The Sweetheart Murders

A Birthday Gift May Yield Clues About A Brutal Double Murder

(CBS)  Joel, now 44, attended high school with John Riggins. In 2000, he decided to write a book about the still-unsolved case. Joel had no way of predicting back then that he himself would become a part of the story.

“When I was reading those court transcripts, you know, there were times the hair on the back of my neck was standing up because this was a fascinating case,” he recalls.

As he kept digging, Joel realized it was not too late to take a fresh look at the blanket. DNA technology had become more sophisticated, and samples could now be compared to those of convicted criminals stored in a new database.

So in 2002, he contacted the prosecutor in charge of Sacramento’s new cold case unit – and didn’t let up.

By that time Joel was doing his job in the face of an overwhelming personal challenge: at the age of 38, he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease.

“I was able to get an operation that not everybody’s able to get. A deep brain stimulation surgery that allows me to move my hand and type and it actually allowed me to finish this book,” Joel tells Roberts. “I’ve had my ability to walk taken away, I’ve had my ability to sign a check taken away but I can still write.”

The Parkinson’s may have slowed him down a bit, but Joel’s persistence paid off: investigators re-opened the case.

Remarkably, within months, there was a hit from the DNA databank.

“And they said it was one-in-240 trillion,” Joel remembers.

It was a one-in-240-trillion match. Finally, after more than two decades, there was a new suspect, tied to the murders through physical evidence. And as detectives would soon discover, this man had a very dark past.

Richard Hirschfield, a man authorities in Davis had never even heard of, was charged in the double murder. A convicted sex offender, his DNA was stored in the FBI database. And authorities say it matched the DNA found on that blanket, that birthday gift meant for Andrea.

For John Riggins’ mother, finally facing her son’s accused killer as he was arraigned, was bittersweet and disturbing.

“He was looking at whomever was sitting there in court…. And it was frightening,” she remembers.

Asked who this Richard Hirschfield is, Joel Davis says, “They always said it took a pretty smart person to pull this off. He has been described by the authorities as ‘unabomber’ smart.”

Hirschfield was also dangerous. He was convicted of a violent sex crime some 30 years ago – five years before John and Sabrina’s murders.

Marge and Michelle, two sisters who do not want their last names used, were 22 and 16 years old when Hirschfield attacked them at Marge’s apartment in Mountain View, Calif. in 1975. It started as a robbery at gunpoint.

Hirschfield tied them up and threatened to kill them. When Marge told him she had no money, he went from robber to rapist.

“It was like he was frustrated. He was mad. ‘All right then, who wants to be raped?’ And then my sister offered herself instead of me,” Michelle remembers.

“Anybody in my position would have done the same thing,” Marge says. “She was my little sister, a sophomore in high school. There was no choice.”

Hirschfield forced Michelle into a closet, while he raped her older sister.

Hirschfield was caught four days later, lurking outside another apartment complex in the area.

He served only five years in prison for that home invasion and rape and was paroled in July 1980. John and Sabrina were killed later that year.