Hawaii has had one serial murder case in its recorded history, and nobody was ever charged with it.
Between May 1985 and January 1986, five women disappeared from Honolulu. All five were found on Oahu, in remote places, most of them close to water. Vicki Purdy, twenty-five, was found at Keehi Lagoon. Regina Sakamoto, seventeen, and Denise Hughes, twenty-one, were found in Keehi Lagoon and in the Moanalua stream. Louise Medeiros, twenty-five, was found near the H-1 freeway at Waikele. Linda Pesce, thirty-six, was found on Sand Island.
The pattern held across all five. Each woman was bound at the wrists, sexually assaulted and strangled. Each had been taken while she was alone at night, either walking or waiting for transport. The bindings were consistent from case to case, which is the detail that turned five separate deaths into one investigation.
Honolulu had never run an inquiry like it. A task force of twenty-seven officers was assembled, the first of its kind in the state, and it worked alongside the FBI's behavioral unit. In 1986 a man was arrested after his girlfriend came forward with information about Linda Pesce's disappearance. He was released when the evidence would not hold. He stayed the principal suspect for the rest of his life, died in the 2000s, and was never charged with anything.
There were no further killings after January 1986. That is a fact investigators have never been able to explain, because it is equally consistent with a man who died, a man who left the islands, a man who went to prison for something else, and a man who simply stopped.
The case is open. The evidence has been resubmitted for DNA testing more than once. Eight months of 1985 and 1986 remain the whole of it, and forty years on the file still names no one.