On November 8 and November 14, 1993, the bodies of two women were found dumped in alleys in a commercial part of Culver City, California: Terri Myles, thirty-three, and Jamie Harrington, twenty-nine. They had been strangled. Within weeks, in December 1993, the police arrested Michael Hughes, a security guard, in Culver City. In 1998 he was convicted of the murders of Myles and Harrington and of two more women: Teresa Ballard, twenty-six, found in Jesse Owens County Park in Los Angeles on September 23, 1992, and Brenda Bradley, thirty-eight, a niece of the former mayor Tom Bradley, found in the same Culver City alleys in October 1992. He was sentenced to life without parole.
Hughes was born in Michigan in about 1958. His father left soon after, and at five he moved with his mother and sister to California, growing up in Pasadena and then Los Angeles and attending Los Angeles High School. His mother drank and beat both children, and he said he had watched her abort his sister's pregnancy. As a teenager he was hospitalized several times for breakdowns. In 1976, at seventeen, he joined the Navy and worked up to gunner's mate. Afterward he drifted back to California, lived on the streets, sold drugs and moved with friends from Oakland to Long Beach and finally Los Angeles.
The cases stayed closed for years, until Los Angeles homicide detectives used new DNA techniques on old evidence. On July 3, 2008, Hughes was charged with sexually assaulting and strangling two more women and two teenage girls between 1986 and 1993. Yvonne Coleman, fifteen, was found in a park in Inglewood on January 22, 1986. Verna Williams, thirty-six, was found in a stairwell on May 26, 1986, and at the time had been counted among the victims of the Southside Slayer, the killer later called the Grim Sleeper and identified as Lonnie David Franklin Jr. Deborah Jackson, thirty-two, also known as Harriet McKinley, was the third; accounts date her death to December 1987 and to June 1993. The charge over Deanna Wilson, thirty, found in a garage on August 30, 1990, was dropped, though prosecutors used her case to show his pattern.
In November 2011 a jury convicted him of the murders of Coleman, Williams and Jackson, and in June 2012 he was sentenced to death. The court denied his motion to reduce the sentence to life on the ground of the beatings and the abortion he had witnessed as a child. In 2008 detectives were looking at other killings in places he had lived or served with the Navy, among them Michigan, San Diego, Long Beach and Frostburg, Maryland. He is held on California's death row.