Chapter 14
King David’s Sins
It was obvious both to Michael Ihde and his lawyer after this admission of guilt that things did indeed look bleak for him. He’d already been convicted in the Lori Smith case. Now with the possibility of the death penalty looming on the horizon, Ihde decided to plead guilty to the Ellen Parker rape and murder charges in exchange for life imprisonment without possibility of parole. He was taken to Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla, Washington, and believed that he would spend the rest of his life there.
But fate was not quite through with Michael Ihde just yet. If he thought he had beaten the executioner’s lethal injection, he was wrong. There were still those Bay Area, California, cases that had gone unsolved—Lisa Ann Monzo and Kellie Poppleton. In particular, Lisa Ann Monzo’s ghost was still out there like a vengeful spirit and it was about to come back and haunt Ihde in a way he couldn’t even imagine. From beyond the grave, Monzo’s DNA and the DNA from Ihde’s own semen were finally going to send him to hell.
It all started in 1987 in the dayroom at the Washington State Penitentiary. Mike Ihde had become friendly with another convicted killer named Richard Danielson. Danielson had lived a very violent past. He had killed a man with as little remorse as if he’d killed a cockroach. Danielson and Ihde were in continuous contact, being in the same unit. They saw each other every day in the prison school, at meals, in the dayroom and the yard. During the course of their conversations Ihde related to Danielson that his wife, Rachel, had moved to Portland, Oregon, and it was there that his new baby had died.
Danielson remembered that incident. “Mike was disturbed over it really bad. I think it was SIDS. [Sudden Infant Death Syndrome].”
As Danielson gained Ihde’s trust, Mike began to open up to him more and more about his life. The repentant Ihde so evident at the Clark County interrogation room was again replaced by the cocky, arrogant Ihde of old. He began to tell Danielson about some of the seamier aspects of his former life on the outside. One day in particular stuck in Danielson’s memory. It occurred in the Unit 5, Protective Custody Dayroom.
Mike Ihde described a date back in the early 1980s in a Bay Area city in California when he had been drinking by some railroad tracks. A girl had come walking toward him and she looked very pretty. He had grabbed her, he said, muffling her screams with her own clothing, just before he did her. Then he had strangled her to death and covered her up with some dirt and leaves. Ihde smirked that the cops had never caught him on that one. He also related that he had committed another similar rape and murder in California and they’d never caught him on that one either. He wasn’t as specific about this one as he was about the girl at the railroad tracks, but Danielson got the impression that it had taken place in northern California. Ihde spoke of the whole thing as if it were a particularly good meal he had once enjoyed.
While Ihde told his story, he had no way of knowing that his listener was no longer the stone-cold killer that he had once been. Richard Danielson had found religion in prison and was a changed man. Danielson went back to his cell after their conversation and dwelled upon what he had just heard. The weight of it preyed more and more upon his mind until he could find no peace within himself. He knew the unwritten prison code about what other cons did to snitches. But he also now had a sense of justice.
As he said later, “Because after Mike shared with me the crimes, I just kind of kept it to myself for a couple of years and I was having a problem with that. I just pushed it back. And then I thought somebody innocent might be charged in the case or might have already been charged and I thought about the victim’s relatives and family members. And what they might have went through and my spiritual walk with the Lord, I was just prompted forward to share it.”
By the fall of 1992 Richard Danielson and Michael Ihde were no longer in the same prison facility. But it wasn’t distance that prompted Danielson to do what he did next. He could no longer keep Ihde’s story to himself. He wrote a letter to the Alameda Sheriff’s Department detailing Michael Ihde’s tale. It landed like a bombshell on the desk of the Alameda Headquarters on 150th Avenue in San Leandro.
The detectives there reviewed his letter, and after weeks of analyzing it, they deduced that the “girl” Ihde had been talking about to Danielson must be Lisa Ann Monzo. Many of the things Danielson had related were so similar. On June 12, 1993, they sent Sergeant Detective Monte De Coste and Sergeant John Reasoner up to the Washington State Penitentiary to speak with Danielson in person. What he told them was compelling. He related what Michael Ihde had told him in the dayroom: “He was drinking near some railroad tracks and this girl was coming toward [him]. She had light brown hair and nice breasts. [He] decided to do her. [He] took her underneath a bridge and up against the slanted part.”
Danielson then said, “I believe that there was some type of clothing used to keep her quiet. I don’t know whether it was used to strangle her or what. I believe she was between the ages of sixteen and nineteen.”
Lisa Ann Monzo had been eighteen at the time.
When Danielson sketched a map for them about the area that Ihde had described to him, he might as well have been drawing the detectives a blueprint of the murder scene in San Lorenzo. After nine long years, the Alameda Sheriff’s Department was finally zeroing in on Lisa Ann Monzo’s murderer—Michael Ihde.
Danielson, for all his faults, did have a certain sense of honor. He was transferred to a special witness protection area in another facility and there he could have kept quiet about the whole proceedings. But he wanted Michael Ihde to know what he had done. He wasn’t willing to just sit back in the dark in anonymity, never taking responsibility for his actions. Via his sister, Danielson sent a letter to Ihde, who was now at another prison in Washington State. He later told the Alameda detectives it contained these elements: “I believe it was the right thing to do in front of the Lord. I had confessed my own sins in a similar manner and felt better for it. I mentioned the part [to Mike] about a passage of the Bible about King David, an offense he committed. [Referring to King David’s illicit affair with Bathsheba and the intentional death of her husband by King David’s orders]. And I mentioned that because of what Mike was hiding and stuff. Maybe that’s the reason why some things had gone wrong in his life.”
After Richard Danielson’s confession, things were to go very wrong in Ihde’s life. With the evidence in hand, Sergeant Reasoner approached Sharon Binkley, the criminalist with the Alameda County Crime Laboratory who had taken such scrupulous evidence at Lisa Ann Monzo’s murder scene. She had kept all the items in storage, especially the vaginal swabs she had taken from Monzo’s body. Since 1984 a new and powerful scientific tool had come on the scene in law enforcement forensics—DNA testing. First used in a double murder case in England during the late 1980s, it had been the key element in solving those crimes. Since then it had gained wide acceptance in the United States after several bumpy years of legal wrangling in the various court systems of individual states.
Binkley had kept up to date on the latest findings in the area of DNA testing, and she had the credentials and expertise to handle the detailed process. She was using a technique called RFLP testing, which got very good results from DNA. It was a slow and laborious process, but Binkley was nothing if not meticulous. She had a no-nonsense manner and took her job very seriously. She knew that her findings would later have to stand up in court by a judicial system that was still skeptical of forensic DNA evidence.
In conjunction with this new tool, she also was an expert in trace evidence, mastering the ability to magnify very small items, such as human hairs and other fibers, under the lenses of powerful microscopes. With these she could trace the items back to a crime scene with a great deal of accuracy.
She and Detective Reasoner won a court ruling that Michael Ihde must produce blood, pubic hair, semen and saliva samples. Sharon Binkley already knew from the Gloria Hazelwood Amador County case in 1978 that Ihde was a nonsecretor, and this factor also applied to the Monzo case. When the samples arrived from Ihde, they clearly corresponded to samples that had been in storage and had come from Monzo’s body. The pubic hair from Ihde matched one that had been lifted from Monzo’s pubic area. And the semen stains on the vaginal swabs were a direct match with the semen samples from Ihde.
Nine years after Lisa Ann Monzo’s brutal murder, the DNA crosshairs had clearly lined up right in the middle of Michael Ihde’s back.