Less than 24 hours after James Davis III killed his mother, a passing driver and then himself by the side of the road in Sabattus, police leaders stood at a podium and promised answers.

“Knowledge is power,” Maine Department of Public Safety Commissioner Michael Sauschuck said on April 3. “When we can provide some details, which we’ll do this afternoon, that information helps people get rid of that unknown that’s always in the back of our minds.”

Four months later, though, it largely remains a mystery why a 29-year-old homebody with no obvious history of violence or longstanding mental illness suddenly snapped.

But officials say they can’t afford to spend more time looking for clarity. That’s often the norm when it comes to murder-suicide cases, according to Maj. Scott Gosselin of the Maine State Police.

“We figure out how it happened, why it happened, the legality of what’s going on, and then we kind of move on to the next one,” Gosselin told the Press Herald last week. “It’s just the dirty, rotten truth of it, but we do the best we can with the resources we have.”

After a homicide suspect is arrested, police and prosecutors must collect and present enough evidence to support a conviction — information that usually gets unsealed as the legal process runs its course. In the most prominent cases, like the October 2023 Lewiston mass shooting, officials might spend significant time studying what happened even though there’s no living perpetrator to charge. But in other murder-suicides, investigations are often truncated, and details about the case may remain sealed for years if they ever see the light of day at all.

It’s “common sense” for law enforcement to devote their limited resources to cases that could end in a prosecution, said Tyron Pope, an adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. But he said that failing to thoroughly investigate murder-suicides, such as by conducting a “psychological autopsy” to better understand the suspect, can erode the public’s faith in police.

The lack of public information surrounding these cases also can make it easy for the community to avoid grappling with the root causes of violence, said Rebecca Hobbs, co-executive director of Through These Doors, a Portland nonprofit that supports and advocates for victims of domestic violence.

“There’s a distorted picture of who commits these crimes; they’re this monster, there’s evil in their core,” she said. “Our ability to imagine that this can happen to us and to the people we know, it’s sadly limited.”

Information that police do manage to gather about murder-suicides is often redacted to protect the privacy of the victim’s family members. Gosselin said that material is usually eventually unsealed, but only if someone thinks to ask for the case files long after most media outlets have moved on.

Improperly redacted investigative documents obtained through a public records request reveal some new information about Davis III and the troubling behavior he began to display shortly before the shooting in Sabattus, a rural Androscoggin County town east of Lewiston.

But they mostly underscore Gosselin’s point: Specific details about murder-suicides and the people who commit them in Maine often remain hidden from public view, not because police refuse to share them, but because they don’t devote the time or manpower to collect them in the first place.

‘LIKE HE WAS GETTING READY FOR SOMETHING’

The police were around the Davis family a lot.

According to a section of the case file that officials unsuccessfully attempted to redact, officers had well over 100 interactions with Davis’ two younger brothers and parents in the decade before this spring’s shooting. In some of these cases, the family members were themselves asking the police for help or were being interviewed as witnesses. In others, they were the subject of calls involving noise complaints, traffic violations or minor crimes.

Several of the entries demonstrate how a call for service involving one family member can loop in another, such as in March 2020, when Davis’ mother, Christine Smith, was issued a disorderly conduct warning after police responded to a noise complaint about her middle son, or in October 2021, when Davis’ father was listed as a “vehicle owner and involved party” after his youngest son was driving erratically in the high school parking lot.

Yet nothing in the record of the family’s interactions with police suggests the existence of Davis.

The logs are not the only place where the eldest Davis brother is conspicuously absent. He appears not to have had an active social media presence. He’s not in any club or activity page photos in Oak Hill High School yearbooks during his time there. Except for one 2010 feature in the Lewiston Sun Journal following his victory in the state geography bee, a couple lists of annual deer lottery winners from more than a decade ago, and a grandfather’s obituary, Davis’ name does not turn up results in the Maine Trust for Local News archives.

Gosselin said that officials don’t know much about what he was like beyond what police reported immediately after the shooting: Davis didn’t drive, worked only sporadically, and lived at home with his mother, whom state police described as his “primary caregiver.”

Family members interviewed by police said Davis did not have a long history of mental health problems, according to Gosselin. But he began acting paranoid sometime in the weeks or months before the shooting, sharing fears with family that federal authorities had him under surveillance and asking those around him to keep their voices down so nobody could listen in on their conversations.

On April 2, Davis went to spend the day at his father’s home, which sits at the end of a residential drive about 1.5 miles from Smith’s house. The fact that he arrived with a ballistic vest and multiple guns, including an AK-47, didn’t concern his family members, who may have expected that Davis was planning on target shooting, Gosselin said. But the paranoia Davis displayed that day did worry them.

“I think he was a little confrontational with family members too, that day, which caused them some alarm and which is really what led them to try to figure out what is going on with him,” Gosselin said. “That’s why dad ended up calling mom; because mom was always the person that could kind of calm him down.”

At her ex-husband’s request, Smith came to pick Davis up. Police believe she was driving him back home rather than to a hospital. They made it less than a mile before Davis turned a handgun on his mother. He got out of the car and fired his AK-47 at oncoming traffic, killing Katherine Williams, 53, and wounding two other men — all total strangers.

Then, he killed himself.

Both guns were originally purchased by Smith, according to police records.

Family members, several of whom have either turned down or ignored interview requests, told investigators that Davis had never previously displayed behavior troubling enough for them to contact law enforcement and ask them to help, perhaps by initiating Maine’s yellow flag law. But Gosselin acknowledged that there’s no way of determining whether there were signs they should have caught.

“It’s hard to know, you know?” he said. “It really is.”

Davis had alarmed at least one longtime acquaintance, according to the improperly redacted police report.

A man who occasionally recruited Davis to help him with contracting work told officers after the shooting that Davis had recently aimed a silver revolver at him after mishearing something he said as an insult.

“You don’t know what I’m going through,” Davis told the acquaintance, according to the report. After the moment passed, Davis acted like nothing happened.

The contractor reported the incident to Davis’ father. But neither man apparently said anything to the police, even though the contractor’s wife and friends pushed him to make a report — he “didn’t want to get the kid in trouble.”

Still, the event weighed on him. He told police that “James has a lot of guns, bullet proof vests, camping gear,” the report reads. “Almost like he was getting ready for something.”

LIMITED BY RESOURCES

Weeks after a gunman committed the deadliest mass shooting in Maine history in October 2023, Gov. Janet Mills and Attorney General Aaron Frey charged a commission of experts with examining the case from every possible angle.

“The complete facts and circumstances — including any failures or omissions — must be brought to light and known by all,” Mills wrote in a letter to the commission, which spent months reviewing thousands of pages of records and interviewing dozens of witnesses before issuing its 215-page final report. “The families of the victims, those who were injured, and the people of Maine and the nation deserve nothing less.”

Other cases receive a fraction of that scrutiny.

Twenty-four pages of reports on a double-murder suicide in Mechanic Falls, obtained through a public records request, include grisly details about the crime scene police discovered on July 27 of last year. But they do not include the contents of the three-page note they found near the body of Jennifer Barney, 37, or any information about what could have driven her to kill her two young daughters, Harmony West, 11, and Hope West, 7. The documents reference conversations with several neighbors who said they did not know the family.

A 47-page file on an October 2024 double-murder suicide in Bath provides a clearer picture of Michael Allen Bailey, a veteran who had been known to struggle with addiction and mental health issues and whom police had flagged as “homicidal and suicidal” a full decade before he killed his estranged wife and daughter. But large sections of text are almost entirely redacted, including some parts that appear to discuss a confrontation between Bailey and his wife, Lisa Bailey, a few weeks before he killed her.

Experts list several reasons why it’s important to collect and share information about violent crimes even when there’s no living suspect to prosecute. Studying these cases can help law enforcement officers identify and evaluate potential risk factors and interventions related to mental health, domestic violence and access to firearms, said Pope, the professor at John Jay. Operating transparently helps maintain the public’s trust in law enforcement and helps victims heal.

“You have to do that for the families and victims in the community,” he said. “Families are often left with unanswered questions, which complicates grief and hinders emotional recovery.”

Hobbs, the domestic violence advocate, said that sharing information about these cases is not about gawking at salacious details but helping the public understand the risks and warning signs of abuse.

“I do think that kind of review is important so that we as a community can see if there are lessons we can learn,” said Hobbs, who sits on the state’s Domestic Abuse Homicide Review Panel. “We should be looking at, if nothing else, how we can do things better in the future.”

But while the scale of the Lewiston shooting necessitated an unprecedented fact-finding effort, Gosselin, the state police major, said the department does not have the manpower to dive deep into the psyche of every murder-suicide suspect. Even putting aside the 18 Mainers killed in the 2023 mass shooting, the state saw an average of 33 homicides per year from 2022 through 2024, compared to an average of about 22 per year throughout the previous decade.

The Lewiston review effort required pulling three investigators off their regular work for several months, Gosselin said. That meant three fewer people available to investigate homicide, sexual assault or missing persons cases where there might be a victim to help or a dangerous perpetrator to catch.

“When we get murder-suicides like that, our resources at the time really dictate how far we can keep digging,” Gosselin said. “I’d like to know more about some of these cases, but, in practical terms, we are limited by the resources we have.”