Crime Junkie - CAPTURED: Bay Area Predator

Episode Date: January 18, 2021

When Michaela Garecht was abducted in 1988, no one was prepared for the heartbreaking investigation to drag on for over 30 years. But just when the case seems to be ice-cold forever, police make a stunning announcement.  For current Fan Club membership options and policies, please visit https://crimejunkieapp.com/library/. Source materials for this episode cannot be listed here due to character limitations. For a full list of sources, please visit https://crimejunkiepodcast.com/captured-bay-area-predator 

Hi, Crime Junkies. I'm your host, Ashley Flowers. And I'm Brett. And the story I have for you today, you are never going to believe. Because it was actually suggested to us by a friend of the victim's family who reached out and asked us to bring attention to a case that, for decades, do you hear me, decades had gone unsolved. So we did what we do.

We put together the story. We wrote a script, and we were literally about to record. When we get an email telling us that after 32 years, the case had been solved. And when you say about to record, it was like an hour before we were going to record. Yes. So we held off for a couple of weeks, letting the police make their announcement because we wanted to tell you the full story of Makayla Garrett with a brand new ending. On the morning of November 19th, 1988 in Hayward, California, up in the Bay Area,

a young girl named Trina is getting super excited. It is the first day of Thanksgiving break, and she's hoping that she'll get to hang out with her best friend in the whole world, Makayla Joy Garrett. They're both nine years old. They're in fourth grade, and they've been feeling a little more like grown-ups lately because every once in a while, they're allowed to go to the grocery store alone without their parents. And they've only been allowed to do this since the summer, but it's like a big deal.

Yeah. I mean, I remember like what when we were in fourth grade or whatever, being able to like... 1999? Sure, sure. Butterfly hair clips everywhere. But being able to like walk to even like a friend's house or a neighbor's house by yourself is like, oh, we're independent now. Yeah, the independence, it felt amazing.

So Trina calls Makayla after breakfast, hoping that since it's break, it's a nice day. Makayla's mom, Sharon, will let Makayla go with her to the rainbow market, which is on Mission Boulevard. It's less than like a quarter of a mile from Makayla's house. And sure enough, Sharon says yes. Since Makayla lives right around the corner, she comes over with $5 from her mom so they can go buy whatever they want. Oh, that freedom. According to Diana Walsh's piece in the San Francisco Examiner,

they decided to take scooters to the market. So Trina's brother lends his scooter to Makayla while Trina rides hers and the girls head off. They get to the store and they leave their scooters outside while they go in and buy some treats like sodas, candy, beef jerky. I mean, not only vacation breakfast of champions, but I'm pretty sure that's all we ate when we were on tour. I'm pretty sure that's all we ate growing up. We lived off beef jerky. True.

Trina and Makayla head out of the store with their food and they're kind of like laughing and talking, getting caught up and just like hanging out with their best friend on this break. And they're so caught up that they realize they're walking and totally forgot about their scooters. So when they remember, they like go back to get them and Makayla's scooter isn't there right where she left it. There's Trina's, but no Makayla's. Now, neither one of them want to go back and explain to Trina's brother that the scooter Makayla borrowed is missing or stolen. So the girls decide to split up and look for it. Someone must have taken it.

Someone must have moved it. Hopefully it's still around nearby. So Trina goes one way, Makayla goes the other. And shortly after they split up, this is like 10, 15 in the morning at this point. Trina hears something that makes her heart drop. She hears her best friend screaming. Trina looks up and she's frozen with fear as she watches a strange man grab a still screaming Makayla around her waist, toss her in the backseat of a car and speed off down Mission Boulevard heading south towards Union City.

Trina runs back into the rainbow market and tells one of the cashiers what happened. And the cashier calls 911 right away and local law enforcement mobilized to try and find Makayla. Now, luckily for them, the woman who calls 911 for Trina says that she saw the man who grabbed Makayla drive by earlier in the day. And as soon as police arrive at the market, she's able to give them a description. She says the man was white. He was in his 30s with this big mustache. And she said he was driving maybe this like burgundy colored car, but she can't say anything about a make or a model. Now, I mean, that's not a terrible description, right?

I mean, it's definitely a starting point. But as I was researching, I found another description of the suspect dated November 20th, just the day after Makayla's abduction. This description from Walt Gibbs Peace in the San Francisco Examiner says that the suspect is younger, actually between 20 and 28 years old, tall and skinny with pimples on his face and dirty blonde hair. Now, this piece goes on to say that police believe the man has a mustache. But the article mentions that Makayla's mom, Sharon, isn't so sure that that's true. Oh, why not? The article doesn't say.

According to the Mercury News, though, I guess for the first couple of days, police had gone with the first description of the suspect, the one where he's older with the mustache. OK, but I guess I don't even understand how there's that much confusion this early on in this case. Like, which description is right? Well, from what I can tell, police believe that the one that's correct is actually the second one, that younger guy with the blondish hair, pimply face. From what I can tell, they went with the first one from the market clerk until they interview Trina. And somehow through her interview, they realized that the woman from the rainbow market was actually describing the wrong person.

And apparently they found that it couldn't have been that man who kidnapped Makayla. Now, nothing in my research says when exactly this conversation happens or why police wait a couple of days before talking to her. But once they do, they feel like they're really able to nail down that second description, the more accurate description and revise what they've been telling the public. So they say there's no mustache. The man's skin problems go beyond just a few pimples, actually. They say he's got like noticeably bad acne that's been described almost like boils on his face with pock marks and scars. So using this new description from Trina, they put together a composite sketch.

And here I'm going to send this to you. And if you want to kind of give the listeners a little bit of a description. So the sketch has, like you said, younger male, he has kind of a longish face. You can definitely see a few like, like you said, like pimples or pock marks or acne scars. I mean, it's just a pencil drawing and a newspaper from what I can see. So it's hard to determine what's like shading and what's copy, you know, debris and what's actually in the drawing. But he has this kind of long, stringy looking blonde hair. Right.

So if the police's first description of the suspect was wrong, then what about the car? Yes. So the car description is actually wrong, too. It's not burgundy. They say that the car that they really want to be looking for is either like tan or beige or gold, like somewhere in that color family, which is completely different than burgundy. Completely, which again, I don't think people missaw things. I think they're looking at two completely different people in completely different cars. Right. Right.

What they are able to say, though, about the car is that it's an older four door sedan that looks pretty beat up. But again, just like the burgundy car, no one knows what the make or model might be. Despite losing valuable time looking for the wrong suspect and the wrong car, the first couple of days of the investigation aren't a total loss. And by Sunday night, Makayla's family and a small army of volunteers managed to hand out over 50,000 missing person flyers with her picture on them in and around the Bay Area. The FBI joins in on the investigation sometime over the weekend. And together with local law enforcement, they do multiple aerial searches with planes and helicopters looking for any sign of Makayla.

Police and the FBI even spend the next week checking out local mechanic shops and scrap yards all over Hayward, looking for that car. I think maybe somebody like ditched it or again, it was like, old, maybe it broke down. They interview tons of potential witnesses all over Makayla's neighborhood. I mean, we're talking adults, kids, everybody. And law enforcement also questions registered sex offenders nearby, which just as a note, we actually have this new show coming out called Darkerina's where Delia has gone and interviewed people who like work in these really dark spaces. And one of the people she interviewed is someone from the FBI who works on their car team, which is their child abduction rapid deployment team.

So like when they come in, and this is totally unrelated to our story. But I found so interesting is he said that actually, like, yes, we have to go door to door. We have to talk to the registered sex offenders at the box. We have to check. But statistically, he said it's actually hardly ever those people even in case of stranger abductions. Which I, yeah, I mean, to me, those be the first people I would think that you'd be interested in. But yeah, I guess not. So see, what do we know? Learn something new every day.

Exactly. Now, this case gets a ton of attention in the local press, partly because I mean, I think at the time, again, this is 88. This was such a brazen crime, you know, totally. I mean, it's a stranger abduction in a public place in the middle of the morning, total broad daylight. Right. And stranger abductions are super, super rare. Like, I know we've talked about so many because, you know, those tend to be the ones that go unsolved for so long. And people in the true crime space hear about these cases so much that you might think it's more prevalent than it really is. But the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children has a stat from Mikaela's era that says,

out of the 23,899 children reported missing between 1984 and 1989, only 511 of those were actually stranger abductions. Wow. Yeah. So because this case was like almost inconceivable at the time, the media was all over it. And the tip lines that the police have open are flooded with calls about men believed to be like matches for the composite sketch, or, you know, people think someone they know is somehow involved. I mean, literally, there are hundreds of phone calls every single day. And according to Don Martinez's piece in the San Francisco Examiner, within a week, police have over 600 leads to go on. Now, this is something we have talked about before, where like getting so much information becomes a bit of like a double edged sword for police, right?

To the point where they almost are getting overwhelmed. Right. Like you have all this information, but it's so much that it's hard to even begin to sift through it. Yeah. You only have so many people, so many man hours. Like how do you decide which is the legit ones, which are going to take you nowhere? And they try and sort through them. They try to go down the right track, but weeks go by and one by one, the leads keep coming up empty. The searches all end up with nothing. And within a month, Mikaela's case is just beginning to stall.

The investigation eventually loses steam and within a year, Mikaela's trail is totally cold. That is, until another young girl goes missing. Three years after Mikaela vanished on December 28, 1991, in Fairfield, California, this is about an hour north of Hayward. A four-year-old girl named Amanda Campbell gets her dad's permission to go down the street and play with one of her friends. Since her middle name is Nicole, now most of her family just calls her Nikki. And Nikki is this really outspoken, friendly kid who's super cheerful. Now, just like how Mikaela only recently got allowed to go to the grocery store with her friends, Nikki's parents have just started letting her and her big brother Matthew do things like ride their bike around the block.

So as long as they're like together, they can do it. Now, on this particular day, Nikki rides with Matthew for a little while. And then at around 4.30 that afternoon, Nikki leaves home on her bike alone without her brother. But she never makes it to her friend's house like she's supposed to. According to the San Bernardino County Sun, Nikki's bike is found that same evening, near a gate leading to a vacant lot around the corner from her house. But there is no trace anywhere around of Nikki. Pretty much right from the start, the search for Nikki is huge.

Like the FBI is here within two days, but there's nothing for them to go on. No witnesses, no leads, just a missing girl and her abandoned bike. But at some point during the investigation, police get wind that another girl who lives in Nikki's neighborhood has been getting some pretty weird attention lately. Wait, what do you mean? So this other girl isn't named in any of the sources that I read, probably because she's 12 years old. But ABC News reported that her parents had called the police a couple of months before Nikki vanished and said that their daughter had been getting mail from a strange man.

Now, this guy's name is Timothy Bingener. I mean, he's clearly like signing it or they found out who he was. And he's 43 years old and even though he doesn't know the 12-year-old girl or her family, he's been writing her these letters that are like all backwards. And like, and I say backwards, not like they're like weird or strange. Like you literally have to hold them up to a mirror to read them. Oh, like literally written backwards. Literally backwards, yeah.

As police look closer at Timothy, they keep finding more and more inappropriate behavior towards underage girls. He has a job at a sewage treatment plant. They learn and he's been using his position to access confidential address information so that he can send birthday cards all over the Bay Area to girls he's never met. Don't like that. No one likes that. And when police ask him about it, they're like, hey, buddy, like, what's this about? No normal man does this.

And Timothy says that he does it because he thinks these girls are quote unquote lonely. Which how would he know he doesn't even know them? Because he's a creep, like they're not lonely. And just wait. So remember how I told you the community in Hayward really like rallied around the Garrett family after Makayla was abducted? Yeah. Yeah, so one of the people who was part of that rally who like came to their house the very same day back in 1988 was Timothy Bingener. No.

Yes, Makayla's mom Sharon actually wrote about this on her blog Seekers Road. Like she clearly remembers him being there. And she told ABC News that he brought his own map and showed her where he wanted to go look for Makayla. So now with this Timothy Bingener link kind of popping up in both Nikki and Makayla's disappearance, police start to wonder if there's a connection between Timothy and these missing girls. And the more they look into Timothy's past, the more they see this pattern developing. Like a girl goes missing from a town near Interstate 80 in the East Bay.

And then what do you know? Good old Timothy appears inserting himself in the investigation. Now, the earliest record I could find of this goes back to 1978 when 11 year old Tara Kossy vanished. Now, I wasn't able to find exactly what Timothy did in Tara's case beyond being connected to the investigation by police. And nothing in my research says what he did in the next five years. But in 1983, after five year old Angela Buge was kidnapped and found murdered a few days later. Well, what do you know? That's when Timothy's behavior starts to get really out of line.

What do you mean? That same ABC News piece reported that Timothy made frequent visits to Angela's grave. Like enough visits that people are noticing that he's like going there so often. And more than that, he liked to go there in the middle of the night. So how many times do you have to go for someone to notice that you're there a lot in the middle of the night? Yeah, that's not super normal for anyone. Anyone? No. Five years later, in June of 1988, this is five months before Michaela was taken,

a seven year old girl named Amber Swartz Garcia went missing from her front yard in Panol, California. This is about 45 minutes north of Hayward, where Michaela lived. Within three days, wouldn't you know it, Timothy turned up uninvited to talk to Amber's mom, Kim, and told her that he'd been out in the woods looking for her. Because he wanted to be the one to bring her home. I don't like that at all. No, like I love a good Samaritan, but this is feeling wrong. And I'm not sure if at first Kim thought maybe this guy was, again, just being a good Samaritan or whatever.

But when she heard him refer to the search as, quote, looking for a dead body, again, three days after she's missing, like that was it for her. She wanted this guy gone. But he kept trying to stay involved. Like literally, he called her for years after this. Oh my God. Now, a year later, in 1989, he got arrested for harassing a pair of young girls that he had lured into his van. Like, apparently he had drove by in this like big, boxy, blue van kind of thing.

Wait, so that's not the car that Trina saw the day that Michaela was taken, though? No, yeah, so he's got this big, boxy, blue van, and in Michaela's, we're looking for a totally different car. But I mean, I think this is everyone's like literal worst nightmare on wheels, because Timothy covered the walls inside this van with pictures of children. Wait, what? Yeah, and as if this isn't creepy enough, Timothy also reached out to police and the FBI. Like, before Michaela disappeared in 1988, here's what's so strange. He wrote a letter telling law enforcement that he thought the next girl to go missing would be nine years old.

Well, wouldn't you know it? Michaela was nine years old when she was taken. Right. And it gets weirder because in 1991, days before four-year-old Nikki vanished, Timothy sent the FBI a Christmas card with a picture of a little girl holding up one, two, three, four fingers. Which is how old Nikki was when she disappeared, right? I mean, I want to say that this is just a weird coincidence and this guy is just a whack job making wild guesses. But how does it happen twice?

Well, and beyond that, again, to your point, like, okay, you make one guess. Okay, cool. But to get it right twice, you have to, in my mind, like, know the girl's ages. You have to, like, target them. You have to know things. Right. There's, like, an element of almost stalking and planning and, you know, expecting to execute this within even a certain amount of days. Yeah.

And here's the thing, he's not just taunting family or law enforcement. This guy is putting himself square in front of media, too. He starts doing interviews with local papers and the things that he says, like, he reads his poetry to the media, poetry about a job that he says he really loved at a crematorium, where this is, like, tragic. He talks about having to deal with dead infants, and I'm, yeah, I'm not reading you excerpts of the poems, which you're going to find, but it is as terrible as you can imagine. Now, what is strange to me, but I mean, shouldn't be a surprise when you learn everything about this guy, is that instead of trying to use the press to make himself look less suspicious,

he does something so bizarre and so strange that everyone can't help but wonder almost if he's trying to get caught for something. By the early 90s, a journalist named Linda Goldstein got an interview with Timothy, but not under normal circumstances. Timothy insists that if he's going to talk, Linda has to come pick him up at 4.30 in the morning. Which I'm sorry, right there is a hard no from me. Thank you very much. Girl, just wait. So she picks him up at 4.30 in the morning, and he wants to be interviewed at the cemetery, where Angela Buge is buried, and she doesn't. Oh, my God, they drive out there and Timothy, as they're driving, wants to play Linda his favorite song called Jesus, Here's Another Child to Hold. And then when Linda asked Timothy what he thinks happened to the girls after their abduction,

actually here, but I want you to read the direct quote. OK, he says quote, well, you know, one of them was sweet and shy and didn't say a thing, but the other went kicking and screaming. I'm just guessing that that's what they would have said, end quote. Wait, my mind is going a mile a minute, but my first question is they like the missing girls, they I think so. I mean, at first I thought he meant the perp. But when I reread it, I really think he's talking about the girls. Yeah, it sends like chills down my spine.

Now, after this, in a surprise to no one, Timothy is officially named a suspect in Nikki's disappearance in December of 1992, with police pretty heavily insinuating in the media that they think he could be involved in the cases of Angela, Amber and Makayla. In some of these cases, police don't feel that they can rule him either fully in or fully out as a suspect, but his name is definitely on their radar. According to Mareva Brown and Wayne Wilson's reporting for the Sacramento Bee, police search his house after a bloodhound found Nikki's scent in Timothy's car and at Angela's grave. This search operation at Timothy's house is pretty unorthodox. Like the police actually invite the media to be there and they make a point of telling them exactly what they're looking for, which I have never seen done before. But even with the media's help and even with this big show that they're putting on, the search comes up empty. And so without anything to tie back to like the bloodhound evidence, Timothy actually is never charged with anything related to the girls' disappearances

or with anything related to another girl's disappearance that he's sometimes linked to, a 13-year-old Eileen Misholov. So without anything concrete and nobody, Makayla's case once again seems to have hit a roadblock. But little do California police know a new lead is on its way. In late 1992, four years after Makayla was abducted, a prison inmate in Indiana named Roger Haggard comes forward and says that he knows who killed Makayla and that he knows where her body is. I'm sorry, wait, how could the student in Indiana possibly know anything about Makayla? Like, was he out of jail back in 1988? So here's the thing about Roger. He tells the police that he escaped from a work detail and fled out to California in 88.

But according to a piece in the Columbus Herald, he didn't actually make the daring escape that he claimed and said he was actually let out of jail because he'd gotten leave from the court to go to this, like, vocational rehabilitation appointment and then just, like, never went back to jail afterwards until he came back to Indiana in 89 and then he was arrested literally two hours after getting back into the state. Cool, cool, cool. Yeah. So Roger tells police that while he was on the run in 88, he met this guy in Hayward named Slam Davidson, who allegedly kind of resembles that composite sketch that I showed you earlier. Now, they both have substance use issues. They drank, they used crack cocaine together and one night after they'd gotten high together at Slam's trailer,

Roger alleges that Slam showed him Makayla's body. He said that she was wrapped up in a tarp and according to Roger, he saw one arm and part of her face and her chest. Now, he says he doesn't know how she died, but he did see that she looked like she'd been stabbed several times. After showing him Makayla's body, Roger says Slam put her in the trunk of the car and together, they drove out to this field outside of Union City that was covered in gladiolas, like, flowers just everywhere. He says that Slam had already dug a hole for the body that was, like, already there, already ready, but Roger said that he got sick watching him bury Makayla's body and just couldn't watch the rest of it. Now, pretty much right from the start, law enforcement is skeptical and Roger's credibility only gets shakier

once he keeps telling his story and every time, like, inconsistencies are popping up. But Makayla's mom Sharon kind of has a different opinion at the time. Marsha Ginsburg reported for the San Francisco Examiner that Sharon actually wants to give Roger the benefit of the doubt on the odds that, like, maybe, just maybe he has some real answers. Right, kind of like a mother's hope type thing. Yeah, and I wasn't able to find if her opinion, like, plays any role in law enforcement's decision making here, but whatever their logic, they actually take Roger seriously enough to bring him out to California in January of 93 for questioning. At one point, Roger's actually driven out to a field where he claims Slam-Buried Makayla so that he can show police where to dig.

But after eight hours, he then admits that he made the whole story up because he wanted to, and I quote, give her family peace of mind. Well, I'm sorry, he made up the story to help the family even though he knew it was a lie. Sounds legit. It's total BS, yeah. And personally, I get a little piece of mind knowing that Roger got six and a half years added onto his sentence after pulling such a heinous stunt. Is it bad to say thank God? Thank God.

Okay, cool. After this whole mess with Roger and the false lead, law enforcement are once again just left with a bunch of loose ends without any solid information to help them narrow down the investigation. They keep trying to investigate, and by 1994, this is six years now after Makayla first disappeared, police have checked over 15,000 leads. 15,000? Oh my God. Mm-hmm.

The investigations continue through the 90s and into the new millennium without any breakthroughs or progress. In 1997, Timothy Bindenar got $90,000 in a settlement after he sues the Fairfield Police Department for defamation over being named a suspect in Nikki's disappearance. And remember how I told you that the police invited the media members to the search? Yeah. So publicizing it, like heavily backfired on the police, which, hi, maybe why we don't see it today, because Tim's able to argue that the Fairfield Police ruined his reputation by painting him as a pedophile and a child killer. Wait, the police ruined his reputation, even though he was the one giving the press like these awful dead kid poems?

And taking journalists to graves in the middle of the night, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But since he was never arrested or charged with the crimes that he was being accused of, like, he was able to make a case. Yeah. And an actually good case, because in January of 2009, as creepy as Timothy is and who the heck knows what he's into, police announced that a convicted pedophile named Curtis Dean Anderson confessed to Amber's abduction and murder before he died in prison in 2007. And they said because of that, they were closing her case and Tim is no longer a suspect. And 2009's a big year because not only does this happen, but later that same year in August at a parole office in Concord, California.

And again, just for context, this is like 40 minutes north of Hayward. Something incredible happens. You see, back in 91, almost three years after Mikayla was taken, another little girl was kidnapped in the same area. It was 11-year-old JC Dugart. Now, this is a pretty popular name, but at the time in 2009, this is 18 years later since she was taken, she was found alive. According to Robert Solonga's reporting in the San Jose Mercury News, no other kidnapping victim in modern American history has been found alive after being missing for that kind of time. Wow. Like, again, this is a huge story, one that I'm sure all of our crime junkies are super familiar with.

And as it's exploding in the news, it opens up all kinds of new possibilities for other long term missing kids. So when they found JC's kidnappers, Philip and Nancy Guerrero, and they arrested them, police start to wonder if Philip and Nancy potentially had other victims. Maybe it's a coincidence, maybe it's not. But if you look at pictures of JC as a child next to pictures of Mikayla, there's like major resemblances between them. Like here, I'm going to send you two side by side or two different pictures and you can tell me what you think. I mean, yeah, I mean, Mikayla was nine and JC was 11, but they're both these sweet looking blonde little girls. They have these toothy little grins that just break my heart. I can totally see the resemblance between the two of them.

And wasn't the abduction M.O. similar to like, forgive me, it's been a while since I've read about her case. But I'm pretty sure JC was grabbed like in broad daylight like Mikayla was too. Yeah, she was. ABC7 News reported that Philip was actually out of prison on parole and believed to be living in the Bay Area in 88, which is like a pretty strong connection. And beyond that, Trina, who was again Mikayla's best friend, who was with her when she goes missing, comes forward and tells police that she believes Philip looks like the guy who took Mikayla. And even more than that, Philip's car at the time looks like the one that the kidnapper was driving.

And she's so struck by this car that she calls Mikayla's mom to like tell her about it. So with this renewed hope that maybe answers are finally on the way, Heyward Police launched a massive search operation at Philip and Nancy's place where JC was held, looking for any sign that Mikayla was ever there. And after a few days of searching, they think they might have found what they're looking for. Law enforcement find a few bones and they bring in cadaver dogs the next day to sniff near where the bones were found. The original searches after JC's rescue turn up a fragment, but now with multiple bones, police are even more intent on uncovering the scale of Nancy and Philip's crimes and seeing if it leads them

to any clues about Mikayla or even anyone else. But tests on the bone fragments show that they're animal bones and not human. OK, but you said the bone fragment. What about the other bones? So according to Odysseus Martinez is reporting for CBS News, they are human, but they're not Mikayla's. In fact, an anthropologist brought in by police believes that they're actually very old bones belonging to Native Americans. So not even like, not that they're not Mikayla's or not even another victim. They were probably there long, long, long before. Like a burial ground situation.

Exactly. So at this point, all police can do is watch as arguably the best lead that they ever had in Mikayla's case just disappears and dries up. They interview JC herself and she says that she doesn't believe Mikayla was ever there. So just as suddenly as it appeared, this spark of hope is crushed. More time passes, more birthdays and holidays and anniversaries without Mikayla or any clue even of what happened to her after she was taken. That is, until yet another infamous case intersects with Mikayla. And it offers this strange new possibility. In early 2012, a convicted murderer on death row in San Quentin, California named Wesley Shermontine,

one of half of the notorious speed freak killers duo who may have killed more than 20 people in the 80s and 90s, he writes a letter to the Stockton record newspaper. In it, he offers to give up more information about where he and his partner, this guy named Lauren Herzog, buried some of their victims and also announces that Lauren is the man responsible for Mikayla's abduction. What? Yeah, according to Chris Day Benedetti's reporting in the Mercury News, Wesley points to how Lauren's family lived nearby, like this place, like a 10 minute drive from Hayward. And he also points to Lauren's resemblance to the police sketch from back in 88.

And so I kind of took a screenshot of Lauren's mugshot lined up side by side with the sketch. And you can tell me if you think they're similar. I mean, like I said in the first sketch, like his face is kind of long, which Lauren's mugshot does display that. His skin is definitely better, but, you know, he's also older, maybe outgrew some of those like adolescent early 20s skin issues. But since you said Wesley's on death row, I'm assuming Lauren is there too? So no, Lauren was actually paroled back in 2010 after this like whole legal mess with allegations of coercion around his confessions. And his convictions actually get overturned as a result. Oh my God.

Yeah, like we could do a whole episode just about the speed free killers and everything that happened with them. But anyway, according to Malia Wollin's New York Times piece about the speed free killers, Lauren got wind of Wesley getting ready to go public with this information that could send him straight back to prison. And he died by suicide in January of 2012 before that could happen. So that kind of even sets off alarm bells for everyone because yeah, he kind of looks like the sketch of her kidnapper. He was in the Bay Area at the time. They're already criminals and now he's not even around to like answer questions about it. Right.

So unlike Roger Haggard, who remember when he wrote in from Indiana law enforcement didn't trust him right from the get go. This time police are looking at Wesley's information pretty seriously. After he writes to the Stockton reporter, this bounty hunter gets involved with Wesley and is like, listen, you tell me where the bodies are. And if you're being honest with me, I will pay you $33,000. So Wesley starts drawing up these maps with places that he claims he and Lauren put their victims, including this old well in Linden, California. And he lists it as Herzog's bone well.

Oh, my God, how far is Linden from Hayward? So it's only about an hour and a half to the east. So it's not as close as where Wesley was saying Lauren's family lived, but definitely with like an eavely like driving distance. So by the middle of February 2012, law enforcement have dug up multiple sites on Wesley's map and have recovered over 1000 bones, including two skulls that forensic teams are saying could be two known speed freak victims whose remains had never been found until that point. Now, they wouldn't know for sure then until they got the DNA results back. But Wesley's information is looking, I mean, at this point, pretty credible, right? Yeah.

Along with the bones, searchers find a woman's ring, they find clothes and beer bottles and car parts and shoes. And they're also bringing cadaver dogs to try and locate a second well, which if Wesley's telling the truth, could have a dozen more bodies. Oh, my God. Yeah, according to the Mercury News, the Hayward police take this pretty cautious approach to all of this. Because obviously there's a ton going on here and as much as they want to find Mikayla if she's there, they don't want to get in the way of any other investigation. So they keep their focus really narrow. And in the whore of all those bones in the well, searchers find a fragment, a fragment that could belong to a child between the ages of five and 14 years old. As the physical searches wind down and DNA testing takes over to identify the bodies, Mikayla's case turns back to just a waiting game, like they've got to see who's out there.

In March, two victims are named publicly, as Kimberly Billy, who was 19 when she vanished in 84, and Joanne Hobson, who was 16 when she disappeared in 85. So with other families starting to get answers, police and Mikayla's mom Sharon kind of just wait on tender hooks for news. And finally, in January of 2013, we are now 25 years out from Mikayla vanishing, the heartbreaking truth comes out. The fragment that they found does not belong to Mikayla. On her blog, Sharon stated that while she wasn't ruling out the possibility that Lauren did snatch Mikayla back in 88, she thinks it's unlikely that her daughter was a victim of the speed freak killers. She believes Mikayla was too young compared to their other victims, and that since Lauren's dead and Wesley's claims about his involvement can't be verified, it is, as she puts it, quote, on the far back burner. As Sharon wrote, over the years, there have been reported sightings of Mikayla in Mexico, even the United Arab Emirates, and theories that Mikayla was a victim of human trafficking even. Sharon's got a whole section on her blog called Who Done It, or Who Didn't Done It, where she goes over potential suspects and gives her perspective on each one.

The rainbow market in Hayward, where Mikayla was abducted from, is now Mexico's super, and for years after the kidnapping, until Sharon moved away, yellow ribbons were laid out every year to honor Mikayla's memory. And a couple of weeks ago, that's how our episode ended. But then we got that email saying that on December 21, 2020, police would be announcing a suspect in the case, and it was no one that we've talked about so far. So all these years, the Hayward Police Department kept investigating, I mean, they would mark every anniversary in a different way than the rainbow market did, not with ribbons, but they would mark it with a relook at the case. And on the 30th anniversary of Mikayla's kidnapping, this was 2018, they decide to reexamine the whole thing, the evidence, possible witnesses, the leads, all of it. The department's fingerprint expert gets a full list of every single person of interest and armed with this list. She starts comparing all of these people's prints with ones that were apparently found on the scooter that Mikayla had been using that day.

And remarkably, thanks to advancements in technology, she's able to find a match. What? Yes, according to Tofer Gok Roger and Holly Silverman's reporting for CNN, the prints on this scooter belong to a man named David Mish. And on December 22nd, 2020, he's officially charged with the kidnapping and murder of Mikayla Garrett. Okay, so he's being charged in December, literally just a few weeks ago, but when was he arrested? Girl, he was arrested back in the 80s. Oh, I'm sorry. Are you telling me that Mikayla's killer has been in jail, like, pretty much his entire time, like, since she was abducted?

Yeah, that's exactly what I'm telling you. You see, David's been incarcerated since 1989, when he was convicted and sentenced to 18 years to life in prison for the stabbing death of a 36-year-old woman named Margaret Ball at her house in an unincorporated part of Hayward. Now, I wasn't able to dig up much about Margaret's murder other than her age and how she died, but I did find that in March of 2018, David was charged with another cold case. So in 2018, he was connected to a double murder in Fremont, California, which is about a half hour south of Hayward. CBS San Francisco reported that a young woman in her late teens named Michelle Xavier was found murdered with her best friend, 20-year-old Jennifer Dewey, along the side of a road shortly after midnight on February 2nd, 1986. Now, at the time, all police would say was that one of the women had been shot and the other's throat was slashed. And the brutality of the murders really rocked Fremont to its core, but the case remained unsolved until new advances in DNA technology linked the evidence to David, who, again, was still sitting in prison.

OK, can we back up a little bit, though? Like, obviously, you and I and most of our crime junkies are really familiar with, you know, advancements in DNA technology and genealogy and all that stuff. But the fingerprints, this guy was in prison. Sure. I have spiraled. I don't understand this. And I literally even talked to a former detective that I know. And I think the prints should have been run, right? Yeah, I don't know. I think we have, first of all, there hasn't been a lot of information out there on this new development, right? Like, this just happened. So I haven't gotten the full story. Did they not know that the prints were on the scooter? Like, were they recently found?

I mean, I would think that that's something they checked for way early on. It was like a partial that they were able to, like, get a better reading from. Yeah, we had prints in the 80s. It's hard for me to believe that the finding the print was new. It's connecting it to him that I think was new, but haven't been able to verify. But when I talked to the detective, the problem is I think we have this, like, idea as armchair detectives that, you know, there's APHIS. It's this national database. We have a fingerprint and we put it in there. And when it gets put in there, it gets run against every fingerprint in the world and we find out if anything else is connected. But it's not like that. It's not really how it works.

It's so messy. So there is a national database, but it's not connected to any of, like, the local databases. And you have to have so many points to be able to submit it there. Otherwise, you're going, like, hand by hand. And even if you could submit it, someone has to physically send it. It doesn't just, like, collect it from a database. Right, right. It's so messy. It's, like, incredible when you think about the advancements we've made in technology and science and how slow the criminal justice system is to keep up with it. Right, to adapt to it and adopt it as, like, a basic practice.

Yeah, how do you reform that? Like, I mean, I have, like, a teeny tiny supercomputer in my pocket and we don't know that a guy sitting in prison who's had his fingerprints taken 32 years ago. And has been there since a year after the abduction? Like, the piece that could have been brought to Michaela's family. I mean, thank God he had been in prison that whole time. I mean, that's, like, I guess the one good thing, at least he hasn't been just roaming around. But to leave the family with unanswered questions. Again, there's so much I don't understand about this that I don't know if I'm missing a piece,

but there's got to be something we can fix, right? Right, it seems like it's own sort of injustice. As of 2021, David Misch is 59 years old and remains in a Cal and Forty estate prison awaiting trial for the murders of Michelle and Jennifer. Now, as far as I can tell, no trial date has actually been set. So this is the 2018 case that he was charged with. He hasn't even gone to trial for that yet. Right, right. So is there any trial date for Michaela yet?

No, like no trial date yet for Michaela either. And who knows how COVID is going to affect that. But regardless of how those proceedings play out, thankfully, it is highly unlikely that he will ever see freedom again. Meanwhile, the search for Michaela's remains continues. Her mom, Sharon, lives in Iowa now where she is currently undergoing treatment for stage four breast cancer. So everyone send your thoughts and your prayers and your... All the good vibes.

Good vibes to her. Even though Michaela's case has been solved, there's no happy ending here. I mean, nothing I can say or do will ever erase the pain of such a terrible loss in the years of not knowing. But I want to leave you with a piece of Sharon's most recent blog post where she speaks directly to her daughter and it was on December 19th, 2020. And she wrote, quote, I am trying to hold on to what has kept me going for a while now. And that is that I know you are a bright and shining light. You were a light to all who knew you when you were here in the world. And you've been a light even to strangers beyond number since you've been gone.

I will, we will try to keep that light shining for you. I love you forever, baby girl. Rest well. I have some things to do here yet, but I will see you in the not terribly distant future, mom, end quote. You can find all of our source material for this case on our website, crimejunkiepodcast.com. And you can follow us on Instagram at crimejunkiepodcast. We'll be back next week with a brand new episode. Crimejunkie is an audio chuck production.

So, what do you think Chuck? Do you approve?