'Hollywood Ripper' sentenced to death
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A 2019 file photo of Michael Gargiulo, who was convicted of killing two women in their homes in California in the early 2000s. He was arrested in 2008 after an attack on another woman in California.
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LOS ANGELES • A man known as the "Hollywood Ripper" has been sentenced to death for the gruesome killings of two women in their homes in the early 2000s.
Michael Gargiulo, 45, was convicted in 2019 of two counts of first-degree murder and one count of attempted murder.
Among his victims was 22-year-old Ashley Ellerin, who was found in her Hollywood home with 47 stab wounds in February 2001.
On the night of her murder, Ms Ellerin had been due to go on a date with actor Ashton Kutcher, who testified at the trial.
The second murder victim was Ms Maria Bruno, a 32-year-old mother of four and a neighbour of Gargiulo who was attacked in her sleep in December 2005 and "quite literally butchered", prosecutors said.
"In this case, everywhere that Mr Gargiulo went, death and destruction followed," Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Larry Paul Fidler said on Friday as he announced the sentence.
Prosecutor Dan Akemon said Gargiulo targeted women who lived near him and waited for the perfect opportunity to attack them at night, in or near their homes, in "totally planned killings".
Gargiulo again insisted he was innocent at Friday's sentencing session.
He was arrested in 2008 after an attack on a woman in her apartment in Santa Monica, near Los Angeles. She survived and testified at the trial.
He also faces murder charges in Illinois stemming from an attack in 1993.
But he will not be executed, at least not for now. California is famously liberal, and Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom declared a moratorium on executions in 2019.
Prior to that, the death penalty was last carried out in California in 2006.
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
