Michael Gargiulo shuffled into a Cook County courtroom Friday wearing dark sunglasses and using a cane as the convicted California serial killer faced charges in the fatal stabbing of an 18-year-old north suburban woman decades ago.
Judge Anthony Calabrese approved a Cook County prosecutor’s request to hold Gargiulo pending trial on a charge of killing Tricia Pacaccio in 1993.
“The record is extraordinarily clear that the state has met their burden,” Calabrese said in his ruling as relatives of Pacaccio listened in the Skokie courtroom.
Prosecutors said they had provided the public defender’s office with a hard drive containing more than 31,000 pages of documents in the case.
Gargiulo was extradited from California, where he’s been sentenced to death for the killings of two Los Angeles-area women.
The 48-year-old native of unincorporated Northfield Township was a longtime suspect in the Aug. 14, 1993, killing of Pacaccio, a Glenbrook South High School senior planning to attend Purdue University that fall. She was found dead near an entrance to her family’s Glenview home.
Gargiulo was a friend of her younger brother, visited the Pacaccio home and was in a car with Tricia the day before she was stabbed 12 times, authorities said.
Gargiulo, then 17, lived nearby and told a friend at the time he was concerned police were interested in him and might frame him for the killing, a prosecutor said Friday. He also was worried he would get in trouble for burglaries, the prosecutor said.
Gargiulo and his friend went together to “get rid of knives” because of those concerns, the prosecutor said.
In 2002, Cook County sheriff’s detectives got a DNA sample from Gargiulo. The following year, tests confirmed his DNA was on Pacaccio’s fingernails, authorities said.
At the time, though, prosecutors in Cook County State’s Attorney Richard Devine’s office didn’t think the evidence was strong enough to charge Gargiulo in Pacaccio’s slaying. The prosecutors thought the DNA could have been the result of “casual contact,” authorities later said.
The decision drew public criticism from Pacaccio’s family.
Gargiulo, who was by then living in Los Angeles and working as an air-conditioning repairman, became what prosecutors there have called “The Boy Next Door Killer.”
In 2001 — two years before his DNA was linked to Pacaccio’s fingernails — he killed Ashley Ellerin, a fashion design student who was stabbed 47 times in her Hollywood home as she was getting ready to go on a date with the actor Ashton Kutcher that night, police said.
In 2005, Gargiulo killed Maria Bruno, a mother of four, in her home in El Monte, east of Los Angeles, police said. Her breasts were cut off.
Then in 2008, Gargiulo tried to kill Michelle Murphy at her Santa Monica apartment, police said. She resisted the knife attack, and he fled, leaving a trail of blood that led to his arrest for the L.A.-area killings.
In 2008, Cook County prosecutors announced they were reexamining the Pacaccio case.
In 2011, two witnesses, one who watched a “48 Hours” TV episode on the crime, came forward and said Gargiulo told them in the late ’90s he had killed a woman in Chicago, Assistant State’s Attorney Ethan Holland said in court Friday.
One of those witnesses said Gargiulo told him he “stabbed a girl” and “had a body” in Chicago, Holland said. The other witness said Gargiulo told him he had “buried the bitch” but later said “he was only kidding” and had “left the bitch on the step for dead,” the prosecutor said.
Later in 2011, then-Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez announced charges against Gargiulo in the Pacaccio murder.
Gargiulo was then locked up in Los Angeles, awaiting trial on charges of killing Ellerin and Bruno and attempting to kill Murphy.
He was convicted in a trial in 2019 and sentenced to death in California in 2021.
Gargiulo’s attorneys had argued against a death sentence for him by saying he suffered from mental illness because of years of abuse at the hands of his family, but the judge was unpersuaded, saying, “Everywhere that Mr. Gargiulo went, death and destruction followed him.”