Witnesses saw Michaela Garecht kidnapped in Northern California in 1988. This week the authorities charged an incarcerated man with murder during a kidnapping.
For more than 30 years, the kidnapping of a 9-year-old girl, Michaela Garecht, has remained a mystery in Northern California, a crime witnessed by only a few people, including a child who was her best friend.
Michaela was never seen again after she was taken from a parking lot in 1988. But now the authorities believe they are closer to solving her disappearance, after decades pursuing a trail that they say has led to a man already in prison for murder.
The authorities in Alameda County said the man, David Emery Misch, 59, appeared in Superior Court of California on Tuesday on charges of murder during a kidnapping in the Garecht case. Held in Santa Rita Jail in Dublin, Calif., east of the San Francisco Bay, he faces “special circumstance” charges, which can carry a sentence of death or life in prison without the possibility of parole, because of his conviction for the 1989 murder of a woman in the Hayward area, case filings said.
Ernie Castillo, Mr. Misch’s lawyer, said in a statement that he “denies the allegations against him and will fight these charges."
“No one in his family believes David would hurt or kill a child,” Mr. Castillo said, adding that a defense team would seek to “root out any junk science” used in the case, “expose bias on the part of the police departments and get to the bottom of what happened.”
The child’s remains have not been found, investigators said. But the Alameda County district attorney said that bringing charges in the case could at least offer some hope for justice.
“The kidnap and murder of a child is horrific,” the district attorney, Nancy O’Malley, said in a statement announcing the charges on Monday. “The pain to the family and friends is indescribable, especially when their child is not found.”
After the charges were announced, Michaela’s mother, Sharon Murch, released a statement saying that she had, in the last year, “come to a place of accepting that Michaela was probably no longer alive.”
“What I did not envision was my daughter as a dead child,” Ms. Murch continued. “It was only when I heard this news, that this vision of reality appeared, and I honestly have not figured out what to do with it.”
She said that she had asked detectives about Mr. Misch’s history of violence. “If Michaela could experience it, I could hear it,” she said, adding, “The thoughts of her fear, her pain, her grief, are overwhelming.”
On the morning of Nov. 19, 1988, Michaela and her best friend, who was not named in court documents, left their scooters at the door of the Rainbow Grocery on Mission Boulevard, in Hayward, Calif., and went inside to buy snacks. When the girls came out they saw one of the scooters had been moved deeper into the parking lot and behind a car, the district attorney’s statement said.
Michaela went to get it.
The driver of the car grabbed her as she walked past his door, the statement said. He forced her into the front seat, backed out and sped off, it said.
At about 10:23 a.m., the Hayward Police Department received a report that a child had been kidnapped. They spoke to Michaela’s 9-year-old friend, a probable cause document says. “When the victim went to retrieve the scooter, she was grabbed around the waist by the suspect and pulled into the car while she violently screamed,” the document says.
The girl and other witnesses described the driver as having blue eyes and long dirty-blond hair, it said.
In the decades that followed, investigators continued to pore over leads. Hayward detectives never stopped looking for her, the district attorney’s office said. The F.B.I. joined the inquiry.
Prints were taken from the handlebars and fork of the scooter, and compared with those of possible suspects, the case document says. But it wasn’t until nearly 30 years after the disappearance — as detectives re-examined evidence, leads and potential witnesses — that progress in the investigation starting leading toward criminal charges.
Officer Michael Wright, a spokesman for the Hayward Police Department, said in an interview on Tuesday that the prints found on the handlebars were from the kidnapper’s palm.
A fingerprint examiner was given names of persons of interest, including that of Mr. Misch, the district attorney’s statement said. This year, he was determined “to be a match to multiple lifts from the scooter,” it said.
“Their ability now to compare prints has been significantly advanced through software, technology and science,” the statement said.
In addition to the prison sentence he is serving for the 1989 murder, Mr. Misch has been charged with two counts of murder in the killing of two women in the nearby city of Fremont in 1986, according to the Fremont Police Department.
Mr. Misch was brought to the Hayward investigators’ attention by the investigators in Fremont, Officer Wright said. “We are hoping that he will be able to provide us with some information,” he said.
The probable cause document said that Mr. Misch refused to speak to detectives on Dec. 2, or provide a swab for DNA analysis. But the document alleged that “physical evidence shows that Misch kidnapped the victim” and then killed her to avoid the risk of discovery.
Detective Robert Purnell of the Hayward Police Department said in the probable cause document: “I believe that it is reasonable to conclude that having violently abducted the victim, a 9-year-old girl, who hasn’t been seen in 32 years, and whose remains have never been found, that Misch murdered the victim, disposed of her remains, and has successfully kept her remains hidden from authorities.”
Two eyewitnesses also identified Mr. Misch in a photo lineup as having been in a car in the parking lot just before the kidnapping, the probable cause document says.
Katrina Hogue, identified by KGO-TV, a local ABC station, as the friend who was with Michaela in the parking lot, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. She told the news station in an interview published on Monday that she had not given up hope for finding her friend. “She might be somewhere,” she said, “and we might be able to find her.”
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