On May 29, 1985, Vicki Gail Purdy, twenty-five, the wife of an Army helicopter pilot, went out clubbing in Waikiki and never met her friends. At midnight a taxi driver dropped her at the Shorebird Hotel, apparently to pick up her car, which was later found in the hotel lot. The next morning her body was found on an embankment at Keehi Lagoon, still in her yellow jumpsuit, her hands bound behind her back. She had been raped and strangled. Her husband told police he suspected a link to her job at a video rental store that also handled pornographic films, where two women had been stabbed to death the year before.
Seven months later it happened again. On January 14, 1986, Regina Sakamoto, seventeen, a student at Leilehua High School who planned to go to Hawaii Pacific University in the fall, missed her bus from Waipahu and called her boyfriend at 7:15 in the morning to say she would be late. The next day she was found at Keehi Lagoon, her lower body unclothed and her hands bound behind her, raped and strangled. The same method made police think of the same killer. On January 30 Denise Hughes, twenty-one, a telephone company secretary who commuted by bus and was active in her church, did not arrive at work. Three young fishermen found her in Moanalua Stream on February 1, wrapped in a blue tarp, her hands bound. On February 5 the Honolulu Police Department formed a twenty-seven-member serial killer task force, working with the FBI and the Green River task force in Washington State.
Louise Medeiros, twenty-five, of Waipahu, had gone to Kauai to be with her family after her mother's death. On March 26 she took a late flight back to Oahu, told her family she would take the bus home from the airport, and disappeared after leaving the plane. Road workers found her near Waikele Stream on April 2, her hands bound behind her back. Police set up sting operations with policewomen around Keehi Lagoon and Honolulu International Airport.
Linda Pesce, thirty-six, left home on the morning of April 29 and was expected back late after a work meeting. The next morning her roommate learned she had not come to work and that her car was parked beside the Nimitz viaduct on H-1, and reported her missing. A man named Howard Gay told police that a psychic had told him a body could be found on Sand Island, and on May 3 he took officers to a precise spot, where there was nothing. They searched the whole island and found her, nude, her hands bound behind her back. Witnesses had seen a light-colored van and a white or mixed-race man with her car.
The FBI's profile described an opportunist who took vulnerable women from places such as bus stops and who probably lived or worked around Waipahu or Sand Island. Police arrested Gay on May 9. He lived in Ewa Beach and worked as a mechanic for an air freight carrier on Lagoon Drive. His former wife and his girlfriend described a smooth talker who liked to tie their hands behind their backs during sex, and his girlfriend said that on nights after they fought he left the house, and that those were the nights of the murders. He was questioned from eight in the evening until three in the morning, failed a polygraph and was released. Police followed him, and local businesses offered a $25,000 reward. Two months later a woman picked him out of a photo lineup as the man she had seen with one of the victims on the night of her murder, but she would not testify, believing he had seen her too. He was never charged, and he died in 2003.
No other killings were attributed to the Honolulu Strangler. It is the second known serial murder case in Hawaii, after Eugene Barrett's, and it remains unsolved. Detectives have since hoped DNA could settle it.