Chapter 22
The Torture Chamber
James Daveggio was a volatile volcano of emotions when he and Michelle Michaud reached Reno, Nevada, on September 25, 1997. Being habitual gamblers, he and Michaud booked themselves into the Circus Circus Hotel and Casino using a credit card she had cajoled out of one of her sugar daddies. While Daveggio hit the slot machines and black jack tables day and night, Michelle holed up in the room with her meth, charging room service and pay-per-view movies. Even though she and Daveggio were not intimate at this juncture—he was sleeping in the bedroom and she on the living room couch—they constantly paged each other. They devised a code: 143 meant “I love you”; 401 meant “I’m sending love”; 422 meant “Undying love”; 42 meant “Forever.” Their relationship had always been strange. But now it was downright surreal.
On the second day of their stay at the Circus Circus, one of Michaud’s sugar daddies arrived for “an intimate moment,” as she delicately put it, while Daveggio stepped out of the room to gamble.
After they had finished having sex, they went to dinner. Michaud convinced him that the van needed repairs and that’s why she still needed to keep his credit card. He bought her pack of lies and let her keep the credit card.
Only when he was gone did Michaud page Daveggio to come back to the room. He spent some time watching movies with her, but his mind was really on gambling. He was able to maintain his almost nonstop gambling frenzy because he was cranked up on methamphetamines. In fact, they both were high as kites during their entire Reno stay. Michaud would admit later of this period, “We used meth like other people drink water.”
Luck was not with Daveggio. The cash advances he had garnered from the credit card were quickly ebbing away on the green felt tables. Daveggio and Michaud took the expedient of buying jewelry with the credit card just to pawn it at a shop across the street. And still it wasn’t enough. Michaud went down Virginia Street to the Cal Neva Club where her old friend and massage parlor owner from years before, Charlie S., was now tending bar. She talked about old times, had a drink and hit him up for fifty bucks. She even told him a strange story about a time in Sacramento when she had supposedly killed a man who had tried to strangle her while he had sex with her. She said, “I cut him and enjoyed it.”
Like many others now, Charlie couldn’t tell for sure when Michaud was telling the truth or when she was lying. Her world had become so warped that her grasp of reality became blurred.
When she returned to the Circus Circus, Daveggio took the fifty from her and lost it in no time. Michaud then called her mom in Sacramento for money and seventy-five dollars was wired to her via Western Union. This did not last long either. Finally, in desperation to earn more money for the tables, Michaud hooked on the street. She picked up a middle-aged Asian man and they went back to her room where he paid her money for sex. But she could no longer make the big money by prostitution. He only paid her fifty dollars. She turned the money over to Daveggio and he immediately lost it.
By the third day of their meth-induced madness, Michaud had maxed out the credit card and the front desk called their room telling them that they would have to leave. Michaud remembered, “James was angry and put off that we didn’t have anywhere to go.” The sexual fantasies à la Gerald Gallego, which he’d ignored in the midst of his gambling frenzy, were now back full force. He was determined more than ever to kidnap some woman in the area and force her to do whatever he wanted. At least this would give him the satisfaction in what so far had been a losing trip.
They looked up Charlie S. at the Sands Hotel and bummed twenty dollars’ worth of gas money from him. With the cash they bought some gas, and had enough fuel to cruise around town looking for a likely victim. Michaud wasn’t quite as into it as he was, not yet, but she didn’t object either. Later she would claim that she didn’t know what he was up to. But Michaud was not that stupid, and Daveggio was less than coy about his intentions. As he sat behind the wheel, motoring around through the downtown area, Michaud suddenly became aware that he was following a young woman who was walking down the street. She remembered, “We came through a tunnellike part by the railroad tracks, and there was a big parking lot on the right-hand side. There was a young lady he had spotted and he circled around again just as she walked to her small white truck. As soon as she got in the truck, he just drove right past.”
Extremely angered and agitated that he had been thwarted in his plans to grab her, Daveggio was furious as they cruised back toward downtown Reno. Nothing had gone right on this trip—not his gambling nor his wish to emulate Gerald Gallego. At a little after 10:00 P.M. on the corner of Washington and Sixth Streets in Reno, not far from where he had wed his second wife, Donetta, he spotted a petite, dark-haired woman standing on the sidewalk alone.
James Daveggio had spotted Juanita Rodriguez standing on the corner, waiting for her boyfriend. Once he drove by, he stopped at the end of the block and told Michaud to take over the wheel while he climbed in back. As she circled around, he crouched down in the interior of the van, ready to strike. Just as the van came even with Rodriguez, he slid the door open and hurtled from the van, grabbing her by the hair and the backpack she wore. Even when he hit his knee on the curb, he didn’t let go. This was one prize that was not going to escape his lusts.
The rest became a nightmare for Rodriguez. His forcing her to disrobe, sticking his finger in her anus and then forcing her to do the same to him. He made her suck his penis and then drew out in time to ejaculate on her face. Even then the sexual torture didn’t stop. It continued for more than an hour as they drove through the darkened mountains on a winding road. The worst was when he kept singing about a person “who shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die.” She was sure he meant to kill her after he was tired with her. It was only by the grace of the woman driver that she was sure that she escaped with her life.
After they let Juanita Rodriguez go, Daveggio became worried that she had seen his distinctive tattoos and that she would identify him by those to authorities.
“We’ve got to go back and cap her [shoot her] in the head!” he kept insisting.
But Michaud drove on and calmly replied, “It was too dark in the van. She didn’t see your tattoos. Look, you have very prominent tattoos all over you. But she can’t identify them. I’m telling you, if you ever get arrested, she can’t identify them. It was too dark. She was traumatized and she was so busy talking and trying to save her own life. She wasn’t paying any attention to any tattoos.”
Actually, it had been light enough to have seen Daveggio’s tattoos during several points in the trip. But by whatever means, Michelle Michaud had divined that Juanita Rodriguez would not remember. In fact, Rodriguez had been so traumatized by the events that she would not remember that Daveggio’s eyes were blue and his hair was blond. (She thought both were brown.)
While FBI Agent Lynn Ferrin and his team and Washoe County criminalist Rene Romero were putting the pieces together in the Juanita Rodriguez abduction case, James Daveggio and Michelle Michaud were taking steps to throw them off the track. After leaving Juanita Rodriguez in the woods at Clipper Gap, they drove past Sacramento to Ceres, a small town in the Central Valley where Daveggio’s wife Deta (they were never divorced) now lived. He went into the house while Michaud slept in the van. The next day Michaud helped him shave his head; she strategically tucked her own hair up under a baseball cap, put on men’s clothing and wore no make-up. From a distance she was so unfeminine-looking now that she could pass for a man.
They added large silver striping on the exterior of the green minivan to alter its appearance and they removed the rosary from the rearview mirror. Daveggio did one more key alteration. He removed the rear captain’s chairs from the van. But he wasn’t just content to leave things that way.
Daveggio must have been remembering how exciting it had been to hold Rodriguez down and force her to do what he wanted. What if there were rope restraints built right into the floorboard of the minivan to tie his next victim down? He had the material at hand—the industrial-strength rope he had stolen from the Williamses’ residence. He could do that right now. Later he could hook up the come-along that he had also stolen and he would have the ultimate mobile abduction/torture chamber. He’d be able to stretch out his victim for maximum sadistic pleasure and do whatever he wanted to her shackled body.
While Michaud stayed inside, Daveggio went to work with a methamphetamine-induced vengeance. He removed the rear captain’s chairs so there would be no obstacles in the way now to throw the next victim into the van through the sliding side door. All that was left in the rear area was a long benchlike chair. He also added a mirror into the interior of the van—better to see his victims once they were trussed. At last he had a van his mentor Gerald Gallego would have been proud of.
While staying in Ceres, Daveggio sent Michaud back to Sacramento to see if the coast was clear with the old motorcycle gang and look for any indication that law enforcement officers were snooping around their former addresses. She did as instructed and returned saying that everything looked normal. He was still paranoid that Juanita Rodriguez had seen his tattoos, but she said, “Look, quit panicking, James. If we ever get stopped, what is she going to tell them? The first thing they’ll ask her, ‘How could you not notice his tattoos?’ And she didn’t notice the color of your eyes either. You have striking blue eyes. So relax.”
She finally convinced Daveggio that they could return to Sacramento. Even though he was still nervous and edgy about the police, those feelings weren’t as strong as his need for more victims. Both were too hyped up now on meth and lust just to lie low. In her drug-crazed madness, Michelle Michaud, however, did one incredibly stupid thing. While watching a news report on a local television station with her daughter and Nancy Baker, the thirteen-year-old she had helped rape in the Williamses’ house, a story came on about the Juanita Rodriguez abduction in Reno. In the middle of the story Michaud blurted out proudly, “We [James and I] did that!”
She must have been counting on her daughter never snitching on her and she knew that Nancy, the thirteen-year-old, was terribly cowed ever since the incident with the gun in the bathroom. She must have figured she had nothing to worry about.
By October Michaud’s and Daveggio’s lusts pushed them on into abducting Michelle’s daughter on a terror ride up to Klamath Lake, Oregon, on a trip filled with molestation and rape. This wasn’t enough, so they did it to her again a week later on the drive to Santa Cruz, along with Nancy Baker. Everything was disintegrating in Michaud’s world now. It was hard to tell at this point what was real and what was fantasy as far as she was concerned. She was hooked into meth so badly that her mind drifted in and out of reality. In early November she told her sister Misty’s live-in boyfriend, Rick Bourne, that she had in years past fingered individuals for Hell’s Angels members to kill. One incident in particular stuck in her mind. It happened in 1982, according to her, when she allegedly lured a Sacramento bail bondsman named Leo into a hotel room. There was a Hell’s Angel member with a pistol waiting inside the room. While Leo was forced to kneel on the floor with the gun to his head, Michaud said, “Sorry, you fucked up”; then the Hell’s Angel blew the man’s brains out.
She also told Bourne that she was involved in some murder where “a Nigger was hung in a tree in Wilton.”
Bourne knew that she often lied and embellished her tales, but with Michaud you never really knew for sure. There was always an element of truth to what she said.
In a last gesture to the past and a keepsake for the future, James Daveggio stole a tape recorder from the Williamses and recorded a rambling message on audiotape to his son, James Jr. On it he said he wanted forgiveness for what he had done and what he was about to do. Maybe no one would understand, he said, but he had to do it. The demons he was struggling with were too strong now. The tape was to be his last will and testament. He vowed he would not be taken alive if caught and he had a semiautomatic and a .38-caliber pistol to prove it.
He left the tape at the Williamses’ residence and he and Michaud dropped off her children at her parents’ house. Then they climbed into her minivan, Michaud at the wheel. The whole wide world lay before them that evening as MacFadden Drive receded in the rearview mirror. It was a world brimming with potential young women to be kidnapped and raped. And like a beacon, Pleasanton was calling James Daveggio home. He instructed Michaud to turn the minivan southward and they motored out of Sacramento, bound for the place where all the “urges” had first bedeviled him and another boy named Michael Ihde so many years before.