Andrew Urdiales was a former U.S. Marine who was convicted of murdering eight women in two states over about ten years. Five of the killings took place in Southern California between 1986 and 1995, four of them while he was stationed at Marine bases there and one while he was back on vacation. Three took place in 1996, after he had left the Marines and returned to the Chicago area. None of the killings was solved until April 1997, when Chicago detectives matched a revolver taken from him months earlier by a police officer in Hammond, Indiana, to bullets recovered from three women's bodies. He confessed to the Illinois killings and then, on his own, told detectives there were matters in California they might want to ask him about.
The legal history that followed ran for more than 20 years. Illinois sentenced him to death twice and took both sentences back, once through a governor's mass commutation and once through the abolition of the death penalty. California then tried him for the five Southern California killings, and an Orange County jury sentenced him to death in 2018. He died in his cell on San Quentin's death row in November 2018, in what prison officials investigated as a suicide.
Most of what is known about Urdiales's early life comes from the mitigation evidence his lawyers presented in Illinois, as summarized by the Illinois Supreme Court in 2007. He was the youngest of six children in a family of Mexican origin. When he was three or four years old his oldest brother, Alfred, was killed in Vietnam, and his mother was depressed for two or three years afterward; his older sisters became his main caretakers. He told a defense mitigation specialist that he had been sexually abused as a child. The family moved from Chicago to Burnham, Illinois, when he was in third grade, and he said he was bullied and beaten there from third grade through eighth grade. The family moved back to Chicago while he was in high school. Illinois Public Media later described the area he returned to after the Marines as the South Chicago neighborhood where he grew up.
That account was contested. At the 2018 California trial the prosecutor, Senior Deputy District Attorney Matt Murphy, told jurors there was little evidence that his childhood had been as unhappy as the defense claimed, or that he had been bullied as much, and several of his siblings testified that their father had been a good parent who took the children on trips to Disneyland and Knott's Berry Farm, KFI AM 640 reported. His California lawyers argued that his mother had drunk heavily while pregnant and that brain scans and psychological tests showed partial fetal alcohol syndrome.
Urdiales joined the Marine Corps at 19 and was stationed at Marine facilities in Southern California from April 1984 until his honorable discharge in April 1991, according to the Orange County District Attorney's Office and the mitigation evidence. He served at Camp Pendleton and at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center at Twentynine Palms. The Hi-Desert Star, the newspaper in the Twentynine Palms area, reported in 2009 that he had confessed to two of the killings while stationed at Twentynine Palms.
From 1991 to 1995 he attended more than 100 counseling sessions with a Veterans Administration psychologist, Dr. Janet Willer. According to the mitigation testimony, he stopped going when the billing arrangements changed and he could not afford the copayment. He then worked as a security guard in Chicago; in 1996 he was a guard at an Eddie Bauer store downtown, according to his confessions as read at the California trial.
Robbin Brandley was 23, a college student, and on the night of January 18, 1986, she was working as a volunteer usher at a jazz piano concert at Saddleback College in Mission Viejo, in Orange County. After the concert she walked from the college's fine arts complex toward her car in a dimly lit parking lot. Her father later described her as kind and generous and remembered a school project she wrote in kindergarten about taking turns on a swing.
Urdiales was stationed at Camp Pendleton. In the account he later gave police, he took a hunting knife and drove to the college to find someone to attack. The Illinois Supreme Court recorded his description of it as a "big old hunting knife" about 11 inches long; the Orange County District Attorney's Office described it as a six-inch hunting knife. At the 2018 trial Murphy told jurors that Urdiales had chosen Saddleback College because he often saw its sign from the freeway, that he parked at the bottom of a hill and walked up with the knife, and that before Brandley he had cruised sororities at UCLA and followed women joggers in Riverside.
He came up behind her, put his hand over her mouth and demanded her purse, then stabbed her. OC Weekly described her as the only one of the women linked to him who was neither shot nor sexually assaulted. In his statement, played to jurors in Santa Ana in 2018, he said he had not really been after the purse. He told Illinois detectives she was "just a random female."
To get back onto the base, he hid the evidence on his clothes and told the military police that his car had broken down and he had needed to fix it. Like the other California killings, it went unsolved for more than a decade, until his arrest in Illinois.
Julie McGhee was 29. On July 17, 1988, Urdiales picked her up, drove her to a remote construction area, and shot her, then left her body in the desert. Most reports place her death in Cathedral City; CBS Los Angeles placed it in Indian Wells. Prosecutors described her as working as a prostitute. He told police he felt nothing afterward.
Mary Ann Wells, whose first name also appears as Maryann, was 31. On September 25, 1988, he picked her up in San Diego, drove her into an industrial area, shot her and took back the 40 dollars he had paid her. The Hi-Desert Star reported that after killing her he returned to Twentynine Palms. Her son told FOX 11 Los Angeles in 2018 that his mother had a "heart of gold."
Tammie Erwin, whose first name is also spelled Tammy, was 20 according to most reports and 18 according to others. Her father told reporters in 2018 that she was the "happiest person" and "always had a smile," and that the trait had gotten her into trouble. She had moved from Oklahoma to California with her boyfriend to get away from drugs, and had been in California about six months when she was killed.
On April 16, 1989, Urdiales picked her up in Palm Springs, drove her to a vacant lot and shot her. The Hi-Desert Star reported that the gun was the same one used on Julie McGhee and Mary Ann Wells.
In September 1992 Urdiales attacked a 19-year-old woman in the desert near Palm Springs. She survived, and her testimony later became the only account of his conduct toward a victim that did not come from him. The Illinois Supreme Court referred to her by initials.
According to her testimony as the court summarized it, he gave her a ride on the evening of September 27, 1992, and she gave him a false phone number. Reports of the California trial say he told her he was a detective. The next morning he picked her up after work and offered to take her to breakfast. He then threatened her with weapons, drove her into the desert, sexually assaulted her and locked her in the trunk of his car.
She got out of the trunk and escaped; two Marines in a passing truck took her to safety and called the police, and she was taken to a hospital. No one was arrested.
She testified about the attack at the Illinois sentencing hearing in 2004 and again at the California trial in 2018. In 2018 she told FOX 11 that she had suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and had taken self-defense classes. "I fought for my life to live my life. I'm not afraid anymore," she said. After the guilty verdicts she embraced two of Urdiales's siblings and told one of his sisters she was sorry for what the family was going through. At his sentencing in October 2018 she told him she forgave him, while saying this did not mean he did not deserve the death penalty, CBS Los Angeles reported.
By 1995 Urdiales had left the Marines and was living in Illinois. In March of that year he was back in Southern California on vacation in Palm Springs. Denise Maney was 32. Prosecutors described her as working as a prostitute. On March 11, 1995, he picked her up, drove her into the desert, sexually assaulted her and killed her. ABC7 Los Angeles reported that she was found in the desert outside Cathedral City.
The Hi-Desert Star reported in 2009 that he had kept a storage unit in the Palm Springs area that held weapons and items taken from his victims.
Back in Chicago, Urdiales killed three women in 1996. Laura Uylaki was 25 and lived in Hammond, Indiana, just across the state line from Chicago. Cassandra Corum, known as Cassie, was 21 and also from Hammond. Lynn Huber was 22 and from Chicago. Some reports give Uylaki's first name as Lori or Cori. The Illinois Supreme Court described Huber as a Chicago prostitute, and later news reports said all three worked as prostitutes.
In April 1996, by his account, Urdiales and Laura Uylaki argued in his truck at Wolf Lake, a lake that straddles the Illinois-Indiana border. The gun went off, she grabbed for it and broke his finger, and she ran; he shot her as she fled and put her body in the lake. He had the finger set at a hospital afterward. Her body was found in the lake; she had been shot and stabbed.
On July 13, 1996, he met Cassandra Corum at a bar in Hammond and they drove to Wolf Lake. He told police he hit her and restrained her with handcuffs and duct tape, then drove for hours to a bridge over a river in Livingston County, Illinois, where he shot her, stabbed her and left her in the water. Her body was found in the Vermilion River on July 14, 1996. She had been reported missing from Hammond.
In late July or early August 1996 he shot Lynn Huber in Chicago after, by his account, she argued with him. He took her to Wolf Lake, and her body was found there.
Ballistics later showed that all three women had been shot with bullets from the same gun.
In November 1996 a Hammond police officer arrested Urdiales for unlawful possession of a firearm and seized a revolver. Several reports say officers first noticed him loitering in his truck in an area known for prostitution. The officer also saw rolls of duct tape in the truck. The charge was a misdemeanor, OC Weekly reported, and the gun stayed with the police.
On April 1, 1997, the same Hammond officer answered a call involving Urdiales and a woman working as a prostitute. She told police he had wanted to take her to Wolf Lake and handcuff her and tape her up. The Hi-Desert Star reported that Urdiales himself had called police that day, complaining that the woman had stolen a check. Wolf Lake was where two of the unsolved 1996 victims had been found. The information reached Chicago detectives, who obtained the revolver seized in November and had it tested. It matched the bullets in all three women.
On April 22, 1997, Urdiales agreed to speak with Chicago police. Detectives showed him photographs of Cassandra Corum, Laura Uylaki and Lynn Huber. When they told him that the gun taken from him in Hammond was the murder weapon, he took off his security guard badge, began taking the laces out of his shoes, and said, "Well, I guess I'm not going to work today."
He then confessed to the three Illinois killings. Without being asked, he told the detectives there were matters in California that authorities there might be interested in. Detective Don McGrath of the Chicago Police Department, who walked him back to the lockup after the interviews, later testified that Urdiales told him he was "kind of glad" he had been caught, because he "was starting to get the urge again."
His statements about the five California killings were the start of the case against him there. According to the Associated Press, investigators in one of the California cases also recovered DNA from a condom left at the scene. The Orange County District Attorney's Office said a different handgun, one he had taken apart, was used in the Southern California shootings. ABC7 Los Angeles reported in 2018 that he had been charged with the California killings in 1997, but no California prosecution could go forward while Illinois had him.
Cook County prosecutors tried him first, for the murders of Laura Uylaki and Lynn Huber. The lead prosecutor was Jim McKay, then an assistant state's attorney. Urdiales claimed insanity and mental illness, and the jury rejected both claims and found him guilty of both murders. He was sentenced to death on September 3, 2002, according to the Illinois Supreme Court. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation later gave the month of the conviction and sentence as May 2002. McKay later described him as "smarter than your average serial killer" and said that when he got angry "the evil side comes out," CBS News reported.
On January 11, 2003, Governor George Ryan commuted all 167 death sentences in Illinois to life without parole, CDCR's later summary said; the Illinois Supreme Court dated Ryan's commutation of Urdiales's sentence January 10, 2003. Urdiales's Cook County sentence became natural life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Cassandra Corum's case was separate, because her body had been found in Livingston County, downstate from Chicago. A Livingston County grand jury indicted him for her murder on March 10, 1998, and in March 2001 the state gave notice that it would seek the death penalty. The case came to trial in Livingston County in 2004, after his Cook County sentence had been commuted.
Jury selection began on April 19, 2004. During a recess that day, guards told Urdiales he could not speak to a defense mitigation specialist seated behind him. He said he did not care, knocked over a cup of water and threw items, and an officer testified that it took several guards to subdue and handcuff him. The judge ordered his legs shackled under a skirted table and his left hand restrained, out of the jurors' sight.
On April 23, 2004, he offered to plead guilty but mentally ill. The state disputed that he was mentally ill. On May 4 he waived a jury on guilt, and the court heard the plea and an insanity defense together. His defense team included Stephen Richards, who had joined the case in late 2003.
Five experts testified, and they did not agree with one another. For the defense, the psychiatrist Dr. Terry Killian found him sane but mentally ill, listing post-traumatic stress disorder, bipolar mood disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, a dissociative disorder, Tourette's syndrome and a personality disorder, and treating dissociation as the most significant. The psychologist Dr. Daniel Cuneo also found him mentally ill but not insane, and put post-traumatic stress disorder first. The psychiatrist Dr. James Merikangas found him insane because of organic brain disease, citing abnormalities on brain scans, and disagreed with the other two about post-traumatic stress and dissociation. Reports from two experts who did not testify were also before the court: Dr. Dorothy Otnow Lewis described him as psychotic and responding to delusions and command hallucinations, and Dr. Charles Opsahl found neuropsychological impairment and paranoid psychosis with a cyclic mood disorder.
For the state, Dr. Janet Willer, the Veterans Administration psychologist who had seen him for more than 100 sessions, diagnosed mild depression and avoidant personality disorder. The forensic psychiatrist Dr. Park Dietz found him sane and not mentally ill in the legal sense. He diagnosed Tourette's syndrome, a personality disorder with schizotypal traits, and sexual sadism, and attributed his poor judgment to anger rather than to mental illness.
On May 10, 2004, the judge rejected the plea of guilty but mentally ill, rejected the insanity defense and found Urdiales guilty of first-degree murder. The judge gave several reasons: the defense experts disagreed about the main diagnosis; none explained how he had functioned as a Marine and as a security guard; and the crime showed planning, since he had brought a gun, a knife, duct tape and handcuffs. "The defendant went prepared and in fact successfully carried out this murder as well as seven others," the judge said. The judge found Dietz more persuasive and noted that Urdiales had read a book by Dr. Lewis.
Urdiales waived a jury on whether he was eligible for death, and the court found him eligible because of his Cook County murder convictions. A sentencing jury then heard the aggravation and mitigation evidence. The state called Detective McGrath, the surviving woman from 1992, and evidence of the California killings drawn from police investigations and Urdiales's own statements. The defense called the mitigation specialist, Dr. Merikangas, Dr. Killian, the psychologist Dr. Stephen Hardy, who judged his risk of violence in prison very low, and Roger Cowan, a former warden of Menard Correctional Center, who testified about the conditions of a natural life sentence and said Urdiales had made a "very good adjustment" to prison, with two disciplinary tickets in seven years. The jury found that death was the appropriate sentence, and the court sentenced him to death. CBS Chicago dated the sentence May 2004.
Because he had been sentenced to death, the appeal went directly to the Illinois Supreme Court. He raised 11 issues, among them his shackling, the trial judge's remarks about appellate judges and state appellate defense lawyers, the rejection of his plea of guilty but mentally ill, the weight of the evidence on insanity, the closing argument, and the instructions given to the sentencing jury.
The court filed its opinion on February 16, 2007, written by Justice Karmeier and joined by Chief Justice Thomas and Justices Freeman, Fitzgerald, Garman and Burke; Justice Kilbride concurred in part and dissented in part. The opinion was modified on denial of rehearing on May 29, 2007. On the shackling, the court found the trial judge had given adequate reasons and that the restraints were not visible to the jury. On the trial judge's comments, the court found no violation of due process, because the judge had disagreed with appellate precedent without disregarding it and had spoken outside the jury's presence.
The court was nonetheless critical of the trial judge, who had criticized appellate justices who ruled on shackling from the bench and had said he planned to send them transcripts. The court wrote that it did not "encourage the kind of rambling, amorphous diatribe in which the trial court engaged," that "a trial judge should be the exemplar of dignity," and that a judge should "control his emotions."
The death sentence remained in force after the appeal: in December 2009 the Associated Press reported that Urdiales was on Illinois death row, and Orange County prosecutors said he would be brought to California after the evidentiary part of his death penalty appeal in Illinois ended.
On August 5, 2009, the Orange County District Attorney's Office charged Urdiales, then 45, with five counts of special-circumstances murder, with personal use of a firearm alleged in three of them. Prosecutors in Orange, Riverside and San Diego counties had agreed in July 2009 to combine the five cases under a state law allowing joint trials, with Orange County handling the prosecution. An Orange County grand jury indicted him on December 14, 2009. "California has waited a long time for justice for five women whose young lives were snuffed out so brutally," District Attorney Tony Rackauckas said when the charges were filed. Senior Deputy District Attorney Howard Gundy, who coordinated the case, told the Hi-Desert Star that he was waiting for a window to bring Urdiales west that would not interrupt the Illinois proceedings.
In March 2011 Governor Pat Quinn signed a bill abolishing the death penalty in Illinois and commuted the sentences of the 15 men then on death row, Urdiales among them, to life without parole. Within hours, CBS Chicago reported, Orange County prosecutors began seeking his extradition. McKay, the Cook County prosecutor, called the situation a joke, saying Urdiales had killed eight women "without remorse," and said he would help get him to California. Orange County prosecutors asked Governor Jerry Brown to seek Quinn's help.
Urdiales was extradited from the Pontiac Correctional Facility in Pontiac, Illinois, where he had been held, in late September or early October 2011. That October the Orange County District Attorney's Office announced that it would seek the death penalty. "The factors of aggravation, which would call for the stiffest penalty, far outweigh any of the factors in mitigation," Gundy told Illinois Public Media.
The California trial did not begin until 2018. FOX 11 Los Angeles reported that the delay came from several causes: prosecutors were reassigned, the original defense lawyer retired for medical reasons, and the judge's calendar caused further postponements. Todd Spitzer, then an Orange County supervisor and the lawyer for Robbin Brandley's father, blamed the District Attorney's Office for the wait, though not the trial prosecutors.
The trial was held in Department C35 of the Central Justice Center in Santa Ana, before Judge Gregg Prickett. The prosecutors were Senior Deputy District Attorneys Matt Murphy and Eric Scarbrough. Jurors heard Urdiales's taped confession during opening statements.
The defense did not contest that he had killed the five women. His lawyers, led by Denise Gragg, argued that childhood trauma and fetal alcohol spectrum disorder had left him unable to control his anger, that he had sometimes dissociated during the killings, and that he had not planned them. They asked the jury to find implied malice, which would have meant second-degree murder and no possibility of a death sentence.
Murphy's closing argument, on May 15, 2018, was that Urdiales hated women and liked killing them. He told the jurors that motive did not have to be proven, that no one had diagnosed dissociation, and that a defense expert had agreed Urdiales was capable of controlling his anger when it suited him. He pointed to the knife Urdiales had brought to Saddleback College and to his planned escape route as evidence of deliberate thought, and said Urdiales had a remarkable memory for what his victims had been wearing.
On May 23, 2018, the jury unanimously found him guilty of five counts of first-degree murder and found true the special circumstances of multiple murder and lying in wait, which made him eligible for death. Robbin Brandley's father said he had been waiting more than 30 years. "The jury did the right thing," he said. He told reporters he had never hated anyone before, but that seeing the crime-scene photographs of his daughter had changed that. Tammie Erwin's father said he supported the death penalty because Urdiales had treated the women "like they were just trash."
The penalty phase began on May 29, 2018. On June 13, after deliberating for about a day, the same jury recommended death for each of the five murders. Murphy said Urdiales "absolutely had no remorse" and noted his lack of emotion during testimony about the assaults. Tammie Erwin's father said that whatever the verdict, Urdiales would never hurt anyone again. Robbin Brandley's father told NBC Los Angeles that he did not expect an execution, "because in California there is no death penalty."
On October 5, 2018, Judge Prickett sentenced Urdiales, then 54, to death on all five counts. He imposed five consecutive death sentences, so that each would stand on its own if any conviction were overturned or a sentence commuted. Tammie Erwin's father told the court that Urdiales "not only killed my daughter, he killed me inside." Robbin Brandley's father said the years of anger and mistrust had taken a heavy toll on his family, and that his wife had died in 2011.
Urdiales apologized to the jurors, the judge, the prosecutors, the victims' families and his own family for having to hear the details of the crimes. "I understand how they voted," he said. "If I were a juror on my case I would probably have done the same thing." Rackauckas said death was the only just punishment.
Urdiales was received on California's death row at San Quentin State Prison on October 12, 2018. He was housed alone in a cell in the Adjustment Center. At about 11:15 p.m. on Friday, November 2, 2018, staff found him unresponsive during a security check. Correctional officers began CPR, and he was pronounced dead at 12:06 a.m. on Saturday, November 3, 2018, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. He was 54. Some news reports gave the time he was pronounced dead as 12:01 a.m.
CDCR said the cause of death was pending an autopsy and that it was investigating the death as a suicide. Another condemned man, Virendra Govin, was found dead in his cell at San Quentin less than two days later, and officials said they did not believe the two deaths were related. No final autopsy or coroner's finding on Urdiales's death was reported.
CDCR's release noted that 25 condemned prisoners had died by suicide since California reinstated capital punishment in 1978, while 13 had been executed in California. At the time, 740 people were on the state's death row.
In a statement, Rackauckas said Urdiales had "remained a callous coward until the end" and had denied the victims' families the chance to see him executed. The statement named the eight women he had been convicted of killing and praised the surviving woman for testifying against him.
Proven by conviction: the murders of Laura Uylaki and Lynn Huber (Cook County, 2002); the murder of Cassandra Corum (Livingston County, 2004); and the murders of Robbin Brandley, Julie McGhee, Mary Ann Wells, Tammie Erwin and Denise Maney (Orange County Superior Court, 2018). The 1992 attack on the surviving woman was proved through her testimony at the Illinois and California sentencing stages; no separate prosecution for it was reported.
The legal finality of the judgments is uneven. No appellate ruling on the 2002 Cook County judgment has been reported; the death sentence in that case was commuted in 2003. The Livingston County judgment was reviewed by the Illinois Supreme Court in 2007, and further proceedings were still under way in 2009. The California judgment was entered on October 5, 2018, and no appellate ruling on it was reported before his death.
His mental state was disputed at every trial. A Cook County jury, the Livingston County judge and an Orange County jury each rejected claims that his responsibility was removed or reduced by mental illness, brain damage or dissociation; the experts who examined him did not agree on a diagnosis.
Details that vary between sources: the length of the knife used on Robbin Brandley (about 11 inches in his statement as summarized by the Illinois Supreme Court; six inches according to the Orange County District Attorney); Tammie Erwin's age (20 in most reports, 18 in others); where Julie McGhee was killed (Cathedral City in most reports, Indian Wells in CBS Los Angeles); the date of Ryan's commutation (January 11, 2003, in CDCR's summary; January 10 in the Illinois Supreme Court opinion); the date of the Cook County sentence (September 3, 2002, per the Illinois Supreme Court; May 2002 per CDCR); and the time he was pronounced dead (12:06 a.m. per CDCR; 12:01 a.m. in some reports). Several later news reports wrongly said Ryan commuted his sentence in 2011, or that Tammie Erwin was killed in 1995.
April 1984: Urdiales, 19, begins service as a Marine in Southern California.
January 18, 1986: Robbin Brandley, 23, is killed at Saddleback College, Mission Viejo.
July 17, 1988: Julie McGhee, 29, is killed in the Coachella Valley.
September 25, 1988: Mary Ann Wells, 31, is killed in San Diego.
April 16, 1989: Tammie Erwin is killed in Palm Springs.
April 1991: honorably discharged; moves back to the Chicago area.
September 27 and 28, 1992: abducts and sexually assaults a 19-year-old woman, who escapes from the trunk of his car.
March 11, 1995: Denise Maney, 32, is killed near Palm Springs while he is on vacation.
April 1996: Laura Uylaki, 25, is killed at Wolf Lake.
July 13, 1996: Cassandra Corum, 21, is killed; her body is found in the Vermilion River on July 14.
Late July or early August 1996: Lynn Huber, 22, is killed; her body is found in Wolf Lake.
November 1996: a Hammond, Indiana, officer arrests him for unlawful possession of a firearm and seizes a revolver.
April 1, 1997: a call involving Urdiales and a woman who says he wanted to take her to Wolf Lake leads to the gun being tested.
April 22, 1997: he confesses to Chicago police and mentions California.
March 10, 1998: indicted in Livingston County for Cassandra Corum's murder.
2002: convicted in Cook County of murdering Laura Uylaki and Lynn Huber; sentenced to death on September 3, 2002.
January 2003: Governor George Ryan commutes all Illinois death sentences.
May 10, 2004: found guilty of Cassandra Corum's murder after a bench hearing; a jury then returns a death verdict, and he is sentenced to death.
February 16, 2007: Illinois Supreme Court opinion on the Livingston County appeal; modified on denial of rehearing May 29, 2007.
August 5, 2009: Orange County charges him with five murders; indicted December 14, 2009.
March 2011: Illinois abolishes the death penalty; his sentence is commuted, and Orange County seeks extradition.
Late September or early October 2011: extradited from Pontiac, Illinois, to Orange County.
May 23, 2018: convicted of five first-degree murders with special circumstances.
June 13, 2018: jury recommends death.
October 5, 2018: sentenced to death by Judge Gregg Prickett.
October 12, 2018: received on California's death row at San Quentin.
November 2 to 3, 2018: found unresponsive in his cell and pronounced dead; CDCR investigates the death as a suicide.