Woman's Body Found Naked on a Beach with a Missing Leg
She was found naked with several broken bones, a broken neck, and her right leg was missing from the thigh down.
We hear about people dying from shark attacks every so often. It doesn’t happen as much as the movies portray it to, but it still occasionally happens to people who are swimming in areas filled with sharks. Michelle Von Emster’s death was originally thought to be just that- a shark attack. However, there are some weird things in her case that just don’t make sense, and many believe that a shark wasn’t the one who tried to kill her.
On the morning of April 15, 1994, 25-year-old Michelle Von Emster was found on the shoreline of San Diego, California. She was found naked with several broken bones, a broken neck, and her right leg was missing from the thigh down. Due to her missing limb, investigators believed that she’d been attacked by a great white shark. Experts familiar with shark attacks immediately disputed this theory, saying that this didn’t look like a typical shark attack. This led to many thinking that she had been murdered.
Michelle was born in 1968 and grew up in California her whole life. She studied at St. Mary’s College, but her university time was derailed when she was diagnosed with cancer. She beat the disease a year after her diagnosis and rented a house in Loma Portal, which overlooks the San Diego Bay. She eventually moved to Ocean Beach, a city known for high crime rates.
On the night of April 14, 1994, she planned to attend a Pink Floyd concert with her friend and roommate Coco Campbell. When they got to the stadium, they were turned away because they’d purchased the wrong tickets. On the way back to their home, Michelle asked Coco to drop her off at the pier that was six blocks away from their home. That was the last time anyone had seen her alive.
The next day, surfers noticed a swarm of seagulls in one area near the shore. They went over to investigate, and they found Michelle face down in the water. She was completely naked other than her jewelry, and her autopsy revealed that she hadn’t been in the water for long before she was found.
A Shark Attack, or a Murder?
Michelle’s autopsy showed that she had a broken neck, broken ribs, broken pelvis, and scrapes along her face and torso. She had sand in her lungs and stomach, indicating that she’d been alive breathing in the sand when her injuries were inflicted. The man who did her autopsy had never done an autopsy on a shark victim before, and he ruled her injuries as a shark attack. Experts were hesitant on believing this theory. It was determined that only a great white could have been the type of shark to rip her leg off, but there were no teeth fragments left behind.
Those who had done her autopsy stated that a great white shark must have torn her leg off and then dragged her to the bottom of the ocean, causing her to break her bones and breath in the sand while the shark was dragging her. This isn’t how great whites typically attack people though.
Experts had said that when a shark bites off a limb, the bite is clean. Michelle’s femur bite wasn’t a clean break but looked like it had been hacked off. The bone came to a point, which happens when the bone gets twisted with a lot of force. It was also said that if a shark had attacked her, she wouldn’t have had time to inhale sand during her death- her leg being bitten off would’ve killed her from the loss of blood, so her bones being broken and sand being in her stomach doesn’t lead to a normal shark attack victim. The Global Shark Attack File doesn’t officially recognize her death as being that of a shark attack.
The most popular theory for her death is that somebody killed her. Her body was found naked, and the waters at the time of her death would have been around 59 degrees, which is rather cold for someone to decide to go skinny dipping in the ocean. Her purse was also found a few miles from where her body was, which doesn’t make sense. Her jewelry wasn’t taken off either, and if she had removed her clothes to go swimming, why wouldn’t she have removed her jewelry? The cliffs near the water are high up, so some believe she might’ve fallen off of the cliffs and died. That theory doesn’t make sense for what happened to her missing leg and why her clothes were taken off. Her clothes had never even been found.
Before her death, Michelle claimed that a man had been stalking her. He rode a motorcycle, and one of Michelle’s former co-workers said that they had seen him make copies of her autopsy report and drive away. Another suspect is Edwin Decker, who had gone on a date with Michelle before her death. He wrote a morbid poem after her death, referencing the shark attack and tearing away her flesh. There was never any evidence found to convict these men, and Decker was someone who pushed for her case to be reopened to try and find a killer.
The most popular theory is that somebody stripped Michelle, possibly assaulting her before murdering her. It’s believed that they may have tried to drown her, which is why she had so much sand in her body. They then likely cut off her leg and dumped her to try and make it look like a shark attack. Smaller sharks in the area likely fed on her body after she died, which is where some of the smaller markings came from. Despite all of this being a reasonable way for her to have died, there wasn’t much investigation done to try and find her killer. Her case is closed, and it’s still said to have been the result of a shark attack despite so many things pointing to a different cause. Since there isn’t anyone openly investigating her case, the true cause of her death will likely remain unsolved.