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For more than two decades, the murders of two UC Davis students have baffled law enforcement, but DNA evidence has finally led investigators to the kidnapper and rapist behind the infamous “sweetheart murders.” I brought it out.
Eleven years after being held on San Quentin’s death row, Richard J. Hirshfield has died of natural causes, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has announced.
His death brings to an end a long and gruesome saga that has haunted the families of Hirshfield’s victims for half a century.
Lovers John Riggins and Sabrina Gonsalves were 18-year-old freshmen at the Northern California school. On December 20, 1980, they were volunteering at a performance of the ballet “The Nutcracker” at the Davis Community Center.
“These kids were exceptional. I don’t use that word lightly,” Investigator Ron Garverick said on the Sacramento County District Attorney’s Office podcast. “They really, really were. Each of them was deeply involved and giving back to their communities, their families, and their schools.”
After the couple left the community center that night, they were abducted by Mr. Hirshfield.
Gonsalves’ sister Andrea reported him missing the next day. She ended up waiting 33 years for her killer to be convicted.
Hirshfield raped Gonsalves and dumped the two teenagers’ bodies in a ravine about 30 miles east of Davis in Sacramento County, where they were discovered by police three days later. Their throats were slit and their heads wrapped with duct tape.
“The Gonsalves family was led by George, who was an Air Force colonel, a very stoic guy, a strong family man,” lead prosecutor Dawn Bladet said on the podcast. “Andrea said she had never seen her father cry until she heard the news of Sabrina’s death. He was on his knees crying for his baby.”
Investigators struggled for nearly a decade to identify the culprit. Then, in 1989, David Hunt and Doug Reiner were arrested as suspects in Yolo County.
Hunt was the half-brother of Sacramento-area serial killer Gerald Gallego, who raped and murdered at least 11 women. Investigators theorized that Hunt had developed similar sadistic tastes.
The suspects remained in jail for three years awaiting trial in Yolo County Superior Court. Before that happened, investigators discovered a previously overlooked stain on the blanket, which turned out to be semen, giving them a breakthrough in the case.
There was no DNA match for either suspect, and both were released. The case has cooled down again.
That was until 2001, when police uploaded the semen sample to the national DNA database. There was an immediate match to a sex offender on Washington state’s list. There, Hirshfield was imprisoned for fondling two girls.
Investigators soon discovered that he had been convicted of another violent sex crime in California five years before killing his girlfriends.
In 1975, Hirshfield broke into the Mountain View apartment of two sisters, ages 16 and 22.
“He threatened them, tied them up, pointed a box cutter at them and assaulted them. He had a gun in his hand. He asked who they wanted to be raped,” said Bladet. The 22-year-old said: “I didn’t want my sister to be raped, so I said, ‘Don’t hurt me, just take me away.’ And he did.”
Although investigators had a clear link to the suspect, securing an arrest and verdict was not an easy task.
“All of the original research material from 1980 had to be examined and documented, and then of course all the new research had to be considered,” Bladet said. “Ultimately, this case required more than 200,000 pages and 80 bank boxes of documents.”
Not all of the original evidence was well preserved, and much of it had to be shipped to Sacramento from Yolo County, where the initial investigation into Hunt and Reiner took place. Prosecutors say multiple witnesses have died since the crime occurred, and many are struggling to tell their stories of what happened in the past.
Then there was the issue of the suicide note left by Hershfield’s brother Joseph, who committed suicide shortly after police announced they had found a DNA match in the murder of his girlfriend.
Joseph said in the note, “Richard did commit the murder, but I was there too. I didn’t kill anyone, but my DNA is still there.”
The memo was both a blessing and a curse, Vladet said, as it sparked a heated debate between the prosecution and defense over whether some of it could be used as evidence.
“There’s a difference between what we know and what we can prove in court, what’s admissible as evidence,” Vlade said. “Joseph’s dying declaration that Richard was guilty could not have been evidence. The law does not allow that, so that part of the note had to be deleted.”
The memo also created an opportunity for the defense team to try to pin the blame on Joseph for the murder, she said.
A jury finally reached a verdict in 2013, more than a decade after crime scene DNA matched Hirshfield. Hirshfield was found guilty of first-degree murder and two counts of use of a firearm with a deadly weapon enhancement. He was being held on death row in San Quentin.
“I felt so much relief for these families. They were just so emotional and so relieved,” Bladet said. “It’s been a long time for them. They’ve been living with this situation for 30 years.”
Mr. Hirshfield died Monday at the age of 75 at the California Medical Facility, a prison hospital in Vacaville.
The lovers he murdered, Riggins and Gonsalves, have a tree and plaque dedicated to them on the UC Davis campus.
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