Streetfighter in a suit

By Bill Theobald, Quad-City Times | Thursday, August 02, 2007

EDITOR'S NOTE: This story was published in August 1984 in advance of James Klindt's murder trial. The reporter, Bill Theobald, now works for Gannett News Service.

 

Behind the law degree, behind the three-piece suit, behind the salt and pepper beard are the eyes -- the eyes that give him away.

    When things are calm so are they; when something goes wrong, they narrow and flash.

    Those steely eyes are what show Scott County Attorney William Davis for what he really is and always will be -- a city kid from Detroit, a streetfighter in a suit.

    And now Davis faces the biggest battle of his career -- trying to convice a jury that Davenport chiropractor James Klindt killed his wife, Joyce, and cut up her body.

    At 43, Bill Davis ("William" is for his office door and his stationary) comes to the task by a long, sometimes bumpy route that started in a blue-collar neighborhood in a Detroit suburb.

    His was a working man's neighborhood of tenements above stores, a car body factory, warehouses, taverns, pool halls and a bookie named "Jimmy the Banana-man."

    Davis' father was a produce wholesaler, selling avocados, figs and dates by the carload to large chain stores. Davis says with pride that his dad "lied like hell" to get the job and then sold the pants off everybody else.

    Although his mother was a licensed beautician, she stayed home to take care of her eight children.

    Child number three, Billy, always wanted to be a lawyer. The romance attracted him and so did being able to wear a suit.

    "In my neighborhood, anyone who got to wear a suit to work was someone," Davis says.

    That was so important Davis says, that a milkman in the neighborhood used to go to work in a suit and take his uniform with him in a briefcase. "I don't think very many people knew he was a milkman."

    Davis attended Catholic schools and excelled in basketball, being named second team all-city and second team all-state one year in high school.

    Still fairly trim, Davis at 5'71/2" doesn't look to be the athletic type -- although he regularly spent his lunch hours at the downtown Davenport Y until preparations for the Klindt case cut too deeply into his time.

    Academically, he was an honor student in high school until the kids he ran around with found out and his grades bowed to peer pressure to the point that he had to take an entrance test to get into a Detroit community college.

    He took night classes, working during the day at odd jobs such as selling french fries to restaurants. It was during this time that Davis met his first lawyers -- in a pool hall.

    Eventually, he decided to take a partial basketball scholarship to attend Grand View College in Des Moines. That might sound like a strange place for a Detroit kid to go, but Davis' parents both grew up in Iowa.

    After a few years at Grand View, he entered Drake University, got married, worked a variety of jobs for a soft drink company and graduated in 1966.

    After working for a year as a milkman, he applied for admission to Drake University Law School. He did very well on his law school test, but his grades weren't high enough and he was turned down. He talked to school officials, they changed their minds, and when he graduated in 1970, he received the award as the top student in his class.

    Before coming to Davenport in 1972 as an associate in a law firm, Davis worked in the Iowa State Insurance Department and the Polk County Attorney's office and was an unsuccessful candidate for the Des Moines City Council.

    His next shot at political office came in 1978 when he ran as a Democrat for Scott County Attorney.

    His opponent was incumbent Elizabeth Shaw and most observers didn't think Davis had a chance. But he ran an aggressive campaign, repeatedly attacking his opponent at press conferences purposely called on Fridays because Davis figured that news was sparse at the end of the week and he might get better exposure.

    He won the office in an upset, promising that he would be "a prosecutor who prosecuted."

    He prosecuted all right -- and he lost.

    In the first big case he tried, Davis went up against former county attorney Ned Wehr in a Des Moines courtroom. Dwight Heninger, charged in the shooting death of Palmer College of Chiropractic student William Saloky Jr. in Davenport, was acquitted.

    That loss still stings, but a series of recent successes have eased the pain and Davis won re-election to his second four-year term without opposition in 1982.

    Those successes have included the kidnapping and murder convictions of five people (known as the Locust Street Five) in the February 1981 slaying of Mark Webb at his Davenport apartment and the kidnapping of another man; the convictions of Albert Ware and his brother Daniel in the November 1982 slaying of Davenport bartender Eugene Tappa; and the first-degree murder conviction this March of Glendale More Jr in the slaying last August of his girlfriend Wauneita Townsend of Bettendorf.

    In the courtroom, Davis is a bulldog, given to fiery, fist-pounding closing arguments. His shrill closing in the Webb trial, during which he repeatedly referred to the defendants as "The Family," is widely known in legal circles.

    One defense attorney who tried a murder case against Davis says that he may carry the drama too far at times.

    But Davis says it's done with a purpose.

    "I try to be dramatic. I think occasionally things can be too dull in the courtroom and you have to wake jurors up and tell them, 'It's real life.'"

    Something of a wheeler-dealer, Davis has faced occasional criticism. His usual response to questions about how he handled some touchy situation is to fire back with something like, "If the people don't like the way I handle things, they can vote me out."

    Hard-driving in the courtroom, he is the same outside. He likes sporting events and drinking after work at a tavern in Davenport's East Village.

    Always a 60-hour-a-weeker, Davis has lived the Klindt case in between his regular duties as county attorney.

    During a recent family outing to a park, Davis brought files to read. He and his wife have three daughters, two of whom are still at home.

    Also in preparation for this trial, Davis has read "Fatal Visions," a best-selling book about a well-liked and highly respected doctor who was convicted in an entirely circumstantial case of killing his wife and two young children.

    He also has talked to several prosecutors who have tried murder cases in which no body or only traces of a body were found. And, he has talked to people who have tried cases against Klindt's attorney, Lawrence Scalise, and read a transcript of Scalise's questioning of prospective jurors in a recent murder case.

    In addition, he has hired Dr. James Hodges of Davenport as a consultant to help him during jury selection. Hodges conducts business classes at area colleges and has been involved in numerous labor negotiations.

    All that work is because, obviously, Davis wants to win.

    But there are other spoils as well.

    Davis is a politician through and through and this case is sure to draw statewide and perhaps even national publicity.

    "I think he realizes this could be a stepping stone for the Iowa Attorney General's office," one attorney said.

    The same attorney said he things Davis, the fighter, has an intensely personal stake in this one.

    "In some cases, Bill gets personally involved. He really decides he wants this guy. I think he's done that in this case."

    Ask him about these things and Davis doesn't really want to say much.

    But the fire in his eyes gives him away.