Chapter 11
Adrift
James Daveggio really didn’t have much to come home to in 1986 after being released from prison. His second wife, Donetta, had had enough of his chicanery and sexual infidelities and divorced him while he still was in jail. She said later, “I made a clean break from him. Moved out of his mother’s house, changed my last name, changed my life. He was a big mistake in my life, but I learned a lesson the hard way. I became more wary of people. It was obvious that some could put on a pretty good act. And James was the master of that. They just can’t keep up the act once you really know them and live with them. Then all their faults came out. The only good thing to come out of my time with him was our daughter, Deborah. She’s a good sweet kid. I didn’t want her to have anything to do with him. As it turned out that was the right thing to do. The farther anyone is away from James, the better.”
In fact, daughter Deborah would do Donetta one better. Much later, when she learned about what her father had done, she would tear up all his photos, making him disappear from their lives.
Now instead of one set of kids to support and a single ex-wife, Daveggio had two. The prospect did not make him happy. A couple who were visiting Daveggio’s mother in Pleasanton after he was out of jail remembered how moody he was. They didn’t really know Daveggio and were struck by his unfriendly nature.
“The guy acted very strangely,” the woman said. “I got the feeling there was something wrong here. But I didn’t know what. He just sat there on the couch and watched as we looked the house over. He hardly said a word. It was nothing you could put your finger on. He was just very creepy.”
Even longtime neighbor Emily Brighton, who lived across the street, felt there was something wrong with Daveggio. “It wasn’t something that was real blatant,” she said. “But there were warning signs that he had a troubled past. Maybe from his childhood.”
Brighton was one to know. She had been the victim of incest as a child, and was now an advocate for other women who had gone through the same terrible circumstances. She’d read quite extensively on the subject, particularly citing The Courage to Heal, and she wondered if Daveggio might have been abused or had some problems as a child. Problems that would not allow him to become a normal adult.
From her own experience and intensive reading on the subject, she told how children growing into adults try to cope with the trauma. “You recover one piece at a time in a slow and painful process. All the puzzle pieces that make up who you are have been jammed together in a distorted and wrong configuration. You have to take them apart and try to put them back together in a proper manner. But sometimes, no matter how hard you try, you can’t make the pieces fit correctly. The pieces have been too damaged.
“Children learn a sense of right and wrong by the age of eight or so. If they have suffered an intense trauma, like abuse, or maybe they lose the affection from a parent, they may never truly be able to distinguish what is right and what is wrong. And it is a progressive situation. Things don’t get better with time, especially if the victim tries to cover up what has happened. The rage and sense of alienation only become worse.”
She surmised that this may have been the case with James Daveggio. “The symptoms were certainly there,” she said. “Especially when I found out what he did later. Often boys who have been abused or molested will take it out on others when they become men. It is a vicious cycle. Their self-esteem is so damaged at a young age that there is a rage inside that becomes harder and harder to control. It sometimes manifests itself in strange ways. One of these is by hurting others; another is alcoholism or drug abuse; another is self-mutilation.”
James Daveggio as an adult would show signs of all four.
Emily Brighton’s comments seemed to hit the nail right on the head as she cited passages from The Courage to Heal, a book about childhood abuse and molestation:
About Daveggio’s sexuality she used as an example,
“Many survivors (of abuse) can feel sexual arousal or have orgasms only if sex incorporates some aspects of abuse.... The context in which we first experience sex affects us deeply. Often there is a kind of imprinting in which whatever is going on at the time becomes woven together. So if you experienced violation, humiliation, and fear at the same time as you experienced arousal and pleasurable genital feelings, these elements (become) twisted together leaving you with emotional and physical legacies that link pleasure with pain, love with humiliation, desire with an imbalance of power. Shame, secrecy, danger, and the forbidden feel thrilling.”
Even though Brighton didn’t know about Daveggio’s self-inflicted three-inch burn mark on his back at the time, she intuitively suggested that he might be a candidate for self-mutilation, to try and expatiate his feelings of guilt. She read on,
“Many survivors have hurt themselves physically—carving into their bodies with knives, burning themselves with cigarettes, or repeatedly injuring themselves. It is natural that survivors struggle with self-abuse. As children they were indoctrinated to abuse, and now they continue the pattern themselves, never having known other choices. Self-mutilation provides an intense feeling of relief and release that many survivors crave. It also is an attempt to control, a type of punishment, a means of expressing anger, and a way to have feelings. Self-abuse is a way to re-create the abusive situation, producing a familiar result.”
Just how right she might have been would surface years later when one of Daveggio’s friends in Sacramento heard him admit that he often cut and burned himself. There was no explanation given by James to his friend about why he did this, just a statement of the facts.
Without knowing it, Emily Brighton had a report backing her contentions, written by Amy Goldman in her presentation The Life of a Child. Ms. Goldman wrote, “For one reason or another, when a child is left alone for long periods of time and frequently, his mind begins to keep him company. Thus begins the fantasy/daydream world. During the fantasies, the masturbation begins.”
Right on top of a list compiled about known serial killers and their childhoods, by Robert Ressler, Ann Burgess and John E. Douglas, is the common theme of daydreaming, compulsive masturbation, isolation and chronic lying.
Amy Goldman went on to write,
“Many people want to know if serial killers were abused as children. The answer is in most cases, yes. The levels and type of abuse range from sexual to physical beatings. However, the abuses can also be very subtle, not easily identified . . . such as neglect. Often though, when there was one type of abuse, there was another. For example, as the parent is hitting the child, the parent is also calling the child names. Although not understood why one child deals with this better than another, it is obvious that the abuse leaves an impression on the future killer which alters his life drastically. The history of abuse in the killer’s background is extremely indicative of the effects of child abuse. This is not to say the abuse specifically caused the killer to be a killer, but I do think it is not unfair or untrue to say that the abuse was a key component.”
James Daveggio’s mother vowed she had never abused her son as a child, and ex-wife Donetta, who knew mother and son well, backs her up. Perhaps in some strange way it was the total opposite of abuse—the unrestrained adoration that had a telling and negative effect on young James. In the world he grew up in, he could do no wrong, which meant there were no limits to his excesses. Without the counterbalance and supervision of a father, and with the unyielding and sometimes misplaced devotion of his mother, he grew up with a skewed sense of self. Even Donetta Rhodes admitted, “You ended up doing whatever James wanted to do. The number one person in his life was himself. The only hole in that life was the worry that he couldn’t be as good as his father—a father he never really even met until he was sixteen. And it was a real strange set of goals he set for himself as concerned his father. His father had nice houses and nice stuff, but he worked for those things. James never did. He didn’t have to with his mom taking care of him, or some other woman doing it. That’s what James really wanted, some woman to take care of him and go along with whatever he wanted. The only time self-doubts crept in were when he was drinking too much and he realized he couldn’t scam everybody. Then he could be hard on himself. Not to be a better person, but to try harder at the scamming. He was the king of bullshitters. If things went wrong, it was always someone else’s fault, never his own. When he got that same message from his mom, what was he supposed to believe? He just remained kind of a kid. A big, dangerous kid.”
Reeling now with two wrecked marriages and indeed plagued by self-doubts, James Daveggio moved back in with his mom, Darlene, in Pleasanton for a while. His mom was the one person who never seemed to criticize him. Even more than Daveggio, she always saw the blame in others for his shortcomings. It was just the sort of reassurance he needed to try and get back on his feet. Donetta Rhodes even contended that James saw her (Donetta) as the reason why he had gotten into trouble in Tracy with Janet Stokes in the first place. If she hadn’t told him she was pregnant, he would never have gone out drinking with John Huffstetler and ended up forcing Stokes to copulate him orally. To his mind it was all his second wife’s fault. He was so off base that that “fact” became established in his mind, and it began to make him feel better.
Daveggio made a few halfhearted attempts at getting a steady job. He even took a course in diesel mechanics school and got a certificate in the program. It was here that he met his third wife-to-be, another trainee named Deta. But he could not stay focused on a regular work life for long. Once he got the certificate, he didn’t do anything worthwhile with it. His life had already fallen into a pattern of never living up to expectations. Not the stint in the army, not his marriages, and now not the diesel school. Just like his old Main Street acquaintance Michael Ihde, he seemed to fail at everything he touched. He hadn’t quite crawled into a bottle the same way Ihde had, but he was certainly adrift.
Daveggio began to go to the Pastime Pool Hall more frequently, once again trying to recapture the good old days with his buddies. Everything seemed to be going in circles for him, from one cocktail lounge to another. It was just easier to sit on a bar stool with his friends, have a few brews, and watch sports on the television set in the corner than face the reality that he was now twenty-seven years old and going nowhere fast. The prospects for an ex-con who had dropped out of high school in the Pleasanton area were minimal at best. All the new businesses were going high-tech, and Daveggio didn’t have the proper skills and education. It must have made him feel even more alienated as the city of his youth changed from its working-class roots to a Yuppie bedroom community. The Pastime became more and more like a bastion against all those outsiders who were now depriving him of even his home turf. The complaints of his buddies matched his own—basically, how the city was changing and for the worse. The new people were snobbish; working-class people were looked down on by the new arrivals. It was a hell of a way to treat “old-timers,” of which they now counted themselves.
Within its smoky walls, the rumors drifting around Frog once again began to percolate. It was no secret what he had done to Janet Stokes in Tracy, and when he had too much to drink he hinted at other dark things he had done as well. The shy, friendly smile would disappear and his brilliant blue eyes become harder, taking on a more dangerous edge. As one of his old-time buddies at the pool hall said, “There seemed to always be two sides to Frog. Normally, he was quiet and polite. But give him a few drinks and he began to brag. The things he bragged about made you wonder. Was he just making this shit up, or had he really done some of the things he said he did? I mean fucking women against their will. I thought it was just the booze talking, but when I found out later what went on, I just don’t know. Maybe he really was trying to tell us something. It’s hard to say if he really wanted to be helped, or he was bragging, after all. I don’t know if that thing about multiple personalities is true. But with Frog he seemed to have at least two personalities. The quiet, friendly one, and the angry, loudmouthed one. There’s no doubt in my mind what triggered the angry one. It’s what comes out of a bottle. Without that booze, I don’t know if he would have ever hurt anyone in his whole life.”
Even though Daveggio was a registered sex offender, who knew the consequences if he deviated again, the cravings for illicit sex were still there in the back of his mind. Like monsters in a child’s nightmare, they were always hiding beneath the bed in a darkened room. Pleasanton was becoming stifling now and too reminiscent of failure. Most of the people in town, except for his buddies at the Pastime Pool Hall, didn’t give a damn whether he lived or died. He had to break out before he became like one of the nut cases who inhabited “the Creek” area, babbling all day long to himself and drinking cheap wine from a bottle in a paper sack.
Perhaps hoping for a fresh start, he, Deta and her eight-year-old daughter moved to Carmichael, a suburb of Sacramento, in 1988. The one thing Daveggio could not leave behind were those inner demons that would plague him more than ever once he reached that Central Valley city.