Who killed LA dealer in knife frenzy?
Briton Neil Revill has spent six years awaiting trial for a brutal
double murder, despite evidence linking the crime to drug gangs. As a
petition goes to the Prime Minister, he explains why he believes he
can still win his case
David Rose in Los Angeles
Sunday April 1, 2007
The Observer/UK
Even for Los Angeles, a city inured to violence, the double slaying of
drug dealer Arthur Davodian and his girlfriend Kimberley Crayton was
exceptional in its brutality. It seemed evident to the detectives who
surveyed his apartment in the northern LA hills that Davodian, 22, was
murdered first – stabbed 17 times in the body – before his head was
severed with a butcher’s precision and removed. It was found ten days
later, wrapped in a carrier bag in the front yard of a Masonic lodge,
by a schoolboy who was puzzled by its overpowering smell. Crayton, 21
– who suffered terrible wounds on her hands and arms – had locked
herself in their bedroom while her lover died. But the killer or
killers smashed down the door and dispatched her with equal
ferocity. Only her baby Kaylee, aged 14 months, survived.
This summer, nearly six years after his arrest, Neil Revill, a
semi-blind dyslexic from Consett in Co Durham, will face a jury in the
downtown LA courthouse which once hosted the trial of O.J. Simpson. He
is accused of both murders and the prosecutors are seeking the death
penalty. His face pasty and drawn, Revill, 33, sat in a white
breeze-block room in the North Los Angeles County maximum security
jail last week and gave an exclusive interview to The Observer,
conducted via a video link. ‘All these years I’ve kept thinking that
something was about to happen: that there would be some new piece of
evidence that would make them drop the charges and set me free,’ he
said. ‘Maybe that’s a delusion.’ Revill, who has no previous
convictions and has always protested his innocence, spoke in the tones
of middle England, his voice betraying few signs of his years in
America or of his origins in the north east of England. His emotions
surfaced visibly only once, when he described the effect of his being
charged with a capital murder on his relationship with his mother,
Brenda, and his father, Graham, a retired RAF mechanic. ‘One good
thing has come of this,’ he said. ‘We’ve become a lot closer. They
visit whenever they can and they’re going to be here for the trial,
though it’s expected to last four months. We were never a very close
family. Now we are.’
This week Clive Stafford Smith, the director of the London-based human
rights group, Reprieve, will write to Tony Blair, asking him to
support a new petition by attorneys from the LA Public Defender office
asking the prosecutors to drop their insistence on the death
penalty. They will point out that the case against Revill is
circumstantial and far from conclusive. There were no eyewitnesses,
nor a confession, no murder weapon has been recovered, and while there
were samples of Revill’s DNA at the crime scene he has always said
that Davodian was a friend, and that he went to his apartment as an
invited guest on the night before the killings.
Meanwhile, evidence has emerged that Davodian was a police informant,
whose information led to the arrest of powerful figures in the
Armenian and Israeli mafias – gangs whose signature punishment for
snitches is decapitation.
Neil Revill and his alleged victim Kimberley Crayton shared an
unfortunate characteristic. Both had been lured from secure,
law-abiding backgrounds to the deeper reaches of the LA drug scene,
seduced by its illusory glamour. Neither really belonged. Crayton, a
niece of the jazz singer Al Jarreau, was brought up amid the sunny
affluence of Orange County, south of LA. Having married her
high-school sweetheart and given birth to his child, she abruptly
changed direction, abandoning her husband to use substantial
quantities of crack cocaine and the still more powerful crystal
methamphetamine. When she died, she had been living with Davodian for
only a month – the last of several brief relationships that revolved
around drugs.
Revill’s trajectory was longer and less direct. He spent several years
in Germany, where his father was based: later, when he turned 18 and
his father was posted to Cyprus, he elected to stay with his
grandfather, a retired miner, in Consett. His dyslexia meant that his
only GCSE was in metalwork, while his blindness from birth in his
right eye deprived him of fulfilling his dream of following his father
into the RAF. For 18 months he lived with a woman in Sunderland,
working in kitchen and bathroom sales. Finally, he said, in the summer
of 1996 and at the age of 23: ‘I began to get bored and kind of upped
sticks. I bought a ticket to Amsterdam and hitch-hiked to Munich.’ He
stayed at a hostel, securing free board and lodging in return for a
little work. Already in residence was a woman he would shortly marry,
a slim American law student on vacation.
Revill’s ex-wife, now a partner in an international LA law firm,
agreed to talk to The Observer on condition of anonymity. ‘I still
care a lot about him, and I guess I always will,’ she said. ‘Even when
we separated, I made sure we stayed friends. He was always a good
guy. I can’t believe he is capable of these murders, physically or
psychologically. He was always so gentle. He watched out for me. And
Neil is a little clumsy. He just doesn’t have the kind of precision
you’d need with a knife to be able to sever a man’s head.’ Davodian,
meanwhile, was a muscley, tattooed strongman. At the time of the
murders, Neil, who is six foot three, weighed only 11 stone. ‘Quite
frankly,’ his former wife said, ‘if he had attacked Davodian, it
should have been Neil who ended up on the slab.’
If ever a marriage were made from opposites, this was it. While his
driven, focused partner completed her studies at law school, Revill
made money as a rock concert roadie and as a guinea pig for drug
trials. Over the following year he made several trips to visit her in
America and eventually asked her to marry him. She said yes. Her
parents laid on a grand wedding at their home in Athens, Georgia in
November 1997. Revill and his wife lived there too for more than a
year. In December 1998, the couple moved to LA – where their
relationship started to fall apart.
>From the beginning, Revill and his wife dabbled in the club and drug
scene. ‘We were just experimenting. No one we knew was really
hardcore back then,’ she said. ‘It was very rare we’d ever do drugs
outside the weekend. But it was a big underground scene; a lot of new
places were opening up. We had a lot of fun.’ The problem was that
‘if you know what you’re doing, LA is a little playground. But if you
don’t, you can easily get lost. That’s what happened to Neil’.
While she hunted for the perfect attorney’s job, he worked in a
delicatessen and later sold mobile phones. When his wife began an
affair, they split up in the spring of 1999, only to be reconciled
before Christmas. But ‘the spark and the trust had gone,’ Revill said,
and they separated for good the following May. For a while he did well
on his own: promoted to phone store manager, he got his own apartment,
a car and a high credit rating. Two months later the US Immigration
Service started asking questions about the status of his marriage, and
whether he was still entitled to work. ‘That was when my world
crumbled,’ Revill said. ‘I lost my job and I had a broken heart. I
went on a party rampage. I took out four new credit cards, borrowed on
them to the limit and blew the lot on drugs. I was already using
ecstasy and speed and had tried crystal meth in small quantities. I
started going on four-day binges, immersing myself in the club
scene. When the money ran out, the only thing I thought I could do was
to start to sell drugs.’
Before long, Revill was friends with Davodian, who lived in a yellow
concrete condominium at 10149 Commerce Avenue in Tujunga, a scruffy,
working-class neighbourhood beset by gangs. Four months before the
murders, Revill was arrested, driving some of Davodian’s drugs to a
dealer who lived across town in Glendale. He was bailed and told to
expect a sentence of six months. ‘I thought, OK, I’ll do my time, get
deported, and then the party’s going to be over: it’s time to move on
and grow up,’ said Revill. ‘What worried me most was how to tell my
parents.’
Davodian and Crayton were murdered in the early afternoon of 11
October, 2001. Revill was arrested on 22 November – the fourth
anniversary of his wedding.
In his 20 years as an LA public defender, Doug Goldstein, Revill’s
lead lawyer, has never known a case like Revill’s. ‘Usually death
penalty trials are about mitigation, trying to get them life,’ he
said. ‘The evidence of guilt is pretty clear-cut: there’ll be
eyewitnesses, a confession, DNA and fingerprints. This is
different. It’s like a Chandler mystery. And I’ve never had a client
like Neil, either. He’s pleasant, polite and articulate; the kind of
guy you’d invite home to dinner. He’s goofy, kind of humble. It’s very
hard to imagine he did something like this.’
The extraordinary delay in bringing the case to trial has arisen
because new evidence has regularly been discovered suggesting that
someone else – probably at least two people – killed Crayton and
Davodian. Each new disclosure has required further investigations by
both prosecution and defence while the scientific evidence – which
turns on the exact interpretation of DNA from the crime scene – is
extremely complex. There was blood in Davodian’s flat from at least
two unknown males.
And long after Revill was charged, documents emerged that showed
Davodian had made dangerous enemies. Four months before his murder, he
had been busted but made a deal with prosecutors known as ‘snitch
three, go free,’ which meant that, if he gave information that led to
three successful prosecutions, he would avoid going to prison. One of
the three was Revill. There was also at least one much bigger fish –
Andre Bolandi, a leader of a gang called Armenian Power, and
Davodian’s main supplier. Thanks to his information, Bolandi is now
serving a long sentence. Other witnesses interviewed by police have
said that Davodian snitched on drug kingpins still further up the
supply chain, including a leading figure in LA’s Israeli mafia.
Davodian’s neighbours have cast further doubt on whether Revill is the
murderer. One, who lived in the house opposite, says he heard men
shouting at Davodian a day or two before the murders, including a
threat to cut off his head. Michael Gregorian, who discovered the
bodies, says he saw two Armenians wearing uniforms from a
carpet-cleaning firm leaving the building a short while earlier. No
carpet cleaners had been working there officially at the time.
Finally, the man who lived and worked in the flat below the room where
Davodian was killed says he saw two men entering the condo and heard
sounds of a struggle.
Revill said that, as the trial approaches, he is starting to feel
nervous. ‘All these years I feel like I’ve shut myself down. I’ve
dealt with this by taking it day by day; I measure my life by the
passage of each eight-hour guard shift. When I first got here, it was
an enormous culture shock. Shutting myself down was the only way I
could cope, especially with so many delays. But I’m still optimistic.’
Revill might be home by Christmas. ‘But I’m not a fool. I know I
could lose and be sent to death row. And if I do, I understand what
might happen.’
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress