Picture this. A sunny Saturday morning in November 1988. Two 9-year-old best friends riding their scooters down a quiet California street, laughing about their school play. They’re heading to their favorite store just four blocks away to buy candy. In exactly 17 minutes, one of them will be gone forever.
The man who takes her is already there, watching, waiting. His trap is set. Before we dive into this story, do me a favor. Hit that like button right now and subscribe to this channel. We cover real crime cases every single week, and your support keeps us going. Now, let’s get into what happened on November 19th, 1988, the day that destroyed a family and created one of the most frustrating investigations in California history.
November 19th, 1988, Hayward, California. The Garrett family’s Saturday morning started like any other. Sharon Garrett stood at her kitchen sink washing breakfast dishes while her husband, Rod, worked on the car outside. Their 9-year-old daughter, Mika, was running back and forth between their house and her best friend, Katrina Rodriguez’s place across the street, trying on costumes for their school play.
Sharon and Rod had tried for 5 years to have Michaela. 5 years of doctors, treatments, and prayers before she finally arrived on January 24th, 1979. They called her their miracle baby. After Michaela came her younger sister Libby and brother, Alex. The family had moved to this peaceful Hayward neighborhood because it felt safe.
treelined streets, friendly neighbors, the kind of place where kids could ride scooters to the corner store without worry. But Sharon wasn’t like other mothers. She was protective. Extremely protective because this was 1988 and California had a problem. Children were disappearing. Milk cartons across the state showed faces of missing kids.
The evening news ran story after story about children vanishing from playgrounds, malls, their own front yards. Every night, Sharon watched those news reports, and every night she held her children a little tighter. She’d check on them multiple times before bed. She’d wake up in the middle of the night just to make sure they were still there.
The fear of losing one of them, especially Michaela, the baby she’d waited 5 years for, consumed her. So, when Katrina knocked on their door that Saturday morning holding a coin her father had given her, asking if Michaela could go to the rainbow market to buy candy, Sharon’s answer was immediate. No.
But Michaela begged, “Please, Mom, we’ll be safe. We’ll be quick. We’ll come right back, please. Sharon stood there, looking at her daughter’s hopeful face. The store was only four blocks away. They’d been there dozens of times. It was the middle of the morning. What could possibly happen? She said yes. That single word would haunt her for the rest of her life.
Sharon handed Michaela $5 and gave both girls that serious mother look. Stay together. Go straight there. Come straight back. Michaela grabbed her scooter. Katrina grabbed Michaela’s brother’s scooter. And just before they pushed off, Michaela turned back one last time. I love you, Mom. Then she disappeared down the street, blonde hair shining in the sunlight.
Laughter trailing behind her. Sharon went back to her dishes. Rod kept working on the car. It was 10:00 a.m. First days of Thanksgiving break. Everything was normal. Everything was about to shatter. The Rainbow Market sat on Mission Boulevard, less than a kilometer away. For Michaela and Katrina, this wasn’t an adventure. It was routine.
They went there almost every single day for candy and soda. They parked their scooters by the store entrance like always, went inside, grabbed their treats, two Mountain Dews, two beef jerkys, two cherry taffies, pegged, and walked back out. They were talking, excited about the holiday, about their costumes, about everything 9-year-old best friends talk about on a sunny Saturday.
And because they were distracted, they forgot their scooters. They actually started walking home before Michaela stopped. Wait, our scooters. Both girls hurried back to the parking lot. That’s when they noticed something wrong. Michaela’s scooter was missing. Not stolen. Moved. Deliberately placed three parking spaces away, leaning against a car.
This wasn’t random. This wasn’t opportunity. This was a trap that had been carefully set. “There it is,” Katrina pointed. Michaela walked over to grab it. She bent down to reach the handlebars. And in one explosive second, a man burst from the car, grabbed her around the waist, and threw her into the back seat.
Katrina stood frozen. Her brain couldn’t process what her eyes were seeing. The door slammed. The engine roared. The car shot out of the parking lot and disappeared down Mission Boulevard. Michaela Garrett was gone. For maybe five seconds, Katrina just stood there. Shock does that.
Freezes your body while your mind screams. Then something clicked. She ran ran back into the Rainbow Market as fast as she could and started yelling. A man took Michaela. He grabbed her and drove away. The cashier, Rona Roland, immediately called police. They arrived within minutes. Patrol cars flooded the lot.
Officers interviewed customers, secured the scene, searched for evidence. Rona also called Katrina’s father. He rushed to the store, and then someone had to make the call no parent should ever receive. At home, Sharon was still at the sink. Rod was still outside. They had no idea their daughter had been gone for 20 minutes. When Rod heard urgent shouting from outside, he didn’t understand at first.
Then Katrina’s father appeared and Rod saw his face. That expression that says, “Everything has gone wrong. Michaela has been taken. Someone grabbed her at the Rainbow Market.” Rod burst through the door, shouting for Sharon. The dish she was holding crashed to the floor. He told her to stay by the phone in case the kidnapper called, in case there was a ransom demand, while he rushed to the store.
When Rod arrived, the scene was chaos. Police everywhere. Yellow tape going up, officers on their hands and knees, searching the pavement and Katrina on the curb, crying, shaking, unable to speak. Rod kept asking the same desperate question. Where is she? Where’s my daughter? But Michaela was already gone. The car had vanished. Every second that passed meant she was getting farther away.
At home, Sharon sat frozen by the phone. Everyone assumed this was a kidnapping for ransom. A man takes a 9-year-old in broad daylight. He must want something, right? Money, a deal. The phone would ring. They’d negotiate. This would be resolved. The phone never rang. Not that day, not that week, not ever. This wasn’t about ransom.
This was something worse. Police faced an immediate problem. No surveillance cameras, not on the building, not in the lot, not on surrounding streets. This was 1988. Security footage wasn’t everywhere like today. Small stores often had nothing. So, their only witnesses were Katrina and people near the Rainbow Market that morning.
Cashier Rona Roland provided the first description. She’d noticed a suspicious man outside before the kidnapping. He’d parked and gotten out, but never came inside. Just hung around, peering through windows, watching people. She said his behavior was so odd. She’d wondered if he was planning to rob the store. white male around 30, large mustache, driving an old dark red car, burgundy or maroon, but she couldn’t identify the make or plate.
Police immediately created a composite sketch. Within hours, it was sent to every station in the area, broadcast on TV news, printed in newspapers. Michaela’s kidnapping became the lead story across the Bay Area. Hundreds of patrol officers started stopping every dark red older car they saw, hoping to spot a terrified 9-year-old inside.
They were chasing a ghost. Meanwhile, investigators sent Michaela’s scooter to forensics. Their theory was chilling. The suspect deliberately moved it next to his car to lure her close enough to grab. His fingerprints should be on it. The examiner confirmed it. There was a print on the handlebar, one that didn’t belong to Michaela, Katrina, or anyone in either family.
This was the kidnapper’s print, the key piece of evidence. But there was a devastating problem. The print was incomplete, damaged. Only about 10% of the full fingerprint could be recovered. And in 1988, with the technology available, that 10% was useless. They couldn’t search databases with such a fragment. It could only be used for direct comparison, meaning they’d need a suspect in custody first.
So, this crucial evidence went into a storage box, filed away, waiting, waiting for 32 years. While investigators worked the scene, Sharon sat at home drowning in nighttime guilt. She kept replaying that morning. Michaela asking permission, her hesitation, the moment she said yes, those last words. I love you, Mom.
If only she’d said no. If only she’d been stricter. If only she’d trusted her instincts. But then Sharon remembered something that made her blood run cold. One week earlier, 7 days before the kidnapping, Sharon had woken up very early and found Michaela sitting at the kitchen table writing. “This was strange. Michaela wasn’t an early riser.
She loved sleeping in.” “Honey, why are you awake?” “I’m writing a poem,” Michaela said, voice groggy. “What’s it about?” Michaela didn’t want to explain at first, but Sharon kept asking. I woke up because I heard noises in the attic that made me think about people who get kidnapped and locked in places like that. So, I’m writing about them.
Sharon felt uneasy even then. Kidnapped people, not people who get killed, Michaela clarified. People who were taken and kept alive, trapped somewhere for a long time. Sharon had been disturbed by it, but thought it was just a child’s imagination processing fears. Now sitting by the phone waiting for news about her missing daughter, that poem felt like something else entirely.
Had Michaela somehow known, sensed something coming? Was it a premonition? An impossible glimpse into her own future? Sharon would carry that question until her dying day. By evening, the FBI joined the case. Hayward and surrounding towns were seeing an alarming spike in missing children. The FBI suspected a serial predator operating in the Bay Area.
Despite FBI involvement, despite media coverage, despite hundreds of tips flooding in, the investigation was going nowhere. And that’s when investigators realized their catastrophic mistake. For two days, police had been hunting a 30-year-old man with a mustache driving a dark red car. That was the cashier’s description.
That was the sketch being distributed. That’s who hundreds of officers were searching for. They’d forgotten about Katrina, the actual witness, the girl who saw the kidnapper’s face, who looked into his eyes before he drove away with her best friend. Katrina had been so traumatized that first day she could barely speak. Officers got her basic statement but didn’t do a full interview.
Two days of searching passed. No dark red car, no man with a mustache, nothing. Finally, investigators went to Katrina’s house for a proper statement. What she told them changed everything and revealed they just wasted the most critical 48 hours of the entire investigation. 2 days had passed since Michaela disappeared. 48 critical hours.
And police were about to discover they’d been hunting a ghost. When detectives finally sat down with Katrina Rodriguez for a proper interview, what she described shattered everything they thought they knew. The man who took Michaela wasn’t 30 years old. He was young, early 20s, no mustache.
Instead, long, dirty blonde hair hanging to his shoulders, face covered with severe acne scars and his eyes. Katrina would never forget those eyes. Blue, she told detectives. But not normal blue, like fox eyes. Sharp. He stared right at me, but it was like he didn’t see me, like I wasn’t there. The car, not dark red, beige, tan, a boxy, older sedan with dents all over it.
The detectives felt their stomachs drop. Everything was wrong. The sketch, the vehicle description, the suspect profile sent to every police station in California. While they’d been chasing a 30-year-old man in a burgundy car, the real monster had been driving away in a beige sedan with a terrified 9-year-old girl in the back seat.
Every hour they’d wasted looking for the wrong person was an hour Michaela got farther away. An hour closer to whatever nightmare awaited her. A new composite was created immediately. Young man, early 20s, long blonde hair, acne scarring, those haunting fox eyes. But the damage was done. The most important window in any missing person case.
Those first 48 hours when you have the best chance of finding someone alive, had been completely blown. The investigation started over from scratch. Volunteers flooded Hayward streets. Dozens knocked on doors, talked to residents, handed out flyers. In just days, they distributed 42,000 flyers across the Bay Area showing Michaela’s picture and what she was wearing.
White Metro t-shirt, rolled blue jeans, black Mary Jane shoes, pearl feather earrings. Police visited every registered sex offender in the area, checking alibis, looking for anyone matching the new description. Tips poured in. 4,000 in the first 10 months alone. Each one had to be checked. Each one led nowhere. Then hikers in a national park near Hayward found something. Footprints. Two sets.
One adult, one child. Following the tracks, they discovered a blanket and empty fast food wrappers in the middle of the forest. Police rushed to the scene. FBI profiler said if the kidnapper was keeping Michaela alive, he’d choose a remote location. The park fit perfectly. A massive search began. Officers on foot.
Helicopters with thermal imaging cameras scanning through thick tree cover. Hours became days. Nothing. No sign of Michaela. No sign of the kidnapper. The search expanded to other parks, mountains, remote areas. Still nothing. Michaela Garrett had vanished like smoke, and the man who took her seemed to have disappeared just as completely.
By now, the case had exploded nationally. Unsolved mysteries featured it, one of their first child abduction episodes. Michaela’s photo appeared on over a million milk cartons across California. The missing children’s program sent out 50 million cards nationwide with her picture and the suspect sketch. Even celebrities joined in.
Joe Montana, the 49ers quarterback, made public appeals begging for information. A $70,000 reward was offered. Despite everything, national attention, the reward, thousands of volunteers, FBI involvement, investigators had nothing. By December, a month and a half after Michaela disappeared, police held a press conference and admitted they had no real leads.
They’d checked thousands of tips, interviewed hundreds of people, searched countless locations. They were no closer to finding her than day one. Months turned to years. Tips kept coming. Police kept following up. Sharon started her own investigation, studying similar cases nationwide, looking for patterns.
Everyone kept hoping Michaela would come home. She never did. Then in 1991, 3 years after the kidnapping, investigators focused on a new suspect, Timothy Binder, age 43. And the more they learned, the more disturbing it got. Binder had been sending gifts and money to young girls he didn’t know. Parents reported him. When questioned, he claimed he was just being friendly. But there was more.
The gifts included Bible quotes with specific sentences underlined. I chose you. Be with me. Police discovered Binder had been fired from Colorado social services in 1985 for collecting addresses of young girls from client files and sending them gifts without permission. They searched his van. Photos of children everywhere.
Bible passages taped to walls. crayon drawings. The van was light blue with a license plate reading, “Love you.” He’d been arrested before for trying to lure girls into his van. Charges were dropped. His only conviction was public intoxication. But here’s what made Binder terrifying. He inserted himself into missing children cases.
6 months before Michaela vanished, a seven-year-old named Amber disappeared. Binder showed up at her mother’s door, offering help, visiting constantly. He even wrote police predicting the next victim would be a 9-year-old girl. Then Michaela, age nine, vanished. When the search for Michaela began, Binder did it again, calling Sharon constantly, showing up at her house, offering to help.
In December 1988, he sent an FBI profiler a Christmas card showing a girl holding up four fingers. Weeks later, 4-year-old Amanda Campbell disappeared from Fairfield. He was also linked to 13-year-old Eileen’s disappearance from Dublin. The pattern was clear. This man had connections to multiple missing children across the Bay Area.
Police got a warrant, searched his home. They tore the place apart looking for evidence. Found nothing. No physical proof connecting him to any crime. When news about Binder leaked, the public went insane. People blamed him for every missing child case. His life became hell. Constant harassment, threats, accusations.
Binder sued Fairfield for defamation. He won. Investigators backed off. Many concluded Binder was just obsessed, inserting himself into cases to feel important, creepy, absolutely dangerous. They weren’t sure. Police moved on. Four more years passed. December 1992. Still no Michaela. Then in Indiana, inmate Roger Haggard, serving 11 years for burglary, contacted police with a bombshell claim.
He knew who took Michaela. He’d helped hide evidence. He could lead them to her body. Investigators were skeptical. But when they ignored him, Haggard wrote the San Francisco Chronicle. The newspaper published his story. Public outcry exploded. Police came under massive pressure. They brought Haggard from Indiana to California, questioned him thoroughly.
He promised to show them not just where Michaela was buried, but who killed her. Police took him to a field of gladiolas in Union City, the same area where Michaela was taken. Officers started digging at 8:00 a.m. equipment. Forensic teams carefully searching, hoping to finally give the Garretts closure. Hours passed. The digging continued.
Then Haggard spoke up. I made it all up. Officers froze. What? I lied about everything. There’s nothing here. Why would you do this? Haggard’s answer was incomprehensible. He said he wanted to give Michaela’s family comfort, help them move on. Instead, he’d given them false hope, then ripped it away. The family was devastated.
Police were furious. The community felt betrayed. Haggard got 6 and 12 years added to his sentence, nearly 20 years total, plus $6,000 in restitution to the Garretts for the emotional damage. Another dead end in a case full of them. Eight more years. August 2000, Michaela had been missing 12 years. Police in Vallejo arrested Curtis Dean Anderson for kidnapping 8-year-old Missy Sanchez.
Fortunately, Missy escaped. Her bravery led to Anderson’s capture. Anderson confessed to another crime, kidnapping and murdering 7-year-old Zana Fairchild in 1999. Investigators suspected more connections, but couldn’t prove anything. 7 years later, in 2007, Anderson was dying, kidney and liver failure. He wanted to confess before death.
He contacted the FBI with a horrifying claim. He’d murdered 13 additional women and girls over the years. Victims police didn’t know about. One was Amber, the seven-year-old who disappeared 6 months before Michaela, the same case Bender had inserted himself into. Anderson provided enough specific details that investigators believed him, but there was no physical evidence.
As for Michaela, Anderson denied involvement, said he had nothing to do with her case. But here’s the interesting part. Anderson drove a car matching Katrina’s description, a brown 1977 Chevy sedan. In 1989, police had actually pulled him over driving that exact vehicle. FBI agents wanted to question Anderson more thoroughly about Muila and other victims.
Before they could, Curtis Dean Anderson died on December 9th, 2007. His death left investigators back where they started. No answers, no closure, just more dead ends. Five more years passed. 2012, 24 years since Michaela vanished. And four, inmate reached out with new information. His former cellmate, convicted killer Lauren Herdzog, looked exactly like the suspect in Michaela’s case. This caught attention immediately.
Herdzog and his accomplice Wesley Shermanine were the speed freak killers convicted of multiple murders throughout California. Investigators checked old photos of Herzdog from the late 1980s. He really did look similar to the composite. Long blonde hair, facial structure, right age range. But there was a problem.
Herdzog had committed suicide in prison in January 2012, just a month before the inmate came forward. Wesley Shermanine, the other half, was still alive and willing to talk. Shermanine said he believed Herdzog was responsible for Michaela’s abduction and murder. He offered to lead police to locations where they’d buried victims over the years.
Police took him up on it. Shermanine led them to a well in Lynen, California, where he and Herzog had disposed of human remains. Excavation began. Forensic teams carefully sifted through everything. They found bone fragments, thousands of them, multiple victims. DNA testing identified five different young women and girls.
Five families finally got answers after years of not knowing. But none of the remains belonged to Michaela Garrett. Police excavated other wells the speed freak killers had used. Searched carefully, analyzed everything. Again, no sign of Michaela. Another promising lead that went nowhere. The investigation was back to square one.
By 2018, 30 years had passed since Michaela Garrett disappeared from that parking lot. 30 years of false leads. 30 years of suspects who went nowhere. 30 years of a family trapped in limbo. Sharon Garrett had devoted her entire life to finding Michaela. In the early years, she sat by the phone constantly. Later, she shifted her search online and started a blog called Dear Michaela, a collection of letters written to a daughter who would never read Them.
Sharon poured her heart into that blog. In one entry, she wrote, “I know you’re out there somewhere, Michaela. I know you can feel me searching for you. Come home, baby. Please come home.” She later renamed it Seeker’s Road and kept it updated for years, maintaining this fragile threat of hope.
But by 2018, Sharon was exhausted and she was dying. Metastatic cancer diagnosed in 2019. aggressive, spreading. She knew time was running out. She’d spent 30 years searching, 30 years hoping, and she still didn’t have answers. But while Sharon’s health failed, something else was happening. Something that would finally crack this case wide open.
In 2018, police in Fremont were investigating a cold case from 1986, a brutal double murder. Two young women, 18-year-old Michelle Xavier and her best friend, 20-year-old Jennifer Dwey, killed after a family birthday dinner. The case had gone unsolved for over three decades. But modern DNA technology was giving investigators new tools.
Biological material found under the victim’s fingernails in 1986, material that couldn’t be analyzed back then, was finally run through advanced DNA systems. They got a hit, a match. The DNA belonged to a man named David Emory Mish. When investigators dug into Mish’s background, they discovered he was already in prison, locked up since the late 1980s for murdering a woman named Margaret Ball.
Margaret had been 36 when she died in December 1988, just one month after Michaela disappeared. found by her step-daughter, brutally beaten and stabbed in a pool of blood. The attack was so violent her front tooth was found several feet from her body. Margaret had been Mish’s friend, someone who’d helped him during hard times. He’d repaid her kindness by murdering her.
Mish was convicted and sentenced to 18 years to life. As his health declined, he’d been transferred to the California Healthcare Facility. Now, with DNA evidence tying him to two more murders, investigators started looking at Mish much more carefully. And someone asked the question that would change everything.
Where was David Mish? On November 19th, 1988, detectives pulled Mish’s records, his known locations, his movements during that time. They discovered something chilling. On November 19th, 1988, the exact day Michaela was kidnapped, David Mish had been in the Hayward area, right near the Rainbow Market. They compared him to Katrina’s description.
Young man, early 20s. Mish was 27 in 1988. Close enough. Dirty blonde hair. Mish had dirty blonde hair in the 1980s. Severe acne scarring. Mish’s old booking photos showed significant acne marks. Blue eyes. Mish had blue eyes. The car. Mish had access to a beige damaged sedan matching what Katrina remembered.
Everything lined up. David Mish fit the profile perfectly. But matching a description wasn’t enough. They needed physical evidence. Something concrete tying Mish directly to the crime scene. Then someone remembered the fingerprint. That incomplete, damaged fingerprint from Michaela’s scooter, the one sitting in an evidence box for 32 years because 1988 technology couldn’t do anything with it.
Mish’s fingerprints were in the system from his arrest for Margaret Ball’s murder. This is where the story becomes a battle between science and time. In 1988, forensic technology was primitive by today’s standards. That 10% partial print was essentially useless, too degraded, too incomplete. They could see ridges and patterns, but not enough to make a database match.
The print just sat there. A piece of evidence that held the answer, but couldn’t speak. 32 years passed. Technology evolved. Advanced imaging systems were developed, computer algorithms that could enhance and analyze fragments that would have been impossible to process in the 1980s. Forensic experts pulled that old evidence out of storage.
They used modern digital enhancement techniques to clean up the image, used sophisticated software to map the partial patterns, compared it against Mish’s prints in the database using systems that didn’t exist three decades earlier, and they got a match. Science had finally caught up to the evidence.
After 32 years of waiting, that 10% fingerprint could finally tell its story. The partial print from Michaela Garrett’s scooter, the bait in the trap, belonged to David Emory Mish. They had him. On December 21st, 2020, the Alama County District Attorney’s Office and FBI held a joint press conference. David Mish, now 59 years old, was charged with the kidnapping and murder of Michaela Garrett.
also facing charges for the 1986 murders of Michelle Xavier and Jennifer Dwey. The press conference was packed. Reporters, camera crews, community members who’d followed this case for decades, and Michaela’s family. Rod Garrett, 71 years old now, had traveled over 100 miles to be there. He and Sharon had separated years ago, but stayed in contact, united by hope they’d someday get answers about their daughter.
When the announcement was made, Rod broke down. 32 years of waiting, of wondering, of hoping. I feel relieved, Rod told reporters. Relieved they caught someone. Hopefully, he’ll tell us where she is. But one person was missing. Sharon couldn’t come, too sick. Cancer had progressed too far.
She was essentially bedridden, fighting for every breath. Police Chief Tony Chaplain read Sharon’s statement. Words that would break your heart. Sharon said for years she’d imagined Michaela in heaven, resting on soft clouds, walking golden streets, dancing on green hills, soaring through the cosmos. I never imagined my daughter would be a victim of tragedy.
Her statement said it was only upon hearing this news that they arrested someone that there was evidence that reality crashed down. And I’m still trying to process it. For 32 years, Sharon had lived in not knowing, and somehow that had allowed hope to survive. Now, with concrete evidence Michaela had been murdered, that hope was finally definitively gone.
Sharon Garrett died in May 2022. Cancer took her before she could see justice served, before she knew where her daughter’s body was, before she could say goodbye. But at least she died knowing they’d caught him. So, who was David Emory Mish? born February 19th, 1961 in Chicago. By age 16, he was already committing violent crimes.
1977, age 16, broke into a house, sexually assaulted a maid at knife point, arrested, convicted, sent to prison, released on parole just one year later. February 1979, arrested for false imprisonment and assault with a deadly weapon. charges upgraded to assault with intent to rape. Released September 1981, July 1982, less than a year later, violently attacked another woman with a weapon.
Prison again, released January 1984. September 1984, indecent exposure. August 1985. Indecent exposure again. Driving around Oakland completely naked. The pattern was clear. David Mish was a predator, a violent repeat offender, and the system kept releasing him. May 1988, 6 months before Michaela’s kidnapping, arrested for breaking into a grocery store in San Leandro.
Sentenced to 1 year in prison plus probation. He served only 6 months. November 1988, David Mish walked out of prison free with a long history of violence against women with nothing stopping him from hurting someone else. That same month, November 19th, 1988, Michaela Garrett disappeared. One month later, December 1988, Mish murdered Margaret Ball.
The system had failed. Failed to keep a dangerous predator locked up. failed to protect Margaret, failed to protect Michaela. 32 years later, David Mish was finally being held accountable. When Mish was first charged in 2020, prosecutors announced they were seeking the death penalty or life without parole. Three counts of firstdegree murder, one count of kidnapping.
But in 2022, something changed. Alama County elected a new district attorney, Pamela Price. DA Price dropped all special circumstances in Mish’s case. What does that mean? Even if convicted of all three murders and the kidnapping, Mish would no longer face life without parole or death penalty.
Just additional decades added to his existing sentence. Public reaction was furious. Michael Clauss, father of murdered Poly Clauss, child safety advocate, called it a complete betrayal. Former Fremont Lieutenant Chuck Oer, who worked the 1986 double murder. If anybody ever deserved maximum punishment, it’s David Mish.
A legal analyst called it reckless, arguing that since Michaela’s body was never found, the threat of maximum punishment could have been leveraged to get Mish to reveal where she is. This is the poster case for life imprisonment to keep someone like this away from society forever. Mish’s defense attorney, Ernie Castillo, welcomed the decision.
He’s argued from the beginning, the evidence is weak. The fingerprint match after 32 years is questionable. No body, no confession, no other physical evidence. Castillo calls it junk science. Says investigators are pinning everything on Mish because it’s convenient. Lets them close multiple cold cases at once.
As for Mish himself, complete silence. Won’t talk about the crimes. Won’t discuss the evidence. won’t consider plea bargains. He won’t tell investigators where Michaela’s body is. Won’t give the Garrett family that final closure. And because of DA Price’s decision, he might avoid the harshest penalties, even if convicted.
But while the legal system argues real people’s lives were destroyed by what happened November 19th, 1988, Katrina Rodriguez is middle-aged now, married, moved to Texas, far from Hayward, far from the Rainbow Market, far from the memories. But she carries crushing guilt. The scooter that was moved, the trap was hers.
The one she’d borrowed from Michaela’s brother. It should have been me. Katrina has said if I’d gone to get the scooter, maybe I would have been taken instead. Maybe Michaela would still be here. That survivor’s guilt destroyed Katrina’s childhood memories. She suppressed almost everything from that time. Blocked it out. The pain is too much.
After the kidnapping, Katrina was terrified to see Sharon. Thought Sharon would blame her, hate her. But when they met, Sharon wrapped Katrina in a tight hug. Never blamed her for a second because Sharon understood. Katrina was just a 9-year-old girl who witnessed something traumatic. None of it was her fault.
Then there’s Libby, Michaela’s younger sister. Libby has no real memories of Mika, too young when it happened. All she remembers are images of her mother crying, her mother waiting, her mother never giving up. To Libby, Michaela isn’t a person with personality and quirks. She’s just a photograph, a frozen moment, a 9-year-old who will never age, never grow up, never become anything more than a memory. and Sharon.
In one of her final blog entries on Seeker’s Road, she wrote, “Ma, I don’t know if you can hear me wherever you are. I don’t know if my words reach you across whatever distance separates us, but I need you to know. I never stopped looking. I never stopped hoping. I never stopped loving you.
You were my miracle baby. You still are always.” Sharon died carrying that pain until her very last breath. As I’m recording this, David Mish is awaiting trial. He’s 62 years old. He’s been in prison most of his adult life and will likely die there regardless. But here’s what makes this case so maddening. Police wasted 48 critical hours chasing the wrong suspect because they didn’t properly interview the main witness fast enough.
While they hunted a 30-year-old man in a red car, the real monster drove away in a beige sedan with a 9-year-old girl who would never come home. They had the kidnapper’s fingerprint from day one. But 1988, technology couldn’t identify him. That evidence sat in a box for 32 years while science slowly caught up.
Multiple suspects investigated. Bender, Haggard, Anderson, Herzog, all dead ends, all wasted time, all wasted hope. And all the while, David Mish was right there in the California prison system, his fingerprints in the database, the evidence waiting. It just took three decades for technology to connect the dots.
32 years during which Sharon Garrett lived in agony. During which the family existed in limbo, during which Katrina carried guilt that wasn’t hers 32 years. And even now with a suspect in custody with evidence, we still don’t have all the answers. Where is Michaela’s body? What happened after she was taken? Did she suffer? How long was she alive? David Mish knows, but he’s not talking.
Police have offered a $10,000 reward for information about Michaela’s location. They’re still hoping someone somewhere knows something. But it’s been 36 years, and the chances get smaller with every year that passes. So, what’s the takeaway from this story? It’s a reminder of how forensic technology has evolved. That incomplete fingerprint was useless for 32 years.
But modern imaging and computer analysis finally made identification possible. Technology solved what nothing else could. It’s a warning about how the justice system fails us. David Mish was a repeat violent predator who should never have been released. But he kept getting out, kept getting chances, kept hurting people. until he destroyed multiple lives.
It’s a testament to a mother’s love. Sharon Garrett never stopped searching, never gave up on her miracle child. She dedicated her life to finding Michaela. Even when everyone said it was hopeless, even when years became decades, even when cancer was killing her, she fought until her last breath. And it’s a reminder that evil is real.
that monsters don’t always look like monsters. That a sunny Saturday morning in a safe neighborhood can become a nightmare in seconds. Two little girls rode scooters to buy candy. One never came home. Michaela Garrett would be 45 years old now if she’d lived. She might have gone to college, gotten married, had children, built a career, lived a full beautiful life.
But we’ll never know what she could have become. Because on November 19th, 1988, David Emory Mish took all of that away. He took a miracle child and turned her into a tragedy. The fora trial is coming. Justice may finally be served, however imperfect. But one thing will never change. Michaela Garrett is still missing. Her body has never been found.
And 36 years later, her family still doesn’t get to say goodbye. If you have any information about this case, about Michaela’s location, about anything that might help, please contact the Hayward Police Department. The $10,000 reward is still active. Thank you for watching, and please keep Michaela Garrett in your thoughts.
She was someone’s miracle child, and she’s still out there somewhere waiting to be brought
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
