Lloyd Davis, 86; Former Judge Rebuilt Life After Stabbing Wife

Former Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Lloyd Davis, who openly discussed stabbing his wife during a drug-induced psychotic breakdown to warn people about adverse reactions to prescription drugs, has died. He was 86.

Davis died peacefully of natural causes Dec. 22 at his home in South Pasadena.

The episode that vastly changed his life and rising legal career occurred Oct. 26, 1969, two years after then-Gov. Ronald Reagan appointed him to the bench.

A family quarrel at the Davis home that Sunday evening escalated, prompting a call to police. Davis had slapped his 16-year-old daughter because she disobeyed his edict not to attend the Roman Catholic Church until she turned 21.

But peace was restored and the police left. Davis and his wife, Mary Troja Davis, were doing the dinner dishes when he picked up a 9-inch butcher knife that had been used to carve roast beef and stabbed her in the lower back as she ran from him.

“Well, I think I just went off my rocker,” Davis testified at his trial in April 1970 on charges of felony assault to commit murder.

He said he remembered nothing between being at the sink washing dishes and standing in front of the house with his wife lying on the grass, a red spot on her blouse.

“Gradually it dawned on me,” he testified under questioning by his prominent defense attorney, Grant B. Cooper, who had defended Sirhan Sirhan on charges of assassinating Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, “that I had a knife in my hand and that I must have injured her with that knife. . . . I think I said, ‘My God, what have I done? No, no, no!’ In horror I threw the knife away from me.”

Davis, who spent nearly a year in psychiatric facilities, much of the time under judicial order, was acquitted by a jury May 1, 1970, by reason of insanity.

His wife spent a week in the hospital with a collapsed lung but recovered. She supported her husband during his trial, often driving him to court. After his release he spent days at the South Pasadena home where the stabbing occurred, but lived for a few years in a separate apartment. Eventually he moved back to the home.

Davis left the bench voluntarily in 1970 on disability. After his recovery he repeatedly petitioned to resume judicial duties but was never reinstated. Until state law changed, enabling him to earn money at the same time as he was collecting disability, he did legal research without pay. In 1980 he again began taking paying clients in business and family law cases.

At the time of his arrest and trial, Davis and his lawyers mentioned only one drug--alcohol--conceding that he had consumed three scotches on the evening of the stabbing to ease his pain from skin cancer. His wife testified that he was not inebriated.

But a decade and a half later, saying he wanted to alert others to a potential problem, Davis attributed his months-long psychotic episode to an idiosyncratic reaction to 5-fluorouracil, a drug he applied topically for precancerous skin conditions. (The common chemotherapy drug is also taken internally for colon and rectal cancer.)

Davis, a member of the Stanford University ski team in college, had spent his life exposed to high-altitude sunshine as a skier, backpacker and Sierra Club hiking leader. By his early 50s, his face and ears had begun to develop actinic keratoses, or precancerous patches of skin.

In a lengthy interview with The Times in 1986, Davis said his dermatologist prescribed a preparation containing 5-fluorouracil to be applied to his face daily. Davis said the medication gradually caused his skin to break out and bleed, and made him feel “confused and irritable.”

Alarmed by the physical and emotional reaction he associated with the drug, he said, he stopped taking it Oct. 25, 1969. The family squabble and stabbing occurred the next day.

Asked why he did not mention the assumed drug reaction in his defense, Davis said in 1986 that he was too disoriented to do so at the time of the 1970 trial. He said he speculated that since people with paranoid delusions often erroneously believe that they have been poisoned, his claims might have sounded purely delusional to doctors and the court.

Psychiatrists who examined Davis in the months after the stabbing said he demonstrated irrational fears about his safety and stopped eating because he was certain his alimentary canal was blocked. He lost more than 30 pounds and had to be fed intravenously.

Decades after the breakdown and attack, Davis told The Times that the ordeal gave him “a greater understanding of how people can malfunction mentally.”

He said he wanted to speak out about the painful experience to warn others that prescription drugs can dangerously alter mental and emotional behavior.

Born in Los Angeles, Davis graduated from Beverly Hills High School and earned his bachelor’s and law degrees at Stanford. He was a naval aviator during World War II and retired from the Naval Reserve as a lieutenant commander.

He was an assistant county counsel for 21 years, defending Los Angeles County in various malpractice suits and notably in the numerous suits stemming from the historic Portuguese Bend landslides on the Palos Verdes Peninsula.

In addition to his decades of leadership in the Sierra Club, Davis was an avid grower of orchids and was active in the San Gabriel Valley Cymbidium Society. He was a member of the Oneonta Club and Caltech Associates and served as treasurer of the South Pasadena Republican Assembly.

He is survived by his wife of 48 years; two daughters, Nancy Gordon and Patricia Carney; two sons, John and Robert Davis; one sister, Diane Hilton; and two grandsons.

Services are private. The family has asked that any memorial donations be made to the donor’s favorite charity.