Transcript of Episode 2
Sunset Cliffs
There was something in the kelp beds off Sunset Cliffs. To the eyes of the young surfer squinting from his board, the seagulls appeared to be miraculously walking on water. He couldn’t make out what they’d flocked around from such a distance, but waved and pointed to alert an older surfer closer to the commotion. Not quite knowing why, beyond a compulsive sense of curiosity, he started paddling out towards the gulls. The area was known as South Garbage, owing to the stench of the rotting seaweed drifting in the surf, and on that day, apart from a few sunbathers by the cliffs, it was uncommonly quiet. Approaching the scene, the birds scattered, revealing their makeshift perch. The body of a young woman was bobbing amongst the kelp, face down and naked. The injuries to her legs, large parts of which were missing, told him she was dead, and that he needed to get out of the water.
On that Friday afternoon in April 1994, Robert Engel received a call sending him out to Sunset Cliffs. Engel, at 60 years of age, had been an investigator in San Diego County, California for 19 years. His work in the Medical Examiner’s Office was no holiday and he routinely surveyed the carnage of gang violence, car crashes and suicides. His office of thirteen investigators examined over two and a half thousand such cases in 1990 alone, when non-natural death was suspected or no doctor had attended the scene. Arriving at Sunset Cliffs at 4pm, Engel found a Jane Doe laid out before him on the rescue deck, recently lifted from the surf. Engel noted she was 18-24 years old, 5 ‘2’ and slim, a brunette with pale complexion and brown eyes. Engel noted the woman had ‘large tearing type wounds with missing tissue’ and determined from the wrinkling of the skin on her fingers that she hadn’t been in the water long. Towards identifying the deceased, who carried no ID or other possessions, he noted a brass bracelet, two rings on her fingers and on her shoulder a partial tattoo. The inked image of a blue monarch butterfly, rendered incomplete by a strip of skin torn away along her right shoulder. The lifeguards who had rescued the body, waited close by, with little doubt over what they thought had happened. One, Lt. Brant Bass, a San Diego Service lifeguard, told reporters ‘we don’t know what else could have caused that type of wound’. The uncomfortable realization was sinking in that the Jane Doe had, in the waters they daily patrolled, fallen victim to a rare shark attack. Emerging from the examination, Engel was inclined to agree, but, perhaps deferring the final verdict to his superior who would perform the official autopsy, he marked the cause of death as ‘unknown’. The unidentified body was taken into the care of the Medical Examiner’s Office overnight.
In all the years since records began, there had only ever been 14 confirmed shark attacks along San Diego county’s 113 kilometers of coastline and only four involved swimmers. The sole fatality was that of free diver Robert Pamperin, who was taken in 1959 by a shark so large his dive companion Gerald Lehrer had initially believed it to be an orca. Now, 35 years later, could there be a second? That was what chief medical officer Brian Blackbourne wondered as he undertook the autopsy on Saturday the 16th, naturally not oblivious of the speculation surrounding the death at Sunset Cliffs. Blackbourne, a Canadian, had been headhunted from Massachusetts five years earlier to head a newly launched San Diego coroner’s office, after the previous office had been accused of ‘conducting faulty autopsies’. The injuries of the unidentified female were unusual, even for a man of his decades of experience. He recorded that her neck was broken ‘as if in a car crash’ with bleeding on the vertebrae of the neck and under the scalp. She had broken ribs, her pelvis had been broken apart by significant force causing internal bleeding and there were various scrapes, bruises and facial contusions. Six to nine inch chunks of flesh were removed from the back, buttocks and shoulders in what appeared to be bites. Similar wounds were noted on the left leg. The right leg was severed, missing entirely from the mid-thigh down. Strangely, Blackbourne found sand in the deceased female’s mouth, throat, lungs and stomach. Toxicology tests failed to show any prescription or recreational drugs or alcohol in her system. Deciding he needed a specialist opinion to make sure, he made a call ahead before driving out the coast to Scripps Oceanographic Institute. Blackbourne described the event and the injuries to experts there, headed by marine biologist Richard Rosenblatt. After listening to their opinions he concluded the autopsy with the cause of death as ‘shark attack’, manner of death, ‘accident’ and that she was alive when the injuries were inflicted. The picture Dr. Blackbourne painted in his summary was a nightmarish one. Judging the victim had entered the water sometime around midnight between Thursday and Friday, she had then fallen victim to a fatal encounter with a great white shark. Taken completely unawares, the shark had hit her with significant force in the dark shallow water as she enjoyed a twilight swim. Grabbing her leg and dragging her to the sea floor, her neck was broken on impact, and with panicked gulps she swallowed sand at the bottom. Her leg severed between the shark’s jaws, she died very soon after from either blood loss or drowning.
By that Saturday evening, the tragic tale of the unknown female killed in a suspected shark attack was headline news across California. Sitting at home watching the 10 o’clock news, Denise Knox, a stationary shop owner, was suddenly hit by a bolt of recognition at the description of the girl with the butterfly tattoo. Calling the coroner’s she was soon driving, with a friend for support, out to the morgue in Kearny Mesa. Unable to bring herself to view the remains, a polaroid photo was taken by an assistant and passed outside to her. Looking quickly at the image no doubt remained. The shark attack victim was her employee, Michelle von Emster.
Michelle von Emster was born in San Francisco in 1968, the eldest of five sisters in a tight knit suburban family. Michelle grew up to be something of a free spirit, befitting the popular image of the era and city she came from. In 1991, she got hit with a devastating blow- a diagnosis of Hodgkin’s disease, a potentially fatal form of leukaemia. Her college plans derailed, she battled through a year of horrible chemotherapy which would come to give her a second chance. After making a full recovery, she took off with a friend on a liberating road trip around California’s Route 66. As a story goes, she stopped along the way at Ocean Beach, San Diego and compelled by the beauty of the spot and her lifelong affinity with the sea, she decided to stay there.
With Brian Blackbourne’s confirmation that the young woman- now identified as Michelle von Emster- had been the victim of a white shark attack, the San Diego PD started receiving a spate of anonymous calls contesting his version of events and claiming the death was no accident. Many put this down to shock at such a rare occurrence, or a reluctance to believe that the waters of San Diego might not be as safe as they’d imagined. Nevertheless, forced into action by the sheer volume of calls alleging foul play, the Police announced, somewhat half-heartedly, that homicide detectives were being assigned to investigate. Lt. Greg Clark, leading the investigation, summed up the unexpectant outlook of the team- ‘to this point there is no indication of foul play… but people calling in tips can’t believe it’s a shark’. Conducting a number of interviews with people around Ocean Beach who knew Michelle, they started weaving together a picture of her last night alive. On that Thursday evening she had planned on going to a Pink Floyd gig at the Jack Murphy stadium with her roommate, Coco Campbell. Unfortunately for the pair, they’d ended up with the wrong tickets and were turned away, disappointed. On the way home just after 8pm, Michelle, in what Coco described as ‘a strange mood’, asked to be dropped off at the pier. This would be the last recorded sighting of her, Coco wishing her goodnight as she slipped out the passenger’s side, wrapped up in a green trench coat. Michelle’s movements after those brief parting moments are draped in mystery and supposition. Through the sweeping flashlight of a couple out for a nocturnal stroll the following night, the authorities came into the possession of Michelle’s handbag, innocuously placed by a seawall. It had been found nearly ten hours after her body and lay near enough to where she’d been dropped off by Coco, but, nearly 2km north from where she ended up at South Garbage. Studies of sea currents suggested she may have entered the water near where her purse was left but drifted southwards. Inside were her house keys, driver’s licence, make-up, a box of cigarettes, $27 in cash and cheque stubs, from which her last pay cheque had been torn- but later revealed to have never been cashed. However, detectives seemed satisfied that Coco Campbell’s statement that Michelle often went to the beach alone and often swam in the sea backed up the medical examiner’s narrative. Lt. Hurley told the press unequivocally that there were ‘no suspicious circumstances and no unanswered questions’. The papers that following Sunday slammed the door shut with the adamant headline ‘Shark Killed Woman, Case Closed’.
Yet, that would not be the end of that. Back in 1994, Ralph Collier, was a leading expert in Pacific white shark behaviour and ecology. Working with the Global Shark Attack File he played a quasi-detective role, investigating reported attacks in the US Pacific region. The GSAF, as it’s abbreviated to, is an international database of shark attacks. Its investigators compile info in case files, listing detail like the species and size of the shark involved, the time of day the incident occurred and the water temperature or consistency at the location. Unlike Engel, Blackbourne or anyone else who viewed had Michelle von Emster’s injuries, Collier had the distinct advantage of actually having seen the damage a shark could inflict on a human given the wrong circumstances. One grisly but necessary part of his role involved the inspection of victim’s bodies or photos in order to determine the kind of shark. In the case of Michelle, though weeks had passed since her death, her right femur was still available to examine. Even at a glance, the bone, supposedly severed from a white shark just didn’t match up. Collier knew from all his experience, that a great white removes a limb with the side to side motion of its straight serrated teeth. On inspection the bone appears as if cut clean through with a saw. Checking back over hundreds of photos of such injuries he was left with little doubt. None looked remotely similar to Michelle’s femur, which Collier described in his assessment as if ‘whittled to a point’, like a splinter, which suggested an injury caused by twisting under great force.
As Collier read back over the Chief Medical Officer’s autopsy report, further red flags emerged. First, he noted the extensive bruising, internal bleeding and trauma injuries, like the pelvis and neck break- highly unusual in shark attacks. On top of that, the examiner’s sequence of events, detailing Michelle being taken in a shark’s jaws then rammed downwards forcefully into the seabed, was a behaviour Collier had never heard of in white sharks. In fact, that species typically strikes upwards from below at a target on or near the surface. Here, Collier found his final piece of evidence- the attack had apparently happened in the dead of an overcast night. Great whites, unable to properly see surface silhouettes in darkness, tend to hunt in the hours around sunrise and sunset. In fact, in the entire records of the Global Shark Attack File they had never confirmed a night time white shark attack. Finally convinced, Ralph Collier marked the event as ‘not consistent with white shark behaviour’. Soon, Richard Rosenblatt from Scripp’s Oceanography Institute, came round to the same opinion having received more details than Blackbourne than initially provided. Adding to Collier’s insights, he observed that there were no white shark scrape or scratch marks on the bone. What’s more, no trace of a white shark tooth fragment, often chipped off during significant bites, could be found in or around the wounds. The sole evidence for any shark involvement at all was post-mortem bites from scavenging blue sharks. George Burgess of the International Shark Attack File added more weight to the tide turning against the original assumptions, stating that he’d never seen a shark knocking someone into the bottom, before concluding ominously, ‘I’d be looking more closely at a felony on land’.
In spite of the rapid open/shut of the case, rumours and whispers spread around Ocean Beach in the years after. So what had happened to Michelle in the hours between 8 o’clock and the estimated time she hit the water around midnight? Denise Knox, who had identified Michelle in the coroner’s office, revealed her young employee had admitted that she’d been forced to move job to avoid a stalker. This guy who rode a motorbike had kept turning up at her previous workplace in Rumour’s Café and watching her. Years after, in 2014, Denise recalled that in the days after Michelle’s death, a man entered the stationary store and made photocopies of her autopsy, before leaving… on a motorbike. Another man fell under suspicion from his own writings. On a now defunct blog post, Edwin Decker, an Ocean Beach writer and bartender, wrote a florid and detailed account of a night of romance he spent with Michelle. The events described by Decker take place on Wednesday night, the second last night of her life. He alleges the two had first met while he was working at Winston’s Bar, next door to Rumour’s Café, and on that Wednesday they had finally ended up on a first date. Decker recounts how the pair had hit it off and headed for his place nearby, but were joined by an unwelcome colleague of his. The last he saw of Michelle she was leaving his cottage in a taxi at 5AM on Thursday. Disappointed at hearing nothing from her in the days after, he remembers turning on the news to find that a girl with a butterfly tattoo had been fatally mauled by a shark. In an apparent elegy, he penned a poem about that moment:
‘The reports said there was a tattoo,
A butterfly on her shoulder,
Which I remembered that night
On my couch when I
Like the shark
Chewed on her lips and took off her shirt’
According to Decker, Michelle had also mentioned that she ‘loved to surf naked at twilight’ so he figured that must have been how she met her fate in the jaws of a great white shark. However, many others remained sceptical and Edwin Decker’s tale of his connection to Michelle only added to this. One of these people was the journalist Neal Matthews, who wrote an article called ‘Great White or Great Wrong?’ in Boating Magazine a few months after Michelle’s unsettling demise. A rare dissenting voice in a media content to follow the official line of shark attack offered by the authorities, Matthew’s fascination with the case lingered. In 2008 when David Martin was fatally injured by a white shark at Solona Beach, only 35km up the coast from Sunset Cliffs, Matthew’s curiosity was reignited. In local news coverage of the death of the 66 year old triathlete, the name of Michelle von Emster resurfaced as one of only two previous shark victims in San Diego county. Thinking back on the article he had written fourteen years before, Matthews felt a sense of indignation and an urge to find justice for Michelle. To the surprise of many he contacted Edwin Decker for assistance and to even greater surprise, the duo wrote a letter appealing for the case to be reopened and reviewed. Glenn Wagner, who had replaced the retired Brian Blackbourne as Chief Medical Examiner, agreed. When finished, his reply was diplomatic. He both defended the ‘good science’ behind his predecessor’s judgment, while acknowledging Ralph Collier’s doubts over listing it in the Global Shark Attack File. Wagner admitted there were undoubtedly many odd details about the incident and ‘issues for which there are simply no explanations’.
Over the twenty six years since Michelle’s passing- a period of time longer than her all too short life- many theories have circulated to try and explain it. Some, like one caller’s tip claiming she’d been fed to sharks for the filming of an offshore snuff film, probably don’t merit much consideration. A number of credible theories, however, offer possible insights into how a young woman came to have her life prematurely extinguished in the cool waters off Ocean Beach.
The first theory is that Michelle von Emster accidentally fell, deliberately jumped or was pushed from Sunset Cliffs. Between 2005 and 2017, there was a yearly average of five deaths or serious injuries at that scenic spot. A drop from 25m onto rocks below, could have caused the forceful twisting impact injury that Ralph Collier identified, causing a severe break. Known as a displaced or compound break, this would explain the pointed appearance of her remaining femur. While shark experts’ agree a great white is the only shark common in the region that could remove a leg in one go, as Neal Matthews suggested in his original coverage, the tissue could have been removed post mortem by smaller sharks, eventually exposing the broken femur. However, if as various oceanographers and other observers believe, Michelle had initially entered the water further north, near her purse, before drifting, then a fall would have to be ruled out. The fact she was found naked and her clothes were never located further complicates this version of events.
Another theory is that Michelle was hit by the propellor of a watercraft. In one scenario, Michelle, taking a dip in the shallows and unseen by the boat, is fatally wounded in a collision. The unwitting occupants of the boat, travelling at speed in near pitch darkness, would barely have registered it. Yet an unlucky swimmer could have been hurled down into the seabed, causing multiple impact injuries, the ingesting of sand and swift death from blood loss at the right thigh. In a second more sinister scenario, an aggressor could have attacked her and drowned her along the shallow sandy shoreline. Taken out by the tide, Michelle’s lifeless body was then hit by the propellor of a boat, resulting in the severance of her femur. To date no owner or user of any seacraft around the time of her death has ever reported such a collision in the water that night and it remains but a theory.
A final theory is that Michelle may have been severely injured elsewhere, then dumped into the sea. This theory often points to a potential hit and run incident or a car crash in which the driver of the vehicle responsible panics and decides to avoid facing consequences. Supporting this theory is the medical observation of Brian Blackbourne that Michelle’s injuries looked like those of ‘a car wreck’ and the events could have occurred hidden in darkness and relative quiet close to midnight. Again no evidence has ever come to light to make this scenario anything more than simply one which can’t be ruled out.
“If it wasn’t a white shark,” Brian Blackbourne asked “then what was it? The sense of exasperation in his question lingers on. Often when faced with a void people try to fill it. That unknown can be too uncomfortable, yet the truth can also be painful. Monsters can serve to fill that void too, conveniently nominated then agreed upon, an explanation for the inexplicable horror of a mystery. In the story of Michelle von Emster the white shark plays this role. The Jaws-like scenario of the carefree and beautiful young woman, clothes thrown off in joyful liberation, only to be taken by a creature of the deep.
In life as in death, the public version of Michelle von Emster that survives is an enigma. It has been contended that portraits of her and her life often appeared to contradict one another. Some interviewed remembered her as a meditator and health food devotee, while others knew a drinking and smoking party girl. For some she hung out around Ocean Beach with a disreputable crew, yet others attested to her homeliness and sweetness. Michelle told a friend she’d been to Europe but her mother on hearing this seemed perplexed and suggested that she’d never really travelled anywhere. Her professed plans just before her death to leave San Diego and move back to be near her family were never fulfilled. In photos she appears at times preppy, the girl next door, in others a veritable bohemian. People looking for something conclusive are inevitably disappointed. What is the most likely explanation is that she was simply being a twenty five year old, experimenting, exploring, learning about herself and world around her. How and why that world was abruptly ended is still elusive for all those seeking answers. As of the start of 2021 Michelle’s case is at an impasse. The authorities in San Diego continue to stand by their judgement that she was the unlucky victim of a shark attack, while in the database of the Global Shark Attack File the name Michelle Von Emster is highlighted in blue- meaning ‘invalid’ case. A margin note reads ‘not a shark attack, possibly murder’. For now the truth lies submerged, waiting to be salvaged.