2 Surfers Found Her Dead But Was She Murdered, Or Was She Killed By A Great White Shark? Inside The Bewildering Case Of Michelle Von Emster
San Diego, California. Michelle Von Emster was just 25-years-old when she died under very strange circumstances after surviving several years of battling leukemia. Michelle loved living so close to the ocean, and she loved spending time at the beach. She was also particularly fond of cats.
On April 15th, 1994, a Friday, two surfers were walking along the beach in Sunset Cliffs, a neighborhood in San Diego, California.
Sunset Cliffs also has a national park element to it, full of sea caves, coastal arches, and perfect places to watch the sun as it rises or sets.
It’s easy to see why tourists and those looking to tie the knot frequent the area.
Aside from the sheer and steep cliffs you have to take care walking near, Sunset Cliffs is, by all means, a safe place when it comes to the crime rate.
So when these two surfers spotted something in the kelp beds along the shore, they couldn’t believe what they were looking at.
FindAGrave; Michelle is pictured above
They got closer, wondering what was floating there in the shallow waters that some seagulls seemed excited about.
They were completely shocked to realize it was a young woman, lying face down, and she had no clothes on.
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Her butterfly tattoo on her shoulder was clearly visible as she bobbed along with the waves. Her right leg was nearly missing entirely, up to her thigh, and she was also missing huge pieces of her skin.
It was reasonable for them to assume she had to have been attacked by a shark, and when authorities arrived on the beach, they naturally thought the same thing.
Although shark attacks in the area are a rare occurrence, they can happen, and up to 10 different species of sharks are thought to inhabit the waters along the coast of San Diego.
It seemed Michelle’s case was over before it even started, but here’s where it gets very bizarre.
Wikipedia; Michelle smiles in the photo above
Michelle was transported to the San Diego Lifeguard Headquarters, where an autopsy was performed on her.
The San Diego Medical Examiner Brian Blackbourne noted that Michelle’s right leg had been removed at the thigh.
She had a broken pelvis, broken ribs, a broken neck, and quite a few contusions and cuts on her torso and face.
She was thought to have been still alive when she sustained all of her injuries, and she had a lot of sand in her stomach, mouth, throat, and lungs.
It was concluded by Brian that she had ingested all of the sand and broke her neck as the shark pulled her down and she was gasping for air.
Brian had never done an autopsy before on a victim of a shark attack, and the other authorities who saw Michelle’s body didn’t even know what a shark attack victim looked like, as they had never seen it before either.
Brian did reach out to the Scripps Institute of Oceanography to ask for more information on shark attack victims, but none of those experts saw Michelle’s body.
He figured her cause of death had to be drowning and blood loss. He went on to detail in the autopsy report that Michelle had been attacked by a great white shark sometime around midnight.
This is where the facts don’t quite add up…
FindAGrave; Michelle smiles in the above black and white photo
The water temperature off the coast of Sunset Cliffs was just 59 degrees, which is absolutely freezing.
Why would Michelle have decided to take a skinny dip in such frigid waters? That doesn’t add up for a lot of people.
Others thought maybe she fell off one of the cliffs that are so precariously steep, but her autopsy does not point to that at all.
Several shark experts have disputed Brian’s findings, insisting Michelle could not have been a victim of a shark attack.
Le Bouil Baptiste – stock.adobe.com
Ralph Collier, a leading expert on sharks who runs Global Shark Attack File, has pointed out that if a shark really did rip off Michelle’s leg, she would have immediately died of blood loss, and there was no way she could have ingested so much sand.
Adding to this, when sharks do bite people, they leave very clean bone breaks. The bone on Michelle’s leg had a very jagged and pointed break.
Additionally, the bruising Michelle had on her face, her broken pelvis, her broken ribs, her broken neck…none of that is in line with a shark attack.
Richard Rosenblatt, the Chairman of the Scripps Institute for Oceanography whom Brian reached out to, explains Michelle’s injuries are not consistent with any kind of shark attack, because the wounds she sustained that appeared to be bite marks were far too small to have been made by a shark.
Now, there were smaller wounds that made it seem Blue sharks had come along to potentially feed on her after her death, but those marks could not have caused her death.
In 2008, a medical examiner by the name of Glenn Wagner re-examined Michelle’s case and confirmed she had died prior to sharks taking a few bites out of her.
All of these things had people thinking Michelle had to have been murdered, dumped in the water, and made to seem as if she was attacked by a shark.
Given the amount of sand she had ingested, it’s possible someone tried to drown her and that’s how that happened.
Michelle was last seen alive at 8 p.m. before she was found in the early morning hours the following morning.
She was supposed to go to a concert with her friend and roommate Coco Campbell, but when they got there they weren’t allowed in because their tickets were for a different night.
On the way home, Michelle apparently asked Coco to take her to a pier close to Sunset Cliffs, but it’s not clear why she wanted to be there, but one thing is clear; Coco said she was not quite acting like herself.
littleny – stock.adobe.com
Coco said she left her at the pier around 8 p.m. and that Michelle was dressed in her trenchcoat since it was chilly that night, in the 50s.
Many people think it’s suspicious that their concert tickets ended up have issues, and that Coco was perfectly ok with leaving her friend behind at a pier in the dark after that, but she was never named as a suspect.
Another thing that’s strange is that Michelle’s purse ended up being recovered about a few miles away from where she was found, in a very public setting.
It still had her money, her keys, and her ID inside of it, and some feel it was purposely left there to throw investigators off.
Her clothes, however, were never found.
Now, Michelle had mentioned to a few people that were close to her not long before her death that she had a man that was stalking her.
She never gave a lot of information, just that this man rode a motorcycle, and she ended up giving up her job at a coffee shop because this man would stalk her at work.
Michelle then went on to work at a copy shop. Bizarrely enough, not long after she was found dead, a man rode up to the store on a motorcycle, walked inside, and proceeded to make several different copies of her autopsy report.
Freaky, for sure. Was this the man she had said stalked her?
There also is a second man that was in Michelle’s life who has raised some eyebrows after her death.
His name is Edwin Decker, and he says he went on a date with Michelle just two nights before she passed away.
He made comments to investigators, saying that Michelle was a free spirit who liked to swim and surf without her clothes on, but her friends vehemently denied this.
Furthermore, he published a very bizarre poem right after her death:
The report 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
Weird? For sure. He also has published several in-depth articles about what he and Michelle did on their date. But a poem doesn’t automatically make you a murderer, and it’s worth noting Edwin was the one who asked investigators to look into Michelle’s case again in 2008.
To this day, authorities consider Michelle’s case closed, and her official cause of death is still listed as being a victim of a shark attack, while Global Shark Attack File refuses to accept that, along with many other people.
ystewarthenderson – stock.adobe.com
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