A Week Since She Vanished, and Still Little Light Is Shed

CANTON, Ohio, June 20 — From the moment her mother entered her home last Friday and found her missing, the circumstances surrounding the disappearance of Jessie Davis were most unsettling.

Someone had poured a bottle of bleach on the floor beside her bed, as if to do away with blood or other evidence. The bedside table was overturned, and Ms. Davis’s mattress was askew, its maroon comforter missing. Her badly soiled 2-year-old son, Blake, gave a chilling description to her mother, Patricia Porter, of what had happened: “Mommy’s crying. Mommy broke the table. Mommy in rug.”

The missing comforter, Ms. Porter has since said, is the same color as the Oriental rug in her own house, where Blake often plays.

Ms. Davis, 26 and nearly nine months pregnant, has not been seen for a week, and investigators have no suspects, Rick Perez, chief deputy sheriff of Stark County, said at a news conference Wednesday. They have repeatedly interviewed Blake’s father, Bobby L. Cutts Jr., 30, a Canton police officer and, until Wednesday, had described him as “fully cooperative.” But at the news conference Mr. Perez, though characterizing Mr. Cutts as “still communicating,” would not say that he was continuing to cooperate.

In an interview Tuesday with a Canton paper, The Repository, Mr. Cutts said he had nothing to do with Ms. Davis’s disappearance.

News reports have also identified Mr. Cutts as the father of Ms. Davis’s unborn daughter, though Mr. Perez said the authorities could not confirm that. In addition, he has two children with his estranged wife, and Nikki Giavasis, an actress in Los Angeles, told Fox News this week that he had a child with her as well. Ms. Giavasis said that Mr. Cutts had beaten and stalked her repeatedly over the last few years and that she had been granted several court orders of protection, one this year.

Ms. Davis was three weeks from her due date when she vanished. It appeared for a time that some clue to her disappearance might have turned up when a day-old baby girl was found in a wicker basket Monday night on the front porch of Don and Sue Redman, south of Wooster, about 35 miles from here.

But though the sheriff’s office is awaiting the results of DNA tests, the authorities are skeptical that the baby is that of the missing woman. Ms. Redman is a school nurse who has worked with young pregnant women, and there is speculation that the infant might belong to one such student.

Ms. Porter said she last spoke to her daughter at 9:20 p.m. on Wednesday of last week. Ms. Davis, who worked at an insurance office, seemed tired but happy. “She was very excited about Chloe,” the girl she was carrying, Ms. Porter said. “We had a normal conversation.”

She did not hear from her daughter the following day and, when she called her twice that evening, reached only her voice mail. “This was odd,” Ms. Porter said, because the two usually spoke five or six times a day. “I just figured she was tired and went to bed early.”

Last Friday morning, Ms. Porter and her daughter Whitney drove to the duplex where Ms. Davis and Blake lived. They found the back screen door open and the patio door unlocked. Ms. Davis’s car was in the garage, and the contents of her purse were strewn about the kitchen floor. The only one inside was little Blake.