Detectives laid photographs of three drowned women on the table and Andrew Urdiales said he did not recognize any of them. Then they told him all three had been shot with bullets from his gun.
He sat for about a minute. Then he took off his security guard badge, started pulling the laces out of his shoes, and said: "Well, I guess I'm not going to work today."
He confessed to the three Illinois killings in detail. And then, without being asked anything, he told the detectives there were "some matters" that authorities in California "might be interested in."
There were five more, going back eleven years, and none of them were on any Illinois detective's radar.
The gun that undid him had been sitting in a police property room for five months. In November 1996 (December, in another account) a Hammond, Indiana officer arrested Urdiales for unlawful possession of a firearm, and he was released after paying a fine. The officer had noticed rolls of duct tape in his truck. On April 1, 1997, the same officer took a call involving Urdiales and a woman working as a prostitute, Patricia Kelly, who said he had wanted to take her out to Wolf Lake, handcuff her, tape her and have sex with her. The officer put the duct tape together with the request, and sent what he had to Chicago. Chicago pulled the seized revolver and test-fired it.
Three women had been killed with it inside four months in 1996, all of them women Urdiales already knew, and all three had been stabbed as well as shot.
Laura Uylaki was twenty-five and from Hammond. He had been seeing her, and they had had sex twice at Wolf Lake on the Illinois-Indiana line, in a sleeping bag he kept in his truck. His account was that they argued, the revolver went off and put a hole in the roof, she grabbed for it and broke his finger, she ran, and he shot her. He undressed her and pushed her into the lake. Her body was found in the lake on April 14, 1996. Some Chicago and Indiana reports give her name as Lorie, and others spell the surname Ulyaki.
Cassandra Corum was twenty-one, also from Hammond, and he had known her about two years. On the night of July 13, 1996 they met in a bar, drove to Wolf Lake and had sex, and she said something that angered him, though he could never afterward say what. He beat her, handcuffed her, stripped her, taped her ankles and her mouth, put her head in his lap and drove south down Interstate 55 for two hours. Past a river bridge he stopped at a park, took her out, shot her once, stabbed her, and threw her off the bridge into the Vermilion River. She was found the next day, still handcuffed and still taped. She was a mother; her own mother, Sherry Alsalah, read a victim impact statement at his sentencing.
Lynn Huber was twenty-two and from Chicago. He saw her carrying a bag of clothes one evening in late July or early August, offered her a lift, pulled into an alley and shot her in the head. He drove her out to Wolf Lake and undressed her there, pricked his finger on a needle in her clothing, and was angry enough about it to stab her repeatedly and shoot her again. She was found on August 2. He gave her bag of clothes to the Salvation Army, saying she would not need them.
He was born in Chicago on June 4, 1964, and little is known about his childhood beyond one incident. In June 1977, just short of thirteen, he beat the family dog to death with a baseball bat and told his parents it had been hurt in a fall. He went to Thornridge High School in Dolton, graduated in 1982 and joined the Marine Corps. From 1984 to 1991 he was stationed at Camp Pendleton. He trained as a radio operator at Twentynine Palms, served in Desert Storm, and was honorably discharged in 1991, when he moved back into his parents' home in Chicago and later worked as a security guard at a mall.
The California killings began a decade earlier, and the first one had nothing in common with any of the rest.
Robbin Brandley was twenty-three, a college student, and on January 18, 1986 she had been working as a volunteer usher at a jazz piano concert at Saddleback College in Mission Viejo. Urdiales was a Marine stationed at Camp Pendleton. He drove up from the base that night with an eleven-inch hunting knife because, he told police, he was upset about something at work and had decided to rob somebody.
He came up behind her in a dark parking lot, put a hand over her mouth and asked for her purse. She gave it to him immediately. He set it on the hood of her car and began stabbing her in the back, and when she went down he stabbed her in the chest. At one point the blade lodged in her ribs and he stood on her body to pull it out. He stabbed her forty-one times and left her there to die.
To get back on base with blood on his clothes he smeared engine grease over the stains and told the military police his car had broken down. They accepted it. He said afterward that it made him think they were, in his words, dumb shits. Of Brandley he said she "could have been anybody" and was "just a random female."
The four that followed were women working as prostitutes, and the second killing set the shape of all of them. Julie McGhee, twenty-nine, was picked up in Cathedral City on July 17, 1988, driven to a construction site, had sex with him and was shot in the head with a .45 pistol as she got out of the car. She was found in a ditch near Cathedral City. He said he felt nothing afterward, that it was "just so quiet and peaceful", and drove to a bar to watch the dancers.
Mary Ann Wells was thirty-one. He drove her into an industrial part of San Diego on September 25, 1988, had sex with her, shot her, took back the forty dollars he had paid her, and left her. His account puts her in an alley; another places her body in an abandoned warehouse.
Tammy Erwin, whose name also appears as Tammie, was eighteen or twenty, depending on the report, and he had been with her before. In Palm Springs on April 16, 1989 he took her to a vacant lot and shot her, then watched from inside his truck as she stayed on her feet holding her head. He shot her again. Then a third time. She was found on April 17.
Denise Maney was thirty-two, or thirty-one in another account. By March 1995 Urdiales had left the Marines and moved back to Chicago, and he was back in California on vacation. Accounts place the pickup in Palm Springs or in Cathedral City. He drove her into the desert, tied her hands, sexually assaulted her, put his gun in her mouth and fired. Then he drove away, stopped, turned around, went back with a knife and stabbed her repeatedly. Describing it later he slipped between "I" and "we." Three psychiatrists treated that as evidence of dissociation; the state's expert called it a man putting distance between himself and what he had done.
Between Erwin and Maney there is a woman who got away, and she is the reason this case is documented as well as it is.
On September 27, 1992 Urdiales gave a young woman a lift and asked for her phone number. His account and hers have her going to a house-sitting job; another account describes her as a nineteen-year-old nurse getting a ride to work. She gave him a false one. He worked out that it was false, waited for her to finish work the following morning, and offered to take her to breakfast. She got in because he looked friendly.
He drove a short distance, pulled over, put a knife to her throat, pushed her head into the dashboard and tied her hands behind her back. Out in the desert he cut her clothes off with the knife, gagged her with her own underwear until she vomited, sexually assaulted her (one account says he attempted rape and could not complete it, and that she called him a coward and begged him to kill her), hit her, called her names, and ordered her to say that she loved him. When she could not say it convincingly he strangled her until she lost consciousness. She said afterward that the interval had been peaceful and that she had thought she was dead and was happy about it. He revived her, bit her neck hard enough to draw blood, forced her into the trunk of the car and drove on.
In the trunk she tried to kill herself: holding her breath, then beating her head against the lid, then winding the twine around her own neck. Then she prayed, got calm, and pulled her hands apart hard enough to snap the twine. She found the latch. She got the trunk open once and he slammed it shut. She got it open a second time, jumped out and ran, and when she looked back he was coming after her with a machete. She ran into the road with her eyes closed, hoping the truck she could hear would hit her rather than let him reach her. The two Marines inside it got her in, and he drove off. The police had a bite mark and her description of him, and nothing else: a bulldozer had gone down the track and destroyed his tire marks.
Her name is Jennifer Asbenson. She testified as "J.A." at his Illinois sentencing in 2004, and the Illinois Supreme Court quoted her at length for a reason the state's psychiatrist, Dr. Park Dietz, put plainly: hers is the only account of what Urdiales actually did with a victim that does not come from Urdiales. Everything else in the file is either a body or his own version of events. At the California trial in 2018 she spoke in her own name, told him from the witness stand that she forgave him, and added that this did not make what he did right and did not mean he should live.
He was interviewed on April 22, 1997 and arrested the next day, and he was indicted in Cook County on April 29. Then Illinois took nine years to finish with him, and produced one of the strangest sequences in American capital practice.
Cook County tried him first, for Uylaki and Huber. The question of whether to seek death, argued while Illinois was debating the penalty itself, held the case up for four years; on April 30, 2001 prosecutors decided to ask for it. The trial opened on April 8, 2002. A jury rejected his claims that he was insane or mentally ill and convicted him, and he was sentenced to death. The dates are given as a verdict on May 23 and a death sentence on May 30, 2002 in one account, and a sentencing on September 3, 2002 in another.
On January 11, 2003, Governor George Ryan commuted every death sentence in Illinois, all one hundred and sixty-seven of them, to natural life without parole. Urdiales was one of the hundred and sixty-seven.
Fourteen months later Illinois sentenced him to death again.
Livingston County had indicted him separately for Cassandra Corum in March 1998 and had never brought it to trial. It came on in April 2004 before Judge Harold Frobish. Urdiales offered a plea of guilty but mentally ill; the state disputed that he was mentally ill at all. His lawyer, Stephen Richards, had encouraged the change of approach. He waived a jury on guilt and the court heard the plea and an insanity defense together.
Five experts testified and no two of them agreed. Dr. Terry Killian put dissociation at the center, along with PTSD, bipolar disorder, panic disorder, OCD, Tourette's and mild neurological impairment. Dr. Daniel Cuneo put PTSD first. Dr. James Merikangas said organic brain disease and legal insanity, pointing to scans showing atrophy and frontal lobe damage. A report from Dr. Dorothy Otnow Lewis, who had examined him for the Cook County case, described him as flamboyantly psychotic and acting on command hallucinations. For the state, Dr. Janet Willer, who had actually treated him for four years at the Veterans Administration, said mild depression and avoidant personality disorder. Dr. Park Dietz said personality disorder, Tourette's and sexual sadism, and that what impaired his judgment was anger rather than illness.
Frobish rejected both the plea and the insanity defense. The defense experts contradicted each other on the primary diagnosis. None of them explained how a man with those illnesses had completed seven years in the Marine Corps and held a job. And the crimes showed planning: he brought a gun, a knife, duct tape and handcuffs. The judge also noted that between the two trials Urdiales had read a book written by Dr. Lewis.
The jury returned death on May 10, 2004, making him, by the account of the Chicago-area press, the first person sent back to Illinois death row after Ryan spared him.
The Illinois Supreme Court affirmed on February 16, 2007 and rejected all eleven grounds of appeal. It then spent several pages on the trial judge, who had repeatedly attacked the state appellate court from the bench, disparaged the motives of public defenders, and announced that he intended to mail a transcript to named appellate justices. The court found no reversible error but wrote that it did not "mean to encourage the kind of rambling, amorphous diatribe in which the trial court engaged," and that a trial judge should be an exemplar of dignity and control his emotions.
In March 2011 Governor Pat Quinn signed the abolition of the death penalty in Illinois, and the second death sentence became life without parole too. He was held at Menard Correctional Center in Chester.
That is when California came for him. Orange County had indicted him in December 2009 for the five Southern California killings, consolidating the Orange, Riverside and San Diego cases into one prosecution, and within hours of Quinn's decision Orange County prosecutors moved to bring him west, which they did in 2011.
He was tried at Santa Ana in 2018 by senior Deputy District Attorney Matt Murphy. On May 23 a jury convicted him of five counts of first-degree murder with special circumstances for multiple murder and for personal use of a firearm in three of them. On June 13 the same jury voted for death after a single day of deliberation. Judge Gregg Pickett imposed it on October 5, and Urdiales told the court he respected the jury's decision. To the families he said: "I express my condolences for your loss."
He arrived on California's death row on October 12, 2018, twenty-one years and six months after Chicago detectives first sat him down with three photographs. Twenty-one days later, at about a quarter past eleven on the night of November 2, he was found unresponsive in a single cell in the Adjustment Center at San Quentin. He had hanged himself. He was fifty-four.
Three death sentences, two states, sixteen years, and not one of them carried out. Illinois took two of them back, once by executive clemency and once by abolishing the penalty altogether. California had not executed anybody since 2006 and has not executed anybody since.
The Illinois record ends with Detective Don McGrath, who walked Urdiales back to the lockup after the interviews in April 1997. On the way to the door Urdiales looked at him and said he was glad, in a way, that they had caught him. He was starting to get the urge again.