Hughes was born in 1956 and worked as a security guard in Los Angeles. Between 1986 and 1993 he raped and strangled women and girls in the south of the city: Yvonne Coleman, fifteen; Verna Williams, thirty-six; Deanna Wilson, thirty; Teresa Ballard, sixteen; Brenda Bradley, thirty-eight; Deborah Jackson, thirty-two; Terri Myles, thirty-five. Most were left in alleys and on vacant lots. Jamie Harrington is also among those named.
He was convicted in 1998 of four of the murders and sentenced to life without parole. The remaining cases were reopened when the Los Angeles Police Department worked through its untested rape kits and unsolved-strangulation files in the 2000s, and DNA connected him to further victims. He was tried again, convicted of four more counts, and sentenced to death in 2012.
The case belongs to the same period and the same neighbourhoods as several other Los Angeles series of the 1980s and 1990s, including the Grim Sleeper. That so many killings of Black women in south Los Angeles across those two decades went unconnected for so long is documented, and the reopening of these cases came out of the pressure that followed.