Couples Who Kill

by Carol Anne Davis

  Darlene’s second husband found a job with a supermarket chain and the family moved frequently, living in four different parts of San Francisco in the next two years. Darlene contributed to the family by working nights in a biker bar. She was much more aggressive than her second husband, who just wanted a quiet life. When the marriage finally broke down, he would file for divorce citing ‘extreme cruelty.’

  By now James had started school but he didn’t enjoy reading and wasn’t particularly bright. He found lessons a chore and often ignored his homework. The teachers noted that he didn’t try very hard – but his blonde hair and big blue eyes meant he was easy to forgive.

  Troubled

  James remained a deeply unhappy boy. One of his sisters would later tell author Carlton Smith that she’d heard her mother ‘criticise Jimmy viciously, telling him to his face that he was worthless; but let anyone else say anything bad about Jimmy and she’d be all over them.’ As a result, she always made excuses for him when he got into trouble at school.

  One of the neighbours, an incest survivor who understood abuse patterns, would later become convinced that James was traumatised, either by abuse or by a parent withdrawing their love at a critical stage. He’d eventually show all four of the symptoms – not knowing right from wrong, hurting others, abusing alcohol and/or drugs and self-mutilation. James’s sister noted that the more he was punished, the wilder he became. This is a common response to corporal punishment as violence never calms anyone down.

  When he was eleven, the family moved again, this time to Union City, so James had another new school to cope with and new friends to make. At thirteen he led an eleven-year-old girl into the bushes and had sex with her – from this time on he was rarely without a sexual partner. By fourteen he had a twelve-year-old girlfriend, Cassie Riley, but within a fortnight the couple had broken up.

  Six months later, Cassie – now thirteen – was found murdered. She’d been grabbed around the throat from behind, punched, stripped to the waist and held under water until she drowned. James was questioned by the police as were the rest of his class, but he said that he now felt indifferent towards Cassie, and he didn’t particularly stand out as most of his classmates also claimed to have dated the unfortunate girl.

  James’s teenage years were as chaotic as his earlier ones. He dated constantly, getting at least one of his girlfriends pregnant. Darlene took the teenager to the clinic to get an abortion. On another occasion he stole a car from a girlfriend’s mum to go joyriding.

  His mother decided he might fare better living with his dad and managed to track the man down to an address in Pacifica. Sixteen-year-old James was sent to live there. His father got him an after-school job in a burger restaurant but he stole from his employer. Fired from that job, he began stealing from his father’s house. He was sent back home but not to Union City, as whilst he was away the family had relocated to Pleasanton.

  Strangely, James continued to idolise his dad yet the man wasn’t an ideal role model – he’d marry at least four times and father eight children, abandoning several of them.

  By age seventeen the troubled youth was playing truant along with some of the tougher guys in town. He began to steal cigarettes and the local police noted that he was easily led. He also increasingly loathed authority, and was suspended from school for calling one of the administrators ‘a baldheaded mother-fucker.’ He now upped the ante and was the driver in an armed robbery.

  This time even his mother couldn’t save him and he was sent to a juvenile detention centre in Almeda County. Afterwards he attended a continuation school in a middle class area where he felt increasingly inadequate.

  A first marriage

  When the going gets tough, the weak tend to procreate. At nineteen, Daveggio got his girlfriend pregnant and married her, becoming a father seven months after the wedding. But, too young to settle, he kept going out with his drinking buddies at night, cheating again and again on his teenage bride. He also faced charges of burglary and receiving stolen goods, charges which would later be dropped for lack of evidence.

  A year later, whilst officially separated, the Daveggios had a second daughter. Now his mother stepped in and persuaded him to join the army, hoping that military training would straighten him out. The result was a disaster. Twenty-one-year-old James was naturally lazy and hated authority. Whilst at boot camp he deliberately stared at the sun until he temporarily blinded himself, knowing that this would obtain him a medical discharge. His army career had lasted three months.

  A second marriage

  The following year, now age twenty-two, James married for the second time. The couple had lived with his mother and stepfather whilst they were dating, and continued to do so after the wedding. James’s new wife noted that he expected her to do everything for him – and that his mother encouraged his chauvinistic approach.

  Eventually the couple got an apartment of their own, and James made money from burglary. He remained troubled and violent, starting numerous fights in bars in which he lost teeth and had his nose broken. He frequently added to his tattoos: many heavily tattooed men are psychopaths. He certainly fitted the profile, lying, abusing others and being unable to maintain a relationship.

  Sexual assault

  In the summer of 1984, whilst still married to his second wife, he followed a drunken woman out of a bar, brandished a pistol at her and demanded that she fellate him. The terrified woman complied then fled to the police but the alcohol had made her so hazy that she couldn’t give them a coherent picture of events, and eventually charges against Daveggio were dropped.

  Another child

  By the following year – July 1985 – Daveggio’s second wife was pregnant. This put him in a foul mood as he couldn’t afford the children he already had.

  Determined to make someone else feel as bad as he did, James Daveggio and a friend, John Huffstetler, picked up a woman in a bar and offered her a lift home. Once in the vehicle, the men attacked her and Daveggio made her fellate him. Afterwards Huffstetler fired his pistol, the bullet just missing the traumatised woman’s ear. Thankfully a nearby police car heard the shot and pulled over the abduction vehicle. Both men were arrested, and Daveggio was bailed the following day. It was also the date that he turned twenty-five.

  Surprisingly, he was only sentenced to one year in prison for this offence – and within four months was on a work release programme and going to church. His time would perhaps have been better spent pursuing educational opportunities as his application for early release was almost illiterate, with ‘welfare’ spelt ‘welfear’ and ‘allowed’ spelt ‘aloud’.

  His second wife now divorced him, so by the time he left jail in July 1986, he was young, free and single again.

  A third marriage

  That year – his twenty-sixth – he briefly studied mechanics at college and met his third wife there. But, as usual, he didn’t stay the course and was unemployed by the time he moved to Sacramento with her and her eight-year-old daughter from a previous relationship. The couple married in April 1988 and within four months were expecting a baby. James blotted out this latest problem with drink and drugs. His third wife produced a son in 1989, but it would be 1993 before he had the sense to get a vasectomy.

  Biker gang

  In the Nineties he joined a biker gang – The Devil’s Horsemen – and was in his element. For the first time he had a complete ‘family’, albeit a somewhat anti-social one. He went out biking with them and hung out at their HQ, drinking and playing cards. He also cheated on his third wife during this period with a woman who beat him up as often as he beat her up. She soon found that he could only sustain an erection if she allowed him to take a sadistic role.

  By 1995 Daveggio’s world was increasingly unstable. He was caught driving whilst drunk and continued to cheat on the woman he lived with. He dated increasingly young girls as they were more biddable and less likely to leave the relationship when he slapped them around. He began to experiment with methamphe
tamine which can lead to violent behaviour, something to which he was already prone.

  By now James Daveggio was in such a state that he couldn’t even hold down bar-tending jobs. His girlfriend threw him out but he immediately found another to give him accommodation. It was only a matter of time before he alienated her, as he had with numerous girlfriends and three long-suffering wives.

  But in October 1996, whilst at a friend’s house, he met someone as potentially dangerous as he was. She was a vivacious redhead, a month short of her thirty-eighth birthday, who would soon help him torture, rape and kill.

  Michelle Lyn Michaud

  Michelle was born on 7th November 1958 in Casablanca, Morocco, the first child of an army father whose work ensured that the family constantly moved around. By the time that Michelle was four, the Michauds had relocated to the USA. There, the couple had two sons, the growing family still moving from military base to military base.

  It must have been painful for Michelle to make friends only to lose them again, so after a while she withdrew into herself. She had a high IQ and was a good scholar but clearly unhappy – photographs show her as a pretty girl with long red hair, big eyes and a tensely smiling mouth. She would later allege that her father put her and her mother down constantly, that no matter how hard she tried she couldn’t please him. She would also later allege that she was sexually molested by an unnamed offender at age ten.

  It’s possible that by her teens Michelle was already a fledgling psychopath. She lied constantly and overdramatised every situation. Acquaintances noticed that she always had to be the centre of attention. One of her sister’s boyfriends would later suggest that she had multiple personalities.

  When Michelle was fourteen the Michauds settled in Sacramento and had a fourth child, another daughter. Curtailed by her authoritarian father, Michelle remained unhappy. A visitor at the house saw him criticise her for putting two slices of meat on a sandwich rather than one. The teenager would misbehave in order to get her father’s attention, then would become very apologetic and submissive, a stance that she would repeat with various men throughout her adult life.

  By fifteen the situation had become so volatile that she was made a ward of court. She would later allege that these teenage years included sexual abuse by a close male relative. He was subsequently mentioned on the internet, but as the abuse hasn’t been substantiated, he will not be named here.

  Michelle also alleged that this relative put her to work as a prostitute at age sixteen – but she later said that she daren’t tell him of her prostitution, so her statements are inconsistent. Everyone who knew her would allege that she often tried to shock in order to get attention. But on other occasions she showed that she was desperate to be liked and, to achieve this, would tell people what they wanted to hear.

  At seventeen she dropped out of high school and did casual work for a time, but by nineteen she was clearly considering sexual services as a career, writing a fantasy entitled My Escapades In A Massage Parlour which includes the words ‘It sounds exciting and very dangerous, going into a room with a stranger, having sex and getting paid for it.’

  By twenty she turned her massage parlour fantasies into reality, working legally from a Nevada whorehouse. Well-spoken and with a great figure, she was popular with punters who wanted a high class callgirl – and her popularity increased when she was happy to talk dirty and offer a wide range of sexual services. She prospered at the ranch for several years.

  At twenty-three she gave birth to a son and moved in with the baby’s father. They also invited another woman to live with them in a ménage à trois. Two years later Michelle had a daughter by the same man. But the relationship became increasingly violent and she left.

  For the next few years she alternately lived off welfare and prostituted herself. Meanwhile her son was suffering from increasingly acute emotional problems so she paid for him to have specialist education. Her daughter, like many female children from dysfunctional families, withdrew into herself. Michelle continued to find work in massage parlours, though the sex work may have led to gynaecological problems, as at age thirty-one she had to have a hysterectomy.

  Arrest for prostitution

  In January 1991 she was offering erotic relief in a massage parlour as usual when a man came in and asked for sex. In a sane world, she’d have complied and been paid and both parties would have gotten what they wanted. But the man turned out to be an undercover police officer who arrested her as soon as she slipped a condom on him. She was fined, told to keep clear of areas frequented by prostitutes and put on probation for three years. By now she was beginning to look increasingly hard-faced and hostile and had begun to beat up her boyfriends and punters. She rented a house close to her parents but mainly visited their house when her father was out.

  The dutiful daughter

  Michelle now lived an increasingly schizoid life. By day she went clothes shopping with her mother and at night she prostituted herself to a succession of sugar daddies. One septuagenarian punter paid her rent and another took her on expensive vacations. They also paid for classy furniture, jewellery and restaurant meals. But she didn’t appreciate their generosity and had wild mood-swings, taking hormone medication to help keep her symptoms under control. Battling to survive in this difficult environment, her daughter remained insular and her son became so distraught that she had to get him a psychiatrist.

  Michelle became involved in religion, going to the local Catholic church and helping run the Altar Society. She regularly had the priest to her house and even got a religious team to bless the building. They said that her daughter’s Wizard Of Oz witch statue and her son’s Darth Vader poster were satanic, so she obediently got rid of them.

  She turned to lesbianism for sexual kicks, telling anyone who would listen that she didn’t like men, that they were merely a source of income. But then she met up with James Daveggio and changed her mind…

  A lethal combination

  Michelle and James went to bed together the first night they met and she noticed that he couldn’t sustain his erection. This happened on subsequent encounters but the couple simply used more alcohol and drugs to fill in the time. She took him to meet her family and he demanded that they respect her. Michelle fell in love for the first time in many years.

  Separately, Daveggio and Michaud were bad news – a psychopathic sex offender and a man-beating prostitute, both of whom were unpredictable heavy drinkers. But together they were lethal. Daveggio wanted to dominate women and Michaud now helped him in this by going to bed with him and one of her prostitute friends. Within weeks they’d upped the ante by persuading non-prostitute women to sleep with them. This became the norm as Daveggio couldn’t maintain an erection unless there were two women in the bed.

  But, outside bed, Michelle Michaud could be desperately conventional, making him say grace before they ate their meals and telling him that he was the ‘man of the house.’ They had some of James’s children to stay and Michelle started calling James ‘Daddy’. She sent him off to work with a packed lunch every day. For a few months she was able to maintain her fantasy of this man as the head of her new family, but he soon became hypercritical and increasingly abusive towards her. The police became concerned that Daveggio, a registered sex offender, was living with young children and he decided to move back in with a former girlfriend.

  This relationship lasted for a few weeks and then he beat up the girlfriend incredibly badly and she threw him out. He promptly phoned Michelle to come and get him. He said that he’d start a new life with her and she was moved to tears.

  Superstition

  Religion hadn’t made her happy so she now turned to another belief system, witchcraft, and began to form ‘spells’. But the spells didn’t work either and she took to using methamphetamines to feel better about herself. In the short term, they blotted out the pointlessness of her existence. But in the long term she needed more and more meth, and alternated between depression and paranoia.
r />   The meth quickly stole her looks, making her lose several stone in weight so that her face looked gaunt and clapped out. One of her sugar daddies left and the other only gave her money when she contacted him, whereas before he was always showering her with gifts. She had to go on welfare and sell her furniture, eventually being evicted for non-payment of rent.

  James Daveggio now moved back in with one of his previous girlfriends but Michelle had to sleep in her van or over at her sister’s house, where she left her children. This arrangement lasted for a month, then James moved into Michelle’s van. Unemployed and increasingly unemployable, they spent their time getting high and feeling increasingly enraged at a world they believed had failed them. As such, they identified with serial killing couple Charlene & Gerald Gallego. Charlene had lured young girls to her van, then both she and Gerald had sexually assaulted them.

  Outlawed by the outlaws

  In the same time period, someone stole The Devil’s Horsemen’s safe. They blamed the meth-addicted James, though he was adamant that he didn’t do it. In part settlement, they took his beloved bike.

  The media often describes such killers as loners, and the word has become a negative one. But, as Anneli Rufus points out in her landmark book Party Of One, serial killers do not wish to be alone. She notes that James Daveggio was popular in school and during his twenties, and only became a violent criminal when his biker gang rejected him because of his excessive drug use. Rufus notes that ‘No one wanted him around except the ex-prostitute who was his accomplice.’ He’d take her with him on the final ride of his life…