David Misch, a man who's been imprisoned for murder since 1990, has yet to be tried for three homicides that took place in the Bay Area in 1986 and 1988. But one of those trials just kicked off on Monday in Dublin.
Misch, now 63, was charged six years ago in the cold-case killings of 18-year-old Michelle Xavier and 20-year-old Jennifer Duey. Both women were found naked and brutally murdered on a desolate stretch of Mill Creek Road near Fremont on February 2, 1986, Duey by gunshots, and Xavier having had her throat slit.
As Bay Area News Group reports, during opening statements Monday, Alameda County Deputy District Attorney Allyson Donovan showed jurors a photo of the two women taken at a family gathering the night they were killed, seen below. "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," Donovan said.
Misch also stands accused of the kidnapping and murder, two years later, of nine-year-old Hayward girl Michaela Garecht. It's a case that sent chills across the Bay Area, and for older Millennials growing up here at the time, it was likely cause for their parents to drill more fear and kidnapping safety precautions into their heads when it came to strangers.
Misch was charged in Garecht's death in late 2020, and hearings have been ongoing in the county court on whether to try her case separately from the murders of Xavier and Duey. The court decided to do that, and Misch will face a second trial after this one concludes.
Xavier and Duey, who were best friends, were canceled on by their boyfriends that February night for a planned double date. Instead they decided to go to rent a movie and share a pizza, and they were at apparently at a Fremont shopping center when they encountered Misch.
Investigators have never been able to pinpoint when and how the two women encountered Misch. A judge last year suggested that he believed a theory that a second suspect could be involved — namely a former Fremont and Union City cop who, at the time, was dating one of Duey's relatives — saying that the women would never have gone to that remote location unless they were with someone they trusted.
But it remains unclear how, or under what duress, they might have been brought there. Their bodies were found stripped, and their undergarments and clothes were strung on a barbed wire fence — images of the scene were reportedly shown to jurors on Monday, eliciting gasps.
And the two women left behind evidence of their own. DNA from Misch's skin cells was recovered from underneath Duey's fingernails, after an apparent struggle. And Xavier had scribbled some numbers and letters in pen on her hand, which investigators later were able to link to a motorcycle license plate that was registered to Misch at the time.
As Bay Area News Group previously reported, while his defense attorney has tried to characterize the DNA exchange as something that happened while Misch was dealing cocaine to and sharing a cigarette with Duey, Misch may have implicated himself in a police interview in 2017. Misch reportedly told investigators that he had witnessed the women being abducted while he was pumping gas that night, and had swooped in to try to help, which is how the skin got under his nails.
Investigators then tried to call him out on the fact that he had offered up a shopping center location where the women were last seen, which was not information that they had given to him. Days later, Misch reportedly attempted suicide in his jail cell, and left behind a note for his brother saying, "Sorry it had to be this way. Yet it protects you and mom from what circus would’ve come up. All the questioning and embarrassment, none of you deserve," and adding, "They’d never let me out now."
The trial is expected to last for several weeks.
Misch has been serving a life sentence, with the possibility of parole, for the 1989 slaying of 36-year-old Margaret Ball. Misch killed Ball, whom he knew through doing odd jobs at her home in Oakland, amid a methamphetamine-fueled robbery, as he confessed to his father — who testified for the prosecution. He was previously convicted as a juvenile, in 1977, for raping a housecleaner at knifepoint — a crime for which he only served two years. And he was then later convicted of an assault and attempted rape of a foreign exchange student in Oakland in 1982, for which he served four years, getting released shortly before the murders of Xavier and Duey.
