The 75-year-old retired Army sergeant says he’s having trouble dealing with the horror that he feels since reporters told him that his daughter, 42-year-old Vida Ann Hicks, was bludgeoned to death by a serial killer.
Vida is one of two of the serial killer’s four victims who had family ties in Cumberland County. Miami police said another victim was 37-year-old Cheryl Lee Ray, whose parents live in Hope Mills.
Davis and his common-law wife, Josie Williams, live in a neat, pin-clean house at 1128 Bowling Green Drive, just off Hope Mills Road. He retired in 1972 after 30 years as an Airborne soldier.
Davis knew that his daughter was murdered in Miami on Aug. 1. Most of what he learned then were sketchy details relayed to him from a Miami funeral home. He said Miami police never called him. The body was cremated when it was returned to Fayetteville.
All the killer’s victims are black women in their late 30s or 40s, and all were street people. Three were crack addicts. All four were murdered the same way.
Miami police have mounted an intensive investigation, with 24 officers assigned to a task force. They are getting help from the FBI and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.
Vida’s body was found on railroad tracks in the Allapattah produce and warehouse district, a few miles west of downtown Miami.
Her head had been caved in with a blunt object. The killer poured a flammable liquid over her clothing and set it afire. Miami police said the flames charred her upper torso.
The Orlando (Fla.) Sentinel reported that Vida lived in the produce district, an area lined with distribution and packing warehouses for fruits and vegetables. Many homeless people hang out in the area, sleeping in cardboard shanties or other makeshift shelters.
The street people subsist on discarded produce, filling shopping carts with overripe or bruised melons, oranges and other fruits to eat or peddle on the streets. Some earn 10 cents a box for “lumping,” a street word for unloading produce trucks. They work long enough to get $5 or $10 to buy a rock of crack.
She married and divorced Marshall Hicks of East Orange, N.J. They had one daughter. She had a second daughter but never married the father, Noble Edward Guest of Shelby.
In 1990, Vida’s life fell apart. Davis said she started using crack. She came to Fayetteville to live with him, bringing her two children. After about two years, she called her children’s fathers, and they came to Fayetteville to take the girls back to their respective homes.
Vida worked from time to time and often moved in with friends. “It would be weeks before we heard from her,” Davis said. “In 1994, she left, and I had not seen her since. I didn’t know she was in Miami.”
Diane had been beaten about the head, and her clothing was set afire.
Diane and Vida apparently knew each other. They were often seen with the “lumpers” around the Allapattah district, helping pile wooden pallets for money. Most of the street people said that they knew the two women and that the two spent their time hustling for money to buy crack.
Diane was one of seven children raised by a single mother, who often hunted her down on Thanksgiving and Christmas and took her home for holiday meals. She had been married, and had three children and an office job, when she discovered crack about 15 years before.
Police found Cheryl’s burned body Jan. 15 in Miami’s oldest cemetery, where some of the city’s founders are buried.
Cheryl didn’t live on the street but managed to keep a $240-a-month room at the Willard Garden Hotel, a run-down motel near the cemetery.
Friends at the hotel described Cheryl as a gentle person willing to share her last cigarette or her only meal of the day.
Cheryl was born in Fayetteville. When she was only a few weeks old, her unmarried mother took her to live with her grandparents in Queens, N.Y., where Cheryl grew up. (Cheryl’s father and mother later married, and they returned to Cumberland County about 10 years ago to live.)
Her mom says Cheryl was a slow learner and couldn’t write above a second- or third-grade level. She dropped out of school in Queens in the 10th grade. She began running away from home when she was 13, sometimes staying away for days.
When she was 18, Cheryl ran away from home for good. She hitchhiked around the East Coast, staying some in Maryland and then in Washington, D.C. She wound up in Miami, where she panhandled under an interstate overpass, compiling a record to prove it. Since 1991, Miami court records show, she was arrested 39 times, mostly for begging.
Janice lived with her parents in North Miami. She often left home to wander through Miami’s inner-city streets, talking to herself and panhandling. She suffered a mental breakdown years ago while in college.
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