Part 2 of 4

Judi Davidson hated Michael Leslie Severance, but she and her husband swear that no one in their family killed their son-in-law – and they don’t know who did.

The Davidsons made no secret of their antipathy for the 24-year-old Lee, Maine, native when they testified June 16 on video for their looming child custody battle for their 11-month-old grandson, Shane Michael Severance.

“I told a lot of people that I hated Mike,” Judi Davidson, 51, admitted. “I told the police. I told the DA. I told the assistant DA. I told [Texas Ranger] Shawn Palmer. There are many people I told” once Severance had disappeared.

Yet the Davidsons deny helping their daughter dispose of herhusband’s body or cover up his murder.

On Jan. 15, the day police allege that Wendi Mae Davidson fatally poisoned Michael, stabbed his corpse 41 times and dumped it in a San Angelo pond, Judi Davidson said he was “bumping around” in her daughter’s veterinary clinic when the mother arrived at about 7:30 a.m.

“I can’t say I saw him, but I know I heard him. Somebody was up,” Judi said in the deposition. “I would say I heard water running, but I am unsure. I asked Wendi where Mike was, and she said Mike was drunk and was not getting up. As usual.”

The Davidsons’ testimony offers the most detailed look yet into the mounting tensions between their family and Michael Severance. It reveals details of Wendi and Michael’s San Angelo wedding on Sept. 13, 2004, and the March 5 weekend in which Wendi stood near her grandfather’s grave and allegedly told her brother that she hid her husband’s body because she feared someone in her family had killed him.

When the parents gave their depositions, the police hadn’t yet revealed that Michael had been poisoned and his body punctured and weighted with 145 pounds of metal and cinder blocks.

Leslie Severance, Michael’s father, saw how badly the Davidsons regarded his family at the wedding, but Les said he didn’t know the depth of their negative feelings until he reviewed the depositions when he returned to Maine.

They show why he needed to go to Texas, he said.

“One reason I went was to ensure the safety of Shane, and two, was to dispel the lies, and those are the lies,” Les said during an interview back home in Maine. “In my opinion, everything she [Judi] says about Michael acting out of character – about him being rude, lazy, drunk – is untrue.”

Les’ attorney, Thomas Goff of San Angelo, agreed.

“Her statement about hearing Michael ‘bumping around’ was absolute nonsense. Totally unbelievable, in my opinion,” said Goff, who took the Davidsons’ depositions in a San Angelo law office. “I feel she is covering up for her daughter. I don’t see how you can interpret it any other way.”

An unwanted son-in-law

Judi and Lloyd Davidson met Michael Severance under the worst circumstances.

They said they didn’t know Wendi even had a boyfriend until she and Michael arrived at the family’s San Angelo home in March or April 2004. Then, almost in the same breath, she told them that she was pregnant with Michael’s child and that they were getting married, according to the depositions released by the Severance family.

Judi and Lloyd had never seen the shy, gangly Air Force staff sergeant and didn’t know Wendi was pregnant.

“I didn’t like it,” Judi said of the pregnancy, “but he was another grandbaby, so …”

It was Wendi’s third pregnancy and second birth. She had terminated one pregnancy before giving birth to Tristan on Oct. 29, 2001, several months before Wendi was graduated from the Texas A&M University College of Veterinary Medicine and fulfilled a nearly lifelong dream of becoming a veterinarian.

During the deposition Judi spoke with disdain about Tristan’s father, who she said wanted nothing to do with the boy, yet Michael’s sense of duty about marrying to be a good father to his child apparently made no impression on her.

“I thought he had issues, initially, because he would just not talk,” Judi said. “He just sat there. … He would just say yes or no and that was it.”

Judi took Michael’s reticence as rudeness. “How can you be polite if you don’t engage in conversation?” she said.

Lloyd Davidson saw it differently.

“I thought he was just quiet. I had just met him. I didn’t have time to form an opinion,” Lloyd said during his deposition. “I tried to talk to him a little bit. He did not seem to want to talk.”

Although she had liked two of her daughter’s previous beaus, Judi said, most of her daughter’s boyfriends were not good enough.

“They didn’t help her,” the mother explained.

Judi campaigned against her daughter’s new husband from the outset, almost daily, she said, but Wendi did not always listen.

are close, but don’t share confidences “because she does not always agree with what I think,” Judi said, “so she would rather keep it to herself, I assume.”

Private lives

Judi sat straight in her chair and punctuated her answers with “certainly!” or “exactly!” while questioned during the deposition proceeding. Deeply loving of Shane and Tristan, she took pride in describing them as happy children, while Lloyd described himself as especially close to Tristan.

Judi said she was a homemaker married more than 30 years to Robert Lloyd Davidson, 52, a self-employed contractor who has worked almost exclusively for several years for one of San Angelo’s most prominent landlords, Terrell Sheen, on whose ranch Michael’s body was dumped.

Judi and Lloyd acknowledged that other than Lloyd’s friend Sheen, they have no close friends or strong ties to church or social organizations. Nor does their daughter, they said.

“I work, I sleep, I work around the house. I play with the kids, and I feed the animals,” Lloyd said.

Both are high school graduates. A lifelong San Angelo resident, Lloyd worked at a Levi Strauss factory before catching on with Sheen.

Judi has been on Social Security disability for about 20 years because she suffers from lupus, a chronic auto-immune disease, yet she had started working unpaid three or four times a week at her daughter’s animal clinic, Advanced Animal Care,when it opened in October 2004. Wendi couldn’t afford to hire more help.

“My life is my children,” the mother of two said.

In contrast, Lloyd said that while they got along well, he never had any “father-daughter” talks with Wendi.

Sheen had bought the clinic building and rented it to Wendi for $1,500 per month. The Davidsons spent $30,000 to $40,000 to get the clinic operational, a large amount of money for the family, Judi said.

Throughout the clinic’s opening and Michael’s death, the Davidsons were enduring other stresses: the death of Judi’s mother, Jessie Mae Elliott Eggemeyer of San Angelo, from lung cancer, and a pitched battle over her estate with Judi’s stepfather.

Michael rebels

On Jan. 13, with a trip to Maine to see his family and friends in Lee scheduled for Jan. 16, Michael and his wife of four months and three days were looking forward to leaving. So were their children, Judi Davidson said.

But Judi and Lloyd didn’t want them to leave, and she told her daughter so repeatedly. The timing was wrong.

“The business was just picking up, and I didn’t want her to go to Maine,” the mother said. “If the business had been going good, that would have been one thing, but … there was no reason for her to be going.”

The ice that had begun to form in Judi and Lloyd’s relationship with their son-in-law from their first meeting was frozen solid. They had evolved a pattern of non-confrontation, avoiding arguments that would upset Wendi and the children, Judi said.

Judi had to do all of the work at the Sept. 13 wedding, she complained. She bought Wendi’s flowers on the day of the nuptials because Michael never did. Leslie Severance was similarly unimpressive, buying no flowers and speaking little to her, she said.

Michael’s habits grated on her. He was sloppy, she said. He liked to sleep in late on his days off. A few times, when Wendi and Michael moved into the Davidson home while the clinic was being readied, he walked around her in his underwear, which she thought was disrespectful.

Michael had too much free time from his Air Force duties, but he didn’t help Wendi around the clinic or with the children, Judi and Lloyd claimed.

“He drank a lot and he was lazy,” said Lloyd, who admitted to occasionally criticizing his son-in-law to Wendi. “He would never do anything.”

“Explain to me how he had so much time,” the mother-in-law demanded. “He was on leave more than he was at work.

“He wanted to get out of the military. He hated it. He was tired of being told what to do and he didn’t want to deploy.”

Michael was expected to leave for Afghanistan after he returned from his Maine trip.

Lloyd said Michael had told him he was looking to pay back his re-enlistment bonus to the Air Force and become a San Angelo firefighter.

“He had a racecar, and that’s all he ever wanted to do,” Judi said. “He stayed in the back [of the clinic], watched racing on TV, and slept until lunch.”

Wendi was interested in racing “for him” and went to races whenever she could, Judi said. With them they took Tristan, who occasionally called Michael “Daddy” but usually just “Mikey.”

Wendi’s relationship with her husband was showing stress. On Jan. 13, Judi witnessed a brief confrontation between her daughter and son-in-law at the clinic. Michael had just placed a puppy on an examination table and left him unattended, so Wendi asked, “‘Are you going to just leave him there?’

“He picked the puppy up, put it in a crate and there was nothing else said,” Judi recalled. “Sometime in between that happening and a little while [after], he left with the baby.”

Michael went to Abilene, the location of Dyess Air Force Base and about 100 miles distant, to visit friends.

“At the time, [Wendi] was concerned, before she got ahold of him on the phone,” Judi said. “She was breastfeeding the baby, so why would he take off with the baby? She was worried.”

It was the first time, Judi said, that Michael had taken his son without Wendi’s permission.

‘Don’t talk about it’

On Friday, Jan. 14, the couple had agreed to go for a night of dinner and dancing, and the evening passed uneventfully. The Davidsons baby-sat Tristan, and a baby sitter sat with Shane, Judi said.

That next morning, Judi arrived at the clinic shortly before 7:30 a.m. Wendi arrived a few minutes later with Shane. Sometime in the late morning, Lloyd Davidson came to do yard work outside the building, and he brought Tristan.

At about 1 p.m., Judi went to visit her ailing mother. Wendi followed, bringing shrimp because Jessie Mae, who was undergoing chemotherapy, thought she might be able to eat it. Then Wendi and her mother went to the Davidson house for dinner, where they discussed the Maine trip.

“She was excited about the trip. She was happy. She told my mom about it, and my mom didn’t want her to go. She was afraid she would go [die], and [Wendi] told her that she would be all right,” Judi said.

Friday night was not discussed and Wendi quickly explained Michael’s absence from dinner, Judi said.

“She said that he was drunk and he had a hangover, and I didn’t want to hear it,” the mother said.

When Wendi told her mother the next morning that Michael had disappeared, the Davidsons immediately told their daughter to report him missing, to file for divorce, and to get a restraining order against Michael to keep him from taking Shane to Maine, Judi said.

They thought that Michael could take the baby away again like he had on Jan. 13. Judy and Lloyd had had enough of Michael and his family in Maine.

“My feelings were that he had just picked up and left and that they knew where he was,” Judi said.

By Jan. 17, Wendi had filed for divorce and was trying to move on with her life as if Michael Severance had never existed.

The family, her mother swore, never again discussed Michael’s disappearance or the discovery of his body, even when on March 5 they stood at the gravesite of Judi’s father – a place family members went in times of reflection or stress, Judi said. It was there that Wendi allegedly confessed to her brother, Marshall, about dumping the body.

Family members never talked about Michael’s disappearance because their attorneys told them not to, Judi insisted, even though attorneys didn’t become involved in the case until early March.

Lloyd speculated that his daughter had panicked when she came home on the night of Jan. 15 and found her husband lying in bed, dead, as she has claimed. He said that in that sort of situation, panic would be normal, and that it’s difficult to judge how someone would act in a panic.

He said he didn’t believe Wendi’s claim about finding Michael dead, “but then as I thought about it, I realized that it probably did happen that way,” Lloyd said. “I can’t think of any reason that she would be lying about him. I could think of no reason why she would kill him.”

Judi ended her statements with a demand that showed how angry she was with Les Severance over his attempt to gain court-ordered custody of Shane, an order that Les Severance later was forced to honor.

“If Mr. Severance wants to see Shane, he can come to San Angelo and see him – after his deposition,” Judi said, adding that her family, particularly she, had faced considerable stress with the deposition process. “I think Mr. Severance needs to be put in the hot seat over this and he should be put in the hot seat with this.”