Hill was born in 1961. Between 1993 and 1994 the bodies of women were found beside the State Route 60 freeway east of Los Angeles, in Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties. Most had been working as prostitutes or were using drugs, and they had been strangled. The press called the unknown killer the 60 freeway strangler.
The case was unsolved for years and was reopened when DNA from the scenes was matched through the California offender database. The California press called him the 60 Freeway Killer, after the road.
The women named in the record are Lorna Reed, thirty-five; Rhonda Jackson, twenty-three; Roxanne Bates, thirty-one; Betty Sue Harris, thirty-seven; Helen Ruth Hill, thirty-six; Donna L. Goldsmith, thirty-five; Cheryl Sayers, thirty-four; and Debra Brown, thirty-three.
He was convicted of six murders and sentenced to death on March 22, 2007. He subsequently pleaded guilty to two more killings, and further deaths from 1979 and from 1986 and 1987 have been attributed to him, which is how the figure of nine is reached.
He remains on California's death row, where no execution has been carried out since 2006 and a moratorium has been in force since 2019.
As in several California cases in this archive, the series ran because the victims were women whose disappearances were slow to be reported and slow to be connected, and it was resolved by a database rather than by an investigation.