Features

Opening arguments allege sex murder glorification

The Associated Press
Wednesday February 06, 2002

OAKLAND — A couple accused of sexually assaulting and killing a college student in their morbid minivan full of torture devices modeled their crime after another murderous couple, a prosecutor told jurors Tuesday in opening statements. 

James Anthony Daveggio, 41, and his girlfriend, Michelle Lyn Michaud, 43, face the death penalty if convicted of charges they killed 22-year-old Vanessa Lei Samson in 1997. 

Relatives of Samson sat in Alameda County Superior Court as Deputy District Attorney Angela Backers told jurors the couple raped a half dozen women before setting their sights on Vanessa Lei Samson. 

Daveggio and Michaud were methamphetamine users who modeled their crimes after those of Gerald and Charlene Gallego, a Sacramento couple whose “sex slave murders” made headlines in the late 1970s, Backers said. 

“These were their personal heroes,” Backers said of the accused couple’s infatuation with the Gallego’s crimes. 

“Michaud described each vicious assault as an ’adventure.’ Daveggio referred to them as ’huntings,”’ Backers told the jury. 

The Gallegos were thought to be responsible for as many as 10 murders. Gerald Gallego is on Nevada’s Death Row; his former common-law wife was released from prison in 1997. 

Investigators working on the Samson case recovered a pornography audiotape titled “Submissive Young Girls,” a book on serial killers, two curling irons with Michaud’s fingerprints on them, and a pack of serial-killer trading cards, court records revealed. 

Authorities said Samson was tied up in the van rigged with hooks and ropes and repeatedly raped with curling irons as the couple drove to South Lake Tahoe. 

Samson’s body was discovered Dec. 4, 1997 in a remote part of Alpine County.