The caller told Los Angeles police he had done it again. He said they had better catch him before he killed another one, and then he told them where to find the body.
He made those calls in 1993 and 1994. The recordings were played to a jury thirteen years later, and Ivan Jerome Hill acknowledged that the voice on them was his.
Eight women were raped and strangled between 1986 and 1994 and left in the suburbs along California State Route 60, the Pomona freeway, in Diamond Bar, Pomona, Chino, Ontario, the City of Industry and San Dimas. Most were working as prostitutes or using drugs. The press called the man who had not yet been identified the 60 Freeway Killer, and he has since been named as one of several men responsible for the killings investigated as the Southside Slayer murders in South Los Angeles, of which he is believed to have committed at least one.
What eventually caught him was not the telephone calls. It was a database.
DNA from the scenes was matched through California's offender index to a man already in prison, serving a ten-year sentence imposed in 1994 for robbery, attempted robbery and assault with a deadly weapon. Accounts date the match to March 2003; he was charged that November, three months before he was due out in February 2004.
Hill was born in Los Angeles on March 30, 1961 and grew up in Pomona. His mother testified at his trial about a father who was violent to the whole family and who, one Christmas when Hill was seven, shot her in the face. She survived; the father went to prison. Hill looked after his younger siblings from the age of ten and was captain of the football team at Pomona High.
By 1978 he was using drugs, in debt, and stealing. On January 23, 1979, at seventeen, he took part in an armed robbery at a liquor store in Glendora where his accomplice, Venson Myers, eighteen, shot and killed Thomas Leavell and wounded Keith Hunt. Myers got life without parole. Hill gave evidence for the state and, as a minor, was found guilty of complicity in the murder and given a short term. He finished high school in custody, took college classes, and was paroled in the mid-1980s, drifting around the San Gabriel Valley as a day laborer, stock clerk and forklift driver.
Some accounts record a further murder conviction in Los Angeles County in August 1989, and a prior murder conviction was found as a special circumstance at his capital trial. Others describe his record of the late 1980s as a theft conviction, with release in February 1993, and on that account the prior murder was the Glendora killing of 1979.
The 2006 trial covered six killings from late 1993 and early 1994. Betty Sue Harris, thirty-seven, was found behind an industrial building in Diamond Bar on November 1, 1993; she had grown up in Pomona, studied at Chaffey College, and, dying of cancer, had resolved to spend the time left to her being a good mother. Roxanne Bates, thirty-one, of Montclair, also known as Roxanne Brown, was found in Chino on November 5. Helen Ruth Hill, thirty-six, also known as Helen Rudd, was found on November 14 in a parking lot in the City of Industry, her hands tied and her mouth taped; her roommate described a devoted mother who looked after her own elderly mother. Donna L. Goldsmith, thirty-five, of West Covina, a wife, a mother of three and a former medical technician, was found in Pomona on November 16. Cheryl Sayers, thirty-four, was found bound in Ganesha Park in Pomona on December 30. Debra Brown, thirty-three, was found in San Antonio Park in Ontario on January 12, 1994.
The trial opened on October 23, 2006, and Deputy District Attorney John Monaghan played the telephone calls. "I did it again," the caller said after Debra Brown was killed. "What's this, number five, number six? I forget, but she's there." Minutes later he rang back: "Y'all better catch me before I kill again."
His lawyers did not dispute that he had killed the six women. Their case was that the killings were not deliberate, that compulsive acts, as one of them put it to the jury, are not done after careful thought and weighing, and that his drug use had driven them. They asked for second-degree murder.
The jury took about three days and on November 17, 2006 convicted him of first-degree murder on every count, finding the special circumstances of multiple murder and a prior murder conviction. On January 2, 2007 the jury returned a death verdict, and in March the judge imposed it, declining to grant him any leniency for his childhood; accounts date the sentencing to March 21 and March 22.
Two more came afterward, both of them older. DNA linked him to the strangling of Lorna Reed, thirty-five, found in an isolated corner of Frank G. Bonelli Regional Park at San Dimas on February 11, 1986, and of Rhonda Jackson, twenty-three, found naked in a dumpster in Palomares Park in Pomona on January 26, 1987. He pleaded guilty to both on May 15, 2009, and Judge Charles Horan of the Pomona Superior Court sentenced the former forklift operator to life without the possibility of parole.
That makes eight first-degree murder convictions, six by verdict and two by plea.
The automatic appeal from the death sentence has never been decided. Review was granted under docket S152463 and the California Supreme Court has issued extension after extension of time for briefing, the most recent recorded in June 2025. Nineteen years have now passed since the sentence was imposed. By May 2024 he had been moved from death row at San Quentin to the California Health Care Facility in Stockton.
The series ran as long as it did for the reason these series usually run: the women who vanished were slow to be reported missing and slow to be connected to one another. What is unusual about Ivan Hill is that he was telephoning the police to tell them what he was doing while he was doing it, and it still took a computer to find him.