Texas Justice

Pamela Colloff: A FEW HOURS BEFORE DAWN ON A sticky summer night in Somerville, a one-stoplight town ninety miles northwest of Houston, police chief Jewel Fisher noticed the faint smell of burning wood. Fisher was following up on a late-night prowler call east of the main drag, in the predominantly black neighborhood that runs alongside the railroad tracks. Turning down the town's darkened streets, he suddenly caught sight of a house on fire and realized that he was looking at the home of 45-year-old Bobbie Davis, a supervisor at the Brenham State School. Flames climbed the walls and skittered along the roof of the one-story brick structure, casting a murky orange glow. The windows had already been smashed in by several neighbors, who had screamed the names of the children they feared were trapped inside, pleading for them to wake up. Fisher quickly radioed for help, but when volunteer firefighters arrived, they discovered the bodies of Bobbie, her teenage daughter, and her four grandchildren inside. Each person had been brutally attacked and left to die in the blaze.

Word of the killings, which took place on August 18, 1992, traveled quickly through Somerville. The tragedy had no precedent; it was—and eighteen years later remains—the most infamous crime in Burleson County history. "Many in the neighborhood remarked that this was the kind of thing that you expected to happen somewhere else, not in Somerville," read a front-page article in the Burleson County Citizen-Tribune. Bobbie had been bludgeoned and stabbed. Her sixteen-year-old daughter, Nicole Davis, a popular senior and top athlete at Somerville High School, had been bludgeoned, stabbed, and shot. Bobbie's grandchildren—nine-year-old Denitra, six-year-old Brittany, five-year-old Lea'Erin, and four-year-old Jason—had been knifed to death. (Bobbie's daughter Lisa was mother to the oldest and youngest children; Bobbie's son, Keith, was father to the two middle girls.) All told, the victims had been stabbed 66 times. Even the youngest member of the Davis family, who stood three and a half feet tall, had been shown no mercy. Jason, who investigators would later determine had cowered behind a pillow, was stabbed a dozen times. His body had been doused in gasoline before the house was set on fire.