Vanessa Lei Samson, 22


Michelle Lyn Michaud


Summary of Offense:

On September 18, 2002, Michaud and her ex-boyfriend, James Daveggio were sentenced to death in Alameda County for the abduction, rape and murder of a 22-year-old Pleasanton woman, Vanessa Lei Samson, in December 1997, in a minivan rigged for torture. The Sacramento couple kept Samson inside their minivan, rigged with hooks and ropes, where they repeatedly tortured her with curling irons while driving east toward the Sierra Nevada. A motorist found Samson's body two days after the murder, face down in the snow, about 30 feet down an embankment alongside a road in Alpine County. She had been strangled.

For more on Daveggio, see: http://www.cncpunishment.com/forums/...rnia-Death-Row