Bitter Blood (8 page)
Most of the killings came in moments of passion brought on by love triangles or disputes of one kind or another—“Harlan County justice”—and were no challenge to investigative skills. Occasionally, a case of another type cropped up—such as the librarian found stabbed sixty-eight times. She had one butcher knife protruding from an eye, another from her throat. Davidson spent nearly a year tracing that to a mental patient who once lived in the victim’s neighborhood. The killer claimed that the Lord had directed her to send the librarian home to heaven. And there was the case of the storekeeper on Jones Creek, near Verda, who had been bound, wrapped in a curtain, and left to suffocate after a robbery in 1961—the case on which Davidson had spent the most effort of his career, earning for him only frustration.
By 1969 Davidson had given up his trooper’s uniform to devote himself completely to criminal cases as a detective. Two years later, in January 1971, he was promoted to detective sergeant and transferred across the state to Post Five at La Grange in Oldham County. By then he was separated from his wife and two children (a son, Daniel Keith, was born in 1962), and he looked at the move as a chance to start anew. In September of that year, as soon as his divorce was final, he married a receptionist he’d met at Harlan Hospital. He and his new wife, Karen, moved into a trailer on the Oldham County Fairgrounds, next to the state police post, and Davidson built horseshoe pits in one of the exhibition buildings. Karen worked for a while at the women’s prison, then took the job of clerk-receptionist at the police post. Later, Dan and Karen moved into a small brick house on Highway 53 overlooking ninety-acre Crystal Lake, where he could fish for bass whenever he pleased. He put covered horseshoe pits in his backyard, set aside one room for his pitching trophies, and hung over his bed a large painting of Jesus holding a protective hand over a state trooper’s car.
The change from Harlan County was dramatic. Oldham was a prosperous rural county with almost no poverty and little violence. “For a long time, I kinda felt like I didn’t have anything to do,” Davidson remembered.
By 1982, Davidson had attended the FBI National Academy, where local law enforcement agencies send their elite for training, had served as president of the National Academy’s graduates in Kentucky, and had risen to the rank of lieutenant. After his promotion, he was sent to another post on temporary duty to help solve some difficult homicide cases, then was offered a chance to move to headquarters in Frankfort as head of intelligence. He tried the headquarters job for six weeks and requested a return to Oldham County. He chafed at desk work. His heart lay in catching outlaws, not in administration. As deputy post commander and head of criminal investigation, administrative duties took up most of his time, but he still could be a detective, still could get his juices stirred by an intriguing case.
But by July 1984, when he got the call about the murders on Covered Bridge Road, Davidson had begun entertaining notions of retirement. Being so often in the presence of death, violence, and evil bothered him more now than it had in his days of youthful exuberance. Under his tough veneer, he was a gentle and sensitive man who soon would miss a day’s work while grieving over the death of his dog, Sarge. Unlike most men who grew up in the mountains—and many of his friends—Davidson didn’t like the sport of hunting. Tracking the animals was fine, but he’d never been able to bring himself to shoot a rabbit or deer. He often dreamed of being in shootouts in which he was wounded, or in which he had to shoot somebody, a prospect he dreaded. Only once had he fired at a human being. That was in his second year as a trooper, when he had to stop a fleeing kidnapper who had hit him in the head and escaped. Davidson fired two warning shots before aiming low to stop the man and hitting him in the foot. “A lucky shot,” said the onetime state marksmanship champion, whose eye was so keen that he could throw ringers in horseshoes 80 percent of the time. Davidson even resisted using his nightstick in scuffles—and he had been in many. He took a lot of ribbing from other officers when, while trying to subdue a marauding, drug-berserk motorcycle gang member who’d attacked several people, he chose to stop him with an uppercut instead of his nightstick, and broke his little finger for his humanitarian effort, keeping him from the horseshoe pits for weeks.
Other things, too, had set Davidson to thinking about retirement. He wasn’t sure he liked the direction police work was taking. He saw too much interagency rivalry, too much demand for credit. “They forget the objective is to put the outlaws in jail,” he said. “When I first started in law enforcement, we just tried to put the goddamn outlaws away and it didn’t matter who shut the door.”
He also feared that the day of the old-time detective who followed his intuitions, using legwork to chase leads wherever they led until he solved the case, was past. He foresaw a day when detectives would spend most of their time at computer terminals following the directions of bureaucrats. He resented the by-the-book, no-common-sense, bureaucratic young officers who seemed to be seizing command without really knowing how to work a difficult case.
“Homicides, you’ve got to live ’em,” he said. “You can read all the books in the world and that won’t help you in a homicide.”
With more than twenty-seven years in the state police, Davidson already had more service than many retired officers. He knew he could get a nice pension. And he could envision himself enjoying a life where no outlaws or murderers intruded, chasing after nothing more elusive than lunker bass, sitting back employing his droll sense of humor in the service of tall tales, as his grandpa had done.
Friends told him that he was crazy. He wouldn’t know what to do if he retired, they said. The first time a big murder broke, he’d be champing at the bit to find the killer. And as soon as he got to the house on Covered Bridge Road, saw the bodies of Delores and Janie, realized what a tough case this was apt to be, and felt the juices of challenge beginning to flow again, Davidson knew that his friends were right.
7
Some things were evident quickly. The decomposition of Delores’s body, the Sunday newspaper beneath it, the Bible nearby told Dan Davidson and the other officers that the murders had not taken place in recent hours and most likely occurred two days earlier, probably as Delores was returning from church. That meant a cold trail.
The position of the body, the wounds, the keys near the door indicated that she had been taken by surprise from behind, hit with high-speed bullets, probably from close range. The angle of the wounds, the blood splatters on the entrance and garage doors said that she had been hit first in the back, again in the head as she was falling, most likely by somebody lying in wait behind one of the cars. The frame of her glasses was found twelve feet away, a lens thirteen feet beyond that. Bits of skull and flesh were scattered for thirty feet.
Delores had been killed first, Davidson surmised. The bullet hole in the storm drain at the end of the house indicated that Janie had taken the first shot in the back as she was trying to get inside the kitchen door. In her left hand was a tissue filled with dog dung. Later, when Davidson learned that Delores and Janie always picked up the dog droppings from the yard, he concluded that Janie definitely had been outside when the killer accosted her. Either she was already dead when her mother arrived, or she was in the backyard, or returning inside, heard the shots that killed her mother, went to investigate, and surprised the killer, who might not have been aware of her presence.
Whichever, it appeared certain that she had been chased through the house before receiving the fatal shot to the base of her skull. Blood drops on the kitchen floor just inside the door indicated that she paused there, probably trying to grab the telephone. She apparently had run around the counter in panic, through the kitchen, jumped a two-foot-high dog gate with bullet holes in her right lung, passed through the family room, and continued down the hallway, perhaps pausing again at the linen closet in an attempt to set off the alarm. She left another blood smear on the corner of her mother’s bedspread as she raced around it into the bedroom, only to find herself trapped in the French room. The angle of the killing shot indicated that she was crouching when the second bullet struck her. Unlike her mother’s death, hers came with terror.
Guesses about the small bullet lodged in the window frame centered on a .223, used in military assault rifles. A grease smudge on Delores’s white chenille bedspread outlined the impression of such a weapon, laid there, no doubt, while the killer rummaged through the inexpensive contents of Delores’s jewelry box.
Was robbery the motive for these brutal slayings? Steve Nobles, the Oldham County police chief, thought so. His department had answered several calls to the Lynch house in recent years, usually to investigate prowler reports from Delores, or because an alarm went off when nobody was home. In November 1977, somebody broke out a window and set off the alarm before fleeing. In September 1980, somebody stole Delores’s big red riding mower. It later was recovered by state police, and the thief, an escaped prisoner, was sentenced to serve more time.
The house, however, had not been ransacked. Items that an ordinary thief might take—TVs, tape recorders, the police scanner (illegal in Kentucky) beside Delores’s bed, the silver service in the dining room—were left untouched. The most valuable items in the house—the Oriental rugs in the living room, dining room, and foyer (estimated value, $50,000)—were still on the floor. Only Delores’s and Janie’s jewelry boxes had been dumped onto their beds. Still, Nobles thought perhaps the thief had been surprised in his work, had killed Janie in panic, then had to kill Delores to make good his escape. Perhaps he’d killed both women, then been frightened off before he could make his haul. Or maybe he’d come to steal a specific item and had found it without having to ransack the house.
Sherman Childers, the detective who’d worked for thirteen years with Davidson, had another theory.
“This was a hit,” he said, after examining both bodies. “A pro took these people out.”
Davidson tended to side with Childers, whose instincts he trusted implicitly. But he didn’t rule out the possibility of robbery. His experience taught him never to rule out anything without evidence.
Daylight was waning and much had to be done. Davidson put out calls for Dr. George Nichols, the state medical examiner, who would perform the autopsies—Dr. Death, the officers called him—and for commonwealth attorney Bruce Hamilton, who would prosecute the case if it came to court. Both were colorful men with forceful opinions and no reluctance to offer theories, which Davidson knew he would have to suffer. His quest now was for fact, though, not theory. He called for more uniformed troopers, sent some to canvass nearby roads looking for abandoned vehicles or anything else suspicious, others to question neighbors. The Jefferson County evidence team arrived, but left after learning that a state police mobile crime lab was on the way from Frankfort. After the crime lab arrived and the technicians set to work dusting for fingerprints, collecting fibers, hairs, bullet fragments, blood samples, and other possible evidence, Davidson organized a group of officers for a thorough search of the yard and nearby woods. Spreading out arm-to-arm, the officers moved across the yard on hands and knees.
Within forty-five minutes of Davidson’s arrival, reporters and photographers began showing up. Kept on the road by officers assigned to guard the perimeter of the property, the reporters sought comments from all who would offer them. Photographers trained their cameras on the house and the comings and goings of police. Powerful lenses picked up Delores’s body, barely visible from the road.
Davidson believed in keeping good relations with the press, which, he knew, could be helpful. “I believe in letting the public know as much as you can,” he explained later. “There’s very few crimes, if any, where somebody doesn’t know something about it. They may not know it’s important, but it may be just the one little thing that we need. If you let the reporters know all you can and keep ’em up with what you’re doing, somebody will come forward eventually.” Like all homicide detectives, however, Davidson held back key bits of information, things only the murderer could know. Those bits would help eliminate attention seekers who might confess to the crime, and could prove crucial in tripping up suspects in interviews.
In this case, though, there was little to give out other than barest details—the identities and ages of the victims, that they had been shot, Delores found outside and Janie inside. As for motive, Sergeant Dennis Clark, the Oldham County information officer, hedged. “A possible motive is robbery,” he told reporters. “There are a few things in disarray that makes that a possibility.”
The reporters wandered off to talk to neighbors and later questioned Dr. Nichols, who told them about the wounds, speculated that they had been caused by small-caliber, high-velocity bullets, and reported no signs of sexual molestation.
At 6 P.M., news of the murders was on every TV station in Louisville. By 8 P.M., crime lab technicians had finished their work around Delores’s body, and men wearing surgical masks lifted it into a black plastic body bag and carried it to a hearse that would take it to the morgue at Humana Hospital in Louisville. Janie’s body would remain in place two hours more.
When thorough searches of the parking lot and house turned up no empty shell casings, Sherman Childers’s belief that a hit man had done this job was reinforced. The average thief wouldn’t use a shell catcher on his weapon and likely wouldn’t have the presence of mind, or take the time, to collect empty shells—especially a thief who was frightened off before he could make his haul.
