Future Forum: Guilt, Innocence, and the Death Penalty 
Crime
Case Open
Did attorney Steve Davis commit suicide, or was he beaten to death by Comanche County sheriff’s deputies? We may never know the truth.
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Some minutes later, one of the officers came back to the store and told Eoff they had lost him. Another officer pocketed the keys from the pickup and drove her in a patrol car to Davis’ house. He dropped her off outside without going in to check whether Davis might have shown up. He hadn’t. He didn’t show up the next day either, or the next, or the next.
Months passed, in fact, with no word of his whereabouts. Then, on February 6, 1997, Patty Mazurek, the co-owner of the Copperas Creek package store, which is near the Shade Tree, was walking in the woods behind her store. She was surveying damage from a grass fire when something white on the ground caught her eye. At first she thought it was a mushroom, but when she got closer, she realized it was a human skull. She hurried back inside and called 911, and a few minutes later Sheriff Works and Texas Ranger Thelbert Milsap arrived. They examined the skull and a pile of bones nearby and found a shirt looped around the limb of a small tree. The limb was about five feet off the ground. The Tarrant County Medical Examiner’s Office used dental records to identify the remains. The official cause of death, which came a few weeks later, was listed as “undetermined (probable hanging).” The manner of death was “undetermined (probable suicide).”
At the Dairy Queen in Comanche and in shops around the courthouse square, doubts surfaced instantly about how Davis had died. How could a six-foot-tall, 170-pound man hang himself from the limb of a sapling barely five feet off the ground? And would a man crashing through a dense thicket in the dead of night, with police officers on his tail, suddenly stop and kill himself? Would he quickly strip off his shirt, knot it around a limb, and somehow twist it around his neck, then slump down and stay slumped long enough to suffocate himself? Why didn’t the cops find him? It didn’t add up. And where had the body been all this time? An elderly woman who lived in a house with a clear view of the tree said she walked her dog in the area nearly every day but had never seen or smelled anything, and her dog had never acted strangely.
And why would Davis kill himself? He had hopes of winning a poetry award, was close to getting his law license back, and had made plans to celebrate his son’s eighteenth birthday when he and Eoff got back from Austin. “I thought we were at the most optimistic point we’d been to since the whole ordeal began,” Fredda Jones said.
Jim Parker has a theory about what happened the night Davis disappeared: “They stopped him that night; maybe they were even following him. They were just going to screw with him, and I’m sure he had some choice words for them. He probably told them he was getting ready to sue them, probably said something about how he had the lawsuit right up there on his dashboard. They go to arrest him, and Steve remembers what happened the last time he was in custody, and he takes off running. After a while they catch up with him in the woods, and these big, burly boys decide they’d subdue him.” Parker suspects the deputies killed him accidentally, then rigged it to look like a suicide to cover their crime.
The sheriff and his deputies haven’t said in their own words what they believe happened that night, but in a letter published on the front page of the Comanche Chief on November 27, 1997, their Austin attorney, Bob Bass, spoke for them. “The ‘truth’ of this matter,” he wrote, “is that the Davis family is unwilling to accept the truth.…The ‘truth’ is that a very promising youth was wasted due to chronic alcohol abuse. The ‘truth’ is that Steven Davis lost the privilege to practice law when he was convicted of a federal crime involving the fabrication of documents designed to circumvent immigration laws.…The ‘truth’ is that when Steve Davis returned to his hometown, he had lost his self-esteem and was seriously depressed.
“The ‘truth,’” he went on, “is that Steve Davis continued to find solace for his depression in a bottle…The ‘truth’ is that another arrest for driving while intoxicated would be treated as a felony, subjecting Davis to yet more time in jail. The ‘truth’ is that despite his family’s belief that he had nothing to die for, on the early morning hours of May 18, 1996, in a drunken depression, Steve Davis fled from police yet again, and this time, fled to one place from which he would never again have to suffer the indignity of humiliating himself or his family by his own irresponsible conduct.”
After Bass’s letter appeared, people in Comanche began to lose interest in the Davis case—but not Fredda Jones. As far as she was concerned, there were too many unanswered questions. In the fall of 1997 her parents, Fred and Betty Davis, hired a private investigator and an attorney, Steve Gibbins, who filed a $4.5 million wrongful death civil suit against Comanche County and the sheriff’s department. (They did not retain Parker and Woodley because they specialize in state court cases.)
When I went to see Gibbins at his Austin office last June, he was sitting behind his desk, chomping on a cigar. He picked up a small, hard object from the base of his lamp. It’s a tooth, he said, from Steve Davis’ skull. (Nine teeth were missing when the skull was found.) “I don’t believe he could have committed suicide,” he told me. “The tree sort of was a sapling. You could pull that thing down. He would have had to be on his knees and sagged down.”
Sitting behind his own desk a few blocks away, Bass told me a considerably different story a few days later. None of the Comanche County lawmen, he said, has ever been accused of police brutality or civil rights violations, although Bergmark, he acknowledged, was sued a few years ago for losing evidence. (He had been called to a convenience store to break up a fight in which a man had his ear bitten off. He collected the ear in a cup but later misplaced it, and the case was dismissed.) Bass has no doubt that Davis killed himself that night. “I’ve had jail suicide hangings that take place in the most insubstantial places,” he said. “It’s not difficult to do.”
So what really happened? On a sunny Saturday morning last fall, I drove out FM 2861, pulled up in front of the Copperas Creek package store, and wandered into the woods. The post oak thicket was denser than I had expected, with brambles, oak runners, and rotting logs waiting to trip anyone walking through the woods, much less running. After a few minutes I found the tree. It was deeper into the woods than I thought it would be. It’s a small tree but bigger than a sapling, and though it bent a bit when I pulled on the limb, it seemed like it could have supported a grown man’s dead weight if the man was intent on killing himself.
I tried to imagine that dark May night. Men in uniform, men with guns, crashing through the underbrush. They corner the suspect. He’s gasping for breath, frightened, desperate. And then what? Do the officers beat him? Do they choke him until he stops breathing? Was it an accident, as Parker theorizes? Do they drag the body deeper into the woods, strip off the shirt, and tie it to a tree to make it look like he hanged himself? Or do they drive away with the body and bring it back some time later?
Or maybe, just maybe, it happened the way the cops said it did. Maybe all the probing, the restless lights scanning the trees, the shouts and the curses, the people crashing through the brush—maybe it all dies away and Steve Davis is alone in the dark. It’s quiet, and as he sits on the cold ground, he thinks about how his life has gone haywire. Maybe, after a while, he gets up, looks at the stars and the sky, and in an alcoholic haze, strips off his shirt and knots the sleeves around a nearby limb to form a noose. Maybe.
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