DUBLIN — In gripping and heartwrenching testimony, the households of three East Bay murder victims — together with a 9-year-old lady kidnapped and killed — described their ultimate recollections of their family members from the witness stand and ended a three-decade wait to confront the person accused of murdering them.
One witness, the perfect pal of the 9-year-old Hayward lady, stared into the eyes of accused Bay Space serial killer David Emery Misch. “They remind me of the kidnapper’s eyes,” she testified.
On the finish of the two-month preliminary listening to in January for Misch, an Alameda County choose discovered that there was sufficient proof to advance the case to the subsequent stage, giving the inexperienced gentle for prosecutors to proceed to trial. No trial date has but been set, and Misch — already serving life for murdering a lady in 1989 — has no motive to rush issues alongside, aside from his expressed disgust with the meals at Santa Rita Jail.
Misch is charged with three counts of homicide. Two associated to the Feb. 2, 1986, killings of greatest mates Michelle Xavier, 18, and Jennifer Duey, 20, whose nude our bodies had been present in a distant space off Mill Creek Highway in Fremont, a grisly scene that steered a sexual motive and that some kind of battle had occurred simply earlier than Duey was fatally shot and Xavier was stabbed to dying.
The third homicide cost pertains to an incident two-and-a-half-years later, when a 9-year-old lady named Michaela Garecht was kidnapped in callous vogue by a person who baited her by transferring her scooter as she purchased sweet at a Hayward comfort retailer, then grabbed her when she went to retrieve it.
However whereas ordering Misch to face trial, Decide Paul Delucchi dropped a bombshell and stated he believed that when it got here to the killings of Xavier and Duey, he doubted that Misch acted alone. Delucchi honed in on a specific suspect — a former police officer — and stated he bought “chills up and down my backbone” when a retired Fremont investigator recounted his interview with the suspect.
The previous officer labored in Fremont and Union Metropolis as a reserve within the late Nineteen Seventies, earlier than temporary stints as a lawman in Seaside and Modesto, state data present. His brother was courting a relative of Duey’s.
“I feel he was as much as his eyeballs on this factor, I actually do,” Delucchi stated, referring to the second suspect. He added, “(Xavier and Duey) wouldn’t have gone up there with David Misch. They didn’t know David Misch from Adam. … They'd go up there with any individual they acknowledged and belief.”
In 1989, Misch was arrested and charged with utilizing a 12-inch knife to fatally stab 36-year-old Margaret Ball. He was in the end convicted of homicide and sentenced to life. It wasn’t till 2018 that Misch was charged in Xavier and Duey’s killings and, two years later, prosecutors charged him with murdering Michaela. Till not too long ago, he confronted particular circumstances allegations that made him eligible for all times with out parole, however newly elected District Lawyer Pamela Worth, who ran on a platform opposing dying or life-without-parole sentences, dismissed them.
The preliminary listening to was akin to an unearthing of a homicide thriller time capsule, and it raised nearly as many questions because it answered. Dozens of witnesses had been referred to as to the stand, most of whom had been requested to recall decades-old recollections of homicide investigations, their ultimate interactions with the victims, or the heart-wrenching strategy of studying their family members had been killed.
“Michelle was turning into my confidant and my greatest pal,” her mom, Christine Xavier, stated on a witness stand, earlier than describing how she realized her daughter had been killed. “I simply bear in mind screaming, and neighbors got here strolling in, simply strolling in the home, and so I’m form of clean after that.”
Forensic proof hyperlinks Misch to each crimes, prosecutors say. Regardless of the litany of witnesses, Misch’s arrest nearly totally boils all the way down to this: DNA proof from beneath Duey’s fingernails was matched to him by a margin within the quintillions. And partial hand and fingerprints from Michaela’s scooter — whereas initially regarded as unusable proof — had been decided by a technician to have come from Misch as properly.
“(Duey) was not docile or somebody who would succumb to being sexually assaulted and not using a struggle,” Deputy District Lawyer Colleen McMahon, who dealt with the preliminary listening to, argued in court docket. McMahon stated the proof indicated Duey fought off her attacker and was making a run for it when she was shot from behind, however that she ended up ultimately fixing her personal homicide by combating again.
A heinous abduction, then nothing
Michaela lived on Seneca Road in Hayward, a residential space filled with households with youngsters. Someday, she went throughout the road and knocked on the door of a household that had simply moved into the world, explaining that she observed a woman her age lived there and was questioning in the event that they might be mates.
It labored. The 2 turned inseparable, and on Nov. 19, 1988, they determined they had been going to be twins for the day. They coordinated their outfits and once they bought hungry, determined to trip to the Rainbow Market on scooters. The shop was little greater than a block away, however they nonetheless requested for permission earlier than heading down.
On the retailer, Michaela wished to get probably the most bang for his or her $5 invoice, her pal recalled on the witness stand 34 years later. They left with Mountain Dew, Laffy Taffy and beef jerky, however shortly observed one among their scooters — Michaela’s — was lacking. They quickly discovered it within the parking zone. When Michaela’s pal heard a scream, she turned and watched in horror as her greatest pal was dragged, kicking and screaming, right into a gold or tan-colored sedan.
On the finish of her daylong testimony, she talked about trying into Misch’s eyes as he sat a couple of toes away from her within the courtroom.
“The depth of the eyes, and the form of them, they struck me as memorable to that day,” she stated. “They remind me of the kidnapper’s eyes.”
Regardless of a widespread search, eyewitnesses, and nationwide media consideration over a few years, Michaela was by no means seen or heard from once more. Misch was arrested on unrelated prices simply days after her abduction, which has led authorities to theorize she was murdered someday in that time-frame.
Two greatest mates with vivid futures
Duey had “fallen in love with accounting,” her mom stated on the witness stand. Xavier bought a superb job at Nordstrom and hoped to be a purchaser for the division retailer sooner or later. The 2 met in highschool and have become so shut they’d repeatedly go on double dates and attend one another’s household gatherings. They did each of these issues the night time they had been killed, first to San Ramon for a grandparent’s birthday celebration, then again to Alameda County the place they rendezvoused with the boys they had been courting.
However the foursome couldn’t agree on the place to go subsequent, so the fellows went bar hopping and Duey and Xavier — who wished to order a pizza and hire a film — determined to do their very own factor. Precisely how they ended up on Mill Creek Highway is unclear.
Of all individuals, it was Mo Sabraw, a longtime Alameda County choose, who noticed the younger girls’s our bodies whereas driving together with his spouse on Mill Creek Highway. His widow, now in her 90s, recalled in court docket testimony that day and the way different passers-by started stopping alongside the street too. When police arrived on the scene, they found each victims’ garments had been folded on a barbed wire fence.
Misch’s attorneys have attacked the forensic proof. In Duey and Xavier’s case, they argued it didn’t present something past the suggestion that Duey and Misch had some kind of interplay someday earlier than her dying.
“We are able to’t even say that he was really current when these killings occurred. Assuming that he was, we will’t say what if something he did,” protection lawyer Paul Feuerwerker argued.
Misch’s different lawyer, Ernie Castillo, argued in opposition to the Michaela homicide cost. His case was a lot easier: that there’s no proof Michaela is definitely useless, and that the fingerprint evaluation was contradictory and “on the verge of being unethical.”
Delucchi stated he had a tough time believing Michaela, as a prepubescent lady, merely began a brand new life for herself after her violent abduction.
“To assume that a 9-year-old would in some way volitionally determined to do what? Simply disappear? To imagine some new identification and by no means contact (her household) once more?” Delucchi stated. “That’s a conclusion that this court docket is solely unprepared to make.”
On Friday, Misch pleaded not responsible to the costs and waived time for a speedy trial. He's subsequent due in court docket on Might 19 the place Delucchi will hear a movement from protection attorneys to sever the Fremont case from the Hayward case.