Mauricio Rodriguez Silva, born in Los Angeles on October 25, 1959, inherited from his mother the growth disorder that left him around seven feet tall and over three hundred pounds, and was born with a cleft palate. His father abandoned the family and he was raised for a period by a grandmother in Mexico City in conditions the court record describes as neglectful. He was convicted of voluntary manslaughter for shooting a 16-year-old boy in 1978 and served just over five years at Soledad.
Within weeks of being paroled in May 1984 he killed three people: Troy Covella and Walter P. Sanders, teenage runaways shot with a shotgun, and his 17-year-old half-sister Martha Kitzler, at the Hollywood house they shared. He strangled Kitzler, stabbed her eight times and cut her throat; the house was ransacked and $2,700 she had hidden under a mattress was taken. He surrendered on May 28, 1984 and told his parole officer he expected the gas chamber and wanted to plead guilty and get it over with. Monique Michelle Hilton, sixteen, is also named in the record. The Los Angeles press called him the Monster.
In April 1985 a jury convicted him of two counts of first-degree murder with the multiple-murder special circumstance and one count of second-degree murder. The first penalty jury deadlocked; a second jury, empanelled for the penalty phase alone, returned a verdict of death, and he was sentenced on August 11, 1986. In People v. Silva (2001) the California Supreme Court upheld the convictions but vacated the death sentence over the wrongful exclusion of a Latino juror; the sentence was later reinstated. He is held at the Substance Abuse Treatment Facility at Corcoran.
The entry previously carried both a 1985 sentence of life without parole and a 1986 death sentence, which are irreconcilable. The court record resolves it: conviction April 1985, penalty retried, death sentence August 1986. Four deaths in total, of which the 1978 killing was prosecuted as manslaughter.