Ashley Ellerin

Case background and investigation

Ashley Ellerin was a 22-year-old fashion design student living in a rented house on Pinehurst Road in the Hollywood Hills area of Los Angeles. On the evening of February 21, 2001, she was stabbed to death inside the house. According to CBS News, her roommate found her body early the next morning on the steps outside her bathroom; she had been stabbed 47 times.

Ellerin had arranged to go out that evening with actor Ashton Kutcher. Kutcher later testified that he spoke to her by phone earlier in the evening, arrived late at about 10:45 p.m., and got no answer at the door. He said he looked through a window, saw what he took to be spilled red wine on the floor, and left assuming she had gone out without him. CBS News reported that Ellerin's father had visited her earlier the same day.

According to CBS News, Ellerin had met Michael Gargiulo, an air conditioning repairman who lived a few blocks away, when he offered to help her with a flat tire, and friends said he afterwards turned up at the house uninvited. Detectives looked at him early on, but there was little physical evidence and no DNA linking him to the scene, and the case stalled for years.

Gargiulo was arrested by Santa Monica police in June 2008 after Michelle Murphy was attacked in her apartment and fought off her assailant; blood left at the scene yielded his DNA, according to Wikipedia's summary of the case. He was then charged with murdering Ellerin and with the December 2005 murder of Maria Bruno, 32, who lived in the same El Monte apartment complex as him. Prosecutors argued that he lived close to each victim.

His trial opened in Los Angeles Superior Court in May 2019. On August 15, 2019, after about three days of deliberation, the jury found him guilty of two counts of first-degree murder and one count of attempted murder. The same jury recommended death that October. After delays that NBC News attributed to procedural issues and the pandemic, Judge Larry P. Fidler imposed the death sentence on July 16, 2021.

Gargiulo is separately charged in Illinois with the August 1993 killing of Tricia Pacaccio, 18, in Glenview. Cook County authorities charged him in 2011, and he was extradited from California in September 2024 and ordered held pending trial. No verdict in that case was found as of September 2026, and he is presumed innocent of that charge.