Veterinarians often practice pit-stop medicine.

Not Wendi Mae Davidson.

When Hansel, Diane Slater’s mixed-breed housecat, got a urinary tract infection, Wendi quickly diagnosed it and gently soothed Slater’s worries, Slater said in an interview in San Angelo.

“I just got good vibes from her,” Slater, a 60-year-old retired legal secretary from San Angelo, said. “She talks to you. She doesn’t rush you out of there.”

Other relatives, friends and clients of the 27-year-old murder suspect describe Wendi in similar terms: Kind. Determined. Thoughtful. Loving. Intelligent. Gentle. Hard-working. Empathetic.

They are horrified by police charges that Wendi fatally poisoned her husband, Maine native Michael Leslie Severance, and mutilated his body before dumping it in a pond owned by family friend Terrell Sheen – with her two children, Shane, 11 months, and Tristan, 3, in attendance.

They accuse police of badgering her, which police deny, and lambaste the media for downplaying her attorney’s claims that the high school honors student passed a lie-detector test indicating her innocence.

“There’s no way that girl ever did the things that they are accusing her of,” Yvonne Walker, Davidson’s aunt, told a San Angelo newspaper.

They regret a civil court judge’s decision awarding 60-day custody of Michael’s and Wendi’s son, Shane Michael Severance, to his grandfather in Maine.

“What is really cruel and unusual punishment is the way they [police and media] have treated her,” family friend Patsy Swafford said in a San Angelo interview. “I think that judge had a screw loose.”

To become a veterinarian

Swafford hit on many themes that Wendi’s defense attorneys likely will find crucial when her case comes to trial – that the Davidsons are a truthful, deeply loving, close-knit family, and that Wendi sought to follow that model with her own immediate family.

Yet Swafford said she could not recall examples of Wendi’s being close or loving with Michael. She did, however, remember often seeing Wendi cradling Shane and Tristan, Wendi’s son by another man, when she visited the young veterinarian at her clinic, Advanced Animal Care in San Angelo.

Swafford said she has known the Davidson children since they grew up on their parents’ remote San Angelo ranch. Swafford met the Davidsons about 20 years ago when Wendi’s father, Lloyd Davidson, started trading birds with her husband.

“They’re both very sharp people, but they are also very down-to-earth,” Swafford said of Lloyd and Judi Davidson. “If ever we went out to their house when they were growing up, you would always see the children helping a bird with a broken wing or a raccoon baby whose mother had gotten killed.”

Wendi’s love of animals grew at suburban Water Valley High School. She dabbled in cheerleading, volleyball and basketball, but was treasurer of the Future Farmers of America club. She also worked for several city veterinarians.

John Lowry, 27, of San Angelo hasn’t seen Davidson since they graduated from Water Valley with the Class of 1996. His strongest recollections center on her determination and intelligence.

“The cheerleaders did not like her, and I would not exactly say that she was popular, but she was very, very nice,” Lowry recalled in a San Angelo interview. “Some people would describe her as strange, but I think some people were jealous of her grades. I think that goes back to her being somewhat less than social.”

Wendi kept to herself. She wasn’t a naturally gifted student, so she worked hard at school and she was impatient with those who lacked her drive, Lowry said.

“While we were out there goofing off, she was hitting the books,” Lowry said.

One of Wendi’s biggest high school disappointments might have been missing valedictorian honors. She made salutatorian, and Lowry could tell that being No. 2 did not sit well with her.

“She was a very controlling person who thinks things have to go her way,” Lowry said. “Everything she has ever done she has had a plan for.”

An ad in her yearbook signed by her family shows their joy at her success. Addressed to “Wendi, Our Baby Girl,” it says, “you have built a very strong foundation and nothing can stop you. Just know and remember we love you very much and we could never be more proud of you than we are right now.”

Under her yearbook picture, as her lifetime career ambition, Wendi wrote, “to become a veterinarian.”

A powerful influence

Davidson achieved her ambition early when she opened her clinic, Advanced Animal Care, in October 2004, said Linda Hohmann, who is unique among the city’s 20 vets for being the first woman animal doctor to open her own clinic in San Angelo.

Most veterinarians don’t start their own clinics at age 26 because it is so costly, Hohmann said, and fewer still operate on prime real estate along Sherwood Way, the city’s most prominent retail artery.

The white, one-story clinic stands alone in a crudely paved parking lot, offset by a large billboard sign announcing Wendi’s veterinary practice. A square cement front porch has a chair stationed to the right of the door. Inside, the clinic has a small, comfortable waiting area, fronted by a receptionist counter. Several shelves carry pet care products. Leashes hang from a wall. The apartment area, where Wendi, Michael and the children had lived, is not visible.

A 2002 graduate of Texas A&M University College of Veterinary Medicine, Wendi worked as a veterinarian for other doctors in Lubbock and Abilene before coming home to San Angelo. Hohmann described her as the latest of a half-dozen vets who have been junior partners or prot?g?s to Terrell Sheen, a retired veterinarian who is among San Angelo’s richest landlords. His patronage to so many different veterinarians helped make the city very competitive for animal doctors.

Sheen is something of a family patron to the Davidsons, friends say. He employs Wendi’s father, Lloyd, as a contractor and hired Wendi as an assistant when she was in college. Lloyd has described Sheen as a close friend.

Sheen had stopped practicing veterinary medicine but bought and refurbished Wendi’s clinic, charges her $1,500 rent, and stood with her in large newspaper ads announcing the opening of her clinic in October.

“I did not have anybody providing me with financial backing,” said Hohmann, who, like Wendi, attended veterinary school at Texas A&M. “She is very fortunate.”

Yet Wendi seemed unpolished when Hohmann saw her answering questions on local TV shows.

“I was a little embarrassed. She sounded more like a [veterinary] assistant,” Hohmann said, adding that she hoped that eventually Wendi would grow within her profession.

It might be Wendi’s clinic, but she gets a lot of help from her mother, Judi, said Royce Wallace, a salesman with NLS Animal Health of Texas, who is among the clinic’s veterinary office suppliers.

“Her mother could be more challenging than Wendi if a vendor tries to tell her what to do,” Wallace said. “You don’t oversell [Judi]. You don’t tell her what she does not need to know.

“She just makes it clear that she is there to manage the business,” Wallace said.

‘Devastated’ by losses

The murder charges, repeated police search-warrant raids and the loss of Shane have devastated Wendi and her practice, Slater said.

The Davidsons obliquely protested the charges shortly after Wendi was first arrested in March, Slater recalled, when they sent a message – or a distress call – to their community. For several days, the large billboard sign outside the practice read: Judge Your Neighbor as You Would Be Judged, she said.

Slater saw Wendi’s pain when she visited her at the clinic the day after the June 24 custody hearing that gave joint custody of Shane to Michael Severance’s father, Les Severance of Lee, Maine.

“I could tell by looking at her eyes. And her mother was really devastated,” Slater said. “Her parents’ attorney said it would be better if she didn’t go [to the hearing]. Wendi had even said that they felt Mike’s dad was not going to get custody of the child.

“But her attitude has been that everything is going to work out all right,” Slater said.

Slater met Michael just before Christmas. She knew that the staff sergeant, who was stationed at Abilene’s Dyess Air Force Base, was due to be posted overseas, and he seemed troubled.

“We were sitting there across the room from one another, and I said, ‘Are you ready for your overseas trip?’ And he said, ‘No.’ ”

When Slater asked Michael if he would make the military his career, “He said, ‘I don’t know. I’ll find some kind of a job.’

“You could either take it as being shy or being very depressed,” she said. “It was like he was off in never-never land.”

Slater is horrified by the possibility that Wendi is a murderer.

“What reason would she have to kill him? If they weren’t getting along, they could have divorced,” Slater said. “She had just started her career, and now, no one goes into the clinic anymore. … I have been terribly upset over this.”

She gasped when she heard that Severance’s body was stabbed 41 times.

“Wendi made a mistake,” Slater said. “She should not have moved the body.”