Opinion ID: 2567349
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Disappearance of John Davies

Text: In November 1981, defendant, then 21 years old, was a close friend of the Davies family, who lived in Belmont. He often visited the Davies residence and spent time with 17-year-old Mark Davies and his 15-year-old brother John. On the morning of Sunday, November 8, 1981, James Davies called the police to report his son John missing. Davies and his wife, Joan, had returned home around 1:30 a.m. and had noticed nothing amiss. Joan had found John missing when she opened his bedroom door sometime after 8:30 a.m. John had laid out his church clothes and had left behind all his possessions, including his only pair of shoes. He usually informed his parents of his whereabouts and, according to them, was not the sort of child who would be expected to run away. James and Joan Davies unsuccessfully made extensive efforts to locate John for several years after he disappeared. Soon after the disappearance, James Davies called defendant to come over and help post flyers describing John. Defendant came over on the Wednesday or Thursday after the Sunday John was reported missing, and left with some flyers. He never visited the Davies family again. Mark Davies testified that before John disappeared, defendant would come by the Davies residence in his white Honda automobile. If he came to visit in the evening, he would throw rocks at Mark's window so Mark could sneak out of the house without his parents' knowledge. They would drive to the Hassler Hospital site off Woodside Road and Highway 280 to explore the partially abandoned grounds. Mark last saw his brother John on Saturday, November 7, about 10:30 p.m., when Mark went to bed. Mark never heard from defendant after John's disappearance. Joan Davies testified that when defendant visited her sons, they would often sit in defendant's car listening to music. Initially, police theorized John had run away. Belmont Police Detective Jerrold Whaley contacted defendant in mid-1982, and defendant told him where John liked to hang out. Because the Davies family reported that defendant was John's closest friend, Whaley contacted defendant often. By September 1984 the police were treating the disappearance as a possible kidnapping and had contacted the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for assistance. On December 4, 1984, Whaley and FBI Agent Robert Deklinski twice interviewed defendant at his residence near Sacramento. In the first interview, defendant denied seeing John on Saturday, November 7, 1981, claiming he did not leave his parents' home that evening, and denied ever throwing rocks to summon Mark or John and sitting in his car listening to music with John. In the second interview, Whaley and Deklinski probed the discrepancies between the Davies family members' and defendant's accounts; defendant was emphatic that he had neither thrown rocks at the boys' bedroom windows nor listened to music with John in his car. Defendant also denied he had ever traveled with John to a hangout he called the morgue, evidently the Hassler Hospital grounds.