John Floyd Thomas

Victims

7 CONVICTIONS, all first-degree murder by guilty plea. Investigators have put the wider figure at between ten and fifteen further killings, and elsewhere at up to thirty; NONE was charged, and the seventeen dead attributed to the Westside Rapist and five to the Southland Strangler are police attributions rather than court findings. He was working as a state insurance claims adjuster when arrested

Years active

November 1972 - June 1986

Location

Los Angeles County, California, USA

Method

Suffocation

Status

Arrested on March 31, 2009 after a DNA sample he gave in October 2008, as part of a state effort to build a database from registered sex offenders, matched two unsolved killings. He PLEADED GUILTY ON APRIL 1, 2011 to seven counts of first-degree murder and was sentenced the same day. THE DEATH PENALTY WAS ONLY EVER AVAILABLE FOR ONE OF THE SEVEN: the prosecutor told the court that CAPITAL PUNISHMENT WAS NOT LEGAL IN CALIFORNIA WHEN ALL BUT ONE OF THE KILLINGS WERE COMMITTED, so the plea removed it only in the Adrian Askew case, and she added that it would in any event have been irrelevant because he would probably die during appeals. Sources differ on the sentence: contemporaneous wire reports say seven life terms, ONE of them without parole; Wikipedia says seven consecutive terms without parole. He had twice been imprisoned before, from 1957 to 1966 for attempted rape and burglary after a dishonourable discharge from the Air Force, and again from 1978 for a rape in Pasadena; THE WESTSIDE ATTACKS STOPPED DURING THE FIRST OF THOSE SENTENCES AND THE POMONA VALLEY KILLINGS BEGAN AFTER HIS RELEASE IN 1983. Held at the California Health Care Facility. He was ninety in July 2026.

Thomas was born on July 26, 1936. He had convictions for rape and burglary from the 1950s and 1970s and had served prison terms, and he worked afterwards as an insurance claims adjuster in Los Angeles, married and unremarkable to his neighbours.

Between 1972 and 1986 he broke into the homes of elderly women in Los Angeles County, raped them and suffocated them. The victims included Ethel Sokoloff, sixty-eight, Elizabeth McKeown, sixty-seven, Cora Perry, seventy-nine, Maybelle Hudson, Miriam McKinley, Evalyn Bunner and Adriana Adams. Two overlapping series in the period, in the west of the city and in the south, were known at the time as the Westside Rapist and the Southside Slayer, and the connection between them was not made. Adrian Askew, eighty-five, is also among those named.

He was identified in 2009 when California, having required samples from convicted offenders, ran a profile taken from him against unsolved cases; he was arrested on March 31, 2009, aged seventy-two. He was held without bail while the charges were assembled, and pleaded not guilty at arraignment.

On April 1, 2011 he pleaded guilty to seven counts of first-degree murder, in a deal that took the death penalty off the table, and was sentenced to seven consecutive terms of life imprisonment without parole. Investigators have said publicly that they believe he was responsible for as many as thirty deaths across the two series. Seven is what he pleaded to, and that is what the count here rests on.

He was seventy-two when arrested, having lived without further known offences for more than twenty years. The case is cited alongside the Grim Sleeper as evidence of what the Los Angeles cold-case backlog contained.