Brandon Tholmer was born in 1949 and grew up in a broken home in the New Orleans area. He was assessed as borderline intellectually disabled and was placed in juvenile institutions for minor offences from the age of eleven. By his twenties he had a record, and he had been held in a California state hospital as a mentally disordered sex offender before being released. In Los Angeles the press called him the West Side Rapist.
Between 1981 and 1983 he broke into the homes of elderly women living alone in the East Hollywood, Silverlake and Wilshire districts, raped them, and killed them by strangling, beating or stabbing. He robbed the houses afterwards. Towards the end he began setting fires at the scenes, and in at least one case set the victim herself alight.
Almost all of the victims lived within a mile of his own Hollywood apartment, which is what eventually produced him. He came under suspicion at the end of October 1983 and was put under surveillance; five days later, on November 7, he was caught trying to break into the house of Irene Rogers, eighty-five, who was paralysed.
The search of his apartment found more than two hundred pieces of jewellery, watches, photographs and other small objects. Relatives of thirty-four elderly women who had died between January 1981 and October 1983 identified items among them. That is where the figure of thirty-four in this roster comes from.
It is also where the case has to be read carefully. He was at one time a suspect in all thirty-four, and the police then eliminated him from twenty-two of them. He was charged in January 1984 with five, and the jury deadlocked on the fifth. What he was convicted of, in July 1986 after a six-month trial, was four counts of first-degree murder with special circumstances: Rose Lederman, eighty, in August 1981; Woolloomooloo Woodcock, sixty-six, in August 1982; Mary Pauquette, seventy-two, in September 1982; and Dorothy Fain, seventy-two, in August 1983. The jury also upheld allegations that he had raped Woodcock, sodomised Fain, and raped and sodomised Pauquette.
The evidence was physical rather than confessional: his fingerprints at the scenes, the property in his flat, and more than a hundred prosecution witnesses. Friends and acquaintances described his interest in much older women, whom he approached at supermarkets where his girlfriend worked. He gave no account of the nights in question and no alibi for any of the dates.
He faced only death or life without parole. At the penalty phase in August 1986 the jury chose life, several jurors saying afterwards that they had rejected the death penalty because of the circumstances of his upbringing; one, Kathy Kaplan, put it as "His life has been a hell on Earth." On November 21, 1986, Judge Clarence A. Stromwall imposed four consecutive terms of life without parole, saying the crimes were among the most vicious he had seen in forty years in the courts. The prosecutor was a deputy district attorney named Lance Ito, later the judge in the O. J. Simpson trial.
He has remained in custody at the California Medical Facility. The proved count is four; the attributed count is thirty-four; and the number he was actively cleared of is twenty-two.