On November 19, 1988, a nine-year-old girl rode her scooter down a quiet street in Hayward, California. Seventeen minutes later, she was gone. Michaela Garecht had left her front door at 10:00 a. m.

in a white sweatshirt, headed with her best friend to a neighborhood grocery store to buy snacks. By 10:17 a. m. , she had been forced into a car in the store’s parking lot, in broad daylight, in front of witnesses.

She was never seen again. For more than three decades, the case was treated by many as a random tragedy, a child in the wrong place at the wrong time. But the evidence told a different story. The man who took Michaela did not act on impulse.

He had been in that parking lot before she arrived. He had already set a trap. The only question investigators could never fully answer was how long he had been watching. Michaela Joy Garecht was born in Hayward on January 24, 1979.

She was a child deeply rooted in her neighborhood, known by the people around her, loved completely by her family. Her mother, Sharon Murch, would spend the next three decades searching for her, publicly and without pause. In November 1988, Michaela lived the ordinary life of a nine-year-old in a working California neighborhood. She went to school, came home, and moved through her world freely, without suspicion.

That Saturday morning, Michaela and her best friend, Katrina Rodriguez, whom everyone called Trina, had a simple plan. Ride to the Rainbow Market on the corner of Mission Boulevard and Lafayette Avenue, buy some snacks, and ride home. It was the kind of errand that barely registers in a childhood, routine and unremarkable. By all documented accounts, it was the first time the girls had made the trip alone, without older teenagers from the neighborhood accompanying them.

The distance was two blocks. It was a Saturday morning in a familiar place. Sharon Murch let her daughter go. There is no version of what followed in which that decision was wrong.

The girls leaned their scooters against the wall near the front entrance of the market and went inside. They were in the store for only a few minutes, buying snacks, doing exactly what nine-year-olds do on a weekend morning. Outside, a man was waiting in the parking lot. His car was an older model, run-down, with a battered front bumper that appeared to have been in a prior accident.

Witnesses would later describe him as a white male, slender, approximately six feet tall, with shoulder-length dirty blonde hair. Investigators estimated his age at between eighteen and twenty-four. While the two girls were inside the store, he got out of his car. He walked to where the scooters were leaning.

He picked one up and moved it, not far, just far enough. He repositioned it toward the back of the parking lot, closer to his car. Then he returned to his vehicle and sat down to wait. He had created a reason for a child to walk away from the store entrance, away from the street, away from the sight lines of anyone passing by, and directly toward him.

When the girls came out, they started walking home, having forgotten their scooters entirely. A minute or two down the street, they realized it and turned back. They returned to the store entrance and saw one scooter where they had left it. The other was gone.

Michaela spotted it further down the parking lot near a parked car. She recognized it and walked toward it. Trina stayed near the entrance. Michaela crossed the lot alone.

When she reached the scooter and bent down to pick it up, the car door opened. The man came out fast, wrapped his right arm around her waist, and lifted her off the ground. She screamed. Witnesses heard it.

Before anyone could process what was happening, he had forced her into the vehicle. The car accelerated south on Mission Boulevard toward Union City. Trina Rodriguez, nine years old, stood at the entrance of the market and watched her best friend be taken. It was 10:17 a.

m. Seventeen minutes had passed. The trap had been set before Michaela ever arrived. The scooter had not been moved by accident.

It had been carried, deliberately repositioned to create a single outcome. A nine-year-old girl separated from her friend, back turned to the street, crouching within arm’s reach of a waiting man. That was not opportunity. That was planning.

Within hours, the Hayward Police Department launched what would become one of the most extensive investigations in its history. Sketches of the abductor were distributed across the Bay Area within twenty-four hours. Missing person flyers went up throughout Hayward, Alameda County, and Northern California. Michaela’s disappearance became the first missing child case ever featured on America’s Most Wanted.

In the first year alone, investigators received five thousand tips. The FBI joined the investigation. Searches were conducted by helicopter, airplane, and on foot across hillsides, parks, and unpopulated areas of Southern Alameda County. Nothing was found.

The forensic team processed the scooter, the one he had moved. They recovered a partial palm print from an unknown source, which investigators believed belonged to the man who had repositioned the scooter minutes before taking Michaela. The print went into evidence, and there it would stay for decades. In the absence of a suspect, investigators pursued persons of interest.

One name kept surfacing. Tim Bindner, a man who had inserted himself into the search for six-year-old Amber Swartz, abducted from Pinole, California in June 1988, just months before Michaela’s disappearance. Bindner was investigated extensively in connection with Michaela’s case and several other disappearances of Bay Area girls. He consistently denied any involvement and was never charged.

The case went cold. Years passed, then a decade, then two. Sharon Murch did not stop. She kept her daughter’s name in public view, gave interviews, and maintained a presence around the case.

In 2009, the case received renewed national attention when Jaycee Dugard was found alive in Antioch, California after nearly eighteen years in captivity. Investigators interviewed her abductor, Phillip Garrido, regarding Michaela’s case. He was not connected to it. In February 2012, Wesley Shermantine, one half of the serial killing duo known as the Speed Freak Killers, directed law enforcement to a well in San Joaquin County.

Inside, investigators found a bone fragment that initially seemed as though it could belong to Michaela. Further analysis confirmed it did not. Sharon Murch had to absorb that hope, and then the confirmation that there was still no answer. The case file did not close.

It sat, worked occasionally, revisited periodically, never solved. The partial palm print from the scooter remained in evidence. It presented a specific problem. The print was real and usable, but it was too small to be successfully scanned through the automated computer databases law enforcement relied upon to match prints against known offenders.

Running it manually, having a trained examiner compare it by eye against known prints, was possible but painstaking, and for decades there was no obvious starting point. In 2016, the Hayward Police Department created a dedicated cold case detective position. Detective Jacob Blast was assigned to the department’s most pressing unsolved cases, and Michaela Garecht’s was among them. Blast began at the beginning, working through case files, evidence logs, witness statements, tips, and forensic reports accumulated over three decades.

Then he sat down with the partial palm print. He compared it manually, hour by hour. And at some point during that painstaking work, he found a match. The print belonged to David Emery Misch.

In 1989, one year after Michaela’s abduction, Misch had been arrested and convicted for the murder of Margaret Ann Ball, a thirty-six-year-old woman from Hayward, and had been incarcerated since. He was also facing separate charges for the 1986 double murder of two young women in Fremont, California. At the time of Michaela’s abduction, Misch was twenty-seven years old. He lived in the area.

He was a known commercial burglar and drug user. Just two months before Michaela was taken, he had been convicted of commercial burglary. He matched the physical description witnesses had given investigators in 1988. He had been in the Bay Area the entire time, in prison for thirty years, and his print had been on that scooter since the morning he moved it.

On December 2, 2020, Hayward detectives traveled to the California Healthcare Facility in Stockton, where Misch was held. They arrived with a search warrant authorizing them to take his fingerprints and a DNA swab. Misch refused to speak to investigators without his attorney present, and he refused to comply with the warrant. Detectives informed him that providing his prints and DNA could potentially exonerate him if he was not responsible.

He refused again. That refusal is not evidence of guilt in a legal sense, but it is a fact, and the affidavit documenting it is part of the public record. On December 21, 2020, thirty-two years, one month, and two days after Michaela Garecht disappeared from the Rainbow Market parking lot, the Hayward Police Department, the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office, and the FBI held a joint press conference. David Emery Misch was charged with the kidnapping and murder of Michaela Joy Garecht.

Two special circumstances were alleged. Murder in the course of a kidnapping and a prior murder conviction. Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O’Malley described the crime as brazen, ruthless, and clearly planned. The positioning of Misch’s vehicle, parked in a lot serving a neighborhood market on a quiet Saturday morning, and the speed and precision with which he acted once the girls arrived, indicated to investigators that he had selected the location deliberately, had been watching, and understood that weekend mornings brought children to that store, sometimes with supervision, sometimes without.

How long he had been there before Michaela and Trina arrived, investigators could not confirm with certainty. What the evidence confirmed was this. When the two girls went inside the store, David Misch got out of his car, walked to their scooters, and moved one strategically closer to his vehicle, positioned to draw a child away from the entrance and toward him. Then he returned to his car and waited.

Sharon Murch released a statement on the day of the charging. She wrote that in the years before the announcement, she had come to accept that Michaela was no longer alive. But the acceptance she had built, the private peace she had constructed to survive three decades of not knowing, was not built around the image of a dead child. It was built around something warmer, something that let her keep going.

When she heard the news, she wrote, the image she had held for thirty years dissolved, and she was left lost in the dark. She also wrote that she was glad there were answers, that she was glad the man had been identified, and that he would never be able to hurt anyone else. And she asked one thing of the public. Don’t forget her.

David Emery Misch was booked into Santa Rita Jail in Alameda County on December 21, 2020, at age fifty-nine. He was already serving a sentence for the 1989 murder of Margaret Ball. He faced charges for the 1986 double murder of Michelle Xavier and Jennifer Duey. And he was charged with the kidnapping and murder of Michaela Joy Garecht.

Three separate cases, three separate sets of victims, one man operating in the same geographic area across a span of years, while law enforcement worked each case in isolation. Michaela Garecht’s body has never been found. David Misch has never said where she is. He refused to speak to investigators in December 2020 and has given no statement, offered no information, and provided no location.

More than thirty-six years after a nine-year-old girl screamed in a California parking lot and was driven away in a battered car, her mother does not have her back. That is the state of this case. That is where it sits today.