SACRAMENTO — A Sacramento judge ordered a 12-day halt to the UC Davis “sweethearts” murder trial after two of the defendant’s court-appointed attorneys said they can’t proceed without their injured colleague.
Linda Parisi underwent knee surgery Tuesday after falling down a short flight of stairs in the courthouse and was dismayed to hear the trial resumed Wednesday without her, her daughter Jessica Graves — also an attorney — told Judge Michael Sweet.
“Frankly, the fact that this case is moving forward is affecting her recovery,” Graves said. Doctors have ordered a seven- to 10-day rest period, putting Parisi’s return date at Sept. 24.
Although prosecutor Dawn Bladet had hoped to introduce next week the DNA evidence allegedly linking defendant Richard Hirschfield to the Dec. 20, 1980, kidnap-slayings of UCD students John Riggins and Sabrina Gonsalves, Sweet — following a closed-door meeting with assistant public defenders Ken Schaller and David Lynch — ruled he was “persuaded we should wait for Ms. Parisi on the DNA.”
Bladet conceded, saying in court that juggling her witnesses to put on those whom Schaller and Lynch could cross-examine threatened to make her case appear “disjointed” to the jury.
John’s parents, Dick and Kate Riggins, who have made a temporary home in Sacramento during the trial, took the delay in stride.
“We’re disappointed, of course, but it’s an unforeseen accident — you can’t do much about it,” Dick Riggins said in an interview outside the courtroom.
Added Kate Riggins: “We don’t want to jeopardize the case.”
The final testimony of the week came from witnesses who years ago handled evidence in the case, along with two women who say they saw the Riggins van near the murder scene nearly 32 years ago.
Kelley Crawford spent part of that December night sharing a bottle of wine with her then-boyfriend, Carl White, in the back of White’s van, which he had parked on a remote dirt road off Folsom Boulevard.
“All of a sudden the van filled with light, so I knew there was a car coming at us,” Crawford testified. White flicked on his headlights, prompting the other vehicle to swerve around them.
That vehicle — also a van, Crawford recalled — followed a right curve in the road before coming to a stop. Crawford said she never saw anyone get out of the van.
“They sat there for a while with their lights on, and then they turned them off,” Crawford said. The couple left about 10 minutes later at the urging of White, who knew the area well and didn’t like what he saw.
“Nobody goes back there,” Crawford said he told her. “That’s not right. We should just go.”
Police found Riggins’ and Gonsalves’ bodies in a nearby ravine, their throats slashed and heads wrapped in duct tape, two days later.
Another witness, Kathryn Harp, recalled seeing the van later on Dec. 20 as she drove with her mother on Hazel Avenue.
“It was parked so cockeyed into the road we nearly hit it,” said Harp, who described the two-tone beige van as being parked diagonally, its rear blocking the right-hand lane. Behind it, parked on the shoulder, was a dark blue, four-door sedan. Both vehicles had their lights off.
“We thought there had been a collision,” Harp recalled. She said she rolled down her window as they drove past but saw and heard nothing, “so we decided to go on.”
Authorities believe Hirschfield’s brother Joseph — who lived in the Rancho Cordova area at that time — may have played a role in the killings and perhaps drove a second vehicle. He took his own life after being questioned by Sacramento homicide investigators in 2002, leaving a note that said, in part, “I was there” and “my DNA is there.”
Earlier, former state Department of Justice criminalist Michael Saggs identified an evidence chain-of-custody form showing he accepted two items of evidence in the “sweethearts” case on June 21, 1989 — newsprint wrapping and a bundle-up blanket recovered from Riggins’ van.
Years later, the semen-stained blanket would yield DNA alleged to match Hirschfield’s genetic profile.
But in 1989, then-Davis police Detective Fred Turner had submitted the blanket and wrapping for testing of possible trace evidence, such as hair and fibers. The same form indicated he retrieved the blanket on Feb. 13, 1990.
By then, Turner had arrested the so-called “Hunt group” — four suspects he believed to be responsible for the Riggins-Gonsalves murders, but whose case fell apart in light of the DNA evidence discovered on the eve of their 1993 trial.
It was unclear whether the blanket was ever examined while in the DOJ’s care. Saggs said under cross-examination by Schaller that any testing procedures should have been reflected on the chain-of-custody form, which only showed it going from Turner to Saggs and back.
“It looks as though there was no activity,” Saggs said.
— Reach Lauren Keene at lkeene@davisenterprise.net or 530-747-8048. Follow her on Twitter @laurenkeene