked up the telephone in Tom Greene County Jail totally unaware that her car was in the same facility that she was and, at that very moment, members of law enforcement were digging through it looking for evidence to incriminate her. She placed a collect call to her parents’ home.
Marshall answered the line, telling the operator that he would accept the charges.
“Hey, Marshall, how are—How is everybody?” Wendi asked.
“Just peachy,” Marshall said.
Wendi continued on, seemingly oblivious to her brother’s sarcasm. She had a mission to accomplish with this call. There were things that needed to be done, and she wanted both her brother and her mother to make a list of the tasks she assigned to each of them. As soon as Marshall secured paper and a pen, she started. “All right. Shane might be covered by military insurance, ’cause I think he still has benefits even after his father’s deceased. So I think he’ll still have military insurance.”
“I know, we’ve already talked about that.”
“Okay. So write it down.”
“I got it,” Marshall said.
“All right. The life insurance policy as well. Check on that,” Wendi ordered.
“Hunh?”
“Check on the life insurance policy, too,” Wendi repeated.
“We are. We’ve talked about that, too.”
“All right. I don’t really want, you know, I don’t want the money. I just think that, you know, even if we can’t even use it for any of this,” she said, referring to her legal expenses, “I still want Shane to have it.”
“I know, and we’re—we’ve been talking about that.”
“Okay. And Mike’s dad—Is he coming down here or something?”
“Maybe eventually, yeah.”
“And he wants some of Mike’s stuff?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“Okay. Well, he can have anything out in the barn. I have everything that I wanted to keep at y’all’s house. There’s not much there, but a few pictures, stuff like that, for Shane.” Wendi’s voice cracked.
“Are you okay, Wendi?”
She drew in a sharp sniffle. “I am, Marshall. I just miss y’all, and I’m very upset about Mike, you know.”
“I know it’s hard, Wendi. I know.”
“’Cause before, I was just doing what I had to do, but now I’m very emotional, you know, ’cause now I can tell everybody what happened and it’s—You know, it hurts to know that somebody you love—Marshall, I loved him so much, I really did, and I wish that I’d been thinking with my right mind, but . . .”
“Well . . .” Marshall said, at a loss for words.
“Obviously I wasn’t, and I need to just suck it up.”
“Well . . .”
“Okay. So . . . and I don’t know about the Mustangs, if y’all want to go ahead and sell them or . . .”
“We’re talking about that, too,” her brother reassured her.
“Okay. Because I don’t really think it matters at this point in time. I mean, I—You know—They’re just as much mine as anybody’s . . . Don’t they still have the car and the clinic sealed off?”
“No. The clinic is ours now, and the car is going to be, probably tomorrow.”
“Okay. Now, y’all need to check in my console. There was eight hundred and fifty dollars cash in there, because I had just taken it out of mine and Mike’s bank account, and was going to—I had it in the safe like my safe at work, but I put it back in the console . . . But I have that money, because that’s the only cash I had, and I just grabbed it and I was going to put it back in my bank account. But check, because that’s a big chunk of change. I want to make sure no dirty cop took it.”
“Okay. I wrote it down,” Marshall said.
“Eight hundred and fifty bucks in the console,” she emphasized.
“I wrote it down,” he repeated.
“All right,” she said.
“Oh, let me ask you a question. Did you get your saline and stuff?” he asked, referring to the supplies she needed for her contact lenses.
“That was another thing I had. I do, it’s here, but they’re still not letting me have it because I’m on suicide watch. I don’t know what the hell I can do with saline, but they won’t let me have it. So, I’m still . . .”
Marshall interrupted, “I thought they told you that you could have it as long as it was new.”
“They said . . .” Wendi exhaled her frustration. “They brought it to me and said, ‘Here, take your contacts out and we can take them.’ I said, ‘No, that’s not the point.’ I said, ‘I cannot see without my contacts.’ ‘Well, we can’t give you the stuff, and we can’t be running them back and forth. So either take them out or leave them in.’
“And so I talked to the nurse, and they’re all assholes. And I was, like, ‘If the guard okays it and lets me put it in this lock-up box’—that, you know, they have keys for—I said, ‘and she will let me take them out at night and put them back in, in the morning, will that be okay?’ She said, ‘I don’t know, you’ll have to talk to her.’
“So I still don’t—I mean, that’s still not resolved, but it will be okay.”
“Well, do what you can on that end to get it,” Marshall said. “We got it to you.”
“I know. Thank you very much.” The conversation turned to documents that Marshall needed to pick up from the clinic and get to her accountant. Then Wendi said, “I talked to the lawyer today and he still sounded really positive. He gave me my arrest warrant thing that they have for me.”
“Uh-huh.”
Wendi continued. “And, basically . . . they have all the facts in there and I . . . found out how they found all this out, because the computer thing, and then they put a tracker deal on my car in . . . February. So when I went to the ranch . . .”
Marshall cut her off. “Don’t tell us all that.”
“Well, it’s public knowledge. It’s in this public record thing. So it’s in there and that’s how they figured it out. But, I mean, I don’t care. I mean, whatever. They can get me for whatever I did and just leave me the hell alone about the rest . . . But, anyway, he said that they were going to be working on trying to get me a psychologist to try to get me out of here,” Wendi said, referring to their efforts to find a doctor who could attest that she did not need to be on suicide watch.
“Right,” Marshall acknowledged.
“And going to try to get my bond reduced. Now, the jailers and the nurses keep telling me MHMR [Mental Health/Mental Retardation, a Texas state agency] is coming, and I better cooperate with them or I’m never getting out of there. I told them I was not speaking to MHMR, because my attorney advised me not to speak to them at all. He was getting me a private psychologist. They’re giving me a real hard time about that. They told me, ‘Well, if you don’t talk to MHMR, you’re never getting out of here.’ ”
Wendi told Marshall that although she was in jail on just one charge, tampering with evidence, the lawyer had warned that a homicide indictment was nearly guaranteed. “He told me we’ll just have to wait and see,” Wendi said. “He said on the autopsy, they don’t have nothing, which—I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing . . .”
“I don’t think they have done the autopsy yet,” Marshall contradicted.
“He said it’s already been done in Lubbock. T
hey couldn’t find anything. They sent samples off to some federal lab to see about toxicology . . . He said he doesn’t know if there’s anything in his system or not. I mean, if there is, they still can’t prove that it was me or you or anybody else.”
“I know,” Marshall said. “Don’t talk about the case.”
“I know,” Wendi sighed.
“You know they’re listening.”
“I know. I mean, I’m just talking about public knowledge, basically.”
“Well, that’s fine. Wait until it’s public.”
“All right. So he told me that somebody would be here pretty shortly to give me a paper to release his body to the military so they could bury him, cremate him, whatever they wanted to do . . . He told me to go ahead and sign that. Have y’all talked to his dad at all?”
“No, we have not.”
“. . . God, this is horrible. All right. Let me talk to Mama real quick.”
When Judy came to the phone, she asked how her daughter was doing, prompting Wendi to give full vent to a round of whining and complaining. “I’ll be much brighter when I get out of this little cell, because, I mean, it’s about to drive me insane, because there’s no TV, you know. I’m stuck here. The only girl that was normal—all the other ones are, like, really suicidal and crazy. But the other girl that was here, she was just handicapped, and she was actually a paralegal, so she told me, kind of—I didn’t talk to her about my case at all.”
“Well, I hope not, because you know they can plant people in there,” Judy cautioned.
“I know. I didn’t say nothing. All I did was talk to her about how the system works and everything. But anyway, she’s gone; she got bonded today, so there’s nobody normal in here. I mean, they’re all in their cells. I can’t see them or talk to them, just the fire watcher girl [slang for the staff member responsible for keeping a close eye on potentially suicidal prisoners] and they have fits and it’s kind of scary. Like multiple personality and stuff like that. And there’s no TV and there’s nobody to talk to.
“I’m sitting in . . . my stupid little vest and my blanket and the stuff the attorney has give me . . . I try to sleep, but I can’t hardly sleep. They only have lights off for five hours at night, and the rest of the time they’re bright lights. And they’re not off, they’re just dim. But I’m able to eat better. You know, I’m still not eating a lot, but I’m eating better.” Then Wendi asked, “Do you have a pencil and a paper?” and got down to business.
They talked about family matters, Tristan’s day care and Shane’s health insurance. Wendi perked up when Judy spoke of a possible source of regular income for Shane. “He should get Social Security benefits.”
“Which is what?” Wendi asked.
“It’s like I have,” Judy said, referring to her disability checks.
“He’ll get money each month?”
“Yeah . . . until he turns eighteen.”
Wendi sounded pleased at this news and turned her questions to Shane’s ear infection. The recording on the telephone line interrupted. “You have one minute left.”
“All right,” Wendi said. “I got a couple of other things, and if it goes dead, then I’ll just ask you tomorrow. You know the name of that guy, the dog that bled in the front waiting room?”
“Yeah. I don’t remember her name.”
“But you can look it up, because it was January fifteenth, around that time,” Wendi pushed.
“Okay. All right. What about it?”
“We need that name, and I need to get it to the lawyer as soon as possible, ’cause they’re going to need him as a witness.”
“All right,” Judy said, sounding confused.
“. . . You can tell they’re very unstable. Who knows where they will be living when—a year or two years, so we need to get that to the lawyer so they can get some kind of statement.”
“All right.”
“Because I don’t want two years from now somebody saying, ‘There was blood on the front waiting room,’ you know, ‘where did that come from?’ ”
“All right.”
“So I definitely need that name. It was around January fifteenth,” Wendi insisted.
“All right.”
“And we need the phone number, all that.”
“All right.”
Wendi then gave Judy a list of names of people who needed to be contacted about heartworm treatments. When the recording stepped in again to terminate the call, Wendi said, “Love you,” and the conversation was over.
Wendi’s agenda was clear: take care of finances and take care of me. Marshall and Judy seemed to be nothing more than tools to that end.
TWENTY-SIX
Immediately after getting off of the phone with his sister, Marshall called Major Steve Whiteaker at the San Angelo Regional Office of Texas Parks and Wildlife. “Have you heard the news about my sister, Wendi Davidson?” he asked.
“Yes. I heard she’d been arrested in connection with the disappearance of her husband.”
“I tipped the police off about where they might find the body. I can be at your office in ten minutes. Do you have some time to talk?”
Whiteaker agreed to meet with him. As soon as Marshall arrived, he laid out his case for a hardship transfer to San Angelo. “My sister, Wendi, is in a lot of trouble and I’m going to try to gain custody of her two children. Zapata is not a good place to be raising kids, and here in San Angelo, I would have help from my family. In addition to the children’s needs, my mother has lupus and my grandmother has cancer. I need to be here to help my dad take care of them.”
“Hardship transfers are not easy to come by, Davidson. You are going to have to spell out the necessity for one very clearly to Colonel Pete Flores.”
Marshall continued his argument. “Things have really gone bad lately due to my sister’s problems. I was here in San Angelo visiting my parents the day that Wendi broke the news to them that she found her late husband dead, and assumed that one of her family members had killed him. So she took the body and put it in the pond on Terrell Sheen’s ranch in an effort to protect the family.”
“Who’s Terrell Sheen?”
“He’s a family friend and former veterinarian that I used to work for. Wendi and my dad have also worked for him, and Wendi keeps a horse out there on the ranch. The whole family pretty much has free roaming of the ranch at any time.”
Marshall then explained the events of March 5 and the one charge filed against his sister. “They set a high bond in order to break the case. My parents pooled their money to hire Wendi an attorney, but they’re already financially strapped because they put a lot of money into Wendi’s vet clinic. After Wendi was arrested, I told her not to talk to anyone but her attorney. When I talk to Wendi by phone from the jail, the first thing I always tell her is to not tell me anything I might have to testify about later.”
Then Marshall related a strange story about his father’s friends that he said happened while his father was out in the field working on a tractor. “One of them lay down behind a dirt berm and stuck his hand up just barely above it. Another friend stood back with a camera and took a picture of my dad coming toward them. The picture makes it look like Dad was burying someone and the picture is floating around out there somewhere.”
On March 9, Palmer and McGuire gathered up all the forensic exhibits that needed laboratory analysis, and drove to Austin. On the way out of town, Palmer called Detective Ron Sanders at the Tom Green County Sheriff’s Office. “Marshall Davidson will be coming in to take possession of Wendi Davidson’s vehicle today. You can release it to him. Could you give him a call and ask him to bring the blue-handled boning knife in with him that was removed from Advanced Animal Care? It’s evidence in the homicide investigation and I’d like you to take custody of it.”
Sanders called Marshall and he said that he’d bring the knife in and turn it over. When Marshall came into the office, however, his attitude had changed. Sanders walked out to greet him and noticed that Ma
rshall appeared to be embarrassed, turning arrogant and dismissive when Sanders asked about the knife.
“I want to hang on to it until I talk to my sister’s attorney about releasing it,” he said in an irritated tone of voice.
“What about the clothing Wendi gave you?” Sanders asked.
“My dad told me you wanted that, and that you wanted the pistol, too. But I need to speak to the attorney first.”
Sanders stared at him, surprised that a fellow law enforcement officer would withhold evidence and act so self-righteous about it. Marshall didn’t flinch under his glare. Sanders turned and escorted him back to claim his sister’s car.
In Austin, Palmer and McGuire completed the paperwork to maintain a record of a chain of custody and turned over their exhibits to the forensic investigators at headquarters. They still needed to recover the missing knife and pistol, but mostly, now, they had to wait for results from the state lab and from the toxicology tests performed on the samples taken during Mike’s autopsy. They had their suspicions about what had happened to Michael Severance, but they knew it was possible that one of the labs would prove them wrong.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Up in Maine, the Severance family tried to hold it together. Nicole closed down the day-care facility she operated in her home for a month in order to help her mother with anything that was needed.
They desperately wanted to bring Michael home. Once the autopsy was completed, they thought it would be a simple matter to facilitate the transportation. They were appalled to discover that they had to wait for Wendi to sign a release form. It was a galling situation that only served to make their pain worse.
The other matter that ate away at their hearts was the fate of Shane. He was in the custody of the family responsible for the death of his father. They felt helpless to make any impact on events unrolling in faraway Texas.
A Poisoned Passion Page 11
