Former Stanislaus official pleads innocent to fabricating self-death threats

Former Stanislaus County clerk-recorder Karen Mathews Davis pleaded not guilty Friday to a charge of lying to federal agents about death threats she allegedly made against herself.

Once hailed as a hero for surviving a brutal attack in her Modesto garage after standing up to radical tax protestors, Mathews Davis, now 68, apparently tried to curry similar public sympathy three years ago during an unsuccessful run for Congress, according to court documents. After reporting that she received written threats in late 2013 and early 2014, she admitted in 2015 to federal agents that she had fabricated them, leaving one in her mailbox and mailing the other to herself, an agent said in an affidavit upon Mathews Davis’ arrest in October 2015.

The accusations are repeated in a formal charging document issued in conjunction with Mathews Davis’ Friday arraignment. Before coming clean, she on four occasions tried to pin the threats on her grandson, a neighbor’s nephew, a member of her church, and a man who said he was wrongly convicted of beating her in the 1994 ambush in her garage, putting him behind bars for 19 years.

Now 79, Roger Steiner lives in a broken-down trailer in a pasture west of Fresno and has been in and out of the hospital numerous times in recent months with congestive heart failure, a condition that killed his father. He could not be reached for this report; last month, Steiner said he was weak and using a walker.

“I’d like to get some loose ends taken care of before I check out,” he said, referring to Mathews Davis’ court case.

Attorneys on both sides had asked for 10 postponements since her arrest, some because of her medical problems. In May, Mathews Davis, who moved to Lodi years ago, had told The Modesto Bee that she had had two back surgeries.

On Aug. 10, a surgeon implanted a peripheral nerve stimulator, a device meant to help control pain. But the procedure backfired and the stimulator was removed Dec. 7, court documents say.

In a December conversation, Steiner speculated that agents were trying to “figure out if she lied 20 years ago, like she did now. If she did (then), that would put a different light on my sentence.

“I think she liked the attention 20 years ago and probably missed it, and maybe she was trying to recreate it (recently),” Steiner said.

Mathews Davis is scheduled March 30 in Sacramento’s federal court for a status conference where attorneys could inform a judge about plea negotiations, ask for a trial date or ask for more time to prepare.

This story was originally published February 6, 2017 at 2:56 PM with the headline "Former Stanislaus official pleads innocent to fabricating self-death threats."