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 offenses 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.
His life before Los Angeles was rough. He was born in 1949 into a Black family in New Orleans, showed signs of intellectual disability early, and was abused by relatives. He left home as a boy and lived on the streets with other children, and from 1960 he was repeatedly arrested and spent years in juvenile institutions, where, by his own later account, other boys abused him physically and sexually. He moved to Los Angeles in the early 1970s and did low-paid work. In 1975 he was arrested for raping a woman of about eighty and trying to strangle her; he was declared a mentally disordered sex offender and sent to Patton State Hospital. He was released in June 1979 and rented a place in Hollywood. At the time of his arrest he worked as a shipping clerk at a shoe factory in Monterey Park and played drums in a little-known rock band called The Hostages.
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. Toward the end he began setting fires in his victims' homes, and in the case of Mary Pauquette, the prosecutor said, he set her on fire.
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, in the deaths of Lucille Pyle, eighty-two, and Mary Pauquette, 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 paralyzed.
The search of his apartment found more than two hundred pieces of jewelry, 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 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. Among those charged was Lorraine Wells, seventy-six, killed in May 1983. What he was convicted of, on July 25, 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. Accounts published since have Woodcock at sixty-nine, Fain at seventy and Pauquette killed in September 1983, and some say he was convicted of twelve murders; the contemporaneous reports of the verdict and the sentencing give the ages and dates above and four convictions. 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, including one in Pauquette's bedroom, the property in his apartment, and more than a hundred prosecution witnesses. His former girlfriend told the court his favorite song was Thin Lizzy's "Killer on the Loose." 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 in Vacaville, where he was reported in 2022 to be held because of his health. Four murders were proved. Police believed he was responsible for seven more that were never charged, and he was once suspected in as many as thirty-four, twenty-two of which he was later cleared of.