justins5256
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Join Date: Aug 08, 2002
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Quote:
Originally Posted by LooksLikeCRicci
Dave Davis? Isn't he the guy that was convicted of killing his newylwed wife, Shannon? If that's the case, I thought the conviction in that case was pretty solid. Were there new developments that I don't know about?
He has always maintained that her death was an accident. An appeal he filed a few years ago focused on the validity of the testing that found traces of debilitating drugs in Shannon's body. Here is an article I found about his appeal.
SCIENCE CHALLENGED IN '89 CONVICTION -
DAVIS APPEAL SAYS TESTS FOR DEADLY DRUG A 'SHAM'
Blade, The (Toledo, OH)
November 25, 2001
Author: MICHAEL D. SALLAH
BLADE NATIONAL AFFAIRS WRITER
Estimated printed pages: 11
When NBC-TV shows reruns of the movie of his wife's murder, David Davis refuses to watch with the other prisoners.
The 57-year-old inmate says he already knows how the plot ends - and it's not his version.
Over and over, he has played her death in his mind: his young wife gasping for breath in his arms, the blood trickling down her chest, and her whispers fading into silence.
"I could never have hurt her," he says, his voice trembling.
It's been 12 years since he was convicted by a jury of injecting a powerful drug into his spouse in the woods near their farm in Hillsdale County, Michigan, after luring her outside to ride horses.
Since his arrest in 1989, he has refused to talk about the death of 25-year-old Shannon Mohr Davis, a nurse from Toledo.
He didn't take the witness stand at his trial, which drew hordes of reporters and network crews to the rolling hills of southeast Michigan.
Now, with what could be his last appeal in federal court in Detroit, the aging man with the white beard and wrinkles insists he was railroaded by zealous prosecutors and expert witnesses.
In a challenge to the intricacies of science, defense lawyers - with the testimony of four medical experts - insist the tests that turned up a deadly drug in his wife's body were a "sham" that went beyond the boundaries of evidence, a court petition states.
Davis insists his wife lost her life after falling from her 15-year-old mare and striking her head on a rock, the same version presented by his lawyers at his trial.
"I absolutely did nothing to her," he said in a phone interview from Marquette state prison, in which he's serving a mandatory life sentence.
Defense lawyer Thomas Bleakley argues that in two autopsies after her death on July 23, 1980, forensic experts found that her head injuries were consistent with a fall from a horse. At least four laboratory tests on her blood and tissues did not turn up any dangerous drugs, court records show.
The Toledo parents of the deceased woman say they are stunned the case is now in federal court and even angrier at their former son-in-law, an international fugitive until he was arrested eight years after his wife's death.
The tragedy sparked three syndicated television shows, a book, and the 1993 made-for-TV movie.
"This is unbelievable," says retiree Robert Mohr, father of the deceased woman. "I've tried to put that guy out of my mind. He disgusts me. He's a liar now, and he's been a liar from day one."
State prosecutors say Davis and his defense lawyers took their case to federal court in desperation and have found no new evidence since a jury in Hillsdale County found him guilty on Dec. 5, 1989.
"There's no question that David Davis killed Shannon Mohr," says Mark Blumer, an assistant state attorney general who prosecuted the case. "It was an extremely well-planned murder." The motive: to collect $330,000 in life insurance benefits.
But in a scientific challenge, defense lawyers insist the substance identified as the murder weapon - succinylcholine chloride - was not found in his wife's blood and tissues.
Once known as "the perfect murder weapon" because it breaks down so quickly in the body, defense lawyers argue there was no way to detect the substance in human tissues back in the 1980s.
The FBI developed a test to find traces of the drug in the 1990s, but it's not the same procedure used in the Davis case, say several independent experts.
In another twist, Dr. Robert Forney, Jr., the toxicologist who testified he found trace elements of the drug in her tissues, is being challenged in the case by four colleagues at Medical College of Ohio.
Three of the medical professors said in sworn statements within months after the conviction that they seriously doubted their colleague's work, based largely on his published papers about the novel findings.
Defense lawyers mounted appeals, but the Michigan courts ruled the professors should have stepped forward at the trial.
Twelve years later, the professors say they stand by their statements - with two saying they feel stronger today about their criticisms.
"It was a misuse of science, and it was wrong," says Dr. Keith Garlid, now a professor of pharmacology at Oregon Health Sciences University in Portland. "I'm still very upset about it."
Dr. Forney, 55, a toxicologist who travels the country as an expert witness, did not return numerous phone messages after initially agreeing to talk about the rare technique.
Several supporters say even if Dr. Forney's methods were controversial, they believe he found the lethal compound. Lucas County Coroner James Patrick says he's satisfied Dr. Forney's procedures were scientifically valid, even if other methods since have evolved with the latest technology.
In a series of delicate tests using gas chromatography and mass spectrometry, Dr. Forney and others were able to identify an "unknown substance" in the dead spouse's tissues and then compared those readings to those produced by the real drug, says Dr. Patrick.
"What they found were very similar peaks," says the coroner, who hired Dr. Forney in 1978 as a toxicologist at MCO.
Until the Davis trial, experts believed only one person in the United States had ever been convicted of murdering someone with the drug: Dr. Carl Coppolino, who was accused in a sensational trial in Florida of injecting his wife with the substance in 1965.
But 12 years after his conviction, he was released from prison when questions were raised about the credibility of the test in that case.
The key question raised by Dr. Coppolino's lawyers: How can anyone detect a drug that decomposes in minutes into succinic acid and choline - both found naturally in the body?
The Davis defense team is hoping federal Judge Paul Borman will grant a hearing based on the most recent court request.
Davis' lawyers are asking for a writ of habeas corpus - a challenge to the federal court that Davis did not receive a fair trial in state court. No hearings have been set, but the judge refused a request by prosecutors to dismiss the case in August.
Smitten
When he spotted Shannon Mohr for the first time at a Sylvania wedding in August, 1979, David Davis told a friend he was going to marry her. For her part, she was smitten by the strapping man with the piercing blue eyes who asked her to dance, her relatives recalled.
In a story with all the makings of a romance novel, the couple began dating and soon talked about marriage.
Described by relatives as young and idealistic, Miss Mohr had just broken up with her previous boyfriend, a Toledo firefighter, say relatives.
"I was a bit concerned about her, because she was on the rebound, and she had just met [Davis], and it was obvious she was in love - really in love," recalls sister-in-law Judy Mohr.
For his part, Davis says he was taken by the brunette. "She was the sweetest, most gentle person - not a day goes by that I don't think about her."
After seven weeks of courtship, the couple married in Las Vegas. After they returned, they settled into Davis' 100-acre farm in Hillsdale County, a pastoral landscape of grassy slopes and lakes.
Davis grew corn and soybeans, and his wife commuted to her nursing job in Flower Hospital in Sylvania.
Ten months after they wed, the couple went for a horseback ride on the evening of July 23, 1980 - an event that would be examined in police investigations, court, and appeals for years to follow.
The Davis' neighbor, Richard Britton, recalls the husband and wife leaving his farm on their horses after they stopped for a visit. About 25 minutes later, he says Davis returned on horseback alone.
"He said something happened to Shannon. She was hurt," recalls Mr. Britton. When the men rushed back to the woods, Mr. Britton recalls she was on the ground, her shoes off, blouse unbuttoned, and blood on her chest.
A rock covered with blood was found nearby. "He said she fell off the horse," recalls Mr. Britton.
By the time they arrived at Thorn Hospital in Hudson, Mich., with her battered body in Mr. Britton's car, a nurse said Mrs. Davis' eyes were dilated and there was no pulse.
In his recent interview, Davis talked for the first time about the events that ended in his wife's demise.
They were riding along a "path through a wooded lot, and we rode this 100 times before," he says. "It was thick and brushy and full of bugs and biting fleas, so you tried to get the horses through there as soon as possible.
"I was in front of her, and as we rode along, I heard her scream. I turned around, and I could tell she was in trouble. She was underneath the horse with one boot in the stirrup. I dismounted and went back to her as fast as I could. She was barely conscious."
Because of her head injuries and her spouse's explanation, her death was attributed to a "fall from a horse" by the local medical examiner's office, and the case was closed.
Suspicious
After the funeral and burial in Calvary Cemetery in Toledo, the Mohrs grew increasingly suspicious.
First, their son-in-law denied buying life insurance on his wife, they say. Then they learned he had taken out $330,000 in policies on her life. Second, the family learned shortly after Shannon's funeral that Davis was going to Florida with a girlfriend.
By then, the family pleaded with the Hillsdale County Sheriff's Department to investigate.
Thirty-five days after the funeral, Mrs. Davis' body was exhumed, but the autopsy did not turn up anything new. No evidence of foul play was reported.
The case was dropped.
The family was livid and began a letter-writing campaign that led to one of the most far-reaching investigations ever waged by the Michigan attorney general's office.
"I poured my heart out," recalls Judy Mohr. "I wrote that it was so important to not let this case die. She was a beautiful and trusting person who didn't deserve to die that way."
The Mohrs then went to federal court in Detroit to try to ban Davis from collecting his deceased wife's insurance benefits. In the weeks after their daughter's death, they say they found out other things about Davis: He was not a Vietnam War veteran as he told everyone in the family, and he was not an orphan.
Worse, he had been married before with two small daughters - something his wife didn't learn until a week before she died. "He told us so many lies, it makes me sick," recalls Mr. Mohr.
Davis has his own story.
He insists that when he was asked at the hospital whether his wife carried life insurance, he thought the nurse was inquiring about health insurance. "We were at the hospital, and I was in a fog," he says.
After the funeral, he says he wanted to get away from Michigan "to clear my mind," and decided to go to Florida. A former girlfriend asked to go along, he claims.
Though the same woman, Jeanne Hohlman, testified at the trial that Davis told her he was a CIA agent living a dual life, he denied ever saying that.
Davis says she fabricated the story "to get back at me for putting her on a plane after we got to Florida, and she has been mad at me ever since."
He says he bought life insurance for his wife and himself. "The agent came to us. I did not go to him," says Davis, claiming it was a way to cover farm expenses in case one of them died.
In November, 1980, the state attorney general's office jumped on the case, but by then Davis was living on a sailboat in a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., marina.
"I was tired of being targeted. I decided to sell my farm and move away," he says.
With Davis sailing between Florida and the Caribbean in 1981, investigators turned to the laboratory.
Using a gas chromatograph, which shatters a sample into tiny components, two Medical College of Ohio toxicologists say they discovered something in the dead woman's tissues but couldn't identify it.
After several failed tries, Dr. Robert Forney and an assistant, Tom Carroll, turned to private labs that use mass spectrometers, instruments that smash molecules into fragments and identifies them.
But even those machines failed to pinpoint the substance.
After reviewing a list of dangerous drugs, the scientists noticed the name succinylcholine, which is used by veterinarians to relax animals.
That's when they decided to go to Sweden.
In experiments at the Karolinska Institute, the two MCO researchers, under the direction of toxicologist Bo Holmstedt, say they identified traces of succinylcholine in the dead woman's tissue.
The findings led to another exhumation on July 1, 1981, when doctors cut out several bruises - possible injection points - and gave the evidence to Dr. Forney.
Dr. Forney later said that tests in Sweden on the new evidence confirmed his suspicions: succinylcholine was present in bruises in the upper right arm and the right wrist.
With the strength of the findings, Davis was indicted on a first-degree murder charge three months later.
At the time, he says he was living on his boat in Haiti. "My attorney told me that I was wanted," he says. "I was tired of it. I had done nothing wrong, but I knew they were out to get me. I decided to leave."
He says he paid people to watch the boat and flew to Los Angeles. Eventually he moved to Santa Monica, where he took flight lessons.
He grew a beard and adopted the name David Meyer Bell. Over the next eight years, he became one of the nation's most celebrated fugitives as he moved to Alaska, Hawaii, and eventually American Samoa.
Investigators flew to Florida, the Bahamas, and elsewhere hunting for him, passing out flyers and posters.
Their break came nearly eight years later: NBC showed a rerun of an Unsolved Mysteries show about the Shannon Mohr Davis case. A woman who dated Davis in Hawaii and knew he had moved to American Samoa - 3,200 miles away - saw the episode and called police.
On Jan. 6, 1989 - more than seven years after he fled - he was nabbed as he showed up for his job as a pilot for an island airline. He was married to a 23-year-old woman and living in a one-room shack.
Witness
By the time the trial began on Nov. 28, 1989, Dr. Forney was the star witness.
While the jurors listened to testimony about Davis' life of deceit and years as a fugitive, the key evidence was the succinylcholine, they later told reporters.
It took the jury only two hours to seal Davis' fate: guilty.
Three weeks later, a controversy arose that would shadow the case for another 12 years - leading to the present appeal.
For several years leading to the trial, it was learned a group of professors at Medical College of Ohio had seriously questioned Dr. Forney's work on the breakthrough research.
The four professors said they found numerous errors and incomplete information in three of the published papers by Dr. Forney, Mr. Carroll, and three other researchers about the detection of succinylcholine.
"I was shocked that this was being passed off as science," says Dr. Garlid.
Various facts in the papers were wrong, the professors said, including the melting point of key substances. One professor, Dr. Amir Askari, wrote a letter to one of the scientific journals, saying he had "grave concerns" about scientific discrepancies.
Dr. Steven Britton, no relation to the Davis' neighbor, said he talked to Dr. Forney about a series of "errors" and "sloppy" reporting in one of the studies in the Journal of Forensic Sciences.
"This is a discredit to us because it was known that it was wrong," Dr. Britton said in a sworn statement.
Mr. Bleakley, the lawyer for Davis, says he was unaware of the simmering dispute at MCO before the trial. He asked Dr. Forney during the trial whether anyone had criticized his work on the process.
Dr. Forney responded: "Not to my knowledge."
Mr. Bleakley says the toxicologist should have been banned from testifying, since his findings were not accepted by the scientific community.
In one of his papers, Dr. Forney surmised that succinylcholine may have been preserved - instead of quickly dissolving - because the embalming fluid in the human tissues was acidic. However, a witness said the embalming fluid used on Shannon Mohr was the opposite: alkaline.
The professors who criticized Dr. Forney's work said they tried to keep the controversy within the medical college community. But when a Blade editorial praised Dr. Forney's testimony after the trial, Dr. Askari said he felt compelled to write a letter to the editor explaining "there are some of us who have serious problems with this kind of science," he says.
Controversy
During the height of the controversy in 1990, a three-member panel in the medical college was appointed to review Dr. Forney's work.
In the end, the panel members acknowledged they were not experts in the field, but after interviewing Dr. Forney, who shared his data with the group, it appeared his conclusions were supported.
However, the panel added that much of the earlier criticism of Dr. Forney and his assistants was justified: The three papers they wrote about the detection of the drug "were very poorly written," and the questions raised about them "were certainly justified."
Lastly, the group concluded: "While the data presented by Dr. Forney to this committee are consistent with his conclusions, it's likely the validity of this method will only be accepted widely after its reliability is confirmed by an independent laboratory."
Dr. Fredric Rieders, a recognized expert on finding succinylcholine in human tissue, says the testing procedures today are different from those used by Dr. Forney in the Davis case, and they since have been accepted in the courts. "They are more advanced with new technologies. And there is considerably more precision."
Though he didn't see the tests in the Davis case, he says he believes that Dr. Forney, with the assistance of the Swedish experts, used credible procedures at the time.
"I talked to Bo Holmstedt about the tests [in the Davis case], and I'm aware of what they did. I'm satisfied that they found [succinylcholine]."
Davis' lawyer says he will ask the judge to hold an evidentiary hearing to decide whether Dr. Forney's findings should have been accepted by the trial court.
Prosecutors say it's doubtful the judge will hold such a hearing. Mark Blumer, the prosecutor at the trial, says Davis was convicted "on a host of powerful evidence" beyond science.
The Mohrs, who divide their time between Toledo and St. Petersburg, Fla., say they want Davis locked up for the rest of his life. "He did it," says Mr. Mohr, who ultimately was awarded his daughter's life insurance benefits.
"There's no doubt in my mind he did it. To this day, I still wonder how we overlooked this guy. We thought he was going to watch over our daughter and protect her. We thought he was going to be a good husband."
Caption:
Shannon Mohr Davis died July 23, 1980, near her farm in Michigan.
THE BLADE
David Davis insists his wife fell from her horse and struck her head on a rock.
A family photo shows Shannon Mohr Davis enjoying a day with her horse on her farm in Hillsdale County, Michigan, in 1980.
THE BLADE
Dr. Robert Forney, Jr., a toxicologist, testified at the 1989 trial that he had found trace elements of a fatal drug in the tissue of the dead woman. THE BLADE
David Davis, left, speaks with his lawyer, Thomas Bleakley, during the trial. Mr. Bleakley says that Dr. Forney should have been banned from testifying.
THE BLADE
Edition: CITY FINAL
Page: A1
Index Terms: SPECIAL REPORT
Copyright, 2001, The Blade
Record Number: 0111250045
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SCIENCE CHALLENGED IN '89 CONVICTION
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