Chapter 8
The Overpass
A curious thing happened in Pleasanton before the furor over the Poppleton case had even died down. It occurred on April 5, 1984, only a quarter mile from James Daveggio’s home on Clovewood Avenue. Fourteen-year-old Tina Faelz was walking home from Foothill High School, the same high school that Daveggio had attended, on a route used by students as a shortcut. It paralleled Clovewood Avenue below West Las Positas Road and crossed under freeway I-680 via a large culvert toward Faelz’s home on Virgin Island Court. Students had been warned not to use the culvert and it had even been boarded up several times. But it was so much closer for students who lived on the eastern side of the freeway to crawl through it rather than walk a half mile north or south to use an overpass. Each time it was boarded up, students pulled down the barriers and kept on using it. James Daveggio may have even used the culvert himself as a teenager. Certainly, he would have known about it.
Tina Faelz began to use the culvert shortcut because she had stopped riding the school bus when other students began to pick on her. Faelz acted young for her age and one other girl on the bus in particular had tormented her constantly. Rather than face the abuse, she began to walk home alone.
Her best friend, Mary Lou Eisma, said, “She was more on the child side. She had a hard time fitting in [at high school].”
Tina Faelz stayed a bit late at Foothill High on the afternoon of April 5, 1984, before starting her walk home. Several students saw her leaving the school yard about 2:25 P.M., heading toward the freeway culvert. It was a typical spring day with sun and clouds and a few showers. Tina passed down the row of houses and out of sight toward the culvert.
At 3:27 P.M. truck driver Larry Lovall of San Jose happened to glance down from his big rig at the drainage ditch alongside I-680 as he drove along and spotted a strange object. Even from his height and the speed he was traveling, the object looked eerily like the body of a young woman. He was so shaken by the sight that he turned off at the next exit and doubled back, parking alongside the freeway. He got out of his truck and scrambled halfway down the embankment, where he did indeed see a girl’s body lying in the ditch. She wasn’t moving and she appeared to be bleeding from multiple wounds.
Lovall didn’t touch her. Instead, he hurried back to his truck and drove to the Alameda County Fairgrounds on Bernal Avenue and called the Pleasanton Police.
Sixteen-year-old Eric Voellm of Foothill High and his friend Jay Dallimore reached the culvert just one minute after Lovall left for the fairgrounds. They, too, spotted a girl’s body in the drainage ditch, her backpack and schoolbooks scattered all around. Voellm was more brave than prudent. He crawled up to the body and later told the Valley Times, “I felt to see if she was breathing. But she wasn’t. There was blood everywhere. Her body was still warm.”
The two teenagers hightailed it out of there, not knowing if the killer was still around. They ran down the streets and phoned the police from a home on nearby Lemonwood Drive.
Within minutes of the two phone calls, Pleasanton’s new police chief, Bill Eastman, had officers on the scene cordoning off the area. It was easy enough to identify the victim, Tina Faelz, because her name was scrawled in all her books and on her backpack. It was also easy to tell the way she had died. There were multiple stab wounds on her head, back and side.
Eastman soon told reporters, “Whoever attacked the girl wanted to make sure she was dead.” He continued, “We believe she was probably surprised on her way home. There is no doubt in my mind that she was killed in that exact same spot where she was found.”
Police Chief Eastman pulled out all the stops to apprehend the killer. There hadn’t been a murder in Pleasanton in recent history, making the town fully live up to its pacific name. Eastman had been a cop ever since the Watts riots had erupted near his neighborhood back in the 1960s, and he decided to get involved. He’d earned a law degree at Pepperdine University and at the University of Southern California as well. He had been a patrolman for fifteen years in Culver City, California, rising to the rank of captain before taking over the police chief position in Pleasanton in 1981.
Eastman was honest and plainspoken with a large dose of common sense, and his officers admired him for it. Even Craig Eicher, president of the local Police Officers Association, not generally known for agreeing with police chiefs, said of Eastman, “He’s done a good job.” City Manager Deborah Acosta agreed by stating, “Bill came to Pleasanton to make the police force more professional and he’s done that. He created a reputation that Pleasanton is tough on crime.”
Eastman had half his entire force, twenty-four officers, working overtime on the Faelz case. They interviewed hundreds of students, friends and family of the dead girl and went over the entire area of her route from school with a metal detector searching for the murder weapon. One of the investigators on the case was Officer Gary Tollefson, the same officer who remembered James Daveggio so well as a troublemaker on Pleasanton’s Main Street. He and another policeman took minute blood samples from the dirt and grass around the area where Faelz had been killed. They never found the murder weapon. They also did not link the murder at the time to James, a strange young man who lived nearby on Clovewood Drive.
Eastman, in frustration, told reporters on April 7, “I have some leads I hope will pan out. But at this time no leads should be labeled as substantial.” In fact, the leads soon drifted off into nothing as the police force tracked down a hitchhiker who had been in the area on April 5 and a student wearing a blue backpack who had been seen there that afternoon as well. Both suspects were located, questioned and released, leaving the leads to all dry up. All that was left was a hunch in Police Chief Eastman’s mind that the killer was not some random person merely passing through. Deep down he felt that the murderer lived in the area and had possibly used the culvert himself at one time.
As April progressed, the case began to disappear from the front pages of the local newspapers and then from even the inside pages as May approached. All that was left was an echo of the words that Foothill High senior Lisa Foster told a reporter, “This is Pleasanton. Things like that don’t happen here!”
But things like that did happen around Pleasanton and in the summer of 1984, James Daveggio, who had lived for so long in the shadows of this community, was going to be suddenly caught in the bright spotlight of a policeman’s patrol car.
The summer itself was hot, one of the hottest on record, with every week having some day up in the hundreds. Daveggio certainly felt the heat in more ways than one; married or not, he couldn’t control the urges that plagued him. Unlike his old buddy Michael Ihde, he hadn’t been apprehended for anything yet. But all that was about to change. He drove to a Black Angus restaurant on the edge of town one hot midsummer night, July 8, 1984, and soon was at the bar drinking with a young woman. Just like so many things in his life, there are two versions of what happened next.
According to one report, she found him fairly attractive, as many women did, but she also turned down his proposals to “get it on.” One drink led to another, and as the clock passed midnight, the woman finally got up to leave. She didn’t notice Daveggio was right behind her, walking quietly through the almost deserted parking lot.
He was half drunk and so was she, but he wasn’t so drunk that he didn’t know what he wanted. As soon as she reached her car, Daveggio was right beside her; a pistol slipped quietly from his pocket into his hand. As the terrified woman caught a glimpse of the pistol, she begged for mercy. What she got instead was an order from Daveggio as he unzipped his pants: “Suck it!”
Too frightened to even scream, and very aware of the pistol, she complied.
But if James Daveggio thought he was getting away scot-free on this one, he was wrong. A witness on the far side of the parking lot had seen the whole thing and called the police. Before Daveggio barely had his pants back up, a patrol car pulled into the lot and shone its lights on the pair. The woman went running toward the cops and told them what had just transpired.
The official police record differs from this version, citing that the woman was having a fight with her boyfriend at the Black Angus and Daveggio intervened. He escorted her out of the bar and they drove away in his car. About an hour later they returned to the Black Angus parking lot and the woman was in hysterics. She claimed to have been kidnapped and forced to copulate him orally. The Pleasanton Police took James Daveggio into custody and charged him with kidnapping and forced oral copulation.
But even then Daveggio’s strange sort of luck still held out. The woman had been very drunk at the time and her story was garbled. On key elements of the incident she was completely blank and on others she had only a vague recollection. Even the assistant district attorney who was to try the case admitted, “She had a bad memory lapse. She started going sideways on us.” He frankly told the court that he didn’t believe the case could be tried to the satisfaction of the state.
The charges against James Daveggio were eventually dropped for lack of evidence and the unreliability of the woman’s testimony. The incident gave him a temporary scare, but not enough to make him quit for good. The urges were just too powerful. Little did he know at the time that his old buddy Michael Ihde was also about to give rape another try right across the hill. Ihde was living in Daveggio’s old backyard in the Bay Area, just up the road from Logan High School, where Daveggio had first begun to toy with the idea of sexual dominance.
At this point Michael Ihde had developed a strong love affair with the bottle. He still had his girlfriend, Rachel Piazza, with him, and they spent most of their time either crashing at friends’ houses or living in his car. They hung out around Ashland Avenue in San Lorenzo for lack of any better place to go. By the fall of 1984 Piazza was pregnant and about to have Ihde’s baby. On her birthday, November 27, she had to be rushed to Highland Hospital in Oakland by her mother for a possible premature delivery. Ihde was more interested in booze than in babies. Often seen at local liquor stores, he would find some out-of-the-way place to drink his liquor and watch the world go by. But on his girlfriend’s birthday the world unexpectedly came to him. It appeared in the shape of Lisa Ann Monzo, an eighteen-year-old high school girl. She couldn’t have fit into his fantasies any more alluringly than if he had dreamed her. She was pretty, with light brown hair, and as he would remember later, she had nice breasts. She was young and shapely, and best of all, alone.
On November 27, 1984, Monzo had been dropped off at her doctor’s office in midafternoon in San Lorenzo to be treated for a sinus infection. She completed her appointment by 3:30 P.M., but her ride was already gone. Home was not very far away, so she decided to walk.
More than likely she was thinking of her upcoming role in the school play The Lion in Winter. Monzo had never acted before, but she garnered the lead role by applying herself with the same diligence and tenacity she had put into her job in school government and on the school newspaper. Her mom and stepfather had abandoned her when she was fourteen years old and she had grown up in various foster homes around the Bay Area. Instead of depleting her self-esteem, the experience seemed to make her stronger. She thrived on everything she came into contact with. By the time she reached the age of sixteen, she elected to stay in the home of a friend so that she could continue her education at San Lorenzo High School. Barbara Wong, the play’s director and drama coach, had picked Monzo over the other candidates for the role because “of her strong vocal quality and strength in her face.”
Brian Larsen, her leading man in the play, remembered, “She was friendly and outgoing and this was her first involvement in theater. She said she was just interested in seeing what the experience was like.”
Lisa Ann Monzo was an independent girl, in good physical shape from jogging and working out. Her best friend, Laura Wells, said of her, “She had a lot of will. No one got in her way. She was nobody’s fool.” School principal Joanne Knowles knew Lisa Ann as a “bright young lady . . . a student body judge who was innovative in school leadership. A strong-willed young lady who was making such a defined mark on our student government.”
Of all the students and teachers who knew Monzo at San Lorenzo High School, perhaps none knew her better than Mary Milton, the librarian. Because Monzo took only five classes per day, instead of six, she spent one hour each school day in the library. Ms. Milton remembered, “Lisa had an unquenchable thirst for knowledge. She was very eclectic. If she found something interesting, she would pursue it until she was satisfied that she had learned everything about it. For one so young she had a profound self-knowledge of who she was and what she wanted. Because she in essence raised herself since an early age, she set very high goals for herself.
“She had such an open mind for one so young. She once asked me if I thought palmistry was for real. I laughed because I knew she was aware of the palm-reading establishment near Hesperian Boulevard a few blocks away and was curious to its legitimacy.
“ ‘Why don’t you go there and find out for yourself? ’ I asked. ‘Then you can decide.’
“ ‘I will,’ she answered, and promptly followed up on her promise. She was like that. Not willing to judge others until she looked into the matter herself. She had such confidence for someone who had endured a not-so-wonderful childhood.
“Lisa talked to me often about going into the military after high school for various reasons. One was that she needed the college grants they offered if she was to get a higher education after graduating. She had no parents who were saving for a college education. Another reason was that she thought the discipline would do her good, since she never knew any parental authority. But it was evident that Lisa was already very self-disciplined. She never used the excuse that she didn’t have parents to mask any failures she might experience along the way. She was willing to accept responsibility for her own life and actions. The impression you got of Lisa was that she was very beautiful and very independent.”
Lisa Ann Monzo also knew how to have fun in high school, perhaps making up for lost time when she was younger. One memorable school photo shows her on the pep squad leading cheers. Leaping in bare feet, a headband around her forehead, and wearing a tiger-print outfit, she was captured between heaven and earth by the photographer. She cups her hands to her mouth and shouts in exultant joy. She seems to almost float, suspended in space and time.
But there was another side to Lisa Ann besides the “strong-willed” go-getter and carefree cheerleader. She had a compassionate heart as well. In her column in the school newspaper, “Just for the Record,” she wrote on November 19, 1984, about calming a sobbing youngster at nearby Lake Chabot park: “He didn’t know me and I didn’t know him. What could it hurt to be a friend for an hour or so?”
In fact, this strong-willed, resilient girl of eighteen had become friends to many people in the community. She had a new family who loved her, and her future looked bright as November reached its waning days of 1984.
As Lisa Ann Monzo walked home from the doctor’s office on that windy November afternoon, her route took her through a small commercial area where local teenagers remembered her passing. She took a shortcut toward an overpass of Highway 238 that crossed the Southern Pacific railroad tracks. The area was deserted near the highway overpass except for one lone man, who appeared to be drinking from a bottle. Monzo hurried her steps to pass him by. The lone man was Michael Ihde.
Already half drunk from a day of imbibing, Ihde saw the girl coming in his direction. As she got closer, he could tell she was very pretty. No one else was around, and the urges were back hard and strong. Even the rough times he had endured behind bars were not enough to dissuade him from what he already knew he would do. He couldn’t pass up an opportunity like this. God only knew when he would get another chance like it.
As the girl walked by, trying to ignore him, he suddenly pounced on her, grabbing her by the waist and punching her in the face. She let out a series of screams and struggled wildly, but she had been taken by surprise and was no match to his repeated blows to the head. Ihde dragged her toward the slanted concrete abutment of the overpass and slammed her against its cold surface. The girl kept screaming, so he pulled her jacket and shirt up over her head to muffle the noise. Then he pushed her to the ground and beat her nearly senseless. In a frenzy, he pulled her bra cups up over her breasts, then pulled her jeans and panties down around her ankles. In another moment he was inside her.
Whatever mercy Lisa Ann Monzo might have hoped for after he was done with her was futile. Ihde had learned his lesson well after leaving Gloria Hazelwood alive. As soon as he was through raping Monzo, his hands sprang to her neck and began choking the life out of the teenage girl. He did it with such violence that he fractured the hyoid bone of her throat on the right side, just as had happened to Kellie Poppleton a few months before. Monzo struggled only momentarily and then lay dead.
Ihde left her that way, jacket and shirt pulled over her head, and jeans and panties pulled down around her ankles. His only pretense at burial was to cover her with some dirt and pine needles. Then he walked away, unseen.
Across town at the Alameda Sheriff’s Department on 150th Avenue, it had been a routine day with the usual number of calls and incidents. Inspector William Smith, a twenty-year veteran of the force, was working homicide, but on this particular week he caught what was called “Night Detective Duty.” He remembered, “On the night of November 28, 1984, I was in the watch commander’s office reading reports that had been turned in that day, and one of the reports that I found was a report of a missing person, Lisa Monzo. In reading the report and making some phone calls and doin’ a little follow-up, things didn’t seem right to me as far as she didn’t seem to be the kinda person that wouldn’t come home after going to a doctor’s office as reported in the missing persons [report].
“So I left a note for Detective Sergeant Tanna, because I had to go home ’cause I was working nights and he was working day shift, that this needed a little bit more attention during the daytime hours because the people need to be contacted. . . school, the doctor’s office, and so on.
“When I returned back to work in the afternoon of the twenty-ninth for my night detective shift, I was told that they were having a meeting regarding Lisa Monzo’s last movements, where she was last seen, and I was given at that time the assignment to organize the search on the railroad track area.
“[As I was on my way] I was notified by radio that they had found a purse by that overcrossing of Highway 238, and Detective Sergeant Little and myself arrived. We were walkin’ into the crime scene and found her body. . . . My role then [became] to secure the crime scene, to allow personnel in that needed to come in, and observe what they did.”
Securing a crime scene was like a well-scripted military operation with guidelines set forth by the California Commission on Peace Officer Standards Manual. The first thing Inspector William Smith, the team leader, had to do was to assume control over the area and designate assignments for team members as they came in. This was broken down further into some key components:
1. Secure and protect the scene.
2. Initiate a preliminary survey and determine scene boundaries.
3. Evaluate physical evidence possibilities.
4. Prepare a narrative description.
5. Depict the scene photographically.
6. Prepare a diagram/sketch of the scene.
7. Conduct a detailed search.
8. Record and collect physical evidence.
As Inspector Smith approached the crime scene, he determined to what extent it had already been protected and then made arrangements to keep out unauthorized personnel. He next made a cautious walk-through, watching where he stepped, while taking notes. He had to concentrate on the most transient evidence first, then focus on the easily accessible areas in open view and work toward the possible out-of-view locations while keeping an eye out for purposefully hidden items. He had to make a judgment call on whether evidence was moved inadvertently or whether some of the evidence looked “contrived.”
The guidelines read: “Do not permit narrative effort to degenerate into a sporadic and unorganized attempt to recover physical evidence—it is recommended that evidence not be collected at this point.”
Forensic scientist George Schiro even went further, recommending, “As the walk-through progresses, the investigator should make sure the hands are occupied by either carrying notebooks, flashlights, pens, etc., to prevent depositing unwanted fingerprints at the scene. As a final note on the walk-through, the investigators should examine whatever is over their heads (tree branches etc.). These areas may yield such valuable evidence as blood spatters.”
As Inspector Smith made his walk-through, two official photographers came into the area and began snapping photos of the vicinity and Monzo’s body. One was Deputy Lancher, who was on duty as a tech man, and the other was Ernie Erler, who was the crime lab photographer. None of this was new to them. They went through their own checklist by photographing with various lenses the overall, medium and close-up views of the scene. They set out recognizable scale devices to determine how large things were, and photographed from eye level to represent the scene as it would be observed by a normal view. Lastly, they took into account the admonishment from the Crime Scene Response Guidelines: “Film is relatively cheap compared to the rewards obtained—do not hesitate to photograph something which has no apparent significance at the time—it may later prove to be a key element in the investigation.”
Lancher and Erler had seen plenty of bodies in all states of rigidity and decomposition over the years. But there was something particularly disturbing about this crime scene. The victim had obviously been so young and pretty until her life had been horribly snuffed out in this lonely spot beneath the bleak concrete supports of an overpass.
As the photographers snapped their shots of the scene, one more key player arrived on the scene. Sharon Binkley, a criminalist with the Alameda County Crime Lab, was an expert in criminalist serology and latent fingerprinting, as well as an evidence technician. In some ways her methods were the most exacting of all the law enforcement personnel present. She collected various evidence, constantly writing down what she found and checking her packaging notations for accuracy. She well knew that a cautious painstaking approach would avoid evidence loss and contamination. Each item was carefully placed into specially marked paper bags and plastic containers with the realization that no two items could be stored together and risk cross-contamination. She also checked Lisa Ann Monzo’s clothes and body for tiny clothing fibers that might have come from the attacker.
All of this was a slow and laborious process amid the glare of spotlights. Binkley thoroughly went over the murder scene with a fine-tooth comb until nearly two o’clock in the morning, looking for minute clues and all the information she could assemble. She gathered an incredible number of miscellaneous items that ran the gamut from “probables connected to the crime” to “barely tangibles.” But the most important thing she did that night was one small procedure that would have huge implications down the line. She took a couple of vaginal swabs from the body of Lisa Ann Monzo and kept them safely in storage.
The news that Lisa Ann Monzo had been murdered hit the teachers and students of San Lorenzo High School very hard. She had been a popular girl and had many friends there. There was a dance scheduled for the night after her body was found and news of the discovery caused a debate whether to let the dance go ahead as scheduled or cancel it. Finally, it was decided to let the dance go forward as an impromptu memorial to Lisa Ann.
The school librarian Mary Milton remembered the dance as a surreal event. “Even though the music was playing, most students just huddled in groups, talking about Lisa. Many were crying. Brian Larsen, her leading man in the play, was devastated. Another boy named Kenneth kept banging his head against one of the bleachers and moaning. Not one person there hadn’t been affected by Lisa’s life and death.”
Across town Michael Ihde was not affected adversely or devastated. He was certain he had gotten away with it. So certain, in fact, that he soon committed an action so outrageous that it defies the logic of any reasonable person. He discovered through one of his cousins where Lisa Ann Monzo had been living. In an act of incredible audacity, Ihde went to her former home and passed himself off as a grieving friend. He cried and sobbed and wondered aloud who could have done such a terrible thing.
Whatever soul Ihde might have once possessed, he left behind in prison. He was as stone-cold a killer as ever walked the streets.
Meanwhile, just over the hill in Pleasanton, James Daveggio was on the way to losing his soul as well. Things were becoming increasingly rough for his second wife, Donetta, who didn’t find James to be the same wonderful individual that his mom, Darlene, found him to be. If he wasn’t chewing her out about something, he was down at the Pastime gambling their money away. Things reached a crisis point on July 25, 1985, when Donetta informed her husband that she was pregnant. She realized that he did not take the news well; but what he did next, not even she could have imagined.