Judy Elliott was born on November 23, 1953, and grew up in Mertzon, a town of 800, southwest of San Angelo in the adjacent county of Irion, graduating from Mertzon High School. She was a real daddy’s girl. Her older sister, Yvonne—known in the family as Cissy—and her brother Darrell always knew she was their father’s favorite.
Lloyd Davidson was a few months older, born on March 14, 1953. Neither one of them has ever stepped outside of the state. They’ve spent their lives in West Texas, a place filled with cowboys, loners and folks seeking escape from the mainstream. A land where brown is a more common color than green. It has two saving graces. The first is that it is not all flat. Around San Angelo, the rolling hills soften the harshness of the environment and entice your exploration beyond the next rise. The second is the sky. It is enormous. In some parts of the country, it is confined to a vast empty space right above your head. Out here, though, it fills the field of vision, covering like a huge dome of blue, arching up from the ground and curving overhead, encapsulating the world.
San Angelo itself feels like an outpost in the middle of nowhere. Driving northwest from Kerrville, the beauty of the Texas Hill Country fades in the rear-view mirror as you pass through miles and miles of nothing. That void encircles the city like a moat, cutting it off from the rest of the world.
The closest city of comparable size is Abilene and it’s ninety miles away. And this is not the Abilene of song. That one is in Kansas. Lots of people love living in Abilene, Texas, but no one ever wrote lyrics calling it “the prettiest little town” they’d “ever seen.”
San Angelo does have some pleasant features in the midst of its drabness. The Concho River runs through it, the waters giving the promise of life. The downtown area is charming with its western architecture and eclectic shops. And the people are kind to strangers and more than willing to lend a helping hand.
In this frontier environment, Judy and Lloyd met and married in 1974. They moved out to their ranch north of San Angelo where they have lived ever since. Lloyd didn’t believe in credit cards or mortgages. He built their home with his own hands, using the money they’d saved for that purpose. Their house sat an eighth of a mile from the road, just over a little hump in the driveway.
Judy was 23 and Lloyd 24 when their first child, Wendi Mae, was born on July 23, 1978. The next year, they welcomed their second child, Marshall Anthony, to the family on September 10. Two new residents in a decade of growth in San Angelo and the surrounding Tom Green County—the population increased by nearly 20 percent between 1970 and 1980.
Before the children were born, Judy worked as a secretary at Angelo State University. In her earlier thirties, Judy became a full-time homemaker after a diagnosis of lupus took her out of the workplace and put her on Social Security Disability.
While the kids grew up, Lloyd worked at the Levi Strauss factory. The ranch where they raised Wendi and Marshall was secluded and the family centered their life there. Neither Judy nor Lloyd was involved in a church or any social organizations. They had few friends and pretty much kept to themselves by choice.
There were frequent visits to Judy’s parents’ home when Wendi and Marshall were little. Judy’s sister Cissy had a trailer there for a while, but then her father built a house for her with Lloyd’s help. Holidays were a cherished gathering time at the Elliot home. On Memorial Day, Fourth of July and Labor Day weekends, they all gathered to grill all day, swim in the pool and listen to music from the juke box on the back patio.
When Judy’s father died in 1987, her mother Jessie Mae was devastated, and too distraught to do anything to hold the extended family together. For a while, family gatherings moved to Lloyd and Judy’s house, but they weren’t too keen on hosting these events. In time, the get-togethers ended, and contact diminished and nearly disappeared. At home, Judy focused on the children, and Lloyd on building an outdoor aviary and creating an exotic bird business. He started with pigeons, parakeets and cockatiels, and expanded from there.
The Davidson place was always home to a menagerie of animals. Wendi got her first dog when she was 3 years old. She named him Licky Candlestick. Wendi’s best friend at Grape Creek Elementary, Stacey McGinley, visited on occasion. But for the most part, the family maintained their unit of four against the world. The kids, as a result, spent a lot of time exploring their immediate environment. They performed acts of kindness for the wildlife they encountered, rescuing a bird with a broken wing or nursing a baby raccoon whose mother had been killed by a car or other mishap. Wendi was only 7 years old when she first expressed her desire to be a veterinarian when she grew up.
Neither she nor her brother Marshall had any serious childhood injuries or illnesses. Wendi’s only trip to the hospital was for a routine tonsillectomy. The two children grew quite close. While both of them were still at Grape Creek Elementary School, Marshall came home one day with ripped clothing and scratches on his face and arms. He told Wendi that a classmate had beaten him with an old tree root. The next day in school, Wendi tracked down the boy in the cafeteria. She got in his face and screamed threats at him and warned him to leave her little brother alone.
Wendi’s love of animals grew when she attended Water Valley High School. She excelled in her animal science class as well as all of the rest of her agricultural studies. Charlie Fleming, her retired vocational Ag teacher said, “She was one of the best students I ever had. A smart, sweet kid.” Charlie kept up with Wendi’s progress long after her graduation from high school, taking great pride in his former student’s accomplishments.
Both Lloyd and Judy were active in the school’s agricultural program when their children were at Water Valley High. They helped out at the school, enthusiastically supported every fundraiser and volunteered to help students at shows. “Anything I asked them to do, they did,” Charlie said.
Wendi showed goats at the Tom Green County, San Angelo and Odessa Stock Shows. It was a good way to raise scholarship money for college. She was very involved in Future Farmers of America, where she became the club’s treasurer when she was a senior. That same year, her younger brother Marshall was also an officer in the group, serving as sentinel.
Wendi also took part in cheerleading, basketball and volleyball. In twelfth grade, she received All Star Honorable Mention for her role as a Police Officer in a one-act play, The Tell Tale Heart. The list of extracurricular activities on her college application was quite impressive.
Because of poor social skills—an inability to relate to others and to understand the impact her actions and words had on those around her—she had a difficult time with peer relationships, particularly with other girls. She was not popular at school. In fact, the other cheerleaders did not seem to like her at all. Her negative experiences with these girls soured her on people a bit.
Her best friend, Chris Collier, was a boy. She dated him for a while when she was 16, but they weren’t interested in each other in that way and drifted back into a comfortable friendship. Wendi didn’t have any serious high school romances. Chris remained a constant presence in her life throughout high school. They had a mutual love for animals and once worked together to untangle a deer that had gotten caught in a barbed wire fence. Beneath her yearbook picture, Wendi wrote that her lifelong career ambition was to be a veterinarian.
She worked hard and got good grades—a combination that stirred up jealousy in others. Wendi had no patience for those who lacked her drive to excel. In academics, Wendi kicked off her first year at the high school by earning Outstanding Achievement awards in Geometry, Ag Science and Honors American History, as well as induction into the National Honor Society. But she was not happy when graduation rolled around. Despite her efforts, she did not graduate as valedictorian. She came in second place as salutatorian.
Judy and Lloyd were proud just the same. They purchased an ad in the annual yearbook addressed to “Wendi, Our Baby Girl.” It read:
You have built a very strong foundation and nothing can stop you. Just know and remember we love you very much and we could never be more proud of you than we are right now.
From high school, Wendi went to college in town at Angelo State University in the fall of 1996. She continued to live at home. During the summers, she worked at North Concho Veterinary Clinic. She had a steady boyfriend, Shay Kelton, the grandson of San Angelo’s venerable legend, western writer Elmer Kelton.
Her brother Marshall also had a summer job. He worked for a veterinarian, Dr. Terrell Sheen, but not at the animal clinic. In addition to his practice, Sheen had a highly successful business as one of the leading landlords in town. Marshall did maintenance jobs on his rental properties and ranch work—fencing, setting up deer feeders, gathering cows and goats—on Sheen’s 7777 Ranch in Grape Creek and on his other property in Mertzon.
Marshall missed having his sister with him at Water Valley High School, but he made his own academic mark. He was one of the charter members of his high school’s National Forensic League, an educational honor society for students with law enforcement aspirations, founded by Bruno Jacob in 1925.
For all of Wendi’s life, she’d lived in the same house with a father who worked at the same factory. The only change in her family structure was the addition of her brother when she was too young to remember being an only child. In 1998, all of that changed.