A Poisoned Passion

by Diane Fanning

  She dragged him up on the dock and slid the body into the boat. Then, she loaded up cinder blocks, an anchor and a tire wheel rim, along with yellow braided rope and plastic zip ties. She climbed inside, and when she was certain the load was well balanced, she moved the boat out to the center of the water, where a submerged fence separated the pond into two sections.

  She methodically fastened the contents of the boat to both ankles, both wrists and the left elbow with plastic zip ties, attaching 145 pounds of weight to Mike’s 155-pound body. Then she eased the body and objects out of the boat, guided it past the fence and into the water on the smaller side of the pond away from the boat dock. She sat and watched until his body sunk to the bottom and disappeared from sight. It was hard work, but she’d accomplished what she’d set out to do. She undoubtedly felt pride in a job well done.

  She returned to the dock, tied up the boat and got in her truck. She drove back down the caliche lane to the road. She got in and out of the truck to open and then close the gate. Before she left, she locked it tight. She then drove off convinced no one would ever find the body—certain that her husband would remain a missing person forever.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Up in Maine, hope was fading fast. The day Michael should have reported for duty had come and gone. Family members called OSI nearly every day urging immediate action. They were fearful that if Mike were not found soon, there was no possibility that they would ever see him alive again.

  Major Bill Walker called Les every couple of days. Some days, he had an update to report. Other times, he called to see how the family was coping.

  Les now knew that Mike had left more than his cell phone and truck behind. His wallet had been left at home and he was reported to have last been seen wearing a tight pair of jeans and a tee shirt—no hat and no jacket. Where would Mike stuff more than $200 in small bills? And how could he handle the January nights with lows at 44 degrees?

  Investigators from the police department kept asking: “Do you think Mike ran off to Canada?”

  Les knew in his heart that his son would not go AWOL, but he based his response on logic. “Why would he leave Texas and go to Canada when he could come home and slip across the border with ease?” Although the sense of what he said was clear to Les, he felt that it went right over the investigators’ heads.

  On January 28, the Air Force sent a team to San Angelo to conduct a search of the two square miles around Michael’s home. They found no evidence pointing to the whereabouts of their missing staff sergeant. OSI Special Agent Greg McCormick and San Angelo Police Department Detective Bill McGuire paid another visit to the clinic during that search to talk to Wendi Davidson. They didn’t learn any new information from the interview, but he did get something else of interest. She gave McCormick permission to conduct a forensic investigation of her laptop. He made a mirror image copy of the hard drive and took it with him for later analysis.

  Marshall dropped into the San Angelo Regional Office of Texas Parks and Wildlife to ask Major Steve Whiteaker about the game warden job opening in Tom Green County. He was interested in a transfer to another game warden position in his hometown. “I won’t have two years as game warden until the end of June.” Two years was the minimum amount of time the agency required before a standard transfer request could be issued.

  “You’ll probably miss the opportunity then, because the current academy class would have their assignments long before that. Most likely, a rookie will fill the position.”

  Marshall explained the situation with his missing brother-in-law and complained about the police “harassing his parents.” Whiteaker thought it odd that Marshall considered it harassment for law enforcement to ask his parents questions about Mike’s disappearance and to look around their property.

  On February 15 at 10 A.M., the Major Crimes Task Force gathered again to update one another and plan their next moves. Although no concrete evidence existed, the suspicions regarding foul play were now high. Those concerns thrust Texas Ranger Palmer into a more active role in the investigation.

  He followed up on two phone calls made to Mike’s cell phone on January 20—one at 12:58 A.M., the second at 1:30. Both were less than one minute in duration and originated from the telephone of Lauren Hahn. She did recall placing late-night calls, but could not remember the date or even the reason for them. She knew Mike, she said, because she used to date Jeff Holden, who was either a cousin of or close friend to Mike.

  Palmer and McGuire traveled to Hamlin, Texas, a small town with a shrinking population of approximately 2,000, a two-and-a-half-hour drive from San Angelo. They met Jeff Holden at the local police department. With Jeff’s consent, they searched his residence to make sure Mike was not hiding there.

  Jeff told them he’d known Mike for four or five years and they went out together to nightclubs. Mike drank beer, he said, but did not smoke and did not use drugs. Jeff hadn’t known about Mike’s marriage until after it happened, but didn’t think it was going well. “Two or three months ago, Mike told me the relationship was on the rocks and he was thinking about calling it quits.” Jeff denied that Mike hated the military and insisted that his friend was looking forward to his next deployment.

  OSI Agent McCormick and his immediate supervisor Arch Harner suspected that Wendi or her family knew something about Mike’s whereabouts. They decided that they needed tracking devices on all of their vehicles. Harner contacted regional headquarters to inquire about the process. His first step, they told him: Check to see if any devices were available.

  Harner found out that there were three trackers they could use. Next, he notified the OSI staff judge advocate in the OSI legal office. They approved of the scope and intentions of the investigation. Harner applied to the regional commander for authorization. He received approval to install a tracker on Wendi’s car and on the two trucks belonging to Judy and Lloyd Davidson. Unfortunately, when he obtained the three promised devices, one of them was unsuitable for their purposes.

  McCormick called Palmer and apprised him of their plans. Palmer was uneasy about their decision. He knew OSI followed appropriate military protocol for a deserter investigation, but he worried because their process was not in line with the proper procedure for a civilian criminal investigation. In that kind of case, Palmer needed a search warrant approved by a sitting judge. He was concerned that the Air Force actions could jeopardize a future prosecution in the event that foul play and a perpetrator were identified.

  At McCormick’s request, Palmer went to Advanced Animal Care to perform surveillance in advance of the placement of the tracker. While there, he spoke to Lloyd, who once again repeated his statement that his son-in-law had fled to avoid deployment overseas.

  Despite Palmer’s reservations, he met Harner and McCormick in the veterinary clinic parking lot at 12:40 A.M. on January 26. The Air Force had already installed a tracker on Judy’s pick-up, now they placed the equipment on the under-carriage of Wendi’s red Camaro. The device they installed was not a real-time tracker. In other words, they could not determine exactly where Wendi was at any given time. However, it kept a log of everywhere she went. They simply had to pull up in the vicinity of her car and download the geographical coordinates from the global positioning system.

  They may not know Wendi’s location every moment, but they’d know every place she’d traveled. With any luck, that information would be all they needed to determine what had happened to Michael Severance.

  TWENTY-TWO

  It was business as usual at Advanced Animal Care. Wendi still had a loyal base of customers. Folks wondered about the mystery of her missing husband, but Mike wasn’t from around those parts and Wendi was. Few wanted to believe that the local girl–turned–professional woman had anything to do with the disappearance of her husband.

  Wendi still had her mind on making sure Mike’s death remained unknown. She wanted to eliminate the record of her online searches into lie detector tests and body decomposition. She asked if Jamie, he
r veterinary assistant, knew anything about searching Internet history. “I think Mike was looking at porn on this computer,” she lied. Jamie told her what little she knew, and promised to ask her fiancé Tim Schwarz if he knew more. Tim came into the clinic and talked to them both. He explained that while you can delete the cache of files relating to browsing activity, the data still remained on the hard drive, where a forensic computer specialist could find it. Wendi processed the reality that she couldn’t conceal her tracks and put her mind to creating a reasonable and innocent-sounding purpose for her searches.

  Wendi didn’t know it yet, but that wasn’t the only data that was a potential problem for her. On February 28, Special Agent McCormick downloaded the information on the tracker attached to Wendi’s car. He discovered that on February 27 at 12:30 P.M., her vehicle had traveled to a remote location near Sutton Road in Tom Green County. It had stopped briefly and then left.

  McCormick and Harner contacted Palmer the next day and told him they were pursuing details about the location. The trail to the coordinates took them to gated private property, but not to the exact spot. A little digging and they knew the land was owned by Terrell Sheen. They went to his office and asked for permission to search it.

  Sheen was willing to allow them on to the property, but he wanted to go with them. The three agreed to meet at the property on the morning of March 3. Sheen arrived as promised and gave McCormick and Harner a tour of the entire ranch. He allowed the investigators access to all the out-buildings and pointed out the different ponds. They identified the spot where Wendi had parked her car on February 27—it was right beside the largest stock tank of them all.

  Her visit to the pond, combined with the Internet search about body decomposition, tended to lead them to the conclusion that Wendi had murdered her husband and disposed of his body on the 7777 Ranch. They hesitated, though. There were other interpretations of the facts. Terrell Sheen had close ties to the Davidson family. Wendi could have had a legitimate reason to be on his property. She knew that the Air Force had searched the swampy area near her home—maybe she was just fearful about what they might find. It all looked suspicious, but not conclusive. As long as there was any room for doubt—any possibility that Mike was alive—the Air Force deserter investigation still progressed.

  On March 4, McCormick and Harner drove into town and up the Loop to the Texas Department of Public Safety building where Ranger Shawn Palmer had his office. The military investigators revealed all they had learned about the property and the forensic analysis of Wendi’s computer. Palmer contacted additional officers to form a round-the-clock surveillance of their suspect. By 5 P.M., Palmer and three others staked out Advanced Animal Care.

  When Wendi pulled away from her clinic and headed home early that evening, two law enforcement vehicles were on her tail. She drove out to Grape Creek Cemetery and then over to her parents’ home on nearby Rollin Acres Road. She brought along a pistol, telling her brother, “The detectives took this to test-fire and get the ballistics off of it. They said it was misfiring, and I talked to someone else and they said it should be cleaned.”

  That day, Shane Zubaty, Mike’s former roommate in Abilene, who now lived in Florida, opened a letter from Wendi Davidson:

  I really wish I knew where Mike was so everyone would be at peace, but I don’t know and I realize that I may never know what happened. I have come to the logical conclusion that Mike left everything to start a new life. The other possibility is that the military may have something to do with his disappearance . . . I have two small children to raise and a business to run. Wherever he may be I love him, but I am trying to move on with my life.”

  She wrote that she realized after her husband’s disappearance that she didn’t really know any of his friends and co-workers “other than he hated work and did not want to deploy.” She invited Shane to visit whenever he came to Texas, because she would like to meet her son’s namesake.

  Shane said that the letter was chilling. He had heard no indication that Wendi was responsible for Michael’s death, but now he wondered. He thought about traveling to Texas, meeting her and drawing his own conclusions.

  At 11 P.M., the watchers were relieved by a new surveillance team led by Detective McGuire. They followed Wendi when she drove back to her place in town, arriving at 8:18 the next morning. Nearly two hours later the men on stake-out watched as a Ford Excursion entered the parking lot and pulled away hauling Mike’s racing car.

  The task force convened on the hill by the car wash over-looking the clinic at 2 P.M. In the pouring rain, the overnight team briefed them and left for home. If developments continued to progress as anticipated, a homicide investigation would soon be in full swing, making Texas Ranger Sergeant Shawn Palmer the lead investigator.

  At 2:30, Palmer approached the clinic with DPS Special Crimes Sergeant David Jones. Wendi had agreed to discuss the disappearance of her husband. Initially, she appeared calm and emotionless as she answered their questions. She reiterated her story with nonchalance, telling the men about her trip to her parents’ home on January 15 and her return to an empty apartment that night.

  She didn’t flinch when Palmer questioned her about searching the Internet for information about the decomposition of a body in water. It seemed apparent that she’d given it some thought beforehand. “When they searched the creek back there, I wanted to know if they would be able to see a body if someone dumped Mike there. I wanted to be prepared for what they might find,” she said. She talked about not wanting to lose it when she saw the condition of his remains after being in water for so long.

  “Why did you look up information about polygraph results?” Palmer asked.

  “The police just gave me a lie detector test. I was curious,” she shrugged. She rattled on a bit about her scientific nature and proclivity for questioning everything in her quest for knowledge.

  When Palmer’s questions turned to Terrell Sheen’s ranch, her demeanor changed. Her eyes shifted, her posture became rigid, her brazenness evaporated. The rambling chat was over. Her answers turned short and curt. “My parents and I have access to that property,” she said.

  “When were you last out there?” Palmer pressed.

  “A week or two ago.”

  “Why were you out there then?”

  “I went with my dad to cut wood,” she answered.

  “Did you go to the stock tank?”

  “The stock tank?” she stalled.

  “Yes, the stock tank.”

  “There’s three tanks out there.”

  “How many have a dock?” Palmer asked.

  “Well, uh, well,” she stammered, looking at the floor. She raised her head. “Just one.”

  A telephone call interrupted the interview. Wendi said, “I’ve got to get that,” and explained that it was her rotation as the after-hours veterinarian on call for a group of San Angelo animal doctors.

  Jason Geron was on the other end of the line. Wendi was not his veterinarian, but this was an emergency. His Bengal cat, Enoch, had been on top of the garage door when Jason had opened it. Enoch was caught between the door and the ceiling. He was in obvious pain and his leg didn’t look right. Wendi gave him directions to her clinic and then explained the situation to the investigators.

  Palmer and Jones left before Jason arrived. They returned to the car wash on the hill joining the rest of the team. The injury sounded serious, making them believe they had a lot of time. They took cover from the pounding rain in a position where they did not have a total view of the clinic. They immediately decided that the ranch needed to be watched round the clock. Air Force Special Agents Harner and McCormick volunteered for the first shift.

  They didn’t realize how desperate Wendi was in the aftermath of the interview. Jason entered the clinic with his daughter and his beautiful marbled dark and light brown cat. The veterinarian hurried through the examination and rushed Enoch into the back for a quick x-ray. She came back, told them the leg was not broken, gave them
medication and hustled them out the door. The abruptness of the visit left Jason feeling a bit unnerved. He hoped he’d never have to rely on her services again.

  Not one of the officers noticed when Wendi slipped out of the parking lot in record time. But when Harner and McCormick pulled out on the road, they spotted the red Camaro ahead of them and tailed her. While Harner drove, McCormick called Palmer and asked for instructions. Palmer told them there was no need to follow her. They needed to focus on securing the ranch. No one thought that she would be careless enough to go straight to the ranch immediately after being questioned about it. Harner and McCormick both suspected foul play now, but doubt still existed. The desertion investigation continued.

  “We’ll be out there all night. We better stop for some vittles,” McCormick said. Harner pulled into a gas station/convenience store and the men stocked up.

  Back in San Angelo, Palmer’s conviction that Mike’s death was homicide overrode all of his doubts. Nothing beat redundancy for making sure all the bases were covered. He sent Bill Mabe of the San Angelo Police Department out to the ranch.

  Prepared for the long haul, Harner and McCormick turned off the highway and followed March Road. When they veered right, they noticed that the day’s downpours had taken a toll on the unpaved caliche surface of Sutton Road. Deep swerving tracks left evidence that someone else had traveled that way—most likely in a two-wheel-drive vehicle. When they passed the final dog-leg in the road before reaching their destination, they spotted the red Camaro. Then they saw Wendi in her blue scrubs standing in front of the gate, fiddling with the lock.