LOOKING FOR THE TRUTH Grandfather dreads returning baby Shane to Texas

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Wendi Mae Davidson scoffed at the idea that she could have lifted her husband’s dead body by herself to dump it in a West Texas pond, according to a woman who said she shared a jail cell with the San Angelo veterinarian.

Court records verify that Lillie Lucio, 22, of San Angelo pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor marijuana possession charge at the Tom Green County Jail processing center on May 25, the same day Wendi appeared in court to answer her grand jury murder indictment.

The two women were among eight to 10 female inmates, and they talked about Wendi’s case for up to two hours while sitting on a bench built into a wall of a holding area near the jail’s front foyer, Lucio said during a recent interview in San Angelo.

Wendi declared her innocence several times and seemed disassociated from her circumstances.

“It did not seem like she was going down for murder,” Lucio said. “I asked her about that [her husband’s body being dumped in a pond], and she’s like, ‘Yeah, me, I’m supposed to move this body myself.’

“She said it sarcastically. She’s like, ‘Come on now. I would not be able to move him because he’s so heavy,'” Lucio added. “She freaked me out. I did not expect to hear that coming from her.”

Wendi, 27, of San Angelo, is charged with murder and two counts of tampering with evidence. Her attorney, Tom Davidson of San Angelo – who is not related to his client – has said she passed a lie detector test indicating that she did not kill her husband and doesn’t know who did. Her trial is scheduled for spring 2006.

Police charged Wendi after her brother Marshall, a law enforcement officer, told them that she said she found Michael dead in bed at their apartment at her animal clinic on Jan. 15 and dumped him in the pond because she knew people in her family hated Michael and feared a family member had killed him.

Police said Wendi poisoned Michael with phenobarbital, phenytoin and large quantities of pentobarbital, drugs veterinarians commonly use to euthanize animals, before weighting his body and stabbing it 41 times to help keep it underwater.

Wendi, who with her attorney has steadfastly refused to comment on the case, isn’t the only one who finds the charges against her difficult to believe.

That Wendi – if she did dump Michael’s body by herself, as is alleged – did it alone is a point in the police case that draws universal skepticism from the Severance and Davidson families and friends alike, including Michael’s father, Les Severance of Lee, and Thomas Goff, his attorney.

Goff said he thinks the San Angelo police investigation is flawed by tunnel vision.

“I think the case against Wendi is very strong. My concern is that there are other people involved who are not being pursued,” Goff said recently. “They took the word of the main suspect. I don’t understand that. I’ll never understand it.”

Police disagree.

“Wendi Davidson is our sole suspect. The evidence does not point to anyone else,” Lt. Curtis Milbourn, spokesman for the San Angelo Police Department, said recently.

“I think we have a good case,” said San Angelo police Detective Dennis McGuire, one of the lead investigators. “It was not an easy case. I know it is a high-profile case, and I know it has drawn a lot of attention, but I think the case we have built is very solid.”

McGuire and Sgt. Bill Mabe of the San Angelo Police Department, Texas Ranger Shawn Palmer, Sgt. David Jones of the Texas Department of Public Safety, and Special Agent Greg McCormick of the U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigation, among others, have spent several hundred hours developing the case, McGuire said.

They ran three search warrants and seized drug records, veterinarian’s medications and other paraphernalia – including two knives, three sets of pliers, two sets of bolt cutters and an apron – that they think were used in committing the crime.

They followed Wendi for several days and used forensic analysis to show that she had used her laptop computer to research how bodies decompose in water.

Others say police should have moved faster when Michael first was reported missing on Jan. 16.

“Nobody questioned any of us, as far as I know,” said Dar Robison, 42, of Abilene, who owns a racetrack where Michael raced ATVs. “We could have told people immediately that his disappearing was out of character.”

Milbourn of the San Angelo police said he knows that police questioned some of Michael’s friends in Abilene, but that McCormick handled much of that portion of the investigation.

McCormick was a key person who helped turn the investigation from the pursuit of a possibly AWOL serviceman into a homicide case, McGuire said.

He acknowledged that the investigation might have appeared to have started slowly, but police had to develop evidence that Michael was missing because of foul play before they could proceed.

“For a long period of time, a lot of people had a lot of suspicions that something bad had happened, but that’s all they had,” McGuire said. “We had to leave all avenues open until we had evidence that pointed us in a specific direction.”

Yet police critics come back to several points that they find troubling. According to the autopsy report, Michael’s 155-pound body was bound with 145 pounds of weights – two cinder blocks, a rock, a boat anchor and a brake drum – attached to his legs, neck and wrists.

“It’s 300 pounds. I don’t think she [Wendi] could handle 300 pounds,” Les Severance said. “That’s an awful lot of weight, and it was on multiple weights spread around his body. I don’t believe that any one person could do that.”

Wendi, according to arrest documents, is 5 feet tall and weighs 150 pounds. Severance friends say she used to keep Michael around her veterinary clinic to help her lift animals, such as big dogs.

“She’s just too small to do all that by herself,” said Diane Slater of San Angelo, who took her cat to Wendi and knew the veterinarian. Slater believes she is innocent.

Michael’s friend Jeanie Campbell, who is 5 feet 10 inches tall and weighs 200 pounds, said she had her 8-year-old son, who weighs about 100 pounds, lie flat and then she tried to pick him up.

“He’s smaller than Mike was, but I am bigger than Wendi is, and I couldn’t do it,” Campbell said.

To move Michael’s body from Wendi’s animal clinic to the ranch owned by Davidson family friend Terrell Sheen would have required its transfer to and from a vehicle, Campbell pointed out. Wendi’s parents each drive pickup trucks, and Wendi owns a 2001 Chevrolet Camaro, from which police said they seized a pair of pliers, trace evidence and sections of carpet.

“She could not have picked him up and put him in the [vehicle] and then taken him from it,” Campbell speculated.

There’s another element that makes the single-suspect theory difficult to accept: According to sources close to the investigation, police believe a small fishing boat was used to put the body in approximately 9 feet of water fairly close to the center of the pond at the Sheen ranch.

Keeping the boat balanced while unloading 300 cumbersome pounds of corpse and weights would have to be exceedingly difficult for one person. In addition, the sides of the pond are too muddy and sheer to make dragging the body into the water very feasible.

Goff said he finds another point troublesome. He thinks that police are taking Wendi’s story about finding the body in bed at about 8 p.m. Saturday as gospel, yet according to the autopsy report, Michael had a blood alcohol content rating of 0.07.

If Friday night, when Michael and Wendi went drinking and dancing, represents Michael’s final opportunity to drink, then the blood alcohol content makes it much more likely that Michael was killed sometime between midnight and 7 a.m. Saturday, Goff said.

An alcohol level drops slightly for each hour of sleep, but freezes at time of death, said Goff, who prosecuted hundreds of OUI cases during a stint as an elected San Angelo County prosecutor from 1992 to 2000.

That also would make it much more likely, Goff said, that Wendi had help from someone in moving the body. Police believe her children, Tristan and Shane, currently 3 years and 11 months old, respectively, accompanied her when she took the body to the pond, but no evidence has yet been uncovered pointing to anyone else’s presence.

One thing is certain: Police and prosecutors have much more information than they have released. McGuire said the investigation has spawned hundreds of documents and other data associated with the Severance homicide.

“We’ve worked very hard on this,” said the detective, who has investigated homicides in San Angelo for more than 15 years.

Investigators must keep details of their investigation secret to prevent tainting the potential jury pool, said Assistant District Attorney Allison Palmer, who will prosecute the case against Wendi with her boss, District 51 District Attorney Stephen R. Lupton, when it goes to trial next spring.

Prosecutors will not seek the death penalty, Palmer said.

McGuire said he would like to meet with Leslie Severance to discuss the case when the trial is over.

“I know he is grieving, and not having faced the loss of a child of my own, I don’t pretend to understand what he is going through,” McGuire said, “but I think we have a lot of the answers that he is looking for.”