Bitter Blood (7 page)

Not until six hours later, when Susan called, would she be allowed to come with her vet and pick up Pooky and Poppy.

Lieutenant Dan Davidson was working on reports at his desk at Kentucky State Police Post Five on State Highway 146 near La Grange, the county seat, about ten miles from Delores’s house, when his telephone rang and the post dispatcher told him about the murders. He pulled a plaid sport coat over his white short-sleeve shirt and the .357 Magnum on his hip and went out the back door to his white 1982 Ford cruiser. Officers from Post Five, uniformed troopers and detectives, were responsible for six counties along the Ohio River—Oldham, Henry, Trimble, Carroll, Gallatin and Owen—reaching to within thirty-five miles of Cincinnati. It was a big territory, and the criminal division, of which Davidson was in charge, had only a handful of men to cover it. Four detectives, a detective sergeant, and an arson investigator answered to Davidson.

On his radio, Davidson asked the dispatcher to call one of those detectives, Sherman Childers, and have Childers meet him at the house on Covered Bridge Road.

Most of Oldham County’s police department was at Delores’s house when Davidson arrived and parked his cruiser at the top of the driveway. A yellow police line already had been stretched around the house. The afternoon was sweltering, the temperature near 90, and Davidson took off his coat and laid it on the front seat as he got out of the car. Sergeant Clark, the Oldham County public information officer, spotted him and came over.

“Hey, Dan.”

“What’s happenin’, Dennis?”

“We got a rough one here.”

Dan Davidson was an imposing figure, a man who would stand out in any crowd. Wide-shouldered, broad-chested, with narrow hips, he stood six-foot-three and weighed 215 pounds. His hair, swept back on the sides in a fifties cut, dipped low onto the forehead of his forlorn face. He wore a huge turquoise belt buckle, heavy turquoise rings, and a broad silver watchband swathed in the same blue stone. Buckled, low-cut dress boots protruded beneath his tapered slacks. On his right arm was a tattoo that almost kept him out of the state police, which has a rule against visible tattoos. His was just above the sleeve line of a short-sleeve shirt. WARRIOR, it said in neat letters put there by playmates with a straight pin and school ink when he was eight. He was forty-five now, only two and a half months away from forty-six, and not only was he one of the best horseshoe pitchers and bass fishermen in the state of Kentucky, he was one of the most respected detectives. As a bass fisherman, Davidson eschewed the razzle-dazzle and high-tech gimmickry that had turned that once simple leisure activity into a big-time commercial sport. Using only instinct, cunning, and patience, he could compete with the best of the pros. He applied the same techniques to his work. A taciturn man, Davidson moved slowly and deliberately, and when he spoke it was with a mountain drawl that caused some young, big-city reporters in Louisville to make the mistake of thinking him less than bright.

Davidson succinctly greeted the officers at the side of the house, and went over to look at Delores’s body.

“We’ve got another one in the house,” Steve Nobles told him.

Davidson waited a few minutes for Childers to arrive before going in to look at Janie. While he and the other officers were inspecting her body, Swinney noticed a hole in the draperies. He pulled back the curtain to reveal the remains of a copper jacketed bullet imbedded in the aluminum frame of the jalousie windows, one panel of which had been shattered into an intricate but intact web of tiny cracks. It was the bullet that had passed through Janie’s head.

Davidson saw immediately that this would indeed be a tough case, and he assumed it would be his. Still, it belonged to Oldham County, and formalities had to be observed.

“How do you want to handle this, Steve?” he asked Nobles.

“Well, Dan, why don’t you take charge of it, and I’ll assign Lennie to work with you on it.”

Davidson nodded, and without changing expression went outside and set to work. Later, he admitted to a certain excitement that day.

“I’d be lying if I said I didn’t get charged up on a homicide. Yeah, it was a challenge to me. Any homicide investigator who sees a body laying there and no perpetrator in sight, it’s a challenge.

“A lot of homicides I went to, a man’s standing there with a gun saying, ‘I did it and I’m glad.’ But you get a body that’s been there a couple of days, that’s a challenge, a real one.

“You’ve also got an uneasy feeling. What if you don’t solve it? What if you don’t solve it? That’s there every day. Every minute. That uneasy feeling gets worse, too, as the case drags on.”

6

Daniel Davidson, Jr., was introduced to homicide at age fifteen by his father, the sheriff of Clay County in the Appalachian Mountains of eastern Kentucky. His father took him to a cabin where an old man, an old woman, and their two grown but feebleminded children had been slaughtered over a boundary dispute at their crude supper table while eating corn bread and soup beans (the Kentucky mountain term for pinto beans). Davidson never would forget the sight of the old man’s brains mingled on the plate with his soup beans, but it wouldn’t affect his taste for the beans, one of his favorite foods.

In the thirty years that had passed since, Davidson had been witness to the effects of more murders than he could remember, so many that he needed something to remind him of individual cases. Under his living room coffee table he kept a grisly scrapbook, fat with photographs of victims of murders he had investigated. In it were people who had been shot, stabbed, garroted, hung, scalded, clubbed, hacked, choked, smothered, left out to freeze, run down by vehicles, and otherwise dispatched, often for trivial or inexplicable reasons. He had investigated cases in which a four-year-old girl shot her three-year-old brother, in which neighbor shot neighbor in an argument over a twenty-nine-cent toy, in which brother killed brother over a slice of watermelon. One young couple doused their four-year-old child with boiling water because he cried too much.

Of the scores of murders Davidson had investigated in twenty-seven years with the state police, only two had gone unsolved—and they still nagged him. He’d worked ten years on one of those cases: the asphyxiation of an old mountain storekeeper in a robbery. He knew who did it but couldn’t get proof that would hold up in court. “I did everything, by God, except use voodoo on them sons-a-bitches,” he told colleagues in exasperation.

Solving murders, busting moonshine stills, putting outlaws in jail—all the things his father had done—was the only career Davidson ever considered. In the hills and hollows where he grew up, he knew he’d never face a shortage of work.

Davidson was born on Bullskin Creek near the tiny coal-mining town of Oneida on the South Fork Kentucky River, delivered by frontier nurses, who took medical care to isolated mountain people by Jeep and horseback. His parents divorced when he was five, leaving him to live temporarily with his grandfather, a storyteller of such repute that people came from all over the hills to hear his tall tales (a noted columnist from Louisville, Joe Creason, even came to record some of them for city folk). After his father remarried and settled into a small white house in Oneida, a settlement built around the Oneida Baptist Institute, a school established for mountain children who had no other place to go, Davidson went to live with him. His father had married a teacher, a proper woman named Ima Jean, who not only had a master’s degree but knew the value of etiquette as well as education. She set about transforming the free-spirited mountain boy who loved fishing and frog gigging into a young gentleman who could make his way outside the hills. She honed his table manners, required daily readings of Emily Post, made sure that he did his school lessons, and even, over his protests, taught him such skills as crocheting.

By the time Davidson was in high school, playing forward on Oneida Institute’s basketball team and winning a state marksmanship contest, his daddy was sheriff, and Davidson already knew that he, too, wanted to be a lawman. As a small child he had been impressed by the uniform his father wore during the year he was a highway patrolman, before the state police agency was formed in 1948. He enjoyed the company of lawmen who were his father’s friends, and by age thirteen he and his own friends had started a weekend game of cops and robbers that would continue for years and range for miles over the mountains. Even then, Davidson took pride in his ability to catch the bad guys.

Later, he tried to explain why he was sure of what he wanted to do with his life long before he got out of school. “Every movie you saw, every book you read, had something to do with a lawman. It just seemed interesting to me. I thought it would be prestigious.”

After his graduation from high school in 1956, Davidson was staying with his mother in Cincinnati when his father called to tell him about an opening for a state police dispatcher at London in adjoining Laurel County. He came home, took the required test, and got the job. He lived at the post; worked eight hours a day, six days a week, on the radio; and when he wasn’t sleeping, he was riding with troopers, getting experience for the day when he would become one himself.

After four years as a dispatcher, he was admitted to the State Police Academy in Frankfort in September 1960. By then he had married a nurse, and two days before his graduation, he drove nine hours round-trip over snow-covered mountain roads to be present for the birth of his first child, a daughter, Deanna Lynn. He made it back to Frankfort in time to complete his training, and returned proudly to the mountains wearing a trooper’s uniform, his youthful ambitions fulfilled. His first assignment was Post Ten in Harlan, the seat of Harlan County, where he had worked his last year as dispatcher.

Harlan County is a testing ground for many new troopers. The most rugged of Kentucky’s mountain counties, it clings to the Virginia border in the southeastern corner of the state, its mountains underlain with five seams of bituminous coal, one atop another, in one of the world’s richest deposits. Bloody Harlan, it was called, because of the battles fought between the coal companies and the miners for half a century, battles waged by night riders with tommy guns and dynamite, battles that on several occasions had brought the National Guard to occupy the county.

When Davidson came to it as a trooper, Harlan was a county of rickety coal camps, poverty-ravaged hollows, and grimy little towns, its streams sluggish with silt from slag heaps, their banks laden with the stripped carcasses of abandoned cars and appliances, its tortuous roads clogged on weekdays by monstrous, gear-grinding coal trucks and on weekend nights by wild young men sloshed with bad whiskey in overpowered cars. It was a county of independent-minded people, where the first possession a boy longed for was a gun, and where guns were the first things reached for when disputes arose. “That’s just the way they settle their problems, using their guns,” Davidson recalled matter-of-factly. “They don’t spend a whole lot of time trying to talk these things over.”

Some young troopers are quickly broken by the violence, the long hours, the tensions of duty in Harlan County, but Davidson thrived on it, and heeding lessons learned from his father, he began building a reputation as tough but fair.

Troopers in Harlan spend much of their time working traffic, and Davidson had long been accustomed to the carnage that is common on mountain roads. As a teenager, when his father was sheriff, three boys he knew died when their car ran under a logging truck, leaving their bodies so mutilated that they were carried away in parts. Only after the bodies were reassembled at a hospital was it realized that a part was missing. Davidson was present when somebody brought his friend’s head into the sheriff’s department in a bushel basket.

In the eight years he spent as a trooper, Davidson investigated so many bloody accidents that only the worst remained seared in his memory: the bodies of five teenage boys crumpled in a creek after their car left the road at high speed and overturned; a head-on crash on a blind curve that killed nine people, leaving only the crying of a single bloodied little girl to break the eerie silence of the aftermath.

Troopers also worked criminal cases—thefts, robberies, fights, murders—and that was what appealed to Davidson. By his second year on the job he had become the most famous trooper in the district to at least one segment of the population—the moonshiners and bootleggers. He loved catching moonshiners at their stills and stopping bootleggers’ cars heavy with their illicit loads. His father, too, had been a big still hunter, credited with busting 290 stills in his four years as sheriff. “I kinda picked that up, actually, from him,” Davidson admitted, acknowledging that he attempted to break his father’s record.

“I was really on a tear. I was on a crusade. Those guys were smart. It really presented a challenge to catch ’em, just like catching a big bass.”

His fervor was such that the bootleggers organized and put a $15,000 bounty on his head, but a plan to kill him by calling him to a fake accident was foiled when officers got a tip about the setup. Davidson didn’t let the threat stop him.

“I don’t guess I had enough damn sense to worry that much about it,” he said.

The bootlegging and moonshining had much to do with the violence with which Davidson had to deal. “Friday and Saturday night, Sunday afternoons, especially in summertime, it’d get up in the nineties, and they’d go to drinkin’ that moonshine and it started workin’ on ’em. Everybody’d get mad at everybody else. You could just about predict when you’d get a killing. It’d be hot and muggy. You’d be riding around saying ‘Well it won’t be long and we’ll get a call’ and sure enough…”