Joseph Wambaugh - Hollywood Hills

A third attack occurred at Yucca and Wilcox avenues. A homeless man awoke with pain in his chest. When he got up, blood gushed from a chest wound and he found that he could not walk. He was rushed to the hospital in time to save his life.

The killer turned out to be a former inmate of a state mental facility. Random beatings and even the senseless killing of vulnerable homeless people were certainly not rare, but this was Hollywood’s first serial attacker of homeless people who was himself a homeless person. The detectives referred to him as “the ultimate self-hating bum.”

Clearly, the most heinous case in the Hollywood detectives’ murder books in the first year of the Obama presidency involved Michael Thomas Gargiulo, who was awaiting trial for serial murder. Gargiulo, a thirty-two-year-old air conditioner and furnace repairman, originally from the Chicago suburb of Glenview, Illinois, was initially linked in a peripheral way to a Hollywood actor.

Long before coming to Los Angeles from Illinois, Michael Gargiulo had been questioned as a teenager in the murder of his high school classmate Tricia Pacaccio. She was stabbed to death in what detectives called a “blitz attack” on her doorstep in August 1993, a week before the eighteen-year-old was to report to Purdue University as a freshman with an interest in environmental issues. In her high school yearbook, the bright and popular girl said she “wanted to save the world,” but as it turned out, she couldn’t save herself. Her murder went unsolved, although DNA material was found under the fingernails of the victim. Years later, Hollywood detectives became intimately acquainted with that case, following a terrible murder in the Hollywood Hills.

On February 22, 2001, actor Ashton Kutcher had driven to the Hollywood Hills bungalow of his girlfriend, Ashley Ellerin, to take her to a Grammy Awards party. She was a stunning twenty-two-year-old fashion student, a model, and an occasional Las Vegas dancer. The young actor knocked and rang the bell but got no answer. He looked through a rear window and saw what he thought were wine stains on the carpet. He left the bungalow, and Ashley Ellerin’s body was found the next day by her housemate. The first detective to arrive called the crime scene “a massacre.”

Every window in the bungalow had bars on it, and there was even a steel door. The doors were in good repair, all freshly painted with no sign of forced entry. Inside, from the front entry down a long passage, were spatter and drops of blood. Beyond that, there was a lot more blood all the way to the body lying on the top landing, described by detectives as “a bloody pulp.” Her hair looked as though she’d just washed it and was fresh from a shower at the time of attack. She wore a terry-cloth robe and pajamas. Her throat had been sawed and ripped open and her head was knocked off the brain stem. Only mangled ribbons of tissue connected her head to her body. The medical examiner stopped counting stab wounds at forty-eight.

Criminalists tried to get latent prints and DNA evidence, but all of the fingerprints in the bungalow belonged to the victim or her housemate. Later, after searching his memory for any possible suspect whom she might have let into their home, the housemate of Ashley Ellerin mentioned “Mike the furnace guy” to police. He said that Ashley and a friend had met Mike when he’d walked out of the nearby dog park one day. Mike was described as being six two, 180 pounds, and having a “dark demeanor. ” He had stopped by the bungalow one afternoon when Ashley was not at home, telling the housemate that he wanted to work on her furnace, and he had been spotted driving his truck slowly past the bungalow on another occasion.

That crime resulted in a seven-year investigation that eventually led Hollywood Division detectives to Illinois and the Pacaccio murder, as well as to other blitz attacks in the Los Angeles area in 2005 and 2007. A detective with the L.A. Sheriff’s Homicide Bureau described one of them as “the most violent murder I ever saw, bar none.” The attacker had done horrible “staging” with body parts on that one, and it looked as though the victim had been ravaged by a pack of sharks.

And finally, in 2008, a Santa Monica woman was attacked in her home but managed to fight off her assailant and survive, despite serious stab wounds. DNA evidence was collected and coordinated and it brought everything together. Michael Gargiulo was at last in custody, awaiting trial in 2010. And Hollywood paparazzi would be ready for Ashton Kutcher if he should be required to testify, drooling over the possibility that his wife, Demi Moore, might accompany him to court.

So there was no dearth of violence and other serial crimes for the dozen overworked detectives at Hollywood Station to deal with, and the detectives at the Major Assault Crimes table got their share of domestic violence cases in that first year of the recession. The MAC detectives who responded late on a blistering hot afternoon to an unusual domestic violence call from a woman in an apartment building in Little Armenia were both cops with more than twenty years on the Job. Gina Villegas, a forty-three-year-old energetic Mexican American, and Carl Cheng, a forty-two-year-old laconic Taiwanese American, were both children of immigrants who got to use their language skills frequently in the polyglot community that was Hollywood.

They hadn’t needed their foreign-language skills when they got ordered to Little Armenia. They were responding to a telephonic plea made to their D3 supervisor by a terrified woman who said that she had been stalked and threatened by an ex-lover who was father to the baby she had given birth to only five weeks prior. Thelma Barker, their detective supervisor, was a bootstraps-up black veteran with thirty-one years on the Job. She was born and raised in Compton and had been a victim of domestic violence herself during a brief marriage at the age of nineteen.

The old three-story building in Little Armenia, consisting of twenty-eight rental units, was a rectangular block of gray stucco, and was possibly the most protected apartment building in that part of east Hollywood. Because of episodes of tagging by street gangs in the area, the owner had taken the extraordinary step of hiring local pensioners as watchmen. The geezers took turns sitting in a tiny office off the lobby from 9 P.M. to 6 A.M. seven days a week, when vandalism was a threat. There were no fire escapes or any exterior balconies that could be easily accessed.

The detectives rang the manager and were buzzed inside by a retired plumber who also did handyman jobs in the building. When he learned who the detectives were looking for, he said, “Confidentially, I don’t like it when the owner of this property gets so charitable. The girl in three-ten is his niece, or so he claims. She’s behind two months in the rent and still he lets her stay. Don’t tell her I told you, but she leaves her two babies alone sometimes. I’ve felt like calling you when she does it, but she’s the boss’s special tenant, if you know what I mean, and I don’t wanna lose this job.”

Gina Villegas thanked him, and when they got to the one-bedroom apartment on the third floor, a dangerously thin woman met them at the door. She was a twenty-five-year-old strawberry blonde with frightened, darting eyes, trembling hands, and suspiciously stained teeth.

Carl Cheng’s glance toward his partner said, Tweaker.

Before either cop could say anything to her, the woman said, “I’m the one who called your office. My name’s Cindy Kroll. My ex-boyfriend is threatening me. I think he wants to kill me.”

“And why would you think that?” Gina Villegas asked while Carl Cheng glanced around the little apartment.

There were two chairs at the small Formica table in the kitchen. And in the living room, if you could call it that, was a sofa, a shabby overstuffed chair, an infant’s crib, and a playpen, all crowded together around a big-screen Sony TV.