'I Was Not Going to Let This Destroy Me'

May 23, 2008 — -- In a Canton, Ohio, courtroom Feb. 28, Bobby Cutts Jr., a former police officer, listened to statements of grief and anger from the family of 26-year-old Jesse Davis, the woman he had been convicted of murdering.

Then, in what became an extraordinary moment that some other family members had advised against, Davis' mother, Patty Porter, stood to make her statement -- a statement she had planned as an act of forgiveness.

"The person before me had told me not to look at him," Porter said. "But I wanted him to look at me. I wanted him to see me."

What hung in the balance was whether Porter could follow through with the forgiveness she believed was necessary to continue with her life. How she faced that decision is a story with an age-old theme ingrained in many religions in which forgiveness is a key tenet, but which seldom reaches the magnitude of what she was asking of herself -- whether to forgive the man who had murdered her daughter.

Only a few months before, in June 2007, Porter had been searching desperately for her daughter. Davis was pregnant and missing from her home in northeastern Ohio.

Cutts was one of the people who joined the search. He had fathered a son with Davis; the boy, named Blake, then 2½, had been found alone in the house.

"He just kept repeating that his mommy broke the table and his mommy was crying and his mommy was in the rug," Porter said. "You could tell immediately something really horrible had happened there."

At first, Cutts denied any knowledge of the disappearance. After hundreds of people had helped in the search, Cutts changed his story and finally led police to a remote area of a nearby park where he had disposed of the body after wrapping it in a comforter -- what his son Blake had mistaken for a rug.

By then, the body was too decomposed to determine an exact cause of death. Cutts claimed the death had been an accident that occurred during an argument when he said he elbowed Davis in her throat.