The Chloe Davis Murder Case
Lolita Davis had grown quiet and still. Her burned and battered body lay partially sprawled on a mattress that had been drug from one of the bedrooms and now rested in the hallway squarely between her bedroom door and that of the bathroom.
Unrecognizable and practically scalped from repeated blows with a claw hammer, her hair and nightgown had been burned almost completely from her body and her wrists had been slashed with a razor - severing an artery. Chloe, her 11-year old daughter, sat at her side.
Chloe rose from the position she had held next to her mother. The house had grown quiet. There were no more screams or guttural moans and gurgles from the dying. All she could hear now was the sound of her own breathing. The house was in shambles, blood splattered the walls and Chloe herself. She looked down at her nightgown. It too was covered in blood.
Chloe was stoic as she maneuvered her way toward the bathroom, side-stepping ever so slightly around the mattress that her mother was laid out on. The hallway was narrow and the mattress and her mother’s body were taking up a great deal of room. When she exited the bathroom she would have to side-step around the mattress again, or walk across the corner of it, in order to get to her bedroom where her clothes were. The living room was just to the right of her bedroom so at least she wouldn’t have to maneuver around her mother’s body again to get to the front door.
She removed her blood soaked nightgown and began to wash up. Chloe was going to have to use the bathroom sink rather than the bathtub this time, as it was occupied by her sister, 7-year old Deborah Ann, who was face down in the now crimson water. Her skull fractured from repeated blows by the same claw hammer that had reigned down upon the head of their mother. Chloe calmly washed her face, dabbing lightly at the blood trickling from the wound on her head where the hammer had grazed her.
She quietly continued to compose herself as she got dressed. She fashioned her blonde hair, which fell just below her shoulders, in to two pigtails, put on her shoes and then made her way to the front door. It had been approximately an hour, give or take, since her mother had expired before her, a little more than two since her father had left for work. As Chloe exited the modest two-bedroom Los Angeles home she had shared with her family, she locked the door behind her.
It was sometime between 9am and 9:30am when Chloe arrived at the home of a neighbor and requested to use the telephone to call her father, who was working at a grocery near by. The neighbor kindly obliged and Chloe calmly, without any detail, told her father he needed to come home – right now. After hanging up Chloe walked back home and patiently waited for him to arrive. She was sitting on the front porch when her father came home and inquired as to what the urgency was that had brought him racing from work. Chloe’s unemotional response was simply “I think you better go in the kitchen and see.” She gave no sign, no warning as to the mayhem that had transpired that morning.
Barton Davis unlocked the door and stepped into what little more than 2-hours earlier had been a pristinely cared for home. He had kissed his wife and left for work right around 7am. Now he was returning at the behest of his eldest daughter in order to survey the scene of a murderous frenzy that had been unleashed only a short time before.
The horrified father went from room to room, viewing the carnage that had once been his family. Approaching the kitchen he found 3-year old Marquis lying in a pool of blood on the floor, almost blocking the entryway. Lying just behind him was 10-year old Daphne. Both children had been beaten in the head with the same hammer that wielded the blows against 7-year old Deborah Ann and the children’s 36-year old mother. All of the victims had received enough blows to render them unrecognizable.
Almost as quickly as he entered, Barton Davis ran screaming from his front door. And as he frantically paced up and down the walkway, screaming and crying that he “no longer had anything to live for” his only surviving daughter attempted to offer words of support; “Brace your self up, daddy. You mustn’t get excited. Come on, let’s go for a little walk.”
While Chloe tended to her father, it was the neighbor who summoned police to the little house next door.
Soon Chloe would be questioned by one of the most infamous police alienists in the history of crime investigation. She was the sole survivor, the only living witness. She would be expected to recount the story of exactly what took place that deadly April morning. And she would capture everyone’s attention when she did.
Part 2
