Michael Gargiulo was convicted in Los Angeles in August 2019 of murdering two women, Ashley Ellerin in 2001 and Maria Bruno in 2005, and of trying to murder a third, Michelle Murphy, in 2008. The jury found that he had killed while lying in wait and had committed multiple murders, and in 2021 a judge sentenced him to death. Prosecutors called him the Boy Next Door Killer, because each woman lived close to him and, they said, he had watched her before he attacked.
The California case grew out of an older one in Illinois. In August 1993 Tricia Pacaccio, 18, was stabbed to death on the doorstep of her family's home in Glenview, north of Chicago. Gargiulo, then 17, lived about a block away and was a friend of her younger brother. In 2003 DNA under her fingernails was matched to him, but Cook County prosecutors decided the match alone could not support a charge. He was charged with her murder in 2011, and in September 2024 he was brought from California's death row to Illinois to face that charge. He denies killing Pacaccio, Ellerin and Bruno. As of September 30, 2026, the Illinois case had no trial date.
Gargiulo grew up in Glenview and went to Glenbrook South High School, the same school Tricia Pacaccio attended. CBS News, which followed the case for more than a decade through its program 48 Hours, reported that he had played high school football and was a childhood friend of Tricia's younger brother, Doug. Doug Pacaccio later described him as one of the neighborhood children who ran around together, and said that he had been friends with him. Gargiulo had been inside the Pacaccio home, Patch reported.
His record in Glenview was not clean. The Journal & Topics, the local paper, reported in 2019 that Glenview police records it obtained under the Freedom of Information Act showed he had been arrested in the village in 1996 and 1997, including over a battery incident and a burglary. City News Service reported during the Los Angeles trial that he had a 1997 felony burglary conviction in Cook County.
Tricia Pacaccio had just graduated from Glenbrook South. She was an A student, ABC7 reported, and was about a week from leaving for Purdue University, where the Santa Monica Daily Press reported that she planned to study engineering. CBS News described her as active in calculus, debate and band. A high school friend, Karen Jones, told CBS she was one of the most energetic and happy people she had known, and her mother, Diane, said Tricia had a great attitude and knew what she wanted from life.
On the night of August 13, 1993, she was out with friends; ABC7 Chicago reported that they were on a scavenger hunt, and CBS News described a senior class gathering. Police believe she was attacked at about 1 a.m., as she reached the door of her family's house with her keys in her hand. She had been stabbed 12 times. Her father, Rick, found her that morning. Her purse and keys were beside her, and her car was in the driveway. Prosecutors said there was no sign of a robbery attempt, and investigators found no evidence of sexual assault or of any motive. Detectives believed the killer had waited for her, possibly hidden in bushes near the house, and that she had known her attacker.
Sheriff's police opened an investigation that August. Detectives interviewed dozens of people, CBS News reported, and no arrest followed. Gargiulo was considered at the time, ABC7 reported in 2011, but investigators did not have enough evidence to charge him. CBS News reported that a day before the killing, Gargiulo and a friend had given Tricia a ride when they saw her crying, a fact his lawyers would later offer as an innocent explanation for his DNA.
Prosecutors in Illinois have described other conduct in the days after the killing. At his 2024 detention hearing, Assistant State's Attorney Ethan Holland told the court that several days after the murder Gargiulo sought help getting rid of knives he owned, that a witness identified as Witness A went with him and another person to dispose of them, and that Gargiulo admitted to that witness that he was afraid the police were coming for him. These are prosecutors' allegations and have not been tested at trial.
The Pacaccio family moved out of the house and stayed away for four years, CBS News reported. Some time after Tricia's death Gargiulo began bringing gifts to her parents, and after the family returned he came to the house and waited more than an hour to speak with Rick Pacaccio, until relatives came to take him away. Rick and Diane Pacaccio told CBS they believed he knew something, and they told the police. Gargiulo left the Chicago area.
In 1999 Detective Lou Sala of the Cook County Sheriff's Police was assigned to the case. The investigation stayed open, but for years it produced no charge.
In Los Angeles Gargiulo hoped to work as an actor or model, CBS News reported. He worked as a bouncer at the Rainbow Bar and Grill, a Hollywood nightclub, alongside two men named Temer Leary and Anthony DiLorenzo, and he was cast as a boxer in a student film made by a University of Southern California film student. He later worked for a heating and air conditioning company. The Associated Press described him as a former air conditioner and heater repairman, bouncer and aspiring actor. At trial, prosecutors said he had boxing and martial arts training and an interest in forensic science and knives.
Ashley Ellerin grew up in Los Altos, California, and went to Santa Rita Elementary, Egan Junior High and Los Altos High School, graduating in 1996, the Palo Alto Daily Post reported. She was accepted into the fine arts program at the University of California, Los Angeles, and at the time of her death she was studying at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising. Her friend Chris Duran told CBS News she was beautiful, fun and spontaneous; another friend, Justin Peterson, called her amazing. She rented a house in the Hollywood Hills with a roommate.
Gargiulo met her months before her death when he stopped to help her friend with a flat tire, according to CBS News. He and Ellerin exchanged numbers, and he began calling often and turning up without being invited. Friends said he was fixated on her. He lived a couple of blocks away and often walked his dog in a park across from her house. Prosecutors told the jury that he had crashed a party at her home days before the murder and could be seen in the background of a photograph taken there, and that witnesses would say he had made a key to her door and had shown a friend a knife he carried in an ankle sheath.
Ellerin's father, Michael Ellerin, had visited her from Northern California hours before she was killed. That evening she had plans to go to a Grammy Awards party with the actor Ashton Kutcher, a friend.
Kutcher testified in May 2019 that he called her in the afternoon from the set of the television series That '70s Show and spoke with her again at about 8:30 p.m., when he was at a friend's house and she said she had just gotten out of the shower. He arrived at her house at about 10:45 p.m. He knocked twice, got no answer, and assumed that she had gone out without him because he was late. Looking through a window, he saw what he took to be spilled wine on the floor. It did not alarm him, and he left. The prosecutor told the jury it had been blood.
Her roommate found her the next morning and called 911. She had been stabbed 47 times. The date of the killing is given as February 21, 2001, by the California condemned list and CBS News; several reports give February 22, the date she was found.
Detective Tom Small of the Los Angeles Police Department's Hollywood homicide unit told CBS News that the police had little physical evidence and canvassed the neighborhood. Kutcher went to detectives the next day; he testified that he was frightened and told them his fingerprints would be on her door. Detectives also ruled out a man who had been in a relationship with Ellerin and had seen her earlier that evening. That man, M.D., was never charged.
Ellerin's friends gave detectives what CBS News called their first and only lead: a man she had met in the neighborhood, known to them as the heating and air conditioning guy, who seemed fixated on her. He was not at first treated as a serious suspect, and it was months before police learned his last name. No one was charged with her murder until 2008. Prosecutors acknowledged at trial that Gargiulo's DNA was not found in Ellerin's home.
In Illinois, new DNA testing in 2002 and 2003 found an unknown male profile in material taken from under Tricia Pacaccio's fingernails. With help from Detective Small in Los Angeles, Cook County investigators located Gargiulo and obtained a sample of his DNA; CBS News reported that he did not cooperate. The sample matched. A Cook County forensic scientist described the material as a roughly even mixture of Tricia's DNA and Gargiulo's.
Cook County prosecutors declined to approve a charge. Their reasoning, given publicly in 2011 by State's Attorney Anita Alvarez and her spokesman Jack Blakey, was that the DNA was a mixture that experts said could not exclude casual contact, and that the match on its own was not enough. Gargiulo had lived a block away and was friends with one of Tricia's brothers. "DNA is not the silver bullet," Alvarez said. Diane Pacaccio told Chicago Magazine, in a statement ABC7 reported, that the county had made false excuses for why his DNA was on her daughter. "How pathetic," she said.
The profile stayed on file. In 2008 it identified him in California.
Maria Bruno was 32 and the mother of four young children, including twins. She had come to the United States from El Salvador as a teenager, CBS News reported. She had recently separated from her husband, who kept custody of the children, and about ten days before her death she moved into a gated apartment complex in El Monte, a Los Angeles suburb. Gargiulo lived across the courtyard. Before she died, she told someone about a strange man across the way, Detective Mark Lillienfeld of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department told CBS.
On the evening before her death she went to dinner and drinks with her estranged husband, according to testimony described by Courthouse News Service. He left her apartment shortly before 3 a.m. When he returned at about 8 a.m. on December 1, 2005, he found a window screen on the floor, found her body and called 911. The recording was played at trial. She had been stabbed 17 times as she slept, prosecutors said, and her body had been mutilated. Investigators believed the attacker came in through a kitchen window.
Detective Lillienfeld led the investigation. Police first looked at her estranged husband, whose car had drops of her blood in it; a restaurant manager testified that she had cut her finger that night, which explained the blood, and police cleared him. He was never charged.
The key evidence was a disposable blue surgical shoe cover found in the courtyard outside her apartment. It carried a drop of Maria Bruno's blood, and DNA on its elastic band was later matched to Gargiulo. A matching cover was found in the attic of the El Monte apartment he had rented. The defense would argue that the cover could have picked up blood from the pavement and that there was no DNA tying Gargiulo to the inside of her apartment.
By 2008 Gargiulo was living in Santa Monica, in a building across an alley from Michelle Murphy's apartment, where, CBS News reported, he could see into her bedroom. Murphy was 26.
Early on April 28, 2008, an intruder came in through a partly open window and attacked her with a knife in her bed. She fought back. She struggled for the knife and kicked him off the bed, and in the struggle he cut his own wrist and bled onto her bedding. He said "I'm sorry" as he ran. She locked her door and window and called her boyfriend and then the police on her cell phone; the 911 call was later played for the jury. She had been stabbed eight times and survived. She never saw her attacker's face, but she described a man in dark clothing, about five feet eleven inches tall, and testified that he was left-handed.
Sergeant Richard Lewis of the Santa Monica Police Department led the investigation. The blood trail was submitted for DNA testing, and about 25 days later the crime lab reported a conclusive match to Gargiulo, whose profile was in a national database because of the Pacaccio investigation. Lewis contacted Detective Lillienfeld about the El Monte killing, and investigators from the Los Angeles Police Department, the Sheriff's Department and Cook County began working together.
Santa Monica police arrested Gargiulo on June 6, 2008, at his apartment, on suspicion of attempted murder. When he was told he was under arrest, Lewis told CBS, he asked which agency was arresting him, which Lewis took as a sign that he was not sure which crime it was for.
After the arrest undercover detectives spent about 40 hours in a jail cell with him, prosecutors said. On recordings made in an El Monte jail cell, he was heard discussing a plan to attack a jailer, take a police car and escape, and police found a makeshift handcuff key in his pants. His lawyer later called the jail operation a subterfuge designed to draw an admission and said that Gargiulo never made one.
On September 4, 2008, while held on the Santa Monica case, he was indicted for the murders of Ashley Ellerin and Maria Bruno.
At a hearing in downtown Los Angeles in 2010, Superior Court Judge Michael Johnson found enough evidence for Gargiulo to stand trial on two counts of murder, with special circumstances of multiple murder and lying in wait; two counts of first-degree burglary, for the break-ins at the two women's homes; attempted murder and first-degree burglary for the Santa Monica attack; and one count of attempted escape. The judge dismissed a special circumstance alleging murder during a burglary. Prosecutors had not yet decided whether to seek the death penalty; by July 2011 the District Attorney's office said it would. He was held without bail in the Men's Central Jail.
The trial did not open until May 2019. The reasons for the full delay were not reported.
The CBS program 48 Hours began working on the Pacaccio case in the summer of 2008, after the family heard of the arrest in California and expected an Illinois charge that did not come. In May 2011 the program broadcast an episode on the case called "The Boy Next Door." Shortly after it aired, a witness contacted the correspondent, Maureen Maher, and the program put the family in touch with Chicago authorities.
Two former coworkers from the Hollywood nightclub came forward: Temer Leary and Anthony DiLorenzo. They said that in the late 1990s, in 1997 or 2000 by CBS's account, Gargiulo had told them he had killed a girl in Chicago. One said Gargiulo first claimed he had buried the girl, and then, pressed to tell the truth, said he had been joking and had in fact left her on a step for dead. In the Illinois arrest warrant the two were identified only by letters.
Alvarez said these admissions to third parties, together with the existing evidence, were enough to proceed. An arrest warrant was issued, and on July 7, 2011, Gargiulo was charged with the first-degree murder of Tricia Pacaccio. Sheriff Tom Dart said his detectives had never once wavered in their belief that the case would be solved. Alvarez and the Sheriff both said their offices had never given up. Because Gargiulo was awaiting trial in Los Angeles, the California case went first, and the Illinois charge waited.
Opening statements were given in Los Angeles Superior Court on May 2, 2019. Deputy District Attorneys Daniel Akemon and Garrett Dameron prosecuted; Gargiulo was represented by Daniel Nardoni and Dale Rubin. He was 43 and had pleaded not guilty.
Akemon told the jury that every victim was a young, outgoing woman attacked at night, at or near her home, close to where Gargiulo lived. He described a man who befriended women, collected what he called real-time intelligence on them, and then manipulated circumstances to attack them, and he said Gargiulo's hobby was plotting the perfect opportunity to attack women with a knife. Prosecutors later listed 20 similarities among the attacks and argued that the motive was sexual and tied to control.
The Pacaccio killing was not charged in California, but the court allowed prosecutors to put extensive evidence about it before the jury to show a pattern. Doug Pacaccio and other members of the family testified. Prosecutors relied on the fingernail DNA, the bootie from El Monte, the blood in Murphy's apartment, the 911 recordings, the jail recordings, and testimony about Gargiulo's admissions and his behavior toward Ellerin.
Michelle Murphy was the first witness. Kutcher testified on May 29 about the night of February 21, 2001. The trial lasted about three months and heard 79 witnesses, according to CBS News, and jurors visited the crime scenes.
Nardoni told the jury that the issue, broadly, was identity. He argued that there was no DNA evidence linking Gargiulo to the inside of Ellerin's or Bruno's homes, and he pointed to other men: M.D. in the Ellerin case, and Maria Bruno's estranged husband in hers. On the Pacaccio evidence he argued that the DNA could have come from casual contact, such as the ride the day before; a forensic expert from John Jay College, Nathan Lents, told CBS that a roughly even mixture suggested more than that. On the Murphy count, the defense did not deny the attack. Rubin argued that Gargiulo had dissociative identity disorder and might have been in an amnesiac or fugue state, and called two mental health experts. Akemon called the claim a complete fabrication and asked why a man who had just come out of such a state would apologize as he fled.
The jury began deliberating on August 12, 2019, and returned its verdicts on August 15. It found Gargiulo guilty of the first-degree murders of Ashley Ellerin and Maria Bruno, found true the special circumstances of multiple murder and lying in wait, and convicted him of the attempted murder of Michelle Murphy and of attempted escape. He showed no visible emotion.
Because the defense had raised his mental state, the trial moved to a sanity phase, set to begin on August 20. Rubin showed jurors photographs of the victims and argued that no sane person could have done such things. Dameron answered that Gargiulo was not normal, but that evil does not mean insane, and described systematic killings by someone who enjoyed the act. A prosecution expert diagnosed only antisocial personality disorder. The jury found that Gargiulo had been sane at the time of the crimes.
After a delay of just over a month for scheduling, the penalty phase opened on October 7, 2019. Murphy told the jurors that she had come to fear the night and had slept with the lights on for a long time afterward. Cynthia Ellerin, Ashley's mother, said she ached to hold her daughter and hear her voice again. Members of Gargiulo's family asked for mercy.
On October 18, 2019, the jury returned a verdict of death; it could instead have chosen life without parole. "You don't kill people that are mentally ill," Nardoni said afterward. Judge Larry P. Fidler set formal sentencing for February 2020, when he would also hear motions for a new trial or a reduced sentence.
Procedural issues and the COVID-19 pandemic delayed sentencing for nearly two years. On July 16, 2021, after an all-day hearing, Judge Fidler denied the motion for a new trial and sentenced Gargiulo to death. He called the crimes vicious and frightening. "Everywhere that Mr. Gargiulo went, death and destruction followed him," the judge said.
Michael Ellerin said that learning of his daughter's murder had marked the beginning of an altered, diminished, heartbreaking life. Murphy said that to this day, spending the night alone filled her with fear, and asked how it could be fair that one person's actions could destroy the lives of so many.
Gargiulo, in orange jail clothes and a face mask, spoke before he was sentenced. He complained that his lawyers had kept him from testifying in his own defense, saying his fundamental choice had been blocked, and said he was going to death row wrongfully and unjustly. He showed no visible reaction to the sentence.
The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation lists Gargiulo among its condemned prisoners, with two entries for the Los Angeles County judgment of July 16, 2021: one for the offense of February 21, 2001, and one for December 1, 2005. The list records that he was received on August 2, 2021, and it was last updated on October 2, 2026.
A California death judgment carries an automatic, non-waivable appeal directly to the California Supreme Court, according to the state Attorney General's office. No decision on Gargiulo's appeal had been reported by October 2026, so his California convictions remain under appeal and not final. California has carried out no execution since 2006, and Governor Gavin Newsom has halted executions for as long as he remains in office, the Associated Press reported at his sentencing.
After the 2019 verdict, the Cook County State's Attorney's Office said it would seek his extradition. Doug Pacaccio told ABC7 Chicago that he felt joy that Gargiulo had been held accountable but that it did not feel finished, and that he expected his sister to get her day in court. Diane Pacaccio called what the family had been through insulting.
Gargiulo was extradited on September 5, 2024, and appeared in the Skokie courthouse the next day. He was 48, walked with a cane and wore sunglasses, FOX 32 reported. Holland told the court that there was no indication Tricia had died anywhere other than where she was found, that Gargiulo was a friend and classmate of her brother, and that he lived about a block from the family. He described the witnesses who had come forward: one said Gargiulo claimed to have stabbed a girl and to have a body back in Chicago, and another gave the account of the buried girl and the step. Cook County Judge Anthony Calabrese denied pretrial release and ordered him held in the Cook County Jail. "The arrest and prosecution of Michael Gargiulo marks a crucial moment in our pursuit of justice for Tricia Pacaccio," Sheriff Dart said. Tricia's mother was in court and declined to speak on camera.
Gargiulo is charged with first-degree murder in the Pacaccio case and has not been tried. On September 30, 2026, CBS Chicago reported that he appeared by Zoom for a routine status hearing in Skokie, that his lawyers were reviewing the evidence prosecutors planned to present, and that he was due back in court on November 11. No trial date had been set. Until a verdict, the killing of Tricia Pacaccio is a charge, not a conviction.
The Pacaccio family has argued for years that the 2003 decision allowed Gargiulo to remain free while Maria Bruno was killed and Michelle Murphy was attacked. "When they need you the most, you can't help them," Rick Pacaccio told CBS Chicago in 2010. "My daughter is gonna get the representation that she deserves," he said later. Rick Pacaccio met Anthony DiLorenzo for the first time at the Los Angeles trial.
Michelle Murphy testified in the guilt phase, the penalty phase and at sentencing. The Ellerin family spoke at the penalty phase and at sentencing. Little was reported about Maria Bruno's family beyond the fact that she left four young children.
Proven by jury verdict, under appeal: the murders of Ashley Ellerin and Maria Bruno, the attempted murder of Michelle Murphy, and attempted escape, all in Los Angeles County.
Charged and untried: the killing of Tricia Pacaccio. The evidence described in public so far is the fingernail DNA, which prosecutors in 2003 judged insufficient on its own, and the accounts of former coworkers who say he admitted killing a girl in Chicago. Prosecutors also allege he sought help disposing of knives days after the killing. He denies it. A Los Angeles jury heard this evidence, but only as evidence of a pattern, and its verdict is not a finding on the Pacaccio case.
Suspected, never charged: in 2011 Los Angeles detectives said Gargiulo was a suspect in as many as ten killings, and police in California have since said there may be more victims. No other case has been charged, and no other victim has been publicly identified.
Denied: Gargiulo denies killing Ellerin, Bruno and Pacaccio. His defense conceded that he attacked Murphy but argued he was not in his right mind; the jury found him sane.
Details that differ between sources: the date of Ellerin's death (February 21, 2001, on the condemned list and in CBS reporting, or February 22 in City News Service and Patch reports); Tricia Pacaccio's age (18 in nearly every source, 17 in two CBS reports); where at the house she was found (doorstep, back doorstep, side door and front porch all appear); and the date (most reports give August 14, 1993, the morning she was found, while a CBS gallery gives Friday, August 13, the night she was out with friends).
1993: Gargiulo, 17, lives about a block from the Pacaccio family in Glenview and is a friend of Tricia's younger brother.
August 13 to 14, 1993: Tricia Pacaccio, 18, is stabbed to death at the door of her family's home; her father finds her that morning.
1996 and 1997: arrests in Glenview; a 1997 felony burglary conviction in Cook County.
1999: Detective Lou Sala is assigned to the Pacaccio case.
Late 1990s: Gargiulo works as a bouncer at the Rainbow Bar and Grill in Hollywood, where two coworkers later say he admitted killing a girl in Chicago.
February 21, 2001: Ashley Ellerin, 22, is killed in her Hollywood Hills home; her roommate finds her the next morning.
2002 to 2003: DNA from Tricia Pacaccio's fingernails is matched to Gargiulo; Cook County declines to charge.
December 1, 2005: Maria Bruno, 32, is killed in her El Monte apartment.
April 28, 2008: Michelle Murphy, 26, survives an attack in her Santa Monica apartment; blood left at the scene is matched to Gargiulo.
June 6, 2008: Santa Monica police arrest him.
September 4, 2008: indicted for the Ellerin and Bruno murders.
2010: Judge Michael Johnson orders him to stand trial.
May 2011: 48 Hours broadcasts "The Boy Next Door"; two former coworkers come forward.
July 7, 2011: charged in Cook County with the first-degree murder of Tricia Pacaccio.
May 2, 2019: the Los Angeles trial opens.
May 29, 2019: Ashton Kutcher testifies.
August 15, 2019: convicted of two first-degree murders with special circumstances, attempted murder and attempted escape.
August to October 2019: the jury finds him sane (reported by October 7).
October 18, 2019: the jury returns a verdict of death.
July 16, 2021: Judge Larry P. Fidler sentences him to death.
August 2, 2021: received by the California prison system as a condemned prisoner.
September 5, 2024: extradited to Illinois.
September 6, 2024: first appearance in Skokie; Judge Anthony Calabrese denies release.
September 30, 2026: status hearing in Skokie; next date November 11, 2026; no trial date.
October 2, 2026: the California condemned list, updated, still lists him; automatic appeal pending.