Couples Who Kill (17 page)

His parents were very supportive throughout the trial. His father said he partly blamed himself and his mother said she was praying that the jury would make a just decision.

Lucas Salmon was found guilty of all the charges against him, but one of the judges said that he didn’t fit the profile of the usual killer on death row, so his life was spared and he was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. In truth, Salmon shared many killer traits – he’d been subjected to harsh corporal punishment throughout his childhood, had had a repressive upbringing, had various stepmothers and stepfathers and was moved around geographically.

Three years after the murder, on 3rd February 2000, George Woldt eventually went to trial. The jury heard that he was an embryonic sexual sadist with psychopathic tendencies. The defence countered by saying that he wasn’t responsible as he had calcium deposits on his brain, alternately described as a bleeding lesion. He also had scars on his back from the numerous childhood beatings he’d received.

But apparently a bleeding lesion doesn’t necessarily result in violent acts – and many of us survive abusive childhoods without going on to murder as adults. (Abused children who kill are, of course, much less culpable and so
are more deserving of help rather than further punishment.) George was a twenty-year-old married man and killing Jacine Gielinski was a choice he made.

The court wanted to hear Lucas Salmon testify as to whether George Woldt had appeared mentally ill that night, but Salmon refused to take the stand. He was given an additional six months for contempt of court.

Incredibly, the defence suggested that Woldt had gone into a disassociative state during the rape and believed that the victim was mounting him. This made no sense as the crime wasn’t a momentary mental lapse – Salmon and Woldt had planned for weeks to rape and kill, had even had practice runs at it. They knew exactly what they were doing and why.

Woldt had already believed that there was a deity when he carried out the rape and murder, but in jail he got religion big time. He told the jury that, if they spared his life, he would ‘honour God.’ He was subsequently sentenced to death.

On death row, George Woldt lost weight and his boyish good looks began to fade. But his lawyers argued that his death sentence was invalid because it had been imposed by the trial jury rather than by the judge, something which has retrospectively been deemed unconstitutional. The Supreme Court agreed in February 2003 and his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.

Lucas Salmon is also serving out his life sentence, though his defence team now argue that he is suffering from high-functioning autism and only killed because he mimicked the murderous actions of George Woldt. But
Lucas chose who to mimic – he could equally have copied the acts of a charity worker or a selfless carer. Instead, he copied a misogynistic rapist and took part in a cruel sex act which he admits he enjoyed.

Salmon may now pose a danger to gay prisoners. Whilst on the outside, he belonged to a Christian organisation which abhorred alternative sexual lifestyles and focused on helping gay people see ‘the error’ of their ways and ‘convert’ to heterosexuality. He still considers all forms of sex outwith heterosexual marriage to be a mortal sin.

Most of us read about torture killers and cringe at man’s inhumanity to man – but the following couple were turned on by reading about the exploits of killer team Charlene & Gerald Gallego. Charlene, who helped her husband lure ten young victims to their deaths, is profiled in my book on female serial killers,
Women Who Kill.

James Daveggio & Michelle Michaud didn’t murder as many victims as the Gallegos, but they sexually assaulted seventeen females, one of whom was only twelve years old.

James was born on 27th July 1960, the second son of Darlene and Jim Daveggio. He was born with additional tissue on his larynx, a congenital condition which would ensure that he’d have a husky voice throughout his life.

Darlene was only nineteen when James was born, but his twenty-three-year-old father had been married before and had deserted the three children from that previous marriage. It was a pattern which his father would repeat again and again. The four Daveggios lived in poor quality housing in San Francisco. Jim drove a truck for a living and money was scarce.

Shortly after James’s birth, the couple moved to Santa Rosa and Darlene became pregnant again. But before their daughter was born, the Daveggios had split up. Jim swiftly remarried and started his third family – and James wouldn’t see his father again until he was twelve.

When James was three and a half his mother moved her
three toddlers to Nevada and remarried, but their lives remained precarious. James almost died at age four when he set himself on fire whilst playing with matches, having to undergo extensive skin grafts to his shoulders and back.

Darlene’s second husband found a job with a supermarket chain and the family moved frequently, living in four different parts of San Francisco in the next two years. Darlene contributed to the family by working nights in a biker bar. She was much more aggressive than her second husband, who just wanted a quiet life. When the marriage finally broke down, he would file for divorce citing ‘extreme cruelty.’

By now James had started school but he didn’t enjoy reading and wasn’t particularly bright. He found lessons a chore and often ignored his homework. The teachers noted that he didn’t try very hard – but his blonde hair and big blue eyes meant he was easy to forgive.

James remained a deeply unhappy boy. One of his sisters would later tell author Carlton Smith that she’d heard her mother ‘criticise Jimmy viciously, telling him to his face that he was worthless; but let anyone else say anything bad about Jimmy and she’d be all over them.’ As a result, she always made excuses for him when he got into trouble at school.

One of the neighbours, an incest survivor who understood abuse patterns, would later become convinced that James was traumatised, either by abuse or by a parent withdrawing their love at a critical stage. He’d eventually show all four of the symptoms – not knowing right from wrong, hurting others, abusing alcohol and/or drugs and
self-mutilation. James’s sister noted that the more he was punished, the wilder he became. This is a common response to corporal punishment as violence never calms anyone down.

When he was eleven, the family moved again, this time to Union City, so James had another new school to cope with and new friends to make. At thirteen he led an eleven-year-old girl into the bushes and had sex with her – from this time on he was rarely without a sexual partner. By fourteen he had a twelve-year-old girlfriend, Cassie Riley, but within a fortnight the couple had broken up.

Six months later, Cassie – now thirteen – was found murdered. She’d been grabbed around the throat from behind, punched, stripped to the waist and held under water until she drowned. James was questioned by the police as were the rest of his class, but he said that he now felt indifferent towards Cassie, and he didn’t particularly stand out as most of his classmates also claimed to have dated the unfortunate girl.

James’s teenage years were as chaotic as his earlier ones. He dated constantly, getting at least one of his girlfriends pregnant. Darlene took the teenager to the clinic to get an abortion. On another occasion he stole a car from a girlfriend’s mum to go joyriding.

His mother decided he might fare better living with his dad and managed to track the man down to an address in Pacifica. Sixteen-year-old James was sent to live there. His father got him an after-school job in a burger restaurant but he stole from his employer. Fired from that job, he began stealing from his father’s house. He was sent back home but not to Union City, as whilst he was away the
family had relocated to Pleasanton.

Strangely, James continued to idolise his dad yet the man wasn’t an ideal role model – he’d marry at least four times and father eight children, abandoning several of them.

By age seventeen the troubled youth was playing truant along with some of the tougher guys in town. He began to steal cigarettes and the local police noted that he was easily led. He also increasingly loathed authority, and was suspended from school for calling one of the administrators ‘a baldheaded mother-fucker.’ He now upped the ante and was the driver in an armed robbery.

This time even his mother couldn’t save him and he was sent to a juvenile detention centre in Almeda County. Afterwards he attended a continuation school in a middle class area where he felt increasingly inadequate.

When the going gets tough, the weak tend to procreate. At nineteen, Daveggio got his girlfriend pregnant and married her, becoming a father seven months after the wedding. But, too young to settle, he kept going out with his drinking buddies at night, cheating again and again on his teenage bride. He also faced charges of burglary and receiving stolen goods, charges which would later be dropped for lack of evidence.

A year later, whilst officially separated, the Daveggios had a second daughter. Now his mother stepped in and persuaded him to join the army, hoping that military training would straighten him out. The result was a disaster. Twenty-one-year-old James was naturally lazy and hated authority. Whilst at boot camp he deliberately stared at the sun until he temporarily blinded himself, knowing
that this would obtain him a medical discharge. His army career had lasted three months.

The following year, now age twenty-two, James married for the second time. The couple had lived with his mother and stepfather whilst they were dating, and continued to do so after the wedding. James’s new wife noted that he expected her to do everything for him – and that his mother encouraged his chauvinistic approach.

Eventually the couple got an apartment of their own, and James made money from burglary. He remained troubled and violent, starting numerous fights in bars in which he lost teeth and had his nose broken. He frequently added to his tattoos: many heavily tattooed men are psychopaths. He certainly fitted the profile, lying, abusing others and being unable to maintain a relationship.

In the summer of 1984, whilst still married to his second wife, he followed a drunken woman out of a bar, brandished a pistol at her and demanded that she fellate him. The terrified woman complied then fled to the police but the alcohol had made her so hazy that she couldn’t give them a coherent picture of events, and eventually charges against Daveggio were dropped.

By the following year – July 1985 – Daveggio’s second wife was pregnant. This put him in a foul mood as he couldn’t afford the children he already had.

Determined to make someone else feel as bad as he did, James Daveggio and a friend, John Huffstetler, picked up a woman in a bar and offered her a lift home. Once in the vehicle, the men attacked her and Daveggio made her fellate him. Afterwards Huffstetler fired his pistol, the bullet just missing the traumatised woman’s ear. Thankfully a nearby police car heard the shot and pulled over the abduction vehicle. Both men were arrested, and Daveggio was bailed the following day. It was also the date that he turned twenty-five.

Surprisingly, he was only sentenced to one year in prison for this offence – and within four months was on a work release programme and going to church. His time would perhaps have been better spent pursuing educational opportunities as his application for early release was almost illiterate, with ‘welfare’ spelt ‘welfear’ and ‘allowed’ spelt ‘aloud’.

His second wife now divorced him, so by the time he left jail in July 1986, he was young, free and single again.

That year – his twenty-sixth – he briefly studied mechanics at college and met his third wife there. But, as usual, he didn’t stay the course and was unemployed by the time he moved to Sacramento with her and her eight-year-old daughter from a previous relationship. The couple married in April 1988 and within four months were expecting a baby. James blotted out this latest problem with drink and drugs. His third wife produced a son in 1989, but it would be 1993 before he had the sense to get a vasectomy.

In the Nineties he joined a biker gang – The Devil’s Horsemen – and was in his element. For the first time he had a complete ‘family’, albeit a somewhat anti-social one. He went out biking with them and hung out at their HQ, drinking and playing cards. He also cheated on his third wife during this period with a woman who beat him up as often as he beat her up. She soon found that he could only sustain an erection if she allowed him to take a sadistic role.

By 1995 Daveggio’s world was increasingly unstable. He was caught driving whilst drunk and continued to cheat on the woman he lived with. He dated increasingly young girls as they were more biddable and less likely to leave the relationship when he slapped them around. He began to experiment with methamphetamine which can lead to violent behaviour, something to which he was already prone.

By now James Daveggio was in such a state that he couldn’t even hold down bar-tending jobs. His girlfriend threw him out but he immediately found another to give him accommodation. It was only a matter of time before he alienated her, as he had with numerous girlfriends and three long-suffering wives.

But in October 1996, whilst at a friend’s house, he met someone as potentially dangerous as he was. She was a vivacious redhead, a month short of her thirty-eighth birthday, who would soon help him torture, rape and kill.

Michelle was born on 7th November 1958 in Casablanca, Morocco, the first child of an army father whose work
ensured that the family constantly moved around. By the time that Michelle was four, the Michauds had relocated to the USA. There, the couple had two sons, the growing family still moving from military base to military base.

It must have been painful for Michelle to make friends only to lose them again, so after a while she withdrew into herself. She had a high IQ and was a good scholar but clearly unhappy – photographs show her as a pretty girl with long red hair, big eyes and a tensely smiling mouth. She would later allege that her father put her and her mother down constantly, that no matter how hard she tried she couldn’t please him. She would also later allege that she was sexually molested by an unnamed offender at age ten.

It’s possible that by her teens Michelle was already a fledgling psychopath. She lied constantly and
overdramatised
every situation. Acquaintances noticed that she always had to be the centre of attention. One of her sister’s boyfriends would later suggest that she had multiple personalities.

When Michelle was fourteen the Michauds settled in Sacramento and had a fourth child, another daughter. Curtailed by her authoritarian father, Michelle remained unhappy. A visitor at the house saw him criticise her for putting two slices of meat on a sandwich rather than one. The teenager would misbehave in order to get her father’s attention, then would become very apologetic and submissive, a stance that she would repeat with various men throughout her adult life.

By fifteen the situation had become so volatile that she was made a ward of court. She would later allege that these teenage years included sexual abuse by a close male
relative. He was subsequently mentioned on the internet, but as the abuse hasn’t been substantiated, he will not be named here.

Michelle also alleged that this relative put her to work as a prostitute at age sixteen – but she later said that she daren’t tell him of her prostitution, so her statements are inconsistent. Everyone who knew her would allege that she often tried to shock in order to get attention. But on other occasions she showed that she was desperate to be liked and, to achieve this, would tell people what they wanted to hear.

At seventeen she dropped out of high school and did casual work for a time, but by nineteen she was clearly considering sexual services as a career, writing a fantasy entitled
My Escapades In A Massage Parlour
which includes the words ‘It sounds exciting and very dangerous, going into a room with a stranger, having sex and getting paid for it.’

By twenty she turned her massage parlour fantasies into reality, working legally from a Nevada whorehouse.
Well-spoken
and with a great figure, she was popular with punters who wanted a high class callgirl – and her popularity increased when she was happy to talk dirty and offer a wide range of sexual services. She prospered at the ranch for several years.

At twenty-three she gave birth to a son and moved in with the baby’s father. They also invited another woman to live with them in a
ménage à trois
. Two years later Michelle had a daughter by the same man. But the relationship became increasingly violent and she left.

For the next few years she alternately lived off welfare and prostituted herself. Meanwhile her son was suffering
from increasingly acute emotional problems so she paid for him to have specialist education. Her daughter, like many female children from dysfunctional families, withdrew into herself. Michelle continued to find work in massage parlours, though the sex work may have led to gynaecological problems, as at age thirty-one she had to have a hysterectomy.