SACRAMENTO — Their outfits reflected the festivities that lay ahead of them. First, ushering duties at a “Davis Children’s Nutcracker” performance, followed by a surprise birthday party.

That evening, Sabrina Gonsalves donned a black zip-up jacket, gray plaid skirt and Italian leather boots for the occasions. Her boyfriend and fellow UC Davis student, John Riggins, paired khakis and a dark-brown pullover sweater.

They made the show, but not the party. Two days later, their dressy clothing became evidence in a double-homicide investigation.

Photographs of the garments — some of them rumpled and crusted with dirt — appeared on a courtroom screen Monday as the trial for the couple’s alleged killer, Richard Joseph Hirschfield, resumed in Sacramento. The case had been on a 12-day hiatus after one of Hirschfield’s defense attorneys, Linda Parisi, underwent knee surgery due to a courthouse fall.

Parisi, using a wheelchair, was back in action Monday, looking to cast doubt in jurors’ minds about the integrity of the evidence against her client.

Hirschfield, 63, faces the death penalty if convicted of kidnapping the 18-year-olds from Davis, killing them and dumping their bodies in a Sacramento County ravine on the night of Dec. 20, 1980. He has pleaded not guilty.

When the murders occurred, Louise Thurman was a Sacramento State University student working part-time for the Sacramento County Coroner’s Office. On Monday, she recalled assisting the pathologists who conducted the couple’s simultaneous autopsies.

“We very carefully put (the clothing) into paper bags” for storage, Thurman said — an act she said she specifically remembers to this day.

Thurman’s testimony capped off a trial day focused on “chain of custody” matters — how evidence in the case has been stored and handled over the past three decades.

Other witnesses included a Sacramento County criminalist and a sheriff’s property-room supervisor — both long retired — who offered details about the paperwork used to track the evidence as it sat in, or moved between, the county’s property warehouse and crime lab.

The quality of that evidence is a cornerstone of Hirschfield’s defense. Parisi said in her opening statement that shoddy practices over the years compromised the evidence, resulting in Hirschfield being “wrongfully accused” — despite a 2002 DNA match from a semen-stained blanket that prosecutor Dawn Bladet has called “beyond compelling.”

Thurman said her duties included helping to prepare the bodies for autopsy and storing the swabs and slides containing the victims’ bodily fluids in evidence envelopes. Prosecutors say Gonsalves’ slides would later show evidence of sexual assault, a claim the defense refutes.

Thurman identified her own hand in several photographs, holding a ruler to measure the lengths of injuries to Riggins’ head and body. He had suffered several blows to his head and the back of his neck, along with lacerations to his left hand and forearm that appeared to be defensive wounds.

Trial proceedings resume today on a temporarily shortened schedule — from six-hour days to four — while Parisi continues to recover from her surgery.

— Reach Lauren Keene at [email protected] or 530-747-8048. Follow her on Twitter @laurenkeene

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