Chapter 6
In the Shadow of Charlie Chaplin
If James Daveggio had paid more attention to his old friend Michael Ihde’s fate of imprisonment, he might have avoided its consequences. But Daveggio had problems that were remarkably similar to Ihde’s. He married a young woman in Pleasanton named Annette and had a daughter, born in 1980. But Daveggio had a roving eye when it came to other women. He also had a hard time keeping a steady job. Generally soft-spoken, despite his raspy voice, he became a different person when drinking—and he turned to alcohol more and more often. He constantly promised to get his act together, but one excuse followed another. He would rather be out drinking with his buddies than at home helping raise a family. And like his father, he really had a thing for the ladies. He met a pretty young woman named Donetta Rhodes at Niles Canyon, a place where teenagers hung out and went swimming in the creek. Many people told Rhodes to stay away from Daveggio. They knew the real man behind the charming facade. But she was only seventeen at the time and in love. All she could see was the handsome young blond with blue eyes.
As she laughed ruefully later, “I thought I knew better than them. I was going to change his ways. Some things you just have to learn the hard way, I guess. And I learned some pretty hard lessons with James.”
In July 1980 Daveggio left his wife, Annette, for Donetta. Rhodes didn’t realize he was still sleeping with his ex-wife, who became pregnant by him again. A daughter, April, was born on July 13, 1981. Just like his father, he was accumulating wives, girlfriends and children at an increasing rate.
Donetta Rhodes was furious at him when she learned of Annette’s pregnancy. She threatened to leave him, but he was a smooth talker. He convinced her to marry him, even though his divorce with Annette wasn’t final. Daveggio and Rhodes drove up to Reno on May 7, 1982, and were married at the Chapel of the Bells on West Fourth Street by Reverend Frank Murtha. Inside the small chapel, which resembled more of an office space than a church, were Denice Bickford and Lisa Bradshaw as witnesses. One thing Donetta quickly learned in Reno was that James loved to gamble. It wasn’t just a passing love affair with the slots and cards, it was an addiction.
Returning to Pleasanton, James and Donetta moved into a stylish new home on Clovewood Avenue that his mom, Darlene, and his stepdad owned. For a while it looked as if they might settle down to be a typical part of the suburban good life.
But living under the same roof with Daveggio’s mother was not easy for Donetta. According to Donetta, “She thought James was God’s gift to the world and that I should do everything for him. Make his bed, cook his meals, worship the ground he walked on. And this was when I was holding down two jobs and he wasn’t working at all! I had a job at Denny’s in Pleasanton and one at a 7-Eleven. James finally did land a good job at a sheet metal company and I heaved a sigh of relief. But in a couple of weeks he quit it for no reason. He was allergic to work.”
Daveggio was also a dreamer and a schemer with 101 get-rich-quick schemes that never quite worked out. Of course it usually took the money that Donetta made from her jobs to get him started on these schemes. “The grass was always greener on the other side of the hill for him,” she said. In pursuit of these schemes they moved to Oklahoma for six months and then back to California near Pacifica, where Daveggio’s dad lived.
Donetta related, “James always wanted to be like his father. He really didn’t even know him until he was sixteen. Then it was his dad this, and his dad that, all the time. He told me once that he wanted to have more wives, more women and more kids than his dad did. I thought it was an awfully strange goal. His dad had been married four or five times and he had eight kids. James’s admission made me feel real uneasy. What kind of person would want those kinds of things?”
In fact, this admission did not bode well for their marriage. Neither did their prospects when they moved back to Pleasanton and started living in motel rooms and even in their car. It wasn’t long before they found themselves right back underneath his mom’s roof on Clovewood Avenue.
“It was tough,” Donetta said. “He hit the bars again and started doing cocaine. And he had a terrible gambling habit. More than once, I just barely got my paycheck and he was running off with it up to Reno or Tahoe to lose it all at the card tables. He also began to play a lot of poker at the Pastime Poolhall with his buddies. This didn’t make things any better, because I didn’t like to drink or gamble. So I got left home a lot with his mom. Life with him was becoming hell!”
Donetta admitted that Daveggio never physically abused her, but the verbal and mental abuse was becoming almost constant. And he was also becoming “weirder” as time went by. He shocked her one day by saying, “We can make some money if we let a guy I know come over and watch while we have sex.”
Donetta put her foot down and said, “No! Absolutely not!”
Equally strange was an incident that occurred while they were driving through Niles Canyon toward Union City, his old stomping grounds where Michael Ihde now lived. As they rode in the car, he turned toward Donetta and said, “I once knew a girl who was killed and her body dumped by the side of the road. It was by a creek.”
She didn’t know which creek he was talking about or whom he was referring to, and she let the comment pass. But in time she would wonder.
About the only job James Daveggio cared to do was bartending, and he found one just over the hill in the hamlet of Sunol, alongside Niles Creek. It was at a dive that catered to bikers. By this time, just like them, he sported numerous tattoos. They included an eagle, a skull and a lion’s head.
A few doors down, at the only other bar in town, was a man named Hans Kuendig. He, too, was about to see something lying beside the road near a creek. It was something he would never forget.
Don’t blink if you’re passing through Sunol in Alameda County, only ten miles from Pleasanton, or you’ll miss it. With an antique shop, flower boutique, general store, tavern and a population of 900, Sunol hardly seems a part of the Greater Bay Area. The old Victorian homes and ranch houses of this quaint village are tucked into sheltering hills dotted with black oaks and pines.
It wasn’t always so quiet and serene, though. In the first years of the twentieth century, Sunol’s neighboring town, Niles, was the home of Essanay Studios and America’s first movie cowboy hero, Broncho Billy Anderson. In 1910 he brought movies out of the studio and into the real world, filming on location around Niles and Sunol. Broncho Billy strutted along its dirt streets, filming shoot-’em-ups and horse operas. In all, Essanay Studios made 450 pictures in the area with other silent film stars such as Ben Turpin, Wallace Beery, Zasu Pitts and Marie Dressler. But one of its actors in particular was destined for greatness—a thin English chap who had a gift for comedy and mime, Charlie Chaplin. In the hills and canyons around Niles and Sunol, he shuffled into the sunset with his signature cane and into the hearts of millions of people and cinematic history in the movie The Tramp.
For a while it seemed that the area would become the movie capital of California. But then Chaplin and the film industry moved south to Hollywood, taking advantage of the better weather and unparalleled sunshine. Niles and Sunol once again slipped back into a quiet lethargy.
Not that the present-day residents minded. It was the very peacefulness and beauty of the area that drew them there in the first place. But on December 2, 1983, local resident Hans Kuendig, an acquaintance of James Daveggio’s, spotted something from his car, alongside narrow Kilkare Road just a half mile north of Sunol, that was neither peaceful nor beautiful. It appeared to be the body of a young woman.
Fourteen-year-old Kellie Poppleton of Fremont was a very pretty girl. Standing five feet five inches and weighing 123 pounds, she looked much older than her tender years. People often thought she was eighteen or nineteen years old. She had blue eyes and reddish brown hair, which she wore in a stylish cut. When she smiled, her eyes had a particular sparkle to them that people noticed.
She was a member of the Christian Group called Young Life, and acquaintance Kathy Wilson knew her as “a really nice kid.” Other neighbors agreed. “She was just your normal teenager. She was interested in clothes and all that stuff. And boys too. But she didn’t seem to have a serious boyfriend.”
Some of the classmates at her old junior high, Wells Middle School in Dublin, remembered her as trying to act more worldly than she really was. But they agreed she wasn’t a troublemaker. “She liked to make up stuff about herself,” one of them said. “Act like she was older than she really was. She was kind of lonely.”
For whatever reason she started skipping a lot of school, even though she lived only a few blocks away. She was bright and intelligent, but she didn’t quite fit into junior high.
It was ironic, if anyone had taken the time to notice, that her middle school was directly adjacent to where James Daveggio and Michael Ihde had spent their days at Valley High Continuation School.
When her family moved to Fremont, Kellie Poppleton attended teacher Dave Dillon’s Junior High Opportunity Class in that city. This class was filled with nineteen other students who weren’t bad kids either, but just needed a little help in motivation, the way that Kellie did.
Dillon spoke of her as being a “good kid. Very, very bright.” But she had been missing a lot of regular school since her family had moved from Dublin to Fremont. She seemed confused, sad and out of place. She didn’t even know the numbers of her new address at The Mission Peak Lodge on Mission Boulevard in Fremont when Dillon asked her. Her real father lived about 150 miles away in the Sierra foothill town of Grass Valley, and the divorce of her parents had hit Kellie hard. Dillon was determined to help her get back on track. “After all, she was just a kid,” he said. “She had a lot of potential if she would just remain focused.”
He remembered Kellie Poppleton leaving his class about 1:15 P.M. on Friday, December 2, 1983. Already clouds were forming and the winds picking up from a Pacific storm that was moving in. As she left his class, Kellie was wearing a dark blue Adidas jogging jacket with red striped sleeves, blue jeans and brown, white and black slip-on tennis shoes. She walked down the street and met a boy from school at the shopping center on the corner of Fremont Boulevard and Darwin Avenue. The boy talked with her for about fifteen minutes and then Poppleton went to a pay phone nearby. One thing a coworker of her mom’s, Kathy Wilson, said, “Kellie would never step willingly into a stranger’s car.” Others weren’t so sure. Since a storm was brewing and she was quite a ways from her home at the shopping center, a nice dry car might have looked appealing at the moment raindrops started to pelt down.
The boy at the shopping center was the last one to see her before motorist Hans Kuendig found her lying motionless alongside Kilkare Road in Sunol at 5:25 P.M. that same evening.
Kuendig got out of his car to investigate and was shocked to find that it was indeed the partially clad body of a young woman with her jeans pulled down and shirt pulled up, exposing her breasts. But the most shocking sight of all was the rose-colored necktie wound tightly around her neck and plastic bag wired around her head. It was later determined the hyoid bone on the right side of her neck had been badly damaged.
He later told a Tri-Valley Herald reporter, “I was sure it was a body and my first reaction was to think that someone had been hit by a car. I backed up for a closer look and was shocked to see it was a woman. Her head was in a plastic bag.”
Kuendig didn’t touch her. Instead, he raced home and called the sheriff’s office. Within minutes they relayed a call to Ken Hale, the nearest government authority, at the Department of Forestry Office. Hale hurried up Kilkare Road and against all expectations found the victim still breathing, though unconscious. He loosened the necktie, but the plastic bag was more of a hindrance.
“It took probably a minute to take the wire off her neck,” he said. He then proceeded to give her cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) as best he could. But her entire face was a battered mess, as if it had been smashed in by a rock. He could see that she was small, white, with short reddish brown hair. Being a resident of Sunol who knew all the local girls, he realized she wasn’t one of them. But beyond that he couldn’t tell much. “She didn’t really look human,” he said. “She was pretty hard to identify.”
At least she was still alive, if just barely. With any luck she would pull through and be able to identify her brutal attacker.
About ten miles down the road to the southwest in Fremont, Trese Rusk, working at Fremont Ambulance Company, dispatched an ambulance to pick up the victim and transport her to Washington Hospital in Fremont. Rusk had no way of knowing at the time that the victim at Sunol was her own daughter from a previous marriage.
The ambulance crew picked up the battered young woman and placed her in the vehicle as night fell in the silent canyon. But the silence was soon shattered by a wailing siren and flashing lights reflecting off the darkened walls. They sped down the winding roads toward the large city of Fremont and delivered Kellie Poppleton into the ER at 6:11 P.M. But here all efforts at reviving her proved futile. At 6:18 P.M. she was pronounced dead by Dr. Harry Andrews. Along with her went all hope of easily identifying her attacker.
As Poppleton was moved to a holding area in the hospital, she was now the only one beyond the disturbing fracas that soon broke out. It was caused partially by the entanglement of jurisdictional lines that had been crossed by just removing her from the scene of the crime. Poppleton was a Fremont girl—still a Jane Doe—who had been found in the sheriff’s territory, by a state official, and transported to Fremont City. All of this combined to create chaos among the converging authorities as she lay upon the gurney, immune to their mounting frustration that soon erupted into a shoving match.
Coroner’s Investigator J.L. Shaw tersely registered it all in his official report: “On the P.M. of 12-2-83, this C.I. [Coroner’s Investigator] received a call from Sgt. Neal [Everett], ACSD [Alameda County Sheriff’s Department], requesting this office to give authorities to view the remains at Washington Hospital. I was informed the remains had been removed from the scene by the fire department [ambulance], and he wanted to see what they had! This C.I. advised Sgt. Neal [Everett], and the R.N. Supervisor she could allow Sgt. Neal [Everett] to look at the remains only! They were both advised nothing was to be removed, nor was the remains to be disturbed any further than what was done in the emergency room. I was advised some clothing had been removed prior to arrival of the ACSD and Sgt. Neal [Everett] had them.”
As if there weren’t enough authorities on hand getting in each other’s way, a Fremont police officer now arrived at the hospital, sent there by Lieutenant Reed of the Fremont Police Department, and in the words of Coroner’s Investigator J.L. Williams, “It was learned that Fremont P.D. had become involved in this case and it was reported that a hassle occurred between the FPD [Fremont Police Department] officer and nursing staff at Washington Hospital.”
Lieutenant Reed’s report stated, “When the remains were removed to the holding area, the Fremont Police officer became concerned that a bag of clothing was being left behind. The clothing reportedly had been removed by the hospital staff and placed in a sealed bag. The Fremont Police officer took possession of this sealed bag. Reportedly the hospital nursing staff became concerned with Fremont Police taking charge because of the orders from this office were that only Alameda County Sheriff’s Department was involved. A physical exchange between the nursing staff and the Fremont Police Officer apparently occurred.”
Poppleton’s mother Trese had been worried ever since Kellie didn’t show up on Friday afternoon at the usual time. Kellie was a dependable girl and it wasn’t like her to be so late without calling. Trese, and Kellie’s stepfather, Tracy Rusk, conducted a four-hour search on Friday night as the weather worsened. At 11:00 P.M. they filed a missing person’s report with the Fremont Police Department. Because Kellie looked so much older than her years and had no identification on her when her body was discovered, the Fremont Police did not connect the Jane Doe in Washington Hospital with the Rusks.
The parents spent most of Saturday retracing the steps of their daughter and talking to acquaintances of hers. It was a horrible day. A vicious storm hit the Bay Area with hurricane-force winds, knocking down trees and snapping power lines. The Rusks staggered through the pelting rain with a deepening sense of fear and foreboding.
Saturday evening Mrs. Rusk watched a report on the television news describing the clothing worn by a victim whose body was in Washington Hospital. She later remembered, “Even though I heard about the clothing, still I denied it to myself.”
At 3:30 A.M. on Sunday morning she panicked and called the Alameda Sheriff’s Department. They escorted the Rusks to Washington Hospital and there lying on the gurney was the battered remains of her daughter. The Jane Doe found in Sunol finally had a name.
The sight was not a pretty one. The CI listed more than thirty blunt injury wounds to the neck alone. Nine more were found on the face—one so bad, the skull bone showed through. Her sixth rib had been fractured as if someone had kicked it.
George Comte, Alameda County Coroner, pronounced on his report that the death was caused by “asphyxiation due to strangulation associated with multiple blunt injuries.” But that hardly said it all. Sergeant Neal Everett related, “We think she may have suffered a lot before dying.”
The Rusks were distraught. Trese cried out in anger, “Anybody who would do that to another human being has to be an animal.”
Tracy Rusk went even further. “He’s a mad animal and should die the same way she did!”
On December 7, a memorial service was held for Kellie Poppleton at Alder Avenue Baptist Church in Fremont. The parishoners really didn’t know the girl that well, but they wanted to honor her memory. An elderly lady said, “She seemed like a nice young girl. Kind of quiet. It’s terrible what happened to her.”
The Rusks arranged for their daughter’s body to be shipped to Sacramento for cremation so she could be interred next to her maternal grandmother. The fact that she was cremated instead of buried would have unforeseen ramifications. Law enforcement criminal labs would not have a body on which to use new scientific techniques not even dreamed of in 1983.
If the Rusks thought they were interring the commotion surrounding Kellie’s violent death, they were sadly mistaken. There was an incident about to be revealed that would make the fracas at Washington Hospital seem like child’s play in comparison.