Chapter 12
Trouble in River City
Sacramento, California, goes by several nicknames: “Sac Town,” “The Big Tomato,” and “River City.” This last one takes note of the two rivers that dominate the city—the Sacramento River on the west side of town, and the American River that cuts straight through its center. Often in winter, fog rolls out over the entire town and blankets the streets with a dense covering of white. James Daveggio’s own life became lost in a sort of fog of rumors and innuendo during his stay in Sacramento from 1988 through 1997 when it emerged again into new and terrifying light.
He had moved to Sacramento, perhaps because he felt he’d just about used up all his good luck in the Bay Area. And for a time it did seem as if he truly would try to reform. The little family of James, his new wife, Deta, and her daughter moved out to a suburb of the city known as Carmichael and settled down on Gunn Road to a longed-for try at domesticity. The house was just across the street from a day care center and even though Daveggio was a sex offender, he didn’t let authorities know about his new address. His usual response to authority was to ignore it if he could.
He couldn’t ignore his past life, however. It kept intruding on him whether he liked it or not. In May 1988, only a month after he married Deta, his ex-wife Donetta served a modification order on him concerning child support for their daughter, Deborah. On July 20 she and her lawyer, and Daveggio and his lawyer, met in the courtroom of Judge William McGuiness in Alameda County. When all was said and done, James Daveggio was ordered to pay $200 on the first and fifteenth of every month for child support. His already tight finances were strained more than ever now. He began to wonder if not following through on his class at the diesel engine school was such a good idea.
Deta became pregnant by August, only four months after the wedding. Daveggio reacted to the news just like he had when his previous wife had informed him of her pregnancy—he went out of his way to sow his wild oats. Whatever his home life may have been, the demons in the back of his mind kept urging him on to more excesses. Not content with a sex life that included only Deta, Daveggio reverted to picking up other women in bars and restaurants. He had a shy, warm manner when he didn’t drink to excess, and many women found it endearing. Rumors even circulated among his friends that he was dating a teenage girl. No amount of wanting to have a normal family life with a new wife and son seemed to restrain him for long. He still had to catch up to his dad in marriages and girlfriends.
He must have been particularly horny on the morning of September 30, 1989, because at 11:50 A.M. he was arrested by Officer McGee of the Sacramento Police for trying to pick up a policewoman posing as a prostitute at the corner of Boxwood and El Camino Avenue. Already half drunk, he was also cited for disorderly conduct.
When he was hauled before Judge Kobayashi’s court, the formal charges read: “James Anthony Daveggio did willfully and unlawfully solicit another person for an act of prostitution.” Daveggio’s court-appointed lawyer, Steven Cohen, advised him to plead nolo contendere (acknowledging guilt), and he complied, paying $292 in cash for his fine and court fees. As part of his plea he signed a document stating:
1. Would not hitchhike or pick up hitchhikers.
2. Would carry identification when outside his residence.
3. Will not loiter for the purpose of soliciting an act of prostitution.
4. Would not rent a room under an assumed name.
5. Would not utilize services of a massage parlor or escort service.
6. Would not loiter in known prostitution areas around Auburn Boulevard from Marconi to Watt Avenue, Del Paso Boulevard from Arden Way to El Camino Avenue, the area bounded by 14th to 19th Streets, D to Q Streets, the truck stop at Stockton Boulevard and Mack Road, Stockton Boulevard from Broadway South to 47th Avenue.
7. Would comply with an AIDS test and get counseling.
Whatever lessons the counseling taught seemed to have no more effect on him than the AA meetings had. Daveggio stayed true to his nature, drinking and chasing women. But at least he stayed out of going back to prison, even though he was a registered sex offender and still technically on probation from his Tracy, California, rape conviction.
The Daveggio household was in pure chaos now. Half the time Daveggio didn’t even try to hide what he was up to. Deta did the best she could to raise their boy and restrain James from his wilder aspects, but things only seemed to get worse. There was not only their son to contend with, but James had all those daughters, who kept being thrown into the mix. His children were scattered all over the area, often coming to live with him and Deta, costing him even more money. One thing became very evident, he didn’t want any more children.
In 1993 Daveggio decided on an operation that would baffle law enforcement agents five years later and temporarily throw them off track. He opted to have a vasectomy. Seeking advice about the operation at a San Jose Planned Parenthood Clinic, he had the procedure performed on December 15, 1993. Six weeks later he had no more discernible sperm in his ejaculations. No sperm meant that not only would he have no more children, but also that he could not be traced in that manner by a DNA test.
The good years in the marriage to Deta lasted about as long as the others had. His last chance at having a “nice little family” was slipping away like a rain puddle in the desert. So was all his pretense at social responsibility. Daveggio decided if he was going to be wild, he might as well pull out all the stops. He bought himself a purple Harley, dyed his short-cut hair purple to match, and joined a local motorcycle gang known as The Devil’s Horsemen.
In keeping with his biker brothers, who went by names such as “Thumper,” “Stick,” “Little Bill” and “Cowboy,” Daveggio became known once again only as “Frog” or “Froggie.” He added new tattoos to his arms, back and chest to go along with the others, becoming a walking tattoo gallery. He grew a “bad boy” goatee to round out his tough-guy image. He began to look just as rough as any other member of the group. With his muscled arms and 220-pound frame, Frog was not someone you wanted to mess with. The Devil’s Horsemen, in some strange sense, became the family he was always looking for.
Their “clubhouse” on Stockton Boulevard in South Sacramento was something to behold. Built like a bunker and displaying a large Confederate flag, the place was open to outsiders by invitation only. One girl named Karen, who had recently moved to Sacramento from Florida, said, “Oh, man, it was far out. The [place] was like one of those militia places. You know, lots of Rebel stuff. It was built like a bunker. They were a bunch of hard-ass guys. They had lots of tattoos and were real tough. But they were fun too.”
Daveggio enjoyed the camaraderie it brought. He often went on motorcycle runs up into the Sierra foothills, Lake Tahoe or down the Valley with his brothers. If one of them got into a fight, they all pitched in. They also hit the bars along Stockton Boulevard pretty frequently, but unlike the others, Daveggio still retained his soft-spoken ways with women. It just blew them away—the aspect of this tough-looking biker with a sweet personality and shy demeanor. Lizzy Bingenheimer, who was part owner of Lizzy B’s Bar in South Sac, fell for Froggie.
Bingenheimer was no stranger to a rough life. One of her old neighbors remembered her as a girl on the south side of town. “I guess she didn’t have a very good upbringing,” he said. “She often would come knocking at the door and ask for something to eat. We always gave her something. I guess her own folks were too drunk or something to feed her. She wasn’t real bad or anything. But nobody was really raising her. She had to raise herself.”
An elderly woman neighbor concurred. “Elizabeth was basically a good girl who kept picking the wrong guys. She was nice to me. Kept me company ’cause I’m an invalid. But that new boyfriend of hers [Daveggio], he wouldn’t speak two words to me.”
Not all of the neighbors, however, were enamored with Bingenheimer. Peggy Morton, who lived nearby at the time, but has since moved, remembered Lizzy as a problem child from an early age. “She just got into drugs early and then it was on to motorcycle gangs. It became a real mess over there. People in and out all hours of the day and night. I think there was a lot of drug dealing going on. She hung out with a bunch of lowlifes.”
Morton remembered James Daveggio in particular. “He was a mean son of a bitch. He got into it one time with my nephew, who made a casual remark about his stupid purple motorcycle. Frog, as they called him, came over and knocked my nephew right off his bike. It was totally uncalled for. I saw the whole thing from my front window and went outside. ‘Hey,’ I said, ‘what’s going on here?’ I was going to discuss this whole thing with him like two adults. But that Frog came right up to me and pushed his finger in my face. He said, ‘Bitch, I’m gonna kill your ass! Or maybe I’ll let my motorcycle gang do it.’ I’ll never forget the look in his eyes. All the girls said what beautiful blue eyes he had, but all I saw was the look of a mean, crazy madman.”
Peggy Morton went back in the house and called the police. They came, but all they did was talk to Daveggio. Police cars on Vista Avenue became a common sight in what one man, Wray Tibbs, had once called Geritol Row. “Most of us were old and retired,” he said. “But that place [Lizzy’s house] was Rancho Notorious around here.”
As Daveggio saw Deta and his son less and less, he began to stay over Bingenheimer’s house more and more. But his old patterns had not changed. Polite and flattering when sober, he could be mean and dangerous when drunk. Morton witnessed Daveggio slap Bingenheimer around more than once. One time in particular caught her attention. “James owned a fancy pickup truck at the time and Lizzy drove it without his permission. When she came home, he gave her a good beating right there in the street.”
But it wasn’t always one-sided abuse. Lizzy Bingenheimer on occasion could give as good as she got. Morton remembered one comical incident. “James was drunk and trying to climb into a side window. Lizzy began beating him on the head with a broom. He kept saying, ‘But, honey, I love you!’ He finally staggered out to his pickup truck and passed out.”
Once Daveggio came into Lizzy Bingenheimer’s life, it wasn’t long before he became a part of Lizzy B’s bar in the capacity of a bartender and unofficial bouncer. If his size and height weren’t enough to calm a rowdy customer, it usually didn’t take any more than a word that he belonged to The Devil’s Horsemen to quiet the malcontent. Anyone with even a bit of sense did not look forward to taking on the whole gang.
Deta Daveggio had to just keep on suffering with all his philandering. There came a point where she couldn’t stand to be around him anymore and moved out of the area. But for Frog, life was about as good as he could have hoped for in the mid-1990s. He had an ersatz family, even if they were a rough pack of bikers; a son to carry on his name; and a girlfriend who loved him, according to her own standards. She liked to jump on the Harley, behind him, and go for a ride down the curving levees of the Sacramento River. With the wind in her hair and the sunset falling over the languid waters that looked like a scene out of bayou country, Lizzy fell in love with Frog.
In some ways it was even more exciting to take the twisting mountain roads up to Lake Tahoe. The cool air was bracing and the scenery beautiful. One service station attendant at the “Y” particularly remembered Daveggio coming in there quite a bit. It was evident he was no stranger to Tahoe and knew his way around even its backroads. With its casinos, Lake Tahoe became a kind of Mecca for Daveggio. So did the prospect of ogling all the nice young girls in their bikinis as they sunned themselves on Tahoe’s warm, sandy beaches in summertime.
As time passed, Lizzy Bingenheimer allowed Daveggio to move into her home on Vista Avenue in Sacramento, but she and her neighbors got a lot more than they bargained for. It wasn’t long before The Devil’s Horsemen started showing up too, at all hours of the day and night. Drinking, yelling, swearing, the roar of motorcycles streaking down the street, became a part of everyday life on the once-quiet avenue. The tree-lined neighborhood of modest homes became wrapped in a state-of-siege mentality between the neighbors and the Horsemen.
One neighbor who lived a few doors down was a retired navy man, and he made no bones about what he thought of Frog and his buddies. “Never did like the guy,” he said. “I thought he was a hustler and a no-good SOB!”
Another neighbor, a few houses up the street, who did not want to be identified, said, “It still makes me mad when I think about that guy. This used to be a nice neighborhood. But when he moved in with that gal, everything went to hell. I wanted to kill him. But then I figured if I killed him, I’d have to kill them all. The whole gang, I mean.”
Another neighbor said, “I used to go to church and pray that they would move or get killed. I know that’s bad, but I really hated them.”
Despite all the turmoil, Daveggio was having the time of his life. For once, he wasn’t the outsider. He was at the very heart of the action, even if it was a strange life. He was in such a good frame of mind that he often passed out small pins made in the shape of frogs to female patrons at Lizzy B’s. Lizzy thought it was cute, just one more sign of what a really nice guy he was.
But she should have been looking a little more closely. Pins weren’t the only thing he was displaying at Lizzy B’s. Once in a while, when Bingenheimer wasn’t around, he would coax some young woman down to the end of the bar, unzip his pants, and expose himself in front of her. Some girls were turned off and never showed their faces in the door again; others didn’t mind at all. Lizzy B’s was that kind of place.
So despite the fact that James Daveggio had it about as good as he ever wanted, there were still demons scratching on the inside, gnawing to get out. Just how deep-seated they were can be detected by a statement made by one of Frog’s acquaintances named Dave. Dave sometimes frequented Lizzy B’s, and he also patronized another bar up the street that Daveggio would know all too well in the years to come. In a rare moment of truth, Daveggio related to Dave that he sometimes inflicted wounds on himself, either by cutting or burning. He had a three-inch burn on his back. One story goes that he got it from a childhood accident. Another that he did it to himself. Either way, he seems to have created self-inflicted wounds at some point in his life. He didn’t know why he did these things. But he felt compelled to do them. This one brief glimpse of the inner turmoil afflicting Daveggio paints a picture of a deeply troubled man, unsettled by terrible memories and urges even at this point in his life, which should have been the most satisfying emotionally. At some level the brotherhood of the biker gang wasn’t enough, nor was Lizzy. Daveggio had a cold, dark void at the center of his life that needed filling, and he knew no other way to fill it except by excess. More drinks, more women, more violence.
The women came first. Daveggio began seeing other women behind Lizzy’s back. Carla Pelfrey, a diminutive, pretty patron of the bar, related that Frog started dating her teenage sister, even though he was already thirty-five years old. Daveggio was able to keep the demons in check enough to still come off as a good guy when he wanted.
“Froggie was a nice guy then,” Pelfrey stated. “He never talked dirty to my sister or slapped her around the way some of those other biker guys did with their girlfriends. Once in a while he would bring over videos and pizza and stuff, like on a Saturday night, and he would pay for it all. He was very generous. He just liked to kick back and watch the TV. He was really into movies a lot. Sometimes he even brought his son, who he got on weekends. He was actually a lot of fun to be around. You’d have never guessed he was a rough biker if you had seen him then. I never guessed about all that other stuff.”
But there always was the “other stuff” with Daveggio, no matter how many wives he went through or how many girlfriends he had. They were never enough—not compared with the thrill of taking some terrified woman against her will into a dark place, unzipping his pants, and forcing her to go down on him. All the Annettes, Donettas, Detas, Lizzies and dozens of others just couldn’t match the excitement of one Janet Stokes, taken at gunpoint into the orchards at midnight and forced to do whatever he wanted.
But if Daveggio had taken the time to read the Bay Area newspapers, he might have discovered a cautionary note in their pages concerning his old buddy Michael Ihde. Ihde had also surrendered to those same urges and finally run out of luck. He’d dug a hole for himself, dark and deep, and a Bay Area prosecutor, with the improbable first name of “Rock,” was going to bury him in it for good. Little could Daveggio guess at the time that Rock had an extra “shovel” lying around for him as well. In the late 1990s Rock Harmon would bury Daveggio just as deeply as he was about to do with Michael Ihde.