I Catch Killers: Police officer Karen Davis’s remarkable career in and out of the police force

As a 20-year cop, with a brief detour as a bikini-clad page three model, crime writer Karen Davis saw plenty of the dark side of Sydney, which eventually came back to haunt her. Don’t miss Season 2 of Gary Jubelin’s ‘I Catch Killers’ podcast series.

Police officer Karen Davis was trying to save a man’s life. He’d been stabbed outside a Newtown hotel, the weapon wedged in his body, and she tried to stem the bleeding until the ambulance arrived.

Moments later it was her own life that was under threat when the stabbed man’s son, seriously impacted by alcohol and drugs, got involved.

“He was drinking a beer and he smashed it on the side of the kerb and just grabbed me. I was actually kneeling down over his father, (he) got me in a headlock and put the smashed bottle to my throat and said ‘I’m gonna kill you’,” recalls Davis in the latest episode of the smash-hit “I Catch Killers” podcast with Gary Jubelin.

EXCLUSIVE: As a subscriber you have early access to Season 2 of I Catch Killers with Gary Jubelin. Immediately below are Parts 1 and 2 of his fascinating interview with former police officer and current crime writer, Karen Davis.

Part 1 (above) – Working in the NSW police force in the 1980s was daunting. You had to contend with daily grind and being hit on by sleazy old cops

Part 2 (above) – Seemingly out of nowhere, the gravity of life as a police officer descended on Karen Davis but she fought her PTSD to forge a new career as a crime writer.

Gary Jubelin with former police officer and now crime writer Karen Davis. Picture: Tim Hunter.

“I couldn’t fathom it at the time because I was actually trying to help. But he’s for whatever reason, he just lost it. I remember thinking, just keep your hand on your gun … (because) one of the constables at Newtown, just before I got there, had been killed with his own gun.

“And my partner froze. And she was just screaming into the radio – signal one – which is (to) stop everything, all police get there as quick as possible…But she wasn’t giving a location.

“Luckily I’d called off and said, this is where we’re going off, at this location. And so the cops from the station just came running around. (We) got surrounded by police, the guy let me go and he got locked up. That was a scary one.”

This was Newtown in the early 1980s, long before any thought was given to police officers’ need to process trauma, and Davis was sent straight to the next job: someone had overdosed on drugs.

On Page 3 of the Daily Mirror

She was also on the front page as well.

More than three decades later, Davis is still haunted by the things she saw – even though in the moment she didn’t have time to feel much beyond the adrenaline.

Now an accomplished author of the fictional Detective Lexie Rogers crime series, Davis has mined her experiences in the hyper-masculine environment of 1980s suburban policing, where she was routinely propositioned by sleazy senior officers. She managed to overcome the prejudice and rise to become a detective and undercover officer, but Davis can only look back and laugh in astonishment at what she went through.

It happened from the moment she walked through the front door of Newtown police station as a 19-year-old straight out of the Goulburn Academy and introduced herself to the senior constable behind the counter.

“He just looked at me and started laughing (and said) I hope you enjoy being thrown across bars,” Davis said.

Moments later in the constables’ room where she was “trying to make myself look invisible” another senior constable approached her and quizzed her about her personal details.

Karen Davis at the very start of her police career.

“He sat down on a chair and he pulled a garbage bin from the corner, put it between his legs. He opened a can of tuna, started eating over the garbage, and asked me what I was doing for dinner. And I’d been there for five (minutes).”

But the one moment that sticks vividly in Davis’s mind from those early days was her visit to the Glebe morgue as part of her induction.

Having never seen a dead body before, Davis was dreading the visit to the facility which could accommodate over 300 people.

“It was like a big Kmart store and (the morgue attendant) said go in there and have a look around all the different bodies and get yourself familiar. What I didn’t know was the morgue attendant held back the three males that I was with. And as I walked in, he shut the big metal doors behind me and turned the lights off,” Davis recalled.

“So I was stuck in the fridge, this massive fridge with God knows how many dead bodies and just not daring to move because if I move I’m gonna walk into one and then I’ll have a heart attack and be in here with them anyway.

“I don’t know how long I was in there for, I just kind of stood still and thought, oh, my God, this is a bit of a test, which of course it was.”

Karen Davis’s books have made a mark in the crime genre.

Davis put her horror first days behind her to carve out a 20-year career while she also dabbled in modelling and featured on Page 3 in the Daily Mirror newspaper in the 1980s.

“(I was paid) $75 dollars or $100 at the time, which wasn’t a great deal even then. But, you know, it was all just taken at a beach down at La Perouse, just very casual, not professional or glamorous at all.”

She said it was generally taken in good humour although there were one or two jibes about her weight. As was often the case her sex would often have an impact on the way she was treated.

This included being called a “Dickless Tracy” to being admonished by a senior officer for not wearing her hat after a picture of her appeared in a newspaper report on a triple fatal accident.

But Davis proved that being a mother wasn’t incompatible with being a police officer and spent the back half of her career, before she turned to writing fiction, as a detective, including stints with child protection and the licensing division.

This included undercover work at some of Sydney’s seedier nightclubs in the 90s and early 2000s arriving home at 5am after a night busting drug dealers.

But the final two years of Davis’s career became an ongoing struggle when she began to experience regular panic attacks.

Two decades of policing, mainly on the frontline, had caught up with her. Seeing too many of life’s tragedies up close and the worst in people had taken its toll.

Karen would later forge a new career as a writer.

With books from the Lexie Rogers series.

“(A) massive panic attack came out of absolutely nowhere. I just had this feeling of doom and gloom that my kids were, I knew they were being minded by my parents, I knew they were okay, but I thought, oh, you know, they’re dead. I just felt dizzy, felt sick,” she recalls.

“I thought that someone’s going to grab my gun and shoot me.

“I was absolutely petrified, I just thought I was dying.”

The attacks continued for two years before her diagnosis with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). During this time she was even having nightmares about being locked in the morgue as a young officer.

“ I’d gone from being a very confident, competent person I thought, to not being able to get out of bed and get my kids to school. And I was scared of everything. I thought everyone was dying.

Davis said she didn’t blame the police force for the PTSD and that it was just a reality of the profession she was in.

On the recommendation of her author mother Lynne Wilding Davis wrote her memoirs to help process her trauma.

Karen Davis said that writing helped her get through her Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Picture: Tim Hunter.

I CATCH KILLERS PODCAST

Episode 1: Haunted by fatal shot – Police sniper Brett Pennell

Episode 2: World’s post in-demand policeman – Former top cop Nick Kaldas

“I was in such a bad place I wanted to get these things off my chest. I even did a tour around Newtown and some of the places that really affected me.”

“Writing these things down helped because it was like I’d finally dealt with some of the grief.”

They became the basis for the Lexie Rogers novels with three already published and another in the works and no, Lexie is not her.

“A lot of the things that have happened to Lexie have happened to me (but she) is a figment of my imagination.”

A NIGHT AT THE EMBASSY

If there was a nightclub that could draw the attention of police when Karen Davis was on the force it was the Embassy nightclub at Double Bay, once owned by Rene Rivkin.

Davis reveals that it was a club that regularly attracted police attention. It is not a current allegation.

“So I would go in with a couple of undercover girls and basically just do cold starts and walk up to people and ask for the drugs,” Davis recalled.

“And it was too easy, almost. They were just handing out cocaine and speed and whatever you wanted, ecstasy tablets, whatever was happening on that day. And the whole idea of that was if you could get so many buys within a period of time, you could close the premises down for a period of time.”

But there was also an inherent risk that put Davis’s policing skills to the test.

“The hardest part about being, I think, a female undercover operative is that a lot of the guys that are selling the drugs, they want to give it to you because they want something in return,” Davis said.

“You had to kind of do a lot of talking. You know, I’m not taking it for myself. It’s for a friend – because they often say, come know I’ve got a motel room across the road. Why don’t we go and test it?”

Davis said the cover stories needed to be watertight and that most of the nerves would come in court when she had to face the person she bought the drugs off.