If Vicki had died and the killer had taken the knives away with him, I might have thought there were two killers involved because most attackers don’t carry a set of knives with them.

The attacker came back from Vicki’s kitchen with a new knife and continued cutting her throat until he thought she was dead. Then he pushed her off the bed, tossed a blanket over her, and left.

Vicki, barely breathing, managed to stand up, her chin touching her chest because her throat was cut so badly, and she somehow staggered, still tied up, to the next room and tried to call 911. That’s when her thirteen-year-old son came out from hiding, found his mom dying on the floor, and ran to the neighbor to get help.

And she lived to tell her story.

AFTER SENDING MY profile off to the detective on the Sarah Andrews case, I got the call from Vicki Davis.

She wanted me to find out more about Painter.

Vicki was a single mother living in a trailer park. She was furious and frustrated because Painter, the man she identified as her attacker, had been arrested, kept in jail for almost a year, and just before the trial date, the case was dropped. The DNA on a cigarette at the scene not only didn’t match Vicki or anyone else connected with her home, but didn’t match Painter either. No other evidence was left by the attacker; there were no fibers, not enough semen for DNA tests, no blood-nothing. At least that was the claim made by the state prosecutor’s office, and Painter was released.

Vicki was at home asleep on the morning of September 19, 1995, when she says a thin white man, about five four to five six, with shoulder-length dirty brown hair, a beard, and a mustache, knocked on the door of her trailer at 1:52 a.m. and said, “My car broke down, can I come in and use the phone?”

She said no, because she was home alone with her young son.

He said his name was Jack Wilson and she offered to call someone for him. He gave her a local number and she called it, but the man who answered did not know anyone by the name of Jack Wilson. She told Jack what happened and he left.

But the man’s appearance at her door in the middle of the night unnerved her enough that she called the police. And she was right to do so-even if the police never did show up-because fifty minutes later there was a loud bang at her front door and she got out of bed to find Jack Wilson in her kitchen. The lights were on and Vicki got a good look at the man as he grabbed her and held her at knifepoint in the living room.

“You made me have to break into my car, bitch. I locked my keys in it and you wouldn’t let me call anyone for help,” he hissed at her.

The attacker blamed her, justifying why he was going to teach her a lesson. Then he pushed Vicki past her son’s room, toward her bedroom. She grabbed the doorframe to stop him from taking her to the back and raping her.

“Stop fighting me, bitch,” he growled, grabbing at her hands. She pushed him against the wall and actually pinned him to it but she couldn’t hold him there for long. As he pushed her away, she made a desperate lunge for the knife and they grappled over the weapon. He won. He had had enough of Vicki refusing to give in.

“If you don’t stop fighting me, we will kill him,” he told her, breathing hard. Vicki thought the “we” her attacker was referring to might mean someone else was outside the house.

“Just let me tie you up and I won’t hurt your son.” His eyes were cold like a snake’s and he held her against the wall with one hand, his other hand waving the knife at her face.

Vicki was terrified and exhausted. She knew she couldn’t fight him much longer. To save my son, she thought, I have to cooperate.

She let him tie her up-with a Nintendo game cord-and she immediately knew it was the biggest mistake she had ever made, as he cut her undershirt and panties off with the kitchen knife and gagged her with them. He began kissing her, sucking her breasts, and rubbing her legs. He didn’t technically rape her, but he did roll her onto her stomach, putting something under her belly to elevate her buttocks. He then masturbated and ejaculated on her buttocks and back.

How stupid is this? she thought. The guy comes all the way up here to rape a woman but doesn’t bother-or can’t? Instead, he masturbated, and when he finished, he took out a knife and started cutting Vicki’s throat.

He cut her throat on one side, then the other.

Oh, my God, Vicki thought, he’s going to kill me.

The attack continued.

When he tried something different, stabbing her in the neck, his thrust literally snapped the blade.

“Look!” he said conversationally, as if he and his victim were sharing an evening meal. “I broke my knife!”

He went to the kitchen, rifled around for another one, came back, then stabbed her over and over until her throat was cut on both sides and he had stabbed her repeatedly in the back and neck.

She should have been dead.

But she wasn’t.

“Aren’t you dead yet, bitch?” he said a number of times, and eventually he thought she was dead because she stopped twitching. He pushed her off the bed.

Vicki later remembered that her head hit the nightstand by the bed when she went down. She didn’t think it much mattered that she hit her head, because if this wasn’t death, it wouldn’t be long.

The perpetrator threw a blanket over her and walked out, taking with him a few items of little value.

Vicki lay there until she was certain he was gone. Then this remarkable woman, bleeding to death, throat cut, stabbed many times, managed to get up despite the fact that her feet and hands were tied, and she staggered to a telephone. She knocked the receiver off the hook trying to call 911.

Just then, her son-who was pretending to be asleep during the attack-came out and found her. Seeing that her son was safe, Vicki muttered with her last conscious breath, “Go get help!” and passed out. Her terrified boy ran next door, banged and screamed until the residents came to the door and called 911. Emergency medical technicians came and Vicki miraculously survived.

It’s just mind-boggling. The damage that was done was seemingly beyond repair. It still amazes me, and Vicki, that she survived one of the most horrific attacks imaginable.

It seemed like one victim was going to see justice. She lived to be able to identify her attacker.

One month after the crime, Painter was arrested. On October 1, 1995, a neighbor called to report a suspicious person in Vicki’s yard. He was sitting in a red pickup truck near Vicki’s home. The arresting officer noted that not only did the driver match the description of the suspect but the composite drawing the police sketch artist did was actually taped to the windshield of his truck! Painter told the officer that he had been visiting his daughter, who lived in the same trailer park, and had just left Vicki’s trailer, where he had said a prayer for her. He was photographed, interviewed, and released.

The next day, Vicki picked Painter out of a lineup of six photos and said the man in the picture was the man who broke into her home, sexually assaulted her, and stabbed her.

He was arrested again four days later when Vicki’s son independently identified Painter from the six photographs he was shown.

“He seems to have some kind of thing going on in his brain that he thinks he is God,” Vicki later said of Painter. “He told the police that he felt strange vibes that told him to go to my house and burn a candle and pray for me right after the attack. When the police finally arrested him, they told me that during the entire ride to the courthouse, he was chanting.”

Painter said he was in the area at the time of the attack on Vicki, visiting a former wife and stepdaughter who lived in the same mobile home park.

That should have been the end of the investigation.