CALIFORNIA 1985 Cold Case Solved After 3 Years — J…
CALIFORNIA 1985 Cold Case Solved After 3 Years — Justice for Michele “Missy” Avila
On the afternoon of October 1, 1985, Mikaela Mischelle Avila walked out of her home in Arleta, California, telling her mother she was going out with school friends and would be home before 6:00 pm She was only 17, under 5 ft tall, and weighed 95 lb.
Laura Doyle honked the horn.
Missy waved goodbye to her mother and got into the car.
Missy never came home.
3 days later, hikers discovered her body face down in a remote stream in the Angeles National Forest, pinned under a 100-lb log.
Her hair had been cut.
Her hands were tied behind her back.
Police found cigarette butts, beer bottles, and men’s overalls at the scene.
They believed the killer was a man.
They were completely wrong.
Missy Avila’s killers were her two best friends, two girls who had known her since she was 8 years old and had shared every secret for nearly a decade.
But what made this case one of the most horrifying betrayal stories in California crime history was not the murder itself.
It was what happened afterward.
Immediately after the body was found, one of the two killers moved into the victim’s family home.
She hugged Missy’s mother and cried every night, promised to find the killer, attended candlelight vigils, and even claimed she had seen Missy’s ghost.
3 years.
3 years living under the same roof as the mother who had lost her daughter, looking her in the eye every day and pretending to grieve, while knowing exactly what had happened in that forest that day.
The case went cold.
Police had no leads, no suspects, until a fourth witness broke the silence and revealed a truth no one wanted to believe.
This is the story of jealousy turning into murder, of 3 years of the most ruthless deception, and of justice finally coming for Missy Avila.
If you are the kind of person who stays until the end of the story, who wants to know not just what happened, but why the best friend became the deadliest enemy, then you have come to the right place.
Consider subscribing to Cold Case Reopened.
We dig deep into the cases everyone else has forgotten.
To understand why Mikael Avila had to die, you must understand who she was and the world she lived in.
Mikael Yvette Avila was born on February 8th, 1968 in Los Angeles, California.
The family called her Missy.
She grew up in Arleta, a quiet neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley, about 20 miles north of downtown Los Angeles.
Her parents divorced when she was young.
Her mother, Irene Avila, raised four children alone, three brothers, Ernie, Mark, and Chris, and Missy, the only daughter, the youngest.
Irene worked hard to keep the family stable.
She was not wealthy, not powerful, but she loved her children in a way that the kids in her family never had to doubt.
The Avila home was always open.
Missy’s friends and her brothers’ friends often stopped by, ate dinner together, stayed overnight.
Irene treated her children’s friends like her own children.
It was the kind of family everyone in the neighborhood knew, trusted, and felt safe entering.
And that very openness would later be exploited in the most ruthless way.
Missy was a petite girl, under 5 ft tall, about 95 lb, but her presence was much larger than those numbers.
People who knew her described her as having natural magnetism, the kind of person who walked into a room and every eye turned toward her without her even trying.
She was beautiful, lively, approachable.
She liked people and people liked her.
At San Fernando High School, Missy was not popular because of arrogance or social power.
She was popular because she was genuinely sweet.
Boys noticed her.
That was a simple fact, and it was not her fault.
But in the world of 16 and 17-year-old girls, where emotions are immature and jealousy is uncontrolled, that attention would become a death sentence.
Karen Severson had known Missy since she was 8 years old, nearly a decade of friendship.
Sleepovers, shared secrets, hours-long phone calls, times they cried and laughed together that only best friends understand.
To everyone around them, Karen and Missy were inseparable best friends.
To Irene, Karen was like a second daughter.
She trusted Karen completely, the way a mother trusts a child who has grown up in her home for 10 years.
But that friendship had a crack that no one could see from the outside.
Karen was jealous of Missy.
Not the fleeting kind of jealousy everyone experiences.
This was the corrosive kind, the kind where you lie awake at night thinking about why someone else has what you don’t.
Karen wanted boys to notice her the way they noticed Missy.
She wanted to be liked the way Missy was liked.
But that attention did not come naturally to Karen, and the harder she tried, the clearer the gap between her and Missy became.
Instead of accepting it, Karen chose a different path.
She began spreading rumors about Missy at school.
She said Missy was sleeping with various boys, including boys who already had girlfriends.
Those rumors were not true.
They were weapons.
Karen knew exactly what would happen when those rumors spread in a high school where relationships changed weekly and loyalty was as fragile as paper.
She knew the girls with boyfriends would turn on Missy, and that is exactly what happened.
There was another event that poured more fuel on the fire.
Karen started dating a boy named Randy, who had previously liked Missy.
Karen told Irene that she had seen Randy pull Missy onto his lap at a party.
Missy told Randy she did not want to get back with him and advised Karen to break up with Randy.
That was the advice of a friend who truly cared.
But Karen did not see it that way.
She saw Missy and Randy in the same frame, and jealousy turned an innocent situation into proof of betrayal.
Karen was furious.
She stopped talking to Missy and that silence was not a pause to cool off.
It was the silence of someone making plans.
Missy did not know that.
She thought the friendship was going through a normal rough patch, the kind of fight all best friends have before they make up.
She did not know that every day that passed, the jealousy inside Karen was not fading but accumulating, transforming into something far more dangerous than the anger of a teenage girl.
And while Missy walked the school hallways, laughing and talking with friends, >> >> living the normal life of a 17-year-old girl, her best friend was looking at her with completely different eyes.
Not the eyes of friendship.
Not the eyes of simple jealousy.
But the eyes of someone who had decided that Missy Avila did not deserve the things she had.
If you feel this case is touching something deeper, hit the like button.
We tell stories like this every week on Cold Case Reopened.
Cold cases that stay unsolved for years, sometimes decades, until someone refuses to let them be buried.
Subscribe so you don’t miss the next case.
Laura Doyle was the third character in this deadly equation.
Laura was not a childhood best friend of Missy like Karen, but she was a mutual friend of both.
Part of the same friend group, same school, same neighborhood.
Laura was taller than Missy, heavier than Missy, and had a completely different personality.
Where Missy was gentle and approachable, Laura was tougher, quicker to anger, and when she was angry, she did not keep it inside.
In July 1985, 3 months before Missy died, Laura saw Missy with Victor Amaya.
Victor was Laura’s ex-boyfriend.
Their relationship had ended, but when Laura saw Victor and Missy together, she did not see two friends talking.
She saw betrayal.
Laura blamed Missy for the breakup with Victor, even though there was no evidence Missy had done anything wrong.
And Laura did not keep that anger to herself.
She told Missy straight to her face that she would kill her over it.
>> >> Pause on that detail for 1 second.
A teenage girl looked her friend in the eye and said she would kill her.
In a normal world, that is an impulsive teenage remark, the kind of threat people make and then forget.
But Laura Doyle did not forget.
And 3 months later, she carried out exactly what she had said.
Now, the two pieces were in place.
Karen Severson, the childhood best friend, carrying nearly a decade of accumulated jealousy.
Laura Doyle, the mutual friend, carrying rage over an ex-boyfriend.
Both aimed at the same target.
Both blamed Missy for things Missy had never caused.
And both were ready to do something no one thought 17-year-old girls could do.
Meanwhile, the consequences of the rumors Karen had spread became reality.
A group of girls at school, led by Sonya Bond, believed the rumors that Missy had slept with their boyfriends.
No one verified it.
No one asked Missy.
They just heard, believed, and acted.
Missy was jumped.
A 95-lb girl was attacked by a group of girls based on lies her best friend had created.
Think about that.
Karen Severson had manufactured the bullet.
Sonya Bond and her group were just the gun.
The Avila family reacted the way any family would.
They pressed charges against Sonya Bond.
The legal case dragged on for months.
And by the end of September 1985, Missy was scheduled to testify against Sonya just 1 week after October 1.
That detail mattered.
>> >> Missy was about to stand in court and tell what had happened to her.
And Karen Severson, the person who had created the entire chain of events leading to that beating, knew that if Missy testified, if the truth was told from the beginning, the trail leading back to Karen would become clearer.
Missy did not know she was surrounded from every side.
She did not know her best friend had created a web of lies around her.
>> >> She did not know that two of her closest friends had looked at her and decided she needed to disappear.
She was just a 17-year-old girl trying to live a normal life while everything around her was collapsing for reasons she did not understand.
October 1, 1985.
It was a Tuesday, an ordinary afternoon in Arleta.
Missy came home after school and told her mother she was going out.
Laura Doyle would pick her up.
Irene looked at her daughter with no reason to worry.
Laura was Missy’s friend.
She had seen Laura hundreds of times.
Laura had eaten dinner at the Avila table.
Laura had stayed overnight.
This was someone Irene trusted with her daughter.
Laura honked outside.
Missy said goodbye to her mother, goodbye to her brothers, then walked out the door.
>> >> Irene Avila would relive that moment in her mind thousands of times for the rest of her life.
The door closed.
The car drove away.
And that mother never saw her daughter alive again.
Missy did not know Laura was not taking her out to hang out.
Laura was taking her to her death.
In the car besides Laura, there was Karen Severson and another girl named Ava Cherundolo.
Ava was a friend of the group, not a main character in the plot, but her presence in the car that day would become the decisive factor in the case 3 years later.
Four girls drove about 45 minutes into the mountains toward the Colby Ranch area in Big Tujunga Canyon deep in the Angeles National Forest.
It was wilderness.
Small streams ran through the forest.
No passersby.
No cameras.
No witnesses except the four girls in the car.
Missy may have thought they were going on a picnic, hanging out, relaxing after the stressful weeks of the Sonia Bond lawsuit.
Maybe she was even happy that Karen was talking to her again after weeks of silence.
Maybe she thought the friendship was being repaired.
She did not know the car was taking her to a remote stream where no one could hear her scream for help.
She did not know the two people sitting with her had already decided.
And when the car stopped by the stream, when the four girls got out under the trees of the forest, Missy Avila had only minutes left to live.
What happened by that stream was reconstructed from Eva Chirumbolo’s later testimony and from what Karen Severson and Laura Doyle admitted in parole hearings years afterward.
As soon as the group reached the stream, the atmosphere changed completely.
Karen and Laura turned to face Missy.
No more smiles.
No more pretending to be friends out having fun.
Both began screaming at Missy, accusing her of sleeping with their boyfriends.
The accusations were identical to the rumors Karen herself had spread.
The same lies.
The same baseless charges.
But now they were used as an indictment, as the reason to do what they had decided before the car even left her later.
Missy began to cry.
The 95-lb girl stood before two taller, heavier girls in a remote forest with no one to help.
She tried to explain.
She tried to say she had not done the things they accused her of.
But Karen and Laura had not come there to hear explanations.
Laura grabbed Missy’s wrists and pulled her toward the stream.
Karen pushed Missy toward Laura.
Then both held Missy’s face down under the water.
The stream water was freezing.
Missy struggled.
95-lb against two people.
She had no chance.
They cut her hair.
They held her under the water until she stopped moving, stopped struggling, stopped breathing.
Then they found a log.
A log weighing about 100 lb.
They placed it directly on Missy’s body to keep her submerged, to make sure she did not float up.
Then Karen Severson and Laura Doyle left.
They left their friend lying there, face down in the cold water, pinned under the log, alone in the empty forest, Mikela Avila died at 17.
She did not die in an accident.
She did not die at the hands of a stranger.
She died because the two people she trusted most in the world had decided she did not deserve to live.
And the next part of the story is the part that anyone hearing it for the first time cannot believe.
4 hours after picking Missy up, Laura Doyle called Irene Avila and asked to speak to Missy.
Irene said she thought her daughter was with Laura.
Laura replied that she had dropped Missy off with three strange guys driving a green Camaro that Laura did not know.
After getting gas, Laura said she went back to where she had dropped Missy off, but no one was there.
That call was not panic.
It was a script.
Every detail was calculated, from the specific green Camaro to the three unnamed guys, creating ghosts the police could chase but never find.
Laura Doyle had just killed her friend 4 hours earlier, and her voice on the phone was calm enough that the mother on the other end heard nothing unusual.
3 days passed.
Irene waited, worried, hoping her daughter would come home.
On October 4, 1985, hikers found the body in the stream.
Police arrived at the scene and found what they thought were clues, cigarette butts, beer bottles, men’s overalls.
Every sign pointed to men.
Police built the theory that Missy had met the strange guys Laura described, and they had killed her.
The investigation went in completely the wrong direction.
No one looked at Laura.
No one looked at Karen.
No one asked why the two best friends of the victim had reactions that were a little too perfect when they heard their friend was dead.
Then came the funeral.
Both Karen Severson and Laura Doyle attended.
They stood there among the family and friends crying for Missy and played the role of grieving friends.
Laura sent the Avila family a sympathy card with $20.
$20, the price of her conscience packaged in a card bought from a convenience store.
But Karen Severson took the deception to an entirely different level.
Right after the funeral, Karen went to Irene and promised to help find Missy’s killer.
She promised she would never give up.
She promised to stay by Irene’s side until justice was done.
And then Karen Severson, along with her 2-year-old daughter, moved into the very house where Missy had grown up.
She slept in that house, ate at that table, sat on the sofa where Missy used to sit.
And every night she hugged Irene and cried with her about Missy’s death.
The mother who had lost her child sought comfort from the only person she thought understood her pain.
And that person was the one who had caused the pain.
Karen’s behavior in the months and years that followed went far beyond ordinary deception.
She frequently returned to the place where Missy was found, standing by the stream, looking into the water.
She kept photos of Missy in her bedroom.
Many photos hung on the wall like a small shrine.
She attended every candlelight vigil, standing in front, red-eyed, tears welling.
She gave media interviews with a perfectly sorrowful expression.
And at one point, Karen told Irene that she had seen Missy’s ghost.
Think about the level of psychological manipulation required to do that.
To look the mother of the person you killed in the eye and say you saw her daughter’s ghost.
That was not impulsive deception.
That was systematic manipulation, the kind of manipulation that criminal psychologists describe as characteristic of the most psychopathic killers.
The case reached a dead end.
Police had no suspects, no new leads, no witnesses came forward.
The three guys driving the green Camaro that Laura described were never found because they never existed.
The case became a cold case.
The file was closed, filed away, and the California justice system moved on to other cases.
And during all that time, Karen Severson was still living in the Avila family home.
Irene later said Karen had fooled everyone.
Her daughter-in-law was fooled.
>> >> Her sons were fooled.
Friends were fooled.
Police were fooled.
Irene said she had no reason to suspect Karen or Laura were involved in her daughter’s death.
Why would she suspect? Karen was Missy’s best friend.
She had known Missy since she was eight.
She was living in the house, helping, crying every night.
Who would look at that woman and think she was a murderer? Irene would carry that question with her for the rest of her life.
She once said, “I am her mother.
Why didn’t I see it?” That is a question no one can answer for her.
Because the truth is there was no way to see it.
Karen Severson had performed the longest role of her life perfectly.
And her stage was the victim’s family’s pain.
