Epilogue

In the spring of 2002, James Daveggio and Michelle Michaud both stood trial in Alameda County, California, for the kidnapping, rape, and murder of Vanessa Samson. The trial consisted of ten weeks of often graphic testimony and photos. Deputy DA Angela Backers told the jurors that evidence proved that Daveggio left saliva on a rubber-ball gag and that Michaud left her fingerprints on several curling irons that had been used to sexually torture Vanessa. Backers declared, “There’s very compelling evidence that will make your job easy in finding these two guilty of first degree murder.”

Backers was correct in this assessment. On May 1, 2002, the jurors found James Daveggio and Michelle Michaud guilty of first degree murder with special circumstances. If anything, the guilt phase had been easy for the jurors compared to what awaited them next. They had to vote for either life without parole for Daveggio and Michaud, or for the death penalty. And in California, very few women had been condemned to death in the last fifty years.

Michaud’s attorneys told the jurors during this phase that Michelle had suffered from “battered woman’s syndrome” for years and had been completely under James Daveggio’s spell. But Daveggio’s own words during the guilt phase came back to haunt Michelle. He had said, “We were partners in everything that happened.” And Angela Backers told the jurors, “The pair formed a predatory team to sexually assault young and vulnerable women for their own depraved sexual gratification. Michelle Michaud pulled one end of the rope and James Daveggio the other when they strangled Vanessa Samson to death.”

Perhaps it was that image that stuck most in the jurors’ minds. On June 12, 2002, the jurors returned to court with their verdict—death for both James Daveggio and Michelle Michaud. Judge Larry Goodman told Daveggio and Michaud, “The penalty is appropriate. The torture and murder of Vanessa Samson was vile, cruel, senseless, depraved, brutal, evil, and vicious.”

 

 

As with all things surrounding James Daveggio and Michelle Michaud, there were always a few surprises. It had been thought by most law enforcement officers that Daveggio and Michaud had been the man and woman pair who had snatched Jaycee Lee Dugard off a South Lake Tahoe street in 1991. Michaud’s photo from that time was a dead ringer for the sketch-artist rendering of the woman suspect in the kidnapping case. It was assumed that Jaycee Lee had been dead for years.

Then out of the blue, in August 2009, there came amazing news that Jaycee Lee Dugard was still alive. It turned out that a man named Philip Garrido and his wife, Nancy, had whisked Jaycee Lee away from Tahoe in their vehicle, and for the next eighteen years, kept her a virtual prisoner in their backyard compound near Antioch, California. Jaycee Lee had two daughters, fathered by Philip Garrido, and it’s almost certain that Nancy, a nursing student, delivered Jaycee Lee’s babies in the compound.

Both James Daveggio and Michelle Michaud might have been amazed at where the Garridos had kept Jaycee Lee and her children all those years. It was only thirty miles away from where James Daveggio had grown up and started planning his twisted schemes of abduction, torture, and murder of young women.