For more than twenty years the deaths of three women in Oakland went unsolved. What named a suspect in 2012 was a set of fingerprints on a tarp that had covered the body of Pamela Sanders, thirty-three, left in the 900 block of 24th Street in West Oakland in July 1991. The prints matched ones on file from a separate sexual assault case in Oregon, and they belonged to Michael Jose Monert, a former bartender who had been working at a produce market when Sanders died.
He was arrested and charged with her murder. After a preliminary hearing ordered him to stand trial, he sent a note to bailiffs at Santa Rita Jail in Dublin in December 2013: "I would like to make a full confession concerning my case." When Oakland police Officer Herb Sanders came to interview him, he described the Sanders killing in detail and then told the officer about two more.
According to the prosecutor, Butch Ford, Monert said he had killed Debra Lynn Adkins, twenty-nine, at the entrance to the Roberts Regional Recreation Area on Skyline Boulevard on October 1, 1989. On May 20, 1991, he said, he picked up Janice Flahiff, thirty-seven, on International Boulevard, drove her to a secluded spot in East Oakland, killed her with a hammer and left her body a short distance away. Her first name appears as Janie in some court reporting. Sanders, he said, he had killed with a hammer on July 29, 1991, at the produce market on San Pablo Avenue where he worked, before dumping her on 24th Street. Ford told jurors Monert had lured women he believed were prostitutes and left their bodies in secluded parts of the city.
Ford said the confession held details only the killer could have known. A pathologist who examined Flahiff's case in 2014 confirmed that she had died of hammer blows to the head and noticed marks on her legs that looked like tire tracks. Asked about them, Monert said he had "freaked out" and, in his hurry to get away, had driven over her. He was charged with the Adkins and Flahiff murders in January 2014, with the special circumstance of multiple murders, which under California law left death or life without parole as the only sentences open on conviction.
The case then stalled over his mind. Proceedings were suspended in 2014 so that he could be evaluated, and in 2015 he was found competent. His lawyer, Todd Bequette, argued that Monert suffered from a delusional disorder caused by a traumatic brain injury from an assault in 2002, that the stress of trial made it worse, and that the disorder had falsely convinced him he had killed the three women. The confession, Bequette said, was full of "grandiose delusions," and in his opening statement he told the jury that "the criminal justice system is prosecuting an innocent man." Judge Kevin Murphy ruled the confession admissible.
The first trial opened on May 17, 2016, and ended in a mistrial within two days at Bequette's request, after Monert kept interrupting the opening statements. Two psychiatrists then disagreed about whether he was competent. Monert at first refused to see a third, telling Murphy he had already been examined by eight over the years: "Don't waste the court's time." In November 2016 a jury took two hours to find him competent. During that hearing four armed bailiffs removed him from the courtroom after he pushed a heavy wooden chair at them, shouting, "I've never been so insulted in my life!" Afterward he asked to represent himself.
The second trial began on November 30, 2016. On December 14 the jury convicted him of the first-degree murder of Pamela Sanders and the second-degree murders of Debra Adkins and Janice Flahiff, and found the multiple-murder allegation true. On January 20, 2017 he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, more than twenty-seven years after Adkins died.