Original subtitles

All I know is I was killed in the homicide and my DNA isn't the one where

I should be.

There's many cases of a different type of stabbing.

Don't you think it's very personal to do the same thing in that world?

and welcome.

I'm Jesse L. Martin.

It was the night of the Grammy Awards in Los Angeles in 2001 when a beautiful

fashion student was murdered inside her Hollywood home.

Ashley Ellerin was a vivacious and talented free spirit with a bright

future. At first, there were no suspects, but detectives worked

tirelessly to catch her killer, only to discover Ashley might not have been his

first murder.

This is how it really happened.

Ashley was 22 years old.

She was a student at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising.

She came to Los Angeles like many young people. You know, she was here to follow

her dream.

I met Ashley at a party in the hills and she and I just clicked automatically.

She was a fashion student too.

She and I became very good friends.

She had a big social circle and was... having parties at her home, and meeting

a lot of up-and-comers in Hollywood.

She was just a person who a lot of people gravitated towards.

She was living only a few blocks away from the Hollywood Walk of Fame and was

just really enjoying herself in Hollywood.

It was around 9.15 a.m. on February 22nd.

Ashley's roommate came home.

And she noticed that the lights were on.

And she was kind of surprised about that because Ashley usually slept late and

then just opened the door and saw Ashley dead on the landing.

I mean, walking in on that, I can't imagine.

It's always going to haunt her, I think.

It's always going to haunt her. Poor girl.

The Los Angeles detective described the killer as this modern-day Jack the

Ripper. It was just a horrific scene.

So when police arrived, Ashley was found right next to her bedroom and the

bathroom.

She had 47 stab wounds on her body and her neck and head and various

areas in her chest.

She had been nearly decapitated.

She was in a bathrobe and she was in her shorts and tank top.

Ashley's body had been posed. She was not sexually assaulted.

But there was kind of a sexual element to it.

There wasn't any signs of anything stolen.

There was $300 in cash they found in the bathroom. She still had jewelry on.

So there wasn't just this robbery gone bad.

It didn't look like any of the doors had been broken into.

So they kind of wondered whether, you know, Ashley may have let in her

intruder.

Somehow this person got in without having to break in.

They also thought, too, because of the frenziness of the attack and the

violence of the attack, that it was actually somebody that she knew, and

they pretty much thought of that instantly.

The last person to ever speak to Ashley Allerin was actually Ashton Kutcher.

So Ashton Kutcher was a 23-year-old actor.

He was an up-and-coming Hollywood star.

He was on that 70s show.

They met at this big party. It was right around New Year's. It just took complete

attraction to Ashley.

She was like a cute little magnet.

Pretty, sweet, heart, everything.

What do you think about these, huh?

February 21st was actually Grammy night in Hollywood.

So she spoke to Ashton Kutcher. They made plans to go out for dinner and

drinks. It was supposed to be their first date. She was, oh my gosh, so

excited. I went over there three days before.

I brought her over some stuff from the showroom.

And she's like, what outfit do I wear? What do I wear?

At one point, though, Ashton's plans changed, and he decided to go over to a

friend's house to watch the Grammys. And so he ended up speaking to Ashley around

8.24 p.m. that night.

And Ashley had told him that she had just gotten out of the shower.

And he said, I'm going to be running a little bit late. I'm going to go to a

friend's house, but let's get drinks afterwards.

Ashton Kutcher couldn't reach her.

He shows up at 10.45 p.m. Her car is there.

The lights are on.

But she's not answering the door.

And then he tried the door because he thought, well, maybe she just couldn't

hear him. It was locked.

And so then he went to a side window.

All he said he saw was it looked like red wine was spilled all over the floor.

And it wasn't.

He didn't really think anything of it because Ashley had a party a few weeks

before and thought maybe it was just kind of remnants of the party. He pretty

much just deduced that Ashley was kind of tired of waiting for him and she

ended up just going out with friends.

The following day, Ashton finds out from mutual friends what happened to Ashley.

And so he ends up calling the police to give them basically a timeline of when

he went over there.

He was a little freaked out because he knew his fingerprints were going to be

on the door handle.

But there was another potential clue about what time this all happened.

The police end up talking to a dog walker who was out the night of Ashley's

murder. He was taking his dog to this dog park that was actually across the

street from Ashley's home.

And he heard a scream.

And he said that his dog immediately looked up.

towards Ashley's bungalow. He said this was around 8.30.

So that is when police ended up kind of pinpointing that was when the murder

happened. It was just after she got off the phone with Kutcher.

Ashley Kutcher was with friends, watching the Grammys, until he went to

her house.

That was pretty easy to rule him out.

Authority still had another man who had seen Ashley that night. They had what he

considered a blossoming relationship.

He was the last person that had seen Ashley alive.

22-year-old Ashley Ellerin was supposed to go on a date with Hollywood A-lister

Ashton Kutcher.

She'd been stabbed 47 times.

My husband said Ashley was murder, murder, murder.

I felt my feet on the floor, and I started crawling around the bedroom on

my hands and knees like an animal.

I was like, I don't understand.

I don't understand.

Stop 47 times.

I can't imagine.

And she was a fighter.

You didn't want to mess with Ashley.

The police did not find much physical evidence at Ashley Ellerin's murder

scene.

They found footprints, and then they also had fingerprints.

But unfortunately, nothing came back to, you know, any suspect.

She had a number of fatal wounds, one of which was a throat wound.

And it appeared that she was...

Attacked from behind, and the wound went from right to left, which led

investigators to believe that they were looking for a left-handed assailant.

Police were focused on a timeline of events that happened that night.

On the night of the attack, Ashley had contacted her landlord, Mark Durbin, and

asked him if he would come over to help her install this track lighting.

She was renovating her home.

And so he went over to Ashley's bungalow around 7 p.m.

So Mark Durbin had gone over to Ellerin's house to help her with some

repairs, and shortly afterwards, they had actually had sex.

He left around 8.15 because he had plans with his girlfriend, and he was

supposed to meet her around 8.30.

Theories were floating around, for sure.

Maybe he was jealous. Maybe Mark Durbin was hoping to date Ashley, and maybe he

found out that she was going on this date with Ashton Kutcher.

Police were looking at Mark Durbin because he was one of the last people to

see Ashley alive, and he also admitted that he had slept with her just

minutes almost before she actually was murdered.

So clearly they did a thorough investigation into Durbin.

He was very cooperative. He allowed police to search his car and his

home.

Eventually they realized that he was not the person that did this.

The detectives cast a wide net. You know, they were trying to talk to

everybody that knew Ashley.

She had a very wide circle of friends.

So they spent many months, you know, trying to track down people. They spoke

to, you know, her family, her friends.

So Ashley's friends told police various stories about a guy named Mike that they

knew to be a furnace air conditioner repairman.

He was this air conditioning guy she met in the fall of 2000 outside her house.

when her and a friend were fixing a tire.

He lived in the neighborhood, young guy, good-looking guy.

From that moment forward, he started inviting himself into her house at these

big parties that she would have all the time.

She threw me that big birthday party.

There was like, I don't know, like 100 people there. He was like aloof. He was

like in the back, dark corner.

I didn't know who he was.

Mike was known by her friends to tell all these tall tales.

At one point he said that he was this Olympic boxer and he was going to go to

the Olympics, but he got electrocuted working on an air conditioning job.

The friends only knew him as this guy Mike. They didn't have his last name.

A couple of weeks before Ashley's murder, she had a party and one of her

friends saw Mike sitting on the couch and so he started talking to him and he

said that... Every time that Ashley walked into the room, Mike completely

fixated on her.

It freaked him out so bad that, you know, towards the end of the night, like

everybody was leaving, but Mike wasn't leaving.

And so he said that he got so nervous about Ashley that he actually stayed

over that night. He got such bad vibes from this guy, Mike.

Ashley's former roommate, Justin Peterson, told police that he was coming

home from a party one night.

It was around like 2 o'clock in the evening, and he sees Mike sitting

outside in this green pickup truck staring at the bungalow.

And he said he called Ashley to let her know.

And he said the following day, he actually confronted him. And Mike gave

him this bizarre tale about how the FBI was looking for him.

were a little more concerned about this Mike guy than Ashley was. She was just a

very open person, and she wasn't very judgy. She had a lot of guys that liked

her. She just had so much going on all the time.

The fact that none of her friends actually knew Mike's last name posed a

huge problem for detectives. It took, like, a year to identify who that Mike

was.

Chris Picaccio was an 18-year-old graduate of Glenview High School.

A very bright, talented young woman with a great future. She came from a great

family.

She was set to take an engineering scholarship from Purdue University.

It was her last summer to hang out with all her friends. You know, all her

friends were going off to college, and so this was her summer of fun.

That night, she went out with friends.

And they went on the scavenger hunt, and then they all ended up meeting up at

around 11.30 at TGI Fridays.

She dropped off her last friend around 1 a.m. and was walking into her home with

her key in her hand, and she never made it inside.

Next morning, Trish was found tragically by her father on the back porch of the

home. The summer of 1993.

The killer had snapped her arm and then stabbed her 12 times in the

arm, chest, and breast area.

The attacker must have been lying in wait. This is somebody who knew she was

out, who knew her routine, and knew exactly where to hide in this area.

Her death devastated the town. Not only did it... affect her family and friends.

The whole community rallied around the family.

In 1993, the Cook County, Illinois Sheriff's homicide detectives had

gathered all the evidence they could.

In 1993, DNA technology just wasn't really there.

So they sadly didn't have that to go on, and the case ultimately kind of went

into the cold case file for many years.

In 2000, a new set of detectives took over Tricia Picaccio's case, and they

actually looked and analyzed the fingernail clippings.

By then, DNA had been an accepted investigative tool, and a cold case

homicide detective named Lou Sala realized that he had offender DNA on the

fingernails of Tricia Picaccio and started going out and collecting DNA

from potential suspects.

So they started in Chicago trying to rule people out.

Back in Hollywood, Ashley Ellerin's friends had quite a lot to say about

this guy, Mike the Repairman, this kind of strange man who would show up at her

house unexpectedly.

Investigator Tom Small knew Mike, the furnace guy, the HVAC guy, lived in the

area. But they didn't have a last name.

One of Ashley's friends told Detective Small that Mike had said to him that

he had been in an accident and he was going to sue the builders of Hollywood

and Highland in Hollywood.

And it was going to make him rich.

Small contacted the corporation to see if there was any lawsuit.

And the counsel said no. So a very enterprising Tom Small.

He said, well, you know what, let me pull all the accident reports anyway in

this area.

And he found a report in 1999 where a guy named Michael Gargiulo had an

incident with a motorist, and Michael Gargiulo filed a police report.

So once they were able to find this license of this guy, Michael Gargiulo,

They then showed that to Ellerin's friends, and they confirmed that, oh,

yeah, that's Mike the repair guy.

Gargiulo was living just a few blocks south of Ashley Ellerin at the time of

the killing.

Actually, if you go up on his roof, he had this perfect view of her window, so

he could actually see her comings and goings.

But by the time they had his address, he no longer lived there.

He had gotten evicted, like, months before.

and so had already fled the area.

It was fall of 2002.

The LAPD gets a call from Chicago detectives. They've come out to Los

Angeles because they want to talk to Michael Gargiulo because he was one of

the original people detectives spoke to back when Tricia Pocaccia was murdered

back in 1993, and they wanted to rule him out through DNA.

Michael Gargiulo was a close friend of her brother, Douglas.

At the time of the murder, Michael would have been 17 and Tricia was 18.

So not only was he really good friends with Doug Picaccio, but he lived just

around the corner.

Detective Sala had determined that Gargiulo had moved out to Southern

California relatively quickly after the 1993 murder of Tricia Picaccio.

But they couldn't track him down, so they ended up...

contacting the LAPD, and so they ended up speaking to Detective Tom Small and

his partner, and Tom Small actually showed them the driver's license photo

and said, hey, is this the guy you're looking for?

And they were like, yeah, how do you know this guy? And then Tom Small was

like, well, we're actually looking at him for a murder in Hollywood.

It was like that moment of, oh, my God.

The two of them compared notes, and it was very eerily similar cases. Both

young women, both of them stabbed multiple times.

Both of them knew Michael Gargiulo. Both of them lived close to Michael Gargiulo.

Mike Gargiulo was hard to find because he didn't rent places in his own name.

He didn't have utilities in his own name. He was always with a woman, and

the places were always their names.

So the detectives actually found an address for Michael Gargiulo. Four

detectives went over there, and then he tried to actually run right through

them. It took four of them to actually pin him down.

And they ended up taking him to a nearby hospital where they actually swabbed him

for his DNA.

In 2003, the Illinois authorities confirmed that the DNA found on Trish

Picassio's fingernails was in fact DNA that came from Michael Gargiulo.

When they get the DNA results back, the Cook County State's Attorney's Office

decides that there's not enough evidence to arrest Michael Gargiulo.

They said that basically he had been in the Picaccio's house before, and also

the day before Trisha Picaccio was murdered, Trisha Picaccio was in Michael

Gargiulo's van.

He gave her a ride to her friend's house. So the prosecutors are basically

saying... that could have been how his DNA got on her fingernails.

Trisha had gone out with, you know, 40-plus friends that evening, and the

only DNA that was on her was Michael Gargiulo's. And so the detectives were

very upset.

That left him essentially a free man.

The admin chart with the murderer of Trish Picaccio or the murderer of Ashley

Ellerin. That decision not to go after Gargiulo as soon as they matched the DNA

basically had fatal consequences.

Investigators from Los Angeles and Cook County, Illinois, believe that the same

man murdered Ashley Ellerin and Trisha Picaccio. His name was Michael Gargiulo.

DNA found on the fingernails of Trisha Picaccio matched Gargiulo's, but the

Cook County State's Attorney's Office decided that evidence alone wasn't

enough to prosecute him.

Michael Gargiulo is a free man.

Maria Bruno was a early 30-ish Hispanic woman who had got married young, had

four children with Irving Bruno.

And after about 10 years, the merit started to somewhat dissolve.

Maria Bruno had recently split from her husband and had moved to this gated

apartment complex.

She was trying to start a new life. She chose that apartment complex because it

was safe.

The night of November 30th, Maria Bruno went out with her estranged husband.

They'd gone out to dinner, and they were drinking at a karaoke bar.

They were there pretty late. They closed the restaurant around 1 o'clock in the

morning. Maria had been drinking a little bit too much to drive, so her

husband drove her to her apartment.

They hung out for a little bit longer together, and they actually ended up

having sex.

And then around 2.45 a.m. was when Irving left the apartment.

And the plan was that he would come back early the next morning and drive her to

where they left her car.

He said he came back around 7.40 a.m. He said he knocked on her door and there

was no answer. He, you know, knocked on it a few times. And then he said he

turned around to leave when he actually saw her kitchen window screen on the

ground.

So he actually climbed through the window and that's when he finds...

His estranged wife, Maria Bruno, butchered in the other room.

I was

the

first person from the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department to arrive on scene.

Maria had over a dozen stab wounds all over her abdomen, her chest.

and her throat.

She had been sexually mutilated.

It appeared as if her body had been somewhat posed.

This is very personal. This is rage.

This is an absolutely horrendous crime scene.

There was a blue cotton booty, like a shoe covering, that was found just

outside of Maria's front door.

Not unlike a medical booty or what a repair person would wear on their feet

coming into your home.

There was a small drop of blood on the interior portion of that blue booty.

It was Maria Bruno's blood. Could it be that her assailant wore that booty?

Hearing Bruno was the one that was the last to see her alive and the first one

to discover her deceased, he was definitely somebody that, you know, we

wanted to query thoroughly.

They found Maria's blood actually in Irving Bruno's car.

We questioned him that morning at length.

They had had a domestic violence incident between them previously.

At one point in time, they'd both been drinking. They got involved in a pretty

heated argument, and Mr. Bruno admitted that he had actually struck Maria.

He felt terrible about it. Law enforcement was never called. She never

really shared that with anybody.

and really it was an anomaly in the marriage.

We were able to explain her blood to this car relatively easily.

That night, while she was in the restroom, she had pinched her hand in

the door and had cut it.

The timeline there was pretty easy to put together regarding his activities,

and he was very cooperative and very helpful with us.

So he was excluded as being a suspect relatively quickly.

The coroner gave an expert opinion that the knife wound injuries were to the

right side of Maria's body, and that's indicative of a left-handed attacker.

There was no foreign DNA collected from the crime scene. There were no

fingerprints, no hair or fibers or other forensic material.

We thought perhaps the offender was somebody who was familiar with their

surroundings. The crime itself was high risk.

There were about 80 units in that one building, and then there were two

buildings attached to it that each contained 80 units.

So you're talking about hundreds of people coming and going at all hours.

It kind of struck me right away. It's not their first rodeo.

After we were able to essentially eliminate the estranged husband, we went

back to doing what cops have been doing for about 200 years, knocking on doors.

looking for eyewitnesses, and one of the witnesses was an older gentleman that

lived directly across the courtyard from Maria, and he had witnessed some

activity a couple of days prior to the murder.

Maria was walking down towards her apartment. She was carrying groceries,

and the neighbor saw this man following Maria, and then Maria getting into the

house, and then the man actually stepping in, and then...

going back like this, like Maria, like shutting the door on him and his hands

like in the air, like, okay, you know, type thing and backing off.

And he had seen that man in the apartment building before on a number of

occasions, just standing by the laundry room, kind of looking overall at the

courtyard. That witness described a man that was white, but perhaps of Italian

descent. And he was able to describe his height and his weight and his hairstyle.

Marie's case went cold and it remained cold for pretty much three years until

2008. We got a call from the Santa Monica California Police Department.

At that point, we'd start putting together some of the pieces to this

puzzle. We realized that we had a serial killer.

He was a husband and a father.

What no one knew for many years, however...

was that Michael Gargiulo was leading a double life.

Michelle Murphy was a 26-year-old young lady living with a roommate in the

central district of Santa Monica. Middle class, neighborhood, college students,

aspiring actors and actresses.

The area itself is fairly safe. Younger professionals, not a high crime area

at all.

I would call it a typical or unremarkable evening.

Michelle worked out in the early evening hours, did some laundry, watched a

movie. She ended up going to bed around 10.45.

She had her second floor balcony window open, you know, because it was a warm

night.

I believe it was about 11.30 when she was awakened to this unknown person on

her bed, straddling her, stabbing her.

It went from zero to 20 instantly.

He began stabbing her. Nothing said, no reason, just began to stab her. Michelle

had no idea what was going on.

At one point during the struggle, she actually grabbed the knife to stop him

with, like, two of her hands. Like, she put her hands around the knife.

The odds were definitely against her. She's tiny. She was able to get her feet

underneath him and kick him off.

And in the course of their struggle, he cuts himself on his right wrist.

and starts bleeding pretty badly.

He says, I'm sorry, and runs out of her apartment.

Michelle, what happened?

Where is that person now?

How long ago?

I was approximately two blocks away when the radio call came

out, standing outside her living room window.

I saw a large amount of blood that was smeared all over the window.

I also saw that the screen leading into the apartment had been cut. I could see

blood drops leading down the staircase.

We ended up making our way up to the front door, and I escorted her from her

apartment. She was in shock.

She was badly cut, bleeding profusely.

She was able to provide a very basic description to the first responding

officer. She estimated about 5'11 and muscular built.

She really didn't get a good look because it was dark in her room.

Within weeks of the attack on Michelle Murphy, the droplets of blood were

identified as belonging to Mike Gargiulo.

His DNA was already in the system.

So at the point Mr. Gargiulo was identified by his DNA, we understood

that he was a person of interest in a homicide from the Chicago area from many

years prior.

Once I got more of the details, I realized we were dealing with a monster

and that it was very important for us to ensure that we got this individual off

the street.

We realized that Mr. Gargiulo lived a stone's throw away from Michelle Murphy,

and you could look from his window.

into Michelle Murphy's apartment.

So Michael Gargiulo was arrested for the attempted murder of Michelle Murphy.

Several years after Maria's murder, in May of 2008, we got a call from the

detectives that were handling the attack on Michelle Murphy, and the very

perceptive detectives in Santa Monica remembered the Maria Bruno murder. So

when they were doing a background investigation of Mr. Gargiulo...

They saw that he lived at one time in El Monte. And sure enough, he lived in the

same exact apartment building where Maria Bruno had been murdered. He lived

across the courtyard and one level up from Maria's apartment.

He had like this incredibly perfect view of her home.

I knew right away he was unequivocally, absolutely the strongest suspect in this

case.

Once the connections were made, The investigators from multiple

jurisdictions all started meeting to compare notes because it was at that

point we realized that we had a serial killer.

Once we'd identified Michael Gargiulo, we went back and wound up searching the

apartment that he lived in when Maria Bruno was killed.

Three or four tenants had occupied that same apartment since his departure, and

when we looked at the apartment, it was actually empty. And my partner at the

time, Sergeant Joe Purcell, had the brilliant idea that we should go up and

look in the attic.

Sure enough, in the attic was a white plastic shopping bag, and in that bag

was a Father's Day card written to Mr. Gargiulo from his then-girlfriend.

And a blue cotton booty that was the same make and model manufacturer that

the blue cotton booty we had recovered two years earlier at the murder scene.

It was a great piece of forensic evidence to tie Gargiulo to the crime.

Years later, they end up finding his DNA or DNA of a male relative on

the elastic of that booty that had Maria Bruno's blood on it.

Several months after the Santa Monica Police Department had arrested and

charged Mr. Gargiulo with attempted murder on Michelle Murphy, we had

presented enough evidence to additionally charge Mr. Gargiulo with

the murder of Maria Bruno, and the Los Angeles Police Department was able to

charge another count of murder for the murder of Ashley Ellerin.

Some of Ashley's friends are going through pictures, and there in the

background is Mike Gargiulo.

I mean, I was taking a picture. Ashley was leaning back on everybody.

You can see him lurking around in the background.

So after Gargiulo starts making headlines, a show actually comes out

about him, an episode of 48 Hours.

I tried to revive her.

That is the worst feeling in your life, when you can't do nothing for somebody

you love.

Two men actually end up being the show.

And these two men had worked with Gargiulo at the Rainbow Bar and Grill as

bouncers when Gargiulo started kind of bragging about killing somebody back in

Chicago.

And that's when they know that they have a pretty important piece of information.

And so with that, they ended up speaking to the state attorney's office. And so

in 2011...

Michael Gargiulo was charged with the murder of Trisha Pachaccio.

When you put all of these cases together, you're like, wait a second,

this is the guy who docked these women. He lived near them.

He waited for an opportune time to pounce.

Michael Gargiulo, for almost 15 years, was watching.

Always watching.

The details of this case are horrifying.

Michael Gargiulo accused of brutally murdering three young, beautiful women.

The media dubbed him the Hollywood Ripper. However, his crimes are beyond

Hollywood. It took about 11 years for the case to go to trial.

Mike Gargiulo kept firing lawyers and representing himself.

It was pretty obvious that he was using that to manipulate the system as best he

could, which he was able to do.

The methodical and systematic slaughter of women by Michael Gargiulo,

the boy next door killer.

That's what this case is about.

Mr. Gargiulo was charged in California for the California crimes.

He was not charged with any of the offenses that he committed in the state

of Illinois.

Trish Picaccia's murder was allowed in to show this pattern of Mike Gargiulo's.

The people of the state of California were seeking death against Mr. Garger,

though. They called him a serial psychosexual thrill killer.

He didn't sexual assault any of them. They believe that he got his sexual

thrill out of the actual act of killing.

Ashton Kutcher in the spotlight today, not as an actor, but as a witness in

court. Sounds like he has a pretty important role here. Yes, he's a

timeline witness.

He will narrow down that period during which she was killed. He was planning to

see Ashley Ellerin the night she was murdered.

Kutcher, you know, just his name really brought a ton of publicity to the case.

Ashton Kutcher was why it kind of got so much coverage.

He saw something that looked like evidence of a crime.

Gargiulo timed these attacks.

very perfectly because in two of the cases, he came in right as another man

was leaving. So he must have known that the focus would be on those people as

the last people to have seen her alive and not him.

A 26-year-old woman had the strength and courage to fight off a killer

that took investigators to answers that they had been seeking for 15 years.

The greatest thing is that Michelle lived. She was able to fight him off. As

he's stabbing with his left hand and fighting with Ms. Murphy, that's when he

got himself on the right wrist.

Michelle Murphy was like a heroic figure in this case to be able to go up there

and testify to what happened.

With her testimony on the stand, she remains probably one of the strongest

people I've ever known.

I think it had a great impact on the jury.

I mean, the defense attorneys had no choice but to concede that, in fact, Mr.

Gargiulo was the one that attacked Michelle Murphy.

They tried to paint that in the best light possible, that he was in some

fugue state or that he was sleepwalking or that he wasn't conscious of his

conduct. The jury, I think, saw through all of that.

During the trial, jurors actually were taken out to each crime scene to see

just how close Mike Gargiulo lived to his victims.

This was a very unique part of the trial that I had never seen before in my

career covering court. It was all pretty powerful to see that.

At the end of the day, the murders were just so similar. He had such a

clear blueprint on not only that, but the DNA evidence and his

location in regard to the murders. It was just undoubtable that it was him.

We start with breaking news from Los Angeles, where a verdict has been

reached in the Hollywood Ripper trial.

We have a jury in the above entitled action. Find the defendant, Michael

Gargiulo, guilty of the crime of attempted murder, Michelle Murphy,

guilty of the crime of first-degree murder, Maria Bruno, guilty of the crime

of first-degree murder, Ashley Ellerin.

So there you have it, guilty on all counts. The courtroom was full for the

verdict, and all the family members were there, and you could just feel this

gigantic sense of relief.

I ache to hold her. I ache to hear her voice, to hug her.

The images that we have to see, I can not unsee them.

Children gave me their mother, and I was taken from them.

Our top story this morning, serial killer dubbed the Hollywood Ripper has

been sentenced to death for the murder of two women and attempted murder of a

third.

Right now in California, there's a moratorium on death penalty cases, and

so it's unclear if he'll ever face the death penalty.

I do believe that there are other unidentified victims of Mr. Gargiulo

somewhere. At one point in time, Mr. Gargiulo made an admission.

that he was responsible for up to 10 murders.

And I believe that was a truthful admission.

If there are people that watch this, if they think there's a murder or an

assault of some type, and they have information that it may be some way

connected to Mr. Garzullo, they should call local law enforcement, or they

should call the Los Angeles Police Department or the Los Angeles County

Sheriff's.

Justice needs to be served and this guy has to pay.

He's got to go.

It's owed to him for all these women and my good friend Ashley.

It's time to go.

Because I lost my best friend.

For what?

Michael Gargiulo currently sits on death row in California.

He's expected to face trial in Illinois for the 1993 murder of Tricia Picaccio.

In August 2023, her family will have waited 30 years for justice in her case.

I'm Jesse L. Martin.

Thank you for watching.

Good night.