In 2003 a forensic scientist in Illinois reported to Cook County prosecutors that the material under Tricia Pacaccio's fingernails was a mixture of her own DNA and that of Michael Gargiulo, who had lived a block from her and been a friend of her younger brother. Pacaccio had been dead for ten years. No charge followed. Two years later, Maria Bruno was stabbed to death in California.
That sequence is the case, and the Pacaccio family have been making the argument for twenty years.
Gargiulo was born in Chicago on February 15, 1976 and grew up in Glenview. He was seventeen in August 1993, and had recently finished at Glenbrook South High School, as Pacaccio had. She was eighteen, a student, an athlete and a member of the debate team. On the night of August 13 she was out with friends in the neighborhood. Her father Rick found her the next morning on the back step of the house, stabbed twelve times, her house keys still in her hand. Her car was parked in the driveway, and prosecutors later told a court there was no sign she had died anywhere but where she was found. Accounts differ on the wounds and on her age: Illinois reporting has generally given twelve stab wounds and eighteen years, while ABC News in 2019 reported more than forty wounds and gave her age as seventeen.
Sheriff's detectives considered Gargiulo at the time and did not have a case. He moved to California in 1998 and worked as an air conditioning repairman, a nightclub bouncer and a handyman.
Ashley Ellerin was twenty-two, a fashion student, and lived in the Hollywood Hills. On February 21, 2001 she was stabbed forty-seven times in her own house and nearly decapitated. Some of the wounds were six inches deep, and the detective Tom Small said one had gone through her skull and taken out a piece of bone. She had been due out that evening with the actor Ashton Kutcher, who arrived late after watching the Grammy Awards at a friend's house, got no answer, looked through a window, took what he saw on the floor for spilled wine and left. He testified about it at the trial eighteen years later. Gargiulo lived nearby.
Then the 2003 DNA report, and the decision not to charge. Jack Blakey of the Cook County State's Attorney's Office told CBS in 2011 that a match on its own was not enough, because the DNA was consistent with casual contact and could not establish that Gargiulo had been present when Pacaccio was killed. The lead detective, Lou Sala, put it differently: they had him in 2003, and it did not work out.
Maria Bruno was thirty-two, married, and the mother of four young children. On December 1, 2005 she was stabbed to death in her apartment in El Monte, in the same complex Gargiulo lived in, and was stabbed seventeen times. Her breasts were mutilated.
On April 28, 2008 he forced his way into Michelle Murphy's apartment in Santa Monica and stabbed her. She was twenty-six, and she fought him hard enough that he cut his wrist badly and ran, leaving his blood on her floor. She is his only surviving known victim, and the blood gave detectives a name six weeks later.
What finally produced a charge in Illinois was a television program. In May 2011 the CBS series 48 Hours ran a segment on the Pacaccio killing, and two men who had worked with Gargiulo as bouncers at a Hollywood nightclub in the late 1990s came forward to say he had told them, while the three of them were driving, that he had killed a girl in Illinois. Cook County charged him on July 7, 2011, eighteen years after the murder and eight years after the DNA report.
The California trial came first, and after years of delay it opened on May 2, 2019. The prosecutor, Dan Akemon, told jurors that the nickname the press had given him, the Hollywood Ripper, was less accurate than another: he was the boy next door, a man who lived near every one of his victims and watched them first. His lawyer, Daniel Nardoni, told the jury that Gargiulo denied killing Ellerin, Bruno and Pacaccio. On August 15, 2019 a Los Angeles jury convicted him of the murders of Ellerin and Bruno and the attempted murder of Murphy, and on October 18, 2019, after a penalty phase that had opened on October 7, the same jury returned a verdict of death. Defense motions held up the formal sentence until July 16, 2021, when he was sentenced to death. The Pacaccio charge was put before that jury as supporting evidence, which is why a case he has never been tried for formed part of the argument that sent him to death row.
For three years after that, nothing moved. By April 2023 he was held at the California Health Care Facility in Stockton, the state prison hospital. Journal & Topics, the Glenview paper that has followed the case since 1993, noted that it was unclear why prosecutors declined to charge in 2003 or what had taken so long to extradite him after the 2021 sentence.
He was extradited in September 2024 and made his first Illinois appearance on September 6, more than thirteen years after the charge was filed. Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart called it a crucial moment in the pursuit of justice for Tricia Pacaccio. He walked into the Skokie courthouse with a cane and sunglasses and told the judge he had suffered two brain hemorrhages and a stroke in a California prison. Judge Anthony Calabrese ordered him held without bond. Assistant State's Attorney Ethan Holland told the court that two witnesses had described Gargiulo admitting the killing, one of them quoting him as saying he had left her on the step for dead. Diane Pacaccio, Tricia's mother, sat in the courtroom and did not speak to reporters.
He has denied the Pacaccio killing and has not been tried for it. In the Los Angeles County Jail he was reported to have told authorities that the fact that ten women had been killed, and that his DNA was present, did not mean he had murdered anyone. Los Angeles detectives took that remark as a sign there were more victims and have said they consider him a suspect in as many as ten deaths, which is an investigative view and not a charge. If he is convicted of the Pacaccio murder, the sentence he faces is life without parole. No trial date had been publicly reported by September 2026. What the record establishes is two murder convictions, one attempted murder, and a thirty-one-year-old case that is finally in front of a court.