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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
As Michelle drove off slowly to portray the illusion of normality, her boyfriend tied up and gagged his shocked victim. He undressed himself, preparing to transfer all of his hatred to this innocent girl.
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.