Road to recovery

Audrey Kishline lay in the hospital semi-conscious.  She’d been told she was involved in a fatal accident.  Hours earlier, she’d been driving along the interstate en route to her dad’s.  She says she remembers almost nothing about what happened while she was driving except for one detail.

Audrey Kishline: I called a family member that told me to turn around.

She doesn’t know now if she was following this advice or made the decision on her own. In any case, Audrey did turn around and somehow she wound up driving west in the eastbound lane of Interstate-90.

Other drivers frantically called 911 to alert police that a vehicle was barreling down the freeway the wrong way heading right into oncoming traffic.

911 OPERATOR:  911, what are you reporting?

CALLER:  Okay, you got a pickup heading the wrong way on the freeway... And it looks like a woman driving.

911 OPERATOR: Female driver.  OK.  All right, we’ll update ‘em on the location.

CALLER: All right.  She almost had pile up right just around this curve.  It’s unbelievable.

Sergeant Tom Hickman of the Washington State Patrol  reconstructed how Audrey managed to get herself so turned around on the interstate.

Sergeant Tom Hickman:  She was actually traveling eastbound on I-90 and she drifted off on the shoulder here, got onto the gravel part, made a complete U-turn crossing clear over the roadway and into the median part onto the gravel, came up out of the roadway and crossed back over the roadway and  down into the ditch here.  She came up out of the—people described it as the vehicle came up out of the forest.  She comes straight up out the roadway and then got back onto I-90 this time heading the wrong direction, westbound in the eastbound lane.

Sergeant Hickman pieced together what happened next. Audrey actually drove for 3 miles in the wrong direction.  Several cars swerved out of the lane to avoid being struck.  Danny Davis and his daughter LaShell were traveling in a light blue Dodge two-door right behind a Ford explorer.  When the SUV suddenly changed lanes to avoid Audrey’s oncoming truck Danny had no time to react.  The vehicles both traveling between 60 and 70 miles per hour collided head on.

SOBERING NUMBERS Drunk driving statistics — Almost 17,000 people are killed each year in alcohol-related crashes - an average of one almost every half-hour. — Only 27 percent of the fatally injured passenger vehicle drivers involved in nighttime single-vehicle crashes had no alcohol in their blood. — Alcohol involvement in crashes peaks at night. 59 percent of passenger vehicle drivers fatally injured between 9 pm and 6 am in 2004 had blood alchohol concentrations (BACs) at or above 0.08 percent, compared with 18 percent during other hours. Insurance Institute for Highway Safety Research

911 OPERATOR:   911.  What are you reporting?

CALLER:  Yeah, there looks like there’s one guy that’s probably dead, and one uh, person not moving at all in the other—in the—in the pickup.

911 OPERATOR:  OK.   So—

CALLER:  In the car

911 OPERATOR: The guy in the car’s not movin’?

CALLER: The guy in the car looks dead.  His head is smashed.

911 OPERATOR: His head is smashed?

CALLER: Yeah.

Her victims

Sheryl Maloy Davis:   I was running circles through the house screaming and stomping.  And, just freaking out and hollering out, “My baby.  Not my baby.”

Sheryl Maloy Davis was made crazy by the news. It was her family members whose lives collided fatally with Audrey Kishline’s recklessness on I-90 that wintry march night. Her 12-year-old daughter LaShell and her 38-year-old ex-husband Danny,  both killed when Audrey’s truck slammed into them in the wrong lane. Danny had been bringing his daughter over the mountain to see her mom.

Davis:  When they didn’t come home, I thought, “Well, he probably worked late.  Probably stopped off to get her dinner.” Or, something like that.

But Danny and LaShell never made it.

FREE VIDEO Remembering Lashell Sheryl Maloy Davis talks about her 12-year-old daughter Lashell, who died in that drunk driving incident. Dateline NBC

Sheryl’s life had been shattered by a drunk driver and not for the first time. Sheryl thought back to a dark episode when she was a child. Her father had been driving drunk and nearly killed himself in a wreck.

Davis:  I have been against drinking and driving since I was a little girl.  That was my campaign before it ever was a campaign.

Murphy:  It almost took your father early out of your whole family.

Davis:  Actually it did take my father.  He was never the same.

But this was so much worse.  Her daughter was dead and so was the father of her two surviving sons.

Davis: They died at 6:08 in the evening.  And, they were not finished with the crash site until midnight.  It took them hours to be able to cut them out of the car.

As for Audrey Kishline, who’d built a career and a support group based on the notion that she could control her drinking, she had a blood alcohol level more than three times the legal limit.  She was helicoptered to a Seattle hospital with major blood loss, broken ribs and a concussion. She was heavily medicated when she learned what she’d done. 

Kishline:  I was told it was a young girl, near my daughter’s age and her father.

Numbed, she watched news reports, the same awful story over and over with her killing two people.  But, for some reason, the full impact didn’t hit her until she got an anonymous letter a few weeks later. There were photos inside.

Kishline:  I see a picture of a young father in a trailer and a young blonde girl.  And I’m thinking, “Who—who sent this—who—who are these people?” 

Murphy: These were the people you killed.

Kishline:  That was the first time I actually saw pictures of those people.  It wasn’t as real before then.  You know, it wasn’t as real.  Now all of a sudden they had faces.  And you know, I just dropped to the floor.

Meanwhile, back across the mountains, Sheryl Maloy Davis said her final goodbye to her only daughter and her ex-husband. 

Murphy:  Did you bury the two of them together?

Davis:  Oh yeah.

Murphy:  Mothers aren’t supposed to bury daughters, huh?

Davis:  No.  That was very hard ‘cause I don’t think there’s anybody around who, when they get pregnant, doesn’t think about what this child might do or what this child might be when they grow up.

For Audrey the gravity of what she had done was inescapable.  Thinking about the victims, the members of MM, her own family.

Murphy:  You have two children, how do you tell them, “I’m a killer.  I killed two people, including a little girl,” who’s about the age of your own daughter?

Kishline:  I told them that mommy killed two people.  She you know drove drunk.  And my daughter just you know, broke down crying.  My son was too young really to fully comprehend what happened.  But I had to tell him.

Pleading guilty
Audrey also had to deal with the legal consequences of her actions.  She was charged with vehicular homicide. Against her lawyer’s advice she pleaded guilty at the arraignment.

Kishline:   I was guilty. And there’s no way I could look at myself in the mirror or face any of my family members when it was so totally obvious that I was driving in a raging blackout and killed two people. 

Murphy:  This is the moment of the awful, ghastly cosmic irony, that the advocate of MM drinking approaches, is charged with vehicular homicide, killing two people as a drunk driver.

Kishline:  The perfect little girl that tried to be perfect all her life, and lied to pretend I was perfect, ends up doing the most horrible thing that you could do to a mother, taking her child.

At first Sheryl Maloy Davis had no idea that the drunk driver who had killed her daughter and ex-husband was the founder of something called “MM” and author of the book that outlined the approach.

Davis: It was someone from I believe the Seattle Times that called me. And, he says, “Don’t you think it’s interesting that Audrey B. Kishline wrote a book about controlling your drinking?”

Murphy: What’d you think of that?

Davis:  I was shocked.

On the day of her sentencing, Audrey sat in court and heard family members and friends of the people she killed tell the judge what they thought of her.

Audrey spoke directly to Sheryl.

Kishline (in court): If it’s any comfort, please know that I will carry the guilt for causing your grief for the rest of my life.  I am so sorry.

The word sorry is a damn poor word for what happened.  But it’s the only word I could say. 

Audrey was sentenced to four and a half years in prison.  She arrived at her new home—the Washington corrections center for women—in August of 2000.  Eventually life behind bars transformed Audrey. 

Kishline: The first few months, I would see my kids on visits, and then I’d have to see them walk back out those 15 million double locked metal doors, cry my eyeballs out, you know cry, cry, cry.  Within I don’t know, six months to a year, I wasn’t crying anymore. 

Audrey was leading the life of a prisoner... doing her best to survive, and blocking out most of what had brought her to this place. But then one day she was told that someone wanted to pay her a visit:  Sheryl Maloy Davis, whose life Audrey had destroyed.

Kishline:  Oh my God.  I was scared to death.

The confrontation was looming.

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