Michael Jose Monert was born in 1966, was raised in Oakland, California, and had worked as a grocer and a bartender. He was a registered sex offender. He told police he believed the three women he killed were prostitutes.
In October 1989 he picked up Debra Lynn Adkins, twenty-nine, on International Boulevard and took her back to his home. In his room he hit her on the head repeatedly with a hammer. He then drove her body up above Skyline Boulevard and left it face down near the entrance to Roberts Regional Park, naked from the waist down with a rope draped loosely over her, and went home and cleaned up her blood.
In May 1991 he picked up Janice Flahiff, thirty-seven, and drove her to Courtland Avenue. He hit her on the head with a small hammer in the truck and pushed her body out of it. Courtland Avenue was then a dead end, so he had to make a three-point turn to get away, and in his haste he drove over her. Her post-mortem examination found tyre marks on her leg. She was found fully clothed, lying face up.
In July 1991 he lured Pamela Sanders, thirty-three, into the shop he was working in. When she followed him into the back he took up a hammer and struck her repeatedly about the head. He cleaned up her blood and dumped her body a few blocks away. He then returned to the shop, where he and his girlfriend, who knew nothing about it, slept in the same part of the building where he had killed Sanders an hour earlier. The next morning a man walking to the West Oakland BART station found her body lying in the street, naked from the waist down and wrapped in two large refuse bags.
DNA testing in 2012 linked him to the Sanders killing, and he was arrested that September. While he was awaiting trial for it he confessed to the other two murders, and the district attorney's office said his confessions contained details only the killer could have known: how the women had died, where they had been killed and where he had left the bodies. Oakland police used what he told them to identify Adkins and Flahiff as his victims.
A jury convicted him on December 14, 2016 of one count of first-degree murder and two of second-degree murder. Because of a special allegation of multiple murders, life imprisonment without the possibility of parole was the mandatory sentence, and it was imposed on January 20, 2017, twenty-seven years after the first death.
His counsel argued at trial that he suffered from a delusional disorder and had confessed falsely. The jury rejected it.
The prosecuting attorney was Butch Ford, assisted by an inspector and a victim-witness advocate.