Chapter 23
“That’s him!”
As would later be alleged before a Grand Jury, it was in Dublin, California, on November 3 that James Daveggio and Michelle Michaud met Patty Wilson working at the game arcade; her abduction and rape occurred soon after. Just like the Sacramento thirteen-year-old, Nancy Baker, they frightened Patty Wilson into remaining quiet. Like the gypsies they had become, Daveggio and Michaud then turned the van eastward and motored up to Lake Tahoe after raping Wilson. It was as if the Bay Area and high Sierras were dual homing beacons to their depraved desires.
They spent some time in a motel room at Stateline in the Tahoe region and helped paint the exterior for a free room. Then they took a room at the Horizon Casino and Hotel not far away. Always hard up for money, Michaud went to the Horizon Casino on November 8 and wrote $389.65 in bad checks. She was soon detained by a security guard and was booked later at the Douglas County jail for an overnight stay. The jail was directly across from the Lakeside Inn where she used to be a customer at the bar. It was her second bad mistake.
Unfortunately for the law enforcement agencies involved, there was still no concrete evidence about who owned the green minivan or who had been responsible for the rape of Juanita Rodriguez. Michaud posted bail and promised to appear for a court hearing in early December. Then she and Daveggio hightailed it back to the Bay Area.
Only ten days later, on November 18, the first significant clues to the depredations of Daveggio and Michaud became evident when the two Sacramento teens were picked up by Sacramento cops and spilled their stories about forced drug usage and rape. Nancy Baker was willing to tell everything, right down to the smallest detail. Even Michaud’s daughter told Detective Willover when he spoke to her that she had been forced to take drugs at the hands of Daveggio and Michaud, and then molested. Michelle Michaud, who had been a good parent, no longer was the virtuous mother. She had slipped far indeed from her days as a crossing guard on busy Franklin Boulevard. According to one account, Michaud’s daughter later told a reporter from the San Francisco Chronicle that she had said to her mother, “They told me to watch out for people like that. But I never guessed it would be you, Mom!”
Detective Willover made out a full report about Baker’s rape and also the one concerning Michaud’s daughter who had been raped on the drive up to Oregon. The Sacramento Police then informed the local FBI about James Daveggio and Michelle Michaud, and they, along with officers of the Sacramento Police Department, scoured the pair’s old haunts all through the later days of November. One of the people they talked to was Peggy Morton, who lived across the street from Daveggio’s old girlfriend Lizzy Bingenheimer.
“The FBI agent told me to call immediately if I spotted James or Michelle,” she said. “I knew them both by sight—James because he hung out with Lizzy all the time and Michelle because I knew her from the Catholic church on Franklin Boulevard. The agent didn’t tell me what they were wanted for, but I figured it must be pretty bad if the FBI was involved. I remembered what James had said to me, ‘Bitch, I’m gonna kill yer ass!’ I didn’t doubt for a minute he was capable of doing it. His eyes were just crazy-looking.”
Even though the Sacramento police and FBI agents canvassed the area, including Bobby Joe’s and the Williamses’ residences, Daveggio and Michaud were long gone. Even though they were living dangerously now, they at least had enough sense to steer clear of Sacramento. In a bit of luck for the fugitives, Detective Willover did not contact the Placer County Sheriff’s Office about the Sacramento girls’ testimony concerning Juanita Rodriguez until November 26, nearly a week later. The man he contacted was Detective Bill Summers, the same detective who had found the body of Gerald Gallego’s last victim, Mary Beth Sowers. In a strange twist of fate, Bill Summers had just finished working on a murder case with another tie to James Daveggio and Michael Ihde. He had been working with Ken Hale of the California Department of Forestry—the same man who had been the first official to see Kellie Poppleton’s battered body along Kilkare Road. The threads of all these different cases so far apart in time and distance were starting to come together at last.
Some media sources would later make a big deal of Detective Willover’s weeklong delay in letting the Placer County Sheriff’s Department know about Daveggio and Michaud. But law enforcement agencies do not operate in a vacuum. There are other crimes to be solved, other disturbances to quell, and everything can’t be dropped for one potential breakthrough in a case, especially when multiple agencies are involved. Real cases are not solved in the methodical and timely manner of television shows. Real cases unfold in murky depths, with interrupting phone calls, conflicting information and court dates on other cases. Everything has a priority. Unfortunately for everyone involved, Daveggio and Michaud had priorities of their own.
Bouncing back to the Bay Area on the day after Detective Willover informed the Placer County Sheriff’s Department that a possible link existed between them and the Juanita Rodriguez case, the pair decided to spend Thanksgiving week at Daveggio’s first wife Annette’s house in Dublin. It was not destined to be a traditional Thanksgiving, however. Daveggio’s sixteen-year-old daughter was supposed to get her driver’s license the next day on Friday, so he convinced her to come stay with him and Michelle at the Candlewood Hotel in Pleasanton overnight. The Candlewood Inn was located close to the Department of Motor Vehicles.
According to the Alameda County Grand Jury indictment, at around 10:00 P.M. on Thanksgiving, Michaud, Daveggio and his daughter checked into the hotel and Michaud immediately plopped down onto the bed and began to read a book. But Daveggio sat in a chair and began to ask his daughter all sorts of strange questions. One was “Would you like to torture people?”
She answered, “I don’t know. I’ve never tortured anyone. But most people like to torture people to watch the fear in their eyes.”
He agreed with her. “Yes,” he responded, “that’s the reason it would be cool to torture people. To see the fear in their eyes.”
Then he asked, “Have you ever killed anyone? You’d never know if you’d like it unless you try. Would you like to go hunting with me?”
His daughter was getting scared now and asked, “What do you mean by hunting?”
“When you go and stalk someone to kill,” he answered.
Now she was thoroughly scared and wanted to change the subject. She knew what kinds of books he liked to read. Books about serial killers.
He next asked her. “If I ever killed someone, would you hide me out?”
“It depends on the situation,” she answered.
Daveggio grilled his daughter a little more with these macabre questions and then got up to take a shower. As the girl sat stunned from the conversation that had just ensued, Michaud quietly put down her book and absolutely floored her with the casual statement, “Your dad’s going to have sex with you.”
“No, he can’t! He’s supposed to be my father. He’s supposed to love me.”
Daveggio emerged from the bathroom wearing only shorts. Michaud went in to take a long shower as Daveggio sat down on the bed next to his daughter and began to fondle her.
“Please stop!” she cried. But he kept right on. As if justifying his actions, he said, “Michelle won’t let me have oral sex with her, and so I’m going to have it with you.”
He pushed her back on the bed and pulled down her pants and panties and forced his head between her legs. She remembered staring at the clock the whole time. The ordeal began at midnight and did not end until 1:00 A.M. Sometime around 12:45 A.M. Michaud came out and joined them. She began to give Daveggio a blow job as he continued oral copulation on his own daughter.
Afterward Daveggio went out to get orange sodas for them all as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. Michaud said to the girl, who was suffering from shock, “Tomorrow is the busiest shopping day of the year and it will be the best day to kill somebody. Do you want to come along with us?”
“No!” the frightened girl responded.
Michaud became angry at her reply. Then she uttered a chilling comment the girl would not soon forget.
“Well, we’ll have to do it sometime really soon.”
After Thanksgiving Day, Daveggio and Michaud went to stay with a friend of his in Pleasanton until November 30. On that date they went to a Kmart store in Hayward to buy two Revlon curling irons. But they didn’t plan to use them on Michaud’s hair. They had other more diabolical plans in mind for the curling irons.
The next day, December 1, was “cruising day,” sizing up the schoolgirls at his old high school, Foothill High in Pleasanton. Perhaps he thought about all the girls who wouldn’t give him the time of day while attending that school. Now they weren’t going to have any choice. He’d simply tie them up and take what he wanted from them and force them to satisfy him. Daveggio and Michaud stopped only briefly in the parking lot of Foothill High until a passing teacher frightened them away. Running low on money, they hit up James’s long-suffering ex-wife Annette for some cash. Next they drove over to Valley High in Dublin where Daveggio had buddied around with Michael Ihde so many years before. They also stopped by Wells Middle School where Daveggio had a daughter—the same school where Kellie Poppleton had been a lonely child. Everything was coming full circle now. The things he and Ihde had only dreamed about so long ago were all coming true.
James Daveggio and Michelle Michaud decided they would strike the next day. Pleasanton would be the target area, his old neighborhood of Clovewood Drive would be ground zero. It was the neighborhood that had seen fourteen-year-old Tina Faelz die a lonely death in a nearby drainage ditch.
But first they had a few more items they wanted to buy. At 6:17 P.M. they stopped in at Not Too Naughty No. 2 in Livermore, an adult sex shop and bookstore. Robert Maisonet was working behind the counter and he remembered a couple coming in that didn’t fit the norm. As he recalled, “They weren’t our typical customers. Our typical customers are couples in their mid-twenties, fairly well dressed. These people were somewhat not as well dressed.”
He also noticed that the unusual couple made a beeline to what he termed—“the most extreme items” in the store—handcuffs, gagging devices and dildos. They picked out a green ball gag to be placed in a person’s mouth during sadomasochistic sessions. It had attached elastic strings that were to be placed around the person’s head. Daveggio also picked out an audiotape with two scantily clad girls on the cover. The tape was labeled Submissive Young Girls.
On December 1, 1997, Juanita Rodriguez was escorted into the Washoe County Sheriff’s Office one more time by Detective Desiree Carrington and FBI Agent Lynn Ferrin for a look at a photo lineup of possible assailants. The information about James Daveggio and Michelle Michaud that the Sacramento Police had passed on to the Placer County detectives was finally being implemented. As Rodriguez flipped through the pages of photos, none of the men looked familiar to her. Suddenly, she let out a small gasp. A photo stared back at her from the page with the face of a man she would never forget. Her finger reflexively pointed at the photo.
“That’s him!” she cried. “It looks like this one!”
It was a photo of James Daveggio.
The news was passed on to Daniel G. Bogden, assistant U.S. attorney at the Federal Building in Reno. A young man with the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force, he issued a complaint against James Daveggio and Michelle Michaud. It stated in part:
“Count One, Title 18, United States Code, Conspiracy to Commit Kidnapping—Interstate Transportation—James Anthony Daveggio and Michelle Lyn Michaud—defendants herein, did knowingly and intentionally combine, conspire and agree to commit a kidnapping offense in violation of the laws of the United States, in that the defendants willfully kidnapped, seized and confined a twenty-year-old female Reno resident and then willfully transported the aforesaid victim in interstate commerce from the state of Nevada to the state of California, for some benefit, defendants alleged herein did further and specifically aid, abet, counsel, command, induce and procure the conspiracy within the meaning of Title 18, United States Code, Section 2.”
U.S. Attorney Bogden went on to state:
“The whereabouts of both these individuals are not presently known. It is believed that both are still traveling together and may be in California or Nevada. Due to their unknown whereabouts, the Government is seeking the sealing of the Criminal Complaint in this matter. If the Criminal Complaint for defendant James Daveggio were to become public prior to his arrest, it is believed that the defendant and his accomplice would attempt to avoid arrest by fleeing the country or attempt to go into hiding. If allowed to complete its investigative efforts, the FBI and law enforcement can minimize or eliminate this flight possibility and keep the defendant and his accomplice from committing further criminal offenses. Therefore your affiant believes that good cause exists to seal the above-mentioned Criminal Complaint until execution of the arrest warrant by law enforcement upon defendant James Anthony Daveggio after which time this Order to Seal will expire automatically upon his arrest.”
United States magistrate judge Robert McQuaid Jr. signed the arrest warrant and issued the order to seal it, eliminating any possibility that the media would somehow alert the pair.
Nearly one hundred miles away, Detective Desiree Carrington drove back to Auburn, California. She was busy too, filling out a Probable Cause Arrest Warrant. She wrote:
“Your affiant, Detective Desiree Carrington is employed as a peace officer for the Placer County Sheriffs’ Department and has attached here to and incorporated by reference as exhibit an official report and records of law enforcement agency. These reports were prepared by law enforcement officers and contain factual information and statements obtained from victim, witnesses and others which established the commission of the following criminal offenses 207 PC 261 (a) (2) PC and 259 PC (kidnapping, rape and the use of a firearm).
“Person to be arrested: Michelle Lyn Michaud.”
Law enforcement agents were at work in Sacramento as well. They contacted Michelle Michaud’s mother, who told them that her daughter would soon be on her way up to Lake Tahoe for a court date dealing with the Horizon bad checks incident.
But one wish of Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel Bogden to “keep the defendant and his accomplice from committing further criminal offenses” was not destined to be. Not only were James and Michelle contemplating further criminal offenses, they were upping the stakes.
As the wheels of justice got into high gear in Reno, Nevada, and Auburn and Sacramento, California, Daveggio and Michaud watched movies on the television in a Pleasanton motel. They took drugs and drank, and according to one source, they ate at a nearby Denny’s restaurant. (This report differs from Michaud’s own timeline.) One waitress who had seen Daveggio in years past vaguely remembered him. It was the same Denny’s where Daveggio’s long-suffering second wife, Donetta, had toiled to make a buck just so James could run up to Reno or Tahoe and lose it at the card tables.
“Yeah, I knew that guy,” she said. “He used to come in here a lot. But I can’t remember his name. He had some nickname. It was some kind of animal’s name. I remember someone calling him that. He also had a real unusual voice. Kind of like an old man’s raspy voice. He liked to order breakfast, sometimes even later in the day. And I remember his eyes. They’re real blue. He was pretty talkative and friendly most of the time. But I hadn’t seen him in a while.”
She had no way of knowing what he had been up to recently or that there was a warrant out for his arrest.
As night closed down over the upscale city of Pleasanton, James Daveggio went out to the van and tested the rope restraints. He had picked his material well. They were strong and unrelenting.