Chapter 4
“Froggie”
James Anthony Daveggio had been born in San Francisco at Mary’s Help Hospital on July 27, 1960, the son of a delivery driver for a liquor supply company. He already had one brother and a sister was soon on the way. But before James was five years old, his father divorced his mother, Darlene, and moved out of the area.
Even though his mom remarried in 1964, Daveggio sorely missed his dad. At some point he found out that his father not only got remarried, but he always seemed to have several girlfriends on the side. According to Donetta Rhodes, a woman Daveggio would later marry, “James always wanted to be like his dad. He idolized him. He even insisted at one point that we go live with him in Pacifica. He wanted the nice things his dad had: the nice house, the good cars, all the kids. But the thing James wanted most was more wives and more girlfriends. I thought that was a real odd thing to tell me. But where it seemed to work for his father, it never quite worked for him. James had a way of bullshitting people for a while. He had this real open manner. But once you got to see what he was really like up close, it was a different story. Everything had to be for him. He really at heart didn’t care about anyone else. And it always tripped him up. It’s like he couldn’t control himself. James always managed to get into trouble at some point.”
When James Daveggio got into minor scrapes as a boy, the one person to always back him up was his mother, Darlene. To her, he was special, even though he did have a speech impediment that made his voice very low and rough. And he was not the quickest learner. If James got into a scuffle with a neighborhood boy, it was always Darlene who found a ready excuse why her son was the innocent party. If he was found to have stolen something, she surmised it must have been a mistake. And when even darker rumors started to circulate about him later, she drove them out of her mind. It couldn’t be her son who was at fault, not the James she knew, who was a loving son.
One woman who had been a classmate of James’s in high school, and still works in the area, remembered him at Union City’s Logan High School as quiet and kind of shy. “He really didn’t stand out. He wasn’t bad-looking or anything. I remember he had long blond hair and blue eyes. I guess I remember the eyes more than anything. They were very bright blue. But other than that he wasn’t someone you really noticed all that much.”
James Daveggio’s photo in the 1976 Logan High School yearbook, The Epitaph, revealed a stocky boy with longish blond hair that reached to his collar. He had one characteristic, though, that could not be captured by just a photo—his voice. Even by the time he was sixteen, it was already deep with just a bit of a rasp to it. It earned him the nickname “Froggie.” He was intimidating because of his size and deep voice, but also approachable because he tended to smile a lot and was fairly quiet. His eyes, girls agreed, were the best thing about him. They were a very deep blue and tended to light up when he smiled. And he didn’t use foul language around girls like some teenage guys did, just to act tough.
But if the girls had looked a bit more carefully at his smile, they might have noticed it contained a strange quality. Both his 1976 and 1977 yearbook photos reveal a secretive nature to his smile, as if he had hidden thoughts. Perhaps it was a smile that masked the bizarre sexual fantasies that were beginning to bubble to the surface of his mind. For by 1976 Daveggio was already showing tendencies of antisocial behavior and deep-seated sexual problems.
The move to Pleasanton from Union City did not help. He didn’t make many friends at his new school, Foothill High, and always seemed to be getting into fights. The more he was punished, the more he rebelled. And his penchant for stealing only increased. He became involved in a robbery of a local gas station and was caught. For his part as the driver of the getaway car, he spent some time in the Alameda County Boys detention camp.
He was also becoming more outgoing and aggressive with girls. According to one source, “He couldn’t keep his eyes or his hands off them. He had roaming hands, if you know what I mean. If he wanted something, he just went after it. That went for people as well as things.”
The move to Pleasanton also brought him into contact with a boy a year older than himself—a boy with sexual fantasies just as wild and violent as his own. The boy’s name was Michael Ihde.
The two bumped into each other on Pleasanton’s old Main Street. Before long they were both skipping school and hanging out. It was here, not at school, that Daveggio got into his true element and made friends. Never a model student, he began to disregard his homework even more. He was never much into books anyway. It was more fun just to hang out with “tough” guys like Mike around Main Street. Not that either Mike or James were all that tough at this point. They didn’t do hard drugs then, but they weren’t above caging a few beers from older boys and smoking marijuana. Then they would go down to an area known as “the Creek,” behind Main Street, and drink their beer or smoke their dope.
One of the places they hung out at was the Pastime Pool Hall on Main Street. A bartender who currently works there grew up with Daveggio. Like everyone else who knew James from that era, he referred to him as “Frog” or “Froggie.”
“Frog used to hang out at the creek [Arroyo del Valle] behind Main Street a lot,” he said. “You could look over there and there would be Frog. Not really causing any trouble. Just back there goofing off. He’d rather do that than go to school. I don’t remember the other guy, Mike what’s his name. I’m not even sure how much of friends he and Frog were. I think they just kind of were in the same crowd, you know what I mean. Birds of a feather. That kind of thing. But I heard about him [Mike] later.”
In fact, nearly half the patrons sitting at the bar on a summer’s day in 1999 remembered Frog. They, like him, were somehow on the fringes of the new upscale Pleasanton—and not particularly pleased at what had become of “their town.” What had once been a working-class city was now becoming snobbish and elitist, according to them.
Pleasanton, as the name implies, is a peaceful upscale community thirty-five miles southeast of San Francisco. It is a place where families move to escape the urban blight and crime of the city. By 1997 this city of 60,000 hadn’t had a murder for over two years. In fact, the eighty-one officers of the Pleasanton Police Department didn’t even have a homicide unit. Murders and violent crime were something that happened in Oakland and over the hill in San Jose.
But San Jose’s close proximity did bring one good thing to Pleasanton. Prosperity. What had once been a quiet backwater town devoted to agriculture and ranching was transformed almost overnight by the computer revolution in Silicon Valley. Suddenly by the late 1970s, thousands of people were moving to Pleasanton for the cheaper prices of homes. Not long thereafter, the high-tech jobs followed. Software and hardware companies took advantage of the space around Pleasanton with its cheaper land prices and flooded the area.
But these were jobs for people with college degrees and advanced technical skills—not the kind of people James Daveggio hung out with. With their minimal education and low-paying jobs, Daveggio and his friends were more likely to be merely service people to these new “techies,” who now inhabited their town in such abundance. Daveggio and his buddies were more aligned with Old Pleasanton, whose roots went back to Spanish California land-grant days, when Don Augustine Bernal had owned all the land in the vicinity as far as the eye could see. A land of rolling, oak-dotted hills and lush green valleys along winding streams, it was suited for cattle raising and an agrarian way of life. But by the late 1970s the agricultural land was quickly going under the bulldozer’s blade to make room for the high-tech firms and the expensive new homes of the workers in those establishments. Needless to say, Daveggio and his Pastime friends looked on the newcomers with ill-disguised envy and hatred. These were the people who were destroying the way of life they knew.
With its old-fashioned saloon appearance and its cool, dark, funky interior, the Pastime Pool Hall is the last throw-back to the old era. There is no Brie and Chablis being served there, just beer and pretzels. Anyone wandering in wearing a three-piece suit would be immediately eyed with suspicion if not outright contempt.
None of the patrons wished to give their real names when the news about Daveggio broke, perhaps worried about the ramifications in a town that knew all too well about James Daveggio by 1997. But they were more than willing to talk about their old friend Frog. “Stan,” a patron wearing a T-shirt and beat-up baseball cap, said, “Frog was actually a nice guy back when he used to come in here in the late 1970s and early ’80s. He didn’t cuss and he didn’t have tattoos and all that stuff. He liked smoking some dope, but just about everybody did then. He wasn’t into any of the harder drugs, like crank or cocaine. At least not when I knew him. To tell you the truth, I think a lot of girls kind of liked him, despite what his voice sounded like. Mainly because of his long blond hair and blue eyes. But he was pretty shy around them. I don’t know how much he hung around with that guy Michael Ihde. They knew each other, that much I know. But I wasn’t really a friend of Mike’s. He was real strange. More of a loner.”
“Jeff,” another pool hall patron, agreed for the most part. “Froggie was all right. Except when he had too much to drink. He couldn’t drink here at the Pastime ’cause he was underage, but he had ways of getting it elsewhere and drinking down by the creek. Then he turned into a loudmouth. It was pretty evident he couldn’t handle booze very well.”
One thing none of them mentioned was Frog’s views and fantasies about sex. Whereas in most cases teenage boys will brag to one another about their exploits, Frog never did. He clammed up on the subject when asked about it. Whatever his sexual inclinations and tendencies, he kept them to himself.
One acquaintance, who was not part of the Pastime crowd and who still lives in the area, remembered Daveggio and Ihde in less favorable terms. “They were always getting into some sort of trouble. Stealing cigarettes and crap like that. I don’t know. Frog wasn’t too bright. He kinda went along with things. He was easily led around by others. They were just trying to be a couple of hard-asses.”
There were also other recollections of Frog—not by his friends, but by the police.
“I particularly remember Daveggio at that time,” Captain Gary Tollefson of the Pleasanton Police Department said years later. “I knew exactly who he was. I knew his nickname was ‘Froggie.’ He wasn’t into hard-core criminal activity then. Just penny-ante stuff. He was always on the periphery of trouble. Like he couldn’t stay away from it. I guess it had some kind of fascination for him. When I think of him back then, he wasn’t really what you’d call a bad guy. A hard case. He actually was pretty friendly and gregarious and I had several conversations with him when I was a patrolman. But like I said, he was always on the fringes.”
The combination of James Daveggio and Michael Ihde and the company they hung out with was a bad mixture. Separately they had their various problems to deal with—together they exacerbated the problems, bringing out the worst in both of them. The fact that they didn’t do hard drugs in 1977 was not going to help them in the long run. They had an affinity for alcohol, and neither of them could handle the stuff. Daveggio’s interest in school deteriorated even more, and by mid-1977 he was transferred to Valley High Continuation School in Dublin, California, a town adjacent to Pleasanton, after cursing out one of the administrators at Foothill High. This put him into even closer contact with Michael Ihde, who was already attending that institution.
Dublin, if anything, was even more an upper-middle class town than Pleasanton. It made both Ihde and Daveggio feel like absolute outsiders, coming from working-class backgrounds. Ihde, in particular, felt uncomfortable and isolated there. “Dublin was a stuck-up place,” he proclaimed years later. “A bunch of hypocrites who thought they were better than everybody else. The teachers really had it in for me.”
Even Daveggio admitted to a friend in Sacramento almost twenty years later, “I didn’t like Dublin. I didn’t fit in.”
By 1978 both James Daveggio and Michael Ihde were staking out their turf as the perpetual outsiders. Someone or someplace was always out to get them or put them down. The prosperity and pretensions of Dublin were like corrosives on their low self-esteems and the only real place they found relief was on Pleasanton’s Main Street with boys just like themselves. Drinking and smoking, talking tough with the other guys, they saw Main Street as a haven from the mores and upscale society that they were learning to despise.
Michael Ihde was even less imposing than James Daveggio. Standing at five feet nine inches, with an angular face and reddish brown hair, he had a thin pinched sort of look about him. His hair was long, with pencil-thin sideburns, and his green eyes had a disturbing yellowish tinge to them. He was the youngest of the three children of Charles and Colleen Ihde of Pleasanton. His parents had divorced when he was eight years old, remarried, and divorced again for good when he was eleven. All of this did not bring any stability to the Ihde household.
Mike’s life became even more unusual when his mother took a job as a civilian employee at Santa Rita Prison, just one mile outside of Pleasanton. He spent his teenage years in employee housing virtually “behind the wire.”
The prison itself sat in a basin surrounded by hills just north of Pleasanton. In the distance, Mount Diablo, or the Devil’s Mountain, made a suitable backdrop to the enclosure. With its bleak gray walls and strands of barbed wire atop its fences, Santa Rita was in stark contrast to upscale Pleasanton, just a mile away.
With more than 800 employees and nearly 5,000 prisoners, Santa Rita was a small city unto itself. In fact, Santa Rita was really a conglomeration of internment facilities; the Santa Rita County Jail, Federal Institution, and Federal Prison Camp, dubbed “Club Fed.” The Federal Prison Camp had been started as a minimum security facility to house bootleggers in the 1930s. Over time the enclosure accepted more hardened cases. Through its gates passed Patty Hearst, newspaper heiress turned brainwashed terrorist, and Sara Jane Moore, would-be assassin of President Gerald Ford. Also serving time there were the likes of junk bond king Michael Milken, Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, and Los Angeles police officers Stacey Koon and Laurence Powell, who had beaten motorist Rodney King nearly to death.
More daring than these was inmate Ronald McIntosh. In 1986 he hijacked a helicopter, flew it to the prison yard of the women’s facility, and airlifted his inmate girlfriend, Samantha Lopez, from the grounds. They enjoyed ten days of freedom until caught buying wedding rings in Sacramento.
Michael Ihde certainly had interesting company in his youth. And if it wasn’t enough that his mother was an employee of the facility, one of his uncles was a full-time Alameda Sheriff’s deputy as well. All of this should have had a beneficial impact on young Mike’s upbringing. But ironically, it seemed to have had just the opposite effect. He began to harbor respect for the cons while turning his back on the cops and prison guards. He had enjoyed school until his freshman year in high school, and then he said, “The teachers were prejudiced against me because I had long hair and was a slow learner.” In Mike Ihde’s world it was always someone else’s fault for the problems he faced. His “slow learning” and truancy got him thrown into Valley High Continuation School—and into the orbit of James Daveggio.
The two boys started spending more time around each other once they were both in the continuation school, feeding off each other’s neurosis and disdain for the law. More often than not, Friday and Saturday nights would find them inebriated with the other boys down on Main Street, even though they were underage. The most compelling evidence of their friendship came from a source in the Alameda Sheriff’s Department who knew them both as teenagers. He told San Francisco Chronicle reporter Patricia Jacobus, “In a bizarre coincidence, Daveggio was friends with Michael Ihde, who was sentenced to death in 1996. . . . Daveggio has had run-ins with the law since his teenage years.”
Whether James Daveggio and Michael Ihde discussed their sexual fantasies of dominance and control at this time, nobody knows except them. There’s even some debate as to how well they knew each other. But in a strange parallel course they were already setting the patterns for their future lives in crime.
It was odd that after 1978 neither one kept in touch with the other. But in an ironic twist, their crimes would be so similar in scope and violence, covering the same locales near Pleasanton, that half a dozen police agencies would eventually ask about a number of victims: “Who did it? James Daveggio or his old friend Michael Ihde?”
Not until the dawn of a new century would they know for sure.
For a time both boys attempted to keep their demons down by marrying young women in the area and joining the armed services. But nothing was destined to work out for these two. They would give in to their most bizarre and violent desires and leave a bloodstained trail from the San Francisco Bay Area to Nevada and Washington State.
James Daveggio was able to keep his demons in check a little longer than his friend. By 1978 Michael Ihde was already on the path to hell.