On the morning of Saturday, November 19, 1988, nine-year-old Michaela Joy Garecht asked her mother if she could walk to the Rainbow Market, located just two buildings from their home in Hayward, California. Her mother, Sharon, hesitated at first, but Michaela pleaded with her. When Sharon finally agreed, Michaela jumped with joy and said, “Oh, boy!” It was the last time Sharon ever saw her daughter.
Michaela and her best friend, Katrina Rodriguez, rode scooters to the store, bought some snacks, and began walking home. Someone had moved one of the scooters to the side of a strange car in the parking lot. When Michaela bent down to pick it up, a hand reached out from the driver’s seat, grabbed the girl, and pulled her into the front seat. Michaela screamed. Katrina stood just a few feet away, nine years old and completely helpless, watching the car speed onto Mission Boulevard and disappear.
The FBI sent six agents to Hayward. A sketch of the kidnapper was distributed across the San Francisco Bay Area within 24 hours. More than 4,000 tips came in during the first month. Police found an incomplete palm print on the abandoned scooter. They checked it against every database available, but without success. Nothing was found during the first year, or the 32 years that followed.
During that time, Michaela’s mother separated from her husband, battled cancer, moved to Iowa, wrote a blog to her daughter weekly, and bought a birthday gift every year for the child whose whereabouts remained unknown. Several of California’s most notorious killers were investigated and then ruled out. Bones were exhumed from an abandoned well and subjected to DNA testing, but again without success. Every lead ended in a dead end.
Then, in 2020, a fingerprint expert sat down and manually compared the 32-year-old palm print with that of a serial killer already in prison. The prints matched. The answer had been there all along, for three decades. This is the story of the kidnapping that shook the San Francisco Bay Area, the killer hiding in plain sight, and the mother who never gave up.
Michaela Joy Garecht was born on January 24, 1979, in Oakland, California, the first child of Rod and Sharon Garecht. The family lived on Cornell Street in Hayward, a quiet East Bay suburb of single-story homes where children still rode bikes in the street without constant supervision. Michaela had three younger siblings, two boys and two girls. She was in the fifth grade, loved singing and drawing, and enjoyed playing Triominos with the family in the evenings. They called her Kayla.
Sharon later wrote that Michaela was the child she had wished for during the five years before her birth, a wish that came from the depths of her heart. The girl had a captivating smile, the kind that made adults laugh even when they didn’t know why. In the late 1980s, Hayward was a city where parents still allowed their children to walk to the nearest store. The Rainbow Market was located at 3975 Mission Boulevard, just four buildings from the Garecht home. Michaela had visited it many times. Her parents had one rule: always go with a friend.
November 19, 1988, was a Saturday, the first day of the Thanksgiving holiday. Katrina Rodriguez, Michaela’s best friend, came over to play. Katrina’s father gave the girls five dollars to buy snacks. Around 10 a.m., Michaela ran to her mother’s room to ask permission. Sharon hesitated. Something made her not want to let her daughter go. That feeling would stay with her for the rest of her life. But Michaela begged, and Sharon gave in. Michaela jumped with joy and said, “Oh, boy!” Then she ran outside with Katrina.
The girls rode their scooters along Cornell Street, turned onto Mission Boulevard, and reached the Rainbow Market. They parked the scooters at the front door, went inside, and bought candy and sodas. Around 10:15, they came out. Both started walking home, forgetting the scooters. After a few steps, Katrina remembered. They turned back. One scooter was still in place. The other had been moved. It was lying in the parking lot a few feet from the store, next to a strange car.
It was not a coincidence. The kidnapper had deliberately moved the scooter, placing it in front of his car door to lure one of the girls and separate her from the other. It was a trap, and it worked. Michaela walked toward the scooter. Katrina stayed near the store. The distance between the girls was only a few meters, but it was the distance between life and death.
When Michaela bent down to pick up the scooter, the driver’s door suddenly opened. A hand grabbed her and pulled her into the front seat with such speed that she barely had time to react, but she screamed. Katrina heard her friend’s scream and looked up. She saw Michaela being forced into the car, saw the door slam shut, saw the car pull out of the lot, then speed onto Mission Boulevard. Katrina, nine years old, stood watching her best friend disappear before her eyes in a matter of seconds. She ran into the store screaming for help.
Store employees rushed outside. The parking lot was empty. The car, the kidnapper, and Michaela were gone. Katrina described the kidnapper to police with remarkable detail for a nine-year-old who had just witnessed the worst moment of her life. He was a white male, between 18 and 20 years old, about 6 feet tall, roughly 175 pounds, thin build, with pale blond hair reaching his shoulders. His face was full of scars, with obvious acne marks, and his eyes were sharp blue, the kind Katrina later described as fox eyes. He wore a white shirt.
The car was an older American four-door sedan, large, brown or cream or pale yellow, looking worn out, possibly with cement stains on its sides and a light mounted on the rear bumper. A sketch was drawn the same day and distributed across the Bay Area within 24 hours. Hayward police responded quickly. The next day, the FBI sent six agents. One of their first actions was a computer search matching the kidnapper’s description against local registered sex offenders.
Police followed a lead from a psychic who claimed Michaela was under a tree near a pond in Garin Park. They searched the area but found nothing. On November 30, Joe Montana, the San Francisco 49ers quarterback, appeared on national television to appeal for help in bringing Michaela home. Tips poured in. By the end of December 1988, roughly 4,000 tips had been received. Investigation costs exceeded $500,000, a huge sum for a police department the size of Hayward’s. None of the tips led to Michaela.
On the scooter left at the scene, forensic experts found a thumbprint and an incomplete palm print. Police hoped this would be the key to the case. They compared the prints against every existing database, military records, and lists of known criminals. Nothing. Palm prints are much harder to match than fingerprints. Databases in 1988 were not designed for large-scale palm print comparison. The best evidence police had was something they couldn’t use.
The largest search in Hayward’s history produced nothing. No body, no ransom demand, no witness other than Katrina, no lead pointing to a name. Michaela Joy Garecht vanished in broad daylight in front of her best friend, four blocks from her home, swallowed by the world without leaving a trace except a faint palm print on a scooter. That print was kept in the file, waiting for 32 years.
News of Michaela Garecht’s abduction spread across the Bay Area within hours and changed how every family in the region viewed Saturday mornings. This was not a nighttime abduction, not in a dangerous neighborhood, not by someone known. A young child was taken from a grocery store parking lot in broad daylight, four blocks from her home, in front of her best friend. If it could happen in Hayward, it could happen anywhere. Parents across the East Bay began keeping their children inside. Schools held personal safety seminars. The community organized vigils and marches. But all the attention did not bring Michaela home.
The first weeks were a private hell for the Garecht family. Sharon stood at the front door waiting for her daughter. Waiting for a call from Michaela. Waiting for Michaela to appear in the back of a police car. Waiting for any sign that she was still alive. Days turned into weeks, weeks into months. The phone rang constantly, but the call was never the one she was waiting for.
Rod Garecht, Michaela’s father, experienced the same pain differently. He was a practical man, the type who tries to control what can be controlled. But there was nothing to control. His daughter was gone, and no one could tell him why, or who did it, or whether she was still alive. That helplessness consumed everything. Within a year of the abduction, Sharon and Rod separated. It was not an exception. Studies show that divorce rates in families whose children are abducted or murdered are far higher than the general population. Grief does not bring people together; it drives them apart. Each had a different version of the tragedy, and those two versions could not live under one roof.
Sharon was forced to leave her job. She couldn’t focus, couldn’t function normally, couldn’t pretend life was moving forward while her daughter was somewhere, possibly screaming for help. She became fiercely protective of her remaining children, two boys and two girls. Each one had to follow rules that didn’t exist before. No going out alone. No leaving the mother’s sight. No going anywhere without the mother knowing exactly where, with whom, and when they would return. Sharon admitted this later, saying, “I didn’t give them much freedom.” She knew she was suffocating her children with fear, but she couldn’t do otherwise. Every time a child walked out the door, she saw Michaela jumping and saying, “Oh, boy!” and never coming back.
Then there were the gifts. This is the detail any parent understands immediately without explanation. Sharon kept buying gifts for Michaela every year, for every occasion, as if the girl were still at home. She bought a Barbie doll in a graduation gown for the day Michaela was supposed to graduate from high school. She bought the children’s book “I Promise I’ll Find You” for Michaela’s eighteenth birthday. A book Sharon turned into a personal vow. The next year, she bought a parrot. She bought the gifts, wrapped them, and set them aside. No one opened them. They accumulated in Sharon’s home like monuments to a stolen childhood. Each gift represented a milestone Michaela was supposed to live but never had the chance to experience.
Imagine that. A mother buying birthday gifts for her missing daughter for decades, not because she believed the child would open them, but because stopping meant admitting her daughter was dead. And Sharon was not ready to do that.
Libby, Michaela’s younger sister, grew up in her sister’s shadow. There is a moment Libby remembered from childhood, one of those innocent things children say that carry a truth adults dare not face. Libby saw her mother crying over Michaela and asked, “Would you cry this much if I was kidnapped?” That question said everything about growing up in a family torn apart by loss. Libby wasn’t jealous of her sister. She was just trying to understand her place in a world where her mother’s pain over the absent one was always greater than any joy the present ones could bring. Years later, sitting at her mother’s kitchen table in San Leandro, beneath the missing-child photo of Michaela still on the refrigerator, Libby said, “I used to wonder what life would have been like if Michaela hadn’t been kidnapped, and what our lives would have been like. I don’t know.”
In December 1993, Sharon gave birth to her youngest daughter, Jana. This coincided with one of the most shocking child abductions in America. Polly Klaas, 12 years old, was kidnapped from her bedroom in Petaluma, California, in October 1993, and killed. When Polly’s body was found and a memorial service held, Sharon was in the hospital delivery room. Labor began while she watched television coverage of another kidnapped child’s memorial. A mother welcoming a newborn while another mother buried a murdered child. Sharon stood between those two worlds because her daughter was still missing, neither alive nor dead, neither here nor there.
Beyond the Garecht family, the case remained open with no progress. Hayward police followed every new lead that surfaced, but every piece of evidence led to a dead end. The palm print on the scooter remained in the file without a name or face. The best evidence police had was something the technology of 1988 couldn’t decode. While the outside world gradually forgot Michaela Garecht, Sharon Murch, who had taken back her maiden name after the divorce, began building what would sustain her for the next three decades. It wasn’t a media campaign or an organization. It was a vow. She would never stop searching for her daughter. She would never let the world forget Michaela. And she would never accept, under any circumstances, that this case was over.
Sharon Murch began using the internet as soon as it became widespread. She created a blog called “Path of Searchers” and wrote letters to Michaela, describing daily life, the siblings, what she saw on her way to work, the weather, anything a mother might tell her daughter if that daughter were somewhere in the world and could read it. The idea was simple. If Michaela were alive, if she were somewhere with a different identity, maybe she would search her own name online and find her mother’s blog. Sharon wrote as if her daughter were reading. She wasn’t writing for the public or the police. She was writing for Michaela. Later, she renamed the blog “Dear Michaela” and continued posting for years. Each post was a line thrown into the dark, hoping someone would catch it.
Someone did. A young woman contacted Sharon, saying she lived in Los Angeles, had been in a car accident, lost part of her memory, and believed she was Michaela Garecht. She wanted to visit. Sharon wanted to believe it. Her entire life had been built around this moment, the moment her daughter came home. But she had been deceived enough times to know that blind hope could kill a person faster than despair. She asked for proof. They exchanged messages on Facebook for a long time. Sharon asked questions only the real Michaela could answer. Finally, after weeks, the truth emerged. The woman was not Michaela. It wasn’t a malicious scam, just someone with genuine psychological struggles who believed she was someone else. But for Sharon, it was another stab in a wound that never healed. Hope surged, then collapsed, and she started again.
Every November 19, Michaela’s family held a memorial at the exact spot where she was abducted. The owners of the Rainbow Market changed, and it was renamed Mexico Super, but the corner of Mission Boulevard and Lafayette Street remained the same. The tree beside where the kidnapper’s car was parked still stands. Every year, relatives, friends, volunteers, and even strangers who didn’t know the Garecht family came to tie ribbons on the tree. Old and new ribbons accumulated, faded and torn by California rains and winds, but never removed. Sharon said those ribbons were a symbol of love, worn out, tattered, but never dead.
Katrina Rodriguez, Michaela’s best friend and the only witness, married, changed her name to Hogg, and moved to Texas, but she never forgot. In 2018, on the thirtieth anniversary, Katrina flew from Texas to Hayward, stood before the ribbon tree, and sang a song for her friend. She told a reporter, “I saw the car back up. I saw him drive down Mission Boulevard. That’s when I ran inside. Thirty years, and that memory is still in my mind like it happened yesterday.” She was nine when she witnessed it, and thirty-nine when she stood there telling the story.
Throughout those three decades, Hayward police refused to classify Michaela Garecht’s case as cold. They said the investigation was still active, that someone was still assigned to it, that leads were still being pursued. But in reality, every promising suspect ended in disappointment. The first suspect to attract attention was Timothy Bindner, an odd man who volunteered to help families of missing children in the East Bay. Bindner contacted the Garecht family offering help with the search. He also contacted the family of Amber Swartz-Garcia, another girl abducted in Pinole just five months before Michaela, in June 1988, and the family of Ilene Mishaloff, who disappeared in Dublin in January 1989. Three missing girls in the same East Bay area in less than a year. Bindner appeared in all three cases.
Investigators asked Amber’s mother to pretend to befriend Bindner, hoping to get information. Both the victim’s mother and police concluded that Bindner was playing a psychological game with victims’ families and law enforcement, enjoying the attention and power his role as helper gave him. But there wasn’t enough evidence to charge him with any abduction. Bindner remained a disturbing ghost, but never the answer.
Then, in 2012, a turn seemed ready to change everything. Wesley Shermantine, one half of the notorious killing duo known as the “Speed Freak Killers,” was awaiting execution when he wrote a letter to law enforcement. Shermantine and his partner, Loren Herzog, killed numerous people in California’s Central Valley during the 1980s and 1990s. Herzog was released on parole, then committed suicide in January 2012. In 2012, Shermantine stated that the original sketch of Michaela’s abductor bore a striking resemblance to Herzog. He led police to an abandoned well where he and Herzog dumped victims’ bodies. Police excavated the well and found bone fragments of at least five people.
Sharon Murch was notified. For the first time in nearly 25 years, there was a real possibility of finding Michaela’s remains. Sharon wrote on her blog that she had a feeling something was going to happen, that she had been waiting deep down. She wrote, “What a big transition from putting information out there to help Michaela find her way home to saying I believe evidence has been found that indicates Michaela is no longer alive.” Mitochondrial DNA testing was conducted, the type passed from mother to child, exactly the type needed for comparison with Sharon. Results came in at the end of 2012. None of the bones belonged to Michaela. Once again, hope surged and faded. Once again, Sharon had to rise from the ashes of expectation and continue.
The case continued to attract national media attention. In 2009, Michaela’s abduction was featured on “Dateline NBC” and “Larry King Live.” In 2014, “Dateline” highlighted the case in its “Cold Cases” series. “Unsolved Mysteries” also covered it. International media began to take notice. In May 2019, the FBI announced a $10,000 reward for information regarding Michaela’s disappearance. Ten thousand dollars. After more than 30 years, that was the value the system placed on information that might bring a child home, or at least provide answers to her family. No one claimed the reward.
Sharon was still in Iowa, where she had moved after years in California. She had incurable breast cancer. When asked about it, she said something that silenced everyone. She said, “It brought her a strange peace, a feeling that she would see Michaela soon.” This wasn’t the talk of despair. It was the talk of a mother who had fought for 30 years and finally found peace in the one hope no one could take from her.
But Sharon didn’t stop. She still wrote in her blog. She still told police she didn’t want to know every detail of what was happening, just to call her when there was an answer. She said, “As long as I don’t know whether she’s alive or not, I have to act as if she’s alive, because she might be, and if she is, she might need my help.”
After 32 years, Michaela Garecht’s case was still open on paper, but practically stalled. Every suspect was wrong. Every lead was a dead end. Sharon had incurable cancer, and the only evidence remaining was what it had always been. An incomplete palm print on a nine-year-old girl’s scooter, collected on November 19, 1988, without a name, face, or answer. That print waited 32 years.
The turning point was in Fremont, a city less than 20 miles away. On February 2, 1986, shortly after midnight, the bodies of Michelle Xavier, 18, and Jennifer Dewey, 20, were found naked along Mill Creek Road in Fremont, more than a mile east of Mission Boulevard. The girls were close friends. Both had been brutally assaulted. Fremont police investigated but lacked sufficient forensic evidence to identify the killer. The case was closed and remained dormant for three decades.
In 2016, the Fremont Police Department created a new position in the Crimes Against Persons unit, focused on unsolved homicides and missing persons cases. A cold case investigator began reviewing old files, starting with the Xavier and Dewey cases. In the decade following the murders, DNA technology had advanced enormously. Evidence samples collected in 1986 could now be analyzed using methods that didn’t exist then. The investigator resubmitted the evidence for advanced DNA testing. The results pointed directly to one name: David Emery Misch.
Misch’s DNA was found under Jennifer Dewey’s fingernails, proving she had scratched her attacker while trying to defend herself. David Emery Misch was born on February 19, 1961, in Chicago, Illinois. His father, Robert, was an alcoholic and violent, regularly abusing his wife and son. In the mid-1960s, the family moved to Santa Clara, California, where Misch grew up and spent his teenage years. Domestic violence doesn’t excuse anything Misch later did, but it explains the circumstances in which a future serial killer was raised. Misch grew up to be a commercial burglar and drug addict, living in the East Bay, the same geographic area where all his later victims lived.
Fremont police discovered that Misch was living in the area at the time of the Xavier and Dewey murders. He was a known burglar, a stimulant addict, and had no prior connection to the victims before killing them. He was the type of opportunistic killer whose random attacks are the hardest for police to trace because there is no connection between killer and victim. But DNA doesn’t lie.
In 2017, Fremont investigators interviewed Misch. A few days after the interview, Misch attempted suicide in jail. That act was more telling than any statement. In 2018, Misch was charged with the murders of Xavier and Dewey. But David Misch’s story didn’t begin with the two girls in Fremont, and it didn’t end there. Before being linked to the double murder, Misch had been imprisoned since 1989 for another crime. In December 1989, a little over a year after Michaela Garecht disappeared, Misch broke into the home of Margaret Ball, 36, in an unincorporated area of Hayward. He beat her to death, stole her car, and fled. He was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after 18 years. He had been in prison ever since.
Look at the timeline: February 1986, the murders of Michelle Xavier and Jennifer Dewey in Fremont. November 1988, the abduction of Michaela Garecht in Hayward. December 1989, the beating death of Margaret Ball in Hayward. All in the East Bay. All within a radius of less than 20 miles. All women or children. All opportunistic victims with no prior connection to the killer. And all of them, David Misch.
While Fremont investigators were building the Misch file for the Xavier-Dewey case, they realized what no one had connected for three decades. Misch lived and worked in the same area where Michaela Garecht was abducted, in the same time period. In 2020, Fremont police sent Misch’s name to their counterparts in Hayward, noting he was someone to check regarding the Garecht case. It wasn’t because of direct evidence, but because his record of violence, geographic location, and timeline matched so closely it couldn’t be ignored.
Hayward investigators received the name and did what could only be done if someone knew who they were looking for. The department’s fingerprint expert was given a list of potential suspects, including Misch, and asked to compare their prints against the thumbprint and incomplete palm print found on the scooter in 1988. This is the important part. The palm print on the scooter wasn’t good enough quality to run through an automated digital comparison system. Police Chief Tony Chaplin later explained that the print required manual comparison, meaning a human examiner had to sit down, place the two prints side by side, and use the naked eye and experience to determine whether they matched. This wasn’t advanced technology, genetic analysis, or a computer algorithm. It was a human being looking at two images and saying, “This is the same hand.”
That’s exactly what happened. The palm print matched David Misch. After 32 years, the evidence had always been there. The answer had always been in the file. The only thing missing was the right name to compare it against. Additional evidence quickly accumulated. Misch matched the description Katrina Rodriguez gave in 1988. A white male, in his early twenties at the time, thin build, with light hair. Two photos were shown to witnesses who identified Misch. Two other witnesses came forward saying they remembered seeing Misch driving into the Rainbow Market parking lot just before the abduction. After 32 years, that image was still burned into their memory. A man in an old car parked near the store on a Saturday morning in November, a scene Hayward would never forget.
Chief Chaplin said his investigators patiently followed new leads because Misch had been safely in prison since 1989. There was no risk of escape, no time pressure. They were able to build the case file carefully, thoroughly, and conclusively before announcing it.
On December 21, 2020, 32 years and 32 days after Michaela Garecht disappeared from the Rainbow Market parking lot, Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O’Malley formally charged David Misch, then 59, with murder, with two special circumstances: murder during a kidnapping and a prior murder conviction. If convicted, Misch could face the death penalty. Chief Chaplin stood before the microphone at the press conference and said, “Today is a day for the family, the community, and healing.” He described Michaela’s disappearance as a tragic story that haunted the Bay Area for decades. O’Malley added, “The abduction and murder of a child is horrific. The pain suffered by family and friends is indescribable, especially when the child or their remains are never found.” She expressed hope that this action would ease the suffering of Michaela’s family, assuring them that justice would be served even after 32 years.
Finally, the palm print on the scooter had an owner. Sharon Murch was not present at the press conference. She was in Iowa, more than 1,700 miles from Hayward, receiving treatment for incurable breast cancer. She joined ABC7 via Zoom to read the statement she wrote when she learned about David Misch. That statement is the most painful document in the entire case, not for what it reveals about the perpetrator, but for what it reveals about 32 years of living in limbo and despair.
Sharon wrote that over the past year, she had gradually reached a point of accepting that Michaela might no longer be alive. This wasn’t acceptance based on specific evidence. No one had shown her a body. No one had given her DNA results. No one had told her with certainty that her daughter was dead. It was acceptance born of exhaustion, of three decades of hope fed by nothing, of a body wasting away from cancer, of the gradual realization that the miracle she had been waiting for would never come. She wrote, “I feel like I’m still looking for Michaela, but now I don’t know where to look. I really feel lost in the dark.”
For 32 years, Sharon knew what she was looking for. She was looking for a living girl, a grown woman who might be somewhere with a different name, a different face, but still Michaela. She wrote the blog for that person. She bought the gifts for that person. She kept the door open for that person. But when David Misch’s identity was revealed, when she read his record, when she understood who he was and what he had done to other victims, the image she had held for 32 years shattered. The image of Michaela alive somewhere. And there was no image left. She wrote that what she never imagined was her daughter as a dead child.
Sharon said she asked police to share every detail of David Misch’s violent past, every case, every victim, every method. She said, “If Michaela went through all that, I understand it.” That is the judgment of a mother who refuses to let her daughter suffer alone, even after death, even when knowing the truth brings only pain. She wanted to know exactly what her daughter went through, not to punish herself, but because she believed looking away would betray Michaela once more.
When asked about Misch, Sharon didn’t hesitate. She said plainly, “What he does is rape and kill people. He doesn’t kidnap children to find them a warm home.” Thirty-two years of hoping Michaela was living somewhere, that she had been raised by someone, that she was happy even without knowing who she was, all of it collapsed in a single sentence. Sharon knew. She had always known. But knowing and accepting are two different things, and she had spent 32 years keeping a distance between them. David Misch erased that distance.
Ernie Castillo, Misch’s defense attorney, stated that his client denied the charges and would fight them. Castillo added, “No one in his family believes David could hurt or kill a child.” He said he would investigate the case to prove David had no connection to Michaela’s disappearance. That is a defense attorney’s duty, ensuring that even a man accused of the worst crimes is protected by the legal system. But for the Garecht family, every word of that statement was a stone thrown at an open wound.
Rod Garecht, Michaela’s father, then 71, drove nearly 100 miles from his home in Amador County to Hayward for the press conference. Rod and Sharon had separated 31 years earlier. Their marriage hadn’t survived the loss of their daughter. But the pain of losing a child doesn’t fade. Rod carried that pain every day since November 1988. He carried it differently, more quietly, less publicly than Sharon. When a reporter asked how he felt, he said, “I’m just glad they got him. That’s all I can say.” Then he added that he hoped police could interrogate Misch to reveal where he had hidden his daughter’s remains.
That is the pain only parents of missing children understand. Not just losing a child, but having no place to put flowers, no grave to stand by and weep. Nothing but a void that time cannot fill. As District Attorney O’Malley said at the press conference, there are no words to describe the horror of a child’s abduction, especially when the child or their remains are never found. Michaela’s abduction devastated her family. Grief paralyzed them, and not knowing what happened to her terrified them. Their pain was, and remains, indescribable.
Chief Chaplin said the investigation was ongoing and that they remained determined to find Michaela’s remains. Misch is in prison. He isn’t going anywhere, but he also isn’t talking. He has not revealed where the body is hidden. He has not confessed to the crime. He has not provided any information to help the Garecht family find their daughter. Perhaps this was David Misch’s final act of cruelty toward Michaela Garecht. Not the death he caused, but the silence that followed. His refusal to return the girl to her family even in death, his grip on that secret as the last remnant of his power.
Katrina Hogg, the best friend who witnessed the abduction when they were both nine, was now around forty-two. She lived in Texas, married, built her own life, but not a day passed without her thinking about that Saturday morning. She was the last person to see Michaela, the last to hear her friend’s scream, the last to watch the car speed down Mission Boulevard carrying the girl she loved more than anything. Katrina carried that memory for 32 years, a memory no therapy could erase, no geographic distance could soften, no time could heal. She flew from Texas to Hayward for the thirtieth anniversary in 2018, stood before the ribbon tree, and sang for her. She told a reporter in a quiet voice that wasn’t quiet at all, “I saw the car back up. I saw him drive down Mission Boulevard. That’s when I ran inside.” Three sentences, 38 years, her entire life contained in those three sentences.
While the Garecht family waited for Misch’s trial for Michaela’s murder, the justice system was conducting its own investigations into his other crimes. What happened in the courtroom showed the world the truth about David Misch. On December 19, 2024, 38 years after the bodies of Michelle Xavier and Jennifer Dewey were found naked along Mill Creek Road in Fremont, a jury convicted David Emery Misch, then 63, of first-degree murder in both cases. Sentencing came on January 21, 2025. Misch received two consecutive sentences of 25 years to life, in addition to the life sentence he was already serving for the 1989 murder of Margaret Ball.
But the number of years wasn’t what people remembered about that trial. It was Misch’s behavior. When the families of Xavier and Dewey stood to read their victim impact statements, when the parents and siblings of the two women killed nearly four decades earlier tried to express a loss time cannot erase, David Misch began to sing. He sat at the defense table and sang, deliberately disrupting the court, deliberately insulting the victims’ memory, making clear that 38 years in prison had not produced a moment of remorse. He was removed from the courtroom.
Royal Roberts, deputy district attorney for Alameda County, said after the trial, “David Misch’s behavior in court is not only condemnable, it is a glaring demonstration of a complete lack of remorse for the murders of Jennifer Dewey and Michelle Xavier. The families of these two young women waited nearly 40 years for justice.” Roberts added, “Thanks to the jury and this verdict, Misch will be held accountable.”
This is the man the Garecht family faced in the next trial. A man who killed at least three people, convicted of murder three times, who sang in court while victims’ families wept. In June 2026, David Misch was still awaiting trial for the kidnapping and murder of Michaela Garecht. He was held at Santa Rita Jail in Dublin, California. He denied all charges related to Michaela. He refused to disclose where her body was hidden. That is the greatest pain this case leaves behind. Not that it took 32 years to find the perpetrator. Not that the justice system was so slow that a nine-year-old girl disappeared and her killer sat in prison for another crime for 31 years without anyone connecting the two. But that Michaela was never found. No body, no grave, no place for the family to put flowers on her birthday, January 24, every year. The day Michaela would have turned 47 in 2026.
Sharon Murch, Rod Garecht, Libby, the brothers, and Katrina Hogg all live in the same void. They know who kidnapped Michaela. They know why. They know he will never leave prison. But they don’t know where their daughter, sister, and best friend lies. Police say the investigation is ongoing, that they remain determined to find Michaela’s remains, but Misch remains silent. That silence, the deliberate silence of a killer who refuses to return the victim to her family, is the last act of violence he can commit from behind bars.
The Michaela Garecht case offers many lessons, none of them new, but all of them worth repeating. The first lesson concerns evidence. The palm print on the scooter was collected on November 19, 1988, and sat in a file for 32 years. The answer was always there. No DNA technology was needed. No computer algorithm. No national database. All that was needed was the right person looking at the right time. A human examiner sitting with two images, comparing them with the naked eye, and saying, “This is the same hand.” In an era when everyone talks about DNA as the miracle that solves cases, Michaela Garecht’s case was solved by the oldest known method: a human being looking at the evidence.
The second lesson concerns never closing the file. Hayward police refused to classify this case as cold for 32 years. They were right. Not because they always had new leads, but because they refused to accept that running out of leads meant running out of hope. When Fremont police sent Misch’s name to Hayward in 2020, the Hayward Police Department had someone assigned to the case, someone ready to take the call, someone willing to sit down and compare fingerprints. If the file had been closed, the Fremont call might never have reached the right person.
The third lesson, and the most important, concerns Sharon Murch. For 32 years, she was the only reason the world didn’t forget Michaela Garecht. Not the police, not the FBI, not the media. A mother. She wrote a blog when no one was reading. She tied ribbons on a tree when no one was watching. She bought birthday gifts for a child who never opened them. She gave interviews for articles most people read and forgot the same day. She did all of this while going through a divorce, raising four children alone, and fighting cancer, while every new suspect brought hope and then shattered it. Sharon Murch didn’t solve the case. She didn’t find David Misch. She didn’t compare the palm print. But she kept the case alive in the public consciousness for three decades, something no law enforcement agency can do alone. She was the flame no one could extinguish.
Michaela Garecht’s abduction, along with other disappearances in the East Bay in the 1980s, such as Amber Swartz-Garcia in June 1988 and Ilene Mishaloff in January 1989, changed how the community viewed child safety. Parents in the Bay Area no longer looked at their children on Saturday mornings the same way. The AMBER Alert system didn’t exist in 1988. It was created in 1996 after the abduction and murder of nine-year-old Amber Hagerman in Arlington, Texas. Many have wondered: if the AMBER Alert had existed in November 1988, would Michaela have been found? Would that faded yellow, beat-up car have been stopped on Mission Boulevard before it disappeared into traffic? No one knows. But that question, and millions of similar questions from millions of similar cases, is what drives continued development of child protection systems.
On the morning of November 19, 1988, a girl in Hayward, California, jumped with joy when her mother allowed her to buy candy. She said, “Oh, boy!” and ran outside with her best friend. She never came back. Her palm print remained on the scooter she carried for the last time, sitting in a file for 32 years. The answer was in front of everyone, but no one saw it until the right person sat down and looked. Michaela Joy Garecht has not been found. But she has not been forgotten.