MICHAELA GARECHT’S COLD CASE Finally Solved — Arrest Shocks Community 

Investigators say they never closed this case despite more than three decades with no arrests. They are hopeful today’s announcement provides some measure of peace for Michaela’s family.  A warning to our viewers. What you are about to watch is a true story. The following program contains content that some viewers may find disturbing.

 Viewer discretion is strongly advised.  It’s the morning of November 19th, 1988 in Hayward, California. a Saturday. The kind of ordinary bright morning that gets swallowed up by routine and mostly forgotten, except for what happens on it. If you’re new here, hit subscribe right now before we continue because this channel covers a new solved cold case every single week, and this is one of the most unsettling ones we’ve done.

9-year-old Michaela Gre lives just two blocks from the Rainbow Market on Mission Boulevard. Close enough that walking or riding over is barely a decision at all. It’s the Saturday before Thanksgiving and families up and down her quiet Bay Area neighborhood are easing into a holiday weekend. Kids out of school.

 Nothing especially urgent on anyone’s schedule. Around 10:15 that morning, Michaela and a friend hop on their scooters and ride the short distance to the market to buy some candy and sodas. The kind of small self-directed errand that feels completely safe in a neighborhood like this one, on a morning like this one. Quick question while we’re here.

 Where are you watching this from? And what’s the weather like there right now? Drop it in the comments. It’s wild to think this all happened on what everyone in Hayward remembers as one of those flawless, sunny Bay Area late fall mornings. They park their scooters outside and go in. When they come back out a few minutes later, Michaela notices something off.

 Her friend’s scooter isn’t where they left it. It’s been moved, pushed back near a parked car at the edge of the lot. Without thinking twice, Michaela walks over to retrieve it. As she reaches for the scooter, a man gets out of that car, grabs her, and forces her into the front seat. Michaela’s friend, standing close enough to see the entire thing unfold, starts screaming and runs back into the store for help.

 By the time the store clerk makes it outside, the car and Michaela are already gone. Investigators respond immediately. Michaela’s friend gives them a detailed description of the man, Caucasian, somewhere between 18 and 24 years old, driving an older model American sedan. Composite sketches are drawn up and distributed across the Bay Area within 24 hours.

 Michaela’s face and the artists rendering of her abductors appear on flyers, on the news, in every corner of a region that mobilizes almost instantly to look for her. what that fingerprint sitting quietly in an evidence file for over three decades would eventually be capable of proving and just how many other lives the man responsible had already destroyed by the time anyone connected his name to Michaela’s case is the reason this case finally moves forward. Stay with us.

 The search that follows in the days and weeks after Michaela’s abduction is massive. Hayward police, the FBI, and volunteers from across the region comb the area, follow up on tips, and chase down every lead the composite sketch generates. Nothing produces her. As the days stretch into weeks and the weeks into months, the case shifts from an active search into something more painful and more permanent.

 An open investigation with no resolution in sight. A family left to wait without any real indication of what happened to their daughter after that car pulled away from the Rainbow Market parking lot. Michaela’s case becomes one of the most well-known unsolved child abductions in California history. Eventually featured on both unsolved mysteries and America’s most wanted national platforms that generate a steady trickle of tips and leads over the following years.

 None of them produce an arrest. Her mother, Sharon Merch, becomes a fixture of the ongoing search, advocating publicly for her daughter’s case for decades, refusing to let Michaela’s name fade the way so many unsolved cases eventually do once the initial wave of media attention passes. What makes this period especially difficult is that Michaela’s disappearance isn’t an isolated tragedy in the Bay Area during this stretch of the late 1980s.

 Just months before her abduction, 7-year-old Amber Schwarz Garcia vanishes from Panol. Just months after, 13-year-old Ela Mishelof disappears while walking home from school in Dublin. For an entire generation of Bay Area parents, this becomes a genuinely frightening period. Three young girls gone within roughly a year of each other, no clear connection between the cases, and no arrests to explain any of them.

 It’s the kind of overlapping tragedy that makes an already difficult case even harder to isolate and investigate since tips and theories about one girl’s disappearance frequently tangle with theories about the others. Over the following decades, investigators look at a rotating list of possible suspects.

 Curtis Dean Anderson, a man later convicted of kidnapping and molesting another young girl and connected to the murder of Amber Schwarz Garcia before his own death in prison, gets investigated as a possible suspect in Michaela’s case as well. Convicted serial killers Wesley Shermanine and Lauren Herszog, the so-called speedreak killers, also get examined for any possible connection.

 None of these leads produce a confirmed match. Composite sketches get revisited. Age progressed images of what Michaela might look like as an adult get released periodically, keeping her case in public view, even as the years accumulate with no resolution. Investigators pursue leads as far away as Oklahoma, reintering a former Hayward resident with a prior conviction, and come up with nothing conclusive there either.

 For over three decades, this is the shape of the case. a detailed description of the abductor, a composite sketch distributed across the entire region within a day of the crime, and absolutely no name to attach to any of it. Detectives are reassigned. Cases pass from one generation of Hayward investigators to the next, each one inheriting a file that refuses to close.

Each one adding whatever new tip or lead comes in without ever quite getting the break that would finally move the case forward. The break, when it finally comes, doesn’t come from DNA or genetic genealogy. The technique that’s cracked open so many other cold cases from this same era.

 It comes from something more old-fashioned, forensic fingerprint analysis, applied with modern patients to evidence that had been sitting in storage since 1988. Detective Robert Pernell, who eventually takes over the case after previous investigators rotate out or retire, becomes the detective whose persistence finally moves the file forward.

Investigators go back through physical evidence recovered from the scene in 1988, including a fingerprint and partial palm print lifted from Michaela’s friend’s scooter, the same scooter that had been deliberately moved by whoever abducted her that morning. A forensic examiner manually compares that print against an expanding pool of possible matches.

 The kind of painstaking, unglamorous work that doesn’t generate headlines the way a DNA breakthrough does, but that requires exactly the same level of dedication over exactly as many years. That print eventually gets matched to a man named David Emory Mish. Finding Mish to make an arrest doesn’t require much of a manhunt at all because he’s already in state prison.

 He’s been incarcerated since December 1989, serving a sentence of 18 years to life for the murder of 36-year-old Margaret Ball, a friend of his, whom he beat and stabbed to death in her Hayward home. What investigators are only now discovering is that Ball’s murder wasn’t an isolated act of violence in Mish’s history. It was one piece of a much longer pattern that stretches back years before Michaela Greer was ever abducted and that would continue to surface for years after his arrest for her case as well.

 Going back through Mish’s history, investigators find a trail that in hindsight is almost impossible to look at without a sense of dread. In February 1986, 2 years before Michaela’s abduction, 18-year-old Michelle Xavier and 20-year-old Jennifer Dwey are shot, strangled, and left on a dark stretch of road in Fremont.

 Their case going unsolved for decades. In July 1982, Mish is convicted of assaulting a woman at Knife Point, a conviction that results in his release from custody by January 1984. a detail that decades later reads as a chilling example of exactly how much violence a system can fail to stop before it escalates further.

 He’s charged with indecent exposure later that same year and again in 1985 for driving nude through Oakland. In May 1988, just months before Michaela’s abduction, he’s arrested for burglary at a San Leandro market, receiving what amounts to little more than a brief sentence before being released back into the community. Then that November, Michaela Garrick disappears from a parking lot two blocks from her own home.

 It’s a pattern that laid out in full describes a man who repeatedly encountered the justice system in the years leading up to Michaela’s abduction and who repeatedly walked away from those encounters with sentences too short to stop what came next. Investigators and observers of the case would later point to this exact stretch of Mish’s record as a devastating illustration of how many opportunities existed to intervene before he was ever in a position to abduct a 9-year-old girl on a Saturday morning. On December 21st, 2020, 32

years after Michaela Gre vanished from that parking lot, Alama County District Attorney Nancy Ali announces charges against David Mish for Michaela’s kidnapping and murder, including a special circumstance allegation tied to the fact that her body has never been recovered. The kidnap and murder of a child is horrific.

 Ali says the pain to the family and friends is indescribable, especially when their child is not found. This crime shocked not just the local community, but the entire Bay Area and the nation. I hope that today’s action and announcement will provide some comfort to Michaela’s family in knowing that justice will prevail even after 32 years since this horrible crime.

Hayward Police Chief Tony Chaplain addresses reporters at the same press conference, calling Michaela’s disappearance a tragic story that has gripped the Bay Area for more than three decades. As police chief, I want to thank the men and women of this department who worked this case and always kept its resolution a priority.

Chaplain says, “We hope this announcement will bring Michaela’s family closer to the peace they deserve for so many years.” He notes that the investigation remains ongoing, that finding Michaela’s remains so her family can finally have that piece of closure as well is still very much a priority even after an arrest has finally been made.

Michaela’s mother, Sharon Merch, reflects publicly on the decades she spent keeping her daughter’s case alive, thanking the officers who worked it across so many years, particularly Detective Pernell, whose persistence finally produced the fingerprint match that broke everything open. I was disappointed when those who worked on the case at the time of the Gerrio investigation rotated out or retired, Merch says.

 But when Detective Robert Pernell took over the case, each of them assured me that I could not ask for a better investigator. It seems they were right. Never would I have thought that this case would be solved after 32 years. Nor was it solved by a witness providing information. It was solved by painstaking police work.

 Mish’s defense attorney, Ernie Castillo, pushes back on the forensic methodology used to connect his client to the case, calling the fingerprint matching technique into question. We will definitely be attacking any concept or idea that a person can with their human eye be able to distinguish ridges or whatever type of patterns we have on our hands, Castillo tells reporters.

 a defense strategy that focuses not on disputing Misha’s broader criminal history, but specifically on whether the forensic method used to match the print meets the standard required for a conviction. What makes this case particularly unsettling isn’t just that it took 32 years to identify a suspect. It’s what investigators uncover about Mish’s activity in the years surrounding Michaela’s abduction.

 activity that suggests his violence didn’t start and stop with her, but continued both before and after, largely undetected for decades. In March 2018, 2 and 1/2 years before Mish is charged in Michaela’s case, Fremont police announce an arrest in the 1986 rape and double murder of Michelle Xavier and Jennifer Dwey. The two young women found shot, strangled, and dumped along Fremont’s Mil Creek Road 32 years earlier.

 The suspect is David Mish. It’s the kind of overlap that once fully understood reframes the entire scope of what this one man is responsible for. Not a single isolated tragedy, but a string of violence spanning multiple jurisdictions and multiple decades. Much of it going completely undetected by the broader public until these separate cold case investigations finally start connecting to the same name.

 In December 2024, a jury convicts Mish of first-degree murder in the deaths of Xavier and Dwey. At his sentencing in January 2025, 39 years after their murders, Mish shows no remorse, instead disrupting the proceedings by singing 99 bottles of beer while victim impact statements are being read to the court, forcing officers to remove him from the courtroom entirely.

 He’s sentenced to two consecutive 25-year life terms. On top of the sentence, he’s already serving for Margaret Ball’s murder. Chief Assistant District Attorney Royal Roberts addresses the outcome directly. David Mish’s behavior in court was not only reprehensible, but a blatant display of no remorse for taking the lives of Jennifer Dwey and Michelle Xavier.

 The families of these two young women have been waiting nearly 40 years to receive justice for their tragic and senseless murders. Thanks to the jury and this conviction, Mr. Mish will be held accountable. As of that sentencing, Mish remains in custody at Santa Rita Jail in Dublin, California. Still awaiting trial specifically for Michaela Gre’s kidnapping and murder, a case that unlike the Xavier and Dwey murders, carries the added unresolved weight of a body that has never been found.

Michaela’s family, more than three decades after her abduction, are left in the position so many families of cold case victims eventually find themselves in, even after an arrest. They finally have a name, a suspect, a mountain of circumstantial and forensic evidence pointing toward exactly what happened to their daughter.

 But they still don’t have Michaela herself. Still don’t have a grave to visit. Still don’t have the one piece of finality that would let this specific chapter of an impossibly long ordeal actually close. Real quick, if this is the first true crime video you’ve watched from us, let us know in the comments what state or country you’re tuning in from.

 We read every single one, and it genuinely helps us figure out what cases to cover next. It’s worth sitting with how narrow the margin actually was here and how much devastation happened in the space between. For over three decades, the fingerprint that would eventually identify Mish sat in an evidence file with no name attached to it.

 Not because the print itself was unusable, but because matching it required the same kind of patient, manual, unglamorous forensic work that doesn’t always get the same attention as a flashy DNA breakthrough. If Detective Pernell hadn’t taken over the case with the specific determination to keep working it long after other investigators had rotated through and moved on, this match might never have been made at all.

 And in the years between Michaela’s abduction and Mish’s eventual arrest, he continued walking free in the community for years. arrested periodically for lesser offenses, serving short sentences, and returning to ordinary life each time. All while, as investigators would eventually determine, having already killed at least three other people before Michaela was ever taken.

 There’s something particularly devastating about the timeline once you see it laid out in full. Mish’s documented pattern of violence and repeated brushes with law enforcement stretches back to at least 1982, six years before Michaela’s abduction. Every arrest, every short sentence, every release back into the community during that stretch, represents a point where a longer intervention might have changed everything that followed.

 for Margaret Ball in 1989, for Michelle Xavier and Jennifer Dwey in 1986, and for Michaela Garrett in 1988. It’s the kind of pattern that once visible makes the eventual arrest feel less like a triumphant resolution and more like a long overdue reckoning with a system that had multiple opportunities to stop him and didn’t.

 For the city of Hayward and for the broader Bay Area, Michaela Gerk’s case became something close to a permanent fixture of regional memory over more than three decades. A story that resurfaced periodically through national television specials through age progressed photos released to keep her case visible through her mother’s decades of public advocacy.

 It became alongside the disappearances of Amber Schwarz Garcia and Elaine Michelof, part of a broader unresolved anxiety that an entire generation of Bay Area parents carried through the late 1980s and beyond. Three girls gone within roughly a year of each other and for over three decades, not one of those cases fully resolved.

 Michaela Garrick would be in her 40s now if she were still alive. Her mother spent more than three decades not knowing what happened to her daughter, advocating publicly the entire time, refusing to let her case fade into the background the way so many unsolved cases eventually do. That advocacy, combined with one detective’s refusal to let an old fingerprint sit unexamined indefinitely, is ultimately what connected a name to a crime that had haunted an entire region for a generation.

 It’s a resolution that still isn’t complete. Michaela’s remains have never been found, and as of Mish’s most recent sentencing for the Fremont murders, he still awaits trial specifically for her case. But for a family that spent 32 years without a single name to attach to their daughter’s disappearance, even a partial answer, even one that comes without a body, without a full resolution, without every question finally settled, represents a kind of progress nobody would have predicted for most of those 32 years. We’re tracking several other

cold cases currently working their way through the courts using exactly this kind of patient forensic work. And we’ll bring you the next update the moment it’s available, but only to people already subscribed when it happens. Hit subscribe now. Drop a comment letting us know where you’re watching from.