SACRAMENTO — Calling the defendant’s crimes “so horrendous, so evil,” a Sacramento Superior Court judge Friday said the death penalty is the “appropriate punishment” to impose on Richard Joseph Hirschfield for the Dec. 20, 1980, kidnap-murders of UC Davis sweethearts John Riggins and Sabrina Gonsalves.
In a courtroom filled with the slain couple’s family and friends, as well as nearly a dozen of the jurors who sat through Hirschfield’s three-month trial last fall, Judge Michael W. Sweet swiftly denied defense bids for a new trial and to set aside the death verdict in favor of life in prison without the possibility of parole.
“These killings involved great violence and displayed a high degree of cruelty, viciousness and callous disregard for human life,” Sweet said. Other factors he considered, he said, were the devastating effects of the murders on the couple’s families and the Davis community, as well as Hirschfield’s past convictions for rape, robbery and child molestation.
Defense claims that Hirschfield was influenced by brain damage and a troubled childhood were “not persuasive.”
Friday’s sentencing marked the final chapter in a case that began just over 32 years earlier, when Riggins and Gonsalves — both 18-year-old UCD freshmen — vanished from Davis after ushering a performance of the “Davis Children’s Nutcracker.”
A frantic two-day search by family and friends led to the discovery of the couple’s bodies in a wooded ravine off Folsom Boulevard and Aerojet Road in Rancho Cordova. Their heads had been heavily wrapped in duct tape, their throats viciously cut. Gonsalves had been the victim of a sexual assault, Riggins struck multiple times in the head.
DNA evidence recovered from a blanket in Riggins’ van — abandoned about a mile from the bodies — led investigators to Hirschfield in 2002, a decade after a botched attempt by Yolo County authorities to prosecute another group of suspects.
Jurors in the case deliberated less than half a day before convicting Hirschfield of two counts of first-degree murder with special circumstances on Nov. 5, 2012, and again a month later as they recommended punishment by death.
Before handing down that sentence, Sweet heard statements from nine of the victims’ relatives, including parents, siblings and cousins who spoke of how the victim’s brutal deaths affected their lives.
“There are no words to tell how much we wish the world still included them,” said Andrea Gonsalves Rosenstein, who was the first to discover her sister missing from their North Davis apartment. “We feel real, constant pain. …I have been haunted since Dec. 21, (1980).”
“We will never know the gifts that John and Sabrina would have given society, but we do know Hirschfield’s contributions: humiliation, pain and death,” said Dick Riggins, John’s father. “It is altogether fitting and proper that this evil man be sentenced to death for what he has done. I can only hope the state will expedite his execution.”
After signing the warrant that will send Hirschfield to death row at San Quentin State Prison, Sweet addressed the victims’ families, who along with dozens of their friends attended more than eight years of court hearings while awaiting Hirschfield’s trial.
“Your lives changed permanently, in the worst possible way, on that December day in 1980, and you have endured so much,” Sweet said. “Hopefully, with the jury’s verdict in this case, they have provided some measure of closure and comfort, and that justice in some small way has and will be served. (You have) my sincere and deep-felt apologies for the tragedies you have suffered.”
The case now proceeds to an automatic appeal.
“Today is clearly a very somber day, and Mr. Hirschfield looks forward to the opportunity for a full and fair appeal,” lead defense attorney Linda Parisi told reporters after the sentencing.
Read the complete story in Sunday’s Enterprise.