Number Thirteen

I thought I could escape but apparently the internet is much more vast and knowledgeable then I thought. My friend that my space has found for me, has my same name except her middle name is Elizabeth. (Megan's (my daughter) middle name) She lives in Washington State and found this she is 15.

This is how my life was shaken and not stirred:

It was early May and Audrey Geisler sat alone on a wooden bench, shaking as she watched her fiancé being led into a Providence courtroom.

He wore an orange jumpsuit and leg shackles and said little as a judge arraigned him on charges of killing 8-year-old Savannah Smith, their neighbor in Woonsocket.

But it wasn't the cuffs or the horror of the crime that Geisler remembered noticing. It was the look on his face.

"It didn't look like him at all. He looked distant and in his eyes, he wasn't there. He was totally and completely not there," she remembers thinking.

More than 20 miles away in Tiverton, Patricia Baesemann turned on the television and unexpectedly caught the same courtroom footage, a site that caused her to freeze in uneasy familiarity. There on the evening news was Joshua Davis, her first love and best friend from high school.

She, too, noticed that faraway look on his face. But unlike Geisler, it didn't surprise her. As a teenager, Baesemann called it "his wide-eyed look" and it had scared her.

Now, six years later, she saw it again. It still scared her.

The police and prosecutors say Davis picked up Savannah Smith at a park in the neighborhood where they both lived. Hours later, detectives found Savannah's body in a wooded area of Cranston.

Friday, Davis, 21, who has been held at the Adult Correctional Institutions since his May 7 arrest, was indicted by a Providence grand jury on one count of murder, one count of first-degree child molestation and one count of kidnapping a minor.

FOR GEISLER and Davis, teenage romance started at Domino's Pizza in Warwick, where Geisler worked as a delivery girl. Occasionally, Davis would walk by and stop in to see Geisler, who also attended Pilgrim High School, as she headed out with a stack of pizzas. At first, Geisler said she paid little attention to the "handsome guy with the red hair. " But after a while, she said she started looking for excuses to go outside in the hope of seeing him.

"He'd come and he'd hug me and he smelled so wonderful and he was always so nicely dressed," Geisler, 22, recalled in one of several phone interviews.

The two began dating in October 2002. By then, Davis had dropped out of Pilgrim and was working odd jobs in the area. Geisler, an honors student, was juggling school with her job.

Seven months later, Davis proposed -- the first of several times he would do so over the next few years. Geisler gave birth to their first child, Megan, last year.

Davis, she said, struggled with depression a lot during their relationship and used drugs, but has never been violent toward her or their daughter.

In fact, when Geisler became pregnant last year, she said, Davis was worried about the idea of being responsible for a child, or even having to hold the baby. Geisler convinced Davis to accompany her to Lamaze class and he seemed to relax a little.

In October, he stayed with Geisler during 36 hours of labor. "I was in so much pain, but he just kept holding me and looking at me," she recalled.

After the baby's birth, money was tight and Davis was working long hours at Sterling Movers in Cranston to try to make ends meet. The couple began fighting incessantly and both were always tired.

In February, they moved from Warwick to an apartment on Coe Street in Woonsocket, where the rent was cheaper and the landlord let them keep their cat and dog. Soon, Geisler learned she was pregnant with their second child.

It was during that time that the couple grew friendly with the neighbors across the street -- David Smith and his children. The families often gathered in the street between their houses, where Smith and Davis would sip beer and the girls would lick powdered sugar off their hands from the German bonbons Geisler treated them to.

The couple, she said, had settled in to their new home.

PATRICIA BAESEMANN remembers a different side of the boy she, too, loved.

Baesemann met Davis when the two were just 10. Back then, she was Patricia Morgan and living near Davis in Warwick. Several years later, in the awkward years of early adolescence, they began dating.

It was a relationship crafted from loneliness. Baesemann had her own share of family troubles and found herself as isolated as Davis, she said. So they did what any teenagers do, they started spending all their time together, mostly at his family's house on West Shore Road.

Davis loved his grandmother dearly, Baesemann said, but his relationship with his mother was rocky.

It wasn't long before Baesemann started seeing a temper in Davis. It started at school. He didn't have many friends there, but he'd pick a fight with anyone he could find. Eventually, he started picking on her.

"The big thing was he would take it out on himself; he'd punch a wall, he'd punch a tree, he'd punch anything he could get his hands on. There was one time he punched a cement wall and wiped the blood on me and said, 'This is what you do to me,' " Baesemann said.

The anger was always accompanied by a look in his eyes. Baesemann called it "that wide-eyed look" and it scared her.

During the bad times, she'd try to calm Davis with presents -- stuffed animals and fake flowers, anything she could find to let him know she cared. But by the time both were in their mid-teens, Davis' behavior had grown worse.

Baesemann tried on several occasions to break up with him, but the result was always the same, she said. Davis would hear the news and go ballistic, screaming and hitting things and often telling her if she went through with it, he'd kill himself. One time, he got so distraught, he drank antifreeze as Baesemann watched.

She panicked and called the police, who told her that Davis was depressed and sent him for a psychiatric evaluation, she said.

But Baesemann said none of those incidents compared with the one that occurred the day when they were about 15 or 16. As Baesemann remembers it, they were walking home from the school bus and they were fighting. Again, she tried to end it.

That afternoon, she and her mother returned from running errands and spotted Davis walking down the street near their house, smiling.

And they saw why. Perched on Baesemann's front porch were each of the stuffed animals she'd given Davis over the years. Their heads had been ripped off and the furry wounds were covered with red paint, like blood.

Baesemann said her mother called the police, but Baesemann said she begged them to leave Davis alone.

"He had a good heart, it's just there was so much going on in his life, I think he forgot how to use it," she said recently, wondering aloud what might have happened if she hadn't moved to South Kingstown, where her mother forbade her from contacting Davis.

For nearly two years, she didn't see the boy she called her first love. She heard he had gotten into drugs. But he'd also started dating a girl they knew from growing up, Audrey Geisler.

A member of Josh Davis' family, who have refused to speak publicly, said he may have used drugs, but like Geisler, insists he was never violent and never had any inappropriate contact with children.

EARLY IN THE afternoon on Sunday, May 7, a pregnant Geisler wasn't feeling well, so she sat outside with their daughter, Megan, in front of their house on Coe Street while Davis washed the car with help from the Smith girls across the street. They shared a bag of Doritos with Davis, who was having a couple of beers, and helped use the power sprayer.

She said she remembers thinking it was a little weird that he allowed them to help. She said Davis wasn't especially patient with children, except for his daughter.

"I wasn't feeling good, so Josh told me to go upstairs and to bring the baby with me because she was getting fussy," she remembers.

At around 5:30 p. m. , Geisler noticed Davis' car was gone. She was worried because he had been drinking.

When she realized he hadn't returned, Geisler said, she opened the window and spotted David Smith in the street. She asked whether he had seen Davis. Smith said he hadn't, but said he'd heard from his niece that Savannah had gotten in the car with Davis and gone somewhere.

Smith asked her to call Davis, and Geisler left a message for him with a friend in Warwick, who said Davis had just left his house.

Woonsocket police records show that Smith called the police at 7:19 p. m. to say he couldn't find his daughter.

At 8 p. m. , Davis returned home to a sea of police officers on his street. They were looking for Savannah and asked him whether he knew where she was.

When we went upstairs, "he was distracted looking," Geisler remembers. "I thought at first it was 'cause all the police were there. There were a lot of cops around looking and it was intimidating. It's usually a quiet street. I just figured he was a little tense 'cause all the people were there. "

Geisler was making hot dogs for dinner and realizing she'd run out of ketchup, she asked him to go out and pick some up. When he got in the car to leave, the police asked him not to, saying they needed him to make a statement, according to Geisler.

She disputes that Davis ever tried to run from the police, as David Smith, Savannah's father, told reporters when Davis was arrested. In fact, she said, when the police put Davis in the cruiser at what she says was approximately 10:30 that night, they didn't handcuff him. They told him "he needed to go down and fill out a statement on the computer so the whole thing was official," she said.

When Geisler learned of Savannah's fate the next morning -- prosecutors say the little girl was taken to Cranston where she was murdered and left in a wooded area -- she was angry, "absolutely angry and furious" at Davis.

But when her anger subsided, Geisler said the questions set in. "I honestly didn't think he could be capable of something like this. It's hard for me to believe because I know the other side of Josh, the loving and caring side. Some might have called him mentally abusive to me, but I never honestly believed he could hurt anyone," she said recently.

LESS THAN a week later, Geisler made the decision to take her daughter and leave Rhode Island to go live with her father in Colorado. She boarded a plane on June 5, Davis' 21st birthday.

That morning, she took Megan to the ACI to say goodbye. Davis, she said, wept and begged her not to take their child.

She left anyway. But distance, she said, hasn't brought many more answers in the two months since.

"I want to know how it is possible that my Joshua Davis, the man I have loved since I was 16, could have done something like this?"



Keep in mind the press took some liberties. Not many but some. He will be sentenced this June. As of today it has been two years.