Murder Most Foul – July 2018

30 Murder Most Foul Vile Pair Videoed Their Victims’ Murders

wanted, and the supply fed his growing

obsession with sexual domination,

sadism and asphyxiation.

He visited strangulation fetish websites

and began collecting DVDs that fuelled

his ultimate fantasy of starring in his

own snuff movie. He wanted to strangle

a woman while having sex with her.

As part of a prisoner release probation

programme, Davis got a job as caretaker

in a Kansas City factory. It was there

that he met Dena Riley, a divorced

mother of four who worked part-time at

the assembly plant.

A porky, bleach-blonde meth addict

with bad teeth, Dena didn’t seem much

of a catch. But she and Davis were at the

bottom of the relationship food chain,

and he’d been looking for a pliable

accomplice. It was a hellish match.

Dena had grown up in Kansas City,

and was married just weeks after leaving

school. She and her husband had three

children in five years. After the third,

she began bed-hopping and using drugs.

Her husband filed for divorce and won

custody of the children in 1990, and the

following year she had a fourth child

with another man.

For the next 15 years, Dena lived on

the city’s squalid margins, bouncing

from one job to another to fund her

meth habit. She was often homeless,

spent brief periods in jail, and dabbled

in prostitution.

Yet she was disarmingly honest

about her addiction, and one woman

at a dog-grooming salon, where she’d

worked briefly, said she sometimes

described her narcotics use and made no

attempt to conceal the needle tracks on

her arms.

“She was one of the gentlest people

around the animals that I’ve ever worked

with,” said the woman.

S

hortly after meeting, Dena and Davis

moved into an upstairs apartment

in a rather stately brick building on a

road named after President Truman in a

suburb of Kansas called Independence.

Neighbours said they seemed well

suited and attached to each other. They

never got drunk or had angry fights

or threw noisy parties. Although they

didn’t socialise much, they seemed

to have some kind of special, deep

understanding.

That much was right. A deadly

symbiosis had been forged, and their

R

ICHARD DEAN DAVIS squinted

at the springtime sun as the

Missouri prison door clanged shut

behind him. The last time he’d seen the

open sky was in 1987 when he was only

24 years old. Now it was May 2005, and

he was at a crossroads after a lifetime of

violence.

With his bulging jailhouse muscles

and blotchy tattoos, outdated ponytail

and scruffy moustache, he was so

obviously an ex-con that he may as well

have had an ID number branded on his

forehead.

One of four children, he’d grown up

in downtown Kansas City in a broken

home with an abusive stepfather. When

he was only six, he fired a rifle shot that

wounded his father.

Always a truant and runaway, he

dropped out of school altogether when

“and kept trying to get me up to his

apartment. I thought he was just a big

flirt, and never wanted to get involved.

But he used to tell me all the details of

his sexual conquests. He seemed like

a really nice guy, though he did have a

strange side.”

She was right. But what Davis

hadn’t revealed was that most of the

women who visited his bed were

methamphetamine addicts, lured there

in sex-for-drug deals.

They were desperate and vulnerable

• just how Davis liked his women. He
  could make them do exactly what he

“He said he wanted

me to be a serial killer

with him. He wanted

me to help him kill

women and get rid

of their bodies. He

got excited when

he explained that

we would suffocate

the victims during

three-way sex, which

he would video

for future viewing

pleasure. I got the

heck out of there”

vile PAiR videoed thei

victims’ muRde

vile PAiR videoed thei

victims’ muRde

Case report by

Francesca Morrison

he was 10, and flopped with older

friends or “ran the streets.” From 13 to

17, he spent most of his time in juvenile

institutions.

His mother couldn’t control him,

so the state sent him away for a string

of crimes and violations, including

theft and drugs. He was released just

before his 18th birthday, and started a

series of short-term jobs: cook, builder,

car washer, garage attendant, factory

worker, truck stop cleaner.

But something always went wrong.

He didn’t like working nights; his boss

was unreasonable; the commute was too

boring. The cycle began again, and he

was convicted in 1984 of burglary and

receiving stolen property.

In return for grassing a friend, he got

a reduced sentence, but had to spend it

in protective confinement as the snitch

made him a marked man behind bars.

He was paroled two years later, but

freedom was fleeting. In October 1987

he denied raping and sodomising a

woman at knifepoint, saying the sex was

consensual. But the jury disagreed, and

he was sentenced to 25 years.

When he came up for parole in 2005,

Davis claimed he’d found God and

changed his ways. The board believed

him and he was released onto the streets

of Kansas City.

For the first nine months, he did

everything required of him under

parole: went to work, stayed out of bars,

attended drug abuse and sex offender

counselling, reported to his parole

officer, registered new addresses.

On the surface, he seemed cocky and

self-assured, and hit on nearly every

woman he met – according to one of his

neighbours.

“He bragged he still had it,” she said,