Honolulu Strangler

What the record shows

The Honolulu Strangler is the name given to an unidentified man believed to have murdered five women on Oahu, Hawaii, between May 1985 and April 1986. All five were sexually assaulted, strangled and left with their hands bound behind their backs, and all were found in or near waterways around Honolulu International Airport. No one has been charged. One man was arrested in May 1986 and released without charge. The case is commonly described as Hawaii's first serial murder investigation, although the Wikipedia article counts the killer as the state's second known serial killer, after Eugene Barrett. Hawaii News Now reported in 2006 that the cases remain open with the Honolulu Police Department.

According to the Wikipedia article and a KHON2 archival report, the first victim was Vicki Gail Purdy, 25, of Mililani, the wife of an Army helicopter pilot. She went out to Waikiki nightclubs on May 29, 1985, and a taxi dropped her at the Shorebird Hotel around midnight; her body was found the next morning on an embankment at Keehi Lagoon. On January 14, 1986, Regina Sakamoto, 17, a Leilehua High School student, missed her bus in Waipahu; her body was found the next day in Keehi Lagoon near the airport's reef runway. On January 30, 1986, Denise Hughes, 21, a telephone company secretary who commuted by bus, failed to arrive at work. Three youths found her body on February 1 in the Moanalua stream drainage canal.

The Hughes killing prompted the Honolulu Police Department to form a 27-member serial killer task force on February 5, 1986, with help from the FBI and Washington State's Green River task force, according to Wikipedia. The FBI profile described an opportunist who picked up vulnerable women, often at bus stops, and who probably lived or worked near Waipahu or Sand Island. Policewomen ran sting operations near Keehi Lagoon and the airport. The killings continued. Louise Medeiros, 25, who was three months pregnant, flew back from Kauai late on March 26, 1986, and disappeared after leaving the airport; police believe she was taken while waiting for a bus. Road workers found her body on April 2 near Waikele stream.

The last known victim was Linda Pesce, 36, who left home on April 29, 1986, for an evening work meeting. Her car was found abandoned on the Nimitz-H-1 viaduct near the airport. Police set up roadblocks to question commuters. Her body was found on Sand Island on May 3, 1986, according to KHON2. Wikipedia reports that a 43-year-old man had approached police saying a psychic had told him where the body was, and that the search he directed initially found nothing.

On May 9, 1986, police arrested Howard Gay, an Ewa Beach mechanic who worked overnight shifts at an air freight carrier on Lagoon Drive, as the primary suspect in the Pesce case. According to Wikipedia and the Honolulu Star-Bulletin coverage it cites, he was questioned from about 8 p.m. until 3 a.m., failed a polygraph examination and was released without charge; police kept him under surveillance. His girlfriend told investigators he had left the house after arguments on the nights of the murders. About two months later, a woman who had seen a man with Pesce picked Gay from a photo lineup but was reluctant to testify. Prosecutors never charged him. Hawaii News Now reported in 2025 that he died in 2003 in California.

Retired HPD Major Louis Souza told Hawaii News Now in 2006 that investigators had looked for a connection among the victims and found none, and that while the arrest was "satisfaction," it was "frustrating that the state didn't feel that they had enough to prosecute him." Retired deputy chief John McCarthy told the station in 2025 that police "were finding a dead female and there were no witnesses," and that investigative techniques were far more limited in 1986 than today.

The killings stopped after Pesce's death. Howard Gay was investigated and never charged, and no other person has been publicly named. The five murders remain unsolved and open with the Honolulu Police Department; none of the reporting reviewed for this profile records a DNA identification or new charges.