DUBLIN — David Misch has waited more than six years for a chance to tell his side of the story, and before a jury on Tuesday afternoon, he finally did it.
Misch, 63, needed to explain just how his DNA came to be under the fingernails of 20-year-old Jennifer Duey, whose nude body was found a few feet from that of her best friend, 18-year-old Michelle Xavier, in a remote section of the hills above Fremont back on Feb. 2, 1986. Misch also needed to convince the jury that an assortment of handwritten letters and numbers found on Xavier’s hand was not a partial license plate from a Honda motorcycle he rode at the time, as prosecutors contend.
Speaking out loud for the first time during his six-week double murder trial on Tuesday morning, Misch launched into his version of events. He painted a picture of his life in the 1980s as an ex-convict who was living out of a Hayward motel, sold cocaine, methamphetamine, marijuana, and “a little acid” to whoever would buy it and hung around prostitutes, addicts and who he referred to as “boosters” — people willing to pay Misch to take them shoplifting around the East Bay.
“You had everybody from the local bars, to yuppies, to the average person who just wants to have some dope for work,” Misch said, when asked to describe his drug clientele in the 1980s. He later added that he even had a few “housewives” who would buy methamphetamine for “weight loss.”
His explanation for Duey’s DNA under his fingernails was simple enough. Misch claims the two shared a cigarette while he was selling her and Xavier and a bag of cocaine — known as an “eight-ball” — just hours before the two were kidnapped, forced up Mill Creek Road and shot and stabbed to death in an apparent sexually-motivated crime. If true, all this was just horrible luck for Misch, who by that point in his life had already been convicted of one rape, a burglary that appeared to have a lewd motive and a random attack on a woman who angered Misch by picking flowers and appearing too arrogant for his liking, according to court records.
Misch testified that he had a system going with local “boosters” who would pay him $100, fill the tank up in his “bright red” Volkswagen Beetle and cut him in on the profits to drive them around and shoplift. These professional shoplifters included a woman known as “Snaggletooth,” a handful of random drug customers and a woman named either, “Gertrude, Gretchen, or Giselle,” who went with him on one particular day of note.
It was the day he met Duey, Misch claimed, who worked at a local mall at the time. Misch testified that his companion paid off another employee as part of the shoplifting scheme and that Duey went up and asked Misch for cocaine. He gave her his pager number and sold her drugs “10-12” more times after that, including on that fateful day in February 1986, he said.
On that final meeting, Misch said that Duey and Xavier asked him for a much larger amount of cocaine than he was used to selling them. Suspicious, he said he agreed to meet up at a local gas station but questioned them before retrieving his bindle and handing it over for a price of $250. He says that while counting the cash, he and Duey shared a cigarette, passing it back and forth until he told them goodnight and left.
“I walked off with her cigarette,” Misch said in a California Okie accent, wearing a sheepish grin on his face. When asked if he took them to Mill Creek Road, Misch denied it categorically.
“I never even heard of Mill Creek Road until this case,” Misch said, adding that Fremont simply, “wasn’t one of my haunts.”
“Fremont police were known as the gestapo,” he said of the department that eventually linked him to Xavier and Duey’s deaths.
As for the motorcycle, Misch claimed that he was no longer driving it in early 1986, because he’d wrecked it in a crash months earlier. His lawyer, Ernie Castillo, had police paperwork proving that Misch was in fact involved in a motorcycle crash in 1985, but it was left up to Misch’s word that he never had the bike fixed or drove it again after that day.
The story Misch told was wildly different than what he told cold case detectives in 2017. Back then, when confronted with DNA evidence, he said that he was at a gas station when he witnessed Duey being kidnapped, then leapt into action, engaging in a tug-of-war with her abductors before they pulled her away and left into the night. Castillo now says that story was simply an example of Misch playing games with the police, who noted in their report that Misch took long pauses during the interview before speaking.
If Misch convinces a jury to acquit him, his legal troubles are far from over. He is also accused of murdering 9-year-old Michaela Garecht after allegedly kidnapping the young girl by moving her scooter next to his car while she bought candy at a Hayward store. He then grabbed her when she went to retrieve it, authorities say.
Xavier and Duey were best friends who were planning to watch a film and share a pizza on the night they were killed. Prosecutors have contended that they had the misfortune of bumping into Misch that night, and that he used a gun and a knife to force them to the secluded area to rape them, then killed them when they began fighting back. By the time Misch was charged in the cold case double homicide in 2018, he was already serving 40 years to life for murdering a woman named Margaret Ball in Oakland in 1989, an attack that also appears to have had a sexual motive.
Originally Published:
Source: www.mercurynews.com