Michael Thomas Gargiulo was born in Chicago on February 15, 1976 and grew up in Glenview, Illinois. He worked as an air conditioning repairman and later as a nightclub bouncer and a general handyman, and the pattern of the case is that he killed women who lived close to him, sometimes within a hundred yards. The Los Angeles press called him the Hollywood Ripper and the Boy Next Door Killer.
On August 14, 1993, eighteen-year-old Tricia Pacaccio was stabbed to death on the back step of her parents' house in Glenview, days before she was to leave for university. She was the sister of one of Gargiulo's friends and he lived a short walk away. The case stayed unsolved for years.
He moved to Los Angeles. On February 21, 2001, Ashley Ellerin, twenty-two, was stabbed to death in her house in the Hollywood Hills. She had been due to go out that evening with the actor Ashton Kutcher, who arrived, got no answer, looked through the window, saw what he took for spilled wine on the floor and left. Gargiulo lived nearby. On December 1, 2005, Maria Bruno, thirty-two, was stabbed to death in her apartment in El Monte, in the same complex Gargiulo lived in.
On April 28, 2008, he broke into the apartment of Michelle Murphy in Santa Monica and stabbed her. She fought him hard enough that he cut himself badly and ran, leaving blood on the floor. The DNA gave the police a name six weeks later.
He was tried in Los Angeles in 2019 and convicted on August 15 of the murders of Ellerin and Bruno and of the attempted murder of Murphy, and sentenced to death in July 2021. The Illinois charge over Tricia Pacaccio remains outstanding, twenty-six years on when it was filed.