LOS ANGELES, CA — The accused serial killer dubbed the “Hollywood Ripper” will face a jury Thursday morning to answer for murders of beautiful young women. He also faces the death penalty if convicted of stalking and stabbing to death young women from Chicago to Hollywood, including the then 22-year-old girlfriend of actor Ashton Kutcher.
Opening arguments are slated to begin Thursday in the trial of Michael Thomas Gargiulo, 43, of Santa Monica. Gargiulo is suspected of the stabbing deaths of fashion designer Ashley Elleri, 22, at her Hollywood Hills home in 2005 and of Maria Bruno, 32 in her El Monte apartment. He is also charged with attempted murder for the 2008 stabbing of a neighbor in her Santa Monica home. Authorities in Illinois also charged him in 2011 with the Aug. 14, 1993, slaying of Tricia Pacaccio, an 18-year-old Glenview woman who was repeatedly stabbed outside her home.
Prosecutors paint Gargiulo as a monster who kills beautiful young women for sexual thrills. They’ve compiled a list of 250 witnesses and may call Kutcher, the Los Angeles Times reported.
Investigators say they tied Gargiulo to the killings in 2008 after his DNA was found in blood splatter at the scene of the near-fatal stabbing in Santa Monica. In that case, a woman named Michelle Murphy was reportedly in bed at home in her Euclid Avenue apartment when she awoke to a knife being plunged into her.
The murder charges include the special circumstance allegations of multiple murders and murder by means of lying in wait, along with allegations that he used a knife in the commission of the crimes.
Gargiulo had been investigated by authorities in Illinois for years as a potential assailant in the attack on Pacaccio, who was stabbed 12 times outside her family’s home, authorities said. The victim’s father discovered her body.
Gargiulo — who has a 1997 felony conviction for burglary in Cook County, Illinois — lived one block away from the high school graduate at the time of the slaying and was good friends with one of her two younger brothers, according to an arrest warrant filed in Cook County.
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Investigators determined in 2003 that a small amount of Gargiulo’s DNA was on Pacaccio’s fingernails, but could not determine if the DNA had come from casual contact from being in her home and around her, according to a statement released by the Cook County Sheriff’s Office.
Following the airing of a CBS “48 Hours Mystery” show on Gargiulo, two people who had worked with him in the late 1990s at a Los Angeles-area bar reported to authorities that he had “stabbed up the girl” and “left the bitch on the step for dead,” according to prosecutors in Cook County, Illinois.
“We have never given up on Tricia Pacaccio or her family and their search for justice in this case,” Anita Alvarez, Cook County State’s Attorney, said in a statement released shortly after Gargiulo was charged in Illinois. “It has been a very difficult and challenging investigation, but we are extremely pleased to be finally bringing this charge and hopefully providing some measure of closure to a family that has been devastated by a violent crime that no one should have to endure.”
City News Service and Patch archives contributed to this report.