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Michael Gargiulo, the Hollywood Ripper, Sentenced to Death for Two Los Angeles-Area Murders

Nearly two years after a jury convicted him of killing Ashley Ellerin and Maria Bruno and trying to kill Michelle Murphy, a judge imposed the death sentence.

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Michael Gargiulo, head shaved and in a white shirt, in a Los Angeles courtroom

A Los Angeles judge sentenced Michael Thomas Gargiulo to death on Friday, July 16, 2021, for the home-invasion murders of two women and the attempted murder of a third. Superior Court Judge Larry P. Fidler imposed the sentence at the end of an all-day hearing, nearly two years after a jury convicted Gargiulo and recommended that he be executed. Procedural fights and the pandemic had pushed the date back again and again. Gargiulo was 45.

"Everywhere that Mr. Gargiulo went, death and destruction followed him," Fidler said.

The jury had found him guilty of the 2001 murder of Ashley Ellerin, a 22-year-old fashion design student who was stabbed 47 times in her Hollywood home, and the 2005 murder of Maria Bruno, 32, a mother of four, in her home in El Monte, east of Los Angeles. Prosecutors told the jury that Bruno was attacked and mutilated as she slept. The third woman, Michelle Murphy, fought him off in her Santa Monica apartment in 2008. He fled, leaving a trail of blood behind him, and that trail led to his arrest and, in time, to the charges in the two killings. Murphy was the key witness at the trial.

She spoke again before the sentence was read. "To this day, spending the night alone creates a world of fear in me," she told the court. She cried as she described meeting the families of the two women who had not survived, and she asked how one man's actions could be allowed to wreck so many lives.

Ashley Ellerin's father, Michael Ellerin, had been visiting his daughter from Northern California only hours before she was killed. He was one of several relatives who described the long wait for a verdict and a sentence. Her murder, he said, "marked the beginning of an altered, diminished, heartbreaking life."

Gargiulo had worked as an air conditioner and heater repairman, a bouncer and an aspiring actor. He sat in orange jail clothes and a face mask and showed no visible reaction when the sentence came. Before it, he complained angrily that his lawyers had kept him off the witness stand. "I'm going to death row wrongfully and unjustfully," he said. "I did want to testify and my fundamental choice was blocked."

Headline writers had called him the Hollywood Ripper and the Chiller Killer. The prosecutor, Dan Akemon, preferred a plainer name, the Boy Next Door Killer, because Gargiulo lived near the women he watched and then attacked in their homes.

The case had been tried under the previous district attorney, Jackie Lacey. Her successor, George Gascón, opposes the death penalty, and the judge refused to allow a statement from Gascón to be read before the hearing. The sentence was unlikely to be carried out any time soon in any case. California had not executed anyone since 2006, and Governor Gavin Newsom had halted executions for as long as he held office.

Illinois was still waiting. Gargiulo had been charged there in 2011 with murder in the 1993 death of Tricia Pacaccio, 18, in his hometown, and he was expected to be extradited to face that case. Prosecutors in Los Angeles had been allowed to put extensive evidence from it before the jury as they set out to show a pattern.

What the record does and does not say. The Los Angeles verdicts cover two murders, Ashley Ellerin's and Maria Bruno's, and the attempted murder of Michelle Murphy, who survived. In Tricia Pacaccio's death Gargiulo had only been charged when this sentence was handed down; he had not been tried, and the California jury did not decide it. A news-agency photo caption published with one report said he was suspected of as many as ten more killings. No charge and no court finding supports that figure.

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