Couples Who Kill
Page 18
Sexual assault and rape
Daveggio and Michaud now embarked on a four month crime spree during which they would assault seventeen girls and women, torture-killing one of them. Many were girls that they already knew, who felt safe with Michelle around.
One girl was a teenage friend of Michelle’s daughter so she had no cause to be alarmed when Michelle showed up and took her to another friend’s house. There the middle-aged woman shared drugs with the teenager, making her feel grown up. But after the drug-taking, Michelle produced a gun and took the girl into the bathroom where she made her strip and ordered the teenager to fondle her – Michelle’s – breasts. The girl said no, whereupon Michaud dragged her into the bedroom and watched as James Daveggio raped her. Whilst the underage girl was being raped, Michelle pleasured herself.
Later she brandished the gun at the child again and warned that she’d kill her if she ever told anyone. The girl complied, scared that she’d get into trouble with her family for taking drugs.
Coerced sex
Later that week they picked up a pregnant hitchhiker and James Daveggio began to make increasingly heavy passes at her. She said no several times but eventually gave in and the three of them had sex. They gave her their phone number and dropped her off in Sacramento then drove on, looking for another victim to humiliate.
Rape
On 25th September 1997 they reached Reno in their increasingly untidy van. Michelle booked them into a hotel paid for by her sugar daddy’s credit card, and the couple took voluminous amounts of drugs and watched pay-TV. When the credit card reached its limit, Michelle turned a few tricks, money which James quickly lost through gambling.
The vacation was becoming dull – but rather than look inwards and identify what was lacking in their lives, Daveggio & Michaud now went cruising for another victim. They spotted a lovely young woman, Juanita Rodriguez, waiting for her boyfriend, and Michaud parked the van and Daveggio jumped out and forced her into the back.
There, as Michelle drove around, he forced the girl to fellate him, ejaculating on her face in an obvious bid to humiliate her. He also fingered her anus and made her do the same to him. Desperate to survive, Juanita lied and told the couple that she was the mother of a newborn baby. At this stage, Michelle became very interested and asked her various questions about the child. James then suggested shooting her dead – but Michelle saved her life, saying that it was too dark for the victim to identify him. She warned Juanita not to look back at the van when she was released.
The torture van
They let her go, but Daveggio kept fantasising about how much better it could have been if the victim was tied down rather than simply held down. He now purchased rope and a ceiling mirror and Michelle let him turn her van into the type of mobile torture chamber that Charlene Gallego had owned.
James Daveggio removed the backseats, only leaving the long bench which ran along the very back of the vehicle. They then put pillows on the floor. The couple also put together a torture kit of handcuffs, gags, a whip and customised curling irons. Still retaining her religious beliefs, Michelle left her rosary hanging from the van’s rearview mirror. From now on they would copy their heroes, the Gallegos, with Michelle luring young women into a quiet location after which the couple pounced and sexually assaulted them.
Mother-Daughter incest
The couple returned to Sacramento – and when the Juanita Rodriguez assault was featured on television, Michelle proudly told her daughter and friend ‘we did that.’ The following month they again set off in the van. Wanting to stay close to her mum, Michelle’s thirteen-year-old daughter begged to come with them. It was a decision she would regret as James Daveggio soon began to touch her intimately. When she asked her mother to make him stop, Michelle said to let him, that the sex would do her good.
The following week they took the same daughter and her twelve-year-old friend (the one whom the couple had previously molested) on a journey to Oregon where they sexually assaulted both underage girls. Michelle told her daughter that she’d often fantasised about having sex with her. Afterwards the couple gave the girls drugs to dull the pain.
Shortly afterwards Michelle’s daughter went into foster care and her son went to live with her parents. She would never parent either of them again.
Anal and oral abuse
Michelle now lured another of her friends to a hotel room where James Daveggio jumped on her. Michelle handcuffed and gagged the screaming woman, then James sodomised her. They left the woman sobbing and bleeding from the mouth as one of James’s punches had cut her lip.
Another abuse victim
In early November they asked one of James’s daughter’s friends to use drugs with them. She willingly got into the back of the van whereupon Michelle battered her from behind and James punched her. The couple handcuffed the teenager and Michelle jumped in the front seat and started the van.
James Daveggio then made the girl fellate him – but he lost his erection when she said that the act reminded her of being sexually abused by her stepfather. Daveggio wanted to see himself as the virile young lover, not a deviant father figure. This is ironic as Michelle had tried to force him into the mould of a loving dad. Michelle now parked the vehicle and performed oral sex on the victim whilst James masturbated to orgasm.
Fearing for her life, the girl promised that if they freed her she would tell the police that she was abducted by a teenage gang. They let her go and she initially kept her word.
The net closes in
The couple now moved in with Michelle’s sister and enjoyed a few days of normality – but their father had heard that James Daveggio was a sex offender and he demanded the couple leave. They drove to a hotel in Lake Tahoe where Michelle passed several bad cheques and was arrested for fraud. She spent the night of 9th November 1997 in jail.
Just over a week later, a teenage girl told her father that Michelle and James had sexually assaulted her. He promptly called the police. They interviewed the girl and also interviewed Michelle’s daughter. Both tearfully admitted being raped and terrorised with a gun. They also told the officers that Michelle had said she and her boyfriend had raped Juanita Rodriguez in Reno. A quick check on the couples backgrounds showed that James was a registered sex offender and Michelle was a sex worker with a criminal record. The authorities had her van registration number – but they had no idea where she and Daveggio were.
Further incest
Meanwhile James took one of his daughters and Michelle Michaud to a hotel, whereupon James went to take a shower and Michelle said ‘Your dad is going to have sex with you.’ James Daveggio then performed sex on his teenage daughter for forty-five minutes, after which Michelle joined in by fellating Daveggio. The desperately unhappy child would later tell police that her father had first sexually assaulted her when she was only ten years old.
That night she wrote in her journal ‘I have never felt so unprotected in my life’ and admitted that she wanted to kill her father and her stepfather, who had beaten her. Like so many children who are casually conceived, she was completely failed by the adults in her life.
The couple dropped off the traumatised girl then went to a sex shop and bought a ball gag. It was early evening on 1st December and they’d alienated everyone they’d ever known and had no worthwhile plans for the future. This time they were going to torture and kill.
A torture murder
On the morning of 2nd December 1997 they were driving along when they spotted beautiful twenty-two-year-old Vanessa Lei Samson walking to work in Pleasanton. Michelle parked the van and James grabbed the girl and forced her into the back. Two men working on a roof heard Vanessa scream – but when one of them glimpsed Michelle behind the wheel he decided that it was just a mother forcing her teenage daughter to go to school. Because it’s legal for parents to act roughly towards their children, he didn’t react. The man would later feel terrible when he realised that he’d overheard an abduction which led to a horrible death.
Vanessa Samson was everything that Daveggio and Michaud were not. She had a degree in business studies and a good job in insurance. She was popular at her work, with her family and at her church.
Whilst Vanessa was captive in the van, Michelle parked outside a welfare office and collected her cheque. If she’d really been an unwilling accomplice of James Daveggio, she now had ample opportunity to alert the authorities. But she waited patiently, collected her money and left. She was also alone with the trussed-up and crying victim when Daveggio went to the restroom, but she didn’t let the young woman leave.
Michelle Michaud now drove north whilst James Daveggio repeatedly raped Vanessa Samson. He also sodomised her with Michelle’s curling irons – they had cut off the cord when adding it to their torture kit.
Eventually the couple booked into a cheap motel, parking the van next to their room door so that no one could see them carrying the bound and gagged twenty-two-year-old. They untied her and Daveggio went out for burgers but Vanessa only managed one bite before she vomited.
When she was trussed up on the bed again, Michaud joined in the torture – her fingerprints would be found on a second pair of customised curling irons, showing that one sadist pressed one side of the tongs against the girl’s buttocks whilst the other inserted the second tong rectally. By afternoon, Michaud would later note, the victim was ‘half dead.’
They now smuggled her back into the van and drove for a while, then got into the back where Daveggio looped a rope around Vanessa’s neck. Michelle then took one end of the rope and James took the other as they’d agreed to kill in tandem. They pulled until their victim stopped breathing, then drove on and dumped her body in an isolated snowbank.
Captured
That morning, Michaud made a court appearance for passing bad cheques so law enforcement knew she was back in the area. That afternoon they arrested her and her boyfriend at their motel. A search of the room revealed crack cocaine and a loaded pistol, as well as paraphernalia which showed the couple were dealing in drugs.
The van yielded further evidence of the couple’s crimes. Rape victim Juanita Rodriguez’s hairs were found, as were curling irons stained with blood. There was also a saliva-soaked ball gag and recreational drugs.
Autopsy
Outwardly, Michelle Michaud was co-operative, agreeing that the police could search her hotel room and van. She answered all of their questions but remained exceedingly vague. At this stage the authorities only knew about the various incestuous assaults and the rape of Juanita Rodriguez, and she hoped that they wouldn’t link her to Vanessa Samson who was still officially a missing person, though everyone suspected she was dead.
But two days later Vanessa’s frozen corpse was found – and meantime the police had forensically tested the curling irons and found traces of Vanessa’s blood and faeces. The subsequent autopsy showed bruising on the girl’s buttocks which matched the pattern of the curling irons. Michelle’s fingerprints were found on duct tape wrapped around the handle of the curling irons, showing that she was the one who’d turned them into a torture implement.
Confession
Michelle Michaud now decided to co-operate fully with the authorities, albeit seriously playing down her part in the rapes and murder. She said that Daveggio had molested her daughter, that he was the one who’d become fascinated by the Gallegos. Even more disingenuously, he’d put her hand on the rope which was tied around Vanessa Samson’s neck and had told her to pull. She’d done so because the girl wasn’t moving and she thought she was already dead. She said that she prayed for the girl every day and found it difficult to sleep.
On 15th December 1997 she pleaded not guilty to the Juanita Rodriguez rape. For the next eleven months she remained in jail, and by the end of that period she’d decided that she hated James Daveggio. By now she was aware that Juanita Rodriguez’s hairs had been found in her van and that the FBI were suggesting she’d played as big a part as Daveggio in the murder so she decided to plead guilty to aiding and abetting the abduction of the girl.
Chameleons
By the time she entered her plea in court, Michelle Michaud looked nothing like the gaunt-faced drug addict who had tortured Vanessa Samson. Now her hair was short and curly and she wore glasses. Denied her beloved crystal meth, she had put on weight and resembled a suburban housewife, looking like court-taken photographs of British serial killer Rose West. Daveggio would also completely change his appearance for his trial, cutting his long hair and donning glasses so that he resembled a professor rather than the barely literate outlaw he actually was.
Fighting for her life
Michelle had helped snuff out Vanessa Sampson’s life for a quick thrill – but she held her own life in higher regard and was determined to save it. As such, she suggested to the authorities that she should infiltrate the prostitution ring she used to work for and pass on their secrets. When this was turned down she told them about witnessing the murder of a bail bondsman by a biker – she could infiltrate the biker gang if the authorities set her free. When they refused to make a deal, she decided to become a prosecution witness at James Daveggio’s trial – the man she had promised to love forever had now become her sworn enemy.
Sentencing
Her ex-boyfriend’s trial for Juanita Rodriguez’s abduction and rape lasted for seven days – but it took the jury only two hours of deliberation to find him guilty. He was subsequently sentenced to twenty-four years.
On 12th August 1999 Michelle Michaud was sentenced to twelve years in prison for the Rodriguez crime, namely for aiding in the kidnap and rape of the Reno college student. She wept during her pre-sentence statement and said she wished she’d done more to stop her boyfriend abducting and terrorising the girl. ‘There is no way to make you understand, because I still don’t understand…I don’t know how it got where it got,’ she said inarticulately. Later she added ‘I’m so, so sorry for not being stronger, for not being able to stop things he has done.’
But realists pointed out that she’d had her own income from a sugar daddy during the time of the rape, and was not financially dependent on Daveggio. And she had become very aggressive when other women showed an interest in him. Moreover, James Daveggio’s defence produced witnesses who said that Michelle Michaud was a strong woman who gave as good as she got.
She remained religious, telling a reporter that she especially enjoyed reading Romans from the Bible, which apparently concentrates on love.
Murder trial
In April 2002 the couple were moved to Almeda County and tried together for Vanessa Samson’s horrific torture murder. A doctor for Michelle’s defence said that the abuse from her boyfriends and clients had left her with post-traumatic stress disorder, with a propensity for subservience. The prosecution countered that she often shared power with Daveggio and at other times was in charge.
Daveggio’s lawyers argued that the couple had killed Vanessa Samson for thrills, not because she was a witness to her own sexual assault. Reaching new levels of legal madness, they suggested that the crime therefore lacked the ‘special circumstances’ that would qualify for punishment by execution. Daveggio’s representatives later said ‘you have to look at the defendant as a person…look at childhood, family illnesses.’ And it was true that Daveggio had had a difficult childhood – but he’d chosen to pass on his pain to someone else.
The murder verdict
The jury, consisting of seven men and five women, spent two days of deliberations, then returned to find the couple guilty of kidnap, rape by an instrument and first degree murder. Daveggio reddened at the verdict and Michaud’s hand flew to her mouth. The couple were subsequently sentenced to death for the horrific crime.
Other victims?
Carlton Smith, who wrote a book, Hunting Evil, about
the case, has become convinced that James Daveggio murdered his former girlfriend Cassie Riley in 1974 in Union City. Another man called Marvin Mutch was convicted of the murder and has been in San Quentin ever since. Carlton Smith has informed the Union City police and the Alameda County district attorney of his findings, but they have refused to act.
Robert Scott, who wrote a later book, Rope Burns, about Daveggio and Michaud notes that Daveggio’s friend Michael Ihde spent four years in jail for assaulting and intending to murder a woman. Both Daveggio and Ihde were age twenty at the time. Ihde later went to prison for another murder and the authorities suspect that both men could be linked to other violent deaths.
Update
James Daveggio is currently on San Quentin’s Death Row. In January 2003 he began advertising on the internet for penpals, writing ‘I have never been out of the USA. Nor will I ever will be now. It may not be like coming to your country, but it will be as close as I’ll get. I’ll be looking forward to hearing from you.’ Doubtless there will be females – convinced that all he needs to straighten him out is the love of a good woman – reaching for their writing pads and pens.
Michelle Michaud is on Death Row in California, one of only fourteen women there. The appeals process moves so slowly that she may remain there for the rest of her natural life.