Chapter 32
End of the Line
Two days after her first appearance in the Alameda County Court, Michelle Michaud spoke to Scott Marshall, a reporter for the Contra Costa Times. It was the first interview she had granted since being arrested at the Lakeside Inn nearly two years before. Escorted into the visitation room by two Santa Rita prison deputies, she slowly sat down on a hard plastic chair across from the reporter. She clutched a telephone and wearily stared at him on the other side of a thick Plexiglas window. The voices of nearby prisoners and visitors bounced around raucously and erratically on the concrete and cinder-block walls of the stark room, but Michaud spoke softly through a stream of tears to the reporter.
“I don’t know how many people will believe it,” she said, “about the real Michelle. The real culprit is James Daveggio. Are you going to meet him?” she asked anxiously. “You’ll learn a lot if you meet him.”
Then she spoke of her own conditions at the Santa Rita Prison, where she was kept isolated from the nearly 4,000 other prisoners.
“The clothes they gave me are awful. They’re smelly hand-me-downs. It’s awful in here.”
She seemed depressed and tired, speaking in a soft monotone to the reporter. She only began to perk up when she announced, “I spend a lot of time reading the Bible. I’ve been reading Romans. I like it.”
Then she mentioned that Romans referred frequently to love.
But it wasn’t long before her mind drifted back to more depressing subjects.
“I want a lawyer. I don’t trust anyone. There’s a lot of deceiving going on,” she said angrily.
Then she blurted out, “I’m not a monster!”
But if she didn’t perceive herself as a monster, many others did. She was about to be reunited with one, though she didn’t know it.
On the morning of October 28, 1999, at the Alameda County Superior Courthouse, James Daveggio was brought into Department 11 for his arraignment on the Vanessa Samson kidnapping and murder charges. His beard was almost white now and the multiple tattoos on his arms were clearly visible, protruding from the sleeves of his pink jail uniform. He wore a pair of dark-framed glasses and a bland, almost bored expression, which was captured by a gallery filled with television and print photographers and newspaper reporters.
They weren’t the only interested parties there—the Samson family sat in the courtroom as well. When Daveggio was escorted into the court by a sheriff’s deputy, Vanessa’s brother, Vincent, stood up and glared at the prisoner.
The commotion of the photographers and television crews hit a fever pitch as one more person entered the side door into Department 11—Michelle Michaud. She blinked in absolute dismay and fear when she suddenly realized who was standing next to her, separated by only one burly court bailiff, her former lover James Daveggio. All too graphically, his presence reminded her that this was the man she had followed down a road of kidnapping and rape, to eventually be accused of murder. The same man she had turned on and helped to convict in Reno. A fact he was not likely to forget.
Michaud quickly lowered her head and only once or twice glanced at Daveggio. He remained totally impassive and didn’t look at her at all. But other eyes were staring at them in the crowded courtroom, especially those of the Samson family. Vanessa’s mother turned toward Contra Costa Times reporter David Holbrook and said, “There are the people who killed my daughter. But I don’t feel anything. I’m not angry.”
Vincent Samson was less subdued. He muttered after looking at the pair, “They’re pathetic!”
At last James Daveggio and Michelle Michaud were reunited, but not in the manner they might have hoped for. Vincent Samson was right; they did look pathetic. Daveggio appeared old and careworn, with his scraggily beard. His bright blue eyes, which so many women had found attractive, were now bloodshot and puffy.
On seeing his photo in the newspaper, ex-wife Donetta Rhodes commented, “He looked awful! Did you see those puffy eyes? That’s what struck me the most. Those puffy, bloodshot eyes.”
If anything, Michelle Michaud looked even more pathetic. With her unkempt hair and faded yellow prison jumper, she was the picture of dejection. She constantly bit her lower lip, as if on the verge of tears. No one who had known the exuberant, foulmouthed prostitute at Mustang Ranch or Bobby Joe’s would have recognized the mousy-looking, teary-eyed, middle-aged woman who now stood in Judge Dean Beaupre’s courtroom.
James Daveggio listened impassively as ADA Jim Anderson stated that he would indeed seek the death penalty against this pair. Daveggio seemed to be miles away from the menacing words and clicks of journalists’ cameras. But not so Michelle Michaud. Her body visibly shuddered as the impact of every word struck home, as if the words themselves were like tiny lethal injections being jabbed into her shackled and firmly restrained arm.
After more than twenty years, James Daveggio was entering Santa Rita, the prison facility where his old schoolmate Michael Ihde had lived as a child. If by some means he could have climbed into a guard tower, he would have easily seen their old school and Wells Middle School nearby, where his own daughters and Kellie Poppleton had attended classes. Not far away was a series of ditches where Ilene Misheloff disappeared one wintry day in 1989. If his gaze had traveled even farther to another ditch, he could have picked out the spot where Tina Faelz bled to death—not far from his old home on Clovewood Drive. Near that ditch where freeways 580 and 680 intersected was the very hotel where he and Michelle had made their plans to “go hunting.”
There in the distance was the exact spot where he and Michelle Michaud had driven her van on the morning of December 2, 1997, and emerged from the mist on the corner of Singletree and Kern Court.
Even though all these facts came to light after their arrests, a fog of suspicion and innuendo still surrounded them and Michael Ihde. Law enforcement agencies still pondered if Michael Ihde had been responsible for the rape and murder of Kellie Poppleton. Other police departments wondered how much Michelle Michaud was connected with the Jaycee Lee Dugard kidnapping.
But of these three, it was James Daveggio who was the main target of law enforcement’s speculation and continuing interest. His possible involvement in unsolved cases read like a Who’s Who of missing Bay Area girls: Amber Swartz-Garcia, Michaela Garecht, Tina Faelz and Ilene Misheloff. Even by the time of Daveggio’s arraignment at the Alameda County Courthouse, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies were still looking at his possible connections with these and other crimes.
In the winter of a new millenium, there was more than just these unanswered questions and speculations. James Daveggio, Michelle Michaud and Michael Ihde were now behind bars for very tangible and proven crimes. Michael Ihde had raped and nearly killed Gloria Hagelwood of Jackson, California. He had raped and murdered Lisa Ann Monzo as well as Ellen Parker of Vancouver, Washington. Michelle Michaud had helped James Daveggio kidnap Juanita Rodriguez and transport her across state lines as he raped her. He had also raped Janet Stokes in Tracy. There were arrest warrants out on him in four different counties concerning all the raped and molested teenage girls.
Now as the winter fogs once again returned to Pleasanton in the year 2000, the grand jury charges against James Daveggio and Michelle Michaud were in binders that covered hundreds of pages with graphic and damning evidence about the two rapes of young Pleasanton women in November 1997, and the kidnap, rape and murder of Vanessa Samson. About the only ones denying those charges were James Daveggio, Michelle Michaud, their lawyers and James Daveggio’s mother.
True to the end, Daveggio’s mother, Darlene, still believed in him and told a San Francisco Chronicle reporter, “I told him I love him. I was crying a lot. He told me, ‘Mom, I swear to you, I did not kill anyone.’ ”
But even a sliver of doubt crept into her voice as she said, “If there’s even the remote possibility that my son could have done this to someone’s child, I am so sorry. If I could take it back and give them my life instead, I would.”
As to Michaud’s and Daveggio’s denials, veteran Alameda Sheriff’s Department lieutenant Dave Hoig had an interesting comment. He had seen his share of serial killers over the years and said, “It is fairly common that a serial rapist or killer will not admit to a crime that law enforcement agencies are pretty sure they’ve committed but can’t yet prove. The suspect will deny it even when they are already sitting on death row for other murders. It’s pretty obvious that a person can’t be put to death more than once, but still the killer won’t admit to unproven crimes. But there’s one thing they have to remember—there are no statute of limitations on murder. Things change over time; new officers come on board and look at old crimes. Technology and forensic science become better. And the case with Michael Ihde is a perfect example. Years after he murdered Lisa Ann Monzo, someone talked and it led eventually to his conviction. Criminals like him and James Daveggio and Michelle Michaud can’t feel too safe just because they’ve gotten away with something so far. The one thing they have to remember is that time is on the side of law enforcement, and they never stop looking at old cases, especially when it involves a missing child or a murder.”
The fact of the matter was that by the year 2000, James Daveggio and Michelle Michaud still faced more years of trials and courtroom procedures. But no matter the outcome—guilty, acquittal or plea bargain—they weren’t going anywhere for a long, long time. The gray walls of the Santa Rita Prison that James Daveggio had looked at from afar when he lived in Pleasanton, in the shadow of Mount Diablo, the Devil’s Mountain, were now their home.