The doorbell rang while Timothy Johnson and his wife were watching TV. When he opened it, a teenager stood there, calm and pale. “We need you to call 911,” the boy said. “I committed a murder.
”
Timothy froze. “Who did you kill? ”
“His mother. ”
“How did you kill her?
”
“With a hammer. I beat her to death. ”
“Why did you do it? ”
“Lots of reasons.
”
That was all he would say. At roughly 10:00 AM on March 27th, 2014, officers from the Corpus Christi Police Department arrived at apartment 1707 at the Windrush Apartments for a welfare check. The Nueces County Sheriff’s Department had passed along the confession. Inside one of the bedrooms, they found Kimberly Hill, 50, dead.
She had been bludgeoned with a hammer. Her son, 18-year-old Kevin Davis Jr. , was taken to the Criminal Investigation Division. At 11:45 AM, he was read his rights.
Then he sat down with Detectives Richard Garcia and Ramiro Torres, who asked him one simple question:
“What happened? ”
Kevin didn’t hesitate. He spoke in a flat, casual voice, as if he were describing a chore. “Well, have you gone to the house yet?
” he asked. “We know what happened. We want to hear it from you. ”
So he told them everything.
He said he had asked his mother for permission to kill himself. He was bored with life. He didn’t like people. He didn’t like living there.
There was nothing depressing about it, he said. It just was what it was. He wrote a suicide note around six that evening. Then he turned it over and wrote something else: a plan to kill both his mother and his sister.
“Kind of like Franklin,” he said. “That’s always been a thing of mine. I’m a bit of a pervert. ”
His mother had decided she was sick of his behavior.
She planned to send him to live with his sister again. That’s when he left in a fury and acted. He tried to strangle her with a cord ripped from a video game controller. She was sitting on the couch watching TV.
She screamed and grabbed the cord. So he went to her room, opened the bottom drawer on the right, and pulled out a hammer. “You kind of get the gist from there,” he said. He hit her at least 20 times in the living room.
But she was still alive. She was still snoring. He dragged her into the bedroom. Then he formed his hands into her brain.
“I kicked at it a bit,” he said. “Then I just decided to reach in and just do it. ”
He kicked at his mother’s brain. “Then I had to .
. . corpse,” he said. “Did you cut her?
”
“I did, actually. ”
He took a bath, cleaned himself up, and changed his clothes. He sounded almost proud of that. The detectives asked about his sister, Desiree.
He said she was okay. She lived in an apartment nearby. He had planned to kill her too, but decided against it. “I’d had my fill of killing,” he said.
“It seemed a little too excessive. ”
He said he’d always loved his mother in the wrong sort of way. There was maybe some rage too. “A little,” he said.
When asked how long he’d had these thoughts, he said since his preteens. He’d never sought help. He just accepted it as part of himself. He wasn’t ashamed of it.
He had left three notes around the apartment. One was addressed to his sister. It said: “Keep your head. Hurry, she might still be alive, although I highly doubt it.
” He knew his mother was already dead when he wrote it. He was messing with Desiree. “My sick sense of humor,” he said. In his mother’s bedroom, another note said: “Chase me.
”
He wanted to run. He had planned to take the gray Honda and leave the state. But his plan failed. He biked halfway across town, then ditched the bike in the woods near the train tracks.
He walked the rest of the way to Robstown, crying his eyes out in the thick woods. He thought, “Oh, what did I do? ”
“You don’t know what you lost till you already lost it,” he said. So he gave up.
He knocked on the first door he saw and asked to use the phone. “I might as well tell them when they asked me questions,” he said. He told the detectives he didn’t regret it. He said he felt sorry in a way, but he wouldn’t take it back.
“Did she do anything to deserve this? ” the detective asked. “Absolutely nothing,” Kevin said. “I’m a cruel, disgusting person.
”
He spoke of his fascination with the more artistic ways of murder. The meticulous manner. The way killers cut their victims open. “Such care, such love,” he said.
He admitted he would kill again. He said he was attracted to death, not life. He liked dead things. Dead people.
Dead animals. “Body’s a body in the end,” he said. “Piece of meat. ”
He told them about the family cat, a gray cat named Claire.
He strangled it, drowned it, cut it open. When asked what his ideal fantasy kill would be, he described dressing up in a nice suit, sneaking into a woman’s house, disabling her boyfriend. He’d bring a pretty dress to put on her. Then he’d remove her head.
“I like my women dead,” he said. The detectives asked if he’d ever hurt his sister. No. Anyone else?
No. This was his first person. “A person, not an animal,” he confirmed. His mother had told him, before he attacked, that she was a grown man and couldn’t stop him.
She said she would cope with it. She had called his sister to come help. That’s why he knew it was time. Now or never.
The jury took less than an hour to decide his fate. In October 2014, Kevin was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole in 2044. At the hearing, his sister Desiree faced him and said: “You took the only person who had your back. Now you are all alone.
”
Before trial, Kevin was offered a plea deal of 60 years with a chance at freedom one day. He turned it down. He is currently serving his time at the John T. Montford Unit in Lubbock, Texas, which provides mental health and medical care for incarcerated individuals with complex needs.
Kimberly Hill had served in the US Marine Corps during the Persian Gulf War. She worked as a hospice caregiver. She loved gardening, skydiving, concerts, and her two children. On her obituary page, a woman named Betty Silvas wrote: “Kim was a bright spot in the lives of my mom and me for several years.
Kim cared for my mom with such love and compassion as she cared for all of her patients. My mom was the last patient she saw on the day she left this world. Kim was a beautiful person on the outside and the inside, especially. She shared so much of her life with us during her visits that we came to think of her as part of our family, too.
”
One of Kimberly’s final Facebook posts, just two days before her death, read: “Cher concert was the best show I’ve ever seen. Like eight stage changes complete with a giant Trojan horse. Ended with her suspended in the air circling the arena. Awesome.
”
A year earlier, she had posted a picture with a caption: “To my children, if I had to choose between loving you and breathing, I would use my last breath to tell you I love you. ”
