Chapter 25
The Bulldog
As James Daveggio and Michelle Michaud drove across town and booked themselves into the Lakeside Inn, Lake Tahoe behind them grew dark and quiet. Not once did they suspect that law enforcement agencies in California and Nevada were starting to close in on them. All the pieces of the puzzle were beginning to come together now, from the reported rapes of the two Sacramento girls, to the abduction and rape of Juanita Rodriguez in Reno, to the Dublin rapes of the teenage girls. Various agencies, including the FBI, were putting together a picture of a man and woman from Sacramento named James Anthony Daveggio and Michelle Lyn Michaud who were probably involved in one if not all these crimes.
Independent of all of these agencies, Police Chief Bill Eastman of Pleasanton was also having his force investigate the disappearance of Vanessa Samson. He had been frustrated by the inability to solve the Tina Faelz case years before, and he was pulling out all the stops on this case. The fact that the perpetrator had committed the crime in broad daylight near a busy interstate and simply vanished like a ghost galled him to no end. One salient characteristic Eastman possessed, however, was the mental tenacity of a bulldog. Large and muscular, at fifty-seven years of age in 1997, he had all the energy of a much younger man. He was known by his officers as a “cop’s cop.” He once told a Tri-Valley Herald reporter, “If you don’t give the streets away, you never have to take them back.”
He made no bones about the fact that he routinely called criminals “punks” and “idiots.” He ingrained in his officers the need to be on the alert always, reasoning that crooks would go elsewhere if they saw a highly visible police force in Pleasanton.
He didn’t compromise when it came to his hard-nosed style and posted memorandums throughout the department that stated, “Be committed, meet community needs, look to the future, get involved and make things better.”
As Deborah Acosta, city manager, had said, “He created a reputation that Pleasanton is tough on crime.” The statistics backed her up. Crime rates were three times lower in 1997 than they had been in 1981 when he took over as chief. In fact, there had not been a murder in Pleasanton for over two years. He’d started a local Drug Abuse Resistance Education program (DARE) in Pleasanton and instituted a K-9 program with trained police dogs. Under his command the police force had grown from thirty to eighty cops. The department headquarters on Main Street had been so outmoded when he first became “Top Cop” that pencils rolled off desks from the uneven floors, and the basement was a mass of exposed wiring. Eastman lobbied and got a new department headquarters on Bernal Avenue, where it became a leader in police work with computer-aided dispatch and records systems. He even got updated radios and new computers for the squad cars in town. He figured a city so tied to high tech ought to be safeguarded by the same use of technology.
But he also said, “Technology doesn’t make a damn bit of difference if you don’t have good people on the street. You can have a set of views, but if you don’t get them where the rubber meets the road, it’s over.”
He was honest and plainspoken with a large dose of common sense, and his officers admired him for it. “I’m serious when I say my leadership style is no mystery,” he once told a local reporter for the Tri-Valley Herald. “What you see is what you get.”
What Pleasanton got on the morning of December 3, 1997, was full-court press from Bill Eastman to find one of its missing daughters, Vanessa Samson. Police Chief Eastman sent his officers in a sweep over the entire area. Friends, coworkers and relatives of Samson’s were interviewed and two sets of flyers were distributed all over town. A canine tracking search was conducted along her usual route of travel from home to work while an aerial search was conducted from overhead. Residents and businesspeople were contacted along the route and a Teleminder computer called 324 residents and businesses in the area asking if they had seen the young woman on the previous day. Other law enforcement agencies all over the area were contacted and a “hit” was put in the California Law Enforcement System to be on the lookout for Vanessa Samson. Local radio, television and newspapers were contacted and before long Vanessa’s face was all over the Bay Area. Police Chief Bill Eastman was leaving no stone unturned to find Vanessa Samson and her kidnappers. The last thing he wanted was another Tina Faelz mystery.
The tracks between James Daveggio, Michelle Michaud and the law enforcement agencies had almost converged by December 3, 1997. Michaud was holed up in room 133 of the Lakeside Inn with methamphetamines while Daveggio once more tried his luck at the casino. If the ominous shape of the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office and jail right across the road gave them any second thoughts, they never expressed them. Michaud was too far into her drugs and Daveggio too far into his gambling addiction by now to take any warning signals. She had already made her court appearance in the morning, and soon they would be back on the road. There were a lot more roads and a lot more potential victims just waiting out there—that the van worked as an abduction chamber had already been proved. They couldn’t wait to give it another try.
Afternoon turned into evening and the winter sun began to go down over 9,000-foot Mount Tallac on Lake Tahoe’s west shore. It angled right toward Tahoma where Detective Sergeant Randy Peshon had once looked for Jaycee Lee Dugard. He had never given up on that case and he had over 150 different folders concerning tips and leads on that kidnapping.
As the late-afternoon shadows crept down the canyons, and law enforcement agents spread out around the South Lake Tahoe area, a van matching the description of one owned by Michelle Michaud was parked right outside in the parking lot. Even the license plate numbers matched.
The local FBI agent, Chris Campion, phoned the Reno office and an electric shock went right through Special Agent Ferrin. At last—this was it! Rounding up Agents Bruce Wick and Mike West, he phoned Agent Kip Steele in Carson City, as well as Douglas County detective Tim Minister. The word also went out to Placer County Sheriff’s detective Desiree Carrington—they were all to converge on the Lakeside Inn at Lake Tahoe, ASAP. Time was of the essence. James Daveggio and Michelle Michaud might vanish at any moment like the footloose gypsies they had become.