The Cold Case That Solved With INSANE Twist
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 are 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 and waiting. His trap is already set. 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 the breakfast dishes while her husband Rod worked on the car outside. Their 9-year-old daughter, Michaela, was running back and forth between their house and her best friend, Katrina Rodriguez’s place across the street, trying on costumes for their upcoming school play.
Sharon and Rod had tried for 5 years to have Michaela. 5 years of doctor’s 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 her brother Alex. The family had moved to this peaceful Hayward neighborhood precisely because it felt safe.
Treeline streets, friendly neighbors, the kind of place where children could ride scooters to the corner store without a second thought. But Sharon was not like most mothers. She was protective, intensely protective because this was 1988 and California had a problem. Children were disappearing. Milk cartons across the state showed the faces of missing kids.
The evening news ran story after story about children vanishing from playgrounds, shopping malls, and their own front yards. Every night, Sharon watched those reports, and every night, she held her children a little tighter. She checked on them multiple times before bed. She woke 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 had waited 5 years for, consumed her completely. So, when Katrina knocked on her door that Saturday morning holding a coin her father had given her, asking if Michaela could ride to the Rainbow Market to buy candy, Sharon stood there looking at her daughter’s hopeful face.
The store was only four blocks away. They had 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 the scooter belonging to Michaela’s brother. And just before they pushed off, Michaela turned back one last time. I love you, Mom. Then she disappeared down the street, blonde hair catching the sunlight. Laughter trailing behind her. Sharon went back to her dishes. Rod kept working on the car.
It was 10:00 in the morning. The first day 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 was not an adventure. It was routine. They went there almost every 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, paid, and walked back out.
They were talking and laughing, excited about the holiday and their costumes and everything that two 9-year-old best friends talk about on a sunny Saturday morning. And because they were so distracted, they forgot their scooters. They actually began walking home before Michaela stopped herself. Wait, our scooter? Both girls hurried back to the parking lot.
That is when they noticed something wrong. Michaela’s scooter was missing. Not stolen. Moved. Deliberately relocated three parking spaces away, leaning against a car. This was not random. This was not opportunity. This was a trap that had been carefully and deliberately set. “There it is,” Katrina pointed. Michaela walked over to retrieve it.
She bent down to reach the handlebars, and in one explosive second, a man burst out of the car, grabbed her around the waist, and threw her into the back seat. Katrina stood completely frozen. Her mind could not process what her eyes were showing her. The door slammed. The engine roared. The car shot out of the parking lot and vanished down Mission Boulevard.
Michaela Garrett was gone for perhaps 5 seconds. Katrina just stood there. Shock does that. It freezes your body while your mind screams at you to move. Then something clicked inside her. She ran back into the Rainbow Market as fast as her legs would carry her and started yelling. A man took Michaela. He grabbed her and drove away.
The cashier, Rona Roland, called police immediately. Officers arrived within minutes. Patrol cars flooded the parking lot. Officers interviewed customers, secured the scene, and searched for evidence. Rona also called Katrina’s father, who rushed to the store. Then someone had to make the call that no parent should ever receive.
At home, Sharon was still at the sink. Rod was still working outside. They had no idea their daughter had been gone for 20 minutes. When Rod heard urgent shouting from the street, he didn’t understand what was happening 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 calling 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 raced 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 sitting on the curb crying and shaking and barely able to speak. Rod kept asking the same desperate question over and over. 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 beside the phone. Everyone assumed this was a kidnapping for ransom. A man snatches a 9-year-old in broad daylight. He must want something. money, a deal, the phone would ring. They would negotiate. This would be resolved somehow.
The phone never rang. Not that day, not that week, not ever. This was not about ransom. This was something far worse. Police faced an immediate and crippling problem. There were no surveillance cameras. Not on the building, not in the parking lot, not on the surrounding streets. This was 1988. Security footage was not everywhere the way it is today.
Small stores often had nothing, so their only witnesses were Katrina and the people who had been near the Rainbow Market that morning. Cashier Rona Roland provided the first description. She had noticed a suspicious man outside before the kidnapping. He had parked his car and gotten out, but never came inside.
He simply lingered, peering through the windows, watching people. His behavior was so unusual, she had wondered whether he was planning to rob the store. white male, around 30 years old, large mustache, driving an old dark red car, burgundy or maroon, though she couldn’t identify the make or get the plate. Police created a composite sketch immediately.
Within hours, it was distributed to every station in the area. Broadcast on TV news and printed in newspapers across the region. Michaela’s kidnapping became the lead story throughout the Bay Area. Hundreds of patrol officers began stopping every dark red older vehicle they encountered, hoping to find a terrified 9-year-old inside. They were chasing a ghost.
Meanwhile, investigators sent Michaela’s scooter to the forensics lab. Their theory was chilling. The suspect had 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 did not belong to Michaela, Katrina, or anyone in either family.
This was the kidnapper’s print, the key piece of evidence in the entire case. But there was a devastating problem. The print was incomplete and damaged. Only about 10% of the full fingerprint could be recovered. And in 1988, with the technology available, that 10% was essentially useless. They could not search databases with such a fragment.
It could only be used for direct comparison, which meant they would need a suspect in custody first. So that crucial piece of evidence went into a storage box filed away, waiting, waiting for 32 years. While investigators worked the scene, Sharon sat at home drowning in guilt.
She kept replaying the morning over and over. Michaela asking permission, her hesitation the moment she said yes, those last words. >> I love you, Mom. >> If only she had said no. If only she had 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 was not an early riser.” She loved sleeping in. “Honey, why are you awake?” “I’m writing a poem,” Michaela said, her voice still groggy. “What is it about Michaela?” Didn’t want to explain at first, but Sharon kept asking. I woke up because I heard noises in the attic and it 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 somewhere, trapped for a long time. Sharon had been disturbed by it at the time, but convinced herself it was simply a child’s imagination, processing fears she had absorbed from the news, now sitting beside the phone, waiting for word about her missing daughter.
That poem felt like something else entirely. Had Michaela somehow sensed something coming. Was it a premonition? A glimpse into her own future? Sharon would carry that question for the rest of her life. By evening, the FBI joined the investigation. Hayward and the surrounding towns were experiencing an alarming increase in missing children cases, and the FBI suspected a serial predator was operating throughout the Bay Area.
Despite FBI involvement, despite saturation media coverage, despite hundreds of tips flooding into the department, the investigation was going nowhere. And then investigators realized their catastrophic mistake. For two full 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 circulated. That was the profile hundreds of officers were actively searching for. In the process, they had completely overlooked Katrina, the actual eyewitness. the girl who had looked directly into the kidnapper’s face before he drove away with her best friend.
Katrina had been so traumatized on that first day that she could barely speak. Officers had collected a basic statement, but never conducted a full and proper interview. Two critical days passed. No dark red car, no man with a mustache, nothing. Finally, investigators went to Katrina’s home to conduct a real interview. what she told them changed everything and revealed that they had just squandered the most important 48 hours of the entire investigation.
Two days had passed since Michaela disappeared. 48 critical hours and police were about to discover they had been hunting entirely the wrong person. When detectives finally sat down with Katrina Rodriguez for a proper interview, what she described dismantled everything they thought they knew. The man who took Michaela was not 30 years old. He was young, early 20s.
He had no mustache. Instead, he had long, dirty blonde hair hanging to his shoulders. His face was marked with severe acne scarring and his eyes. Katrina said she would never forget those eyes blue, she told detectives. But not normal blue, like fox eyes. Sharp and piercing. He stared right at me, but it was like he was looking through me like I wasn’t even there. The car was not dark red.
It was beige tan, a boxy, older sedan covered in dents. The detectives felt the ground shift beneath them. Everything was wrong. The sketch, the vehicle description, the entire suspect profile that had been sent to every police station in California. While they had been looking for a 30-year-old man in a burgundy car, the real predator had been driving away in a beige sedan with a terrified 9-year-old girl in the back seat.
Every hour spent chasing the wrong description was an hour Michaela had gotten farther away. An hour closer to whatever nightmare was waiting for her, a new composite was created immediately. young man, early 20s, long blonde hair, severe acne scarring, those haunting fox eyes. But the damage was irreversible. The most critical window in any missing person’s case, those first 48 hours when the chance of finding someone alive is greatest, had been completely lost.
The investigation was forced to start over from the beginning. Volunteers flooded the streets of Hayward. Dozens knocked on doors, spoke with residents, and handed out flyers. Within days, 42,000 flyers had been distributed across the Bay Area showing Michaela’s photograph and a description of what she had been wearing.
A white metro t-shirt, rolled blue jeans, black Mary Jane shoes, pearl feather earrings, police visited every registered sex offender in the surrounding area, checking alibis, and looking for anyone matching the revised description. Tips poured in. 4,000 in the first 10 months alone. Each one had to be followed up. Each one led nowhere.
Then hikers in a national park near Hayward made a discovery. Footprints, two sets, one adult, one child. Following the trail, they found a blanket and empty fast food rappers in a remote section of the forest. Police rushed to the location. An FBI profiler noted that if the kidnapper was keeping Michaela alive, he would choose somewhere remote.
The park was a perfect fit. A massive search operation began immediately. Officers on foot, helicopters equipped with thermal imaging cameras sweeping through the dense tree cover. Hours became days. Nothing. No sign of Michaela. No sign of her abduction. The search expanded to other parks, mountains, and remote areas across the region. Still nothing.
Michaela Garrett had vanished like smoke, and the man who took her had disappeared just as completely. By this point, the case had exploded into national attention. Unsolved mysteries featured it in one of their earliest child abduction episodes. Michaela’s photograph appeared on over a million milk cartons across California.
The missing children’s program distributed 50 million cards nationwide carrying her image and the revised suspect sketch. Even celebrities became involved. Joe Montana, the San Francisco 49ers quarterback, made public appeals and personally begged for information. A reward of $70,000 was offered. Then it climbed higher.
Despite everything, national attention, the reward money, thousands of volunteers, full FBI involvement, investigators had nothing solid to show for it. By December, a month and a half after the kidnapping, police held a press conference and acknowledged publicly that they had no real leads. They had checked thousands of tips, interviewed hundreds of people, and searched countless locations.
They were no closer to finding Michaela than they had been on day one. Months became years. Tips kept arriving. Police kept following up. Sharon launched her own private investigation, studying similar cases from across the country and looking for patterns that might point to her daughter.
Everyone held on to the hope that Michaela would somehow find her way home. She never did. Then in 1991, 3 years after the kidnapping, investigators turned their attention to a new suspect, Timothy Binder, 43 years old. And the more they uncovered about him, the more disturbing the picture became. Binder had been sending unsolicited gifts and money to young girls he had no connection to.
Parents had filed complaints. When questioned about it, he claimed he was simply being friendly and generous. But there was considerably more to the story. The gifts often included Bible verses with specific sentences underlined. Sentences reading. I chose you. Be with me. Police discovered that Bender had been dismissed from his position at Colorado Social Services in 1985 after he was caught collecting the home addresses of young girls from client files and mailing them gifts without any authorization. When officers searched
his van, they found photographs of children everywhere, Bible passages taped to the walls, crayon drawings. The van was light blue and bore a custom license plate reading, “Love you.” He had been arrested previously for attempting to lure young girls into the vehicle. The charges had been dropped. His only standing conviction was for public intoxication.
But what made Binder truly alarming was his pattern of inserting himself into active missing children investigations. 6 months before Michaela vanished, a 7-year-old girl named Amber disappeared. Binder showed up at her mother’s door offering to help and visited the family repeatedly. He even sent a written prediction to police stating that the next victim would be a 9-year-old girl.
Then Michaela, aged nine, disappeared. When the search for Michaela began, Bender repeated the behavior. He called Sharon constantly, showed up at her home and made himself available as a volunteer. In December 1988, he mailed a Christmas card to an FBI profiler depicting a girl holding up four fingers.
Weeks later, 4-year-old Amanda Campbell disappeared from Fairfield. He was also connected to the disappearance of 13-year-old Eileene from Dublin. The pattern was impossible to ignore. This man had documented connections to multiple missing children cases across the Bay Area. Police obtained a warrant and searched his home thoroughly. They found nothing.
No physical evidence linking him to any crime. When news of the investigation into Binder became public, the community’s reaction was explosive. People blamed him for every missing child case in the region. His life became unlivable under the weight of constant harassment and threats. Binder eventually sued the city of Fairfield for defamation. He won.
Investigators quietly backed away. Many concluded that Binder was simply a deeply disturbed individual who inserted himself into tragedies to satisfy some compulsive need to feel important. Dangerous. Certainly a killer. They could not prove it. The investigation moved on. Four more years passed. December 1992. Still no Michaela.
Then from a prison in Indiana, an inmate named Roger Haggard contacted police with a startling claim. He said he knew who had taken Michaela. he had helped conceal evidence. He could lead them to where her body was buried. Investigators were deeply skeptical, but when they showed no interest in pursuing his claims, Haggard wrote directly to the San Francisco Chronicle.
The newspaper published his story. Public outrage erupted. Police came under enormous pressure. They brought Haggard from Indiana to California and questioned him at length. He promised to deliver not only the location of Michaela’s remains, but the identity of her killer. Police took him to a field of gladiolas in Union City, close to the area where a Michaela had been taken.
Officers began digging at 8:00 in the morning. Forensic teams worked carefully, methodically, hoping to finally bring the Garrett family some form of closure. Hours passed. The digging continued. And 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 explanation was incomprehensible. He said he had wanted to give Michaela’s family comfort. He wanted to help them find a way to move forward. Instead, he had handed them false hope and then yanked it away without warning. The family was devastated. Police were furious. The community felt profoundly betrayed.
Haggard received an additional 6 to 12 years added to his existing sentence, nearly 20 years in total, along with $6,000 in restitution to the Garrett family for the emotional harm he had caused. Another dead end in a case that seemed to be built from nothing but dead ends. Eight more years passed. August 2000.
Michaela had been missing for 12 years. Police in Vallejo arrested a man named Curtis Dean Anderson for the kidnapping of 8-year-old Missy Sanchez. Fortunately, Missy managed to escape and her courage led directly to Anderson’s capture. Anderson confessed to another crime as well, the kidnapping and murder of 7-year-old Zeanna Fairchild in 1999.
Investigators suspected additional connections to other cases, but could not establish proof. 7 years later in 2007, Anderson was dying of kidney and liver failure. He wanted to confess before the end. He contacted the FBI with a horrifying disclosure. He claimed to have murdered 13 additional women and girls over the years.
Victims police had no knowledge of. One of them was Amber, the 7-year-old who had disappeared 6 months before Michaela. The same case Timothy Binder had inserted himself into Anderson provided enough specific detail that investigators believed him, but there was no physical evidence to corroborate his claims.
As for Michaela, Anderson denied any involvement. He said he had nothing to do with her case. But here’s the detail that caught investigators attention. Anderson had driven a car matching Katrina’s description precisely, a brown 1977 Chevrolet sedan. In 1989, police had actually pulled him over while driving that exact vehicle.
FBI agents were preparing to question Anderson more thoroughly about Michaela and his other alleged victims. Before they could, Curtisine Anderson died on December 9th, 2007. His death left investigators exactly where they had always been. No answers, no closure, just more dead ends piling on top of each other. Five more years passed.
In 2012, 24 years since Michaela had vanished, a prison inmate reached out with new information. His former cellmate, convicted killer Lauren Herzog, looked strikingly similar to the suspect sketch from Michaela’s case. This immediately captured investigators attention. Herzog and his partner Wesley Shermanine were known as the speed freak killers convicted of multiple murders throughout California.
When investigators compared old photographs of Herzog from the late 1980s, the resemblance to the composite was genuinely notable. Long blonde hair, similar facial structure, the right age range. But there was a problem. Herzog had taken his own life in prison in January 2012, just 1 month before the inmate came forward.
Shermanine, the other half of the pair, was still alive and expressed willingness to cooperate. He told police he believed Herzog was responsible for Michaela’s abduction and murder. He offered to take officers to locations where he and Herzog had disposed of victims over the years. Police accepted the offer. Shermanine led them to a well in London, California. Excavation began.
Forensic teams worked carefully through everything they uncovered. They found bone fragments, thousands of them belonging to multiple victims. DNA testing identified the remains of five different young women and girls. Five families finally received the answers they had spent years waiting for, but none of the remains belonged to Michaela Garrett.
Police excavated additional sites associated with the Speedfree killers and analyzed everything recovered. Again, no trace of Michaela. Another promising lead that dissolved into nothing. The investigation returned to Square 1. By 2018, 30 years had passed since Michaela Garrett disappeared from that parking lot. 30 years of false leads.
30 years of suspects who led nowhere. 30 years of a family suspended in a state of agonizing uncertainty. Sharon Garrett had devoted her entire existence to finding Michaela. In the early years, she sat beside the phone constantly, refusing to move far from it. Later, she shifted her search online and created a blog called Dear Michaela, a collection of open letters written to a daughter who could never read them.
Sharon poured everything she had 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 Seekers Road and kept writing, maintaining this fragile thread of hope that refused to break. But by 2018, Sharon was exhausted and she was dying.
Metastatic cancer diagnosed in 2019. Aggressive and spreading. She knew time was running out. She had spent 30 years searching in 30 years hoping, and she still did not have answers. But while Sharon’s health was failing, something else was quietly happening. something that would finally crack this case open. In 2018, police in Fremont were working 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, had been killed following a family birthday dinner. The case had gone unsolved for over three decades, but modern DNA technology was giving investigators tools that had not existed before. Biological material collected from beneath the victim’s fingernails in 1986.
Material that could not be meaningfully analyzed at the time was finally processed through advanced DNA systems. They got a hit. The DNA belonged to a man named David Emory Mish. When investigators examined Mish’s background, they discovered he was already in prison, incarcerated since the late 1988, just one month after Michaela disappeared.
She had been found by her stepdaughter brutally beaten and stabbed in a pool of blood. The attack had been so savage that one of her front teeth was found several feet from her body. Margaret had been Mish’s friend, someone who had offered him support during a difficult period in his life. He repaid her kindness by killing her.
Mish was convicted and sentenced to 18 years to life. As his health declined, he had been transferred to the California Healthcare Facility. Now, with DNA evidence connecting him to two additional murders, investigators began examining Mish far more carefully. And then someone asked the question that would change everything.
Where was David Mish on November 19th, 1988? The exact day Michaela was abducted, David Mish had been in the Hayward area, right near the Rainbow Market. They compared him against 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.
His old booking photographs showed significant acne marks across his face. Blue eyes. Mish had blue eyes. The car. Mish had access to a beige damaged sedan that matched what Katrina remembered. Everything aligned. David Mish fit the profile with disturbing precision. But matching a description was not enough. They needed physical evidence, something concrete and direct tying Mish 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 had been unable to do anything meaningful with it. Mish’s fingerprints were already 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 any modern standard. That 10% partial print was essentially without value, too degraded, too incomplete. Examiners could see ridges and partial patterns, but not nearly enough to generate a database match. The print simply sat there, a piece of evidence that held the answer, but could not yet speak it. 32 years passed.
Technology evolved in ways no one working that crime scene in 1988 could have imagined. Advanced imaging systems were developed. Computer algorithms emerged that could enhance and reconstruct fragments that would have been entirely unworkable in the 1980s. Forensic experts retrieved that old evidence from storage.
They applied modern digital enhancement techniques to clarify the image. They used sophisticated pattern mapping software to analyze the partial ridges. They compared the result against Mish’s prints in the database using systems that had not existed three decades earlier. And they got a match. Science had finally caught up to the evidence.
After 32 years of waiting in a box, that 10% fingerprint could finally tell its story. The partial print recovered from Michaela Garrett’s scooter, the bait that had been used to spring the trap, belonged to David Emery Mish. They had him. On December 21st, 2020, the Alama County District Attorney’s Office and the FBI held a joint press conference.
David Mish, now 59 years old, was charged with the kidnapping and murder of Michaela Garrett. He was also charged with the 1986 murders of Michelle Xavier and Jennifer Dwey. The press conference drew reporters, camera crews, community members who had followed this case for decades, and Michaela’s family.
Rod Garrett, now 71 years old, had traveled over a 100 miles to be present. He and Sharon had separated years earlier, but remained in contact, bound together by the hope they had shared for so long that they would 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 from that press conference. Sharon could not be there. The cancer had progressed too far. She was essentially bedritten, fighting for every breath. Police Chief Tony Chaplan read Sharon’s statement aloud to the room.
Her words were enough to break anyone who heard them. Sharon said that for years she had imagined Michaela in heaven, resting on soft clouds, walking golden streets, dancing across green hills, soaring through the cosmos. She had never allowed herself to imagine that her daughter had been a victim of something terrible. It was only upon learning that someone had been arrested, that evidence existed, pointing to what had happened, that reality had finally come crashing down, and she was still trying to process it.
For 32 years, Sharon had lived inside the uncertainty of not knowing. And somehow that uncertainty had kept hope alive. Now, with concrete evidence that Michaela had been murdered, that hope was definitively gone. Sharon Garrett died in May 2022. Cancer took her before she could see justice served, before she learned where her daughter’s body was, before she could say a final goodbye.
But at least she died knowing they had caught him. So who exactly was David Emory Mish? Born February 19th, 1961 in Chicago. By the age of 16, he was already committing violent crimes. In 1977, at 16 years old, he broke into a house and sexually assaulted a woman at knife point. He was arrested, convicted, sent to prison, and released on parole after just one year.
In February 1979, he was arrested again for false imprisonment and assault with a deadly weapon. Charges that were upgraded to assault with intent to rape. He was released in September 1980. By July 1982, less than a year later, he had violently attacked another woman with a weapon, prison again. Released in January 1984, September 1984, indecent exposure.
August 1985, indecent exposure again. This time driving through Oakland completely naked. The pattern was unmistakable. David Mish was a violent predator and the system kept releasing him back into the world. In May 1988, 6 months before Michaela’s kidnapping, he was arrested for breaking into a grocery store in San Leandro.
He was sentenced to 1 year in prison plus probation and served only 6 months. In November 1988, David Mish walked out of prison. a man with a long and escalating history of violence against women with nothing standing between him and his next victim. That same month on November 19th, 1988, Miila Garrett disappeared. One month later, in December 1988, Meech murdered Margaret Ball.
The system had failed. Failed to keep a dangerous predator off the streets. 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 first-degree murder and one count of kidnapping. But in 2022, something changed. Alama County elected a new district attorney, Pamela Price. DA Price dropped all special circumstances allegations in Mish’s case. What this meant in practice was significant. Even if convicted on all three murder charges and the kidnapping, Mish would no longer face the death penalty or life without the possibility of parole.
He would receive additional decades added to his existing sentence, but nothing more. The public reaction was furious. Michael Klouse, the father of murdered polylouse and a prominent child safety advocate, called it a complete betrayal. Former Fremont Lieutenant Chuck Orur, who had worked the 1986 double murder case, said bluntly, “If anybody ever deserved maximum punishment, it is David Mish.
” A legal analyst called the decision reckless, arguing that since Michaela’s body had never been recovered, the threat of maximum sentencing could have been used as powerful leverage to compel Mish to disclose her location. As another analyst put it, “This is the poster case for life. Imprisonment to keep someone like this away from society forever.
Mish’s defense attorney, Ernie Castile, welcomed the decision. He has argued throughout that the evidence against his client is fundamentally weak. A fingerprint match made after 32 years is questionable at best. There is no body, no confession, no other physical evidence connecting Meech to the crime. Castillo has called the forensic work junk science and argued that investigators are pinning these cases on Mish because it is convenient, allowing them to close multiple cold cases simultaneously.
As for Mish himself, he has maintained complete silence. He will not discuss the crimes. He will not address the evidence he refuses to consider any plea arrangement. And he will not tell investigators where Michaela’s body is. Will not give the Garrett family the final closure they have waited more than three decades for.
And because of DA Price’s decision, he may avoid the harshest possible penalties, even if the jury convicts him on every charge. But while the legal system argues and maneuvers, real lives continue to carry the weight of what happened on November 19th, 1988. Katrina Rodriguez is middle-aged now, married. She moved to Texas long ago, putting distance between herself and Hayward, between herself and the Rainbow Market, between herself and the memories she has never fully escaped.
But she carries a guilt that has never lifted. The scooter that was moved, the trap that was set, it was not Michaela’s scooter. It was the one Katrina had borrowed from Michaela’s brother. The trap was for her. It should have been me. Katrina said, “If I had gone to get the scooter, maybe it would have been me instead. Maybe Michaela would still be alive.
” That survivor’s guilt destroyed Katrina’s ability to hold on to her childhood memories. She suppressed almost everything from that time, built walls around the memories because the pain of accessing them was too much to bear. After the kidnapping, Katrina was terrified to face Sharon. She was convinced Sharon would blame her, would hate her for surviving, while Michaela did not.
But when they finally met, Sharon wrapped Katrina in a tight embrace and held her. She never blamed Katrina for a single second because Sharon understood Katrina had been a 9-year-old girl who witnessed something no child should ever have to see. None of it was her fault. None of it was ever her fault. Then there’s Libby, Michaela’s younger sister.
Libby has no real memories of Michaela. She was too young when it happened. What she remembers are fragments of her childhood. Images of her mother crying. Her her mother waiting beside the phone. Her mother never giving up and never moving on to Libby. Mika is not a person with a personality and quirks and an infectious laugh. She is a photograph.
A frozen moment. A 9-year-old who will never age, never grow up, never become anything beyond the memory of who she was on a sunny Saturday morning when she rode her scooter four blocks to buy candy. and Sharon. In one of her final entries on Seeker’s Road, she wrote, “Mika, 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 love and that pain until her very last breath.
As of this recording, David Mish is awaiting trial. He is 62 years old. He has spent most of his adult life in prison and will very likely die there regardless of the outcome. But here’s what makes this case so deeply and permanently maddening. Police wasted 48 critical hours chasing the wrong suspect because they failed to conduct a proper interview with the one witness who had seen everything.
While they hunted a 30-year-old man in a dark red car, the real predator 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 could not speak its secrets. That evidence sat in a storage box for 32 years while science slowly, painstakingly caught up to it.
Multiple suspects were investigated over the decades. Binder Haggard, Anderson Herzog, every single one a dead end. Every single one a source of wasted time and shattered hope. And all the while, David Mish was right there inside the California prison system. his fingerprints already in the database, the evidence already in storage.
It simply took three decades for technology to connect them. 32 years during which Sharon Garrett lived in unrelenting agony, during which an entire family existed in a state of suspension, during which Katrina carried guilt that was never hers to carry, 32 years, and even now with a suspect in custody and evidence on the table, we still do not have all the answers.
Where is Michaela’s body? What happened in the hours and days after she was taken? Did she suffer? How long was she alive? David Mish knows all of it. He is not talking. Police have offered a $10,000 reward for any information about Michaela’s location. They are still hoping someone somewhere knows something, but it has been 36 years now, and the chances grow smaller with every year that passes.
So, what does this case leave us with? It is a reminder of how dramatically forensic technology has evolved. That incomplete fingerprint was a useless fragment for 32 years. Modern imaging and computer analysis finally made it speak. Technology solved what nothing else could. It is a warning about how catastrophically the justice system can fail.
David Mish was a violent repeat predator who should never have been released. He kept getting out. He kept getting chances. He kept hurting people until he destroyed multiple lives. The system that was supposed to protect Michaela and Margaret Ball had released the man who would kill them both. It is a testament to what a mother’s love can look like at its most determined and most heartbreaking.
Sharon Garrett never stopped searching, never gave up, never accepted that her miracle child was simply gone and that was the end of the story. She devoted her entire life to finding Michaela. Even when everyone else moved on, even when years became decades, even when cancer was taking her life one day at a time, she fought until her last breath.
And it is a reminder that evil does not always announce itself. That monsters do not always look like monsters. That a perfectly ordinary sunny Saturday morning in a safe neighborhood can become a nightmare in under a minute. Two little girls rode scooters to buy candy. One never came home. Michaela Garrett would be 45 years old today if she had lived.
She might have gone to college, fallen in love, raised children of her own, built a career, grown old surrounded by the people who loved her. But we will never know what she might 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 trial is coming.
Justice may finally be served, however imperfect and however delayed. But one thing will not change. Michaela Garrett is still missing. Her body has never been found. And 36 years later, her family still cannot say goodbye. If you have any information about this case, about Michaela’s location, about anything at all that might help bring her home, please contact the Hayward Police Department.
The $10,000 reward remains active. Michaela Garrett was someone’s miracle child. She is still out there somewhere waiting to be brought
