The Murder of Louis Davidson, M.D.
(“House Call,” Forensic Files)
The presence of a beauty queen, even if it’s Miss Southern Delaware Bartlett Pear, gives a true-crime story the allure of a fairy tale gone awry.
The Forensic Files episode “House Call” is especially hard to resist because it centers on a genuine heavy hitter — a former Miss Jamaica pageant finalist.
Pretty face, awful crime. Denise Davidson probably thought police would never implicate someone like her when her estranged husband turned up dead.
But her poise and fluffy hair didn’t help when it really counted, and she ended up in prison. So for this week, I poked around to find out whether she’s still incarcerated — and if so, whether she’s enjoying madcap Orange Is the New Black-like adventures or it’s just plain dismal living behind razor wire.
But first, here’s a recap of “House Call” with additional information from internet research:
In 1982, Louis Davidson, M.D., married onetime swimsuit model Denise Davis, and they moved into a large house in Carrollwood, Florida, a few years later. Both of them originally came from Jamaica.
Messy divorce. The doctor was described as kind and generous and “so smart he was almost scary” by Kathy Molino, R.N., a former colleague who appeared on Forensic Files.
But it turned out that the Bayfront Medical Center’s head of emergency pediatric medicine hadn’t made a wise choice for a wife.
The marriage soured, and Denise filed for divorce in 1989. The doctor reportedly believed she was cheating on him. She alleged there was violence in the relationship, according to a Jamaican Gleaner story.
The couple reconciled, but at some point Denise acquired Miami night club owner Leo Cisneros as a boyfriend. He had suspected ties to Jamaican drug trafficking.
By 1994, Denise and Louis Davidson were headed for divorce court again and a custody fight over their 8-year-old daughter, Natalie. Denise reportedly wanted to take her back to Jamaica to live.
The doctor had found a girlfriend, a paramedic named Patricia Deninno, and the two were engaged. Denise, 34, and Cisneros, 32, were expecting a baby together and also planned to get married.
Outsourced killers. But Denise and her new man wanted to avoid a dispute over Natalie and collect a life insurance payout of more than $400,000 by taking the doctor out of the picture permanently.
The first hitman they engaged was himself gunned down in Jamaica in 1993, before he could carry out the murder, according to what Denise’s sister, Ava Davis, told police, the St. Petersburg Times reported in a story by Craig Pittman.
The couple then arranged for two more hitmen, Robert Gordon, 32, and Meryl Stanley “Tony” McDonald, 47, to kill the pediatrician.
Pretending to be prospective tenants, the contract killers visited the rental office of Thunderbay Apartments, where the doctor lived in St. Petersburg, Florida, and obtained layouts of the entire complex and a two-bedroom unit.
On January 25, 1994, the doctor, 38, answered his door to find at least one of the killers on the other side. Court papers allege that one of the men had somehow chatted up the doctor in the parking lot, and they walked into the apartment together.
Whatever the case, once inside his home, the men roughed up Louis Davidson and drowned him in his bathtub, then left town pronto.
‘The Wire.’ Dennino found the doctor in the tub with his knees tied with a vacuum cleaner cord and a gag over his mouth.
The victim’s watch, camera, and money clip were missing, according to court papers. But thousands of dollars in cash and other valuables were left undisturbed, leading police to believe that murder was the real motivation.
By this time, Cisneros had fled to Jamaica.
Denise Davidson stayed in Florida, and authorities put her under surveillance.
She made the investigation easy.
Detectives followed her into a Western Union office, where they witnessed her wiring $1,200 to Robert Gordon and noticed that she signed the paperwork with an alias, Pauline White.
They eventually gathered enough evidence to prove that she had given Gordon and McDonald a total of $14,000 to $15,000 via a series of transfers.
Phone records revealed that she made numerous calls to Gordon the day of the murder.
Idle threat. Detectives found the local Days Inn room where Gordon had stayed and discovered a pair of Voit sneakers and a man’s sweatshirt that had Louis’s blood on them. One of the sneaker treads matched a footprint at the crime scene.
Meanwhile, once Denise realized the police considered her a serious suspect, she disguised her voice and left a threatening message (“You’ll be sorry, Denise…”) on her own answering machine in hopes of throwing off investigators.
No luck with that ploy, because detectives found evidence that Denise had made the call herself from Dooley Groves, the citrus fruit store where she worked as a manager. (A Snapped episode about the case says that she made the call from a payphone.) They also discovered evidence that Denise had bought a gray sweatshirt and Size 9 Voit sneakers – like those left behind at the Days Inn — at a Tampa Walmart, according to the Snapped episode that debuted in 2021.
The ultimate penalty. Police arrested Denise at Tampa International Airport as she was waiting to board a flight to Kingston, Jamaica. She was held without bail.
Florida investigators tracked down the assassins and put them as well as Denise on trial in 1995.
By this time, she had given birth in jail to Selena, her daughter with Cisneros. According to a St. Petersburg Times account, Denise’s face lit up when the baby made an appearance in court, which prosecutors complained was an attempt to win the jury’s favor.
At the trial, Davidson testified that Cisneros had masterminded the murder plot without her cooperation.
Nonetheless, the jury convicted her of solicitation for murder, and she got a life sentence.
At the hitmen’s trial, Susan Carole Shore, an accomplice who served as a driver for the hired killers, testified for the prosecution. She met Gordon and McDonald at a Hialeah race track and accepted their offer to take them to St. Petersburg for $100. But she said she knew nothing about a murder plot, and received probation and deportation back to England.
The jury found McDonald and Gordon guilty and voted in favor of the electric chair.
“Your honor,” McDonald read from a prepared statement, “God Most High told me to tell you that you should override the jury’s 9 to 3 recommendation.”
Circuit Court Judge Susan F. Schaeffer, known as “Ms. Death” for her harsh sentencing, was unimpressed and gave Gordon and McDonald the death penalty for first degree murder.
Slippery boyfriend. Pittman, who appeared on Forensic Files, remarked that Leo Cisneros was too cowardly to kill the doctor himself. That seemed a little strange. Reluctance to slaughter an innocent man with one’s own hands sounds more like evidence of a bit of humanity.
Regardless, no one ever got to hear Cisneros’ side of the story at the trials.
He had vanished and was still missing when Forensic Files first aired “House Call” in 2002. In 2008, America’s Most Wanted sought help in finding him, without success.
Cisneros remains at large.
Filing away. It should be mentioned that “Leo Cisneros” is a relatively common name, and the internet has stories about at least two felons by that name, but neither of them is Denise Davidson’s former boyfriend, whose full name is Leonardo Anselmo Cisneros.
The two hitmen clearly had no idea where Cisneros was hiding out. Otherwise, they would have used the information to win themselves plea deals.
They both made efforts to get new trials, however.
Gordon filed an unsuccessful 1997 appeal claiming that having an all-white jury didn’t count as a jury of his peers and that the court had neglected to hold Denise Davidson accountable to the same standards that had factored into his punishment.
He didn’t get anywhere with a writ of habeas corpus with the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida in 2004, either.
Meryl McDonald filed a motion for rehearing, which was denied in 2007. (The Murderpedia page for each of the men provides links to the court papers.)
As of today, neither man has been executed. They’re prisoners in the maximum-security section of Union Correctional Institution in Raiford, Florida.
No deprivation camp. Regarding Denise Davidson, she is inmate #153691 at the Homestead Correctional Institution in Dade County, Florida.
It’s a prison with a minimum-security area that sounds a lot like the fictional Litchfield Penitentiary of Orange Is the New Black fame.
Davidson’s current custody status is “close,” which means limitations on off-premises activities. In other words, for OITNB fans, no van-driving gig like the one Lorna Morello and Tiffany Doggett scored.
But Homestead offers plenty of other diversions, including four softball teams and classes in art, creative writing, music, aerobics, yoga, and anger management.
Inmates also have the opportunity to study PC support services and automotive service technology.
On the down side, Davidson looks somber in recent photographs.
She probably regrets ending her marriage by soliciting two hitmen instead of one divorce lawyer.
That’s all for this week. Until next time, cheers. — RR
