Veterinarian’s suicide haunts unsuspecting friends, family
Those close to her still trying to grasp what led to death
Three days before she stood on the balcony of her condo and faced the last seconds of her life, Valerie McDaniel got in her car and drove up to Austin to have dinner with friends, just as she had countless times before.
All of them were aware of the latest news in her life. How could anyone not be? The story of the revered veterinarian arrested in a failed murderfor-hire plot had made headlines across the nation. But even if it hovered above the gathering like a faint noxious mist, on this night it didn’t matter. She was just Val, the charismatic heart of all her various groups of friends — the girl who lit up a room with equal parts warmth, wit and intelligence.
The Friday night gettogether was like so many others of the Girls Gone Mild, as her Austin friends called themselves. But of
course it wasn’t. Unknown to them, even to her best friend and “soul sister” Maggie Whitley, she had come to say goodbye.
The Girls were left stunned and grieving as news spread on the following Monday, March 27, of McDaniel’s suicidal leap from the seventh floor of her River Oaks condo. None had realized their impromptu party was in truth a farewell bash. Like so much of McDaniel’s behavior over the last few months, the impulses behind it were a fully veiled mystery.
“We had a wonderful evening,” Whitley said. “And then she was gone.”
The weeks leading up to McDaniel’s arrest, and her death soon after, remain a black box that those close to her are trying to pick apart. They had been suspicious of her boyfriend, also arrested in the alleged plot, for a year or more. But in the weeks before, they had become worried. She had cut off communication or contact with most of them. The full extent of what she was concealing — or whether it was deliberate concealment — is a question that haunts them.
The publicized details of her alleged participation in a plot to kill her ex-husband and her boyfriend’s former girlfriend were chilling. They included a $20,000 payoff to an undercover cop posing as a hitman and gruesome photos of the staged killings. In a statement McDaniel left behind after her death, she claimed the arrest was entrapment and that she had never wanted her husband hurt.
By all appearances, boyfriend Leon Jacob was the main architect of the alleged scheme. He had approached a bail bondsman he knew looking for a way to reach another of the bondsman’s clients. Jacob apparently believed the man would help arrange the kidnapping or silencing of the former girlfriend, whose complaints to police had led to felony charges of assault and stalking.
One of McDaniel’s lawyers told reporters that she entered the picture only at the end of the plot and suggested she had been lured in by her boyfriend with incomplete awareness of the particulars. Harris County prosecutors disputed that, saying that McDaniel was a willing participant in the scheme regardless of when she entered it. The truth may never be known.
Rarely lost temper
McDaniel’s friends and her sister remain skeptical. What makes no sense to them is that she abhorred violence and didn’t like her friends to even criticize her ex. That was her daughter’s father, she always said, and she loved him very much. Whatever her grievances during almost two decades of a trying marriage, she rarely lost her temper and typically played the role of peacemaker.
Had she finally had enough and snapped? The charges against her say yes. Angela Hudson, McDaniel’s younger sister, defiantly claims no.
Hudson said her sister was her closest friend and constant confidante. Not once had Hudson ever heard her express hatred toward anyone. With McDaniel’s divorce final, the property settled, her business doing well, and both of them in new relationships, why would she suddenly decide to kill her ex and turn her 8-year-old daughter’s world upside down?
Hudson flew to Houston from her home in Seattle and spent a week with her sister after she had posted bond and been released from jail. She became convinced the charges against her were wrong. On leaving, she offered ample encouragement.
“I told her this will all work out and the truth will be known,” Hudson said. “She did not do what she was accused of. I know that. She kept saying she would be OK. None of us had a clue she was hurting like that. She was holding all that pain in.”
That and much more, apparently. As close they were, even Hudson did not appreciate the extent of her sister’s attraction to Jacob. She figured it was a passing thing. Ditto Whitley and McDaniel’s other intimate friends. Only to her iPad, where she left a lengthy statement for posthumous public consumption, did McDaniel speak of her deep love for Jacob and what he meant to her.
While that secrecy in itself was unusual, Hudson and other friends said there were other troubling hints that something was not right. Those who happened across McDaniel said she did not look particularly healthy or vibrant. Usually she was in the company of Jacob, and when they bumped into friends he would rush to leave. Calls and text messages to her went unreturned, birthday flowers unacknowledged. She took time off from work, a rarity unless she was sick.
‘She was snowed by him’
The “normal Val” was kind and compassionate beyond measure. The person who allegedly got mixed up in a murder plot was some smitten and apparently vengeful alter ego created by the chemistry of a bad marriage and a rebound relationship with someone offering romance and passion that she had never experienced. To her friends, it doesn’t add up.
They insist too many details remain unknown. They also wonder how much she really knew about the man who had moved in with her.
“She was snowed by him,” one friend said. “She was vulnerable. She wanted love. He knew what he was doing and pursued her.”
After her arrest following the police sting operation, her family and her best friends urged her to fight, to hire the best lawyer in town. A trial, presumably, would go into details about her boyfriend’s alarming past and her ex-husband’s behavior during their troubled marriage.
Early this year, after warnings from authorities to stay away from his ex-girlfriend, Jacob was charged with a felony count of stalking and harassment. That charge was pending at the time of his arrest on the murder-forhire charge. He remains in jail with bail denied.
Jacob also had faced similar charges involving his ex-wife in Illinois. He received an 11-month sentence but was granted probation. In Ohio, Jacob was charged in 2012 with burglarizing the home of the head of the residency program that had terminated him.
To those who had known McDaniel for years, a criminal trial might reveal a more complex picture than prosecutors had described, one of manipulation and deceit. If she was willing — or able — to reveal it.
Yet in the face of mountainous publicity, McDaniel had other ideas about how to resolve matters. At heart, many friends said, she was not a fighter and never had been. Perhaps she could not imagine walking into a courtroom and airing intimate details from her private life.
The much-admired vet was horrified to be at the heart of scandalous headlines and even more so to be thought of by strangers as a “monster.” In fact, she said as much. In the final two weeks of her life, she dictated her version of events on her iPad, almost two hours worth. She left it for a friend who lived in the building with instructions to make sure her story got out.
The friend, KPRC-TV general manager Jerry Martin, gave the iPad to police. However, the station apparently has a copy of her audio statement. It aired a fiveminute report last week in which McDaniel’s voice was heard in snippets.
“Try not to judge me,” McDaniel said. “I didn’t wake up one day and just say, ‘hey, I want to kill my ex-husband.’ I didn’t want to hurt Mack. I never did.”
The attorney for her ex-husband did not respond to requests for comment.
KPRC also declined a request from the Chronicle to listen to the full audio file. In any case, she wanted people to know that the allegations of a criminal plot were not true. McDaniel said she would not have conspired to do anything that would cause her pain.
“I’m so sorry about everything,” she said.
Stunning connection
Regardless of the details of the foiled plot, or the extent of McDaniel’s involvement, the simple fact that her name was connected to it stunned everyone who knew her. On the worst days of her marriage, her tendency was to turn the other cheek. One friend said the most demonstrative reaction she ever saw was McDaniel throwing her husband’s cellphone into the bay after getting some particularly maddening news. So why now?
“She wasn’t even talking about him anymore,” said Whitley, a friend for almost three decades. “She kept the practice and had her daughter, and that was all that mattered. Yeah, she had to pay him some money. So what? He was paid off. She didn’t care about that.”
While she did complain that contact with her ex remained an ongoing problem, none of her friends who spoke to the Chronicle said McDaniel appeared unduly burdened by it. As she herself said in her lengthy iPad summary, she mostly just wanted him to be nicer to her.
“She was happy — that was the thing,” said one longtime friend. “She was on new ground now. And then, all of a sudden, crazy comes to town.”
McDaniel had met Jacob in 2014. Nine years her junior, he was temporarily living with his mother, her next-door neighbor in West University Place. The neighbor, Golda Jacob, was an attorney who represented her in the divorce case. And the first impression her son made was not a good one.
“The cockiest (expletive) I ever met in my life, and I was completely turned off immediately by his attitude,” McDaniel dictated to her iPad.
Hudson remembers those days and confirmed that her sister tried to avoid him.
“I came into town shortly after she met him,” her sister said. “He would come over and knock on her door, day after day. She would hide and pretend she wasn’t there. She wanted nothing to do with him.”
Despite the rejection, Jacob persisted. Eventually he broke through. In her recorded statement, McDaniel talks about falling in love with him and makes reference to a particular moment — “the most passionate, romantic moment in my life.”
“He made me happy, he talked to me, he kept me company,” she said in her lengthy final explanation.
“She never spoke much about her boyfriend, but I do know she was very lonely after the divorce (filing) despite the marriage being hell for her,” said Angela Murphy, a friend who had spent many nights talking with McDaniel about their lives and similar personal histories.
‘A loving heart’
Murphy was happy to see her friend getting on with her life. Though she, too, had misgivings about Jacob and thought McDaniel could do much better, she did not press the matter, sensing that McDaniel disliked hearing negative comments. Then their talks ceased altogether.
“My last conversation with her was in January,” Murphy said. “She wouldn’t answer my calls or messages. I just figured there was a good reason for it, and that she was not avoiding me to be mean.”
That avoidance ultimately included her sister, who did not know what to make of it. There had been times over the years when McDaniel was traveling or so exceptionally busy that the contact would tail off. But not for long.
“My sister was my best friend,” Hudson said. “We talked all the time. I didn’t know what was happening. I knew there was this guy she was seeing and was really happy about. But I started having a gut feeling about him. I know her so well and we’re so close … something was just off.”
Hudson did not find out exactly what — and by how much — until the day McDaniel and Jacob were arrested. A few months earlier, her sister could not have appeared happier.
Today she sits in her Seattle home, 1,700 miles away, heartbroken and with far more questions than answers.
“She had such a loving heart,” Hudson said. “This was not her.”
“I told her this will all work out and the truth will be known. She did not do what she was accused of. I know that. She kept saying she would be OK. None of us had a clue she was hurting like that. She was holding all that pain in.” Angela Hudson, Valerie McDaniel’s younger sister