Chapter 27
Witchy Woman
So far the FBI agents hadn’t searched the interior of the minivan but they did haul it to Reno and obtained a search warrant, even though they already had a statement from Michelle Michaud that they could search the van. They weren’t taking any chances on the legality. The following morning, December 4, in the crime lab garage of the Washoe County Sheriff’s Department, Agent Lynn Ferrin supervised a specialized crew as it scrutinized the van’s interior. The search revealed a plethora of incriminating material.
He wrote in his report, “[We found] a rosary style beaded necklace with crucifix, a roll of duct tape, audio and video cassette tapes, bedding, several pillows, eyeglasses, photographs, dangling earring with horse head, magazines, jewelry, a sleeping bag, controlled substances, and dark colored pistol with magazine.”
The evidence was damning indeed. Juanita Rodriguez could identify some of the items, especially the rosary she had been looking at when repeatedly raped by Daveggio. Some of the other items were even more interesting. The title of the audiotape was Submissive Young Girls.
Agent Ferrin went on to write, “Further, due to the fact that there is probable cause to believe that the minivan contains fibers, hairs, blood, semen and fingerprint evidence, as well as other trace evidence relating to the kidnapping and sexual assault offenses, authority is also requested to allow the Washoe County Laboratory Forensic Investigation section to conduct a detailed search of the interior and exterior of the minivan and to obtain any fibers, hairs, blood, semen and trace evidence related to the kidnapping offense and sexual assault offense.”
One of the main persons involved in the search of the van was Toni Leal, a forensic technician with the Washoe County Sheriff’s Office, who did photography and processed film and latent work. She assisted the FBI as they went through the van and lifted hair samples and other small items by means of special adhesive tape and a thorough vacuuming of the entire interior with a powerful vacuum cleaner. She was in fact able to collect two small hairs consistent with those taken from Juanita Rodriguez. Amidst the immense amount of hair, lint and rubbish collected from the van, this was no mean feat. She also obtained a blood sample from James Daveggio that day and put it in a tube so that it could later be used by criminalist Rene Romero.
But one of the most interesting things Toni Leal found in Michelle Michaud’s minivan was a curling iron with duct tape still attached. The cord had been severed from the curling iron. She also found several items wrapped up in a white towel: a green ball gag, yellow nylon rope, duct tape, tissue paper with a reddish stain on it and a large Revlon curling iron. In the front cup holder rack, she discovered a cassette case entitled Submissive Young Girls, and the tape itself was in the cassette player.
Amid all the trash in the van, Toni Leal picked up a couple of items that turned out to be important later as far as fingerprints were concerned: an AM/PM drink container and Diet Pepsi plastic bottle. She documented everything using the Washoe County Code system, which began everything with the letter Q. The Pepsi bottle became item Q12782, the AM/PM cup Q12780. Among all the debris she also found a book entitled Dead of Night. It was about serial killers.
Toni also requested a major case set of prints to be collected from James Daveggio and Michelle Michaud not only for the Washoe County Sheriff’s Office, but for the California Department of Justice as well. A major case set of prints differed from a normal set of fingerprints in that not only the fingertips were rolled, but the side of the palm and the entire palm as well. Ms. Leal was taking no chances on these two.
A great deal of this material and information was soon sent to criminalist Renee Romero, who really went into her element. She obtained the vacuumed items and other small fibers from the interior consistent with the Juanita Rodriguez crime of September 29, 1997. Starting with a low magnification of about thirty mags to get a general idea of what she was looking at, she steadily increased the power to nearly 400 magnifications. She was now an expert with the stereomicroscope and could actually see the item in three-dimensional form, allowing her to analyze a single fiber to a remarkable degree of accuracy. One by one she noted fibers that came from clothes that Juanita Rodriguez had been wearing on the night of her abduction and were now picked up by adhesive tab at the lab. All of this added to the ever-growing amount of quantifiable evidence against James Daveggio and Michelle Michaud.
On that same day, December 4, 1997, another fateful event took place fifty miles southwest of Reno in Alpine County, California. At around ten o’clock in the morning, a motorist stopped by the side of the road on Highway 88 near Crater Wash and saw a “dark shape in the snow.” Curiosity overcame his caution and he walked a little closer. What he saw next made him rock back in horror. The dark shape was the frozen body of a young woman.
The motorist quickly contacted the Alpine County Sheriff’s Department and Deputy Everett T. Brakensiek was dispatched to the scene. Alpine County is the most mountainous county in California, and the least populated. With peaks jutting 12,000 feet into the sky and a population of less than 2,000, there are more bears, deer and raccoons in the county than there are people. Presiding over the whole area was Sheriff “Skip” Veatch, and he knew that the backcountry dwellers were an independent lot and sometimes at odds with the local law enforcement. But their crimes were usually petty in nature, consisting of shooting some game out of season, cutting firewood without a permit or pilfering road-crew equipment. Once in a while a mountaineer might come into the “big city” and county seat of Markleeville, population 200, on a drunken spree, but murder was practically unknown in Alpine County.
The body of the young woman was first put down as a traffic accident. But Deputy Brakensiek knew this section of Highway 88 like the back of his hand, and it soon became evident to him that this was no traffic accident. He scrambled down the snowy embankment and found the victim fully clothed in a dark coat and blue jeans. He inspected her body and discovered she possessed a checkbook, audiotapes, and wallet with cash still inside. The checkbook and wallet revealed that she was a twenty-two-year-old woman from Pleasanton, California, named Vanessa Lei Samson. Beside her lay a long length of black rope.
James Daveggio’s and Michelle Michaud’s luck had held for months in eluding the authorities. But now, they were in the land of chance where luck often rides on the flip of a card or the roll of the dice. The motorist had discovered her body after a week of sunny weather. The next day it snowed, obliterating all forms on the ground beneath a cover of white.
Once Deputy Everett Brakensiek relayed his information to the Alpine County Sheriff’s Office, a phone call was placed to Police Chief Bill Eastman in Pleasanton that Vanessa Samson’s body had been found. At 5:30 P.M. a policeman and chaplain arrived at the Samson household with the sad news that their daughter had been found, but she was not alive.
Everything was coming full circle very quickly. A man named David Valentine came forward with a bit of interesting news to the Pleasanton Police Department at about the same time that the chaplain was visiting the Samsons. He had bought a house on Page Court in Pleasanton near Kern Court, not long before Vanessa Samson took her fateful walk on December 2. Valentine and a co-worker, David Elola, were up on the roof of the house replacing shingles on that foggy, cold morning. Just about 7:50 A.M. they heard a scream from the street below on Singletree Way. As David Valentine remembered, “I heard a large, I mean super-loud, female’s voice. It was most definitely a scream. I thought something desperate happened. But Dave had a better view and then he said, ‘Hey, nothing happened. Nothing. Just calm down. It’s probably a mom just getting her daughter into the car.’ ”
Unfortunately, David Elola had seen Michelle Michaud through the windshield of the van and had assumed that she was Vanessa Samson’s mother. Vanessa was not a large girl and looked about high school age from a distance. Besides, not many people connect a woman driver with a kidnapping.
David Elola recounted, “I focused on the van that was slowly pulling away. And as it proceeded to go left, I focused in on the driver ’cause that’s the first thing I wanted to find out, who was driving. I saw a female and she had long brown-black hair. She was looking forward. I could see just her profile.”
The whole scene seemed to verify his initial thoughts that it was just some suburban mom getting her recalcitrant daughter to go to school and maybe they had some kind of argument. It wouldn’t be the first time a teenage daughter screamed at her mom. Besides, the way the van slowly pulled away allayed his last bit of suspicion.
But David Valentine wasn’t so sure, and the scream kept bugging him. As he said later, “I kept having a weird feeling in my stomach. I went back to the house two days later, to see how the roof turned out, and I don’t know exactly what time it was, but I did see police officers passing out flyers, and that’s when my heart completely dropped. So we notified the police officers immediately. And it happened so quickly that, you know, we talked about it, but then he [the police officer] said, ‘If you have any questions, please page me.’ So I went to bed that night and started thinking; I remembered looking at the license plate and the first number was definitely a three. And I paged him [the officer] and he called me at my parents’ house. He said, ‘Why are you calling?’ And I said, I remember things and I did look at the license plate, and I know the first number is a three. And he said, ‘Thank you very much,’ and he started quizzing me, saying what color is the van, and I said, ‘You know, I know it’s a forest-green-color minivan.’ ”
Good luck was deserting James Daveggio and Michelle Michaud now like rats off a sinking ship. Vanessa Samson’s body not only was found in the snow near where they had been arrested, but now there was a reliable witness who could put Michelle Michaud’s minivan at the scene of the abduction at the time that it had happened.
The autopsy of Vanessa Samson’s body came on December 5 in Auburn, Placer County, California, at the request of Alpine County. Alpine was a very small county and didn’t have the facilities for such a major crime case. The autopsy was performed by Dr. Curtis Rollins, who had a degree in Anatomic Pathology with a subspecialty in forensic pathology, which concerned the determination of cause mechanism and manner of death in suspicious, sudden and violent deaths. He had a large audience that morning, including Deputy Everett Brakensiek and Officer Tom Nagel of Alpine County, Detective Desiree Carrington and Sergeant Bob McDonald of Placer County and two of their evidence technicians. Also there was a criminalist from the Department of Justice and FBI Agent Jeffrey Reed.
Following prescribed procedures, Dr. Rollins carefully opened the body bag and documented each piece of clothing as he took it off Vanessa Samson’s body. He noted that her Calvin Klein jeans were unzipped and contained no belt. He also thoroughly searched for any trace evidence on her clothing. Then he carefully looked at her body for any external injuries. As far as that was concerned, it soon became obvious that she had a large bruise mark around her throat.
Dr. Rollins wrote:
“Cause of Death—mechanical asphyxia, due to a ligature strangulation. Mechanical asphyxia is essentially lack of oxygen, and mechanical lack of oxygen due to ligature strangulation which means that a ligature was placed around this person’s neck and pulled tight enough to either cut off the air flow and all blood flow to her cerebral circulation or brain, resulting in death.
“In any asphyxial death there’s several findings that you discover. Some of the classic findings of dying of asphyxia are the point above the ligature you get what’s called cyanosis, which means basically that the blood can’t get out because you’ve occluded venous flow, so it turns purple. You get cyanosis.
“Once the cyanosis stays there for awhile you get tardu spots or petechiae, which are darker spots within the blue. Sort of like pinpoint areas. You also get on your eyelids and on the sclera of your eye, petechial hemorrages which means, little busted vessels. The eyes protrude a little, so you get exophthalmos.
“[Vanessa Samson] had a furrow mark on her neck. That’s just an area where the ligature was pulled tight enough and for long enough that it left a permanent sort of trench in the skin. It measured about a fourth of an inch wide. It was about ten and a fourth inches long. And it’s an important thing about that ligature mark on her neck that it’s horizontally oriented, which is not sloping upwards, which means she wasn’t suspended. [Consistent with hanging, as in a suicide.]
“Over her left buttock region there was a cluster of individual bruises. On her right buttocks there’s an area also of similar appearing purple or violaceous bruising.”
Later when shown photographs of the curling irons, Dr. Rollins said, “The curling irons would be included in the group of objects that could have caused that injury.”
When asked later by a prosecutor, “Assuming a curling iron was examined and determined to have fecal matter and blood that was Miss Samson’s blood, would that be consistent with an item that was inserted into her rectal area?”
Dr. Rollins’s answer was succinct. “Yes” was all he said.
Officer Chris Phelps of the Pleasanton Police Department was also there that day to obtain fingerprints from the dead woman. Because her fingers were no longer very manageable due to rigor mortis, he had to use a device known as a “spoon.” A fingerprint card was attached to the spoon, and by rolling it over her stiff fingers and palm, he was able to pick up her prints. These fingerprints were very important indeed. They would be found on some items that came from Michelle Michaud’s van.
The news of arrested suspects in the Vanessa Samson case and the Juanita Rodriguez case hit the television airwaves in the Bay Area, Sacramento, and Reno in time for the early-morning broadcasts on December 5, 1997. One of the most interested viewers was Michelle Michaud in the television room of the Douglas County Jail. She looked up at the screen and the image of her own photograph there sent her into a state of shock and panic. Up until this moment she believed the authorities only knew about the abduction and rape of Juanita Rodriguez. That was bad enough. But it was now crystal clear that they had also found the body of Vanessa Samson. Michaud knew that a conviction for the Juanita Rodriguez crime meant prison time. The murder of Vanessa Samson could bring the death penalty for her killers.
At this critical moment she decided to cut her losses. Witchy woman Michelle Michaud was about to start severing her ties with James Daveggio, one by one. What she would do next would have drastic repercussions not only for him, but for herself as well. Whether she misjudged, or panicked, or thought of what she was going to do as a well-conceived plan, only she knows for sure. But it would ultimately backfire on her as well as on Daveggio.
After the news report she called her father in Sacramento and told him the news about her was true. He was so stunned he didn’t know what to think. He knew Michelle had problems, but nothing like this. One thing gave him scant comfort, she swore she hadn’t killed anybody. About noon on the same day, a cellmate of Michaud’s named Theresa Agorastos alerted the sheriff that Michaud had something to tell them about a murder in Alpine County, California.
Agorastos brought Michaud into the presence of Deputy Sheriff Doug Conrad. Both women were crying, but for very different reasons. Michaud of course for being caught, but Agorastos was crying because of what Michaud had just told her. She later told reporter David Holbrook, “I’d never heard anything like it. I was crying my eyes out. I told the deputies to get her the hell out of my cell. My God, the things they did to that poor woman! It was sickening.”
Michaud finally spoke to the deputy and said, “I saw the newscast [about the discovery of Vanessa Samson’s body]. I told Theresa I was scared. I was in trouble and I didn’t know what to do. Theresa brought me up to the gate to see you.”
Michaud said she had some information about Vanessa Samson’s murder.
The Douglas County sergeant on duty placed her in an isolation cell and phoned Detective Kibbe in Pleasanton, who rang up FBI Special Agent Chris Campion in South Lake Tahoe. Detective Kibbe told Campion that Michelle Michaud wanted to talk about the Samson murder. Would Campion interview her? He didn’t have to ask twice. Agent Campion was at the Douglas County Jail before 2:00 P.M., and along with him came Detective Tim Minister of the Douglas County Sheriff’s Department.
They sat down with Michaud in an interrogation room and Agent Campion turned on a tape recorder. He said, “Michelle, we just started talking [indicating the tape recorder was turned on] and I just want to ask you to make sure that I’m clear that you want to talk to us, to me and Detective Minister here, about something that’s obviously bothering you. You’re obviously emotional right now and it’s something that you need to get off your chest. Is that true?”
Michelle [crying]: “Yes. I have some information about the young lady who was killed a couple of days ago.”
Agent Campion went over her rights again and she signed a Miranda form. Then he and Detective Minister questioned her for several hours and not only did she give information about the Vanessa Samson kidnapping and murder, but she talked about the Juanita Rodriguez abduction and rape as well. She also talked about the trip up to Oregon with her daughter. She admitted that Daveggio had molested her daughter, but she denied having any hand in it.
At one point she told Agent Campion, “He’s [Daveggio] been reading these books, and I have these books on serial killers.... He had a thing about the Charlene and Gerald Gallego book.”
As far as the murder of Vanessa Samson went, she was still hedging her bets and not admitting to full involvement. She said, “Was she gone before? [Meaning was Vanessa already dead when she pulled on her half of the rope.] I’m not sure. No movement. Not sure.”
Then Campion wanted to know if Michaud was involved with the Jaycee Lee Dugard kidnapping. She said, “No! I swear to God!”
Her testimony took up seven audiotapes.
The next day, December 6, Placer County detective Desiree Carrington was brought in and Michelle Michaud talked further about the Juanita Rodriguez case. This time it took up four audiotapes.
All the stress and terrible emotional strain was finally catching up with Michaud. On the way back from the session with Detective Carrington, she collapsed in her cell. She was rushed to a nearby hospital and placed in intensive care. When Agent Campion visited her there the next day, Michaud told him she had collapsed because of an imbalance in hormones caused by a recent hysterectomy. She said that Daveggio hadn’t allowed her to take her hormone medication. But the nurse had another explanation. She told Michaud that people coming off a heavy dose of methamphetamines will often react in a similar manner.
Whatever the cause of her collapse, Michaud’s hospital visit was short. By the next day, December 8, she was back in the Douglas County Jail giving more taped testimony. Once again she was asked about the murder of Vanessa Samson. Even though she once again tried to distance herself from that killing, she did admit that James Daveggio had placed her hands on the rope tied around Vanessa’s neck and made her pull in tandem with him. Then, according to Michaud, he muttered, “Together, forever.” This time six audiotapes were filled.
Michelle Michaud and James Daveggio were separated by more than just distance now. She was not subscribing to Benjamin Franklin’s loosely translated adage “Hang together or hang separately.” She didn’t intend to hang at all. She would let Daveggio do it on his own. And as time went by, she would give the prosecutors the rope to hang him with.
But time would tell if her testimony was a clever attempt to put most of the blame on him while sparing herself or if indeed it was a tremendous loss of nerve on her part. One thing was for sure—Michelle Lyn Michaud was handing over on a silver platter evidence that might have taken months to uncover, or may have never seen the light of day at all. In her rush to put the blame on Daveggio, she forgot one thing. Juries are unpredictable things, often unwilling to convict on circumstantial and trace evidence alone. But with the testimony of an eyewitness, especially one involved in the crimes, they could destroy not only the recipient of the message, but the messenger as well.