Wife-Stabbing Blamed on a Cancer Medication : Ex-Judge Rebuilds His Life After the 1969 Attack That Temporarily Shattered His Family

When he was appointed to the Superior Court bench in 1967 by then-Gov. Ronald Reagan, Lloyd Davis had four children, ages 11 to 15, and a socialite wife. The family lived in a roomy house on a shady street. All that Davis had to look forward to, it seemed, was prominence and increasing good fortune.

His fall came on Oct. 26, 1969.

“South Pasadena Judge Jailed in Stabbing,” read the headline in the Pasadena Star-News. Beneath the word stabbing was a photograph of the 9-inch kitchen knife, with bent tip, with which Davis had attacked his then 51-year-old wife in the kitchen of their home while their children played upstairs. Davis’ wife was hospitalized for a week with a collapsed lung; she eventually recovered. Davis, charged with felony assault with intent to commit murder, was acquitted by reason of insanity.

He Reopened Topic

There followed a number of years during which Davis would not talk about the episode that temporarily shattered his family; and in hopes that many people have forgotten, his wife still prefers not to have her name used in conjunction with the incident. But Lloyd Davis recently reopened the topic because he said he wants to inform people about the role an adverse drug reaction can have in creating mental imbalance.

Davis, who appears extremely fit for his 70 years, is convinced that the stabbing and his subsequent psychotic episode were triggered largely by an idiosyncratic reaction to 5-fluorouracil, a topical medication commonly prescribed for pre-cancerous skin conditions. The drug, which is also administered internally for colon and rectal cancer, is one of the most common chemotherapeutic agents in use today, according to William Quan, a clinical oncology pharmacist at UCLA’s Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Medicine, Behavior Link

“To our knowledge we’re unaware of reports of this type of adverse reaction being associated with 5-fluorouracil,” said Martin Hirsch, a spokesman for Hoffmann-La Roche Inc. which manufactured the medication. “The only report of this kind was Lloyd F. Davis’.”

In the years following the stabbing, Davis began to examine the suspected link between the medicine and his erratic behavior. In the 21 years he had spent in the county counsel’s office before being appointed judge, Davis had defended many malpractice cases and so had learned how to research medical matters.

Applying this skill to his own case, Davis found that most of the major medical journals, as well as many periodicals that report on advances in neurology and chemotherapy, had made mention of neurotoxic reactions to fluorouracil. Symptoms include irritability, confusion and cerebellar ataxia, which pharmacist Quan defined as “lack of coordination of the brain.”

According to the medical literature and doctors contacted by The Times, neurological reactions to this particular medication are rare and usually mild. There is no absolute evidence linking Davis’ knife attack with use of the medication. At least one doctor, neuropsychiatrist Robert Sedgwick, said he remains unconvinced that a neurotoxic reaction was to blame. Sedgwick, who examined Davis soon after the assault, said that someone suffering from a neurotoxic reaction does not often take “directed, goal-specific” action such as stabbing someone. Davis’ claim could be “a defense mechanism, removing the responsibility from him to the drug,” Sedgwick said.

Violent Reaction Possible

Although he could not conjecture about the specific effects of fluorouracil on Davis, David Gorelick, assistant professor of psychiatry at UCLA School of Medicine, said that it is possible for topical substances to cause neurotoxic reactions in some people and that under the influence of the medication such a person could become “disinhibited” to the point where he would be capable of violence.

Davis believes his story should serve as a suggestion that doctors rule out physiological causes of mental illness before turning to psychological roots. He also wants users of medication who may experience bizarre reactions to consider that the cure can sometimes be worse than the sickness, he said.

A member of the Sierra Club for 50 years, Davis was a hiker, climber and ski-mountaineer in the days before sun screen.

When Davis, a 1939 graduate of Stanford University Law School, was in his 50s, the effects of all that high-altitude sun began to show on his face and ears. He developed actinic keratoses, pre-cancerous patches of skin. His dermatologist prescribed a preparation containing 5-fluorouracil, to be applied all over Davis’ face daily.

“The first week nothing much happened,” Davis said during an interview in his Wilshire-area law office. “The second week it looked like I had a bad case of sunburn. The third week my face was broken out and bleeding.” Before going to work each day, he camouflaged the unsightly skin as best he could with an opaque sun screen.

Increasingly Confused

“During that last week I became increasingly confused and irritable,” he said. Davis remembers going to an auto show with his wife one evening and becoming upset because he couldn’t find the exhibit he was interested in. In the courtroom, he would open a file and be unable to decipher its contents, he said.

Once Davis made the connection that perhaps it was the medication that was causing him to be agitated, he stopped applying it, he said. That was on a Saturday. On Sunday, he went for a hike in the local mountains with his wife and children. Davis said he became irate that day at minor things that wouldn’t ordinarily upset him--such as looking for a parking place.

By Sunday dinner, Davis said, he was behaving in an erratic, belligerent manner. The newspapers would later report that neighbors called the police when they heard a noisy argument at the Davis home. In the dispute, the judge had slapped his daughter because she disobeyed his request that she not join the Roman Catholic church until she turned 21.

Davis said his wife and he had argued from time to time in the past. “I’d probably slapped her once or twice when she’d get hysterical; she’d hauled off and slugged me a few times, too.”

However, Davis said he was not aware of any animosity toward his wife that Sunday evening. The police had gone; peace had returned to the household and the children had gone to their rooms upstairs. Davis was washing the dinner dishes when his wife came up behind him. He picked up a 9-inch knife that had been used to carve roast beef and stabbed her in the upper right back.

Davis later testified that he had had three drinks of Scotch that evening and that he was drinking to ease the pain of skin cancer. His wife testified that he was not intoxicated. Davis said he did not recall the actual stabbing and remembered only standing in front of his house (his wife had run outside when she was stabbed) where he saw his wife lying on the grass, with a red stain on her blouse.

‘I Had a Knife in My Hand’

“Gradually it dawned on me that I had a knife in my hand and that I must have injured her with that knife,” he said under questioning by his attorney. “I think I said, ‘My God, what have I done? No, no, no.’ In horror I threw the knife away from me.”

In the weeks following the attack, Davis descended into a psychotic state, brought on, he said, by the trauma of viciously attacking his wife, as well as the prospect of the trial and censure by his friends and colleagues. (Psychiatrist Sedgwick said it is not uncommon for psychosis to be triggered by a traumatic event.)

Davis wound up on the psychiatric ward at St. Vincent’s hospital where electroshock treatments and medication soon brought him out of the psychotic state. Because he was so disoriented at the time, Davis said he made only a feeble case for the argument that the skin cancer medication could have triggered his violent outburst. He speculated that since people with paranoid delusions often erroneously believe that they’ve been poisoned, his claims might have sounded purely delusional to doctors.

A judge brought in from San Diego to hear the case (a local judge would likely have been biased due to personal acquaintance with Davis) committed Davis to Atascadero State Hospital, a facility for the criminally insane about 20 miles north of San Luis Obispo. Davis said he was apprehensive for his own safety: “I was going to be up there with 1,800 other patients, all of whom had been sent there by a judge.”

Davis said the court made inquiries at the hospital to assure that he would not be sent to a ward that housed anyone he himself had committed to the facility.

Inmates Sought His Help

“The first couple weeks I was pretty darned frightened,” he remembered. But Davis soon discovered that he was one of the more popular inmates since most everyone there was looking for a legal loophole that would get him out of the place. Davis dispensed informal legal advice, volunteered to help research psychological problems in the hospital library and played bridge with sex offenders and other violent criminals.

When he was released from Atascadero six months later, “It was just a question of facing up to the world, as it were,” Davis said. “Over a period of time, people forgot or accepted (the stabbing and subsequent events).”

Davis said the ordeal gave him “a greater understanding of how people can malfunction mentally and more acceptance of eccentricities in other people.” He said he also gained insight into the mental health system from an angle that a judge normally would never experience--for instance, Davis said, “the problem of trying to distinguish who needs to be restrained (in a facility like Atascadero) and who doesn’t.”

It would be years before Davis’ wife felt comfortable having the former judge live in the family home again. For several years, Davis visited with his wife and children during the day, returning to his own apartment at night.

If Davis had been convicted of a felony, he automatically would have been removed from the bench. As it was, he was acquitted of the crime, but he had been forced to apply for disability retirement because of his emotional state.

Once he had recovered, he appealed to the Commission on Judicial Performance, which has the power to restore to capacity a judge who has been put on disability retirement. If his request had been granted, Davis would have been on call to substitute as a judge around the state.

Doctor Says He Recovered

Davis’ doctor, Sedgwick, wrote to the commission that in his opinion, Davis had recovered from his mental illness: “He (Davis) is presently as well-qualified to be a judge as he was when he was on the bench in the first instance.”

Davis said the commission was “horrified” at the thought of reinstating a judge who had assaulted his wife during a bout of mental illness. “If I’d had a heart attack or a stroke, they’d put me right back to work,” he said.

He said he continued to “pester” the commission with applications until 1980 when he turned 65 and the board was no longer compelled to hear his case. Jack Frankel, who is director and chief counsel for the commission, would not comment on why the commission had denied Davis’ repeated applications for restoration to capacity.

From 1971 until 1980, Davis did legal research without pay. Because he was receiving disability income, he could not lawfully charge for his services. In 1980, a new ruling said that judges on disability could practice law for profit, and Davis once again collected fees for his work as an attorney as well as disability and a pension.

Today, Davis practices business and family law in his office four days a week, reserving Wednesdays for hikes with the Sierra Club. He’s a member of the “100 Peaks” section of the club in which climbers attempt to scale 270 designated peaks in Southern California higher than 5,000 feet. Davis has conquered 215 of the peaks.

Grows Orchids

His other hobbies are growing orchids and tinkering with his 1967 Porsche, which has 320,000 miles on the odometer.

Davis maintains contact with his four children, whom he says were initially “quite shaken up” by the stabbing. One son, a nurse, lives at home with Davis and his wife. There’s a married daughter who’s a civil engineer living in Idaho. Another daughter is in business school in Baltimore, and the second son is a mechanical engineer with a public utilities company in Northern California.

Davis’ sister, Diane Cochran of Carlsbad, said that her brother’s family appears to have recovered from the events of 1969. “It (Davis’ breakdown) was a momentary aberration. He’d never been like that before, and he won’t be like that again,” she said. “People have to understand that things like that can happen in a flash, like an automobile accident.”