TORONTO — Even now, almost 30 years later, Richard and Carol Davies grasp for the words to explain how they felt when a Florida jury declared their teenaged son guilty of first-degree murder.
"I lost it. I could not believe it. Oh, my dear boy," the 73-year-old mother said in a recent interview, fighting back tears. "I'm a mom. I never thought I'd ever get over it. I don't."
The shock, the heartache, the traumatic memories at the prospect their son, William Russell (Russ) Davies, was facing the very real threat of execution is barely diminished by the passage of decades that have yielded few answers.
Outside court that March day in 1988, his father recalls the helicopter waiting in anticipation of flying his son to a death-row date with the electric chair.
"I vividly remember walking out of the courthouse as the helicopter was taking off right after Russell's sentence," Richard Davies, 72, says. "We watched the helicopter take off from the helipad."
His son, however, was not aboard. He had been spared a death sentence following a trial that lasted about seven hours. Instead, he was on his way to the Union Correctional Institution, dubbed "The Rock," to begin serving a life sentence. The clothes his mother had taken down in anticipation of his release went unused.
Now 48, Russell Davies was raised in Richmond Hill, Ont., the couple's third of four sons. He was a quiet, smart kid, "a perfectionist like his dad," his mother says. At the time, his father was a school music teacher by day, a university student in the evenings. His mother drove a school bus. Church was mandatory on Sundays. Church camps in summer.
The boy was close to his maternal grandparents, and when his grandmother died in 1980, things started to unravel. He went to pieces when they closed the casket, his mother says. He became increasingly resentful, rebellious. Started smoking and skipping school.
"I wasn't an overly loving parent. I was a disciplinarian in home. I was tough," Richard Davies says as he sits on his living room couch in Stouffville, Ont. "I'm guilty, in my mind, of not the greatest parenting."
After a stint at a special school and minor scrapes with the law, the teen dropped out in Grade 10, went to work at a local Tim Hortons, then disappeared. He had stolen his boss's car and his mother's credit card, and made his way to Daytona Beach, Fla.
The first clue something was amiss came when Richard Davies received a call from a judge in Florida asking for his son's exact birth date.
What the parents didn't know was that their son had fallen in with "The Family" — an older rougher group — and would soon find himself charged along with five other members with the murder of one of their own. The first they heard was when he called — about a year after his arrest.
"He says: 'Mom, I'm in jail.' I said, 'What?' 'Yeah.' 'What are you in jail for?' 'They charged me with murder'," Carol Davies says.
By the time they got down to Daytona Beach for the trial, his co-accused had all struck plea agreements that would see them spend no more than two years behind bars. Russell Davies, barely 18 at the time of the killing in June 1986, was left to face a first-degree murder charge based largely on the evidence of one of the others — a man who testified he was drunk and urinating out the window of a car when he witnessed the shooting by moonlight.
"We heard the facts. We had spoken with Russell and heard his account, and just couldn't believe that he would be found guilty of murder," Richard Davies says. "We were dumbfounded."
Not a man prone to showing his feelings, the father nevertheless becomes emotional and his hand taps the couch rhythmically as he recounts returning to Canada to put an end to his promising career.
"I left teaching because of the shame involved," he says, his voice quivering.
He admits he essentially wrote off his son for a dozen years, but it's different now, he says without hesitation.
"He's changed his life and turned it around."
The ailing parents find it increasingly difficult to get down to Florida to visit their prisoner son — something they used to do every year. What little hope they have of seeing him rests with his transfer back to Canada, but Florida has refused to let him leave.
Carol Davies still struggles to come to terms with how her world shattered, saying it took years before she found some peace.
"We don't understand any of it. I don't think about it any more. It really took me down," she says. "Nobody can know what you feel like. You have to bury it."
