DUBLIN — Just before their horrifying deaths on a cold, desolate country road at night, two best friends from Fremont secretly gave police a blueprint to identifying their killer.
Jennifer Duey, 20, fought back, grabbing and scratching her attacker. Michelle Xavier, 18, secretly scribbled down a seemingly random assortment of letters and numbers onto her hand, characters that meant nothing to police for decades until they ran the DMV registration data of their lead suspect.
Those two acts, nearly 40 years ago, led to the beginning of a trial on Monday for 63-year-old David Emery Misch. Already serving a life sentence for murdering a woman in 1989, Misch has been accused of three new homicides in two separate cases: the killings of Xavier and Duey on an empty stretch of Mill Creek Road near Fremont in 1986, and the 1988 abduction and slaying of 9-year-old Michaela Garecht of Hayward.
All four killings appeared to have a sexual motive, according to prosecutors, who say Misch admitted having a deep resentment for women, channeled through his own bitterness over what he called his mother’s failure to stop his dad from abusing him. If that sounds like twisted logic, it was apparently good enough for Misch to justify raping a woman as a teen, holding a mother hostage in her own home and later assaulting a stranger in Oakland, all crimes that prosecutors will now use to demonstrate that the attack on Xavier and Duey was part of a pattern.
The three pending murder counts have been split into two trials. Regardless of this trial’s outcome, Misch will still have to attend to the Michaela murder charge next.
Raised in Fremont, Xavier and Duey were best friends who did everything together, and the last day of their lives was no exception. After work, they met up to attend a family gathering, then planned to rent a movie and share a pizza after their boyfriends took a rain check on a double date.
Before leaving the family gathering, the two snapped a picture together. It would soon be plastered all over town as part of a campaign to raise awareness of a $35,000 reward for information leading to their killer’s identity.
“Little did they know as they stood here smiling that Michelle’s car would be taken up a horrifying mile-and-a-half drive to where they were murdered,” Deputy District Attorney Allyson Donovan told jurors in her opening statement Monday morning.
While prosecutors are confident that Misch is the killer, they can’t prove how the women ended up with him that night. Xavier’s white Pontiac Firebird was recovered with bloody seats in a nearby shopping center, so it has been theorized that Misch used his gun to abduct them. How he crossed paths with them is unknown, but they were on their way to a pizza parlor and video rental store when they disappeared.
“He met them and murdered them,” Donovan told jurors, after explaining there was no apparent connection between Misch and either woman.
The first witness, Jennifer Duey’s mother, was called to recount her last interaction with her daughter and describe how her family learned of the killings. A retired teacher and school principal, Diane Duey said that Jennifer was one of six siblings with a “very outgoing, strong personality” who worked at a makeup counter at the local mall.
“When I would visit her at work, she would yell, ‘Hey everyone, that’s my mom!” Diane Duey recounted in one of the few moments of levity on Monday. She was also shown a picture of herself with her children in the mid 80s, and her voice began to break.
“That was the last day we were ever all together,” she said.
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At the trial’s start, Donovan spoke for three hours, painstakingly going through the investigation in detail, from drone shots of the crime scene as it looks today, to the number of barbed wire strands on the fence, to Misch’s tendency to wear a large knife on his waistband in the late 1980s.
During her statement, Donovan frequently displayed photos of the victims’ bodies as they were discovered by passers-by in 1986. It is a scene of revolting mayhem that caused gasps and tears from attendees and jurors every time the images were projected onto a giant roll-down screen.
The young women were found, nude and bloody, along Mill Creek Road in the hills behind Fremont, their clothes and undergarments hanging from trees and a barbed wire fence. Xavier’s throat had been slashed ear to ear, while Duey was shot three times, apparently while attempting a desperate escape.
It wouldn’t be until the early 2000s that police were able to use skin cells under Duey’s fingernails to identify Misch as a suspect, prosecutors say. Then they realized that Misch owned a motorcycle in the mid-80s, which came within one digit of the numbers and letters Xavier had scrawled onto her hand with ballpoint pen that night. Suddenly, a nearly 20-year cold case all made sense.
Still, there was a 15-year gap between the DNA match and the charges against Misch, and prosecutors have never publicly explained why. This was seized on by Misch’s lawyer, Ernie Castillo, who told the jury that it proved not even the police believed the match was significant.
“(Misch) is an easy target. He’s something they’re trying to use to close a case that has been a mystery for decades,” Castillo said, later adding the DNA match was, “Nothing more than a reflection of their social lives rather than the identity of the killer.”
Castillo’s opening statement came with a pledge: Misch will take the stand during trial, weather the “tough questions” about his predatorial behavior of the 1980s and explain everything. The short version, Castillo said, is that Misch was regularly selling Duey cocaine back in 1986, and that the DNA transfer happened as they shared a cigarette during a drug deal earlier in the evening.
“Then they went their separate ways and he never saw them again,” Castillo said.
But Misch told a very different story to police in the early 2000s, first claiming he didn’t know or recognize the women, then saying that he actually witnessed Duey being kidnapped and rushed into save her. He told police he viewed himself as a protector of girls and sex workers in the area and the DNA transfer must have occurred when he was acting as their knight in shining armor.
Castillo said that story was just as bogus as it sounds, and that Misch was simply “toying” with police at the time. But Donovan seized on one interesting detail: Misch’s story centered in the same shopping center the girls were last seen driving to that night, a location which had not been provided to him by police.
The prosecution is expected to call dozens of witnesses over the trial, which is expected to span several weeks. But she said the two most powerful witnesses will be the ones she doesn’t call: Duey and Xavier, who solved their own murders with their actions that night, she said.
“Michelle and Jennifer left clues behind on their hands so that investigators could prove their horrifying murders were on David Misch’s hands,” Donovan said. She later added, “Their voices will be heard.”