Chapter 5
Blood Brother
Michael Ihde dropped out of school in 1978, married his already pregnant girlfriend, Becky, and joined the marines. Perhaps he hoped they would make a man out of him, just like the television ads promised. But nothing ever worked out quite right for Mike. He injured his foot in the first few weeks of basic training and was released from the marines with an honorable discharge.
Suddenly at a loss of what to do and unemployed, Ihde moved with his new wife up to the small town of Ione in California’s Gold Rush Country. With its false-front buildings and Gold Rush architecture, it looked more like a Hollywood movie set than a real town. Strangely enough, Ihde had chosen a town with a large penal institution dominating the skyline. The Preston School for Boys belied its innocent-sounding name. It was a large, dark, glowering nineteenth-century building made out of sturdy cut stones. Sitting high on the hill on the west side of town, it seemed like a fantasy right out of Charles Dickens’ imagination. There were some pretty hard cases inside, despite their ages—criminals who somehow mirrored Michael Ihde’s own troubled mind. Consciously or not, Ihde kept finding himself living in the shadow of prison walls.
He obtained a job as a laborer in a nearby locale with the American Forest Products Company, but right from the start he missed a lot of work because of his injured foot. Never one to believe very strongly in the American work ethic, he found it more enjoyable to stay at home and dwell on his fantasies of sexual dominance. Not with his wife, but with a stranger.
By March 24, 1978, Michael Ihde was no longer willing to dream those fantasies. He was ready to act. He walked to the Safeway parking lot in the nearby city of Jackson, and directly into the path of Gloria Hazelwood, who was getting into her car.
 
Thirty-two-year-old Hazelwood had just finished work at Garibaldi’s Studio in Jackson’s old downtown and had climbed into her ’73 Dodge Dart at about 5:00 P.M. As she put the car in reverse and backed up, she nearly ran into Ihde. He dashed to her driver’s-side window and begged, “Please, lady, I need to get to the top of the hill,” indicating a direction just outside of town. “It’s urgent.”
Hazelwood didn’t know him and was about to refuse, but he persisted.
“Please take me,” he said. “I’ll give you five dollars if you do.”
The money seemed to do the trick. Not that she wanted it, but if he was willing to give her five dollars just to drive him out of town, she decided it must really be an emergency. Despite some misgivings, she opened the door for Ihde and he climbed in.
He directed her onto State Route 49, then to Electra Road, and had her drive halfway down its narrow blacktop to an isolated spot near the Mokelumne River. When they reached an uninhabited area, he suddenly said, “That’s enough.”
Gloria Hazelwood stopped the car and without any warning Ihde balled his hand into a fist and punched her in the face and stomach. Scared witless, she started screaming. This only made him punch her harder as he yelled, “Shut up!” Taking a red rag out of his pocket, he tied her hands together behind her back and jerked her panty hose and panties down. He shouted at her to spread her legs. When she was slow about it, he forced them apart. With her head up against the car door, he brutally raped her.
When he was done, he allowed her to pull her panties and panty hose back up. He took her car keys and forced her out of the car and up an embankment by the side of the road. Ihde told her to face the Mokelumne River. She dutifully complied, still scared out of her mind, while he searched on the ground for something.
In the next instant Gloria Hazelwood found out exactly what he was looking for. Ihde came up with a large rock in his hand and slammed it into her head. She tumbled down the embankment and he followed, pounding her with the rock.
“Please stop it!” she cried. “I won’t tell anybody!”
“Do you expect me to believe that?” he scoffed. He kept right on pummeling her head with the large stone.
It was only when Hazelwood pretended to be dead that he stopped. She put on a good act, pretending to have stopped breathing, as he looked her over to make sure. Ihde threw the rock away, convinced she was indeed dead. He scrambled up the embankment and disappeared into the forested countryside.
Hazelwood never passed out, but she had been beaten into a daze. She said, “After he was gone, I struggled to get to the top of the hill. I just thought if I don’t get up there no one will see me. No one will help me. I was trying to climb up the hill and I was sick and so dizzy and I fell a couple of times when I tried to stand up. So I crawled to the top of the hill and I got in the car and locked the doors. Then I blew the horn until someone stopped.”
Hazelwood was first taken to nearby Amador Hospital and then to Sacramento Medical Center. She required numerous stitches to her head, but luckily for her there was no brain damage. Unluckily for Michael Ihde she was still alive.
Gloria Hazelwood had no doubt as to his intentions. She told the investigating officer, Amador County Detective Sergeant Norman Pettingill, “He wanted to kill me.”
Detective Pettingill took a description of the assailant. Hazelwood described him as “a white male, twenty years of age, about five feet nine inches tall, with a slender build. His hair is medium brown with a reddish tint. It is collar length and combed straight back without a part, curling up at the bottom near the collar. It is closely cut, and possibly a layer cut. The sideburns are very narrow, coming straight down to approximately the jaw line, with no flare.”
From this description the police were able to create a sketch, which they published in the Amador Press News. But even with this, after a month-long search of the area, they had to admit, “We’ve run into a brick wall.”
But Michael Ihde never was lucky for very long. In June 1978 an unknown informant called the sheriff’s office and turned him in. Perhaps as usual, he had not been able to keep his mouth shut and had bragged about his exploits with Gloria Hazelwood. At 8:00 A.M. on June 14, the authorities converged on his home in Ione. They stormed into the house and arrested Ihde, handcuffing him, before placing him in the patrol car. Then his luck turned even more sour. The woman he had picked at random to kidnap and rape turned out to be the wife of his own foreman at American Forest Products.
There were soon dark rumors of vigilante justice by Ihde’s coworkers at American Forest Products—something not so far-fetched in this Gold Rush Country town. A few miles down the road in Sonora, Ellie Nesler would stride into a courtroom one day and shoot the alleged molester of her boy, dead.
It was only the efforts of Gloria’s husband that finally cooled down the hotheads before they did something rash. He told a reporter for the Amador Press News, “I don’t want any retribution on his [Michael Ihde’s] family. I think the law should take its course. I’m not going to do anything about this but let the courts do their work and I don’t think anybody else should do anything either.”
At his trial Michael Ihde was all outraged innocence. “I know I am innocent,” he declared. “My wife and a lot of other people believe in my innocence. I feel I should have been granted a change of venue because of the prejudice here and the newspaper articles. I feel very sorry it happened to Mrs. Hazelwood. If I was Mr. Hazelwood, I would want to get the guy too. I have always put women on a pedestal because I love my mother so much.”
Despite his protests, the only ones to buy his “innocent routine” were his mother and wife, Becky. She stated that her sexual relationship with him was completely normal and he had never tried anything “weird.” She went on to say that he never beat her or abused her.
But his wife would find out soon enough just how “weird” he was.
The jury had no problem finding Michael Ihde guilty on November 30, 1978, of Count 261 (2), Forcible rape, and Count 217, Assault with intent to murder.
Ihde, who had spent his childhood in a prison compound, now got a one-way trip back to a prison, except this time he was going behind the walls instead of just looking at them from a distance. From his early years around cons and a few hard cases who hung around Pleasanton, he already knew some of the ropes about life behind bars. He was well on his way to becoming an “institution man,” one who finds it almost easier to live in prison than on the outside. The world outside had too many options, too many chances to get into trouble. On the inside, everything was regulated. A man knew just where he stood with the guards and the other prisoners.
The authorities tried to mend his ways and give him a different outlook on life. He got the prerequisite counseling about finding a regular job once he was released and how to conduct himself back in society. But the authorities had little success with Michael Ihde.
Lessons that should have been impressed upon him in prison didn’t stick. The only real lesson he took to heart was “Don’t leave the next victim alive.” By 1982 he was on the outside again, minus a wife. Becky had gained a new insight into his real nature and had promptly divorced him when she discovered he was not an innocent who had been framed. The terrible things people had been saying about Mike were now obviously all too true.
He was paroled to his old stomping grounds in the East Bay, not too far from where James Daveggio lived. Ihde was just as violent as ever, covered only by a thin layer of civility. Hanging out in the less than palatial environs of Ashland Avenue in San Lorenzo, Ihde began to have a fling with the bottle. He made halfhearted attempts to find a job, but more often than not he found himself sitting around the sparse apartment with a six-pack or a bottle of booze. He did manage to gain a new girlfriend, Rachel Piazza, but she was just as slovenly and prone to drinking as he was. Too often their drinking bouts turned into arguments and then into fights. Neither one of them could hold down a job for very long. Ihde felt stifled in the shoddy surroundings. He took to wandering down the Southern Pacific tracks to a spot beneath a large freeway overpass. The area had been turned into a hobo jungle, with discarded beat-up furniture stashed away in the bushes and screen of small trees. It was a place where he could drink in peace, away from the hectoring of Rachel and her demands that he get a job. Basically, he had been a loner all his life and this spot’s isolation gave him a chance to think about what he really liked—sex with someone fresh and exciting. Sex with someone who didn’t expect it. Sex with someone he could abuse and dominate. Someone like Gloria Hazelwood. Within a year he was ready to strike again.