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‘Sweethearts’ murder trial begins at long last
SACRAMENTO — It was the whir of a bathroom fan that alerted Andrea Rosenstein to something terribly, horribly wrong.
Rosenstein — then known as Andrea Gonsalves — made a habit of leaving the bathroom light on so her younger sister Sabrina “could see her way” when she returned to their shared Alta Loma Street condominium at night.
“She would have turned the light off” before going to bed, Rosenstein testified Tuesday in Sacramento Superior Court. So when the fan continued to blow the next morning, “I knew that she had not come home.”
A frantic Rosenstein called her family and that of John Riggins, Gonsalves’ best-friend-turned-boyfriend and fellow UC Davis freshman, who had ushered a performance of “The Davis Children’s Nutcracker” with her the night before.
Riggins, it turned out, was missing as well.
Rosenstein had last seen the couple the afternoon before, assembling baskets of Christmas cookies the sisters had spent several weeks baking for their friends and boyfriends’ families.
“I was sick and crabby, and I said something about, ‘Don’t use all the best cookies for John’s family,’ ” Rosenstein said. It would be “the last thing I said to her.”
The young couple’s uncharacteristic disappearances on the foggy night of Dec. 20, 1980, led to a tragic discovery two days later: their bodies dumped in a wooded ravine near Highway 50 and Hazel Avenue in Sacramento County, about a mile from Riggins’ abandoned van.
Both of their throats had been cut, their heads wrapped tightly in duct tape. Gonsalves showed signs of being sexually assaulted.
But more than two decades would pass before investigators identified the suspect whose jury trial got under way Tuesday — another 10 years later — in a courtroom packed with the slain students’ families and friends.
Richard Joseph Hirschfield, 63, is charged with two counts of murder, each of which carry four special-circumstance allegations that qualify him for the death penalty if he is convicted. They allege murder in the commission of kidnapping, rape and oral copulation, as well as the commission of multiple murders.
Hirschfield has pleaded not guilty. His lead defense attorney, Linda Parisi, says he’s been “wrongfully accused.”
Riggins’ parents, Dick and Kate Riggins, plan to attend each day of the lengthy trial “to let the jury know that even after 32 years, we’re still interested. This really isn’t a dead case,” Dick Riggins said in an interview.
He praised the people who have kept the case in the spotlight over the decades, including former Davis Enterprise reporter Joel Davis, who wrote a book about the case, and longtime family friends who have attended most, if not all, of Hirschfield’s pretrial hearings on the families’ behalf.
“They just refused to let the memory of John and Sabrina die,” he said. “The strongest emotion I have right now is profound gratitude for those people who have worked for so many years for this day.”
DNA match
Hirschfield was identified as a suspect in the UCD “sweethearts” murders through a cold-hit DNA match that Deputy District Attorney Dawn Bladet called “beyond compelling,” the odds of it occurring in the Caucasian population being one in 240 trillion.
Such advanced technology was not available to investigators in 1980, and eventually the case stalled, Bladet told the jury of seven men and five women during her opening statement.
“Despite the best efforts of investigators, the murders remained unsolved,” Bladet said.
Still, detectives held on to the evidence in the case, including a quilted blanket found in the Riggins family van. It was intended as a gift for Andrea, whose surprise birthday party Riggins and Gonsalves were supposed to attend the night they vanished.
“It was one of those things that old people wear,” Rosenstein testified Tuesday, smiling as she recalled a TV commercial from that time that advertised the bundle-up blanket. “She got me that for when I was studying. That was so sweet.”
The blanket held little evidentiary value until the early 1990s, when Faye Springer, then a criminalist for the state Department of Justice, discovered on it three semen stains that had darkened with the passage of time.
By then, authorities in Yolo County had built a case against four other suspects known as the “Hunt group.” They alleged that the group had murdered the UCD couple to create an alibi for defendant David Hunt’s half-brother, serial killer Gerald Gallego, who in December 1980 was in custody for a similar crime.
But DNA testing performed on the eve of the Hunt group’s 1992 trial failed to match the profiles of Riggins or any of the three male suspects, and the case fell apart.
Still, the Hunt group is expected to factor heavily into Hirschfield’s defense, although Judge Michael W. Sweet, who is presiding over the trial, has restricted the parameters of the so-called “copycat” murder theory.
Likely to take the witness stand is Ray Gonzales, David Hunt’s ex-brother-in-law and a police informant who helped then-Davis police Detective Fred Turner develop his case against the Hunt group. Gonzales has claimed that Hunt cohort Richard Thompson — now dead — confessed on tape to his and Hunt’s roles in the killings, but background noise made the recording useless.
A single hair found on Riggins’ sweater, later deemed “consistent” with David Hunt, also points toward the Hunt group’s involvement, Parisi told the jury.
It was “on the body — not a blanket in a van that lots of people had access to,” Parisi said in her opening remarks. She also contended that lax storage practices and chain-of-custody failures over the past three decades have compromised the prosecution’s evidence.
“In some situations, the evidence raises more questions than it answers,” she said. “Unfortunately, this becomes a theme.”
Suicide note
Jurors will hear evidence of Hirschfield’s criminal history, including a 1975 conviction for robbing and raping a Mountain View woman whose younger sister and boyfriend also were in the apartment. Attorneys disagreed in their opening statements as to whether the crime bore similarities to the 1980 murders.
He served his time in a Vacaville prison, not far from Davis, where Hirschfield was known to stay with friends — sometimes for months at a time — during the 1970s, Bladet said.
The jury also can consider portions of a suicide note penned by Hirschfield’s brother, Joseph Hirschfield, shortly after Sacramento County homicide detectives came to his Beaverton, Ore., workplace to question him about his brother’s whereabouts around the time of the “sweethearts” murders.
“But I have been living with this horror for 20 years,” wrote Joseph Hirschfield, who had been living in a Rancho Cordova mobile home park around the time of the murders. “I was there. …My DNA is there.”
“This mystery is … forevermore solved,” Bladet said. “Richard Hirschfield committed these murders, and I’m going to ask you to find him guilty at the end of the evidence.”
Parisi, meanwhile, cautioned the jury against getting “swept along” by the emotionally difficult case and instead urged it to focus on the quality of the DA’s case.
“The evidence tells you that the mystery is ongoing,” she said. “We’re confident you will hold the prosecution to its burden and deliver the only just verdict given the state of this evidence, and that is not guilty.”
Testimony in the case continued today.
Following Rosenstein on the witness stand Tuesday were Christian Boyce and Kim Eichorn — childhood friends of Riggins — and longtime city of Davis employee Bob Bowen. They were among the last people to see Riggins and Gonsalves alive at “The Nutcracker” performance.
“He had a party” to attend, Boyce said of Riggins, who had started to help him with stage cleanup. “I wanted them to go off and go to their party, so I offered to do the work myself.”
About 15 minutes later, “I saw them walking to their car.”
— Reach Lauren Keene at [email protected] or (530) 747-8048. Follow her on Twitter @laurenkeene
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