A convicted serial killer dubbed the “Hollywood ripper” is appearing in court in Skokie on Friday after authorities long sought to bring him to trial in the 1993 slaying of 18-year-old Tricia Pacaccio.
Michael Gargiulo was questioned by police after the Glenview teen was found by her father stabbed to death on the front porch of her home on Aug. 14, 1993. But the case remained unsolved for years, as Gargiulo, originally from Glenview, relocated to California, where we was eventually tried and convicted for multiple murders, including that of a woman who was set to go on a date with actor Ashton Kutcher the night she was killed.
In 2011, Cook County prosecutors charged Gargiulo with murder in Pacaccio’s killing, though he was already being held in Los Angeles on other murder charges.
Now, Pacaccio’s family has a chance to see justice of their own, as Gargiulo will finally stand trial in her death.
After he was charged, her parents, Rick and Diane Pacaccio, thanked Cook County detectives who worked on the case but criticized prosecutors for failing to charge Gargiulo in 2003, after his DNA matched a sample found on their daughter’s fingernails.
“We just can’t understand why they didn’t do anything sooner when they had the DNA,” her mother told the Tribune at the time.
Then Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez had said the case against Gargiulo only reached the standard for charges after two witnesses came forward to say Gargiulo admitted to them that he killed Pacaccio. The DNA match linking Gargiulo to Pacaccio, she said, was critical to the case, but in the end it was no “silver bullet,” she said, according to Tribune archives.
On the night she was killed, Pacaccio had gone out with friends, driving around for a scavenger hunt. She never made it back inside her home.
The next morning, her father found her body at the door. She had been stabbed repeatedly.
Neighbors described hearing her fathers cries across the neighborhood that morning.
Pacaccio, described as a top-notch student, had finished high school and planned to attend Purdue University to study engineering.
Gargiulo, then 17, lived a block away and was considered a suspect, but prosecutors said there was not enough evidence to bring charges.
Detectives with the Cook County sheriff’s office in 2003 obtained a DNA match to Gargiulo from material under Pacaccio’s fingernails, but Alvarez at the time said prosecutors needed more to file charges because Gargiulo had been in her home previously.
In 2008, Gargiulo was charged in Los Angeles with the 2001 stabbing death of Ashley Ellerin, 22, the girlfriend of Kutcher’s, as well as the death of another woman, Maria Bruno in 2005, and the attempted murder of a third, Michelle Murphy in 2008.
He was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder and one count of attempted murder in those killings and sentenced to death. There is currently a moratorium on carrying out capital punishment in California.
