Sword and Scale - Episode 114

Episode Date: May 12, 2018

Some crimes are so extreme that they defy the laws of nature. Ending the life of your very own mother, for example, is so unfathomable to most that it may be the most vile crime imaginable. The story we tell you here goes well beyond that. Strap in..See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Sort and scale contains adult themes and violence and is not intended for all audiences Listener discretion is advised Well, this dice how I ended her life. I'm kind of more fascinated by the more artistic ways of murder and the particular manner, the way they cut them open, just slice them pieces. I mean, such care, such love. Hello and welcome to season 5, episode 114 of Sword and Scale, a show that reveals that the worst monsters are real. Today's episode is a particularly nasty one. I mean, it's got a trifecta of triggers.

Children, mental illness, and yes, the family cat. That's all you get to know for now. You're an adult, presumably. Proceed at your own risk. On some level, almost all the stories we tell involve deception. We've seen over and over again how a secret fantasy, a hidden lifestyle, or a false identity can lead someone to take another life. Thankfully, such extreme examples of deception are not commonplace. But even though they are rare, they speak to something far more common about the human

condition. None of us can ever truly know what is going on inside the minds of those around us. And in the words of a man you're about to meet, it's kind of funny how you never really really know someone, not even your own son or brother. March 27, 2014. Robstown, Texas. Just outside Corpus Christi. It was a Thursday morning. Timothy Johnson and LaWanda Houston were sitting down watching TV and enjoying a cup of coffee.

Usually Timothy would have been at work already, but he decided to take day off to spend some time with his wife. At around 10 a.m. just after they let their dog out, Timothy and LaWanda heard their doorbell ring. Well, my doorbell rang and I just happened to, you know, kind of turn my head and I said, yes, and he waved to me like this. He said, come closer. A short, scrawny man with a peach fuzz mustache and thin wireframe glasses was standing at the door. Some guy was standing there, he said, if I'd call 911, he'd just murder somebody.

So I told him a wife called 911. And I said yes, and then that's when my husband came around the corner, he's like, I need your own call 911, I just murdered someone. And I looked at my husband, my husband started talking to him and I just came into the garage and called 911, and was talking to them. And they asked me, did he have blood on him or anything like that and I said no, not that I can see.

And they asked me if I could take him my phone so he could talk to him. So they had a held a conversation with him on my phone. The 911 operators. While waiting for law enforcement to arrive, Timothy struck up a conversation with the young man. And I went outside and was talking to him and asked him questions about it, but he just told me that he actually who he feel and he said his mother, and I said, well, how'd you do that? He said, I'll be able to hammer.

And I said, why'd you do that? And he just kept telling me lots of reasons. He wouldn't ever tell me why. What's the other reason that he's telling you? He just kept telling me lots of reasons. He wouldn't ever tell me why. What's in the reasons that you tell him? He just kept telling me lots of reasons. Oh, okay. So he wouldn't tell you the reasons just the word lots of reasons. So I stood out there and waited waiting until the cops got here to pick him up.

Did you hear him saying why he killed somebody or who he killed? He said he, when I came back to tell him that the cops were on their way, my husband was having a conversation and my husband said, who did you kill? And he said, my mother. He's like, well, why'd you kill your mom? He's like, it was just a lot of reasons, you know. And that was it. He kept trying to take a look and toward the road, not actually eye contact with us. Did he look,prought that he looked

Agitated or would you actually just like he was up saying? I couldn't put the calm he's real calm and there he had raised his voice. He's everything. No problem Get out of nothing just that they're talking So when he told you to get killed his mother Did he ask you to call the police or he had that first thing asked when I went to know if we count 911 Okay, he just murdered somebody. Okay. Imagine this was you.

You're sitting down, watching TV and drinking coffee, and then all of a sudden a teenager you've never met is at your door, calmly asking you to call 911 because he just murdered his own mother. What do you say to something like that? I told him I was sorry, you know, for the problems that he was having and I kind of felt sorry for him and in a way just how he was you know acting everything he was scared but calm. And I was trying to keep him that way so I offered him something to drink. He's something for no sorry. He told him he was scared of us because we were too nice to him. He's never had no one nice to him He said, that's what told me. Yeah

Did you feel like you were in danger at any time that you were talking to a murderer? I felt nervous You know because I've never had anything like that happen before and I didn't know how to react but on the phone call I made sure and called 911 again because they were taken too long and she's like, what do you feel threat? And I said, no, but I don't know what could happen because he just murdered someone and he's calm. So that kind of made me nervous. You know. You really feel like you and your husband might be in danger some point in time.

Yes. I did. When someone knocks on your door and says he just murdered someone and you're kind of in shock. You know, and... You believed it, you believed it? In a way I did, but in a way I did, and I thought maybe he might have been on medication or something, you know, because he was just too calm and just, you know, not so much about everything. You believed it? It's just, you know, not someone that's about everything. You do believe him?

Not at birth. And when I started talking to him after I told him I was going to come 911, and I started talking to him, and more I asked him, and he was coming out with the answers you're like here, and I figured something had happened. He wouldn't ever tell me why he done it or nothing. He just told me he's done it happened. That's all he told me. OK, did he seem like he might have been a male case? Who you?

Was he talking normal? He was just talking normal. OK, so it's not every day if somebody comes to your home and knocks on the door and tells you he'd kill somebody. No, sir. OK. OK. Anything else you think may be important?

Not at this time. If we were to tell if he did kill somebody, would you believe it? Yeah. Eventually, the police pulled up. The young man calmly puts his hands up in the air and surrenders. Timothy and LaWanda would later find out

that this young man's name was Kevin Davis. And everything he had told them was true. Well, my name is James Garberino, I'm professor of psychology and senior faculty fellow at the Center for Human Rights of Children at Loyola University of Chicago. Dr. Garberino has been serving as an expert witness on murder cases for over two decades. It began with a call from a lawyer who had read some of the scholarly work I had published on the intersection of child abuse and community violence and producing what it came to be called the war zone mentality of teenagers, particularly getting involved in community violence often to gangs.

And it just sort of grew from there to more general work as a witness in murder cases. So I worked on all about 125 murder cases over the years. Dr. Garberino's job is to make sense of violent acts that most people would dismiss as senseless. As coincidence would have it, he actually worked on the case of Joshua Phillips, who you might remember from episode 112. If you're frustrated by the result of Joshua's recentencing, you're not the only one. We asked Dr. Garberino if he felt Josh's sentence was appropriate and in line with Miller versus Alabama, the Supreme Court decision that mandatory minimum sentences of life without parole

are unconstitutional for juvenile offenders. No, I don't think it was appropriate. I don't think it is in line with the Miller decision. I have a new book that's just come out called Miller's Children by giving teenage killers a second chance matters for all of us. And I've now worked in about 50 Miller cases. And I think there's a fundamental problem in the way courts have decided these cases that they're making what I believe is the false assumption that the nature of the team

nature's crime predicts their potential and the reality of their rehabilitation. And I haven't ever seen any evidence that demonstrates that. Having met Josh Phillips, I've been read about him and read all the reports on him. I think that he is rehabilitated. So I think it's a miscarriage of justice and it's all too frequent in miscarriage of justice. Do you think our legal system does a good job of defining adulthood? I mean, is 18 just an arbitrary number or is there science behind that cutoff point? Well, it's the cutoff point as an absolute value of 18 is better than nothing, but it's really not in tune with what developmental science is telling us.

And that's when these are my why there's a lot of pressure to move that age up. California has moved it up to, I think, 24 or 25. Court decisions in Illinois have allowed it to be moved up. So there's a lot of consensus about 18 for a lot of things, but within my lifetime, the drinking age moved from 18 to 21. And some places, the driving age has moved up because young drivers are more dangerous than older drivers.

So I think the movement eventually is going to be to move it up from 18 somewhere in the early 20s. And that will be more accurate a reflection of how brain development is occurring, how immaturity is replaced by maturity through education, meditation, therapy, transformational experiences, and so on. Age indeed plays a part in our legal system, and we tend to be more lenient to juvenile offenders, but can some people just be born evil? It's the age-old

question, nature versus nurture. We've been trying to answer it forever. Can a person be inherently evil from birth or is it learned behavior, a product of their environment? In Dr. Garberino's book Listening to to Killers, describes a path that juvenile killers take from childhood innocence to adult depravity. In a sense, I think almost no one would say that infants are good or bad. Nor theological views that say infants can be inherently evil, but most modern people don't really subscribe to that. So it's much more than a matter of babies just are. They're biological organisms with the potential for psychological processes to work.

And most people who really look at it said that how you get from being a totally innocent baby to a culpable teenager adult is this interaction between the experiences that you have and the temperamental issues that you bring with you. And then finally, how do you seem to interact to create a mind of a personality? So you have that developmental pathway at work. Then you have situational factors.

For example, if you live in a neighborhood where there's almost no choice but to join a gang, you join a gang. And once you're in a gang, now a whole other set of circumstances come into play about the likelihood that you will find yourself either with a gun in your hand or with people who have guns in a situation of conflict with other people who have guns. So I think it's kind of arrogant, often people to say, well, I would never go down that pathway. I don't think that's not so true, that people can find themselves in situations, even the best of people, where they doesn't seem to be a non-violent option. And that certainly is what some of these cases are about. Other times, kids are subjected to abuse and abandonment that produces rage in them,

and they go from being an innocent baby and a young child to being a teenager for rage and sadness about the way they were treated. And that becomes a kind of wild card in their emotional life and their behavior. Some of the most terrible murder cases involving young people come out of that, you know, that pathway, if you will. Now, there are people who are so damaged that birth, they have no capacity to have empathy, and they're on the path to become a psychopath. And most psychopaths end up getting involved, some kind of a moral activity because they

don't have a moral sense to start with, it's all logistical for them. But there are psychopaths who don't end up with criminal paths because they have nutrient, supportive environments around them. are psychopaths who don't end up with criminal paths because they have nutrient-supported environments around them. They still may have some of those temperamental characteristics, but they're not criminal. So, there's multiple pathways, and it's really a matter of understanding the whole context in which a particular biology is moving forward. And then you add the cultural element on top of it.

And I think one of the most interesting studies I've read in a couple of years and study that looked at the voices in the heads of Schizophrenics, it's called auditory hallucinations. And we study that what do the voices tell you if you're in the United States, if you're in India, or if you're in Ghana, country, and Africa. And they found that in 70%, 70% of American schizophrenic voices in their heads, what are called auditory hallucinations, 70% were here in voices that told them to commit acts of violence against themselves or others. In India, it was only 20%. In India, most of the voices told them things like clean your house better.

And in Ghana, it was only 10 percent. And gone, and most of the voices understood to be positive conversations with God. So if you're a skitzer for any kind of voices, it matters a lot whether you're an MD or United States because the culture of violence in the United States is so powerful and pervasive, it even gets into the head of crazy people who are supposedly are disconnected from reality. You ever hear that phrase, it takes a village to raise a child? With so many different factors at play, it's virtually impossible to be able to isolate a specific cause or causes, to violence within juveniles.

Two people with the same mental illness on opposite sides of the world, responding in completely different ways. Because in many ways, younger minds are not quite as developed, we make exceptions in the law for younger offenders. We typically give them more lenient sentences in the hopes that they may still be rehabilitated. However, there are some crimes that we, as a society, see as unforgivable and irredeemable. There are some crimes that don't only go against our laws, but against the very laws of nature. Crimes that are so inherently disturbing that it becomes difficult to see the perpetrator as a child or even a human being.

The crime I'm talking about is parasite. Well, parasite is killing a parent, that's where it comes from. I would say that in a gross sort of way, what differentiates it is that it's intrinsically personal. I mean, if you put a continuum, we're killing a total stranger, it would be at one end of a continuum. Parasite must be at the other end because you're talking about killing the people who bore you, who raised you. So, in that sense, it's fundamentally different. And as a result, I think that most parasite cases are very intricate, intense, dynamic between the kid and the parents who end up paying

or parents who end up getting killed. Kevin Jazzrell Davis was an 18-year-old high school student who lived in a two-bedroom apartment in Corpus Christi, Texas, with his mother 50-year-old Kimberly Hill, a former marine corporal who worked as a hospice caregiver. In the fall of 2013, Kimberly told the manager of her apartment building the Windrush apartments that she was having some problems with her son. What has happened when a Kimberly came over to my office like about a couple of months ago saying that she was having trouble with Kevin because he didn't want to go to school or who wanted to be playing games and she was really frustrated.

And that's all we talked about. Okay, so do you remember more or less? I know you don't know the exact date, but how long before that his lady came to the office to talk to you about her son. All day about, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, No, she mentioned nothing about nobody. No, nothing like that. Does he want to go to school? That was it. Kevin, like most teenagers, was sick of going to school.

Other than that one conversation, Kevin and Kimberly seem to be getting along OK. Kevin continued to show up at school. And others who knew Kimberly don't recall her expressing any other problems with her son over the next few months. Well, you're wearing a problem between problems with her son over was a good kid. You know, that really surprised me, you know. That's okay.

He was a good kid. On the evening of March 26th, 2014, a woman named Sierra Salas went over to the Windrush apartments with her fiance and baby to visit her mom. Her mother lived in apartment 1708, directly above apartment 1707, the home of Kimberly Hill and Kevin Davis. On Sierra's way up to her mother's apartment, she bumped into Kimberly in the hallway at around 8 or 9 p.m. And I saw my parents just open up her door and I saw the baby and when we stood and

we said, good night to each other and tell my mom to call her and I said, okay. Kimberly seemed to be her normal self, warm, cheerful, and friendly. Well, it's her demeanor, was she happy, was she upset, was she angry, or... Yeah, she looks... she was happy, she just... I mean, she talked to me, she just talked to my mate. We, like, she just talked to us, she was fine to us, like, you know, she just turned on herself, like, what a show he was. A few minutes later, Sierra and her fiance ran into Kevin as Sierra would later recall something seemed off about him that night. five minutes or ten minutes after and he was just staring at me. Like all like, like, like,

at home? It was like five minutes, that's what I'm saying, like, five minutes after. But he was just staring, oh, the other, like, at me. And I felt like, I think, look, he's looking at me and my face looks good, but like, after that, he looked at me and he's like, made like a smart car out of us and went inside. Sierra slept in her mother's living room with her baby that night. Completely unaware of the horrific scene playing out in the apartment beneath her.

And how long did you stay there that night at your mom's? I spent the night there. Okay, did you hear any noises or anything? No, that's what I'm picking out on. I heard that some person was something but I didn't pay attention to it because there's a lot of cats and dogs outside and that's what I'm thinking out on. I heard that just something, but I didn't pay attention to it because there's a lot of cats and dogs outside and that's how it's made noise, make noise, and it's not anything of it. And recently there has been our kids in the trash line and I think anything.

Okay. And I actually was scared because I stepped up the window open that night. And my son and my child just stepped in the room and I stepped in the living room with the windows open. The following day, one of Kimberly's co-workers, Kathleen Flanagan, noticed that Kimberly wasn't at her morning meeting. Well, we have normally at our office in the morning, we have reports in the morning where our staff gets together and we fill them in on anything that came in on call,

over the night, the report that we received. Normally on weekdays, it isn't mandatory for staff to be there. So we have some of our staff there and some that are not, some that start out in the field. Normally Kim would come in in the morning and she was not there that morning. Kathleen likely figured that she was just running late. She had talked to Kimberly the day before, and it hadn't seemed like there was any reason

to be concerned. I don't remember the exact time I wanted to say it was around 3.30 the day before. The afternoon. And the afternoon. Okay, and did you speak to her on the phone? I did. On the phone, okay. On the phone.

How did she sound? Was she upset, angry, or what was it? No, she actually the opposite. She's sounded wonderful. We kind of visited on the sound for a little while. It was just all very positive. She was in a really good mood. We had a very good phone call. According to Kimberly's boss, Celeste McCraw, Kimberly would often report directly to her work site instead of checking in at the office. Sometimes she comes into the office, sometimes she goes directly out to care for patients.

So it's not unusual for her to not come into the office. But that morning Kimberly didn't show up at her work site either. One of the employees were just expecting to meet her at one of the nursing homes. And she was not there at the nursing homes. They employed, called her a couple of times, did not get her on the phone. And so had called the office to see if she had come into the office. And she had not. So we had called her one time and had not reached her and then shortly

I guess it was within about a 15 minute time range. We had gotten a call from, I don't know who it was, I did not take the call myself, but one of the employees had called, had come to me and said that someone had called doing a wellness check on Kim. The employee did not get the person's name, they just said that it found it like it was either, that it was someone in law enforcement and they said that they were doing a wellness check. At that point, I decided I was going to go to Kimberly's house and check on her and see if she was

alright. So last rushed over to Kimberly's apartment building. So I got in my car. I went to her apartment and when I got to the apartment when I pulled into the drive I felt that there were police cars, multiple police cars there. I pulled up to one of the police cars and introduced myself, gave the gentleman my business car, told him I was Kimberly Foster and was checking on her because I realized that she was not out seeing patients and that she was missing in parent length because she, and we thought she was providing care for patients, but apparently she had not been. And I wanted to make sure she was alright.

And at that point, he told me that he could not give me any information, but if they were there investigating. The Windrush apartment complex was swarming with police cars. Inside apartment 1707, investigators had already discovered a trail of blood, leading from the living room to the master bedroom, where they found the body of Kimberly Hill. The crime scene was like something out of a movie, the things that Kevin Davis confessed to doing to his mother in the ways that he hurt her, or the thing that you don't normally see every day.

Kimberly's body was uncloathed from the waist down. The cause of death was apparent. Her skull was split wide open, and there was a bloody hammer lying on the carpet next to her. There was about 18 denaceration about the head, scattered about the surface of the head. Kimberly's son, Kevin Davis, was arrested and charged with her murder. I was telling you before talking we just need to do a ride and make sure you understand what's going on right now you're at least a murder. Miss Anna? Okay.

Today's March 27, 2014 the time is 11.45. After his arrest, Kevin agreed to participate in an interview with detectives Aril Garcia and Ramero Torres at the Corpus Christi Police Department. These rights were read or explained to me before the statement. I do hereby knowingly, intelligently and voluntarily, way the rights list of the both. No one has threatened to me, forced me, or promised me anything to make their statement. Because I'm right. Yes, but you're right. You can let me sign it right here.

Kevin takes his time signing the waiver in front of him, joking with detectives that he probably shouldn't scribble on such an official document. Then the interview gets underway. You've talked to some people you want to get some stuff off your chest. We're here to listen to you. What happened to telephone? You know what happened? Well, have you...

Has anybody gone to the house yet? You really? We know nothing. We have, but we want to hear it from you. Oh, we have an idea. Give you a little look at this. Start at the beginning, man. What cost was this?

Well, very beginning, I asked my mother for permission to die, or rather commit suicide, to sort of feeding around the bush sort of thing, because well, that doesn't really matter while I'm killing myself. You're a judge. I'm bored with life. I don't like life. I don't like people. I don't like living it basically. There's really nothing anything depressing about it. There's what it is. And so I wrote the note. I did. On March 26th, the day before Kimberly's body was found, Kevin decided he was going to kill himself because he was bored.

He addressed the following note to his mom and sister. March 26th, 2014, 6.51 am. Life resignation notice. I had a change of heart. I said I was going to do it, and so now I need to speak to my word. I am a man after all. I'll be it a hilarious one. Too much damn work.

Too many obligations. Seriously, fuck people. But most of all, fuck me. By the way, I've always fantasized about murdering and raping you too. It's kind of funny how you never really know someone, not even your own son or brother. And then you get a disability. I'm all now actually molded over and then on a whim actually I turned it over, filled a plan to kill both my mother and my sister.

On a whim, Kevin decided that rather than kill himself, he was going to carry out a sick fantasy. He flipped over the same piece of paper he'd used to write his suicide note and wrote out a backup plan to kill his mother and sister. According to Kevin, this had been a fantasy of his ever since he was a kid. How long have you got this culture you were? It's around my pre-teen, actually. Do you ever seek any medical attention, psychological? Do you feel like you can cope with that?

Nope, I never really speak to health, actually. I just accepted it as a part of me. I wasn't really ashamed of it. It was just what it was. Instead of seeking help, Kevin kept these fantasies to himself. You ever tell anybody else what your plans were, what you want to do, your mom, or your sister? No, but over the years they were, and as a younger boy I was a lot dumber, a lot more angsty.

You know, I said things, but I guess they basically brushed it off. I guess the hymns were everywhere, but they're my family. Family looks past that kind of stuff, or they try to not look at it. I guess. To the outside world, Kevin appeared quiet, withdrawn, maybe even awkward. But how could anyone have known his tranquil demeanor was masking fantasies about rape and

murder? Phanases which ultimately remained hidden until the evening of March 26, 2014. After Kevin's mother refused to grant him permission to kill himself, he decided to make his fantasy a reality. And so I kind of left off nefarious, get it right in there. You did what? Well, I tried to strangle her with a cord, ripped cord from a video game console controller. That didn't work.

What was your first attempt at sitting on the couch? Why didn't you? Kevin, as scrawny as he was, found himself unable to overpower Kimberly. So he dropped the video game cord in search of a more effective weapon. That didn't work out too well. It started screaming. And so I went to her room, opened a drawer at the very bottom to the right. I pulled out a hammer.

I went back and couldn't let it room in. Well, you kind of get the gist from there. Kevin began hitting her in the head, again and again. With the hammer, he'd taken out of his bedroom. So I raced back into her room, grabbed the hammer, came back out, and then did it. I'm going to tell him who the enemy is living with him. At least 20, but then she was still alive. I dragged her into the room and he probably clearly saw.

At this point in the interview, the interrogating officers asked Kevin if he used any other weapons during the head. I'm in the head. I believe I may have gotten her hand because she was covering herself. Kevin gestures to the top sides and back of his own head, indicating where he hit his mother with the hammer. Top back. And now actually the entrance wind is around the others. And then when you drive through to the living room, I mean to the bedroom, you kept on hitting her there? Yeah, I caught her. Kevin continued bludgeoning his mother with the hammer until her skull was cracked open.

Her brain exposed. Somehow, Kimberly was still showing signs of life. So Kevin bent down and reached out towards her open skull. When you reached the end of the vector brain, I kicked out of the bit and I just, I was kind of silly, but then I just decided to reach out and kind of just warmed my hands into a range to kind of just cut it, you're still snoring. Okay.

You're still alive? You're still alive. And you went in there and you grabbed this brain? Yeah. Thanks, sir. Later in the interview, Kevin recalls that he had, in fact, used a knife at some point during the attack. And there was some blood in the knife that you said you never used it.

I guess just blood just from where you grabbed it. Oh, that knife. Actually, I used that to start a blinds up or something. Then that didn't really work outside. It's kind of sad to delve on it. You do that in the living room on the bedroom. Because it was fun in the bedroom. I may have started that.

Yeah, actually, I used a knife in a living room. And then I did not take it with me. So the brain were already coming out when you grabbed the EX, but she was still strong like a baby and so I just kind of cried. Dr. Joel Kutnik, a psychiatrist who conducted an interview with Kevin, would later testify. He stuck his hand in the skull and mixed up the brains. Then I think he told me he got a knife and mixed them up. Then he also said that it felt like putty, the consistency of the brain tissue.

And then he said something about he tasted the brain. But Kevin's twisted fantasy did not stop there. So after you went in and you killed her and you made sure she was dead by grabbing her brain moving around then you took her close off for it. Well she already... Oh actually I had to drag her by her clothes to get her in there. It was very laborious, actually. She's going to be really much easier. Yeah.

Should you match her mother? A logical mother? Yeah, actually she is my natural mother. I take out from my father. It's not clear whether Kevin points out that he takes after his father because of his physical appearance or because of the answer to this next question. Okay, yes, Kevin lost his virginity to his own mother's dead body I'd always loved my mother I guess no wrong sort of way, but I Kind of love I guess

Maybe some rage maybe just a little Freudian I guess maybe some rage, maybe just a little. I think the Freudians, I kind of get where he comes up, sure. I can't. Kevin eventually admits to detectives that this was not exactly his first sexual encounter. Before that, did you ever have sex? Well, I guess I'm being quiet about it, I might as well sell you now.

Yeah, it's on the note to the PS part. We used to have a great cat named Clare BCL, he was the thing of mine too. Now you know. And so I strangled it, I drowned it, and then I cut it open. You know the rest. I get the rest rest. You got stuck through the cat? It's the cat cat. Yeah, I got it. I got it.

Yeah. So Kevin's first sexual encounter was with his pet cat after he'd killed it. Then his first sexual encounter with another human being was with that of his mother's corpse. This might be a great time for another blue apron ad. Just kidding. That's later. You here, we're here. Shake with the blipers. No. You're thinking that having sex with his mother's corpse. But no, I don't necessarily mind.

After having sex with his mother's corpse, Kevin washed up and got changed before deciding what he would do next. Did you change in the bathroom? I did. I took a bath before then. I painted this really more about the little personal, but yeah, I needed to clean it off.

And then I changed. Originally, Kevin's a little personal, but yeah, I need to clean it off. And then I changed. Originally, Kevin's plan had been to kill his sister after murdering his mother. Her body was sister. What's your sister's name? Deseret Hill. Was it a fantasy of yours to kill her as well? And what? And what?

And what? And what? And what? And what? And what? And what? And what? And what? I don't know how I did actually, but I decided against it because while I had my fill of killing, I didn't seem a little much. It was too excessive. A little too excessive after beating his own mother with a hammer, grabbing her brains and having sex with her body, Kevin says he decided against killing his sister because it would have been a little too excessive. Adding the phrase, you know,

as if he's expecting the interrogators to understand where he's coming from. Somehow, they managed to stay calm as they continue to question him. notes that you wrote. How many notes did you write? Three. Three. There was one in the living room. Yeah. That one was addressed to who. Dendra ranked my sister because I knew she was... she's a good girl but rather sensitive. I knew she would lose her head if she kind of saw that. You remember what the notes are? Keep your head, hurry. She might still be alive although I laid out it in parentheses. But when you wrote the note you knew, your mom was already dead? Oh yeah, I knew it.

And you know, the guy is messing with desperate by writing that, that she might still be alive. And my six cents a kilo, my house pretty well off my rocker by then. And then the second note in your mom's bedroom, what did that one say? You remember? Chase me. The note in the bedroom reads, Chase me. Sorry for the mess. Would I address to the police or to who?

I was just in a very playful mood at the time. I just wanted to run. I just wanted to see how far I could get. So what you're planning to leave town according to one of the notes that you wrote? Oh yeah, but I've been great. I'm going to try to get the state for anything really. Kevin didn't know how to drive. So he hopped on his bike and started riding away from the apartment. In his words, I zigzagged around like an idiot

because I had no idea where I was gonna go. It was a little leisurely because I mean, after you murder someone, after you cross that kind of line, you don't really think much about it. Initially my plan was just to run, run, run as hard as I can but then I ended up crying my eyes out really think much about it. Kevin gave up on running, ditched his bike in the woods, and went up to a random house to see if he could use the phone. He rang the doorbell of LaWanda Houston and Timothy Johnson,

asked them to call 911 and waited in the yard until police arrived. Kevin turned himself in, but he didn't do it out of guilt. She was the best mother that you could ask for. She, you know, she just, she worked two jobs. Clyde Hill would never see his daughter again. It's just a sad situation. It's all I'm called for. I mean, they even had to do that. You know what I mean?

And I'm sorry. You just don't take your mother's life. Kimberly Hill was a single mother who devoted herself to her children and to her hospice patients, many of whom considered her to be like family. It is far too often the case that the worst among us take the lives of the best among us. We've dealt with a lot of deranged killers on this show, but Kevin Davis stacks up

among the most despicable of them. You know, things like the motion that he displays, he could just be talking about how he went in the basement to build a model car, and then, you know, his parent interrupted him, and they had a parent yelled at him, and he yelled back, and so he smashed the car just to kind of anger, but without much expression of any anger. So what a little I can see suggests that this is someone who is really experiencing what we call dissociation, in a sense of disconnecting from their underlying emotions, but still being driven by some very powerful emotions.

So it comes out in this matter of fact way. But the topic and the content is very emotionally intense, driven by some very powerful emotions. So it comes out in this matter-of-fact way, but the topic and the content is very emotionally intense, but it's delivered in a very sort of cool way. Is it safe to assume that Kevin is likely dealing with some sort of severe personality disorder? Certainly, you know, without knowing anything about them before or after, certainly it looks like a very severe personality disruption, maybe disorder. You know, it's hard to tell because, you know, to attack your mother, that typically my friends require a massive amount of rage. And because it's not like just picking somebody off the street or somebody you meet casually, to sustain that much rage with that much physical assault against a human person with a hammer or a knife, just speaks of something very deep and big in their emotional life that's overriding everything else.

Maybe the most shocking aspect of this case is that Kevin went on to sexually assault his own mother's body after killing her. I'm sure Freud would have something to say about that, but what do you make of that detail? Does it provide any sort of clue as to what is going on in Kevin's mind. Nails typically normal mailed up and get sexual and other emotions wrapped up together. A lot of the analysis of rape in general talks about it being about power sometimes even more than sex. But power and sex is so tied up for males, certainly in a society like ours, it

is not rather unusual for them to be confused in the middle of the salt, but of course it's extremely unusual for the salt to be on your mother rather than some other female, perhaps a female who would represent your mother as a target of your anger and rage. So, this is, in my say, there's no universals. This is not the only time this has happened to my knowledge, but it certainly rare and extreme that part of it. It seems like the only problem Kevin's mother expressed to anyone else about her son was that he wasn't doing well at school. Given what eventually happened, it's hard to imagine

there weren't any other signs. For example, Kevin himself claimed that he'd once killed the family cat. With that in mind, is it often the case that parents will cover up warning signs or convince themselves that there's nothing out of the ordinary going on with their children? Well, I think it's very clear that both happens in the sense that parents will cover up and often their motivation is The alternative is to admit something that's so scary and horrible that It's overwhelming to make that admission It's the ability of that sometimes it feels like the necessity of parents to rationalize things

about their kids is part of a general thing that families develop their own internal culture in which things that to an outsider might look crazy just become the norm within the family. So that's one reason why it's often hard to say there are warning signs because warning signs require somebody from the outside to look in with a different perspective. That's also, of course, why it's hard in America to see certain kinds of warning signs, because there are things that are normal here which are not informal in many other societies. Because families do tend to develop internal norms, it's often hard to see within the family, and then you add this motivation that parents have,

that who wants to think their kid is crazy or dangerous. And so you go the extra mile of rationalizing, and you cope for it and compensate for it. And then, in most cases, it just passes on into adulthood. But in some cases, it escalates into some horrible extreme like this case where going backward you might start to say, well, okay, there was knowing what happened when he was 19. This makes sense now what happened when he's 12, like killing the cat.

At one level that's very disturbing, but of course, at another level, people wear fur coats. So there is this sort of cultural normalizing of violence that can sometimes mask how disturbed someone is until they do something that pushes up against that normal and goes beyond it, like killing the family cat or the family dog. In terms of rehabilitation, what options are available for someone like Kevin,

who seems to have no remorse whatsoever? Well, probably very limited. In my book Millie's Children About the Rehabilitation Transformation of Teenage Killers, there's a chapter called Are There Exceptions? And the two classes of exception seem to be kids who are so profoundly damaged and early childhood through the really traumatic severe abuse that they never get a chance to develop the normal human range of feelings and relationships.

The other group are budding psychopaths, either because they're born without the switch for empathy or because they've been beaten out of them or whatever reason, but they don't have the normal sense of connecting to other beings that is named abyssin against killing. There's a famous psychiatrist who tells a story of seeing a five-year-old boy in his home office. And it's a British psychiatrist and so home office would paneling in a fireplace. And the psychiatrist is called out in an emergency phone call, and always on the phone, he's thinking, wait a minute, who did that? He in my office. So he goes back and this kid had been passing the time doing a little science experiment to discover what will burn. So you had thrown a book in the fire because that burned.

He had broken off a leg from the chair and thrown it in the fire. They showed that wood burned, paper burns, and then he had thrown the psychiatrist cat in the fire just in the same sort of way that he didn't get it. There was any difference in a cat and a piece of wood thrown in the fire. And that fundamental lack of connection about being to being connection is at the heart of this. It's a bit like one guy once said to me, how can I become her life, I'm kind of more fascinated by the more artistic ways of murder and meticulous manner, the way they cut them open, just

slice them pieces, I mean such fair, such love. Had he not turned himself in, there is no way to know what Kevin Davis might have gone on to do. But we do know that this was not Kevin's only fantasy. According to the testimony of Dr. Cutnik, the psychiatrist who interviewed Kevin, he'd had fantasies about necrophilia, which is having sex with dead people, sex with children, although he said he had fantasies, but never had sex with children. He denied that. He thought about sex with animals. He's had thoughts about

going around the world and killing beautiful women. Kevin admits to detectives Garcia and Torres that, if given the opportunity, he would kill again. Let me ask you, at this point, what do you consider yourself? You consider yourself. I'm going to use a dirty word, okay, but I don't really mean to insult you. Okay. You consider you men and you disturb. You consider yourself crazy. You do.

What do you consider yourself, any of those? No. Or you think you're okay, you just got your belt on. I'm not mentally disturbed, disturbed, I'm not saying, I know exactly what I did, I know that it's wrong, and the traditional sense of wrong. It was just the fantasy you had, and you had to carry it out. Not you. Now I feel vaguely, like I'm done. I mean, sure. You still feel like, well, you're done with your mom.

You still feel like you want to keep on killing? To keep on, you know, the other fantasy? Or how do you feel? I came here to pay for my crimes, so I guess I should continue the truth. The truth is, like this, isn't it? I would kill again. I thought it was. I just think you want to kill it.

Now, men aren't my thing, actually. Women. Yeah. Okay. You have a girlfriend? I don't. I've never had a girlfriend. I'm going to go. What's going to do with you? You're a fancy, I'm a girlfriend. I don't. I've never had a girlfriend. I'm going to go.

What? Give me your fancy, I'm still in a woman. Oh, your fancy killing would be your age killing class, because that'd be. There's a little peculiar among him. Okay. I'm not surprised to what I'm going to hear, but you tell me. Maybe dressing up in then I sued, needing in to her house,

disabling her boyfriend. Yeah, I'd bring a pretty dress with me to dress her up and... I was always into strangling, but after that last blunder, I guess maybe something big and sharp would be more along my thing. And I could probably cap data. I prefer my women day. I'd dress her up, I'd stitch her up, kind of try to work the head back on perhaps. And then I'd go to town and it would be a night to remember. And then I'd kind of just

burn everything and run for the hills. To close out the interview, Detective Garcia asks Kevin what he thinks his punishment should be. Jerry being fed I can a lot I can suffer for years or I can give them a death penalty whatever they think What do you think you deserve? I have exactly a mom I just there to rock you suffer Detective Garcia gives Kevin three options asking which of them he thinks he deserves. Ten years probation, 20 years in prison, or a hundred years in prison. Without hesitation, Kevin chooses a hundred years in prison. Kevin's trial began on

Monday, October 6, 2014. Kevin had entered an initial plea of not guilty, but at the start of his trial, he changed his mind and pleaded guilty. Nobody really knows what was going on through Kevin's mind, but while the jury heard the details of what he had done to his mother, Kevin turned his head towards them and smiled. The emotions that he showed were sometimes snickering, sometimes smiling at jurors and those who were testifying didn't show any type of remorse at all. On October 8th, the jury handed Kevin his sentence. Today it took a jury less than an hour to decide

that Davis should spend the rest of his life in prison. From the courts now, justice you can say has been served for the victim who died at the hands of her own son, 18-year-old Kevin Davis, will spend the rest of his life in prison for the brutal attack that claimed the life of Kimberly Hill. Before Kevin was led out of the courtroom, his sister Desiree said to him, quote, you took the only person who had your back. Now, you are alone."

End quote. who had your back. Now you are alone." Kevin Jezrelle Davis will never see the outside of a prison again. And that's probably a good thing. So the next time you're waiting at the check out line with your Nabisco shredded wheat, organic, free range, carton of eggs, or your all-natural gluten-free soy milk. And you see an awkward looking teenager who's a little quiet and withdrawn. Ask yourself, if you have any idea what's going on in their head. In fact, that goes for anyone around you. You know people based on their outward appearance, whatever facade they choose to present to you. You can't read their minds. Even the most well-read experts in the field of psychology can't tell you

what someone is really thinking, which leads to the obvious question. Do you really know anyone? That does it for another episode of Sword and Scale. We hope you've enjoyed it. If you like the show, please join us on Patreon. For five bucks a month, you can get Sword and Scale Plus, a completely separate, completely different show with all new stories of all new cases you won't hear on this feed. It's just 5 bucks a month and you can find it at patreon.com slash sword and scale. Don't forget to check out our store with lots of cool new merch, shirts and sweatshirts and mugs and all kinds of stuff.

Just go to store.sordanscale.com. Thank you again for supporting this show. Thank you for telling your friends about it. Thank you for leaving us a five-star review on iTunes. And until next time, be nice to Kitty and stay safe. You're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all you're all