Too Young and Too Pretty

At first, she was just a body in the River Market.

A 22-year-old white female, four days dead, concealed in a Jeep Cherokee parked at Fifth Street and Delaware.

Parts of her head and body were wrapped in duct tape, Jackson County Medical Examiner Thomas Young would write in his autopsy report. Also encircling the head, neck, trunk and knee areas are portions of speaker wire that are fastened in simple overhand knots. The subject wears no clothing. A silver metal ring with nine clear stones encircles the left long finger. A bracelet composed of multiple beige beads encircles the left wrist. A necklace composed of turquoise and other types of beads and stones encircles the neck…. A colorful tattoo of a parrot on a tree branch lies in the right buttock.

Police took the owner of the Jeep, 38-year-old Matthew Davis, into custody early on June 6. He was arrested on an existing warrant for domestic abuse.

That day, police went to the Cup and Saucer restaurant on Delaware and flashed a photograph of two regular patrons, a couple who lived in the River Market Lofts across the street. The photo was of Davis and his girlfriend, 22-year-old Amber McGathey. McGathey, they said, was the dead woman in the back of the Jeep. That was five months ago, but the events leading up to Amber’s death have remained a mystery to police and prosecutors. Davis has refused to speak to anyone except his lawyer about what happened; sources close to him told the Pitch they expected him to plead guilty to a felony charge of abandoning a body at a hearing scheduled for November 4. Amber’s father, however, is convinced that Davis deserves to be charged with murder.

Bartender Jack Ferguson, a twentysomething with star tattoos in the crooks of his elbows and a closely shaved head, still has vivid memories of the couple. “Amber was always Versace-ed out,” he tells the Pitch. “She was always wearing these bright, fluorescent colors. They both had this celebrity aspect to them. They were reclusive and outlandish. I was fond of them. They were good tippers.”

Matthew Davis was 16 years older than Amber McGathey, but the two had a lot in common. Both lived off trust funds. Both struggled with drug abuse.

One was my friend.

I met Amber McGathey five years ago, when we were freshmen at Loyola, a Catholic university on Chicago’s north side; she sat next to me in a smoky dorm room crowded with kids bonding over pot. She told me how the seedy neighborhood had inspired her to hand out blankets and hot chocolate to homeless people downtown.

When Amber and I ran into each other again, we shared Parliament Lights in front of Mertz Hall. In conversation, she’d cock her head and concentrate as if she could see into your brain. When she spoke, she physically gripped people — their hands, their shoulders, their wrists — in a way that demanded attention. Her energy was unsettling.

It scared me.

Once, I saw Amber and some friends tripping on acid on the Jes Res (the nickname for the lawn between the chapel and the hall where the school’s Jesuit priests lived) in view of Lake Michigan. That type of partying was acceptable college recreation.

But by sophomore year, Amber’s drug use had clearly bypassed everyone else’s. She took a job at a club called Le Passage on pricey Rush Street downtown and grew thin, which complemented her fashion sense but betrayed her growing dependence on cocaine.

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Amber’s parents had split up when she was very young. Her mother, Deb Augustine, lives in Waterloo, Illinois. Her father, Boyd “Butch” McGathey, lives in Parkville, Missouri. Amber had a brother three years older, but when she was 4, he died in a hospital. Augustine says Amber was a beneficiary of the settlement that followed the resulting malpractice lawsuit.

Receiving money as a result of her brother’s death never sat right with Amber. Augustine says her daughter was extravagant and irresponsible with her finances; her friends say material things just didn’t matter much to her.

The social-justice focus of a Jesuit education amplified her rich-girl guilt. When she left for several months to volunteer as an aid worker in Africa, I remember feeling relieved. Africa seemed like an opportunity for her to get clean.

By the time she came back, Amber had gained some healthy weight. She moved into an apartment below me with a guy named Jason, who didn’t go to our college. When I ran into her in the lobby or on the elevator, she was jumpy. She talked fast. Her mouth seemed dry. Something was wrong. I kept my distance.

My then-roommate, Jeremy McKenna, and I learned later that Amber wore turtlenecks in the summer because Jason choked her, leaving bruises. Twice she called the police on him.

Whenever she could, Amber retreated to another friend’s apartment, where a group of guys passed a bong between classes and watched daytime TV. Through them, Amber met Mikey. They were both fans of Phish and Crosby, Stills and Nash, and would hole up together for days at a time. Jason eventually relinquished his grip on Amber, but not before using a bat to break every window and headlight of Mikey’s car.

“Our relationship was weird and centered on drugs,” Mikey tells me now. “We never used the terms girlfriend or boyfriend. We just spent a lot of time together and did a lot of drugs together.”

Cocaine, Ecstasy, and prescription pills such as Xanax were the couple’s main entertainment. Mikey was so thin that the blue veins under his skin were visible in his face. Talking to him was like talking to a ghost. But one day, after a long absence, he reappeared. His hair was shorter, his blue eyes were bright and his skin was no longer translucent. He still went to Phish shows — now with a group of sober fans in a group called the Phellowship. He wanted to reach out to Amber, who was still using.

But she hadn’t hit bottom.

In the fall of 2002, Mikey got a call from Amber. She needed to borrow money to pay a dealer. She’d been awake for days and hadn’t eaten. Eventually, Amber found someone to cover her debt. A day later, she called a neighbor’s apartment; my roommate that semester, Katie Sylvester, happened to answer the phone. Amber was nearly unintelligible. She was looking for coke or money or help. Katie went to her apartment.

Amber answered her door straight from the shower, naked and dripping with soapy water. Katie got her dressed and convinced her to walk down to the Red Line train station. Amber didn’t want to get on the train. Once on, she didn’t want to get off. She thought everyone on the train was looking at her. Katie coaxed her off the train at the Belmont station and got her through the doors of a drug rehab clinic.

Shortly after that, Amber asked her mother to come to Chicago for a weekend. During her visit, Augustine says, she felt that something was wrong. Amber’s roommate told her it was drugs. When Augustine returned to Waterloo, she called Amber’s dad in Kansas City and told him to get Amber. (Augustine would not comment further about her daughter to the Pitch.)

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Before she left Chicago, Amber stopped by Jeremy McKenna’s place at eight in the morning.

“She said she came to say goodbye,” McKenna tells me from Denver, where he has moved. “Mainly, she told me all the bad things she’d done…. She felt really shallow. She didn’t really know who she was. She was so used to living that other life, and she was scared to rediscover herself and the challenges of being clean.”

Boyd McGathey was overjoyed to have his daughter back in Kansas City. McGathey is the general manager for ADT Security Systems, the largest security-alarm company in the country. He’s in charge of a region that includes Omaha, St. Louis and Kansas City. Two years ago, he also joined the board of the TIPS Hotline, which raises funds to offer rewards in unsolved crimes. She moved in with McGathey in Parkville.

I took a job at the Pitch, moving here almost a year after Amber did. I made some halfhearted attempts to trace her with numbers snagged from mutual friends, and once she left me a message that said she was in Waterloo for a weekend and would be back in Kansas City soon.

The friends Amber made in Kansas City, mostly people in treatment and in 12-step programs, speak of her in glowing terms. Because of the private nature of treatment and recovery, they have asked not to be identified by their real names.

One friend, Tim, refers to himself and his wife as Amber’s “recovery mom and dad.” Tim met Amber in 2003 at the Valley Hope drug treatment center in Atchison, Kansas, where Amber spent her first 35 days after returning to Kansas City.

“She was almost too young and too pretty to be in [treatment] yet,” Tim says. “We were going around the room, answering the question ‘Why are you here?’ She was the last one to talk. She said, ‘I don’t know, but this being clean sounds like a lot of fucking work.’ I was just like, God, I love this kid. You knew where she was and what was going on with her as soon as she opened her mouth.”

Tim invited Amber to 12-step meetings in North Kansas City, close to her father’s house. But after living in Chicago, quiet Parkville cramped Amber’s style. She moved to an apartment near Westport Road and Broadway.

Since she was no longer in college, Amber knew she needed something to focus on. She took photography classes; taught kids at a day-care center; and went to, then dropped out of, massage school. She loved learning about natural healing. She made loose plans to go with a friend from Chicago, Beth Manuselis, to work at an organic farm in Hawaii that requires its workers to live chemical-free. She took Bikram yoga classes in a sweaty studio on 43rd Street and State Line. She was big on candles, tarot cards and crystals, things her dad calls “moonbeam stuff.”

Amber had been clean for about seven months when she fell in with a woman from her recovery program. Though the woman was twenty years older, the two became inseparable.

“We were lovers. We were so in love,” recalls the woman, Tina. “Amber was so full of joy. She flitted here and there, in Kansas City, in Chicago, in Africa, like a butterfly landing. She didn’t live very long, but she brought so much joy to so many people.”

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Tina sits at the Broadway Café, within sight of Amber’s old apartment, talking about the time that she and Amber bought chocolate milkshakes from Chubby’s on Broadway, where Amber worked for a short time. They gave the milkshakes to people waiting at bus stops along the busy street. In Tina’s car, decorated with crystals and pictures of angels, she plays the Ani DiFranco and Alana Davis songs that she and Amber sang and danced to at top volume.

Tyler, a gay man in his early thirties, was one of Amber’s closest friends. He says Amber befriended the crustiest attendees at their 12-step meetings — read books aloud to them, hugged them, cooked for them, made them feel loved. “She was the one to drag you to self-help, to gurus, to get manicures and pedicures and massages…. She was the newcomer [to meetings], and people came near her because she was beautiful. She hung out with the disgusting old fuckers. Maybe she was atoning for a bad past life.”

Tyler says that when Amber was with Tina, she would call his house in the middle of the night. He could hear screaming and glass breaking in the background as she begged him to rescue her from Tina’s house.

Tina won’t talk about using drugs with Amber, but several of Amber’s friends say they’re sure the two fell back into old habits together.

When Amber was using, material cares fell by the wayside. She’d wind up in one place, her car in another. Her cell phone, which she always answered when she was clean, would be turned off. A full voice-mailbox became a signal to her father and close friends that she was in trouble.

Amber’s relationship with Tina annoyed her father. It wasn’t because Amber was involved with a woman, though McGathey didn’t quite understand that. But he felt that Tina was a bad influence, that she was using Amber as a meal ticket. In frustration, McGathey canceled Amber’s debit card and took away her cell phone and her car. “I’m not funding this,” he says he declared. “The relationship [with Tina] was over two weeks later.”

Tina claims that their breakup, which happened last January, was mutual and encouraged by their respective 12-step sponsors.

A few months later, Amber met Matthew Davis.

Tyler says Davis saw Amber at one 12-step meeting, which Davis attended sporadically. He was known to the group as a heroin user. Tyler says Davis secured an invitation to hang out with Amber and some friends after the meeting.

Matthew Davis is the son of Emmett Ray Davis, who bought and expanded the concrete-foundation pourer May Development Co. Inc. The company has made millions for the Davis family, according to a source close to the Davises. The younger Davis, a trust-funder who couldn’t seem to stay out of trouble, had accumulated an assortment of speeding tickets, reckless-driving convictions and drunken-driving charges in Kansas in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In 2000, he served 10 months in jail for a criminal-threat conviction in Johnson County. While Davis was in jail, his father died of lung cancer and Davis inherited a large sum of money from a trust that paid him each month.

Former girlfriends recall that Davis was charming and coercive. Police records show that one woman, who claims she was with Davis for five years, filed two counts of domestic assault against him, which are still pending. Jackson County court records allege that during an argument, Davis broke the woman’s cell phone when she threatened to call police, then punched her in the face several times before holding his pocket knife to her throat and threatening to kill her. In another report, dated March 2003, the woman alleges that Davis dragged her by her hair across his floor, which was covered with broken glass, then threatened to kill her if she left him.

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A friend, who asked not to be named, remembers talking to Amber about Davis: “She was telling me about this guy she met, how he was the greatest dude …. She said he was going into figures, naming how much money he had, and she was like, ‘Don’t do that. I don’t want to know.'”

Other parts of the conversation bothered the friend, who says Amber was having trouble accepting an identity as a drug addict, something her 12-step meetings pushed her to do. Surely, Amber suggested, she’d be healthier if she let herself have a beer once in a while, as opposed to being completely vice-free.

Amber and Davis quickly became as close as she and Tina had been. Just one month after meeting, they moved in together at 510 Delaware in the River Market Lofts.

It was important to Amber that her father be as crazy about Davis as she was. She invited them both out to dinner. “I disliked him from the beginning,” McGathey says of Davis. “He was trying so hard to be outwardly gregarious, but as soon as I’d turn away, he’d just stoic up and get fidgety. I could see it out of the corner of my eye, but when I’d turn back, he’s got this big grin.”

Months earlier, Amber had made plans to go to a detox center in West Palm Beach, Florida, for a three-week vacation. The place offered a holistic, new-agey healing program for people suffering from various illnesses, including addiction recovery. Just before going to Florida at the end of May, Amber traveled to Chicago and spent a night at her old friend Mikey’s house.

Amber confessed to Mikey that the night before she left Kansas City, Davis had been up doing coke with friends at their apartment. She’d resisted, she said. She added that it was the first time she’d seen Davis doing anything harder than smoking weed or drinking.

“You’ve got to get out of there,” Mikey told her.

But while Amber was clearing her mind in Florida, Davis was getting in over his head in Kansas City. Jack Ferguson, the bartender at the Cup and Saucer, says that Davis and some companions came into the bar one Saturday morning while Amber was gone. He says the group looked as if they hadn’t slept; he guessed they had all met while partying the night before. They ran up a $90 tab and left without paying, but Ferguson could tell it was an accident, because Davis also forgot his cell phone.

When Amber called Davis’ cell phone from Florida, she was surprised to hear Ferguson answer.

“I don’t know what’s gotten into him,” Amber said of Davis. She told Ferguson she’d take care of the tab when she came back.

Distressed at her boyfriend’s behavior, Amber called her father in tears, telling him she wanted to cut short her trip to come home and help Davis. She called Tina and Mikey with the same message.

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McGathey picked her up at the airport on Sunday, May 30. After a week and a half of juice diets and colonics, she pounced on the leftover jalapeño pizza in her dad’s refrigerator.

Then Amber left for Davis’ place, and her father left for business in St. Louis.

The following Tuesday, Amber kept her promise to pay Ferguson the $90. “She was embarrassed,” Ferguson recalls. “She seemed older than 22. She seemed very peaceful. I mean, she was always peaceful, but this time she was more so. She looked beautiful and tan and healthy.”

The last call Amber made from her cell phone was to her father, on the afternoon of Wednesday, June 2. When he tried to call her on Thursday, her phone was off.

After his plane touched down in Kansas City on Friday afternoon, McGathey called Amber’s phone hundreds of times — repeatedly, he says, “like you would if you were trying to win a radio contest.”

The next day, McGathey went to the River Market, where he unsuccessfully tried to figure out which building Davis lived in. Eventually, he remembered that Davis had called his house once. After retrieving the number from his caller ID, McGathey pressed *67 to disguise his own number and called Davis.

“He answered and he sounded all gooned-out on something,” McGathey says. “I asked him where Amber was, and he said that she’d gotten upset. I asked Matt what the blowup had been about, and he said, ‘I guess it was me.’ He said she left with Tina. When he said that, my heart sank.”

But Davis had lied. McGathey now guesses that after speaking with him, Davis tried to make it look as though Amber had left under her own power, getting rid of her purse, the biggest bag that she’d taken to Florida, her keys and her debit card — all items that have not been recovered.

Chris Packham, who works as a manager at the Cup and Saucer, remembers Davis showing up at the bar with a large man who seemed angry at Davis. “He kept saying, ‘Shut up, just shut up’ to Davis as they walked in,” Packham says. “They ordered two drinks, and the guy paid with a $100 bill. I heard him say, ‘This is so bad.'”

Saturday night, Davis drove his Jeep to Fric & Frac, a bar on 39th Street and Genessee. There, he saw an acquaintance, a woman in her early thirties. He told her he was having a party at his apartment and that he’d give her a ride.

“Can you smell that?” Davis asked when they got into the car. She said she couldn’t smell anything. “My girlfriend overdosed in the car,” he told her. The woman says she looked behind her and saw a crumpled, white sheet. She made a move for the car door, but Davis stopped her. “That’s not her,” he said, as if his girlfriend being in the Jeep was the silliest idea in the world.

Shortly after Davis and the woman went upstairs, police, acting on an anonymous tip about the body, arrived at the apartment and took Davis in for questioning.

Boyd McGathey found out about his daughter’s death on the news, just as he was about to file a missing-person report.

The Jackson County Medical Examiner’s office ruled Amber’s death an accident caused by “opiate toxicity.” Thomas Young found trace amounts of cocaine and morphine in her system. There was no other evidence of trauma to her body, though it was too decomposed for Young to determine how Amber had ingested the drugs.

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For several weeks after his daughter’s death, McGathey hibernated with his grief. Then he channeled his anger into action.

McGathey called the medical examiner’s office when the toxicology report was finished and pressed Young to explain the medical details. Young told him that it’s common for drug users to conceal the body of an overdose victim. But for McGathey, there was nothing common about the manner in which his daughter’s remains had been treated.

On September 20, frustrated with the glacial movement of the case against Davis, McGathey sent a lengthy e-mail to then-Police Chief Rick Easley and others. “On June 2, 2004, he [Matthew Davis] killed her in his apartment in the River Market area,” it read. “We don’t know how or why but we’re certain he was directly involved with her death, either by directly causing it or at the very minimum, [he] stood by and watched and allowed her to die needlessly to protect himself. A witness has come forward describing a loud domestic disturbance at Matthew Davis’ apartment on the night Amber was killed. Boot marks [were found] on an interior door of the apartment…. I believe she was trying to lock herself behind to protect herself from her killer…. When Matthew Davis was arrested on June 6, 2004, at this apartment he had a black eye, further evidence of this struggle in which I believe Amber was trying to escape for her life.”

As a member of the Kansas City Crime Commission, McGathey set up a TIPS reward for his own daughter, seeking information that would lead to additional charges against Davis (or any other suspects).

Phone records show that Davis made many phone calls during the days when he knew Amber was dead, and McGathey hopes that someone he called might come forward with information that will help charge Davis with something more than abandoning a body, a class-D felony that carries with it a maximum sentence of four years. Even when stacked with the existing charges of domestic abuse and three new counts of possession of a controlled substance, Davis could plead guilty and serve only four years.

The medical examiner’s report notes that, during their ride from Fric & Frac, Davis told his acquaintance that his girlfriend had overdosed on heroin. Young must rely on that report, because heroin has a short “half life” in the body, he says, after which it rapidly metabolizes into morphine. “In a toxicology report, morphine may mean morphine, or it may mean heroin,” he says.

In cases of fatal opiate poisoning, Young says, it takes from one to twelve hours for the user to die. During this time, the victim would fall into a coma. But if someone calls paramedics in time, the victim can be quickly diagnosed with an injection of a “narcotic antagonist” and then, perhaps, saved.

McGathey can’t believe that Amber would voluntarily try an opiate like heroin or morphine after she’d just left a detox retreat. And he says his daughter was afraid of needles.

But from a recovering addict’s perspective, it’s not unbelievable at all. Tyler says Amber was curious about heroin because it was a drug she hadn’t tried. Mikey admits that he had imagined horrible scenarios and was relieved to find out she’d died of an overdose instead of a fatal beating. “It’s better that she did it to herself,” he says.

Davis didn’t call anyone in time for Amber. Maybe he wasn’t even in the room with her when she was dying. Only one person really knows what happened, and Davis has kept his secret in the Jackson County Jail since his arrest on June 6.

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