Psychic’s Foreboding Turned All Too Personal

For years, Linda Davis, a self-professed psychic known professionally as Kelly Roberts, has been sought out by law enforcement agencies as far away as Kansas to help investigate kidnapings and homicides.

Several months ago, the Escondido woman detected something amiss in her own marriage of 14 years and purchased a handgun, which she carried under her belt.

The personality of her husband, James, had been changing rapidly over the past year, she said. Moreover, something inside her felt ominous.

Like He Was Chasing an Animal

On Sunday, Davis fired the gun for the first time, killing her husband as he attacked her with a baseball bat moments after the two discussed getting a divorce.

“I’ve seen every expression on Jimmy’s face over the course of 14 years, and the expression I saw on his face Sunday was of a totally different person,” Davis said Wednesday. “He looked like he was chasing down an animal he was trying to club to death. I don’t know what was in that body, but the man I married was gone.”

Escondido police say they won’t seek a murder complaint against Davis, 31. Their own investigation confirms the woman’s statements to police that she killed her husband, 36, in self-defense after he struck her on the head and face with the bat, Sgt. Dan Starr said.

“We’ll release all the information we have to the district attorney’s office, probably next week, but we’re not going to be pushing for prosecution,” Starr said.

Davis said she first sensed a growing agitation in her husband last spring, which she feared would grow violent, and blamed it on stress at work. He was an outside sales representative for an automobile parts manufacturer.

“I remember thinking to myself that something was going to trigger him,” she said. “I didn’t take the word trigger literally, though.”

Psychiatric Observation

On June 4, she said, her husband grabbed her own revolver and trained it on her for 20 minutes. He finally relinquished the gun, police were called, and he was admitted to the psychiatric unit at Palomar Medical Center for a week of observation, police said.

After that incident, she purchased a .38-caliber, semiautomatic handgun that she kept with her by day and under her pillow at night. The two agreed to live in separate bedrooms in the family home in the 2000 block of Fuerte Lane, she said.

She said she put props on her side of the bedroom door “so, if he came in at night, I’d hear him. But I wanted the door open a little so I could hear the kids”--their daughters, ages 7 and 9.

“Then I sensed something more about two weeks ago, but I simply didn’t want to believe it,” she said. “I didn’t follow my own advice I give others. You’re not supposed to rationalize what psychic feelings you get, or talk yourself out of them, but I did. I didn’t react to my own gut feeling that something was going to happen. But I told two or three friends that I thought he was going to snap.”

Davis said she has since come to believe that her husband was on drugs. She said he had been acting edgy and had experienced a dramatic, 30-pound weight loss that brought him down to a still-hefty 230 pounds for his 6-foot-1 frame.

“We hadn’t talked about divorce until Sunday--and then he was the one who brought it up,” she said. “He said, ‘We better get off the pot and file for divorce.’ When I said, ‘OK,’ that’s when it must have registered with him that there wouldn’t be a reconciliation.

“I asked him to please check into a motel room for a couple of days so nothing would get violent, or to let me take the kids to my sister’s. But he assured me that he wouldn’t get violent. He said, ‘The last thing I’d do is hurt you or the kids.’ Then he told the kids to get ready to go to the park.

“I was sitting down in a chair and the next thing I knew, he whacked me over the head with the bat. He came up over me from behind. The first blow should have killed me, and I started to black out, but I knew if I did, I’d be dead and the kids would be, too.

“I got out of the chair and reached for my gun. He had the look on his face like he was angry that he didn’t kill me and that he’d have to chase me down. He came swinging after me, like with a sickle going through a wheat field.

“I screamed for the girls so maybe they’d try to hide. I don’t remember what happened next--I only remember hearing four shots--but I shot at him and we both went down on the floor.”

The entire incident was over in 10 seconds, Davis estimated. One of her daughters called 911 but hung up, and a neighbor who heard the shots called as well. It wasn’t until paramedics arrived that she realized she had shot herself in the right leg.

Her husband took five bullets to his chest and arm, and died an hour later at Palomar Medical Center. Davis suffered the blow to her head--but no fracture--as well as blows to her face, police said.

Looking for an Even Keel

She spent the night at the hospital, and checked in the next day at a North County motel, where she is now recuperating.

“Now I’m simply trying to get our lives back on an even keel,” she said. “I refuse to have my life torn apart any further than it’s already been.”

Investigators from several police departments told The Times in April--for a story about Davis at that time--that she had offered sometimes invaluable assistance in their investigations.

Escondido Detective Ron Israel recalled how he had used Davis’ services to help track a runaway across the country. Davis’ advice on where to look hit the mark every time as the youth zigzagged his way to Florida.

“I’ve been doing this work for 17 years,” Israel said at the time, “and let’s say that, in a business where you’re skeptical about everything and everyone, I’m less skeptical about her.”

Homicide detectives in Sedgwick County, Kan., used Davis’ help by telephone to assist in a murder investigation there. “She came up with information and told us a few things that really surprised me,” said Detective Jerry Byerly of the Sheriff’s Department there. “She gave us some very interesting and somewhat useful information--some things that I cannot disregard.

“A lot of these kinds of people are flaky,” Byerly said at the time. “But she’s no flake.”

San Diego County sheriff’s Sgt. Bill Southwell said earlier this year: “She impressed us with her genuine concern about the people in (a kidnaping) case. She said she didn’t want any headlines, but just wanted to help.”

In the two days before Sunday’s shooting, Davis was being interviewed by a reporter for Paramount Television for an upcoming segment on the new syndicated news magazine show, “Hard Copy.”

This week she had been scheduled to travel with the production crew to the Midwest to continue the interview at the scene of one of her investigations, “Hard Copy” reporter Bradley Chamberlin said.