Robbin Brandley
At approximately 10:30 p.m. on Saturday, January 18, 1986, a security guard making rounds at Saddleback College in Mission Viejo, Calif., spotted a figure lying on one of the student parking lots along the campus’s western perimeter, according to the Orange County Weekly. It was dark, and at first he thought perhaps it was a mannequin that a student may have left there as a prank—the poorly-lit parking lot made it difficult to tell for sure. At first he simply drove past, but moments later, having second thoughts, he turned around and headed back to the nearly-deserted area where the whitish figure lay.
Getting out of his car, the security guard noticed that the figure was lying on the pavement next to a Chevrolet Citation. As he approached it, however, he saw that it was lying in a pool of blood and suddenly realized that it wasn’t a mannequin at all. It was the dead body of a young woman. Two students on the way to their cars saw the grisly scene as well. They recognized the young woman as that of Robbin Brandley, 23, a communications major who had left a party in the fine-arts building just minutes earlier. There had been a music recital at which Brandley had volunteered as an usher, and the party had immediately followed the recital. Brandley had been wearing a long print dress with flower designs, but it had been pulled up above her stomach, revealing bikini underwear and knee-high stockings. A purse, later determined to be Brandley’s, lay on the pavement nearby. The asphalt around her body was wet with her blood.
Detective Michael Stephany of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department was among the first law enforcement officials to arrive at the scene. Stephany observed immediately that Brandley had been stabbed numerous times, mostly in her neck, chest and back. He also noted that she had sustained cuts to her hands, which he theorized were defensive wounds. Other than Brandley’s body and her blood, there was little evidence: no other DNA, fingerprints, hair, or clothing fibers were found at the crime scene for Stephany and his colleagues to work with. An autopsy would show that Brandley had been stabbed 41 times, but the brutal murder would remain a mystery for the next 11 years.
Julie McGhee
On July 17, 1988, Julie McGhee, 29 and a prostitute, disappeared after being picked up by an unknown male in the Cathedral City area of Riverside County. Her remains, stripped of identification, were later found in a remote desert area. Identifying her body was made more difficult by the mutilation of her body by coyotes and possibly other animals. Cartridge cases for a .45-caliber handgun were found near McGhee’s body. McGhee’s slaying was initially investigated as a single, isolated homicide.
Two months later, on September 25, 1988, another prostitute, Mary Ann Wells, 31, was picked up by someone in nearby San Diego County and driven to a deserted industrial complex within the City of San Diego. Her body was found later, shot once in the head. As in McGhee’s death, a cartridge case was left behind at the scene of Wells’ murder. A condom found at the scene had the Wells’ DNA on it, as well as DNA from another person—believed to be the killer’s—but the stranger’s DNA did not immediately lead anywhere.
Mary Ann Wells
By the time of the next slaying some seven months later, again in Riverside County, investigators began to see the links between the deaths. On April 16, 1989, another prostitute, Tammie Erwin, 20, was picked up and driven to a remote area near Palm Springs where she was shot three times and her body dumped. Again investigators found cartridge cases near the body.Investigators from Riverside and San Diego counties began comparing notes. They realized that they had a serial killer on their hands: ballistics tests showed that the cartridge cases from the McGhee, Wells, and Erwin murders scenes all matched. Each of the women had been killed with the same gun, but they lacked, at this point, both the weapon and a suspect to whom they could link it.
Tammy Erwin
But there was no link between the prostitute shootings and the murder of Robbin Brandley. The victim contrasts were too great: Brandley wasn’t a prostitute; she was a college student. Brandley also had not been shot; she had been repeatedly stabbed. For the next three and a half years there were no additional murders that police could attribute to the same killer.
Jennifer Asbenson, 19, a nursing assistant in Palm Springs, worked the night shift at a home for disabled children. On September 27, 1992, according to Asbenson and CBS News, she went to a bus stop to catch the bus that would drop her near the children’s home. She first went to a store to make a purchase, but when she returned she saw the last bus for the night leave without her. In a panic, she knew that she did not have a way to get to work. Moments later a man pulled up in a car and asked Asbenson if he could give her a ride. He did not seem threatening and, in fact, seemed like a Good Samaritan, so she accepted the ride. She said that she “didn’t feel any sense of fear,” and thought that he “was so nice and so charming.” Although he made a few advances toward her, he dropped her off for work in time for her shift, which ran from 10 p.m. until 6 a.m.
Jennifer Asbenson
The man was waiting outside the children’s home the next morning when Asbenson got off work. She told police, as well as reporters, that she was not frightened by the man, who said: “Let me give you a ride home.” Her thoughts were that the man was not dangerous, and that if he had wanted to do something to her he could have done it the evening before. As a result, she accepted the ride—again. Once inside the car, however, things were much different this time. He put a knife to her throat, tied her hands behind her back and then drove her into the desert. When they arrived at the remote location, Asbenson’s nightmare intensified. He cut off her shorts and bra, and shoved her underwear into her mouth.
Afterward he forced her to perform sexual acts, and tried to rape her. He then strangled her until she passed out. When she regained consciousness he opened the car door and told her to get out, but held her back by yanking on her hair. He then forced her into the car’s trunk and drove off.
Convinced that she was going to die, Asbenson desperately searched for the trunk’s release mechanism. When she found it, she waited for what seemed the right moment and jumped out onto the road. After several cars would not stop for her, she stood in the road in front of a Marine truck and forced it to stop. When her abductor saw the two Marines helping her, he fled, she said. The Marines drove her to safety and she reported her terrifying ordeal to the police.
Denise Maney (left) and Laura Uylaki
Two and a half years later, on March 11, 1995, again in the Palm Springs area, the elusive and as yet unidentified serial killer claimed yet another victim. Denise Maney, 32, a Riverside County prostitute, was picked up from a street and driven to a remote desert area. According to police and court records, Maney disrobed, after which the killer tied her hands behind her back.
After sexually assaulting Maney, the killer placed a .45-caliber gun in her mouth and “blew the back of her head off.” Following his modus operandi, the killer took her clothes with him and left her body in the desert.
Cassandra Corum (left) and Lynn Huber
On April 14, 1996, halfway across the nation, a Cook County, Ill., prostitute was picked up off a street and driven to the Wolf Lake area straddling the Hammond, Ind., and Chicago border. Sometime during the ordeal Laura Uylaki was shot twice in the head with a .38-caliber revolver, and afterward her killer threw her nude body into Wolf Lake where it was later found on the Chicago side of the lake. Police theorized that the killer had taken the victim’s clothing and other items to hamper their efforts in identifying her.
However, police in Illinois did not connect the murder with those in California.
Three months later, the killer struck again, also in Illinois. On July 14, 1996, the nude body of Cassandra “Cassie” Corum, 21, another prostitute, was found floating in the Vermillion River in Livingston County, Ill., near the town of Pontiac. Duct tape had been placed over her mouth, and she had shot been once in the head. An autopsy later showed that she had also been stabbed seven times in the chest and head. Her wrists had been handcuffed, and duct tape had also been used to bind her ankles. Corum had disappeared from a bar in Hammond, Ind., after conversing with a man, and had left with him after getting into his pickup truck.
The following month, on August 2, 1996, the nude body of Lynn Huber, 22, of Chicago, was found floating in Wolf Lake, only a few yards from where Laura Uylaki’s body had been found in the spring. Like most of the other victims, Huber had been a prostitute, and the killer had left none of the victim’s clothing or identification near the murder scene.
Andrew Urdiales
On November 14, 1996, Hammond, Indiana patrol officer Warren Fryer stopped a man driving a pickup truck after observing that the driver was parked outside a suspected crack house on the 800 block of Becker Street with a prostitute known to the police. As a precaution, Fryer called for backup and waited for additional police to arrive before moving on the suspicious person. When officers approached the pickup, according to Fryer, the driver, Andrew Urdiales, 31, was “cooperative.” As Fryer spoke with him and Urdiales explained that he had served in the Marines, he noticed a revolver inside the pickup and loudly yelled, “Gun!” to his fellow officers.
The revolver, retrieved by another officer, was a snub-nosed, chrome-plated .38 special, and the officer noted that it was fully loaded with six bullets. Since Urdiales did not have a permit for the gun, he was arrested for carrying a concealed weapon and the revolver was confiscated.
As the pickup was being prepared to be towed, Fryer and the other officers noticed that the vehicle, inside and out, was “spotlessly clean.” Fryer also noted that the truck bed and the cab “were as clean as you would wash the outside of your car…as if they had come out of the showroom.” Rolls of duct tape 
were also found inside the vehicle. Urdiales was soon released on the concealed weapon charge, but was later convicted of a misdemeanor for the unauthorized possession of a handgun.
were also found inside the vehicle. Urdiales was soon released on the concealed weapon charge, but was later convicted of a misdemeanor for the unauthorized possession of a handgun.
On April 1, 1997, Officer Fryer received a call about a man and a woman fighting at a motel, then known as the American Inn, at 4000 Calumet Avenue in Hammond. According to police, Urdiales told an officer that the woman, a prostitute, had stolen something from him. The prostitute, however, also known to the police, told Fryer that Urdiales was “kind of kinky” and that the altercation arose because Urdiales had wanted to take the woman to Wolf Lake, handcuff her in the back of his pickup and have sex with her.
Fryer told the prostitute, “Geez…don’t do that. We’re finding girls up there dead.”
Fryer wrote a police report about the incident and filed it, but did not arrest Urdiales or the woman. Instead, he later ran a computer check on Urdiales that encompassed known infractions involving him in Hammond, including the November 1996 incident involving the unauthorized possession of a handgun. Fryer then wrote a supplemental report that included all of the information he knew about Urdiales to date, and forwarded it to the detective division. Because Fryer had made the Wolf Lake connection to the murdered prostitutes, copies of the reports were in turn forwarded to homicide detectives with the Chicago Police Department (CPD) with the hope that the information might be useful to them. Following their review of the documents, CPD Detective Don McGrath asked Hammond police for Urdiales’ confiscated revolver.
Upon receipt of the weapon, McGrath took it to a gun expert. After a thorough examination, the ballistics test results showed that it was the same gun that had been used to kill Laura Uylaki, Cassandra Corum, and Lynn Huber. McGrath now knew for certain that he had a serial killer on his hands.
