Brandon Tholmer was convicted by a Los Angeles jury of murdering four elderly women who lived alone in the East Hollywood and Silverlake area of Los Angeles, all within a mile of his apartment. Rose Lederman, Woolloomooloo Woodcock, Mary Pauquette and Dorothy Fain were killed in their homes between August 1981 and August 1983. A Superior Court jury deadlocked on a fifth murder charge and declined to send him to the gas chamber, and Judge Clarence Stromwall sentenced him to four consecutive terms of life in prison without the possibility of parole.
He was not a stranger to the courts when he was caught. In the 1970s he had been convicted of a rape and robbery, declared a mentally disordered sex offender and committed to Patton State Hospital. He was released in June 1979 and was still in outpatient treatment under court supervision when Los Angeles police arrested him in November 1983. Police Chief Daryl Gates called his release "another failure of our system."
What is known of his early life comes mainly from his defense at the penalty phase of his trial. Deputy Public Defender Kathleen Cannon told the court that he came from a broken home in the New Orleans area. He had been diagnosed with borderline intellectual disability, she said, and from the age of 11 he had spent several years in juvenile facilities for minor crimes.
His date of birth was not reported. United Press International gave his age as 27 at his arrest and at his preliminary hearing, and as 29 in its reports of the verdict and the sentencing.
By the early 1980s he was living in Los Angeles and working as a shipping clerk for a shoe manufacturer. UPI later described him as an aspiring rock musician. His former live-in girlfriend testified at his trial that he was a rock fan and that his favorite song was "Killer on the Loose" by Thin Lizzy.
In 1983 UPI reported that detectives had first focused on him because of his conviction in one of the 1975 "Westside Rapist" cases, a group of attacks on elderly women in West Los Angeles. A UPI report dated November 9, 1983, gave the year of that conviction as 1976. UPI's report of the verdict described the earlier case as a 1975 rape and robbery.
After that conviction he was declared a mentally disordered sex offender and was sent to Patton State Hospital. He spent three years there and was released in June 1979, according to the police account given at his arrest. UPI's verdict report said he was held at Patton until 1979, when he was released on parole.
Once out of the hospital he remained under the supervision of Superior Court Judge Kathleen Parker, who oversaw his outpatient therapy. After his arrest in 1983 she told reporters that the arrest surprised her and that he had made "considerable progress" in therapy. UPI reported that he had been due for release soon from the sex offender program.
Between January 1981 and the autumn of 1983, Los Angeles police were investigating a long series of killings of older women in Hollywood and nearby communities, spread over about 20 square miles. By the time of his arrest police counted 32 unsolved cases. Most of the women were in their 70s or 80s, with ages ranging from 46 to 88. Most lived alone in single-family homes and were attacked in the early morning. In five cases a fire had apparently been set to cover up the killing, and several women had been robbed, police said.
Four of those deaths became the core of the case against Tholmer.
Rose Lederman was 80. She was killed in August 1981, the earliest of the four killings for which he was convicted.
Woolloomooloo Woodcock was killed in August 1982. UPI gave her age as 66 in its reports of the verdict and the sentencing, and as 69 in its report of the preliminary hearing.
Mary Pauquette was killed in September 1982. She was 72 according to the reports of the preliminary hearing, the verdict and the sentencing, and 73 according to the first report of Tholmer's arrest. Her house was set on fire, police said.
Dorothy Fain was killed in August 1983. She was 72 according to the verdict and sentencing reports and 70 according to the report of the preliminary hearing. At the sentencing her daughter told the judge that her mother had been a survivor.
All four lived alone, and all four lived within a mile of Tholmer's apartment. Beyond their names, ages and the dates of their deaths, little is on record about who these women were.
Two other women whose deaths were charged against him at different stages were Lucille Pyle, 82, whose murder was one of the first two charges Chief Gates announced at the time of the arrest, and Loraine Wells, who died in May 1983. Tholmer was ordered to stand trial for the Wells killing, but the jury could not agree on it, and he was not convicted of either death.
Detectives put Tholmer under surveillance in the week before his arrest. At about 4 a.m. on a Monday in November 1983, officers watched him leave his home in the Rampart district, between Hollywood and downtown Los Angeles. A later UPI report placed his home in the Wilshire District. They followed him on foot to a nearby house where an 85-year-old woman who was paralyzed lived with a full-time nurse.
According to Chief Gates, Tholmer "prowled the location and began to attempt an entry." He tried the door and looked in through a window. "We thought that was far enough," Gates said. The officers arrested him, and he did not resist.
Gates told reporters that police had "good" evidence linking him to two of the killings, though he would not describe it. He was careful about the wider series. "We do think that he is involved in several of these, how many we can't say at this time," he said, and police doubted that Tholmer was responsible for all 32 cases.
The police announcement that day said he was charged with the murders of Lucille Pyle, 82, and Mary Pauquette. Police also said a similar method had been used in two unsolved killings in May 1982 outside the city, of an 82-year-old woman in San Fernando and a 79-year-old woman in Beverly Hills, both still under investigation.
When Tholmer appeared in court later that week, the district attorney had filed a single murder count, for the death of Mary Pauquette. He pleaded not guilty. He also pleaded not guilty to a separate rape count. A spokesman for the district attorney, Al Albergate, explained that the office had filed only the case it could prove so far. "We have only filed on what we have sufficient evidence on now," he said, and investigators were still working to connect Tholmer to other deaths.
UPI reported that by then the police count of similar killings in Hollywood and nearby areas had reached 34, and that police called Tholmer the prime suspect in all of them.
Municipal Court Judge Michael Tynan ordered him held without bail until a hearing on November 30. The same week Judge Parker revoked his status as a mentally disordered sex offender, which had allowed him to be treated as an outpatient, and set a hearing on that question for December 7.
After a four-day preliminary hearing closed to the public, Municipal Court Judge Nancy Brown ordered Tholmer to stand trial on five counts of murder and one count of attempted burglary. The murder counts carried special allegations that could make him eligible for the death penalty. The prosecutor, Deputy District Attorney Lance Ito, said the allegations included multiple murders, murder during a sexual assault, burglary and arson.
The five women named in the murder counts were Rose Lederman, Woolloomooloo Woodcock, Mary Pauquette, Loraine Wells and Dorothy Fain. All had lived alone, in single-family homes or apartments.
Before the hearing prosecutors dismissed the rape count because the complainant could not positively identify Tholmer. Ito said Tholmer remained a suspect in 27 other unsolved killings of elderly women in Los Angeles over the previous two years. He stayed in custody without bail pending arraignment in Superior Court.
The trial in Los Angeles Superior Court, before Judge Clarence Stromwall, lasted six months. Tholmer was not charged with sex crimes as separate counts. The sexual-assault, burglary and arson allegations came before the jury as special circumstances attached to the murder counts.
His former live-in girlfriend was among the witnesses. Her testimony about his taste in music, and his favorite song, "Killer on the Loose," was reported by UPI when the verdict came in.
On a Friday in July the jury convicted him of four counts of first-degree murder: the killings of Rose Lederman, Woolloomooloo Woodcock, Mary Pauquette and Dorothy Fain. The jurors found the special-circumstance allegations true, including multiple murder. In the killings of Woodcock, Pauquette and Fain they also found true allegations of sexual assault. Ito told the court that late in the series Tholmer had begun setting fires in the women's homes.
The jurors could not agree on two other counts: the murder of Loraine Wells in May 1983, and the attempted burglary in November 1983 at the home of the 85-year-old woman, where he had been arrested. Judge Stromwall declared a mistrial on those two counts. UPI gave Loraine Wells's age as 82 in its reports of the verdict and the sentencing and as 76 in its report of the preliminary hearing.
The special-circumstance findings left the jury only two possible sentences: life in prison without parole, or death in the gas chamber at San Quentin.
The penalty phase was set to begin on August 5. In August the jurors spared his life and recommended life without parole. Several of them said afterward that they had rejected the death penalty because of the hardships he had suffered, and one juror said his life had been "a hell on Earth." The defense evidence on that point was the account of his childhood given by Kathleen Cannon: the broken home, the intellectual disability and the years in juvenile institutions from the age of 11.
At the sentencing hearing Dorothy Fain's daughter spoke to the judge in tears. She called Tholmer a predator and asked that the sentences run one after another, warning that otherwise he "will, at some point, be released" and would hunt again. She told the court that her mother had been a survivor until he broke into her home and killed her.
Judge Stromwall imposed four consecutive terms of life in prison without parole. He said he had spent 40 years in the criminal justice system. "I have not observed more vicious crimes," he said. He added that if the jurors had returned a death verdict, he would not have overturned it.
The numbers attached to Tholmer's name changed over the life of the case, and they need to be kept apart from what a jury decided.
At his arrest in November 1983 police were investigating 32 unsolved killings of older women and said they doubted he was responsible for all of them. Later that week UPI reported a count of 34 similar killings, with police calling him the prime suspect in all of them. At the preliminary hearing the prosecutor said he remained a suspect in 27 unsolved cases besides the five charged.
By the time of the verdict, police had cleared him in 22 of the up to 34 deaths in which he had once been suspected. They still believed he had committed seven more killings beyond the five charged, but Ito said there was not enough evidence to charge him with them. UPI's verdict story put the total in which he was suspected at 12.
None of those other deaths was tried, and the jury did not convict him of the Wells killing. In law he stands convicted of four murders.
The sentence of life without parole ended any prospect of release on parole. Where he would serve the sentence was not made public, and his later years in prison have not been reported.
1975: The rape and robbery for which Tholmer was later convicted (UPI gave the conviction year as 1976 in one report).
Later 1970s: Declared a mentally disordered sex offender and held at Patton State Hospital for three years.
June 1979: Released from the hospital to outpatient therapy under court supervision.
January 1981: Start of the series of killings of older women in Hollywood and nearby communities that police later investigated.
August 1981: Rose Lederman, 80, killed.
August 1982: Woolloomooloo Woodcock killed.
September 1982: Mary Pauquette killed.
May 1983: Loraine Wells killed (charged; the jury deadlocked).
August 1983: Dorothy Fain killed.
November 1983: Placed under surveillance; arrested before dawn at the home of an 85-year-old woman; Chief Daryl Gates announces charges in the deaths of Lucille Pyle and Mary Pauquette.
November 9, 1983: Pleads not guilty to murdering Mary Pauquette; Judge Michael Tynan orders him held without bail; Judge Kathleen Parker revokes his mentally disordered sex offender status.
After a closed preliminary hearing: Ordered to stand trial on five murder counts and one attempted burglary count.
July (after a six-month trial): Convicted of four counts of first-degree murder with special circumstances; mistrial on the Wells count and the attempted burglary count.
August: The penalty jury recommends life without parole.
After the penalty phase: Sentenced by Judge Clarence Stromwall to four consecutive terms of life in prison without parole.