6 Years After Death, Family Still Waiting : Tragedy: Parents didn’t learn that their daughter was a possible slaying victim until the controversial NHI art project was in the works.

Pat Riccio pulled the coroner’s calling card from her front screen door and then she knew. The improbable, drug-scarred life of her vagabond 19-year-old daughter, Michelle, promising for the first 15 years or so, was over.

That was April, 1986, but even today, she recalls her queasy feeling when she called the coroner. Almost in a monotone, the deputy coroner broke the bad news. “Your daughter has expired,” he said flatly.

For the next six years, no law enforcement officer visited Pat and Jerry Riccio to discuss their daughter’s death. Nobody phoned their San Marcos home.

Jerry Riccio, Michelle’s adopted father, had to call homicide investigators for the Sheriff’s Department to verify what the coroner had concluded: Michelle died of a self-inflicted drug overdose. A syringe and several needles were found scattered around her body in the middle of an orange grove.

Then came NHI, a controversial art exhibit opened in San Diego last February as a tribute to 45 seemingly forgotten women found dead since 1985. Most of them prostitutes, transients, drug users or a combination of the three, their cases had been scrutinized by the Metropolitan Homicide Task Force since late 1988.

San Diego law enforcement agencies have spent millions of dollars and assembled their most skilled detectives to probe the slayings. But it took the art exhibit, named “No Humans Involved,” after police slang for crime victims considered unimportant, for police to re-examine Michelle Riccio’s case and for Pat Riccio to find out that her daughter is now considered a possible murder victim.

Since 1988, Michelle Riccio’s name has been on the task force’s list of 45 women, dropped off and placed back on again at intervals that even the chief of the task force cannot precisely identify.

But, ever since five local artists approached Pat Riccio in January and asked for a photograph of her daughter to place in their exhibit, the task force has expressed a special new interest in the case and is planning to contact Riccio and her husband for the first time.

Last month, Riccio learned by watching a CNN broadcast about the NHI project that the head of the homicide task force thought her daughter might have been murdered. The police never had told her that, although she had suspected it.

Questioned last week by The Times, Richard J. Lewis, director of the 15-member task force, acknowledged that previous investigators may have made a mistake by clinging to the notion that Riccio’s death was a suicide. The young woman used methamphetamine almost exclusively, a drug that is very difficult to overdose, he said.

“The coroner’s office used to have a habit that, if they couldn’t determine the cause of death, or if it was a ‘soft kill,’ they’d say it was a was a drug overdose,” Lewis said. “I seriously question some of that.”

Riccio was found in the middle of an orange grove in Valley Center, near Escondido, less than a mile from where the body of another woman, Jodell Jenkins, was found. Her mother never knew about that development either.

“I can assure you it’s being investigated,” Lewis said. “I want to keep her in a loop of seven to nine cases in North County that could be related.”

Lewis, who has been head of the task force since late 1990, said he has never spoken to Pat or Jerry Riccio but is planning a meeting soon.

“At the very least, I want them to know that someone cares about what they’re going through,” he said.

For Pat Riccio, it will take more than a casual chat to erase years of neglected feelings.

The last time Michelle Riccio was home, a week before her death, she sat at the kitchen table with her mother and tried to explain what had become of her life. She talked in rapid-fire cadence, nervously removing all of her jewelry to give her mother for no apparent reason.

“You don’t know what it’s like out there, Mom,” she said. “You have no idea.”

“Why don’t you just get out of it then?” her mother asked.

Michelle had no answer.

Drugs had become so much a part of Michelle’s life that it was difficult for her parents to recall the times when her daughter organized impromptu plays with her neighborhood friends in the back yard. She had played flute in the elementary and junior high school bands and had some talent as an artist, painting her youngest sister’s bedroom wall with images of Smurfs taken from a cereal box trading card.

But she dropped out of high school, entered and exited two drug clinics and wound up falling into a sordid group of friends who preferred more than anything else to experiment with narcotics.

She lied to her parents. Her grades plunged. Friends complained that she was stealing from them.

Finally, she was given the kind of ultimatum that often comes from exasperated parents. Michelle would have to obey a strict set of rules at home or leave. She moved out.

From time to time, Michelle popped up at home. Before she even spoke a word, she would proudly pull up her sleeves to prove she had not been pricking her arms with needles.

“Nobody in this house rested when Michelle was not at home,” Pat Riccio said. “Until she died, we never rested at all.”

A devout Catholic who has Mass said for her daughter every Jan. 11 on Michelle’s birthday, Pat Riccio wonders what she could have done differently.

“Why didn’t I lock her in her room?” she has asked herself. “When she was 13, why didn’t I buy her that blouse at Sears? Sure it was expensive, but maybe it would have helped. You think about all those things.”

On April 22, 1986, two days before she died, Michelle phoned home at 9 a.m. Her father asked how she was. “All right, I guess,” she mumbled.

She baby-sat for a friend that day, who last saw her at 2 p.m. when Riccio said she was heading to her mother’s house in San Marcos.

Two days later, the coroner’s card was stuck in the door with a note on the back to call immediately.

After Pat Riccio telephoned, and her husband called the Sheriff’s Department twice--once to find out information about Michelle and another time to get the homicide report--Riccio did not pursue other aspects of her daughter’s death.

Family and friends urged her to put the bad memory out of her mind. Michelle had been discovered by a worker on the orange grove, propped up against a tree, with a teaspoon of an unidentified “yellowish substance” hanging from her pocket. A syringe with the yellowish liquid, never identified by the coroner, was found at the scene.

When the coroner’s office concluded that she had injected herself with too much methamphetamine, the Riccios thought it sounded plausible.

In 1988, the task force released a list of dead women they were investigating. Michelle was among them and when the information was published in the newspaper, a neighbor phoned. Pat was stunned and, when she called the San Diego Police Department, they told her it wasn’t true. She called a year later and was told the case was closed.

But the exhibit changed all that. Two downtown billboards showed the image of Donna Gentile, a prostitute and police informant found murdered in East County seven years ago. Next to Gentile’s picture were the letters “NHI.” Lewis says NHI has never been used within the task force.

Accompanying the billboards, five artists set up shop at a downtown gallery and displayed 45 framed black-and-white photos. Eight were photos of the actual victims, including Michelle Riccio. The rest were stand-ins who agreed to be photographed to represent those whose pictures were not available. After the exhibit opened, families and friends of the women donated three more photos.

More than 3,000 people stopped into the gallery and scores more watched a series of live performances dealing with sexual abuse and other factors that compel a woman to turn to drugs or prostitution.

“Outstanding!” wrote one man in a exhibit sign-in book reserved for comments. “Every day it becomes easier to forget, to sweep them under the rug. This show reminds, forces people to stop ‘sweeping’ and start weeping.”

Deborah Small, one of the five organizers, said one of the exhibit’s purposes was “to give the families their due. We want a full and fair investigation of every murder, and we hope that is what happens.”

As far as Pat Riccio is concerned, the exhibit has helped move her daughter’s investigation along.

“This gave Michelle some exposure,” Riccio said. “It helped me share my experience. It made me want to find out what happened. The artists should get the credit they deserve for opening some eyes in the city to the fact that the police really don’t investigate the crimes they say they do.”

Although Lewis of the task force says the NHI exhibit did not result in one new tip or piece of information about the murders, he found something meaningful about the work.

“These women come from a segment of society that is ignored. Nobody brags that their city has more whores than anyone else. Civic leaders don’t say that,” Lewis said. “This brings attention to the fact that we have these killings that do occur.”

As far as Pat Riccio knows, Michelle was not involved in prostitution. But it would not have mattered if she was. Every child got treated the same: her 22-year-old son who is a student at USC; her 19-year-old daughter, who is in the Army, and her daughter who is in the sixth grade.

Nearly every day, the family is reminded of Michelle. Pat Riccio dreads April 24, the sixth anniversary of the day her daughter was found. On that date every year, Pat drags her sister-in-law to bingo or to some other event to ease her mind.

“I try and block out the whole day,” she said.

But, for the rest of the year, Pat thinks of Michelle as her pretty and artistic daughter. If she were alive today, her mother is certain, she would have overcome some of her drug problems to go on and pursue a normal life with a family of her own.

“She would have made a great 25-year-old,” Riccio says happily. “She would have stayed out of trouble, I’m sure. She was a good girl. She just had a couple of years of bad luck.”