Running throughout Ronnie Davies' life is an unforgivable amount of references to falls and accidents.

Four days before Ronnie landed in a coma, DeMille said Ronnie had tumbled down a slope while the two were hiking at a Washington dam. He thought he'd grabbed the boy before he hit his head, DeMille told doctors and investigators.

The same day, Ronnie's mother told a Dr. Lonnie Hammargren that Ronnie had "fallen off a table" recently.

Medical staff also heard Ronnie had fallen off a swing at preschool a few days earlier and been punched in the stomach by another child. Chandler and prosecutors could never verify any of these incidents in a study of Ronnie's injuries and in multiple interviews.

They did find evidence that Ronnie had been admitted to Dixie Medical Center at the end of December — five months earlier — with blows to his head. Tom was baby-sitting the little guy at that time, too, and told hospital officials and police Ronnie had slipped and hit his head getting out of the tub.

The investigation turned up several more suspicious injuries to the little boy in the last several months of his life.

On Jan 21, Ronnie's father came for a visit. "When I got there, Jan wouldn't let me take him. My little boy had a black eye and a fat lip," Harley Davies told police.

In one interview with police, Jan Davies said Ronnie had also "tripped on a can three weeks earlier and hit his head. "He got up," Davies told police. "He didn't complain."

The boy's pain and injuries seemed to mount in April.

In the last few weeks she watched the little boy, right up until late April, Jan Snyder said Ronnie was sick all the time. He threw up a lot — sometimes three or four times a day for days on end. He'd lay around not moving much some days and slept the whole time.

"What's the matter?" his baby sitter would ask.

"My head hurts," he'd say.

"Sometimes he would hold his head and scream," Snyder told police.

In a later interview, Jan Davies said her son had been subject to "the usual falls" in April. "He went backward out by the side of the house. Fell back and hit his head."

She said her pediatrician, Dr. Shepard, had suggested she get Ronnie a football helmet, "because he had a habit of always hitting his head."

For Jan Davies, it was her second round of trouble with police regarding an abused child.

A few years earlier, in April 1980, suspicions arose about Jan Davies and Harley Davies, her husband at the time. The two were living in Nevada.

Harley had a 3-year-old girl named Angel, and someone told officials the baby had a bad bruise on the right side of her head.