OAKLAND — In a new court filing, prosecutors have revealed the secrets of accused East Bay serial killer David Emery Misch — his prior attacks on women, his explanation for why his DNA got on one of the three people he’s charged with killing and his failed suicide attempt after homicide investigators confronted him.
And a new theory by Alameda County prosecutors has also surfaced, linking an earlier tragedy to the unsolved disappearance and presumed homicide of 9-year-old Michaela Garecht. They believe her accused killer, Misch, was visiting the gravestone of his infant son when he happened to notice Michaela and her friend.
Nine months before Michaela’s Nov. 19, 1988 abduction, Misch’s 3-month-old boy, David Michael Misch, died and was buried at the Chapel of the Chimes Cemetery in Hayward, across the street from the Rainbow Market where Michaela was taken. His first birthday would have happened in November 1988.
An old, dirty, hubcap-less Oldsmobile Cutlass was seen by one witness driving erratically in the cemetery that day. Prosecutors now believe that car — which matches the description of the kidnapper’s, given by Michaela’s best friend — was Misch’s Oldsmobile, and that it was pulling out of the cemetery just as the girls arrived at the market.
To most it would have been a heartwarming sight: two 9-year-old best friends, deliberately dressed the same so they could be “twins” for the day, riding red and blue scooters to buy candy.
According to prosecutors and new court records, Misch saw opportunity — two vulnerable victims — and sprung into action. His thumbprint and palm print were later lifted from the scooter, authorities allege.
“It is hard to conceive of the human capable of sitting in a car outside a supermarket, looking at one scooter on a wall, having cleverly moved the other to lure an innocent child to the driver’s side of your car door, knowing that your intent is to grab her and then find gratification through her pain, suffering, fear and death,” Alameda County Deputy District Attorneys Allyson Donovan and Mark Melton wrote in a legal motion. “What kind of person would have the motive or the intent to do that?”
A 91-page court filing authored by Donovan and Melton attempts to answer that question by laying out Misch’s past, some of it never before released publicly.
In the filing, prosecutors argued to Judge Paul Delucchi that the three murder charges Misch faces are similar enough in motive and modus operandi to condense the two cases into one trial. Misch’s lawyers argued that prosecutors were using legal “gamesmanship” and rhetoric and speculation in place of real evidence.
Delucchi sided with the defense, meaning that on March 4, Misch will go to trial in the Feb. 2, 1986, killings of best friends Michelle Xavier, 18, and Jennifer Duey, 20 in Fremont. Only after that will he stand trial on charges of kidnapping and murdering Michaela, at a yet-to-be-determined date.
Misch’s lawyers argued there isn’t enough evidence to determine motive in either case, and that there’s strong evidence Duey and Xavier were killed by two people, not one. Prosecutors viewed both incidents on a string of Misch’s other sexually motivated crimes.
At age 16, in 1977, Misch was convicted of using a neighbor’s key to illegally enter the home and sexually assault a housecleaner at knife point. He began to strangle her but she kicked him the stomach and convinced him to spare her life, prosecutors said. Out on parole two years later, Misch allegedly entered another neighbor’s home wearing nothing but a jacket and held a mom and her two kids at knifepoint.
Then, in 1982, he attacked an 18-year-old Swiss exchange student as she picked flowers in the Oakland Hills, knocking her unconscious and dragging her to a secluded area, until nearby residents heard the commotion and scared him off, prosecutors said.
Misch barely stayed out of jail long enough to have time to abduct Michaela. He was released from a parole hold just five days before the kidnapping. Three days after it, Misch was arrested in Hayward in possession of wire cutters, an ax, a large pocketknife and a flashlight, prosecutors said.
In 1990, Misch got a life sentence — with a chance for parole after 18 years — for the Dec. 7, 1989 murder of 36-year-old Margaret Ball, who was beaten and stabbed to death inside her home. Misch’s dubious explanation was that they were engaged in consensual sex when Misch slapped her for not wanting to continue and she pulled a knife on him first. Ball’s boyfriend and family members told police she was terrified of Misch and that he’d threatened her before.
Duey and Xavier’s killings bore similarities to the abduction of Michaela. Those who knew them described them as “inseparable” best friends, on their way to a video rental store, when they simply disappeared on the night of Feb. 1, 1986. Their bodies were discovered hours later off Mill Creek Road in Fremont.
The case went unsolved until a DNA test linked Misch to skin cells found underneath Duey’s fingernails in 2003, prosecutors said. Despite this, prosecutors waited another 15 years to charge Misch, a delay that has never been publicly explained.
But Fremont police went to Folsom State Prison in 2003 to interview Misch about the match, new court filings show. Misch allegedly talked about liking “big knives” and how he attacked the exchange student because she was walking with an “arrogant attitude.” He also discussed his son’s death, and his own upbringing, in which he said he suffered at the hands of an abusive father. Misch blamed his mother for failing to stop the abuse, prosecutors said.
He at first denied ever seeing Xavier or Duey. When confronted about the DNA, he repeated stunned denials of wrongdoing, then offered an explanation that painted himself as a hero, according to court papers.
Misch claimed that he was filling up his car with gas in Hayward when he noticed a woman being dragged into a vehicle by two men. Because he saw himself as a “protector of all the girls” who cared for sex workers in the area, he ran up to help. He said Duey must have accidentally scratched him as he was attempting to rescue her, prosecutors allege.
A police sound recorder should have captured all of this, but detectives realized after leaving the interview room that it had turned off midway through. When they attempted to talk to him weeks later, he recanted his story, but repeated it in a 2017 letter to his mom, authorities said.
Police came back to interview Misch on Sept. 8, 2017. Four days later, he used a homemade noose to attempt suicide in his prison cell, and authored a suicide note to his brother, according to court filings.
“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,” Misch allegedly wrote, later adding, “They’d never let me out now.”
